A Nightmare on Franklin Street

A “FILM TAMPA BAY PRESENTS” SCREENING Don’t quote us on this, because info’s hard to come by and the rules are kind of loose. But it’s at least probable that The Conjuring is currently the…

The proliferation of home video in the early 1980s led to a broad rediscovery of the movies of the past. Before VCRs, you had to either catch a movie in cinemas or get lucky with…

A profile of the prolific schlock director, Ed Wood has Tim Burton stepping outside of his usual comfort zone, while still managing to be a heartwrencher about a loveable, misunderstood loner and the found family…

Ah, Alien. The science fiction thriller that reimagined everything about outer space — again, just two years after Star Wars. The originator of one of film history’s most iconic creatures. It’s kind of a perfect…

Three gnarly, 17th-century Salem Witches (Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy) are unwittingly conjured up for a Halloween night in present-day Salem. While they tend to spruce up the party festivities with their outlandish…

Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn is one of that rarest and most delicate of film series entries — the combination sequel/remake. Stephen King, a fan of the original, went to bat for Sam Raimi…

Six young and hopeful actors land roles in an experimental horror film shooting on a remote location. Their performances will be captured without any crew present in a single, uninterrupted take by cameras and drones…

Here in 2021, French neo-Ballardian director Julia Docournau just won the Palme d’Or for Titane, a candy-dipped nightmare of a movie about a woman who gets impregnated by a car. But back in 2016, audiences…

The 1950s were drenched in schlocky, gimmicky horror and sci-fi pictures that got churned out in backlots and piped into cinemas all over the country as fast as the negatives could get processed. But THEM!…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the event horizon of genre earnestness creeps ever closer; sincerely intended movies even ten or fifteen years old seem goofy and campy now. And the threshold seems even…

Does The Rocky Horror Picture Show need any introduction? It’s a cultural artifact with unlimited lifespan — it creates new audiences for itself each screening, and will most likely continue to be shown in theatres…

Consider this timeline: director Tim Burton makes Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in 1985 with huge financial success. As a result, Warner Bros. is willing to pay for him to develop a script for the next movie…

Want to get scared but have a short attention span? We’ve got just the thing. It’s Stephen King’s Creepshow, a horror anthology movie directed by the famed George Romero and starting Hal Holbrook, Adrienne Barbeau…

Psycho is based on a book of the same name by Robert Bloch. During its writing, Bloch was living 35 miles away from the real-life murders of Ed Gein, a serial killer who flayed his…

Tim Burton’s entire artistic output, his oeuvre, is about presenting outcasts as heroic figures. Telling audiences that just because you feel different from everyone else, doesn’t mean you aren’t exactly who you’re supposed to be.…

A few years ago a documentary was released called Room 237, about a group of obsessive people who believe that Stanley Kubrick was trying to send the world a message through The Shining. That message…

A few years ago, the text we wrote to introduce the Korean film The Host to the “A Nightmare on Franklin Street” series decried the travesty of Western audiences’ blind spot for Korean horror. While…

There is a particular needle that must be threaded here. Of course you need to know enough about Get Out, our pick for the best horror movie that came out in 2017, to want to…

Director Jordan Peele has spent the past few years developing into one of the most original, creative minds in genre film of his generation. And even with stratospheric expectations for his sophomore effort, Us is…

Nosferatu was the product of Prana Film, a German film studio (with an Indian name) founded by an occultist with the intention of producing movies on supernatural themes — but Nosferatu was its only output,…

“The role they were born to play” gets tossed around a lot these days, but offhand it’s hard to think of better casting than Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck (the “actor” playing Count Orlok in…

The script for the original 1978 Halloween was written in 10 days, which… yeah, actually seems like plenty of time, come to think of it. It’s a pretty terse movie: silent killer menaces teens, travels…