Archives: Movies

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…

Candyman turns on a well-worn urban legend: look in a darkened mirror, say a name three to five times, and whatever horror you’ve called up from the nether-whatever will appear. In this case, the monster…

Spectacular soundtracks, grindhouse thrills, B-movie ingenuity, incredible style: there are plenty of good reasons blaxploitation took off like it did in the early 1970s. The simplest explanation, of course, is that these films served moviegoers…

Film critic Mike D’Angelo once wrote that the ideal way to see Takashi Miike’s Audition is to have a trusted friend that knows your tastes hand you an unlabeled copy in a paper bag, so you have…

Fifty years ago, Michael Powell was the darling of British cinema, thanks to the movies he directed with Emeric Pressburger, including Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. And then he made Peeping Tom. It’s since been…

Remember Scream? Scream was very popular. No complaints here, because it deserved that popularity; Scream was fresh and original and good. But “popular” in Hollywood often translates into “let’s do that same thing again,” and…

Why did it take a million years to make a movie out of the R.L. Stine series Goosebumps – the best-selling book series in history until a certain boy wizard popped up? ‘90s kids didn’t…

This second film version of the Victor Hugo novel Notre-Dame de Paris (the first was a Theda Bara vehicle, The Dancer of Paris – now considered lost) was a super-duper-spectacular as only the Hollywood of…

Did you know: David Cronenberg thinks The Brood is the only real horror movie he’s made? Let that sink in. He’s either got a really unusual conception of horror movies or a really unusual understanding…

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