Horror

Started by TenseAndSober, April 22, 2003, 05:01:56 PM

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RegularKarate





Night of the Demons

So, in a rush while loading up my Netflix queue and working at the same time, I made a mistake that is probably made most with horror movies... I was attempting to rent the 1957 Night of the Demon when I accidental got the 1988 Night of the DemonS (and last night's Office had Pam saying how she rented 28 Days Later thinking it was 28 Days).

Well, so this was one of those movies that was just someone going "hey, Horror movies are easy, let's do one... someone get me some bad makeup and some tits"... it's awful.. I watched a good deal on fast forward.  There was one scene though that really just made me wonder... the movie is just filled with nothing but bad horror cliches... this one is teenagers getting possessed by demons in a house that's evidently possessed because an Indian died there, but there's this scene were a girl who's gone demon has her shirt open to let everyone get an eyefull of the reason they think people come to see horror movies and she's rubbing lipstick all over her chest and just randomly shoves the lipstick container through her nipple INSIDE her breast... not like a magic trick...like they built a prosthetic and actually showed it go into her boob.

anyway, this movie is garbage, but that one scene was so bizarre I posted this anyway.

MacGuffin

Blame this guy for your anxiety
"Halloween" director John Carpenter believes in giving audiences what they don't want.

NEW YORK — The toughest part about making a truly frightening film, according to director John Carpenter, is keeping a straight face.

"The movies that are the most fun are horror movies — you laugh a lot, they're fun," says Carpenter, who should know — his résumé of terror includes classics "Halloween" with Jamie Lee Curtis, "The Fog" with ex-wife Adrienne Barbeau and "Vampires" with James Woods.

The director might be smiling, but the audience at a good horror flick is cringing, or gasping, or covering their eyes. Horror fans get a chance to do all three, over and over and over, when the 10th annual "Monsterfest" arrives Sunday on AMC.

The 24-hour-a-day, nonstop festival of fright runs through Halloween and covers more than 70 years of horror, from 1931's "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" through 2003's "Gothika" — more than 230 hours of films over 10 days. Three horror films will make their "Monsterfest" debuts: "The Exorcist," "The Lost Boys" and "Wolfen."

"The Exorcist," one of the all-time great horror films, is a perfect example of a scary movie that leaves Carpenter in stitches. From laughing, not slashing.

"I love watching that movie," said Carpenter. "The dialogue the devil has, the bad language used by the devil, is hilarious."

For Carpenter, making a good horror movie involves creating anxiety for the audience.

"They should be frightened that you're going to show something they don't want to see," Carpenter said. "You need to go off the tracks, do something grotesque, something they don't want. They like that."

Carpenter, whose work outside the horror genre included "Starman" with Jeff Bridges, the original "Assault on Precinct 13" and the Kurt Russell vehicle "Escape From New York," is a fright film aficionado.

His favorites include old Roger Corman classics like "It Conquered the World," along with movies such as "Bride of Frankenstein." Although a fan of early monster movies, he believes the modern horror movie began in 1960 with Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho."

"Before then, there was a lot of gothic horror — monsters, like Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy," Carpenter said. " 'Psycho' was modern, deliciously directed, with well thought-out scenes."

It was that sensibility that Carpenter wanted to bring to his low-budget "Halloween." Made in 1978 on a budget of $320,000, the film grossed an estimated $55 million and spawned an assortment of sequels.

On Oct. 31, AMC will air all five "Halloween" movies along with a behind-the-scenes look at Carpenter's classic original with Curtis and Donald Pleasence. Among the fun facts revealed: the mask sported by murderous Michael Myers was a Captain Kirk mask, covered in white spray paint. ("Halloween" also is being released in 150 theaters nationwide for special screenings on Oct. 30 and 31.)
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

OrHowILearnedTo

Quote from: MacGuffin on October 21, 2006, 12:45:27 PMhis résumé of terror includes classics "Halloween" with Jamie Lee Curtis, "The Fog" with ex-wife Adrienne Barbeau and "Vampires" with James Woods.

Yeah, vampire$ is such a classic. Much better than that stupid one set in... you know... the place where it snows, and has that thing where it does stuff. What was that called again?

MacGuffin

The Splat Pack
Wondering where all those ultraviolent movies are coming from? Meet horror's new blood
By REBECCA WINTERS KEEGAN; Time Magazine

The shuddering naked woman strung up in the meat locker was not the problem. Neither was the guy ripping through chains embedded in his flesh to dismantle a ticking bomb in front of him. What worried the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) when the ratings body screened Saw III, the latest installment in the lucrative, torture-based horror franchise, was the disturbing "tonality," according to the film's director, Darren Lynn Bousman. "This movie is too dark?" asks Bousman, a 27-year-old Elvis Costello look-alike from Kansas. "That's what I set out to do! It's a horror movie." Before altering Saw III to garner a more box-office-friendly R-rating, Bousman called up another director who specializes in movies people watch through their fingers, Rob Zombie, the tattooed heavy-metal vocalist. "I told him to talk to the MPAA as a filmmaker," says Zombie, 41, whose depraved gorefest The Devil's Rejects contains what many consider cinema's most artful human-roadkill scene. "Explain why the extreme violence is necessary to tell the story in a way that's more socially responsible." When pressed, Zombie admits he doesn't actually care what's socially responsible. He just wanted to help out a kindred spirit, another guy who understands the unique beauty of a properly lighted viscera shot.

Bousman and Zombie are both members of an emerging and collegial band of horror auteurs--unofficially known as the Splat Pack--who are given almost free rein and usually less than $10 million by studios or producers to make unapologetically disgusting, brutally violent movies. If they get it right, there's a fervid fan base, composed mostly of people far too young to take death seriously, who will send those movies into almost gruesome profitability (some of the films have made more than $100 million). The group is loose knit, and other members include the director of the first Saw movie, James Wan, and his co-writer, Leigh Whannell; Hostel writer-director Eli Roth; The Descent's Neil Marshall; and Alexandre Aja, who remade Wes Craven's 1977 cannibalistic film, The Hills Have Eyes.

The gore-happy gang owes a lot of its recent good fortune to Whannell and Wan, who ushered in the latest iteration of big-screen bloodlust with the first Saw movie in 2004, just as eerie Japanese horror movies like The Ring were peaking. Whannell was a Melbourne, Australia, TV host who thought he had a brain tumor. His film-school buddy, Wan, was unemployed. "I would have done anything to be healthy again," says Whannell, now 29, who, it turned out, was actually just suffering from stress headaches. When he felt better, he wrote the script for Saw, in which a terminally ill cancer patient, Jigsaw ultimately played in all three movies by the creepy character actor Tobin Bell forces people to consider what they're prepared to do to stay alive. Using $7,000 of Whannell's savings, the pair shot a shocking 10-min. film in which Whannell played one of Jigsaw's victims who has to dig a key from the digestive tract of a paralyzed cellmate before Whannell's character's jaw is split open by a reverse bear trap. On the strength of that short, Los Angeles--based Evolution Entertainment ponied up $1.2 million to make a feature. The sets were grungy--most of the film takes place in a dirty bathroom--and the actors, Danny Glover and Carey Elwes, weren't too expensive. Wan got to direct, and Whannell starred as another of Jigsaw's victims.

Bought and savvily marketed by Lionsgate, Saw was a huge hit, proving that mainstream audiences have an appetite for sadism--at least if it's cleverly conceived. Another Saw quickly followed. So far the franchise has earned more than $250 million worldwide, and Saw III will open in roughly 3,000 U.S. theaters Oct. 27, the biggest release of the films to date. Saw films skew to the under-25 audience and are as popular with girls as with guys. "Good horror movies don't need stars, and they don't need special effects," says Tom Ortenberg, Lionsgate president of theatrical films. "They earn their scares through twists, through intelligent writing and great up-and-coming directors." Most of the Splat Packers are on only their second or third film in a genre that many critics willfully ignore. If there's a nascent Stanley Kubrick or Steven Spielberg in the mix, it's still too soon to tell. But there's certainly innovative filmmaking under way that rises above the mindless slasher sequels of the '80s or such predictable teen-star killfests of the '90s as I Know What You Did Last Summer.

The basic plotline of most of these films is that people are stuck somewhere and have to endure horrible things--or indeed, do horrible things to each other--to escape. The more deviant and repulsive the treatment, the better. Bousman, who directed the later Saw films, says he got inspiration for that meat-locker scene from shoveling the driveway during endless Kansas winters. "I always thought I was gonna die 'cause it was so cold outside," says Bousman. "What happened if you were stuck outside with no clothes on? The ideas start off in the real world, and then we take them beyond."

Roth's film Hostel, about young backpackers caught in a pay-for-torture club in Slovakia, was inspired, he says, by a website he saw advertising a club in Thailand that claimed to let you shoot someone for $10,000. The torture scenes Roth devised came from researching European witch trials and Nazis and from some trips he made to the tool aisle at Home Depot (one shot guarantees you'll never look at bolt cutters the same way again). In the scene that won Roth the Most Memorable Mutilation prize at this month's Scream Awards, a kind of horror Golden Globes, a rich American pays to blowtorch a Japanese girl's eyeball. "I don't know if it's medically accurate that the white goo would come out of her eye," says Roth. "It just looked so disgusting we had to go with it." He later found out that torture by blowtorch has been used by Iraqis both during and after Saddam Hussein's rule. Roth, 34, has taken heat for the brutality in Hostel, the DVD of which knocked the family-friendly film The Chronicles of Narnia off the top-selling spot at Wal-Mart last spring. "People say, 'How can you put this stuff out there in the world?' Well, it's already out there," says Roth. He appeared on Fox News and proclaimed that it was because of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld that Americans are watching horror films: "You're so scared, you want to scream."

O.K., the Splat Packers are brash. But considering their work, they're actually a very normal bunch. In fact, the writers and directors of the new wave of horror movies seem to be mild young men from the suburbs who grew up watching The Shining at sleepovers while Mom and Dad slept in the next room. The Old Guard of horror directors, including Craven and Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), has welcomed the newcomers, inviting them to its Masters of Horror dinner parties in Hollywood (also occasionally attended by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, who are co-directing a slasher double-feature called Grindhouse, due next year). And for men (and it is all men) who spend their lives coming up with vile ways to kill people, the horror club is awfully warm and fuzzy. "I'm just so happy to be part of this wave," says Roth. "Everybody's so psyched for each other."

The only thing that could end this horrorteurs lovefest, it seems, is if the extreme gore craze starts to suffer from, well, overkill. After Saw III comes Turistas, which is sort of like Hostel with Brazilian bikini girls instead of Slovakian ones. In addition to Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse, 2007 will bring a full sicko slate, including Hostel: Part II, a retooling of Halloween by Zombie and The Hills Have Eyes II. "These movies aren't for everybody," admitted Zombie, the day after he turned in his Halloween script. But they don't have to be. "I see trailers for movies like [romantic weepie] The Lake House, and I think, I would have to rip my eyes out of my head to sit through that. But that's somebody's favorite movie." And somewhere, at some sleepover this weekend, someone is watching Saw or The Devil's Rejects while Mom and Dad sleep in the other room, and appreciating that, yes, it does feel good to scream when you're safe.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

First 'Halloween' to Return to Theaters

Horror-film fans with a taste for `70s-style slasher antics can indulge themselves next week when the original "Halloween" movie returns to theaters for the first time in 27 years.

A digitally remastered, high-definition version of the 1978 film, which turned Jamie Lee Curtis into a star, will play at 8 p.m. Oct. 30 and 31 in 150 movie houses.

A new 20-minute featurette about "Halloween," including interviews with original cast members and a look at the movie's impact on pop culture, will precede the screening.

"Halloween," which spurred a spate of multi-sequel slasher films, tells the story of an escapee from a mental institution, Michael Myers, who goes on a murderous spree on Halloween night.

Seven sequels have followed. The eighth is on the way, to be written and directed by aptly named rocker Rob Zombie. "Halloween 9" is slated for release on Oct. 19, 2007.

"I take the original film very seriously, and I want to make it terrifying again," said Zombie.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

RegularKarate





The Haunted Strangler

An older Karloff stars in this as what starts off as a relatively sweet role.  He's a novelist that is trying to find out who the REAL Haymarket strangler was as he believes that man that was hanged twenty years earlier was innocent.  As he (literally) digs deeper, he finds himself becoming the strangler.

I really like watching Karloff transform himself.. it's funny, but neat.  It's kind of like watching an early Jim Carrey without the goofy noises and exagerated body movements.

I don't want to ruin anything, but this movie catches you by surprise a couple of times.  Overall, a really good time for a movie I hadn't really heard much about until recently.

modage





watched the Last Man On Earth portion of this disc last night.  it is the film that heavily influenced Night Of The Living Dead (man, nothing is original!) and stars Vincent Price as a scientist who is the last living (non-vampire) on earth.  the film also appears to have inspired 28 Days Later though whether it was thru Romero or not is questionable.  Price goes about his days doing routine tasks like eating, gathering supplies and burning bodies.  in flashbacks we see what happened to the rest of the humans and why he may be immune to the virus.  the film is sort of hollywood in that scenes that would play much creepier and more realistic without are covered in score.  one scene in particular has price laying on the couch listening to jazz records while vampires try to break into the house!  so the film shows the monotony of life and also the sadness of being alone.  until he discovers he may not be.... dun dun dun.  RECOMMENDED>
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

MacGuffin

Quote from: modage on October 24, 2006, 10:41:44 AMit is the film that heavily influenced Night Of The Living Dead (man, nothing is original!) and stars Vincent Price as a scientist who is the last living (non-vampire) on earth.  the film also appears to have inspired 28 Days Later though whether it was thru Romero or not is questionable.

Actually, all of these films are influenced by Richard Matheson's novel, "I Am Legend."

One of the most influential vampire novels of the 20th century, I Am Legend regularly appears on the "10 Best" lists of numerous critical studies of the horror genre. As Richard Matheson's third novel, it was first marketed as science fiction (for although written in 1954, the story takes place in a future 1976). A terrible plague has decimated the world, and those who were unfortunate enough to survive have been transformed into blood-thirsty creatures of the night. Except, that is, for Robert Neville. He alone appears to be immune to this disease, but the grim irony is that now he is the outsider. He is the legendary monster who must be destroyed because he is different from everyone else. Employing a stark, almost documentary style, Richard Matheson was one of the first writers to convince us that the undead can lurk in a local supermarket freezer as well as a remote Gothic castle.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

modage

Quote from: MacGuffin on October 22, 2006, 09:40:43 PM
The Splat Pack
such a lazy article.  these filmmakers have nothing to do with one another.  most probably have never met or neccesarily even LIKE one anothers work.  can we quit trying to group everything into some imaginary movement?  the Three Amigos, ok, they actually are friends who actually help one another out on films.  this is just ridiculous.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

Ghostboy

Actually, I think a lot of them are members of the Secret Society Of The Pizza Knights in LA. So they do at least know each other.

Anyway, as October winds to an end, I'm trying to make it through a horror film a night. Last night I watched Miikes Imprint.

MINOR SPOILERS  It's definitely the best from the Masters Of Horror series I saw (which doesn't necessarily mean much, does it?). Very beautifully designed and shot, to the point that sometimes you forget about the atrocities you're witnessing because the composition is so impressive. It's not exactly scary, but there's a torture scene that's incredibly hard to watch (and fairly original, as these things go) and lots and lots of dead fetuses to warm up your cool autumnal nights. The acting isn't too great, but after a while you get used to it. The ending gets downright goofy - it involves a muppet that's as hilarious as it is grotesque, and it's a testament to Miike's mastery of tone that it doesn't derail the entire film.


The DVD has a documentary that, I think, is longer than the film itself, and is incredibly in depth about every aspect of the production. Miike seems like a pretty gentle, laid back guy with a sense of humor about his own work.

RegularKarate





C.H.U.D.

That's right.

Most people know what CHUD stands for even if they haven't seen the movie: Canabalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller.  It actually DOESN'T stand for this though... that's just to throw you off.. the origin of C.H.U.D. is hidden in a government cover-up.  This government cover-up is what keeps the movie from being good.

I've heard the commentary is just the cast and director making fun of the film the whole way through... I wish I had watched it like that.  Instead, I had to sit through almost an HOUR of boring "plot" and "character establishment" before we even get to the eye-glowing creatures what live under your own feets.

There are a couple of decent scenes of monsters and gore, but it's hardly worth it.  All I could think while watching this was "Less chat, More C.H.U.D.!".

RegularKarate





Don't Look Now

Another classic I had never seen.  This one was a pleasant surprise, however, because it was really entertaining.  It begins with the well edited death of a child and the rest of the movie from that point forward is so erie and mysterious that you can't stop watching despite a naked Donald Southerland and some scenes that seem to kind of go nowhere.  The movie plays around with psychic ability and death.  Once the movie ends, you realize there was something going on throughout the entire film, though not as obvious as say, the Sixth Sense which has a similar feel to it's finale (no, not like that).  I have my theories, but I'll need to watch it again.

And I can honestly say that there were some truly creepy scenes.

modage


Quote from: RegularKarate on October 26, 2006, 12:16:22 AM

whoa me too!  watched this 2 nights ago for the first time and also enjoyed it.  had heard a lot about it over the years showing up on Scariest Lists and such so i was looking forward to it.  though i wasnt sure it was neccesarily a horror film even through most of the movie, but the final minutes convinced me that it was.  yeah, the editing was insane.  it was the sort of "art/horror" that i would imagine xixax to enjoy.


this was not, but i enjoyed this anyway.  i would have expected this to be a total Jaws knock-off, and a few scenes were, but the film was actually quite different.  it was the first film from the Howling team of John Sayles and Joe Dante so i guess i should've expected a little more because like that film this was different, fun and definitely had a few nods to previous horror films.  plus, any movie that has entire groups of KIDS eaten by piranhas has got to be atleast worth a rental.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

modage





this is another one i was really rooting for.  but also another one where i admire the filmmaker and his intentions a little bit more than the final film.  i love films where you arent just dealing with one thing, like the slugs, but the zombies, and all the other crazy creatures in here as part of this things life cycle.  i liked nathan fillion and elizabeth banks, there were some great makeup effects, and some incredibly gross stuff. but i think the parts that didnt quite hold together as well were the beginning character bits and the lack of (what i can only refer to as) "holy shit!" moments.  it ALMOST had them, it had moments that SHOULD'VE been them, but for the most part they didnt quite hit the bullseye.  i had also expected more of a comedy or a wink wink 'hey remember these silly 80's films' kinda deal, but the film played it mostly straight and was probably better off for it.  like i said its even tough for me to give a lukewarm review because i just wanted to love it for NOT being a "Splat Pack" ultraviolent film, or a Japanese horror remake, or a sequel or a remake of a classic film but in the end it reminded me of The Blob remake i watched earlier this month but much grosser and not quite as good.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

modage





with Halloween just around the corner i'm having a full-on marathon this weekend, watching the last few 'new' films for the year and trying to get a handful more favorites in as well.  yesterday included 3 new ones the first of which was Mark Of The Vampire.  this was another film that i had seen images from over the years but never actually seen the film.  one of the reasons for this is possibly because it was produced by MGM, instead of Universal, so has never been included in various horror sets and has only recently become available on dvd, (though i actually watched it on TCM).  the film itself which reunites Bela Lugosi with his Dracula director Tod Browning in what is essentially a remake of Brownings own (lost film) London After Midnight.  several odd things about the film are that Lionel Barrymore has top billing (and not Lugosi), Lugosi has what appears to be a bloody bullethole in the side of his head which is never explained! (though Robert Osbourne did in his TCM intro), and the film which is essentially a straightforward vampire tale has a twist ending that is so strange it makes it almost to have been a comedy.  it wasnt very good, especially coming a few years after Dracula, but the ending almost made it worthwhile. 

also finally got around to watching Bad Taste after several years of procrastination, though i'm not sure now how much of a horror film it was.  this was Peter Jacksons first film and it was definitely interesting to watch and see what he was able to accomplish with friends on weekends over 4 years (!).  some really disgusting moments along with some off the wall humor, you can see him building towards Dead Alive though i still can't imagine how he got to LOTR. 

and a year later, after a minor wave of xixax (and otherwise) hype, i finally saw Eyes Without A Face.  the circus-y music was a strange fit, the mask itself was really creepy and the transfer looked incredible.  i liked it.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.