Posted by:
Brian Salisbury
In preparation for that glorious week of genre film geek bliss that is Fantastic Fest, we thought we’d offer up this preview of all the horror titles to be featured this year. The subgenres range from ghost stories, to apocalyptic anthologies, to documentaries on various horror subjects. Independent, foreign, and big studio titles are all represented in the 2012 slate. We’ve provided trailers, where available, to give you a little taste of what Fantastic Fest audiences will be seeing. If you’re not one of the lucky ones who’ll be attending this year, use this post as a guide for what you should be watching for on VOD, on Blu-ray, or in theaters over the next several months.
The lineup is, unsurprisingly, fantastic.
Posted by:
Seth Hall
The situation down in the bayou is going south.
The first issue introduced us to the world of Hoax Hunters, and introduced us to a mystery worth solving, before we cover it up. The second issue dug a little deeper, and told us just what kind of world we were entering, before leaving us alone with the monsters that lurk on its surface. In this third issue, with the background established, the story goes all out, exploding from the pages in a mix of blood, terror, mystery, and humor.
The third installment of Image’s horror comic opens with a bang (or rather, an entire magazine full of them), and ends in an ominous whimper bringing us one issue closer to a showdown in the swamps. But I get the feeling this will not be a final battle by any means. Authors Michael Moreci and Steve Seeley, with artist Axel Medellin, have alluded to what seems to be an overarching storyline, complete with another shadowy conspiracy. Our antagonist may have a small legion of followers and powers beyond those of our crew, but I get the feeling that he is only a smaller part of what is going to be a much larger picture.
Posted by:
Seth Hall
Stephen King was my first real entrance into the world of horror. When I was in ninth grade, I convinced my English teacher to let me read The Stand for my assigned reading, even though it wasn’t “AP-approved.” My powers of persuasion may rival those of Randall Flagg, but I digress.
Joan Allen will star in the King adaptation (adapted by the master himself) of A Good Marriage. The story was a part of King’s recent collection Full Dark, No Stars. The tale finds a woman alone in her home while her husband of twenty years is away on business. While searching for batteries in the garage, she discovers a wooden box hidden under the work bench. What she finds is “a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends a good marriage.”
Full Dark, No Stars currently sits on my list of books to read, in a queue behind many others (I think I may have a problem), but I may just have to move this one up a bit, because filming will begin sometime in October.
Source: Bloody Disgusting
Posted by:
Seth Hall
Throughout my education and training, I have always been taught to watch for the smallest details.
The international one-sheet for The Collection, the sequel to The Collector, has been released. The film is directed by Marcus Dunstan, who also co-wrote the film with Patrick Melton. After escaping from the Collector, protagonist Arkin (Josh Stewart) is kidnapped by a team of mercenaries hired by the father of another victim by the name of Elena. Arkin is forced to assist the mercenaries in the rescue of Elena by infiltrating the Collector’s hideout, which has been laden with deadly traps.
Click past the bump to see the one-sheet
Posted by:
Brian Salisbury
Ben Wheatley is a filmmaker whose career seems aimed directly north. He wowed audiences with Down Terrance, and then proceeded to shove hot coals into our agape mouths with his followup Kill List. To say we are highly anticipating his next film is like saying a zombie uprising occurring simultaneously with an alien invasion and giant monster attack on all major cities is a bad day. The first trailer for Wheatley’s Sightseers presents us with a side of the director we haven’t seen before, or at least not to this degree. Namely, it looks funny. Savage, violent, and horrifying…and funny. The nonchalance and, frankly, callous amusement with which this couple murders innocent people is high-scarious. The trailer is a bit long, but I didn’t feel particularly spoiled after the last title card faded from sight. Take a look at it below, and think twice before planning your next vacation.
Sightseers is out in the UK in November, hopefully we’ll get it stateside soon.
Posted by:
John Gholson
Some unscrupulous schlubs decide to dispose of some toxic garbage in the catacombs of an abandoned Valmont chateau and quickly meet their horrifying fates at the hands of Catherine Valmont, the zombie in the title of Jean Rollin’s 1982 effort The Living Dead Girl. It’s a gory opener, playing against the film’s gore-soaked resolution like a bloody bookend. The Living Dead Girl was my first Jean Rollin film. I watched it on a whim on Netflix one day, familiar with the director’s reputation for French “lesbian vampire” films, and was taken aback by how much I enjoyed the movie. Since then, I’ve watched what I could through Netflix and through the release of Kino-Lorber’s Redemption series of Blu-rays (ten of the seventeen releases in the Redemption line are Jean Rollin films). If you were looking to explore Rollin’s work, The Living Dead Girl is a great start.
The film is about Catherine Valmont’s (Francoise Blanchard) relationship with her best friend and lover Helene (Marina Pierro). A blood oath promise that they made as children is Rollin’s thin explanation of Catherine’s resurrection, but what he’s really getting at with their story is the way we allow ourselves to become trapped within co-dependent relationships. The undead Catherine needs fresh blood to stay alive, and Helene drops any moral regards to sustain her lover. She leads people to the Valmont estate so that Catherine can feed, and once Catherine becomes fully aware of the unholy abomination she has become, Catherine begs for a death that Helene will simply not allow.
Posted by:
John Gholson
I have to admit – I was a little worried about Two Orphan Vampires. I’d never seen a Jean Rollin film from the 1990s and I imagined something with synthesized saxophone music and lots of softcore lesbian sex. Rollin wears this mantle from cinephiles as the king of lesbian vampire sexploitation, but I’d never really found that title fitting when examining his work. It’s mostly artsy, with only the briefest flirtations with sleaze. “Maybe this is the one,” I thought, picturing this later effort as something that would be right at home on Cinemax in 1997.
Well, Two Orphan Vampires is definitely not that. It’s unmistakably a Jean Rollin film, with its dual lead female roles and midnight jaunts through graveyards and train stations. Aside from the score (unimpressive noodling around with a synthesizer), it would be hard to pin a year to the film. It looks, sounds, feels, and tastes, for better or worse, like Jean Rollin.
There’s actually a pretty cool gimmick at the heart of Two Orphan Vampires, one that I’d like to see explored within a stronger narrative, in which the titular vampires (Alexandra Pic and Isabelle Teboul) are blind during the day but have full vision at night. They’re taken in by a doctor who thinks he may have a cure for their blindness, unaware of the secret they share. He doesn’t realize they’re leaving the house every night to feed and generally get into trouble.
Posted by:
Rod Paddock
These are sins before horror. I am here to make amends.
Welcome to the new Sins of Omission column here at Horror’s Not Dead. It’s not really new, it’s just renamed. Think Tide with Color Guard; same soap, new label. This iteration is going to cover a huge sin of omission: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece Psycho.
The Omission
Psycho is the the story of Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) a secretary who embezzles $40,000 from one of her employer’s customers. Marion makes a run for it, eventually checking into The Bates Motel, a roadside hotel owned and operated by the Bates family. Marion is checked in by Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). Norman takes a liking to Marion, inviting her to dinner. Before dinner Marion hears an argument between Norman and his overbearing mother.
Soon after dinner we witness on of the most iconic scenes in all of cinema: the murder of Marion Crane in the shower. I have viewed this scene dozens if not hundreds of times, and it stands up to the test of time. A women at her most vulnerable is murdered by a complete psychopath. The remainder of the film is following Marion’s friends and family in their search for her. Eventually the family figures out what happened.
I have two reasons for my sin. First, I was not born when it was made, Psycho came out a decade before my birth. Secondly, and horrifyingly simply, I just never got around to seeing it.
Posted by:
Seth Hall
There are two types of horror protagonists.
The first are well-armed, well-trained, and unstoppable. Demons? Hollow points filled with holy water. Zombies? Cannon fodder. Mighty Cthulhu? Airstrike. These characters may break a sweat, and they may bleed, but in the end, they’ll light a cigar, utter a macho pun, and strut on to the sequel.
The second are real. They are regular people with no special training, no weapons beyond what they can find, and they can very easily be killed in the most brutal and painful ways. Assuming they survive the horrors they are doomed to face, they will most likely suffer the side effects of extreme psychological trauma. Their battle will not just be physical (and even that will be bone-shatteringly, eyeball-gougingly hard to watch), but mental as well. These are not people used to the horrors of every day life, much less those of a monstrous, a supernatural, or even a human origin. When they leave this metaphorical arena of blood, they will be forever changed. They won’t have any military awards ceremony to go back to, and they will not be eager to share their stories. They will have their experiences permanently seared into their minds, with no hope of ever overcoming what they had to do to survive. If you can even call it survival.
Clearly, one of these character types is far more impressive and intriguing than the other.
Posted by:
John Gholson
I can imagine in the context of the time, with Hammer Films entering its final creaky decade and with the stunt casting of twin Playboy Playmates, that Twins of Evil would’ve been received as one of Hammer’s lesser efforts. No matter; time and distance have been kind to Twins of Evil. The Collinson Twins carry none of the baggage of their time, having faded from the public eye, and Hammer’s old-fashioned gothic approach feels appropriately classic now, not as dusty as it did in the wake of eye-opening contemporaries like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist.
Synapse has brought the film to Blu-ray (in a Blu/DVD combo pack), the first time the movie has been available since the days of VHS (Synapse also did the same for Hammer’s Vampire Circus, which is a great disc, even if the feature isn’t as strong as Twins of Evil). For Hammer fans, Twins of Evil is a must-own. The HD transfer is vivid with sharp contrast and lively, organic film grain. It’s not that Twins of Evil has never looked better — it’s that no Hammer film I’ve seen has ever looked better. Synapse ups the game in the special features department by including a feature length documentary (also in anamorphic HD) that specializes on Hammer’s three-film approach to J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla story.
Posted by:
Seth Hall
Sometimes, I find trailers more entertaining than the finished product. Nevertheless, I continue to hope for the best. When the writing and acting in modern horror films finally manages to match the imagery, atmosphere, and visual effects that draw us into the theaters, we will enter the real golden age of the genre. Of course, with my luck, that will be the same day that the portals to R’lyeh open up and all film is destroyed in the resulting invasion.
With all of that in mind, several new pics and a (mostly) well-crafted trailer have been released for The Apparition, the upcoming horror film from Warner Bros. Pictures and Dark Castle Entertainment. The film is directed by Todd Lincoln and stars Ashley Green, Sebastian Stan, Luke Pasqualino, and Tom Felton. I’ll be honest. The trailer is very impressive. Visually, anyway. And the story is actually quite unique.
The plot centers around the hypothesis that ghostly apparitions are products of the human imagination. In an attempt to prove this as scientific theory, a group of students attempt to create a specter using only their minds. After they are successful, the entity that they have created begins to spread like a virus, infecting a young couple’s home.
Posted by:
Seth Hall
Possible the greatest fear in the entertainment industry, for both artists and fans alike, is the sophomore slump. A band releases that first moving album. A director creates their first visual masterpiece. And a comic brings paint and ink to life from inside that plastic-protected first edition. And then comes the second, and it is nowhere near as impressive as the first. And then, you can only wait in desperation for the third one, hoping to recapture that same magic.
I am pleased to report that this is not the case with Hoax Hunters #2.
Once again, Michael Moreci and Steve Seeley deliver a fast-paced horror action piece helped along by the detailed, colorfully compelling art of Axel Medellin. And fortunately, the mystery pace described in our review of Hoax Hunters #1 remains present. For every question answered, two or three more rise up to take its place, including yet another magnificent twist ending even more shocking and exciting than in issue #1. Are there still unanswered questions? Most certainly. But, if you’re like me, you love a good mystery, and nothing is more disappointing than a mystery giving you the bloody answer in the first ten minutes.
