Whether it’s a closeup of Lon Chaney Jr’s face getting hairier and hairier using lapse-dissolve photography in his various Universal Monster Movies or Rick Baker’s Oscar-winning full body transformation of David Naughton in An American Werewolf in London, the measuring stick for all werewolf films is the transformation scene. A good transformation scene not only […]
Eating just before watching the mind-blowing horror short Mashed Potato Face is not recommended. Many readers can probably relate to the feeling of taking another bite of mashed potatoes when you’re already stuffed, and the queasy feeling that can accompany that decision. Well, that’s nothing compared to how viewers will feel while watching this short, […]
It’s not much of a gig for Myles Park (Steve Vanderzee) being the opening act for a Hollywood sell-out trying to return to his stand-up roots to prove he is more than just a guy making bad movies for the money. But it takes place in a real theater and that sure beats telling jokes […]
Breakfast is a gripping Australian shocker short blending body horror with another fright-fare aspect that would be criminal to spoil here. Written by Paul Beattie and codirected by Beattie and Melanie Rios, Breakfast delivers an eerie tale featuring differing character perspectives and a chilling atmosphere throughout. Katherine (Rebecca Smee) has been sick and bedridden for […]
The Faceless Man is a confusing mess. The first 10 minutes feel like a high school theater production of an angst-filled father/daughter melodrama that takes place in the middle of a crowded cancer ward. It’s badly acted, badly written, and almost bad enough to make you stop watching altogether. But please don’t. When the action […]
Ever wonder where all the love for Thanksgiving horror is? Well, so do I. Thanksgiving is that lost holiday right between Halloween and Christmas, heck even the decorations in my household go directly from ghosts, monsters and pumpkins to Santa, snowmen and reindeer. Well thankfully this gory serving of Thanksgiving horror from up and coming […]
Writer/director Finn Callan’s U.K. short film Guest is rich in spine-tingling atmosphere, from the bandaged appearance of its protagonist Mary (Melania Crisan) to the heavy sense of dread throughout to the decidedly creepy reason why Mary is in her current state. Mary has entered, uninvited, the home of a woman (Jessica Munna) after being pursued […]
The latest entry in the subgenre of young women finding power as werewolves is I Am Lisa, a film that follows such entries as Canada’s Ginger Snaps (2000) and the Danish/French coproduction When Animals Dream (2014). Prolific director Patrick Rea’s (Arbor Demon [2016]; Nailbiter [2013]) latest feature, I Am Lisa combines a powerful revenge story […]
Old-school film stock and classic giallo techniques combine in writer/director Kevin Fermini’s horror short Death Walks on Nitrate. The result is a trippy, beautiful looking slice of cinema with an eerie aesthetic. Katie Carpenter (Disengaged from Gruesome Magazine’s own Christopher G. Moore and The Haunting of Hill House are among her 20 horror film credits) […]
The body of a teenage girl is found washed up by the banks of a river. Police arrive, look around for a bit and deduce that she wasn’t just killed. She had been hunted. It’s unclear how they leap to this conclusion given the minimal investigation, but it’s still just the opening minutes of The […]
It’s been a long time since Michael Wolffsen (Tyler Mane) has been back to the family compound, and it’s not because his life away from home has been so fabulous he didn’t have time to look back. If anything he’s spent all those years obsessing over what he left behind, always worrying that someone or […]
Witches more interested in their social media accounts than their craft find themselves in diabolical danger in the horror short The Witches of Bushwick. Cowriters/codirectors Catherine Delaloye and Joe Pardavila have crafted an admirable slice of supernatural cinema that sets its sights on social media influencers, poseurs looking for a big financial score, and the […]
A weekend retreat at an isolated cabin in the woods. What could possibly go wrong? It’s a bit of a rhetorical question since the old ‘cabin in the woods’ trope has been used to make dozens and dozens of horror movies, whether it’s a group of cabins at a summer camp (Friday the 13th) or […]
Let’s start with the fact that Baby Frankenstein is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a horror movie. Yes, it has a ‘monster’ in it and there is a bad guy that you want to see murdered in the most grisly and gory way imaginable. But nobody dies in Baby Frankenstein; nobody even gets […]
An apocalyptic event has taken place leaving David (Tim Kaiser) alone in the woods with little more than a pocket knife, a few meager supplies, and a battered old tent. As if that wasn’t bad enough there are things, evil things, waiting just outside the tent to get him the minute he lets his guard […]