What is it about dolls that strikes fear into my cold little heart? From the moment I saw Talking Tina in The Twilight Zone, I knew something was amiss with recognizing life in an inanimate object. Pediophobia, the fear of dolls, is a primitive fear. To be superstitious of something similar to a person, but […]
A lone office worker finds himself dealing with mysterious machines in the U.K. horror short The Third Hand. Prolific actor Tom Bonington, who fright fare fans may recognize from such films as The ABCs of Death 2 (2014) and A Haunting at the Rectory (2015), plays the worker, who watches snowy television and buys a […]
Imagine that you are taking a tour of the special room at the home of real-life paranormal detectives Ed and Judy Warren, the room with the warning signs and multiple locks on the door where they keep all the creepy stuff they’ve collected through years of investigating the things everybody else is too scared to […]
My favorite style of horror film is that which deals with an eerie, unsettling atmosphere bordering on — or diving headlong into — the surreal, with the filmmakers never fully or easily explaining what is unfolding. Water Horse, a brilliant short film from co-directors Sean Temple and Sarah Wisner, delivers just such an unsettling experience […]
Unlike a lot of horror movie franchises that start big then fizzle out over time, some to be rebooted for a new generation (Halloween) and some to forever haunt the “You May Also Like” pages of various streaming services (A Nightmare on Elms St.), the Child’s Play series has quietly chugged along, with varying degrees […]
What do you look for in a zombie movie? Is it sophomoric political satire, a script riddled with silly self-referential jokes? An all-star cast who sleepwalks through the film, most of them in glorified cameos that add up to little more than stunt casting? A story about the zombie apocalypse being caused by global warming […]
Provocative, prolific horror filmmaker Izzy Lee imagines what might happen in the near future should a certain wall be built on the border between the United States and Mexico in her latest short shocker, Re-Home. Lee is no stranger to creating fright fare with a sociopolitical vibe, and this, her latest offering, continues that trend. […]
Seen as a sort of revisit to the celebrated television series Masters of Horror, the new scare-fare anthology Nightmare Cinema serves up five tales of terror from renowned directors Mick Garris, Joe Dante, Alejandro Brugués, Ryûhie Kitamura, and David Slade, with a wraparound segment featuring Mickey Rourke as The Projectionist. As with any cinematic portmanteau, […]
A group of young hikers finds that the opportunity for sudden wealth leads them down dangerous paths in the horror outing Stay Out Stay Alive. Greed motivates some members of the party, but the lust for riches proves to be no match for supernatural forces in the forest in this engrossing thriller. Amy (Christina July […]
Director Chris Roe blends a classic cinematic melodrama approach with a healthy dose of EC Comics-style horror in his black-and-white short film Cemetery Tales: A Tale of Two Sisters, the first installment in a planned Cemetery Tales series. This 1949-set tale stars Traci Lords (Not of This Earth, 1988; Skinner, 1993) as Victoria Chastain, a […]
There is a long tradition of actors and actresses starting their career in genre films and going on to “better” things, like Kevin Bacon in Friday the 13th, Jennifer Aniston in Leprechaun or George Clooney in Return of the Killer Tomatoes! It’s much rarer for one at the height of their career to do the […]
“The eye.“ That won’t make a lot of sense to you until after you have seen Brightburn, but once you have…well, it’s all you are going to be thinking about for a long, long time: “The eye.” That thing in the restaurant…that thing with the woman’s eye. In fact, just reading this, and remembering “the […]
When you find a ventriloquist dummy chained, gagged, and sealed in a crate in the attic of a house into which you just moved, common sense dictates that you either leave the dummy alone, get rid of it, or better yet, break the lease and get out tout de suite. Luckily for viewers of the […]
An abused little boy retreats to a fantasy world in writer/director Davide Melini’s U.K. short horror film Lion, but his violent, drunkard father and intimidated mother (Tania Mercader as Amanda) come face to face with a harsh reality. Lion is still on its film festival run, and has claimed more than 263 awards so far, […]
A successful young couple, tired of living in their gorgeous San Francisco apartment, decide to look for an estate in Napa Valley where they can relax, start a family and live their version of the American Dream. It’s just their bad luck that the owner of the $3.2 million property they decide to settle down […]