Some vampires are sexy because they're so unabashedly wicked -- bad boys (and girls) don't come badder than pallid immortals who live by the blood of humans. But others get their erotic zing from soulful torment: Imagine the agony of eternal life when all you want is to fall in love and grow old with someone, each moment made more precious by the knowledge that it will someday end. Ooooh, dreamy. From Twilight's Edward Cullen to Interview with the Vampire's tortured Louis de Pointe du Lac, these emo vamps are simply irresitible.

Edward Cullen (Twilight series, ongoing )
Born in 1901, Edward Anthony Masen was dying of Spanish Influenza when his mother begged vampire Carlisle Cullen to save her son. Frozen at the age of 17, Edward (Robert Pattinson) refuses to drink human blood and endures decades of loneliness rather than risk breaking his vow. But he falls in love with Bella Swan, and is torn between pursuing their relationship or protecting her -- from himself and his fellow vampires -- by breaking her heart.

Continue reading "Sharp Fangs, Big Hearts - The Ten Sexiest Emo Vampires" »

Ever heard of a little thing called triskaidekaphobia? That's the fear of the number 13, and it's got legs. Not superstitious, you say? Well, sophisticated 14th-floor dwellers: If your elevator buttons skip from 12 to 14, you live on the 13th floor. Bet you'll be careful with those mirrors and keep an eye on black cats from now on. In the meantime, peruse this list of movies that feature the number 13 -- perhaps you'll learn something useful.

13 Tzameti (2005):
An impoverished Georgian immigrant blunders his way into an underground suicide tournament organized for the benefit of wealthy, jaded gamblers in this bleak psychological chiller. "13" is the protagonist's number and "tzameti means 13 in Georgian, so the movie's U.S. title is actually "13 13." That's a whole lotta bad luck.

Continue reading "How Many Scary Movies Does It Take to Show That 13 Is an Unlucky Number? (Nine)" »

George Romero has been the undisputed master of cannibal zombie movies for 40 years, starting with his debut, Night of the Living Dead (1968). But he's not all about shambling corpses. Take a stroll through Romero's ten best movies, including The Crazies, in which a military bio-weapon turns a quiet small town into a nightmare of violence, and the downbeat vampire flick Martin in this movie list, and decide which of his many flicks freaked you out the most.

Rank your favorite Romero movies »

For the full schedule of Night of the Living Dead on AMC, click here.

Sylvester Stallone's Edgar Allan Poe biopic (cue the "Yo, Poe! jokes) has resurfaced with Robert Downey Jr. in the lead and Poe's short stories and poems are still being recycled into movies and TV shows at a furious clip. If his grocery list turned up, someone would probably film that, too. There are at least 200 movies based on the works of America's first horror writer, which puts him up there with Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare in the "most adapted writer" sweepstakes. But great Poe movies are tough to find. Tough, but not impossible: So feast your eyes on the top ten Poe and Poe-related movies:

10. Tales of Terror (1962)
Yes, it's a lesser entry in Roger Corman's famous Poe series: Two of the three segments are pretty forgettable. But "The Black Cat" rolls that story and "The Casque of Amontillado" into one big ball of hammy goodness tailor-made for Peter Lorre and Vincent Price, who appear to be having the time of their lives playing arch-frenemies.

Continue reading "The Ten Creepiest Fright Flicks of Edgar Allan Poe" »

Think about it: If witches were all warty hags, how much damage could they do? When it comes to corrupting the weak and luring the suggestible on the path of righteousness, there's nothing like luscious lips and insinuating hips. Which is why so many witchy women are hotter than hell; that and proximity to the lake of fire or something. So without further ado, let's have a look at the most alluring of Lucifer's luscious lady friends.

Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter), Harry Potter Series (2007-2010)
Yes, Bellatrix is mad, bad and dangerous to know, but she's working that belle dame sans merci vibe for all it's worth and she's the closest thing the Harry Potter series has to a full-blooded fatal femme.

Continue reading "Maitland McDonagh - The Ten Movies With the Sexiest Witches" »

With the Toronto Film Festival debut of George Romero's Survival of the Dead just around the corner, it's time to evaluate his bloody body of work. And contrary to what some people believe, it's not all about the living dead.

10. The Dark Half (1993)
Not tip-top Romero, but easily one of the best adaptations of a Stephen King novel out there. Timothy Hutton is terrific in the dual role of a mild-mannered literary novelist and the alias who somehow comes to life after the writer publicly "kills" him to thwart a blackmailer who's threatening to blow the lid on his sideline in sleazy thrillers.

Continue reading "Hierarchy of the Dead or George Romero's Top Ten Fright Flicks" »

Less a remake than a wholesale re-imagining of the original Halloween II, directed by Rick Rosenthal and written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill, Rob Zombie's sequel to his reboot is driven by the kind of questions that plague every doom-haunted horror buff. It may be fun to groove on the kick-ass pluck of uber-final girls like Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode, but when you really think about it, it's hard to imagine Laurie -- or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's Sally Hardesty or Scream's Sidney Barrows -- ever forging a normal life from the bloody shreds left after her ordeal with a psychopath.

Continue reading "Halloween II Review - Is Rob Zombie Twice as Scary This Time Around?" »

More than 30 years after the night he came home, Michael Myers is coming home again in Rob Zombie's Halloween II. Zombie's 2007 reboot of the lucrative franchise was the exception that proved the rule, a remake that neither slavishly recreated the original with gorier special effects nor slapped a familiar title on a generic fright flick. So what better time to take a look at the original Halloween movies and see how they hold up and stack up?

the-killing-machine, it's a rotten deal. The only reason Halloweeniacs didn't hunt down writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace and kill him is that when he was Halloween's production designer he bought a mass-market Captain Kirk mask, stripped off its hair and painted it white, thereby inventing the "face" of Michael Myers.

Continue reading "Maitland McDonagh - The Best and Worst of the Halloween Movies (Pre-Zombie)" »

Like the art of crafting horror movie taglines, the art of naming sequels is demanding, under-appreciated and frequently a losing battle against the bottom line. It's tough to make a sequel that isn't just a rehash of the stuff people liked in the first movie, but it has to be downright demoralizing to see the result of your efforts rubber stamped "Homicidal Maniac III." Sorry, dude.

Sure, old-school naming conventions could be cheesy: "Son of the This," "Revenge of the That," "Curse of the Other Thing." But sequel titles tell all kinds of tales, some about the plots and some about the behind-the-scenes movie business wrangling.

The Evil Dead Series (1992)
Sam Raimi wanted to call the second Evil Dead (1982) sequel "The Medieval Dead." That would have alerted fans to its crazy mix of 14th century deadites and 20th century Ash (complete with boomstick, chainsaw arm and '88 Olds), and super fans to the fact that this was the movie Raimi wanted Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987) to be. But Universal Pictures nixed the title, presumably because it smacked of history class; they settled for Army of Darkness, though they would no doubt have preferred "Evil Dead 3: Deader Than Ever," or something equally lame.

Continue reading "Maitland McDonagh - Seed of Chucky! Jason's Revenge! The Secret Language of Horror Sequels" »