Tracy Letts may have just won a Pulitzer Prize but in the hearts of horror fans, his play August: Osage County will never dethrone his nasty little paranoid creepshow Bug. Unfortunately, misleading blood-and-guts promos plagued William Friedkin's 2006 movie adaptation. "People who would have enjoyed the film didn't go see it, because they were put off by the marketing campaign," says Letts, "And kids who were enthusiastic to see the movie were furious -- 'Why are these people talking?' They didn't understand that there would be these long scenes of dialogue, so they felt cheated. Because they were cheated!" 

Letts himself is quite democratic in his love of horror. "It's tough to identify what it is I like about it. But I like pretty much everything about it!" he says. "I was into J-horror when that started to appear, but then they all got remade and watered down." The last movie that really got under his skin? "The remake of The Hills Have Eyes of all things!" admits Letts. "I don't know that here's acres of social commentary, but it was a pretty good scare."

Tracy Letts' Top 10 Horror Movies

Continue reading "Pulitzer Prize Winner Tracy Letts on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, "Poorly Acted, Poorly Directed .... Genius."" »

Between Twilight and Prom Night, it seems like the way to set up a successful horror movie is to end the title with "-ight." Or maybe not: Cloverfield manages to hang on the list, despite no actual news. Hey, Clover is one powerful fish-monster, what can we say?

Actually, what can you say? Think we got something horribly wrong? Or missed the biggest horror news of the week? Then talk back in the comments, and let us know what you think. This week's topic of discussion: Come up with a horror movie song parody title! As an example, "Jason's Mom," a parody of Fountains of Wayne's "Stacy's Mom." Go to it, Monsterfesters.

Horror Power Rankings
Rank	LW		Movie (or Comic, etc.)
1	1		Twilight The Twilight trailer gets released on MySpace, and quickly works it's way to become the second most downloaded trailer of all time; the number one spot isn't too far out of its sights. Hey, it's Twilight's world, we just live in it.
2	-		Poultrygeist Sorry non-New Yorkers, but we're the only people who get to see a theatrical "screaming" of the latest Troma masterpiece. Ron Jeremy. Lipstick lesbians. And hundreds of undead chickens. We're so there.
3	-		Bioshock Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) signs on to direct the film adaptation of the mega-selling video game. Can't wait to see the Little Sisters betray each other, then form alliances, then betray each other again. Then form another alliance.
4	5		Cloverfield Pics from the Cloverfield 2 viral campaign turn out to be from the end of first Cloverfield viral campaign. Still, for a few hours, the Internet was all aflutter, which is good news for the monster sequel.
5	-		Deal With The Devil Lionsgate picks up the Alias Enterprises comic book series about a cop who teams up with a serial killer to stop a series of copycat killings. If it's anything like Rush Hour, sign us up.
6	-		Igor Not so much horror as horror parody, next summer's big budget, animated mad scientists vs. assistants movie gets a trailer. Who knew John Cusack had gotten so short, and fat?
7	-		The X-Files: I Want To Believe Mulder & Scully walk through the snow, followed by helicopters, with a big, bloody "X," in the Polish version of the X-Files 2 poster. And we still have no clue what the movie is about.
8	-		Frontier(s) Our reviewer thought it was a slick technical package that feels dead inside. Dead inside is just how we like our horror, isn't it?
9	10		Prom Night Thanks a lot for making liars of us, Prom Night. Last week we said that not only would the movie be out of the top 10, but $50mil was out of it's reach. Now, both things look to be false. Stay tuned...
10	-		The Strangers The Liv Tyler home invasion flick starts gearing up its marketing with some creepy TV clips. The buzz around it has been good, and whether or not it's based on true events, this might be the one to watch.

In 1990, readers thrilled at Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's send-up of both the '70's horror classic The Omen and the entire biblical Apocalypse in their collaborative novel Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. A bungled switch-at-birth results in the Antichrist and his pet hell-hound being raised in a modest country home, while another, totally normal, child gets the diplomat mansion, the Satanic nanny and the whole bit -- thus, the end of the world winds up being a little more disorganized than you'd expect. Demand for a film adaptation piqued, and in 2002, Terry Gilliam announced that a script had been written; rumors that Johnny Depp and Robin Williams had been cast as the book's respective demonic and angelic presences spread like wildfire. So what happened?

Continue reading "Will The Omen Ever Get the Terry Gilliam Spoof It Deserves?" »

Over the past few years, horror has been outsourced. If foreigners can run our call centers then surely they can make something as simple as a horror movie, right? In fact, they've turned out to be better at it than we are. After a run of J-horror (The Ring, The Grudge, any number of movies featuring dead wet girls with long black hair), there was a run on K-horror (A Tale of Two Sisters, The Host), and now there are the French imports: Haute Tension, Inside and the regrettably titled Frontier(s). It sound(s) like the title of a grad school paper(s), but is, instead, another reminder that people who live in the country are creepy and should be destroyed. 

In Paris, the banlieus are burning and four street kids use the riots as cover for a bank robbery. The criminal foursome are young, multi-ethnic and attractive, like a United Colors of Benetton ad. The designated group hottie, Yasmine, is pregnant and is planning on getting an abortion ASAP, while the guys like to smoke pot and video themselves having a lot of sex. It's like watching a Gus Van Sant movie dubbed into French. Très sexy. Très disaffected. Très hip.

Hiding out in a quaint country inn, the four soon discover that its rustic charm is undermined by the fact that it's run by a family of neo-Nazi cannibals, whose flesh-eating, inbred mutant zombie babies nest in an abandoned nearby mine. One by one, the criminals come to a bad end via hook, hot steam and chopper until only a traumatized Yasmine is left, because the Nazi family needs her womb to brew the master race.

By the time one of the sexy young thugs is impaled on twin meat hooks by an enormously fat, leather-apron-clad Nazi cannibal, you could be forgiven for thinking to yourself, "Mon dieu, it is Le Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and you wouldn't be too far off. If you ordered a horror movie pizza and said "give me everything on top," then what arrived at your door would look a lot like Frontier(s). If it's been in a horror movie, it's in this flick -- and we're not talking tips of the hat, but straight-up steals and samples from Psycho, Hostel, The Descent, Hannibal, Motel Hell, House of a Thousand Corpses, Haute Tension, Sheitan... and that's just in the first 30 minutes. After that my brain got tired.

Continue reading "Frontier(s) Review - Like a Horror Movie Pizza With Everything on Top" »

Novelist Scott Sigler's horror column appears every Thursday.

There's one thing built into any story involving the undead: They can't really die, because, well, they are already dead. That means their decomposing posteriors always come back for more, and in Hollywood, "coming back for more" means sequels. A first sequel is no big whoop. It's mandatory, and you can still evaluate each movie on its own merits. But when you hit that all-important second sequel, then you've got yourself a trilogy, and that brings on the opinionated analysis of the entire franchise as a single entity.

Case in point: The third installment in the Brendan Fraser Mummy series, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which hits theaters in August. We're out of Egypt and into China, moving from the Pharos to the well-preserved remains of a Han Dynasty emperor (played by Jet Li). 

So, welcome to Uncle Scotty's Highly Scientific School of Franchise Measurement™. Here at Uncle Scotty's, we score a franchise on an 10-point index based on:
• Actors
• Overall Story Continuity
• Monster Factor
• Special Effects
• Movie Plots
Give each element a 10-point rating, average it out, and you've got your index score. This was developed by people at NASA, using computers and other advanced technologies. There might be some alloys and biotech involved as well -- it's technical -- you wouldn't understand... so just trust Uncle Scotty.

We will need to re-calibrate this score after Part Three hits the screens, but let's take a look at a pre-emptive rating of The Mummy franchise.

Actors: 9
Fraser (as Rick O'Connell) is pretty kick-ass at his version of Indiana Jones. Arnold Vosloo was absolute perfection as the High Priest Imhotep in the first two movies. For the third movie, can we give an early score? The baddie is Jet Li. Jet Li. Mummies are bad-ass enough as is. Now throw in a spin kick and you're queuing up potential greatness. Now, could a spin-kicking mummy also be totally retarded? Sure. We'll have to wait and see, but did I mention, it's Jet Li?

Continue reading "With a New Setting and a New Director, Will The Mummy Franchise Hold Up?" »

Blogger Stacie Ponder's horror columns appear every Wednesday.

Let's get one thing clear up front: I'm not a "gearhead," as the kids might say. I'm not into cars as a hobby, a status symbol or a sport. If you are, that's cool, but in my opinion, cars are simply tools that serve a purpose, like screwdrivers and crimping irons. Cars get you from Point A to Point B in varying degrees of luxury and comfort, and that's about it... unless, of course, we're talking about scary movies. We all know that in the world of horror, cars hate you. We've all seen countless films where cars decide not to work at the precise moment that you really effing need them to, that moment when the mask-wearing, overall-sporting, pointy implement-wielding cookadook is about to make with the stab-stab.

What about movies featuring cars that aren't satisfied to merely abandon you in your time of need, but rather the cars that must kill? Are they ever... well, are they ever scary? Better yet, does it matter? Honestly, I don't think there'll ever be a film featuring a killer car that's going to leave me wide awake at night, terrified beyond all get-out with my blankets pulled up to my chin, wondering if that car I hear driving down my street is coming to kill me. Something tells me it's just not gonna happen. Just because they're not necessarily terrifying doesn't make killer car movies any less fun, however.

Continue reading "Cars That Kill - Not So Scary but Lots of Fun" »

News, reviews, and snarky opinions are the backbone of the blogging world, and horror is no exception. What began two years ago as a traditional genre blog, The Horror Blog has slowly blossomed into an entertaining forum for expression thanks to the weekly Horror Roundtable, in which prominent bloggers assemble to answer questions like "Setting Zombies on Fire: Decent Strategy or Horrible Mistake?". Curated by Steven Wintle, each Roundtable topic is an opportunity to pick the brains of writers who really know their stuff.

"I sent out invitations to the first batch of participants just to get the ball rolling," says Wintle, "This group was comprised of practically every horror blogger I could think of. After that initial drive, I would occasionally extend an open invite on the blog, and we would get new recruits either that way or just by people inquiring about it." Wintle gives full credit to his panelists for the Roundtable's success to date, "It's like a dinner party, but everyone invited is a cannibal."

Continue reading "Site of the Week - Horror Blog's "Weekly Roundtable"" »

Maybe you already saw Teeth maybe you didn't... but either way, you've probably already cracked a joke about it. Mitchell Lichtenstein's vagina dentata movie rode a wave of one-liners to the top of many people's 2007 must-see movie lists, and arrives on DVD today. Lichtenstein took a break from filming his new movie (Happy Tears, starring Demi Moore and Parker Posey) to comment on whether fans of the radiant Jess Weixler can look forward to more Teeth turns in the future.

Q: Teeth was gratefully received by horror fans, and they have a long memory. Do you have plans to return to the genre anytime soon or revisiting the story?

A: Conceivably. It's left sort of open-ended so that there could certainly be the further adventures of Dawn, but I don't quite know what they would be yet. I don't want her to turn into Aileen Wuornos... but I enjoy the genre so maybe I'll come up with something.

Q: The special effects were pretty graphic. Did capturing an R rating impose constraints on your creativity?

Continue reading "Director Mitchell Lichtenstein Says the Ratings Board Thought Teeth Was a Cautionary Tale " »

A gentle man with a fearful occupation, Dr. Charles Ptak D.D.S knows that his work can be off-putting. "Many people don't understand how you could handle the blood, or drilling in the oral cavity with blood and saliva and infectious material and so forth," he says, adding: "I've seen a lot over the 25 years I've practiced; I can be amazed, but not surprised."

While many people consider the prospect of oral surgery to be scarier than a visit from Pinhead or Freddy Krueger, Dr. Ptak isn't himself immune to the allure of a great scary movie. The classic creature-features that Shock Theater played on TV in the late '50s primed him for a later interest in darker fare, such as Hellraiser, and clinical detachment doesn't help. "I'm not so far removed from my emotions and empathy for other people that it doesn't get to me. That film was horrible, very expressive -- and that's why we love movies," says Dr. Ptak.

Dr. Charles Ptak's Top 10 Horror Movies

Continue reading "Classic Creature Features Primed Oral Surgeon Charles Ptak for Darker Fare " »

In late 2006, Capcom's release of Lost Planet provided fans with an opportunity to relive moments ripped directly from Starship Troopers, planting controller jockeys behind the wheel of a giant mech tasked with clearing a frozen wasteland of its insectoid inhabitants.

It was a fun romp, but one that lacked a crucial option -- the ability to play from the antagonist's perspective. Thankfully, on May 27, Capcom is releasing Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Colonies Edition, an expansion which will fill the void.

Continue reading "Lost Planet Now Lets You Play From the Monster's Point of View" »