Blogger Stacie Ponder's horror columns appear every Wednesday.

As you may recall, this past Sunday was Mother's Day, a holiday in which we buy cards, make phone calls, and go out to eat to celebrate the women who brought us into the world. My mom did much more than simply, you know, have me: She's the one who got me into horror movies when I was young, and it's still something we share today.

So as a horror fan and writer, how could I let Mother's Day pass without mentioning...uh...Mother's Day? Or Pamela Voorhees of Friday the 13th? Or the Mommy of...Mommy? But in my never-ending quest to be different and to stand out, I've decided to shine the spotlight on the other moms of horror, the ones who are all about saving rather than killing. These women are all about their kids. And as this concerns horror movies -- and not movies where Julia Roberts is the second wife who loves her stepkids and tries so hard to be loved back -- not all good-intentioned moms meet happy endings.

Rachel Keller: The Ring (2002)
One of the things I like about Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) in Gore Verbinski's The Ring is that she wasn't the best mom in the world. She didn't neglect her weirdo kid, Aidan (David Dorfman), but she was concerned first and foremost with her own life and her own career. This self-centeredness, of course, led her to the evil videotape, the wet-haired dead girl in the well, a horse that flips out and commits suicide, and a questionable sequel. If only she'd joined the PTA or stayed home to make cookies for that weirdo son!

Amanda Shepard: Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
In order to help her daughter Tina (Lar Park Lincoln) overcome some extreme psychic-power-induced emotional trauma, Mrs Shepard (Susan Blu) enlists the help of Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser). Little does she know that Dr Crews doesn't want to help Tina -- he wants to exploit her telekinetic abilities in a mad quest for fame and fortune! If you think that alone makes him a jerk, then, honey, you don't know Dr. Crews. Not satisfied with simply manipulating the Shepards and bilking them of money, Crews actually pulls Tina's mom between himself and the pointy end of a garden implement wielded by Jason Voorhees. Dr. Crews is bad news!

Laura Baxter: Don't Look Now (1973)
The fact that Laura (Julie Christie) just couldn't get over the death of her daughter Christine (Sharon Williams) led the remaining Baxters on a nightmarish trip through Venice. Creepy psychic sisters, a serial killer on the loose, Donald Sutherland's butt... and one of the most shocking endings in horror film history are but a few highlights of Nicolas Roeg's cerebral exercise in terrifying atmosphere.

Chris MacNeil: The Exorcist (1973)
Man, Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) really has it all: A fabulous career as a famous actress, spiffy sunglasses, an obscenity-and-pea-soup-spewing daughter who's been possessed by Pazuzu... wait, that last thing sucks. But Chris is a great mom who soldiers on, seeking help and answers in both science and religion in her quest to help her daughter Regan (Linda Blair) overcome her demon-flavored difficulties. And in the end, she bears no grudge against Regan for all the bad behavior -- not for the swearing, the punching, the killing of her friend and director, not even for peeing on the floor during a party. Moms rule!

Continue reading "In Praise of Horror Movie Moms" »

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" »

Blogger Stacie Ponder's horror columns appear every Wednesday.

Anyone who socializes on any scale whatsoever knows the importance of a good exit: Don't be the last one to go. Don't insist everyone join you dancing on the table when your hosts are clearly ready for Slumberland. These tips will all but ensure that you'll be invited out with the gang again. If you'd like to guarantee you'll be on the guest list, however, you might want to consider a great exit line. I'd recommend something more snazzy than my old standard "Well...bye," but less violence-inspiring than, say, "Seacrest... out." And don't be afraid to fail as you experiment: "Later, dudes, I'm outta here!" might sound too much like an Olsen twin quipping to Uncle Jesse circa '89. "See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya!" sounds like a yearbook signature. Keep trying. You'll get there, I promise.

In the world of the horror film, a great exit line serves many purposes: It can set up for a sequel, it can leave the viewer with a sense of dread long after the credits have rolled, or it can simply be something that inspires endless quoting and bad impressions. Surely, we all have our favorites -- let's bust out the chestnuts.

There's More to Come
These endings leave the door so far open for a sequel, the door has actually been blown off the hinges and has exploded into a million tiny pieces.

Friday the 13th: "Ma'am, we didn't find any boy." "But...then he's still out there!" Yes, Alice, almost 30 years on and Jason is still out there. And he's mean and gross.

Continue reading ""He's Still Out There" - Classic Exit Lines That Get Under Your Skin" »

Blogger Stacie Ponder's horror columns appear every Wednesday.

Hey, did you hear that they're remaking Friday the 13th? OMG, I know, right? There are news items left and right as the cast is slowly being revealed: Bright-eyed star here, that person from that one show there... Heck, even Jason has a face now: Derek Mears, the kinda weird looking dude from the Hills Have Eyes 2 remake. "But wait," you're saying, "Surely that Derek Mears fellow is a grown-up. In the original film, wasn't Jason a crusty little kid living on the bottom of Crystal Lake?" Why yes, observant reader, he certainly was. Hmm.

See, that Jason Voorhees is a tricky character. Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers are pretty straight-forward: One is a child murderer who was killed by a mob of angry parents and now he's some sort of magical burnt-up-looking guy who can kill you in your dreams, while the other is, you know, the embodiment of pure, soulless evil. Yes, I realize there was all that Thorn crap in Halloween 5 and Halloween 6, trying to give Michael a reason for being so bad, but quite frankly I'm ignoring that stuff.

Jason's Backstory

Continue reading "From Crusty Little Kid to Superhuman Zombie - The Muddled History of Friday the 13th's Jason" »

Blogger Stacie Ponder's horror columns will appear every Wednesday through April.

The recently released Prom Night remake has got me to thinking. No, my thoughts haven't turned to remakes in general (quite frankly, I think my brain has exceeded maximum capacity on that issue) or PG-13 horror (which isn't an oxymoron, I swear) or even baby's breath, taffeta, and tiaras. See, Prom Night has got me thinking about the rules and regulations of slasher films.

While I'm so sure that you've never noticed how... formulaic slasher films can be, I assure you that it's absolutely true -- while there are always exceptions to the rules, undoubtedly there's a slasher paradigm that's easily recognized once you've seen --  well, once you've seen more than one of them. Make a checklist, pop in the original Prom Night and see how many boxes you've ticked off when it's over: Masked killer? Past traumatic event that leads to subsequent murder spree? Set in a summer camp or high school? Ineffectual authority figure, teenage kill fodder, and a Final Girl? Check, check, check, check. Is the film tied to a specific time of year (a holiday or special event)?  Ch-- aww, you know the answer by now.

After spending a while ruminating on slasher rules and given all the holiday and event-themed plots, would it be possible, I wondered, to tie a flick to each month of the year? Call me crazy, but I figured I'd give it a try -- if there's one thing I've always said, it's that I live life on the edge. So bust out your Blackberries or your Palm Pilots or whatever it is you kids use for a calendar (if you're anything like me, you're still using a datebook from 2002) and let's fill it up with a year's worth of horror!

January
Ah, the time of fresh starts and making resolutions that are sure to be broken. Next time around, kick off a new beginning with New Year's Evil (1980). The killer offs a victim when each time zone hits the new year to win the love of his favorite VJ. Does it really matter whether or not the movie's any good when it pivots around VJ's, not to mentioned one called "Blaze"? No, it doesn't.

Continue reading "Slasher-of-the-Month Movie Selections: A Year's Worth of Frights" »

People ask me all the time, "Stacie, do you think comic books can be scary?" Alright, so no one has ever asked me that. Should the situation ever arise, however, I'll have my answer at the ready: "Why yes... I do think comic books can be scary. I've been waiting forever for someone to ask me that." 

It's extremely difficult to create a comic book that will actually frighten readers. For starters, unlike in straight-up literature (a la Stephen King), the storytelling in comics features a visual element that prevents the reader from completely using his or her imagination: No need to picture the monster in your head when the artist has put it right there on the page. And there are numerous variables beyond the control of the comic creators, the biggest being pacing. A reader can blow through a comic book in 20 seconds if he or she chooses, so slow builds to a climax and jump scares can be impossible to accomplish.

So is my ready-made answer, "Yes, I do think comic books can be scary," a lie? I have been known to lie, like that one time my friend's mom bought me a sweatshirt with a puffy-paint rendering of a teddy bear and I told her I liked it... but I'm not lying now, I swear. Comic books can indeed be scary, and I know this because I was frightened out of my mind by the first one I remember buying:

Tomb of Dracula #69 ("Cross of Fire...Cross of Fear!")
I pored over the cover -- a great shot of Dracula holding a cross as his hands burn from its touch -- and the pages inside, particularly a sequence in which some children are trapped in a farmhouse as gnarly, corpse-ish vampires break through the doors to get to them, reading the issue again and again. It terrified me as much as any film could ever hope to.

That leads me to an equally important question: Would that sequence scare me if it ever made it to the multiplex? Obviously, there are so many elements involved, who knows what the final result would be. Plenty of horror comics have been translated to film with varying degrees of success: Sometimes they rock my face off, and sometimes they leave me waving my middle finger in the air.

Continue reading "When Horror Comics Hit the Big Screen -- What Didn't Work... and What Did" »

Blogger Stacie Ponder's horror columns will appear every Wednesday through April.

If you'll excuse me for a moment, I'm about to get all, "You kids get off my lawn, oh my bursitis is flaring up" here. I realize that no one wants to hear about the "good old days" or how "Our old LaSalle ran great," but I'm saying it anyway, because some things cannot be denied: Made-for-TV horror movies were better way back when.

Plenty of theatrically released genre films kept me awake late into the night, plagued by thoughts like, "Could Jason Voorhees climb up the side of my house and get in my window?" (Of course, it never occurred to me to ask why Jason would travel all the way to southeastern Connecticut just to come after me in the first place.) But some of my most enduring childhood scares came courtesy of those "mild" made-for-TV horrors. In the '70s and early '80s, you had to look no further than the "Movie of the Week" to get your fill of mind-warping frights. Here are but a few that really got the blood pumping -- without showing it flowing:

Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)
Charles Durning and his good ol' boy cronies mete out some country justice on Bubba (Larry Drake), a mentally-challenged man falsely accused of murder. Soon after the cornfield showdown, a scarecrow stalks Bubba's executioners, delivering some... uh, scarecrow justice. Widely considered the mack daddy of straw dude horror flicks, Dark Night of the Scarecrow is still absolutely terrifying.

Continue reading "Remembering Made-for-TV Terrors " »

Most every horror fan has heard, at one time or another, some variation of the questions,  "Why do you watch that crap?" Sometimes it's more accusatory, "How can you watch that kind of crap?" Or maybe it's: "You're a whack job." Once I even got, "So, you like horror movies, huh? Wow, that's an ugly shirt." I realize that's not a statement about horror movies, necessarily, but I was irritated nonetheless: My shirt rocked!

See, an enjoyment of scary movies is often equated with negatives from general perversion, to a lack of intelligence, to bad fashion sense. It's not just fans that are unfairly maligned, either. As genre master John Carpenter quipped in the June 2000 issue of Fangoria, "If you direct my kind of pictures, you are kind of a ghettoized guy anyway. Horror directors are a little above pornographers. Just a hair."

Well, kids, I'm here to prove the naysayers wrong, to show that even though I dig fright flicks, I'm still capable of deep thoughts.

Monster-Related Musings
I spend most of my days exercising my brain with scientific ponderables such as string theory, or philosophical musings like, "If a tree falls in the forest and only Helen Keller is around, does the tree make a sound?" Then I'll bring it around to horror with something like, "Since Jason Voorhees has died and been brought back to life, does that technically make him a zombie in Friday the 13th, Part 6 and onward? For that matter, is Frankenstein's monster a zombie? Is there a difference between a zombie and a reanimated corpse? Of course, I mean a George Romero-style zombie, not, like, a voodoo zombie which is another matter entirely." Then I snap out of it and realize that I've been talking to myself for 15 minutes and people are beginning to stare and back away.

Recently I engaged in a debate... err, with myself... regarding whether or not paper is 2D or 3D. In the end, I decided that paper is, in fact, 3D; though its width is negligible, it's still there. Stack a bunch of pieces atop one another and you'll prove it.

Right about now you're saying to yourself "What does any of this have to do with anything, and...dear lord, is Stacie drunk?" That's neither here nor there. My point is, aren't 3D horror movies effing awesome?

A Quick History of 3D
Though 3D movies have been around nearly as long as motion pictures themselves (patents were sought as early as the 1890), horror began popping off the screen in the medium's heyday, the 1950s.  Whether it was animals-run-amok action style (Bwana Devil), comedy style (Spooks! featuring The Three Stooges), sci-fi style (It Came From Outer Space), or plain old monster style (Revenge of the Creature), audiences were getting their scare on while wearing dorky cardboard and cellophane glasses. Heck, even Alfred Hitchcock got in on as Grace Kelly felt three dimensions of strangulation in Dial M for Murder.

Continue reading "3D and Horror: The Perfect Combination" »

Blogger Stacie Ponder's horror columns will appear every Thursday through April.

Last Thursday I opened my mailbox and found an unbelievable bounty: Three credit card offers (I'm pre-approved! How awesome am I?), an envelope full of Valpak coupons (Hello, 20% off at the dry cleaners!), and a screener copy of the April Fool's Day remake. While I totally dig getting free movies, I can't say I'm terribly excited about the new April Fool's Day. The 1986 original is one of my favorite slasher flicks and I'm simply not much interested in seeing it re-done -- although having seen the trailer, it appears that the new version has very little to do with the old one.  Eventually I'll have to watch it, I know. I'm pretty sure that as a horror blogger I'm morally obligated or something.

Remakes. Man, we horror fans can't get away from 'em. Sure, they've been around forever -- there's Nosferatu (1979) and John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), to name a couple of great ones -- but in the last couple of years they've multiplied like cockroaches. Every time you squish one (that is, every time the reviews stink and audiences ignore flee), and you think that's that, five more suddenly appear to take its place. Try as you may, they simply can't be annihilated for good. The horror remake will undoubtedly be standing alongside Cher after the world explodes in a nuclear holocaust.

Continue reading "Why, Michael Bay, Why? The Remakes Multiply" »