It’s often said that “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” but that’s not entirely true.

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$1,000 for the day. Filming service. Discretion is appreciated.

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Not long ago we got two very cool genre films that had very similar stories. They were the British sci-fi film Dredd and the Indonesian action flick The Raid. Some fans think it’s obvious that one group of filmmakers stole the “lone hero battling his way up a building that’s absolutely packed with vicious henchmen”(…)

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Anyone who covers (or at least obsesses over) the current landscape of international horror cinema should be pleased to notice when a specific country speaks up and bangs out a fresh handful of genre films. Over the years we’ve seen eruptions like these from Spain, France, Ireland, Japan, and a dozen other nations that don’t(…)

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There’s a good reason that so many independent horror films take place in an isolated location that’s populated by only a handful of characters: because the fewer “moving parts” a low-budget producer has to worry about, the lower the odds of something going irrevocably wrong. If you have A) a creepy location, B) a decent(…)

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It was only a matter of time before the filmmaking team known as “The Butcher Brothers” would drop the slightly silly moniker and start crediting themselves as normal guys, and it only seems fitting that Mitch Altieri and Phil Flores would choose to do it with a film like Holy Ghost People. The duo has(…)

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The idea of a micro-budget found footage horror film shot entirely with an iPhone might be a quick turn-off for a lot of viewers – the iPhone is hardly a professional-level cinematographer’s tool, after all – but for those with an open mind, a little bit of patience, or a pointed interest in “DIY” filmmaking(…)

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Kudos to any independent filmmaker who dares to brave an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation (especially the ones who try to remain relatively faithful to the author’s work), as opposed to yet another woods-bound slasher flick. As cool as Lovecraft can be on the page, he’s a remarkably difficult author when it comes to cinematic adaptations, and(…)

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There are two very broad, distinct, and (fine) obvious types of horror stories being told in this 2013 indie thriller from After Dark Films (Originals). In one corner we have the “happy family in a creepy house they just bought to get away from the city” stuff and in the other is the “evil female spectre who(…)

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There’s really no way to review or discuss the new Spanish suspense thriller The Corpse of Anna Fritz without cutting right to the chase: it’s about a man who defiles the corpse of a recently deceased actress. And by “defiles” I mean precisely what you think: the movies deals with necrophilia in a very frank(…)

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Do we ever truly “get over” the untimely demise of a loved one? How does one begin the healing process if they were directly responsible for that loved one’s untimely demise? Does guilt have a statute of limitations?

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What would happen if you combined a mid-1980s slasher flick with the “history repeating itself” hook of Groundhog Day and the highly underrated 1992 television satire Stay Tuned? Well, you might get a movie that looks a little like Todd Strauss-Schulson’s clever, strange, and consistently funny The Final Girls, but it probably wouldn’t be quite(…)

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If you’re a fan of the pulpy, silly, and sometimes gruesome pop-culture throwback movies like Larry Blamire’s The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001), Andy Fickman’s 2005 rendition of Reefer Madness, last year’s comedy/horror/musical Stage Fright, or anything that could be accurately described as campy, affectionately old-fashioned, or downright “John Waters-y,” you’ll probably find a lot(…)

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If you went only from the first 25 minutes of the colorfully harsh new indie horror movie Avenged (known in the UK as Savaged), you’d probably be tempted to dismiss it as yet another effectively ugly, bleak, and unpleasant “rape / revenge” movie – but that’d be a pretty stupid thing to do. Who the hell judges a(…)

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There’s low budget, there’s micro-budget, and there’s “drive into the woods on an ATV with nothing but a chainsaw and a few interesting ideas” budget, and it’s on that third chain of the ladder that you’ll find a weird little movie called Red Trail 90.

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Horror fans sure do seem to love to hate clowns, don’t we? Even those who can appreciate the “traditional” sort of clown that we see at the circus, at kids’ birthday parties, or in old-fashioned TV shows have to admit that when the lights go down, there’s something irrefutably unsettling about a clown. Especially in(…)

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One of the more pleasant surprise of the 2011 horror landscape was the emergence of the “Bloody Disgusting Selects” line of theatrical and video releases. A joint effort between a company known as The Collective and (of course) our friends at Bloody Disgusting, “BD Selects” hit screens of various sizes with solid acquisitions like Yellowbrickroad, Rammbock,(…)

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Found footage warning! The indie sci-fi/horror film known as Banshee Chapter has been classified as “found footage” and is deemed worthy of this warning because apparently some viewers dislike “found footage” even if it’s used in service of a nifty and novel genre conceit like the one found in Banshee Chapter. In other words, if(…)

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Back in 2005 I was lucky to catch a 47-minute Lovecraft adaptation called The Call of Cthulhu, thanks to the Slamdance programmers who liked it enough to book it … even though it’s only 47 minutes long. Easily one of the most faithful Lovecraft adaptations ever produced (the best of the adaptations often take great(…)

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When it comes to over-the-top and unapologetically insane independent genre films, few nations on this fine planet come close to touching Australia. I knew it the second I saw Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior back in 1983, and nothing I’ve seen in the intervening years has proved my theory wrong: Australians know how to(…)

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Now here’s a weird one! Not in a bad way, but “weird” as in “interesting, odd, sometimes even a little frustrating, but also rather fascinating and oddly satisfying once all is said and done.” (It’s a rarely used definition of “weird,” true.)

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Imagine you’re at a party with Oscar-winning actor Jeff Bridges, and for some reason he leans over to you and says, “Want to hear my impersonation of Sean Connery playing Gandalf the wizard?” Obviously you respond with, “Yes! Of course!” and then he virtually explodes with a deep, booming Welsh/British/Dagobah and delivers a drunken soliloquy about evil(…)

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(Full disclosure: the director of this movie is a friend of mine. I have not liked all of his films. Just most of them. Including this one. End of disclosure.)

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“Why don’t we re-tell the Dracula myth as sort of a superhero origin story?”

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To the cynical or jaded horror viewer, the indie indie called The Mirror may throw up a few red flags right off the bat: It’s about a haunted mirror, obviously, which will immediately draw comparisons to last year’s Oculus, although the films don’t have all that much in common. It’s “based on actual events,” which generally(…)

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To strike a “perfect” balance between comedy and horror is an outrageously difficult task, and one that very few filmmakers pull off.

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Possess the… Possession? Wait, what? The key to a “faux documentary” is sincerity. From brilliantly funny comedies like This is Spinal Tap and Bob Roberts to clever thrillers like Man Bites Dog and The Blair Witch Project, one lesson is clear: your movie only works if everyone keeps a straight face. And that’s part of(…)

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No matter what happens to be in fashion within the horror genre in any given year, it seems that there will always be room for haunted house stories. Zombie tales, slasher flicks, and biological mayhem seem to wax and wane in their popularity but not haunted house movies: from The Old Dark House (1932) to(…)

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Check yourself before you [REC]4 yourself One hates to simply compare a sequel to its predecessors, mainly because it’s a basic and simplistic way to analyze what should be considered its own movie – but in the case of the [REC] franchise it’s worth noting that the first two films are freaking brilliant, and the third one(…)

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An occult thriller about the repercussions of cyber-stalking seems more than a little timely this year, and when a new indie film seems like it was torn out of a current newspaper, it’s important to figure out if the film is brave and insightful – or if it’s simply tacky and opportunistic. Given that Dark Summer(…)

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For all the whining and complaining we do about vampire stories that render the creatures as toothless and anemic whiners (my apologies to the fans of Twilight and/or Dracula Untold), there always seem to be a few independent filmmakers who find a new and novel use for the legendary bloodsuckers. This year alone yields films as interesting and(…)

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Whenever it seems like the werewolf movie has been completely forgotten, we get a nice reminder that this immortal legend of horror cinema will always have its fair share of supporters. It was way back in 1981 when The Howling, Wolfen, and An American Werewolf in London hit the screens, and while there was a semi-resurgence with Ginger Snaps (2000), Dog(…)

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The Bigfoot Project Sometimes it’s really weird how these things work out: Dredd and The Raid came out around the same time, and they had a lot of plot components in common. More recently we saw two cult-related indie horror films (The Sacrament and Children of Sorrow) that were released (and produced) only months apart, and also bear a few striking similarities.(…)

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Separation Anxiety While most indie horror films are interested in getting you as much “bang for the buck” as humanly possible, there are always a few filmmakers out there who insist on using the horror genre as a vehicle for plain, simple, and sometimes painfully “relatable” stories about the frank difficulties of normal life. (Check out(…)

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If you grew up as a horror film fanatic in the 1980s, you may have run through most of the American slasher flicks and occult thrillers – and then you rented Lucio Fulci’s 1980 cult favourite Zombie, which hopefully led you to all sorts of gore-laden apocalyptic mayhem from Italian splatter-slingers like Umberto Lenzi (Nightmare(…)

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The arrival of a new Pollyanna McIntosh movie is generally worthy of note among genre fans, mainly because the fantastic Scottish actress seems to have pretty solid taste in horror scripts (Offspring, The Woman, White Settlers, etc.), but also because she’s a fine lead actor… and super pretty to boot. (Full disclosure: Yes, we’ve met.(…)

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Not all “horror” movies are about shocks, scares, jolts, and suspense. OK, maybe 99% of them are about that stuff – but there’s a small subdivision that’s tucked deep down in the smarter and perhaps more sensitive section of the genre, and that’s where you find “speculative” horror fiction that’s 1/3 sci-fi, 1/3 drama, and(…)

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There are plenty of (usually independently produced) movies that take firm aim on the “chew ‘em up and spit ‘em out” nature of Hollywood. My favourites are Swimming with Sharks, Living in Oblivion, The Player and The Day of the Locust. But while those films are satirical and often very funny deconstructions of The Hollywood Machine, the new(…)

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Mirrors are sort of fascinating – how they actually work, not just the ways in which mirrors can act as portals, creatures, and harbingers in fantasy and horror stories – but if you ask a horror movie aficionado about “that movie about the killer mirror, you’ll get a response like Mirrors (1995) or (dear lord) one of(…)

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  The common complaint about the first chapter of The ABCs of Death – or, fine, at least my main complaint – is not that the 26 shorts were weird, random, nasty, and sometimes nonsensical; it’s that there wasn’t much in the way of consistency. Yes, ABCs #1 did offer a solid handful of legitimately creative(…)

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Be Prepared. Be Very Prepared.

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Straight to D/V/D By the time your horror franchise reaches its third chapter, you run the risk of simply repeating yourself. That’s not always a terrible thing (most of the Friday the 13th sequels are virtual remakes of their predecessors, but some of ‘em – like Part 4 and Part 6 – are actually pretty(…)

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The Paris, Texas Chain Saw Massacre What happens when the creators of Inside (aka À l’intérieur) decide to combine Stand By Me with a splash of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and big portions of “home invasion” insanity? You’d probably get something that looks a lot like Julian Maury and Alexndre Bustillo’s Among the Living (aka Aux yeux des vivants),(…)

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When you’re very young, “being scared” is not an amusing sort of experience. Oh, sure, as soon as we hit about 13 – and hopefully throughout our adult lives – we spend most of our times “playing along” with scary stories. And on the rare occasion when a film or a novel really does scare(…)

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The potential “problem” with films like WolfCop is not that they’re ridiculous; it’s that they often celebrate being ridiculous, which is sort of lazy way to tell a joke. (And I put “problem” in quotation marks because that’s my issue with broad and silly “grindhouse homage” movies, not necessarily yours.) Fortunately, the plainly ridiculous yet admirably stone-faced WolfCop earns(…)

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“A troubled young woman is convicted of petty felonies and forced to withstand house arrest in the home of her estranged mother, blank slate of a stepfather, and a bunch of evil spirits who make creepy noises…” Yeah, Housebound probably sounds like a mash-up of two or three clunkers you’d probably rent from Redbox and end up(…)

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As lazy as this might sound, movies like Dead Snow 2 are particularly easy to review, and the reasons why should be pretty simple: same writer / director, pretty much the same crew, it’s got the same tone, the same style, and the same sense of humour, but given that this is a Part 2,(…)

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It’s often pretty interesting when a smart male filmmaker tells a horror story that’s about women. Directors like Eric England (Contracted), Paul Solet (Grace), or Lucky McKee (May, The Woman, etc.) But wouldn’t it be a cool switch to see a horror story about a man that was written and directed by a woman? I(…)

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Most horror films offer normalcy that is invaded by something truly scary – or at least that’s how the formula works most often. But leave it to an astute genre guy like Lucky McKee (May, The Woods) to deviate from even the most basic of established genre formula and deliver a ferociously strange new horror(…)

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The recent resurrection of the historical Hammer Films studio was, of course, cause for much celebration among horror fans around the world. The British production company built a name for itself in horror in the 1960s and it’s been great to have them back. (You don’t have to bother with The Resident, but Hammer productions Wake(…)

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There’s more than enough doom, gloom, and moody atmosphere in the creaky but engaging maritime thriller Cargo (2006) to help one forgive its more familiar components, and even at its weaker moments it offers a great pair of performances that manage to keep the ship afloat. Yes, that was a very terrible pun. My apologies.

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If you’re familiar with the work of Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono, you already know what to expect from Cold Fish: something entirely unpredictable. The film will not disappoint. A strange, savage, and altogether fascinating slow-burn thriller about a domesticated schlub who gets pushed around by his nasty daughter, his licentious wife, and his latest business partner, Cold Fish feels(…)

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There used to be a TV show with a theme song that went like this: “You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have: The Facts of Life.” One could easily remove the word “life” from the end of that lyric and replace it with “world of micro-budget(…)

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Most horror movies tell you what you’re in store for right off the bat: it’s a zombie movie, or it’s a haunted house story, or it’s collection of creepy short films, or… you get the point. Good horror films will often offer a literal vs. metaphorical angle to their story. (For example: is that woman(…)

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Anarchy in the USA Despite having a good time with 2012’s The Purge and finding it a bit more satirically compelling than most studio horror flicks, my main “gripe” about the film was simple: why introduce such a clever concept – that all crime is legal in America for 12 hours – and then stick(…)

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Darren Bousman loves to take the hard road. The energetic writer/director hit the horror geek jackpot when he was chosen to direct Saw II, and it’s safe to say that he helped keep that franchise focused (and very profitable) through Part 3 and Part 4. A young filmmaker coming off three big hits has some options,(…)

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First-time feature writer/director Axelle Carolyn is certainly no stranger to dark fiction. In addition to her literary career (which includes columns at Fangoria and a book on modern horror cinema called It Lives Again!) to a trio of short films (The Last Post, Hooked, and The Halloween Kid) and a handful of acting gigs in(…)

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Lots of horror movies start with a young woman accepting a mysterious offer and living to regret it in seriously unpleasant ways, and here’s an interesting new one from Spain known as For Elisa (aka Para Elisa and For Elise). Not many of the components offered here are all that unique or remarkable on their(…)

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Genre enthusiasts certainly enjoy a good apocalypse. Zombies are a pretty cool way to end the world, plus we also have some vampire and robot angles worth enjoying, but what’s wrong with a plain old (even eerily banal) sort of apocalypse? No zombies or vampires or robots (oh my) but just a stark and simple(…)

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A good portion of American indie horror flicks deal with an outside (generally malevolent) force that impacts a person or a family unit. Lately I’m noticing a proclivity in smaller foreign genre flicks to go the other way: how a mundane “everyday” tragedy is the impetus for the terrors at hand. That’s a basic way(…)

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As more and more independent filmmakers get a taste for “found footage” storytelling, we start to see several common components that always seem to be included, regardless of whether or not the finished film is any good. The half-predictable and half-novel Skinwalkers (aka Skinwalker Ranch), for example, employs several of the faux documentary tropes that are(…)

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As usual: what was once the domain of indie filmmakers with more creativity than cash has become dominated by the major distributors. We’re talking about “found footage horror,” a storytelling gimmick that was resurrected by The Blair Witch Project several years ago, and has since become a sort of playground for indie filmmakers all over(…)

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I look forward to a new Vincenzo Natali movie like most movie geeks anticipate the next feature from Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. Ever since I stumbled across his 1997 debut film Cube, which still stands up (despite its lesser sequels) as a very novel approach to cerebral horror or dark fantasy or violent sci-fi…(…)

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When we horror fans take note of a new low-budget zombie movie (and we frequently do), our praise is often directed towards the film’s novel hook, energetic presentation, or impressive splatter effects. (All three if we’re really lucky.) But now comes a new low-budget zombie movie that’s not all that novel (indeed it’s virtually plotless),(…)

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You Can’t Kill Their Spirit It should come as no surprise to the astute horror fan that Lucky McKee has a knack for creating horrific women. Even a casual glance at his filmography, which includes the underrated The Woods, the shocking The Woman, and the still wonderful May, tells you this is a male filmmaker(…)

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As per usual when we delve into the realm of direct-to-video horror sequels, a brief history lesson is in order. (Or if not required, then at least halfway amusing.) So let’s begin by reminding everyone thatJoy Ride (known in the UK as Roadkill) was a 2001 horror/thriller/neo-noir that actually holds up pretty darn well if(…)

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One notable side effect of Hammer Films’ (very welcome) resurgence is that it seems to have inspired some indie filmmakers to consider “old-fashioned” a viable route. It usually takes a hit zombie film to spawn a lot of imitators, for example, and the same certainly holds true for any of the sub-genres found in the(…)

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It’s been almost a decade since the rough, tough, and memorably grim Aussie import called Wolf Creek helped to usher in an international wave of graphically intense horror films. (Some people would refer to films like High Tension, Wolf Creek, Hostel, and Saw as “torture porn,” a phrase I find more than a little stupid.) While(…)

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It would of course be a massive understatement to say that Sam Raimi’s mid-’80s indie classic horror flick The Evil Dead is a memorable or influential movie. The film inspired a supremely excellent sequel in Evil Dead 2, a widely-adored sorta-sequel in Army of Darkness, and has inspired not only a pretty impressive remake (Evil(…)

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What are the “bare essentials” for creating a good thriller? Screenplay, obviously, is priority number one. A few good actors, a decent visual approach, and some editorial skills are essential, but really: the screenplay is the foundation. The low-key and deceptively unassuming indie thriller calledFavor sum my theory up quite nicely. Here we have a(…)

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With a title like Jug Face, you could get just about anything. Is it a satire? A basic slasher retread? A tale of haunted dishware? The good thing about an offbeat title is that it compels you to approach the film with a touch of caution and a dash of attentiveness. Fortunately Jug Face –(…)

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Lots of horror movies take place in the wilderness, and it’s not really hard for a screenwriter to get their characters out there. It could be a rave in the forest, a wrong turn in the desert, or a detour caused by a crazy hitchhiker in the mountains, but in most cases the “WHY” of(…)

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