*****SATANIC SPOILERS!***** The late 1960s and early 1970s broke new ground with high-end supernatural/occult-themed films, such as “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) and “The Exorcist” (1973). That wave continued into the mid-1970s, but it devolved into a slew of exploitation flicks made primarily for drive-in theaters, such as 1975’s “The Devil’s Rain” and “Race with the Devil,”…
Tag: Horror
Recurring Nightmare; CreepIECon Returns to the Inland Empire for 2023…
The Growing Horror… Last year, the city of Ontario, California hosted a horror-themed convention in February called “CreepIECon”, which was successful enough in its freshman year to take another stab at it in 2023. Having just returned from CreepIECon 2023 earlier today, it’s safe to say that by attendance alone, the convention has grown significantly…
“Trick ‘r Treat” (2007) is an underrated, yet definitive Halloween horror flick…
******SPOOKY SPOILERS!!****** Tricked From Theaters. Written and directed by Michael Dougherty and produced by Bryan Singer (the team behind “X-Men 2”, “Superman Returns”), 2007’s low-budget horror anthology “Trick ‘r Treat” took time to find an audience; several years after plans for its theatrical release were unceremoniously scrapped in 2007. A hit at film festivals, the…
“Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things”: 50 years of a zombie cult classic…
Rise and Dine. The late George Romero’s 1968 horror classic “Night of the Living Dead” reimagined zombies from their previous incarnation as mindless victims of voodoo magic into rotting, flesh-eating corpses, reanimated from death itself. Romero’s reinvention of zombies has become commonplace today (“The Walking Dead”, and countless other imitators), but it was still a…
Halloween in February: ‘CreepIEcon 2022’ comes to SoCal’s Inland Empire…
“Welcome To My Nightmare…” This past weekend, during a sunny but windy Southern California February, my favorite holiday of Halloween briefly returned to the month of Valentine’s Day. Long delayed due to the COVID pandemic, CreepIEcon 2022 (the “i” and “e” emphasized for “Inland Empire”) finally reached the Ontario Convention Center in the San Bernardino…
Musings for Halloween: “The Changeling” (1980)…
*****SPOOKY SPOILERS AHEAD!***** Many years ago, I remember seeing a trailer for a then-new horror movie coming out which featured George C. Scott (“Patton” “A Christmas Carol”) living in an apparently haunted house. The one thing that made me nearly wet my seat was the sight of an antique wheelchair, shrouded in cobwebs and sans…
Biting the bullets: “From Dusk Till Dawn,” 25 years later…
*****BLOOD-SUCKING SPOILERS!***** Dawn of “From Dusk…” I still vividly remember trying to get my friends to come with me to see the new vampire/crime-drama flick from director Robert Rodriguez (“Desperado” “Spy Kids”) and writer/actor Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction,” “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” ) back in February of 1996. I was a bachelor in…
Retro-Musings: Is the Spanish-language version of 1931’s “Dracula” the better bloodsucker?
Monster Mash. As a kid I loved the Universal Studios monster movies. I was about born about 30-40 years too late to have caught them in original theatrical release, so I used my parent’s old 25” Zenith to get my monster movie fixes. I used to collect the Aurora model kits of the monsters as…
“Kolchak: The Night Stalker” (1974-5) was a pulpy mix of Columbo and Scooby Doo…
A very different era. In order to understand and appreciate this series I’m about to get into, modern readers should understand that the 1970s were a very different era; we’re talking nearly a half-century ago. When watching many shows of that time today, there are many casually sexist/racist terms, cultural appropriations and other unwitting offenses…