Tag Archives: horror movies

Fright Club, Slider

Fright Club: Amusements in Horror

Leave a comment

A perversion of childhood innocence in an attempt to create anxiety and fear—that, basically, is the definition of carnivals, circuses, theme parks. Maybe that’s why the amusement park and its inhabitants make for such excellent horror movie fodder. Let’s discuss.

5. Zombieland (2009)

Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Deadpool) take the tried-and-true zombiepocalypse premise and sprint with it in totally new and awesome directions. An insane cast helps: Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, Bill Murray. That’s eight Oscar nominations and one win, that’s what that is. Plus, I cannot imagine a better cameo in a film than Murray’s in this one.

I give you, a trip to a loud and well-lit amusement park is not a recommendation Max Brooks would make during the zombiepocalypse. Still, you’ve got to admit it’s a gloriously filmed piece of action horror cinema.

Between the sisters trapped on a ride slowly lowering them toward hungry mouths (good thinking on those boots, ladies!), Columbus’s rule breaking heroism with that effing clown, and the all-time great Tallahassee shoot out, director Ruben Fleischer directs the hell out of the amusement park portion of this movie.

4. It (2017)

Clowns are fun, aren’t they?

The basic premise of It is this: Little kids are afraid of everything, and that’s just good thinking.

Bill Skarsgård has the unenviable task of following a letter-perfect Tim Curry in the role of Pennywise. Those are some big clown shoes to fill, but Skarsgård is up to the challenge. His Pennywise is more theatrical, more of an exploitation of all that’s inherently macabre and grotesque about clowns.

Is he better than the original? Let’s not get nutty here, but he is great.

Director Andy Muschietti shows great instinct for taking advantage of foreground, background and sound. Yes, It relies heavily on jump scares, but Muschietti’s approach to plumbing your fear has more depth than that and he manages your rising terror expertly.

3. The Last Circus (2010)

Who’s in the mood for something weird?

Unhinged Spanish filmmaker Alex de la Iglesia returns to form with The Last Circus, a breathtakingly bizarre look at a Big Top love triangle set in Franco’s Spain.

Describing the story in much detail would risk giving away too many of the astonishing images. A boy loses his performer father to conscription in Spain’s civil war, and decades later, with Franco’s reign’s end in sight, he follows in pop’s clown-sized footsteps and joins the circus. There he falls for another clown’s woman, and stuff gets nutty.

Like Tarantino, Igelsia pulls together ideas and images from across cinema and blends them into something uniquely his own, crafting a film that’s somewhat familiar, but never, ever predictable.

The Last Circus boasts more than brilliantly wrong-minded direction and stunningly macabre imagery – though of these things it certainly boasts. Within that bloody and perverse chaos are some of the more touching performances to be found onscreen.

2. Us (2019)

From a Santa Cruz carnival to a hall of mirrors to a wall of rabbits in cages, writer/director Jordan Peele draws on moods and images from horror’s collective unconscious and blends them into something hypnotic and almost primal.

But Us is far more than a riff on some old favorites. It’s as if Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland turned into a plague on humanity.

And it all starts innocently enough with a family outing to the carnival—an environment that has always been a perversion of innocence, a macabre funhouse mirror of the playthings and past times of children. Peele takes advantage, using this stage to create an even wilder and more bewildering look at who we are.

1. Freaks (1932)

Short and sweet, like most of its performers, Tod Browning’s controversial film Freaks is one of those movies you will never forget. Populated almost entirely by unusual actors – midgets, amputees, the physically deformed, and an honest to god set of conjoined twins (Daisy and Violet Hilton) – Freaks makes you wonder whether you should be watching it at all.

This, of course, is an underlying tension in most horror films, but with Freaks, it’s right up front. Is what Browning does with the film empathetic or exploitative, or both? And, of course, am I a bad person for watching this film?

Well, that’s not for us to say. We suspect you may be a bad person, perhaps even a serial killer. Or maybe that’s us. What we can tell you for sure is that the film is unsettling, and the final, rainy act of vengeance is truly creepy to watch.

New In Theaters, Slider

Bird of Prey

1 Comment

The Nightingale

by Hope Madden

There is a moment in George Miller’s 2015 action masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road. The empty bridal chamber is revealed quickly. Scrawled on the wall: Who killed the world?

It occurred to me partway through Jennifer Kent’s sophomore feature The Nightingale that Miller isn’t the only Aussie director with that question on the mind.

The Nightingale is as expansive and epic a film as Kent’s incandescent feature debut The Babadook was claustrophobic and internal. In it she follows Clare (Aisling Franciosi), an Irish convict sentenced to service in the UK’s territory in Tasmania.

What happens to Clare at the hands of Leftenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin), the British officer to whom she is in service, is as brutal and horrifying as anything you’re likely to see onscreen this year. It’s the catalyst for a revenge picture, but The Nightingale is far more than just that.

As Clare enlists the aid of Aboriginal tracker Billie (Baykali Ganambarr, magnificent) to help her exact justice, Kent begins to broaden her focus. Those of us in the audience can immediately understand Clare’s mission because we witnessed her trauma in its horrifying detail. Kent needed us to recognize what British military men were capable of.

What she wants us to see is that the same thing—the worst, almost imaginable brutality—happened to an entire Australian population.

In the second act, Clare—on a higher social rung than her tracker, and just as condescending and racist as that position allows—and Billy begin to bond over shared experience. Franciosi’s fierce performance drives the film, but Ganambarr injects a peculiar humor and heart that makes The Nightingale even more devastating.

Kent’s fury fuels her film, but does not overtake it. She never stoops to sentimentality or sloppy caricature. She doesn’t need to. Her clear-eyed take on this especially ugly slice of history finds more power in authenticity than in drama.

Her tale becomes far more than an indictment of colonization, white male privilege, domination and subjugation. It’s a harrowing and brilliant tale of horror. It’s also our history.

Fright Club, Slider

Fright Club: Missing Persons

Leave a comment

There is something primally terrifying in the idea of missing persons – losing someone or being lost. Where are they and what is happening to them? No mater which side of that question you are on, the imagination conjures terrifying images.

Listen to the full podcast, including a special interview with Hounds of Love director Ben Young.

5. The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)

John Erick Dowdle’s film is a difficult one to watch. It contains enough elements of found footage to achieve realism, enough police procedural to provide structure, and enough grim imagination to give you nightmares.

Edward Carver (Ben Messmer) is a particularly theatrical serial killer, and the film, which takes you into the police academy classroom, asks you to watch his evolution from impetuous brute to unerring craftsman. This evolution we witness mainly through a library of videotapes he’s left behind—along with poor Cheryl Dempsey (Stacy Chbosky)—for the police to find.

Cheryl is Carver’s masterpiece, the one victim he did not kill but instead reformed as his protégé. It’s easily the most unsettling element in a film that manages to shake you without really showing you anything.

4. Berlin Syndrome (2017)

Aussie photographer Clare (Teresa Palmer, better than she’s ever been) is looking for some life experience. She backpacks across Europe, landing for a brief stay in Berlin where she hopes to make a human connection. Handsome Berliner Andi (Max Riemelt) offers exactly the kind of mysterious allure she wants and they fall into a night of passion.

What follows is an incredible combination of horror and emotional dysfunction, deftly maneuvered by both cast mates and director Cate Shortland. The mental and emotional olympics Palmer goes through from the beginning of the film to the end showcase her instincts for nuanced and unsentimental performance. Clare is smart, but emotionally open and free with her own vulnerability. The way Palmer inhabits these characteristics is as authentic as it is awkward.

Even more uncomfortable is the shifting relationship, the neediness and resilience, the dependency and independence. It’s honest in a way that is profoundly moving and endlessly uncomfortable. Riemelt matches Palmer’s vulnerability with his own insecurity and emotional about-faces. The two together are an unnerving onscreen pairing.

3. The Vanishing (Spoorloos) (1988)

Back in ’88, filmmaker George Sluizer and novelist Tim Krabbe adapted his novel about curiosity killing a cat. The result is a spare, grim mystery that works the nerves.

An unnervingly convincing Bernar-Pierre Donnadieu takes us through the steps, the embarrassing trial and error, of executing on his plan. His Raymond is a simple person, really, and one fully aware of who he is: a psychopath and a claustrophobe.

Three years ago, Raymond abducted Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) and her boyfriend Rex (Gene Bervoets) has gone a bit mad with the the mystery of what happened to her. So mad, in fact, that when Raymond offers to clue him in as long as he’s willing to suffer the same fate, Rex bites. Do not make the mistake of watching Sluizer’s neutered 1993 American remake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcA10H-85×4&t=36s

2. The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Blair Witch may not date especially well, but it scared the hell out of a lot of people back in the day. This is the kind of forest adventure that I assume happens all the time: you go in, but no matter how you try to get out – follow a stream, use a map, follow the stars – you just keep crossing the same goddamn log.

One of several truly genius ideas behind Blair Witch is that filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez made the audience believe that the film they were watching was nothing more than the unearthed footage left behind by three disappeared young people. Between that and the wise use of online marketing (then in its infancy) buoyed this minimalistic, naturalistic home movie about three bickering buddies who venture into the Maryland woods to document the urban legend of The Blair Witch. Twig dolls, late night noises, jumpy cameras, unknown actors and not much else blended into an honestly frightening flick that played upon primal fears.

1. Hounds of Love (2018)

Driven by a fiercely invested and touchingly deranged performance from Emma Booth, Hounds of Love makes a subtle shift from horrific torture tale to psychological character study. In 108 grueling minutes, writer/director Ben Young’s feature debut marks him as a filmmaker with confident vision and exciting potential.

It is the late 1980s in Perth, Australia, and at least one young girl has already gone missing when the grounded Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings) sneaks out her bedroom window to attend a party. This isn’t nearly as dumb a move as is accepting a ride from Evie White (Booth) and her husband John (Stephen Curry).

As the couple dance seductively and drink to celebrate, Young disturbingly conveys the weight of Vicki’s panicked realization that she is now their captive. It is just one in a series of moments where Young flexes impressive chops for visual storytelling, utilizing slo-motion, freeze frame, patient panning shots and carefully chosen soundtrack music to set the mood and advance the dreadful narrative without a spoken word.

New In Theaters

Fin Again Begin Again

Leave a comment

47 Meters Down: Uncaged

by George Wolf

Two years ago, Johannes Roberts proved he could craft some fine sharky thrills amid the soggy dialog and questionable logic of 47 Meters Down.

He’s back as director/co-writer for Uncaged, with a bigger budget and a mission to deliver more of whatever you liked the first time. The scares? They’re jumpier! The sharks? They’re scarier! The water? Wetter!

Roberts builds these thrills on an unrelated shark tale. Four high school girls in Mexico go diving where they shouldn’t – an underwater Mayan burial cave. It’s currently being mapped by a team led by one of the girls’ Dad (John Corbett), which makes the cutting edge dive gear more believable than last time.

But all that gear is perfectly form-fitting for a group of teen girls, so…

So, forget it, and appreciate how Roberts borrows elements from the horror gem The Descent to create satisfying waves of claustrophobic, over the top terror.

If you remember the best scene from 47, you’ll see it re-imagined here, along with a very direct homage to Jaws and a nicely twisted and completely ridiculous finale.

Because if you haven’t noticed, Spielberg’s less is more approach to the monster has…say it with me…jumped the shark. For Roberts and Uncaged, more is more, and this film doesn’t stop until you’re shaking your head at the skillful outlandishness of it all.

Outtakes

Nightmares Fest Unveils “Early 13”

Leave a comment

Though it’s only a few years old, Columbus, Ohio’s Nightmares Film Festival (NFF) has not only established itself as a can’t miss event for horror fans, but one with revered traditions.

One of those is the annual release of its “Early 13,” a baker’s dozen of early selections that serve as a preview of the tone and style of its October 24 to 27 event. This year’s first wave of programming includes premieres, genre icons and exciting new voices.

Among the early selections are films from Elija Wood (Mandy), Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz (Goodnight Mommy), and Travis Stevens (Cheap Thrills), as well as films helmed by women directors from around the world, and two filmmakers returning to Nightmares with new projects.

“The Early 13 is an exciting tradition for us, and has really become the unofficial start of the festival,” said NFF co-founder Jason Tostevin. “We do it because we want to give everyone a sense of the breadth and depth of the program that will take shape in October.”

Representatives of the major programming categories at Nightmares — horror, thriller and midnight; shorts and features — are included in the list, as are two films that will play as part of the fan-favorite Saturday block: the “Late Night Mind Fuck” program.

“We choose the Early 13 each year based on their high scores with the jury, and also for their alignment with the spirit of the fest and the tone of that year’s program,” said co-founder Chris Hamel. “Just like the full lineup, there is something for every genre fan in this preview.”

Submissions are still being considered for another month at Nightmares. The Early 13 films are the only submission decisions the festival makes before the Sept. 13 submission deadline, Tostevin said.

Nightmares Film Festival has been called one of the world’s best horror film festivals by every major genre outlet. It has maintained its position as the world’s top-rated genre festival on the submission platform FilmFreeway for 33 consecutive months. 

FEATURES

SWALLOW – Second screening worldwide – Thriller Feature

Directorial debut of Carlo Mirabella-Davis. Starring Haley Bennet (The Magnificent Seven). 

A newly pregnant housewife finds herself increasingly compelled to eat dangerous objects. As her husband and his family tighten their control over her life, she must confront the dark secret behind her new obsession. A “deeply unsettling feminist thriller” (Variety).

EAT, BRAINS, LOVE – North American Premiere – Horror Comedy Feature

A zombie road trip film based on the hit novel by Jeff Hart. 

When Jake and his dream girl Amanda contract a mysterious zombie virus and eat the brains of half their senior class, they must elude the government’s hunter — a teen psychic — as they search for a cure. 

THE OBSESSED – World Premiere – Late Night Mind Fuck Feature

From Italian extreme director Domiziano Cristopharo (Nightmares winner Torment). Based on  the real-life story of Bjork stalker Ricardo Lopez. Albania’s first horror film.

Cristopharo presents this dark and deeply affecting tour of the mind of a madman, via a body horror film featuring practical FX, including a penis with a mouth, teeth and tongue included.

DANIEL ISN’T REAL – Regional Premiere – Midnight Feature 

The newest film from Elijah Wood’s SpectreVision. Stars Arnold’s son Patrick Schwarzenegger.  

Luke, a troubled a college freshman, resurrects his childhood imaginary friend Daniel to help him cope with a violent family trauma. But as Daniel’s influence grows, it pushes Luke into a desperate struggle for control of his mind — and his soul.

THE LODGE – Regional Premiere – Thriller Feature

From Austrian directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz (Goodnight Mommy).

Trapped inside a cabin by a fierce blizzard, two children and their future stepmother must fight for their lives against an unseen evil force.

THE GIRL ON THE THIRD FLOOR – Regional Premiere – Horror Feature

Directorial debut of hit genre producer Travis Stevens (Cheap Thrills). Stars C.M. Punk.

A man tries to renovate a dilapidated house for his growing family, only to learn that the house has other plans.


RECKONING – Midwest Premiere – Thriller Feature

Created by husband and wife team Lane and Ruckus Skye.

Miles from the nearest power grid, Lemon Cassidy scratches out a humble living in an isolated Appalachian farming community. Her life is tossed into chaos when two men from the oldest family on the mountain hold her son hostage until she can settle a debt her missing husband owes to their cold-hearted matriarch.

SHORTS

LIPPY – Horror Short

Directed by Lucy Campbell

England

Two girls enter an underground world of strange forfeits and grisly demands when they are caught stealing lipstick testers.

GASLIGHT – Thriller Short

Directed by Louisa Weichmann

Australia

A waitress waiting for her bus on a deserted road is stalked by a vampire. 

CHANGELING – Midnight Short

Directed by Faye Jackson

Scotland

A new mother is increasingly mesmerised and appalled by the strange transformations happening around her baby.

BOO – Recurring Nightmares Short (returning filmmaker)

Directed by Rakefet Abergel 

USA

A traumatic event forces a recovering addict to face her demons.

REUNION – Horror Comedy Short

Directed by Andrew Yontz

USA

A woman spends the night with her friends she hasn’t seen in 10 years only to find out they may have become serial killers.

LIMBO – Late Night Mind Fuck

Directed by Dani Viqueira

Spain

When his family resolves to flee him, a man becomes unmoored from reality.

Nightmares returns to Columbus’s Gateway Film Center with its 2019 edition October 24 to 27.

New In Theaters, Slider

Thump, Thump, Draaaag

Leave a comment

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

by Hope Madden

Was there a story you heard as a kid that scared you sleepless? Mine was Bloody Fingers, the tale of a mangled man who dragged his carcass toward you. You could hear him coming: thump, thump, draaaaag. My neighbor used to sneak up behind me muttering those terrifying words.

Writer Alvin Schwartz knew how to work a kid’s nerves even better than my neighbor. Inspired by campfire tales and urban legends, he spun yarns for maximum kid fright, then paired them—and this is the important part—with the inspired line drawings by Stephen Gammell. The result, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, became the go-to for kids who like to be scared and schools who like to ban books.

Director André Øvredal (TrollHunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe) and co-writer Guillermo del Toro both know something about tingling the spine. Together with a team of writers—some veterans of horror, some of family films—they’ve created an affectionate and scary ode to the old series of books.

Set in Mill Town, Pennsylvania around Halloween, 1968—trees are turning, Nixon is about to be elected, Night of the Living Dead is showing at the drive in—Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark follows three wholesome high school outcasts and a handsome out-of-towner. On the run from the Vietnam-bound, letter-jacket wearing bully, they hide in the old, abandoned Bellows place. The town says the house is haunted.

Sounds a little cliched, right? The kind of story you’ve heard over and over, but that’s exactly the point. To begin to tell Schwartz’s tales—all of them pulled from the collective unconscious, all of them drawing on those same old stories that were new to us as kids—Øvredal sets a familiar and appropriate stage.

His framing device works well enough for a while. Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), who hopes to be a writer herself, swipes creepy old child killer Sarah Bellows’s book of stories, but when she gets them home, new stories write themselves in the blank pages and, one by one, the kids in Mill Town go missing.

This is what PG-13 horror should look like. Yes, like most of the genre films engineered for youngsters, Scary Stories rehashes tropes familiar to adult viewers, but Øvredal’s clear fondness for the terrifying source material, especially the illustrations, gives the film the primal, almost grotesque innocence of a childhood nightmare.

The film’s tone is spot-on, performances solid and the set design and practical effects glorious. This is more than an anthology of shorts. It’s a cohesive whole that contains a handful of Schwartz’s nightmares, but the whole is not as great as the sum of its parts. Too heavy with clichés in the framing device, the film loses steam as it rolls into its third act.

An analogy of lost innocence, nostalgic without becoming too sentimental, this is old school scary, as unapologetically unoriginal as its source material and almost as effective.

 

Fright Club, Slider

Fright Club: Body Fluids in Horror Movies

Leave a comment

Viscosity! That’s the name of the game today, and it’s a messy, messy game to play.

Today we slip and slide through the sloppiest movies we could find as we count down the most inspired use of body fluids in horror. The whole mess is recorded live at Gateway Film Center, so please listen.

And don’t forget to bring a towel!

5) Don’t Breathe (2016)

Fede Alvarez’s magnificent home invasion horror made this list, beating out the projectile vomit of The Exorcist, the melting bums of Street Trash, the medical what-not of Re-Animator and the viscosity of other films. How did it do it? It was not because of volume.

It’s really just the one scene.

The one with a turkey baster.

The one with the single hair.

Ew.

4) Dead Alive (1992)

The list doesn’t exist without Peter Jackson, let’s be honest. Any old horror director can work with blood. Jackson certainly can. That party scene? The arterial spray poor Lionel Cosgrove causes with his lawnmower is truly a site to behold.

But what Jackson can do with pus and a bowl of custard? Chef’s kiss right there.

3) We Are the Flesh (2016)

Emiliano Rocha Minter loves him some taboos. No one bursts through taboos like him – well, Takashi Miike, maybe.

He also really loves body fluids. We mean all the body fluids. His 2016 social commentary swims them all. All all all.

Taboos and body fluids. Sloppy!

2) Evil Dead (2013)

Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive held the record for most blood in a film – 1000 gallons – until 2013.

It’s a record Sam Raimi’s earlier Evil Dead franchise efforts had once held, but Fede Alvarez (making his second appearance on this list!) drenched all records when he poured out 50,000 gallons of fake blood in a single scene.

Allegedly It Chapter 2 tops that, but I don’t know how you out-soak a torrential downpour of blood.

Gozu (2003)

Who’s not afraid of taboos? Well, the great and prolific Takashi Miike has no fear of body fluids, either. Hell, Ichi the Killer’s title screen is done in semen and one of Audition’s most memorable moments sees a multiple amputee eating his mistress’s vomit.

But with Gozu, Miike’s not holding back: blood, urine, semen, lactation, pus and other discharges I’m not sure how to even categorize. Gozu is an inspired, viscous mess.

New In Theaters, Slider

Gatorcane

Leave a comment

Crawl

by George Wolf

Just when you thought it was safe to explore your Florida crawlspaces during a Category 5, here comes Crawl to remind us that while Sharknadoes put tongues in cheeks, Gatorcanes are looking to remove the whole head.

Haley Keller (Kaya Scodelario) is a University of Florida swimmer (a Gator!), which comes in pretty handy when she ignores evacuation orders to look for the father that always challenged her to do better in the pool.

Dave Keller (Barry Pepper) is lying injured in a soggy basement, and even before Haley finds him, she finds that they are not alone.

Director Alexandre Aja (High Tension, Piranha 3D, The Hills Have Eyes remake) utilizes the confines of the flooding house to fine effect. Walls, pipes and tight corners create natural barriers between gator and bait, but as the water level keeps rising, Aja finds plenty of room for simmering tension and effective jump scares.

Plus plenty of bloodletting. Oh, yes, people do get eaten.

This survival tale doesn’t worry too much about suspending disbelief. It just keeps the water rising, the obstacles mounting (Haley’s “You gotta be fucking kidding me” speaks for all of us) and the visual effects nimble and nifty.

Writers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen get a bit too enamored with the father/daughter estrangements and swim team parlance (“You’re faster than they are! Swim!”), but Scodelario provides a capable anchor, giving Haley authentic layers of toughness and grit.

Aja and the effects team do the rest, enough to make Crawl an often entertaining creature and bloody fun summer feature.

New In Theaters

Friends to the End

Leave a comment

Child’s Play

by Hope Madden

You have to give it to the marketing team saddled with Lars Klevberg’s reboot of Child’s Play.

First came the trailers. You couldn’t see the doll, but you heard that old TV theme song, “People let me tell you ‘bout my best friend! He’s a warm boy, cuddly toy, my up, my down, my pride and joy…”

Creepy.

And then the posters. You know, still no Chucky doll in the frame, but a ripped-to-shreds cowboy doll splayed across the ground.

Well, pardner, Sheriff Woody’s got the last laugh because Child’s Play the film is not 1/10th as inspired as its marketing. It’s a tedious time waster uninterested in plumbing any of its possible themes—single parenthood, poverty, loneliness, tech—for terror. Instead it goes for the obvious prey and hopes star power will blind you to its ordinariness.

Discount those straight-to-video installments in the series if you will (and honestly, you probably should), but at least they each tried to do something different. At some point they embraced the ridiculousness of this itty, bitty freckle-faced problem and just ran with it.

Not this time. Nope, what we have here is one deadly serious and wildly unimaginative reboot. Hell, the doll doesn’t even look good!

And yet, Aubrey Plaza, Brian Tyree Henry and Mark Hamill all signed on to star in what amounts to the 8th Chucky film.

Why?

It’s not the concept. The possessed doll conceit has been updated from the soul of a serial killer to modern technology. Imagine if google home required a super creepy doll in bib overalls to work. Admittedly, there are all sorts of Terminator/Maximum Overdrive/Demon Seed possibilities here, all of which are left entirely unmined.

Instead it’s just a defective AI doll (voiced by Hamill himself), birthday gift from a department store clerk (Plaza) to her lonely but clearly too old for the toy son, Andy (Gabriel Bateman, quite good, actually).

They’re all good, especially Henry. Too bad the film doesn’t deserve it. Aside from one kill inspired by Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (nice!), and performances that are all better than the material, the new Child’s Play is a pretty tedious affair.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Gateway to Hell Horror

Leave a comment

Our friend is looking to buy her first home and our only advice was probably the same advice she got from everyone: check the basement for the gateway to hell. That always causes trouble for new homebuyers, doesn’t it?

Indeed, these netherworld exits and entrances don’t exist only in suburban basements. Nope, you can find them anywhere. In fact, you can even create your own. No idea why you would want to do that, but (assuming horror films are how-tos), it can be done. Which are the best gateway to hell horror movies, you ask? Luckily, we’ve done the math.

5. The Ninth Gate (1999)

A bunch of films nearly had this fifth slot: Amityville 3D (mainly so we could make fun of Laurie Laughlin), The Gate and its Harryhausen influences, Event Horizon’s blackhole to hell. But we landed on The Ninth Gate because we love Frank Langella and Lena Olin.

Johnny Depp plays a sleazy rare books dealer in Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s novel. Depp’s Dean Corso falls into a mysterious adventure of finding and appraising three volumes allegedly co-authored by Satan himself (or herself?).

Maybe the element of this film that makes it more interesting than it might be is that, while the humans longing for the knowledge in these volumes are terrible people, the film doesn’t seem to find Satanism (the real worship of an actual Satan, not today’s activism branch) a potentially worthwhile activity. Satan (Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski’s wife) is also an interesting character—in concept, anyway.

Plus, black masses! Love those!

4. The Beyond (1981)

Lucio Fulci was really preoccupied with the gateway to hell. He produced an entirely worthwhile trilogy on the topic. And while City of the Living Dead and House by the Cemetery have their charms (well, for one of us), The Beyond is by far the most entertaining of the three.

As is always the case in Fulci films, the dubbing is half the fun, here unintentionally aiding in the overall surreal quality of the picture. Liza Merrill (Catriona MacColl, who stars as different characters in each of the three Gateway films) has inherited an old Louisiana hotel from her dead uncle.

Guess what’s in the basement?!

Silly, gory as hell, hypnotic and oh-so-Fulci, The Beyond is a dreamy peek into hell. The clashing accents and lack of logic only strengthen the vibe.

3. Insidious (2010)

Yes, technically this one takes place in “The Further” – but we don’t buy that this creepy red guy plays organ in limbo or purgatory. We’re going with hell.

Director James Wan and writer (and co-star) Leigh Whannell launched a second franchise with this clever, creepy, star-studded flick about a haunted family.

Patrick Wilson (who would become a Wan/Whannell staple) and Rose Byrne anchor the film as a married couple dealing with the peculiar coma-like state affecting their son, not to mention the weird noises affecting their house.

But what makes this particular film so effective is that we get to go into The Further to reclaim the lost soul. It’s a risky move, but these filmmakers do what few are able to: they show us what we are afraid of.

2. The Sentinel (1977)

Journeyman writer/director Michael Winner helmed this weird little gem about a damaged young woman and her journey toward the only destiny that can save her.

It starts, as these things so often to, with the search for a new place to live. New York model Alison (Cristina Raines) is offered an incredibly great rate for a gorgeous NY brownstone apartment.

Is it the gateway to hell? Yes, but NY real estate being what it is, she takes it.

Look at this cast: Burgess Meredith, John Carradine, Christopher Walken, Ava Gardner, Jerry Orbach, Jose Ferrer, Beverly D’Angelo and Chris Sarandon, mainly playing the various and fascinating demons hoping to throw poor, fragile Alison off her path.

Meredith in particular is a magnificent Satan.

1. Baskin (2015)

Welcome to hell! Turkish filmmaker Can Evrenol invites you to follow a 5-man police squad into the netherworld, where eye patches are all the rage, pregnancy lasts well under the traditional 40 weeks, and you don’t want to displease Daddy.

The serpentine sequencing of events evokes a dream logic that gives the film an inescapable atmosphere of dread, creepily underscored by its urgent synth score. Evrenol’s imagery is morbidly amazing. Much of it only glimpsed, most of it left unarticulated, but all of it becomes that much more disturbing for its lack of clarity.

As is always the case, the real kicker is the Satan character. Here, central figure Mehmet  Cerrahoglu’s remarkable presence authenticates the hellscape. Evrenol’s imaginative set design and wise lighting choices envelope Cerrahoglu, his writhing followers, and his victims in a bloody horror like little else in cinema.