Editorials
[2013 HORROR MOVIE PREVIEW] LEFTOVERS & INDIE
I can’t even believe how happy I am to enter the New Year. These 2013 horror movie preview lits were a lot of work, but well worth it. Over the past several days we’ve shared with you all of the great genre films we’ll be seeing in theaters next year, everything from a new Evil Dead to a new Sin City and Machete.
With the end comes the indie films, and the leftovers, which includes various titles from Magnet, Anchor Bay, IFC, among a few that could end up premiering at the 2013 film festivals. We look forward to catching all of them and telling you guys what to look forward to. And with that we ask you, which ones are YOU most excited for?
LIONSGATE & SUMMIT / PARAMOUNT / UNIVERSAL / SONY / LEFTOVERS & INDIE
CLICK ANY TITLE FOR SYNOPSES, TRAILERS, DETAILS & MORE STILLS (If Available)
Dates Subject to Change
The ABCs of Death (January 31, Magnet Releasing)
Twenty-six directors. Twenty-six ways to die. The ABCs of Death is perhaps the most ambitious anthology film ever conceived with productions spanning fifteen countries and featuring segments directed by over two dozen of the world’s leading talents in contemporary genre film. Inspired by children’s educational books, the motion picture is comprised of twenty-six individual chapters, each helmed by a different director assigned a letter of the alphabet. The directors were then given free reign in choosing a word to create a story involving death.
Girls Against Boys (February 1, Ancor Bay Films)
When Shae (Danielle Panabaker), a naïve college student, is tormented by several men in a matter of days, she reaches her breaking point, and is drawn into coworker Lu’s (Nicole LaLiberte) twisted plan for revenge. Together, the two embark on a gruesome killing spree, terrorizing and brutally murdering not just their attackers, but any man who gets in their way. However, after a wild weekend of retaliation, the friendship between the girls shifts into a dangerous obsession, and their perverse game becomes a desperate struggle for Shae to maintain control against Lu’s deadly and seductive influence.
Stoker (March 1, Fox Searchlight)
After India’s (Wasikowska’s) father dies in an auto accident, her Uncle Charlie (Goode), who she never knew existed, comes to live with her and her emotionally unstable mother (Kidman). Soon after his arrival, she comes to suspect this mysterious, charming man has ulterior motives, but instead of feeling outrage or horror, this friendless girl becomes increasingly infatuated with him.
The Lords of Salem (April 26, Anchor Bay Films)
Heidi, a radio station DJ, receives a wooden box containing a record. Heidi listens and the bizarre sounds within the grooves immediately trigger flashbacks of Salem’s violent past. Is Heidi going mad or are the Lords of Salem returning for revenge on modern day Salem?
7500 (August 31, CBS Films)
Kwanten and Smart will co-star as married couple Brad and Pia Martin, who board Vista Pacific Flight 7500 with their two longtime friends for a trip to Japan. Bibb is set to play Laura Baxter, a stewardess on the transpacific liner, who is involved in a complicated and secret relationship.
The Devil’s Rapture (October 11, LD Entertainment)
Something very strange happened in the small village of New Bethlehem, a devout community kept under the tight reins of the town’s vigilant Elders. Six girls born on the same day to different mothers. Perhaps a coincidence or as most believe a chilling omen of something yet to come. Now, on the eve of their 18th birthday, the young women are mysteriously disappearing one by one and feared dead. Terror has overtaken this quiet community. Could this be the work of a serial killer, one of the village elders or a horrific prophecy come true, born of the supernatural, The Occult?
Maniac (TBD, IFC Films)
Elijah Wood plays the role of a serial killer who works at a shop that sells antique mannequins. He finds victims on the Internet and stalks them like prey, all the while suffering from hallucinations that throw him back into the past, when he was abused by his own mother. In his twisted mind, he gains a measure of revenge against his mother with each kill.
S-VHS (TBD, Bloody Disgusting)
Searching for a missing student, two private investigators break into his abandoned house, which contains another collection of mysterious VHS tapes. In viewing the horrific contents of each cassette, they realize there may be terrifying motives behind the student’s disappearance.
The Green Inferno (TBD)
Apparently inspired by Italo mondo films like Ruggero Deodato’s notorious 1980 Cannibal Holocaust and Antonio Climati’s 1988 Natura contro (also known as The Green Inferno and Cannibal Holocaust II), The Green Inferno follows an idealistic student and a group of naive do-gooders who are captured by cannibalistic Indios after their plane crash lands in the Peruvian jungle. In it, a group of student activists from New York City travel to the Peruvian amazon to stage a protest and save un-contacted tribes. Things do not go as planned.
Here Comes the Devil (TBD, Magnet Releasing)
With Here Comes the Devil, Bogliano moves into a supernatural realm: On a family vacation, a couple’s son and daughter disappear while exploring a cave-riddled mountainside. The children eventually return home seemingly unharmed, but are withdrawn and devoid of emotion. The parents fear they have fallen prey to something inhuman — and that this dark evil has come home with them.
The Quiet Ones (TBD, Hammer Films)
The Quiet Ones tells the story of an unorthodox, but charismatic Professor (Harris) who uses controversial methods and leads his best students off the grid to take part in a dangerous experiment: to create a poltergeist from negative human energy.
Horns (TBD, Mandalay Pictures)
Daniel Radcliffe will portray the number one suspect for the rape and murder of his girlfriend. He awakens one morning to find horns starting to grow from his own head and soon realizes their power drives people to confess their sins and give in to their impulses — an effective tool in his quest to discover the true circumstances of his late girlfriend’s tragedy.
Berberian Sound Studio (TBD, IFC Films)
Set in 1976: Gilderoy is hired to orchestrate the sound mix for the latest film by Italian horror maestro, Santini. As time and realities shift, Gilderoy is lost in a spiral of sonic and personal mayhem, and has to confront his own demons in order to stay afloat.
Grabbers (TBD, IFC Films)
An idyllic remote Irish fishing village is invaded by enormous tentacled creatures from the sea who are picking off the villagers one at a time. The inhabitants learn that the one thing the creatures don’t like is alcohol, it makes people taste horrible, so they realize that in order to stay alive, they’re going to have to get as drunk as possible.
Frankenstein’s Army (TBD, Dark Sky Films)
Using shocking vintage newsreel footage as his jumping-off point, Raaphorst has hit on a unique and bold premise. Toward the end of World War II, Russian soldiers pushing into eastern Germany stumble across a secret Nazi lab, one that has unearthed and begun experimenting with the journal of one Dr. Victor Frankenstein. The scientists have used the legendary’s Frankenstein’s work to assemble an army of supersoldiers stitched together from the body parts of their fallen comrades – a desperate Hitler’s last ghastly ploy to escape defeat.
Byzantium (TBD, IFC FIlms)
On the run for murder, two young “sisters” arrive penniless at an English seaside town. Clara is a fiercely modern woman who has her eyes on the future and no time for the past. Teenager Eleanor is shy and innocent. Yet they both hide the same secrets: they are really mother and daughter, and they are both … vampires!
Eleanor is exhausted by 200 years on the run and desperate to settle down. But little does she know that her mother has been protecting her all of the years from their own kind, “The Brotherhood”. To escape them, they must either blend in or continue running away. But just as they think they may have escaped, their past rapidly catches up with them.
Hatchet III (TBD, Dark Sky Films)
The story finds Harris hunting down the true secret to ending the voodoo curse that has left Crowley’s ghost terrorizing Honey Island Swamp for decades. Mears will play a brooding, pompous SWAT team leader who is sent in to contain the carnage strewn about the haunted swamp. Williams will play a fast-talking journalist who fancies herself an expert on the legend of supernatural stalker Crowley.
Antiviral (TBD, IFC Films)
Antiviral follows Syd March, an employee at a clinic that sells injections of live viruses harvested from sick celebrities to obsessed fans. Biological communion – for a price. Syd also supplies illegal samples of these viruses to piracy groups, smuggling them from the clinic in his own body. When he becomes infected with the disease that kills super sensation Hannah Geist, Syd becomes a target for collectors and rabid fans. He must unravel the mystery surrounding her death before he suffers the same fate.
Cabin Fever: Patient Zero (TBD, The Indomina Group)
When a cruise ship in the Caribbean collides with an abandoned research vessel, a deadly virus is unleashed. Passengers must find a way to survive before the flesh eating disease consumes them all.
Dark Was the Night (TBD)
Dark Was the Night centers on the isolated town of Maiden Woods, where a nearby logging company has disrupted the balance of the life in the woods. From the frozen forest, an evil will emerge and threaten the local citizens; their only hope being the local Sheriff and his trusted Deputy.
Nothing to Fear (TBD, Anchor Bay Films)
A horror/thriller that follows a young family as it tries to reinvent itself by moving to a small town in rural Kansas. The family is tormented by an ancient demon with an insatiable blood lust. It revolves around two young sisters and their family, who accidentally discover one of the seven gateways of Hell in a small town in rural Kansas.
Auteur Filmmaking is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days in reference to big name directors like Quentin Tarantino and even Wes Anderson, but the truth is that film is a collective medium, and no one person can be responsible for every single aspect of a particular production. However, the smaller a film’s budget, the bigger the individual impact of every creative decision behind it – and the easier it becomes to identify a genuine auteur.
This isn’t necessarily a judgement of value, as blockbuster filmmaking comes with its own challenges and a good movie remains a miracle regardless of how big the crew is, but I’ve always been more interested in soulful b-movies produced by handfuls of passionate artists than blockbusters backed by creative armies.
That’s why I love exploring low-budget franchises that never left the hands of their original creators, as you really get to know the artists involved with these flicks and can accompany their evolution over a period of time. With that in mind, I’d like to invite readers to join me in this multi-part series as we look into a vampire saga helmed by one of the most fascinating auteurs of the 1990s. Naturally, I’m referring to Ted Nicolaou’s criminally underrated Subspecies!
The Birth of an Unlikely Horror Franchise
A proud graduate of the University of Texas’ Film program, Nicolaou got his start in the industry as a sound technician working on Tobe Hooper’s original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. From there, the filmmaker would go on to work for notorious indie producer Charles Band, the founder of both Empire Pictures and Full Moon Productions. According to Nicolaou, Band would usually contact him with an offer to direct a feature after more prominent filmmakers, such as the late, great Stuart Gordon, had already refused, meaning that his projects tended to have lower budgets and more inexperienced crew members.
The plans for Subspecies began almost immediately after the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, with screenwriter David Pabian turning in an initial draft of the film after a Romanian producer contacted Band and explained that Romanian tax incentives could cover the cost of film production there so long as Full Moon took care of the post-production process. Since Stuart Gordon was unwilling to travel to Romania, Ted Nicolaou ended up taking over the picture.
However, while the financial incentives meant that this Romanian-American co-production could look and feel much more expensive than it really was, with Nicolaou scouting for locations in advance and selecting real castle ruins to be featured in the movie, the director was soon faced with an incredibly difficult shooting process. In interviews, Nicolaou would later describe the experience as something of a nightmare, with language barriers and the generalized distrust of capitalist outsiders sabotaging many of the team’s plans for the film.
In fact, the script, which had already been altered by Band, ultimately had portions of it rewritten by both Jack Canson and Nicolaou himself in an attempt to adapt the story to their unique limitations.
Radu Is One of Horror’s Greatest Underrated Villains
In the finished film, which was released directly to video in 1991, we follow a pair of American anthropology students, Michelle (Laura Mae Tate) and Lillian (Michelle McBride), as they reunite with their Romanian colleague Mara (Irina Movila) in her native land. The group intends to study the folklore surrounding the secluded town of Prejmer, but their research is cut short by the return of Radu Vladislas (Anders Hove) – the evil son of a vampire king (Angus Scrimm) who had previously established a truce with the region’s human residents. It’s now up to Radu’s human-loving half-brother Stefan (Michael Watson) to protect the girls from a fate worse than death as the power-hungry vampire seeks to control a magical artifact known as the Bloodstone.
Right off the bat, you may have noticed that the film’s premise sounds decidedly old-fashioned when compared to other vampire movies from around the same time. While the 1990s saw the rise of cool-looking bloodsuckers with badass elements borrowed from Westerns, as well as the sexy aristocrats of Anne Rice’s stories, Subspecies has a lot more in common with Nosferatu and the Hammer Horror series than any of its contemporaries.
This is both a blessing and a curse, as the film falls victim to overly familiar genre tropes while also standing out as a rare example of a ’90s vampire flick that isn’t afraid to flex its muscles as a Creature Feature. In fact, I’d argue that the presence of age-old clichés is a small price to pay when confronted with one of the most compelling vampire antagonists in all of cinema.
Named after Vlad the Impaler’s real-life brother, Anders Hove’s Radu is such a fascinating character and the main reason why Subspecies is still worth watching 35 years later. From his animalistic mannerisms to the joy he feels in simply existing as a chaotic creature of the night, and that’s not even mentioning the iconic makeup that almost certainly inspired the undead from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Radu is a hypnotic presence harkening back to a time when audiences didn’t mind purely evil villains that couldn’t be redeemed through tragic backstories or sex appeal.
Gothic Atmosphere on an Indie Budget
Of course, the film’s Romanian setting and authentic art direction do a lot of the heavy lifting whenever Radu isn’t around. From the masked festivals of the village to the visually interesting selection of local extras, Subspecies’ multicultural elements help it to stand out when compared to similar flicks from the ’90s.
That being said, Nicolaou’s unique eye for special effects and exciting action sequences – as well as Vlad Paunescu’s excellent cinematography – make the movie a delight for fans of expressionist cinema and old-timey gothic horror. While the crew is obviously dealing with limited resources, many of the flick’s blemishes (such as the odd stop-motion demons that serve Radu) end up feeling more like charming idiosyncrasies than actual flaws.
I’d argue that the only real issue here is pacing, as there are long stretches of film where the protagonists are simply bumbling around without realizing what’s really going on around them. Thankfully, the gorgeous visuals and surprisingly effective soundtrack usually make up for this. Besides, how can you dislike a movie where shotgun shells are loaded with rosary beads and our lead vampires duke it out in a dramatic swordfight that would feel out of place during the golden age of Hollywood?
Your overall enjoyment of Subspecies will mostly depend on whether or not you find low-budget corner-cutting and janky practical effects charming rather than distracting, but I know I’ll keep coming back to this Full Moon feature again and again in the future.
That being said, while this first movie is worth revisiting by its own merits as the birth of an indie horror icon, I’d like to invite you to join us as we look into the cult sequel Bloodstone: Subspecies II soon.
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