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Shout! Factory’s Scream Factory Announces ‘The Howling’ Special Edition Blu-ray and DVD!

It’s time to unleash the beast within and join the pack as Scream Factory is proud to present the ferocious 1981 classic The Howling Collector’s Edition on Blu-ray and DVD June 18, 2013. Directed by legendary filmmaker Joe Dante (Gremlins) and written by John Sayles and Terence H. Winkless, this massive cult hit is based on the popular novel by Gary Brandner. The all-star cast includes Dee Wallace (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Cujo), Patrick MacNee (The Avengers, A View to a Kill), Dennis Dugan (Happy Gilmore), Christopher Stone (Cujo), Belinda Balaski (Piranha), Kevin McCarthy (Innerspace), John Carradine (The Twilight Zone), Slim Pickens (Dr. Strangelove), Elisabeth Brooks (Deep Space) and Robert Picardo (Star Trek: Voyager). Brimming with edge-of-your-seat suspense and awesome make-up effects courtesy of Rob Bottin (The Thing), this riveting werewolf tale sinks its teeth into your deepest fears and never lets go!

For the first time ever on Blu-ray, this definitive collector’s edition home entertainment release of The Howling features anamorphic widescreen movie presentation and is packed with a bounty of special bonus content, a collectible cover featuring newly rendered retro-style artwork, a reversible wrap with original theatrical key art and more! READ MORE

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Take The Expanded Ultimate Horror Challenge!!! How Do You Rank Now?

We have heard your cries! MANY of you felt that the The Ultimate Horror Challenge wasn’t comprehensive enough! So we included an additional 20 films that round it out a bit more. Many of these are from your suggestions! But this still isn’t a list of every horror movie ever made. And it still doesn’t contain every major work of every horror auteur (there’s still no John Carpenter’s They Live or Wes Craven’s The Last House On The Left).

The next update will be the Ultimate Horror Challenge: Final Edition – where we take your best new suggestions and use them to get up to 101 films that every horror fan should see! So in addition to your ranking, let us know which films should make the cut! Should newer fan favorites like Frozen or The Devil’s Rejects be included? Should we go back and pick up a few more old-school slashers? You’re shaping the Final 20! Discuss and vote and I’ll tally it up!

There are now 81 Films listed below the jump. Each film you’ve seen earns you 1 Point. Count out how many you’ve seen and let us know which category you fall into!

1-10 Points: Soccer Mom

11-20 Points: Mildly Adventurous

21-30 Points: Casual Fan

31-40 Points: Enthusiast

41-50 Points: Hardcore

51-60 Points: Unstable

61-70 Points: Need Meds

71-80 Points: Psychopath

81 Points: Special Circle Of Hell

Head inside to take the challenge! The films are listed in no particular order. This is NOT a ranking! READ MORE

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Editorials

[Special Feature] Where Are All The Great Werewolf Movies?

The werewolf is the most under-appreciated and misused of all of the classic horror creatures. Sure, we get all kinds of movies with werewolves in them, but more often than not those films seem more concerned with mentioning werewolves and then showing some bizarre half-assed approximation of them. Like they’re checking off a box on a list.

Obviously one of the most recent and popular misuses of the werewolf would be in the Twilight films, but dissecting those is like taking candy from a baby and I don’t want to spend too much time on it. Suffice to say – they look more like foxes, transform in the daytime, communicate via telepathy and are generally pretty lame. They’re also prone to jorts, which makes them almost like Native American Incredible Hulks who turn into dogs instead of big green guys.

But it’s not up to some teen franchise to carry the torch of one of our best monsters. That falls under the stewardship of actual horror films. So why do most of them drop the ball so badly? Incompetence certainly plays into it and is probably the biggest factor, but there’s still a lot of people with actual talent out there missing the mark. Why?

One of my theories is that too many of these movies seem overly concerned with adding a unique spin or futzing with the rules. I’m not saying there’s not room for that – any genre should be open to reinterpretation. But there are so few great “classic” werewolf movies that maybe we should concentrate on getting a few more of them under our belts. I think that needs to happen before we can expect any spin or subversion of the genre to have any real impact, because right now we’re spinning and subverting something with such a decentralized compass that it just feels random. For example, if you’re going straight into your Nazi Demon Werewolf movie without even exploring some of the inherent possibilities the creature’s metaphor, you’re doing it wrong.

Let’s talk great werewolf movies. And why The Howling might not be one of them. Head inside for more. READ MORE

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The Howling

After a bizarre and near fatal encounter with a serial killer, a newswoman is sent to a rehabilitation center whose inhabitants may not be what they seem.