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SCREAMBOX Hidden Gems – 5 Horror Movies You Should Stream Tonight

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Pictured: 'Doom Asylum'

The Bloody Disgusting-powered SCREAMBOX is home to a variety of unique horror content, from originals and exclusives to cult classics and documentaries. With such a rapidly-growing library, there are many hidden gems waiting to be discovered.

Here are five recommendations you can stream on SCREAMBOX right now.


The Barn

Before The Barn Part II streams exclusively on SCREAMBOX on May 26, catch up on the 2016 original. The Barn stands out among the glut of ’80s slasher throwbacks because it’s not satirical or a send-up; the unapologetic love letter approaches the well-trodden material with a refreshing earnestness. Capturing not only the style but also the spirit of his influences, writer-director Justin M. Seaman taps directly into horror fans’ nostalgia while introducing an imaginative mythology with ample heart in a charming package.

At its core, the film is a coming of age tale about a teenager who doesn’t want to grow up; it just happens to be framed by murder and mayhem. Set in 1989, the film follows best friends Sam (Mitchell Musolino) and Josh (Will Stout) as they embark on a final Halloween hurrah before graduating high school. A trick-or-treating pit stop turns deadly when they learn that the urban legends of The Boogeyman, Hallowed Jack, and The Candycorn Scarecrow are all true. Each of the killers has its own unique look and backstory.

The ’80s atmosphere is established immediately by the retro-style production logo at the top of the film and doesn’t relent for 88 minutes, complete with gory practical effects, fake film grain, a synthesizer score composed by former Evanescence drummer Rocky Gray, and appearances by genre icons Linnea Quigley (The Return of the Living Dead) and Ari Lehman (Friday the 13th).


Antrum

Subtitled “The Deadliest Movie Ever Made,” Antrum is presented as a long-lost movie from the late ‘70s. Akin to Ringu, The Ring, and John Carpenter’s Masters of Horror episode “Cigarette Burns” — all three referenced in the dialogue to avert claims of ripping them off — it’s rumored that no one who has ever seen the cursed film has lived to talk about it. Do you dare watch it?

The 2018 Canadian film is bookended by brief faux-documentary segments featuring film experts providing context on the fatal history. The rest of the 94-minute runtime is presented as the only known copy of Antrum, complete with subliminal “peculiarities” spliced into the print designed to provoke physical and psychological effects on the viewer.

The story follows siblings Oralee (Nicole Tompkins, Resident Evil 3) and Nathan (Rowan Smyth) on a literal descent to Hell as they attempt to save their recently euthanized dog. Writing-directing duo David Amito and Michael Laicini not only capture the 1970s atmosphere better than many productions with bigger budgets, but they also convincingly build a creepy, Blair Witch Project-esque mythology on top of it.


Doom Asylum

10 years after being wrongfully pronounced dead only to survive and go on a killing spree, Mitch Hansen (Michael Rogen) — who looks like a Wish.com version of Frank from Hellraiser and spouts Freddy Krueger-esque one-liners — has become something of an urban legend. A group of friends — including Frankenhooker‘s Patty Mullen as final girl Kiki LaRue and Sex and the City star Kristin Davis in her film debut — go trespassing in the asylum that Mitch has turned his killing grounds. In addition to the killer, they also have to contend with a group of over-the-top punks.

Billed as a horror-comedy, it’s difficult to tell if the humor in 1987’s Doom Asylum is intentional or incidental at first. Once director Richard Friedman (Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge) and writer Rick Marx introduce Kiki’s quirk of referring to her boyfriend as “mom” to comfort her on the anniversary of her mother’s death, however, it’s clear that the satire is deliberate. The lines between genuinely funny beats, dated ’80s humor, and inadvertent camp are blurred throughout the runtime.

The film is intercut with clips from old black-and-white movies, a 1936 adaptation of The Demon Barber of Fleet Street among them. Some of them cleverly tie into the plot, while others seem to exist only to pad the scant 78-minute runtime. There’s some solid gore along the way, including a particularly memorable death scene in the final act. Doom Asylum may not be a top-tier slasher, but it’s certainly entertaining enough to warrant a cult following.


Savageland

One could easily mistake Savageland for a genuine true-crime documentary rather than what it actually is: a convincing, cleverly-plotted faux-documentary about the largest single-day homicide in the history of Arizona. Co-written and co-directed by Phil Guidry, Simon Herbert, and David Whelan, the clever take on found footage horror succeeds because it fully commits to the gimmick.

After the entire 57-person population of Sangre De Cristo — a small border town colloquially known as Savageland — is wiped out, undocumented Mexican immigrant Francisco Salazar (Noe Montes) is caught covered in blood. He never speaks a word in his defense and, based on the overwhelming evidence against him, is sentenced to death. What seems like an open-and-shut case proves to be anything but when a roll of photos shot by Salazar on the day in question is discovered, as retracing his steps via the 36 exposures paints a clearer picture of what happened.

The incorporation of real-life sociopolitical tensions — including conservative hate-mongers using the tragedy to perpetuate their bigoted beliefs, ignorant officials wanting to wash their hands of the whole ordeal, and activists speaking out for justice — helps to ground the material. Even when genre elements are introduced, credible filmmaking and natural performances (including Wolverine and Swamp Thing co-creator Len Wein as an expert photographer) lend verisimilitude.


Kolobos

1999 direct-to-video obscurity Kolobos has been described as “The Real World meets Saw by way of Suspiria.” Fresh out of film school, co-directors Daniel Liatowitsch and David Todd Ocvirk drew inspiration from the then-novel concept of reality TV and then-obscure Italian horror to craft a colorful addition to the ’90s slasher canon.

The film finds five young people (one-time WWE diva Amy Weber among them) living together in a snowy mountain resort while their every move is filmed for a “groundbreaking experimental film.” After dedicating the first act to character development, horror aspects are swiftly introduced when the first victim is claimed via booby trap and all exits are sealed. More ruthless deaths executed by a faceless killer follow as the dwindling few fight to survive.

Shot on 35mm for $500,000, Kolobos smartly utilizes an ingenious premise with a single primary location and a handful of characters. It’s visually interesting and well paced, save for the superfluous epilogue that was tacked on to pad the runtime. The awkward title — inspired by the colobus monkey, from a Latin term meaning “mutilated” — may not inspire much confidence, but the movie deserves more attention.


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Editorials

‘A Haunted House’ and the Death of the Horror Spoof Movie

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Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.

This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.

Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.

The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.

You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.

Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.

In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.

In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.

Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.

However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.

Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.

Not a good idea.

Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).

Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.

A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.

At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.

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