Movies
5 Horror Films Released On October 10th!
Each morning I’ve been checking to see what horror films have released that day in horror, and while the month started off strong it sort of tapered off. Until today.
October 10th was a pretty great day in horror history, bringing us David Cronenberg’s 1975 Shivers (They Came from Within). Released in the States in July of 1976, the film follows the residents of a suburban high-rise apartment building who are infected by a strain of parasites that turn them into mindless, sex-crazed fiends out to infect others by the slightest sexual contact. This was Cronenberg’s first foray into body horror and would eventually lead to him terrorizing horror fans with films like Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, Dead Ringers and even The Fly. With Shivers, Cronenberg won “Best Director” at the 1975 Sitges Film Festival.
Wiki notes some interesting controversy I wasn’t aware of:
The Canadian journalist Robert Fulford, writing as “Marshall Delaney”, decried the content of Shivers in the pages of the national magazine Saturday Night. Since Cronenberg’s film was partially financed by the taxpayer-funded Canadian Film Development Corporation (later known as Telefilm Canada), Fulford headlined the article “You Should Know How Bad This Movie Is, You Paid For It.” He called it “crammed with blood, violence and depraved sex” and “the most repulsive movie I’ve ever seen.” Not only did this high profile attack make it more difficult for Cronenberg to obtain funding for his subsequent movies, but Cronenberg later said Fulford’s article also resulted in him being kicked out of his apartment in Toronto due to his landlord’s inclusion of a “morality clause” in the lease.
Another interesting addition to October 10th in horror history is Roger Spottiswoode’s Terror Train, which would star Halloween‘s Jamie Lee Curtis. The 1980 slasher film was part of the early masked-slasher horror boom, and follows the members of a college fraternity who played a cruel prank on a shy kid named Kenny Hampson. Years later, they are having a costume party on a train; unbeknownst to them, someone has boarded the train with them and is killing them all one by one. According to Wiki, FOX acquired the film and put $5M into P&A only to have the film gross $8M. Not the booming success they had hoped for.
Also released on this day, Tony Malanowski’s 1978 Night of Horror, which would eventually open in the States in 1981.
In 2003 Uwe Boll would break onto the scene with his horrid video game adaptation, House of the Dead, which would bomb at the box office. Still, the film garnered a “director’s cut” so Boll could show what he really intended to release. It was just as terrible. The new version “features new dialogue, alternative takes, pop up commentary and animation from the original video game.” He produced an equally awful direct-to-video sequel. In the adaptation of the SEGA game, a group of unsuspecting teens stumble upon the living dead in an old house. When one of them dies during a rave at the house, the others band together to get revenge.
Lastly, the Dowdle brothers got behind the camera for the 2008 Quarantine, a found-footage remake of [REC] that starred “Dexter’s” Jennifer Carpenter as a television reporter who is trapped inside a building quarantined by the CDC after the outbreak of a mysterious virus which turns humans into bloodthirsty killers. It was surprisingly good, considering the original was an instant horror classic. It too spawned a very awful direct-to-video sequel.
Hollywood tends to learn all of the wrong lessons when confronted with an indie success story that doesn’t follow the established rules of the industry. For instance, instead of accepting that the massive success of Backrooms has more to do with Kane Parsons’ individual talent as an established artist who has been producing high-quality videos since the pandemic (combined with the popularity of liminal horror among younger audiences), producers are now trudging through old Reddit posts looking for the next viral meme that studios think might have the potential to be turned into a cash cow.
This is by no means a new phenomenon, and I think one of the most pertinent examples of Hollywood misunderstanding what makes a movie work has to be the aftermath of The Blair Witch Project. While Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s genre-defining movie proved that POV camerawork and lo-fi aesthetics can captivate mainstream audiences when backed by a genuinely compelling story, there was a sudden trend of filmmakers attempting to appear hip by incorporating found footage into their films as if the occasional presence of diegetic recordings was enough to make a movie seem “hip”.
That’s why the 2000s were such a frustrating period for found footage fans, as the genre was still mostly relegated to obscure indie productions while studios only teased us with the format’s narrative potential. And yet, talented filmmakers can tell compelling stories under any circumstances, and this is how we get to the weird world of found footage bonus features produced alongside traditional movies.
Diegetic filmmaking may not necessarily be easier than conventional camerawork (it’s a lot harder to simulate reality without the added toolbox of cinematic editing), but it’s certainly a hell of a lot cheaper. That’s why it makes sense that plenty of high profile projects invested in found footage bonus content in order to add value to their home video releases – a once profitable industry that is sorely missed in the current media landscape.
The irony here is that many of these found footage extras were a little too good when compared to their promotional origins. With that in mind, I’d like to take a closer look at three examples of found footage bonus features that were better than the movie they were meant to enhance!
3. Halloween: Resurrection (2002): WebCam Special
I might lose some of my horror cred for admitting this, but Halloween: Resurrection was actually the first Halloween film I ever saw. Thankfully, this misguided entry didn’t scare me off from watching the other movies in the series, but even as a teenager I recognized that the flick’s premise of an online streaming show gone wrong had some merit to it – it’s just too bad that these ideas were never fully realized in the feature itself.
It was only years later that I discovered the fabled WebCam Special on Resurrection’s physical media release and got the film I had always wanted. This 41-minute cut of the film is by no means a masterpiece, but excluding everything except for the found footage elements of the production somehow transforms this ill-advised sequel into a deeply unsettling exercise in voyeuristic cinema.
In fact, I’d argue that the long takes of Michael simply moving through the house without calling attention to himself are much closer to John Carpenter’s original vision of the bogeyman than any of the exaggerated sequels that depict The Shape as something more akin to a superpowered Jason Voorhees. It’s just a shame that the franchise would never explore this format again.
2. Believers (2007): The Quanta Group Videos
Daniel Myrick’s Believers is by no means a bad movie, with this direct-to-video thriller following a duo of paramedics who find themselves captured by a deranged death cult inspired by all the worst aspects of Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate. Unfortunately, the Blair Witch alumni’s low-budget exploration of religious madness was quickly forgotten simply because most people didn’t bother to engage with the other half of the experience by exploring the DVD menu.
Within the disc’s extras, Myrick actually included in-universe interviews and orientation videos meant to expand the Quanta Group’s backstory and beliefs. These found footage recordings greatly enhance The Believers by providing much-needed context for some of the film’s scariest moments. There’s even a wonderfully creepy epilogue sequence here as another group explores the cult’s dilapidated compound after the events of the film.
While it’s baffling that this material didn’t make it into the movie itself through in-universe cutaways (especially IO’s darkly humorous interview), watching it alongside Myrick’s film turns the whole thing into a highly compelling multi-media experience.
1. Dawn of the Dead (2004): The Lost Tape & Special Report: Zombie Invasion
I’ve always considered 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake to be Zack Snyder’s best film (though most of the flick’s qualities are the result of James Gunn’s excellent script) even if it fails to capture the social anxieties of Romero’s 1978 original. However, this apocalyptic production is also the perfect example of an expensive project being overshadowed by the low-budget bonus features on its own home video release.
You see, the Dawn of the Dead DVD actually boasts two separate found footage short films that I find much scarier than the movie they’re marketing. The Lost Tape: Andy’s Terrifying Last Days Revealed is a somber video diary written by Gunn and starring Bruce Bohne as the ill-fated Andy – a minor character in the main film who becomes trapped in his own gun store when the zombies attack. Then there’s my personal favorite, Special Report: Zombie Invasion, a fully simulated news program starring Babylon 5’s Richard Biggs (as well as Bruce Boxleitner) that chronicles the spread of the undead virus.
Not only do these bonus features add context to Snyder’s film, but I’d argue that they make for a better standalone viewing experience than the so-called “main attraction”. Special Report honestly feels like a charming low-budget adaptation of Max Brooks’ World War Z novel (despite coming out a couple of years before that book was published), and I adore how The Lost Tapes turns Andy into a genuinely tragic figure.
These obviously aren’t the only found footage extras worth revisiting (for instance, I adore that Skull Island mockumentary that accompanied the special edition of Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake), but I figured that the three aforementioned projects could provide us with a snapshot of a curious moment in popular culture where found footage could still impress viewers despite not being quite as respected by the studio system.
That being said, don’t forget to sound off in the comments below if you can think of any other found footage bonus features that deserve a shout-out! After all, I’d love to see this trend of diegetic extras make a comeback in modern times – especially where found footage-heavy movies like Backrooms are concerned.
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