Even then, the profit-driven machinations behind film distribution can still result in movies becoming unavailable to legally stream or purchase – and that’s not even mentioning the recent trend of studios scrapping completed projects in order to guarantee a bigger tax break.

However, for every Batgirl and The Golem, there’s a case where dedicated fans have managed to unearth elusive media and make it available for everyone. This month had one such pleasant outcome when dedicated cinephile Darren Payne announced via film preservation FB Group Film is Fabulous that he’d recovered a long-lost episode of the BBC’s 1968 anthology series Late Night Horror.

Directed by Paddy Russell and written by I Am Legend scribe Richard Matheson, “No Such Thing as a Vampire” is a 25-minute short following a doctor’s wife who becomes ill and soon suspects that she’s actually being visited by a blood-sucking vampire. What follows is a gruesome tale that pushes the limits of 1960s horror programming with a surprising amount of disturbing imagery.

Pictured: BBC’s ‘Late Night Horror’ Title Card

This story is only the second of Late Night Horror’s six episodes to be recovered (with Russell’s other grim tale, The Corpse Can’t Play, having been found back in 2016), as the program’s terrifying reputation led to the BBC scrapping and allegedly destroying the show entirely after receiving numerous complaints from sensitive viewers.

As Doctor Who fans are sadly aware, the BBC also had a nasty habit of taping over “unwanted” recordings as a cost-saving measure back in the day, so the fact that Payne recovered a private 16mm telerecording of the show after inquiring about a collection of mystery reels at England’s Regent Theater is nothing short of a small miracle.

That being said, while No Such Thing as a Vampire was originally broadcast in color, the surviving copy is limited to black-and-white (though Payne guarantees that the film remains just as terrifying without the added color). There’s also talk of an experimental color recovery process being planned for the print, though there’s no guarantee that it’ll work out.

The high-resolution digital scan of No Such Thing as a Vampire is set to make its public debut during this year’s edition of the UK’s Grindfest on September 20, with the footage then being returned to the BBC for a wider release!

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Grind hits the ground running with its lambasting of everything from MLMs to delivery services to unionizations, with all paths directly leading back to nefarious corporation DRGN. It opens with a tense look from inside an Amazon-like warehouse, where its workers face horrific consequences if they miss their package quota. From there, Grind employs Barbara Crampton as the Founder and Rob Huebel as an upper-level DRGN manager, serving as the connective tissue anchoring the segments.

Consistency varies in this anthology, but Grind at least smartly gets its roughest segment, “MLM,” out first. Crampton gives a valiant effort as the domineering yet ominously encouraging boss to two new reps of Lala Leggings as they struggle to maintain their sales goals. This segment quickly gets a bit too off the rails and loses sight of its messaging, but at least it succeeds in establishing the anthology’s overarching big comedic swings.

“Delivery” ramps up the action and carnage with a fun supernatural twist to the hells of being a DoorDash driver, one that makes up for clear budgetary constraints with vibrant creativity. From there, Grind careens into its best and darkest segment, “Content Moderation,” starring Christopher Rodriguez-Marquette as a hopeful DRGN employee promised to move up the ranks if he can succeed in clearing his content queue. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that DRGN has no intention of letting a plebe ascend into upper management and take drastic measures to snuff out hope and sanity.

It’s this segment that feels fully realized and the most polished, both in scares and messaging. It’s also filled with fun homages and memes, including a recurring Frogman jab. “Union Meeting” closes out the anthology with a comical depiction of Starbucks stand-in Neptunia, where its employees attempt to unionize until DRGN unleashes Neptunia’s mascot to squash it.

There’s a noticeable difference in technical precision and quality between segments, with rough seams showing in parts. Grind makes up for it with scrappy DIY spunk and attitude, even when it leans too far into twee humor. That’s largely because it’s so relatable and authentic in its biting commentary on an unsustainable gig economy. Who can’t relate to the work grind at this stage?

Grind holds up a middle finger to all conglomerates and billionaires that view their employees as disposable cogs. It tackles quite a lot of ground with clarity and with an admirable sense of humor. The anthology also fills its cast with a lot of notable horror talent, including Gigi Saul Guerrero, Matt Mercer, and Dead Meat’s James A. Janisse.

What Grind lacks in polish, it compensates for in its smart and earnest lambasting of the work grind. It’s a fun, cathartic reminder that it’s not just you; the current cruelty of big companies sucks. Grant, Dougherty, and Stardust commiserate with an uneven, lighthearted anthology that takes an energetic stab at the system that chews up its employees and spits them out.

Grind made its world premiere at SXSW. Release info TBD.

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However, you can’t exactly shoot a short action film every week without breaking the bank, so it makes sense that most anthology shows chose to focus on genres that could still work within a limited budget, with the most popular choice being horror. And with decades of television providing us with short-form thrills, we’ve decided to come up with a list recommending six of the best horror anthology stories to watch during this Halloween season!

For the purposes of this list, we’ll only be including entries from episodic series, so no segments from made-for-TV films like Trilogy of Terror. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own short-form favorites if you think we missed a particularly memorable story.

With that out of the way, onto the list…

6. Class of ’99 – Night Gallery (1970-1973)

Rod Serling’s lesser-known follow-up to The Twilight Zone may not be as popular as the ground-breaking show that turned the writer into a household name, but this spooky little program featured some of the best horror stories ever broadcast on the small screen.

A great example of this is the second episode of season two, which features a mind-bender about the inherent insanity of human prejudice. Starring horror legend Vincent Price as a professor instructing a class of mechanical students, the 18-minute-long Class of ‘99 is still scarier and more impactful than many feature-length genre films – and that’s why it’s an easy choice for spooky season viewing.

5. Safe at Home – Freaky Stories (1997-1999)

As a horror-obsessed ’90s kid who grew up in Canada, Freaky Stories was exactly the kind of show I looked forward to whenever I turned on YTV. And while this animated anthology was generally about as kid-friendly as Goosebumps and Tales from the Cryptkeeper, it could still surprise viewers with the occasional extra-freaky yarn.

Case in point: Safe at Home, an eerie adaptation of the classic urban legend where a girl finds herself home alone with her pet dog and gets a surprise visit from an escaped maniac. It may clock in at less than five minutes, but this is by far one of the most memorable segments of the entire show even if it sanitizes the tale just enough to keep it from traumatizing the show’s younger audience. Just keep in mind that this is a true story, it happened to a friend of a friend of mine – I swear!

4. Itchy – Room 104 (2017-2020)

Despite featuring episodes tackling (and often subverting) nearly every conceivable genre throughout its four seasons, Mark and Jay Duplass’ Room 104 had a particular knack for telling unsettling tales about deranged characters in disturbing situations. That’s why it’s appropriate that one of the show’s standout episodes happens to be a deeply unsettling Found Footage story written by Mark Duplass and helmed by Creep director Patrick Brice!

Following Arturo Castro as a troubled man who isolates himself in the titular motel room in order to record a bizarre series of videos about his horrific skin condition, Itchy soon devolves into paranoid horror as we begin to question the protagonist’s mental state as well as the intentions of his unseen “Doctor.”

Just thinking about this minimalist romp is enough to make my skin crawl, and that’s why it had to make it onto the list.

3. Skin & Bones – Fear Itself (2008)

Better known as the Canadian successor to Masters of Horror (with some fans even calling it the show’s unofficial third season), Fear Itself had quite a few memorable episodes despite not being quite as popular. One of my personal favorite stories here happens to be Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo yarn, Skin & Bones.

Following rancher Grady Edlund (Doug Jones) who returns as the sole survivor of a hunting trip out in the mountains, this episode chronicles the family man’s descent into body-horror induced madness as he slowly transforms into a ravenous creature of Native-American myth. Scary, atmospheric and straight to the point, this is a must-watch for spooky season that also happens to feature one of my favorite performances from Jones.

2. The Outside – Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2022)

Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour and starring Kate Micucci of Garfunkel and Oates fame, this avant garde web-comic adaptation is so good that I kind of wish it were a standalone movie rather than part of Del Toro’s short-lived anthology. In the episode, Micucci plays an awkward woman who embraces a new skincare product in an effort to be accepted by her peers. However, her overuse of this mysterious lotion ends up having horrific consequences.

I won’t go into further detail in order to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say that the episode’s stylish visuals and stellar performances (with even Dan Stevens making a memorable appearance) make it one of the best entries on the list. And with recent films like The Substance reminding audiences that body-horror can also be used to tell deeply human stories, I think this is the perfect time to revisit Amirpour’s criminally underseen gem.

1. Cigarette Burns – Master of Horror (2005-2007)

I admit that I’m split when it comes to the subject of John Carpenter. On one hand, this intrepid filmmaker is responsible for so many memorable movies that he’s more than earned the right to stay at home playing video games and watching sports for as long as he wants. On the other hand, one of the greatest genre creators of all time is still alive and kicking but we haven’t seen a new movie from him in decades!

And while some critics point to the director’s 2010 thriller The Ward as a sign that he was right to retire, Carpenter released one of his best “films” only a few years earlier as a part of the Masters of Horror anthology. Titled Cigarette Burns in reference to the circular markings indicating that a film reel is reaching the end, this incredibly meta thriller combines the narrative scares of The King in Yellow with the gritty neo-noir of moves like 8mm – and all that in less than an hour!

If you’re only going to watch one episode on this list, make sure that it’s this one.

The post Six of the Best Horror Anthology Episodes to Watch for Halloween appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Fortunately, there’s one area where this definitely isn’t the case, and that would be the Found Footage genre. As far back as the early 2000s, in-world camera movies have been incorporating concepts like social media and online virality into their visual vocabulary through both Screenlife movies as well as productions meant to look like they were originally shot to be online videos. Of course, it takes an especially tech-savvy production team to make sure that these innovations come off naturally, and that brings us to David James Clark, Joe Martinez-Weinberger, Taylor Weiss and Dean Smith’s Clickbait, a horror-comedy anthology film satirizing modern internet culture.

A passion project born from the aftermath of the SAG and WGA strikes of 2023, Clickbait is the first major feature-length film developed by Gallows Humor Pictures, an independent production company founded with the goal of creating budget-friendly genre movies with a comedic edge. And for their first collaboration, the team decided that a bit of meta commentary was in order.

In the finished film, the wraparound segment introduces us to Ralph (Tyler Arceneaux), a struggling livestreamer eager to react to scary videos in order to pull in more viewers on Halloween night. He gets more than he bargained for when a mysterious user promises to grant his wish, leading to a series of gruesome vignettes featuring YouTubers and other influencers dealing with horrific situations – all the while Ralph’s real life begins to spiral into madness.

From Mr-Beast-inspired pranks gone wrong to health influencers being pushed to insanity by the contents of their subscription boxes, there’s an entertaining collection of digital parables here to keep viewers entertained – provided that you’re already familiar with some of the issues afflicting modern day content creation. While I don’t particularly mind the reliance on online in-jokes and parodies of controversial real-world personalities, Clickbait’s attempts at humor might not be quite as effective for audiences who aren’t terminally online.

However, if you are familiar with the internet’s current algorithm-ruled landscape, I’m sure you’ll appreciate the filmmakers’ attention to detail in everything from Ralph’s hilarious chat (one of my favorite aspects of Screenlife movies), as well as the occasional use of genre-accurate jump-cut editing. Even the actors are in on the joke here, playing off of their characters’ exaggerated online personas without becoming so over-the-top that they turn into abrasive cartoon characters. I was especially impressed with Arceneaux as our bumbling lead, as well as Anthony Laurita’s surprisingly dark turn as the leader of a desperate prank channel willing to do anything for clicks.

Of course, the real internet contains enough silly content as it is, so it’s the horror elements that make Clickbait stand out. And with the exception of a weak first segment parodying clout-chasing ghost-hunters, I really enjoyed the film’s peculiar taste for bonkers scares that often match its humorous premise. Sure, the low budget means that some of the gore effects aren’t quite as impressive as something you might see in bigger Found Footage endeavors, but there are enough disturbing ideas here to make up for any technical blemishes.

Unfortunately, the experience is hampered by a messy narrative that focuses more on absurdity and shock value than proper storytelling. I actually really like how all the segments are linked by a thematic connection to influencers and the dangers of online obsession (as well as the fact that the wraparound story works as its own standalone horror yarn), but it’s a shame that so much of what happens onscreen is motivated by sheer randomness instead of any real attempt at a cohesive story.

While I loved the inclusion of insane elements like a Gollum-like little brother for our main character, I would have enjoyed the experience a lot more if these ideas were tied to the plot instead of everything just being the arbitrary result of a generic haunting. In fact, we get little-to-no explanation for any of Clickbait’s supernatural elements. I’m aware that less is more when it comes to establishing lore in the horror genre, but I think the movie would have benefited from a bit more information regarding the exact nature of the entity taunting Ralph.

That being said, there’s still a lot to like about Gallows Humor’s Found Footage debut if you can stomach some iffy production value and a script that mostly serves as an excuse to provide audiences with laugh-out-loud critiques of online culture peppered with the occasional dose of disturbing imagery. Not only that, but Clickbait is also the rare horror anthology that feels like it was produced from the ground up to be an interconnected feature rather than a best-of compilation showing off a collection of unrelated short films. It certainly won’t appeal to everyone, but I think this particular headline is worth clicking on.

If you’re a fan of horror films that satirize online culture, I’d recommend watching Clickbait as part of a double-feature alongside either one of Michelle Iannantuono’s Livescream movies.

Clickbait will premiere at the Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, California on May 31 for a private screening, with a wide release to come later this year. Stay tuned for more release information.

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Lionsgate releases Freaky Tales in theaters on April 4, 2025.

In the anthology, “Set in 1987 Oakland, Freaky Tales is a multi-track mixtape of colorful characters — an NBA star, a corrupt cop, a female rap duo, teen punks, neo-Nazis, and a debt collector — on a collision course in a fever dream of showdowns and battles.”

Check out the trailer and new poster below, which introduces “The Last of Us” star Pedro Pascal as an unconventional warrior ready for violence. The film also marks one of the final on screen appearances for the late actor Angus Cloud (Abigail, Your Lucky Day).

Pedro Pascal, Ben Mendelsohn, Jay Ellis, Normani, Dominique Thorne, Jack Champion, Ji-young Yoo, Angus Cloud, and Tom Hanks star in Freaky Tales, executive produced by hip-hop pioneer Too $hort.

The energetic anthology made its debut last year at the Sundance Film Festival. I wrote in my review, “While Boden and Fleck create a specific love letter to the Bay Area, its adoration of music and movies is accessible on a larger scale. The way the filmmakers effortlessly shift through styles to capture each segment’s story, even playing with form and technique, makes for one of the more entertaining movie surprises in recent memory. ” 

Freaky Tales dabbles in a variety of genres, but expect horror to play a key role as well. Filmmakers Boden and Fleck wring a few comedic beats from The Lost Boys as connective tissue, and Scanners becomes one of the most surprising sources of gory inspiration.

Get ready to venture back in time to visit one pulpy depiction of the Oakland music scene with zany ’80s anthology Freaky Tales this April.

The post ‘Freaky Tales’ Trailer – Gory Violence and Music Collide in ’80s Genre Mixtape Anthology appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

A Story to Scare My Son brings to life the disturbing tale of the same name, written by R.D. Ovenfriend.

Subscribe and stream the episode below and explore the lore of other items in the shop, with a rotating cast that includes Mike Flanagan, Kate Siegel, Devon Sawa, Scout Taylor Compton, Joseph Winter, Melanie Stone, David Dastmalchian, Sara Paxton, Jocelin Donahue and more!

Listen on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts.

For an uninterrupted experience, find stories from The Antique Dealer’s private collection and more at The Obsidian Covenant (Patreon).

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Instagram: @antiquariumpod
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It can be increasingly easy to write off American Horror Stories, especially when a middling season of American Horror Story proper is currently airing. American Horror Stories began with a rocky start that was too indebted to the franchise’s past. However, it’s gradually become an underrated destination for heightened, campy tales of terror that aren’t bogged down by the plotting and structural issues that so-often hurt American Horror Story’s seasonal narratives. Not only is American Horror Stories’ third season a consistent batch of terrifying tales, but it also contains some of its best work.

“Bestie” is one of American Horror Stories’ strongest episodes and exactly the type of tale that this series should be telling. It’s an incredibly uncomfortable experience, from start to finish, that works as well as it does because of its raw and vulnerable characters. These are real characters with genuine depth that feel like the antithesis of the caricatures who often dominate American Horror Story. Series newcomer, Joe Baken, makes an excellent first impression with a script about loneliness and the dangers of toxic relationships, even if they’re virtual. The story doesn’t succumb to the typical pitfalls and even when it does make use of unnecessary tricks, like an in media res introduction, they’re benign touches that don’t drag down the episode. Any misgivings in “Bestie” can quickly be overlooked with the arresting, dreadful atmosphere that’s achieved through its extended duration.

“Bestie” paints itself in a bleak world where characters monologue on their respective tragedies that can be a lot to take in and makes it feel as if these characters are destined to fail. Jessica Barden, Seth Gabel, and Allius Barnes all excel with their respective material here so that “Bestie” truly becomes an unsettling experience. In most American Horror Stories episodes, a protagonist’s death is expected and sometimes even encouraged, but the final act of “Bestie” leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth even if it’s an effective twist that stays true to the episode’s toxic themes. Max Winkler directs the hell out of this episode that’s as emotionally grueling as it is visually arresting. 

American Horror Stories’ pendulum swings to the opposite side of the horror spectrum with “Daphne.” Franchise mainstays, Brad Falchuk and Manny Coto, write an episode about advanced rogue A.I. that’s ultimately still just a story about connection, much like in “Bestie.” “Daphne” is the weakest of season three’s four episodes, but it’s still a completely serviceable installment of campy, modern horror that’s far from “bad.” “Daphne” becomes a bit of a fumble. There’s a lot to like here between Reid Scott’s starring role and the brilliant casting decision to pull Gwyneth Paltrow off Ryan Murphy’s bench to voice an algorithm-driven AI rather than a living, breathing human. However, “Daphne” also is very much structured in the shadow of COVID-19, which repeatedly gets addressed and undercut, while a new virus looms. This narrative component becomes relevant to the story, but it never feels necessary. It’s more of a glaring, preachy touch that muddles some of “Daphne’s” grander messages. 

After Black Mirror’s existence it’s become increasingly difficult to tackle any advanced A.I. horror or sci-fi story unless you’re ready to top its lofty heights. American Horror Stories hardly tops Black Mirror in this department, but it goes in enough of a different direction. “Daphne” does achieve a certain Tales From the Crypt campiness to it all that works in its favor and helps set it apart from a more dour Black Mirror episode.

There are shades of Her as Reid Scott’s Will attempts to wrap his head around the idea of a loving relationship with a vaccine-questioning A.I. Daphne repeatedly argues why artificial intelligence and humanity aren’t that different and what is love if not just an algorithm? This is all meant to be taken in jest, but it’s quite fitting that an episode where A.I.’s merits are argued arrives at a time where actors, writers, and even the public have never been more against the prevalence of this invasive concept. “Daphne” is much more predictable than “Bestie” and its big final act twist falls flat and feels silly in comparison. 

American Horror Stories episodes can sometimes rely on a twist to carry home its message. However, there are also episodes like Joe Baken and Alexis Martin Woodall’s “Tapeworm” that work because they deliver on exactly what’s been promised. “Tapeworm” begins as a fairly surface level deconstruction of the modeling industry’s punishing nature and unrealistic body expectations, not to mention the impossible, unhealthy lengths that people are willing to go to achieve this dream. The story in “Tapeworm” may be played out, but it remains effective and successfully banks on compelling characters who the audience actually wants to see survive. Laura Kariuki gives a truly captivating performance as Vivian Finch and she’ll hopefully show up again as a lead in future Ryan Murphy productions.

All of this becomes heightened by the fact that the episode’s heroine, Vivian, is incredibly fit and only “too fat” by the destructive standards of a toxic industry. Vivian’s metaphorical inner monster, jealousy, gets replaced by a tangible creature that turns her into her worst self. “Tapeworm” isn’t subtle with its jealousy, body dysmorphia, and tapeworm parallels, but they still give this story a sturdier foundation that’s more than just some excuse for squirmy body horror. There’s a message here, underneath all of the gross imagery. It’s another episode that trades in some very uncomfortable imagery, although Vivian uncontrollably engorging on food is even harder to watch than the intestinal body horrors that lie inside of her. “Tapeworm” is such an effective slow burn exercise in horror that builds to a gruesome, satisfying reveal during the episode’s tail end. It’s one of the most horrifying visuals that the series has ever conjured and is enough to justify this entry. For an episode that’s titled “Tapeworm,” it sure does not disappoint.

“Organ,” the final episode in this season’s “Huluween Event,” keeps the body horror and social commentary going. Written by Manny Coto and directed by Petra Collins, “Organ” explores some good old-fashioned organ trade fun, albeit with a unique twist that turns this episode into more of a pitch black satire against the ultra-wealthy one-percent and their lavish luxuries and habits. Raúl Castillo leads the episode as Toby, a real man’s man who laments the “male castration” agenda in a woke society. Much like the broader story elements from the pandemic-fueled “Daphne,” this material feels like it’s a season too late, even if these issues are still relevant. 

American Horror Stories concocts an engaging mystery over just what’s going on with Toby beyond the general organ theft. At only 38 minutes, “Organ” is the season’s shortest episode and it benefits from not overstaying its welcome through another unnecessary ten minutes. “Organ” is not without its more gratuitous moments, like a bloody, gore-filled dream sequence, but it still zips through its story before it culminates in a massive finale. “Organ” definitely embraces the more humorous side of horror and isn’t afraid to lean into laughter over slaughter. The commentary in “Organ” connects and the episode makes its point. It may not be a wholly fresh idea and it’s very Clive Barker in nature, but American Horror Stories presents it in a way that still has bite. 

American Horror Story may not always be worth the time commitment, but anyone who’s fallen off the series and still itching for that vintage Ryan Murphy vibe owes it to themselves to check out the new season of American Horror Stories. It’s a season that knows how to have fun and covers a lot of territory in just four episodes, three of which dabble in body horror variations. American Horror Stories is Ryan Murphy’s horror universe at its best, strongest, and tightest. It’s a horror binge-watch that’s guaranteed to improve any Halloween party this year.

All three seasons of ‘American Horror Stories’ are available to stream on Hulu.

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“Veronica, it’s just a comic book…”

The CW’s Riverdale–against all odds–has become one of the most bizarre and unabashedly genre programs that’s currently on television. What started as a double-dog-dare of a premise that was ostensibly, “Archie Comics, but Twin Peaks,” will have produced more than 130 episodes across seven seasons that have included some particularly big swings and stylistic experiments (musicals have become a yearly tradition on Riverdale) over the years. Meanwhile, anthology horror has never been more popular on television and if any supernatural-adjacent series is designed to tell spooky tales around the metaphorical campfire, it’s Riverdale.

A Tales from the Crypt tribute already snugly fits within Riverdale’s uniquely weird wheelhouse. However, the events that surround the show’s seventh and final season–where the cast have magically been sent back to an alternate version of the 1950s, something that only Jughead is cognizant of–facilitate the perfect opportunity for Riverdale to embrace its comic roots, albeit through a wildly different genre and style. “Tales in a Jugular Vein” is one of the most fun episodes that Riverdale has done in years, and one that’s an absolute love letter to the pulp horror that helped the genre get to where it is today.

Riverdale’s seventh season conveniently benefits from Jughead’s recent employment at “Pep Comics” under the supervision of Al Fieldstone, a thinly-veiled counterpoint to the editor-in-chief of EC Comics’ Al Feldstein. This allows a comic book-based anthology episode to make sense on a practical level, but “Tales in a Jugular Vein” also finds a thematic reason to tell this story that informs the season’s narrative even if it’s still largely a standalone, non-canonical anthology genre exercise. Even the episode’s title itself, “Tales in a Jugular Vein,” is a reference to a collection of short horror stories by Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho. Bloch himself was an avid fan of pulp comics like Weird Tales, which brings a nice synchronicity to the Riverdale episode’s reference points.

“Tales in a Jugular Vein” is structured around four stories that cover a lot of ground as far as the horror genre is concerned. The introductory tale looks at the horrors of teen bullying and social hazing. These embarrassing customs push Dilton to mentally snap as he comes up with rather creative means for the heads that he acquires after he puts his basketball team through some group bonding in the form of decapitation. It’s a story that largely comes down to its final visual, but Riverdale nails it. The second story looks at a case of forbidden fruit where both of the involved parties end up rotten. It’s a combination of Tales from the Crypt’s surprise zombie lover installment, “‘Til Death,” and the comic series’ “A Fatal Caper,” which features a comparable leprosy-based twist.

Riverdale properly escalates the stories in “Tales in a Jugular Vein” and the concluding entries are particularly strong. Betty gets caught up in a “beauty is only skin deep” morality tale that turns to the unnerving urban legend that involves a spider making a nest inside of an oblivious girl’s beehive hairdo. It’s a story that’s shown up in the animated and younger-skewing Freaky Stories, not Tales from the Crypt, but its urban legend status makes it feel like a contemporary to the rest of these pulp parables. The final entry is the ultimate Archie/Betty/Veronica love triangle horror story that plays on Tales from the Crypt’s classic womanizing tale, “Split Personality.” Out of all of the Tales from the Crypt love triangle stories to recreate, this one holds the most substance and it even replicates the episode’s symmetrically scary big finish.

The entire cast rises to the occasion and showcases unseen sides of their personality here–especially in the case of KJ Apa–and it’s the most activated that everyone’s been in years. Everyone seems to truly relish the opportunity to play (even more) heightened versions of their characters where it’s encouraged to chew scenery and abandon restraint. It’s the perfect parting gift to these actors who can often feel like they’re going through the motions when it comes to their latest incredulous storyline. 

In an abstract story sense, “Tales in a Jugular Vein” succeeds, but this anthology episode becomes even more entertaining once it’s filtered through its pun-making Crypt Keeper imposter, the Key-Keeper (Dan Vukovic). Riverdale has established such a cast of outlandish caricatures that it would have been easy for the show to put the Black Hood, the Gargoyle King, or even Sabrina Spellman in the master of ceremonies role. The fact that Riverdale actively avoids those easier alternatives in favor of creating its own creepy Crypt Keeper clone speaks to the reverence that it holds towards its “source material.” If Riverdale is going to do a Tales from the Crypt episode then it’s sure as hell going to feature its own take on the wisecracking Crypt Keeper.

This is also just a gorgeous looking episode of Riverdale and longtime series director, Jeff Woolnough, really directs the hell out of Greg Murray’s script to make this feel like an EC Comic come to life. Each story is made up of highly stylized shots, canted camera angles, and grandiose zooms that perfectly create impressionistic comic-style splash panels. Shudder’s Creepshow has adopted this aesthetic to great effect and it’s quite a surprise to see that Riverdale beats them at their own gruesome game. There’s dramatic lighting that casts a spider web pattern over Betty that foreshadows her fate that might be the best piece of cinematography from the entire series. To truly sell the idea that these stories are lost in a bygone era of tamer sensibilities, Archie even delivers an exaggerated “head shake” reaction as he tries to regain his composure after being tranquilized. Riverdale descends into full on Tex Avery before its main character gets vivisectioned in half and it’s absolutely glorious. 

The closest analogue that Riverdale has to this anthology horror extravaganza is the season two episode, “Tales from the Darkside,” which also breaks itself up into separate character-driven chapters. That being said, “Tales from the Darkside” doesn’t exist out of canon or take the radical genre swings that are employed here. It’s still an episode that leans into a whole Texas Chain Saw Massacre aesthetic, right down to its opening text crawl and narration, but it ultimately doesn’t do enough with it. Alternatively, “Tales in a Jugular Vein” can’t help itself from lovingly wearing its references on its rolled back sleeve. 

“Tales in a Jugular Vein” is clearly the evolution of “Tales from the Darkside,” it’s just a shame that it took five seasons to happen. This could have become its own seasonal tradition, like the show’s approach to musicals, if Riverdale went down this route several seasons earlier. Hell, it could have even become its own spin-off. The CW actively chased young adult-friendly anthology horror through series like Two-Sentence Horror Stories, as well as being known for its penchant for endless spin-offs, so it’s bittersweet that this idea didn’t come around earlier in the CW’s life. It’s hard to imagine that a “Tales in a Jugular Vein” anthology spin-off wouldn’t have at least lasted longer than Riverdale’s failed Katy Keene. 

Nobody would have questioned if Riverdale just had some frivolous fun with these horror stories, so it’s quite impressive that “Tales in a Jugular Vein” uses this as an opportunity to hold a mirror up to society and preach good values while it chastises the contrary. This all appropriately occurs during a point in Riverdale’s season where the characters face a moral crossroads as everyone sits on the precipice of potential change. “Tales in a Jugular Vein” has fun while it creatively massacres its cast, but it becomes a larger deconstruction on how these types of stories demonize women, set up unhealthy gender stereotypes, and influence society, even if they’re “just comic books.” 

This hits even harder considering that Riverdale itself is based on Archie Comics, but an attempt to sensationalize what was initially intended as wholesome content that was explicitly an antidote to what was being experimented with in EC Comics during the 1940s and ‘50s. This blossoms into a broader exploration of television’s effect on the youth and if the stories that are told in Riverdale, and by proxy the CW Network as a whole, are equally corrupt and polluting the minds of today’s youth even if they’re “just a TV show.” Riverdale engages in some surprisingly powerful commentary with “Tales in a Jugular Vein” that’s much deeper than the supernatural shenanigans that typically motivate the series. It’s a really evocative angle to frame the series, especially during its swan song season where it actually has the hindsight to reflect back on its legacy and the stories that it’s told for seven seasons.

If nothing else, it’s a genuine surprise that one of the best Tales from the Crypt tributes in years is found in the seventh season of Riverdale. As the Key-Keeper Crypt Keeper would say, “Don’t judge a hook by its shudder.”

The post “Riverdale” Just Delivered a Modern ‘Tales from the Crypt’ with a Gleeful Tribute to EC Comics appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Animation is one of the most versatile mediums of storytelling and over the past decade it’s been able to shake the restricting baggage that animated content is purely for younger audiences. Animated series for adults are among some of the best dramas and comedies on television, especially those that lean into the limitlessness of the medium. Animated series like Primal, Castlevania, and Love, Death + Robots have been groundbreaking horror series that show what’s truly possible in animation. The abundance of streaming services means that ancient programs have been unearthed to “complete” certain streaming libraries and it’s always exciting when new audiences can experience older content, even those that are products of their time. 

HBO Max has the majority of HBO’s original series since the cable network’s inception, but there are still a handful of series–Tales From the Crypt among them–that are unable to stream. A lesser-known HBO original is Spicy City, a six-episode science fiction/cyberpunk anthology series that was masterminded by animation savant Ralph Bakshi, is also unavailable to stream on HBO Max (although it can be watched on archive.org). There is surely less outcry to add Spicy City to HBO Max’s library, but the dark show holds a special place in history as the first animated series that’s specifically for adults. Spicy City is a fascinating anomaly that’s even more interesting to examine 25 years later.

The 1990s were a revolutionary period for animation that definitively marked the public’s acceptance of “cartoons” as a medium that can entertain adults. Disney animated films were still viewed as the norm, but a small ripple that would eventually turn into a tidal wave started to form when a video Christmas card–of all things–started to gain traction. Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Jesus vs. Santa crude video short made its way through film and television executives’ mailboxes and this unconventional approach to seasons’ greetings would become the impetus for Comedy Central’s South Park. Comedy Central’s development on an adult-animated series caused a serious stir in the television industry. 

One of the stranger chain reactions of South Park’s development is that HBO would rush into production their own animated series, Spicy City, just so they could technically claim the credit for having the “first animated series targeted specifically towards adults.” Spicy City technically accomplished this goal and aired one month before South Park, on July 11, 1997. That being said, the fates of these two series could not be more different and the irony on the matter is rich enough that Spicy City’s bittersweet and short-lived “victory” could be the karmic resolution for one of its own episodes. Spicy City “wins” the war, but it comes and goes in a single season of six episodes whereas South Park is still on the air 25 years later. It comes across as quite amateurish in the larger pantheon of science fiction and cyberpunk anthology series, animated or otherwise.

The only other comparable animated series on television during the 1990s was MTV’s Liquid Television, which actually feels quite in sync with many of the ideas explored in Spicy City, especially its cyberpunk noir story, “Tears of a Clone.” There’s also Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, which curiously started its three-season run on HBO in May of 1997, predating Spicy City. However, Spawn’s comic book roots and teen demographic seem to preclude it from fitting into the “adult animation” category, despite its clearly mature language and brutal subject matter. HBO considers Spicy City to hold this honor instead of Spawn, but their production of both of these series in the ’90s speaks to their desire to push animation to new places.

Each episode of Spicy City is introduced by Raven, a buxom nightclub hostess who’s able to distill these macabre tales of science fiction into tidy lessons. Spicy City doesn’t always work, but it continually feels like an animated series for adults, for both better and for worse. Ultra-sexed DDD-breasted heroines fill up the frame and Spicy City showcases sex a lot more than it does violence, but there’s still gratuitous gore that the series doesn’t avoid. More often than not the series’ animation looks like a Saturday morning cartoon version of sexy science fiction stories, which pulls Spicy City in two directions. It’s clearly geared for adults, but so often the character designs and action sequences feel like they pull staples from kids’ cartoons.

It’s telling that Spicy City had a brief syndication window in 2002 on Canada’s Teletoon late-night animation block, which was geared towards teens, not adults. In fact, the overseas animation for Spicy City was handled by Koko Enterprises (then Ko Ko Entertainment), who worked on Batman: The Animated Series,  Batman Beyond, and Justice League, as well as kid-centric animated programming like Freakazoid!, Animaniacs, and Histeria!

Spicy City’s first episode, “Love is a Download,” is a VR love story that feels like the type of tale that one would find in Black Mirror. This premiere actually tells a rather prescient story about getting too attached to a VR world and those who spend more time in a simulation than reality and increasingly lose their grip, more than a decade earlier than Ready Player One. The animation in the virtual reality world leaves a lot to be desired and it’s quite jarring to see Flash-level visuals catering to adult audiences on HBO, no less. It’s so counterintuitive to how the medium now works. It’s possible that Spicy City also thought that aesthetics weren’t the most important element to draw in audiences because of South Park’s ability to turn its rudimentary visuals into its secret weapon. The problem is that South Park still has subversive writing and original ideas behind the crude animation and humor. Spicy City, on the other hand, only has the semblance of science fiction and genre storytelling to lean back on, which often isn’t enough to keep audiences engaged throughout these six episodes.

It’s a real misfire that the least visually appealing episode is what kicks off the series. It’s entirely possible that it gave audiences the wrong idea of what the typical episode of Spicy City would look like. This pilot is also directed by John Kafka, who has a reputation in anime, but not on the adult side of things. Kafka cut his teeth in the animation department for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and directed disposable children’s series like Dino Babies and Danger Rangers. Arguably, the animator’s greatest claim to fame was directing the direct-to-video Cinderella sequel, Cinderella II: Dreams Come True. It doesn’t seem as if Kafka quite rises to the challenge in Spicy City.

“Mano’s Hands” finds a premise that’s actually interesting and effectively highlights the dangers of obsession and how it can take over people’s lives. The episode creates genuine pathos for a disembodied hand and there’s a very Baby’s Day Out slapstick quality, but with hands. If nothing else, there are no other anthology series that tell this story. “Manos’ Hands” also predates Idle Hands, the premier evil hand movie, by several years. 

“Tears of a Clone” tells a film noir detective story about a man’s missing “daughter,” which suddenly takes on more sinister developments. The episode gets into questions of identity and the difference between an original and a replica, if any, as it comments upon the expendable nature of organic bodies and humanity’s need to evolve beyond their natural forms. This episode also includes the series’ strongest protagonist and if Spicy City had continued it’s not hard to picture future detective stories that return to this hard-boiled character. “Tears of a Clone” includes some gorgeous visuals of Spicy City’s sprawling futuristic world and the series’ art design is a consistent highlight throughout the series even when the writing falls flat. There’s also a gonzo laser beam death massacre, which doesn’t disappoint.

“An Eye For An Eye” broaches similar ideas, but touches on the corrupted nature of the judicial system and police force, and how they can so easily be gamed. It’s encouraging to see this episode attempt to include some LGBTQ+ storytelling all the way back in 1997, but it’s also largely played for titillation. There’s shallow depth given to these characters’ relationships. At times this feels like a deranged Batman: The Animated Series episode that doesn’t feature the Dark Knight. It includes one of the series’ strongest conclusions where its twisted femme fatale has her skin stolen and donated to others in some Brazil-level cosmetic carnage.

Most of Spicy City’s episodes are cautionary tales where an over-reliance on technology leads to mankind’s increased laziness where machines surpass them as the dominant breed. “Sex Drive” explores this concept through romance and whether it’s possible for a man to truly love a machine or if it’s an inherently artificial construct. It’s some really deep material, even if it’s not perfectly executed. Like most of Spicy City’s episodes, the central idea is way ahead of the curve, which in this case is the unconventional romance, Her. “Sex Drive” repeatedly compares, contrasts, and overlaps human and machine until they’re left as one “humanchine” portmanteau. Spicy City’s final episode, “Raven’s Revenge,” attempts to flesh out the series’ sultry host so that she’s more than just a bookend to episodes. In doing so, this finale digs into body modifications and genetic mutations that reflect “alterna-ceuticals,” which attempt to “cure” and “imperfect society.”

Spicy City faced an uphill battle and didn’t leave much of a cultural impact during its short run, but HBO did actually try to foster the series and help it grow into something with legs. HBO’s main condition regarding season two’s development is that Bakshi would need to replace season one’s writing team (which included his son, Preston) with professional screenwriters. Bakshi wouldn’t budge on this area of compromise, which led to Spicy City’s season two renewal being rescinded and the program being reduced to the footnote that it is today. HBO would continue to pursue genre anthology series, but animation was no longer near the top of their agenda.

Spicy City’s six episodes are broad in their execution, but several installments conclude with some genuinely disturbing acts of horror that reiterate the dangers of experimental technology. Some entries allow for a peaceful coda. However, by and large there’s a nihilism that courses through the series that’s reminiscent of HBO’s other big genre anthology series, Tales from the Crypt. Overall, nothing in Spicy City amounts to must-see genre storytelling, but it still makes for an entertaining distraction for a few hours. Spicy City isn’t necessarily worse than some of the other sci-fi and horror anthology series that exist. More than anything it succeeds as a fascinating time capsule of the late 1990s and a promising premise that could have possibly evolved into something more substantial and memorable if Bakshi and the show’s production got out of their own way. 

So many sci-fi anthology series proudly adapt stories from the genre’s greats and Spicy City might have made more of an impact if it decided to riff on the works of Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, or even Clive Barker for even just one of its episodes. A longer season could have also featured a healthy mix of original stories and classic adaptations. However, it’s likely for the best that Spicy City attempted to forge its own path even if it’s one that not many people were interested in. Science fiction needs to learn from its mistakes in order for it to evolve and Spicy City has no shortage of lessons to learn. The obscure series has new value during a time when anthology series and cyberpunk stories are at an all-time high. 

The post “Spicy City” – HBO’s Adult Animated Cyberpunk Anthology Series Turns 25 appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

When it comes to the versatile nature of anthology shows, one of the biggest selling points of the genre is that every episode tells a completely original story. It’s easy to get lost in the stories, but the best anthology shows understand that the act of storytelling itself is just as important to the experience. Stories can be found anywhere, but the process of being a storyteller is akin to being human. Man has been telling stories since its very existence and without storytellers, society would be left in arrested development. Granted, every piece of television technically tells a story, but it’s anthology shows that have the rare tradition of engaging with the audience on a personal level as if they’re trading stories around a campfire, in a bar, or lost in a void.

Anthology series have never gone out of fashion and they’re having a particular Renaissance at the moment, but what’s so special about Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities – now streaming in full on Netflix – is that it revives the lost anthology series trope of a host who introduces, or bookends, each story. To some, this device may seem silly or antiquated, but it’s a crucial and underestimated element for how an anthology series can succeed.

Anthology genre fare can explore such exaggerated material that a popular approach taken with a host figure is that it’s some macabre creation instead of a standard celebrity storyteller. The most popular example of this is Tales From the Crypt’s Crypt Keeper, who eventually transcends his source material and becomes a celebrity in his own right. Tales From the Crypt’s short-lived science fiction-based spin-off, Perversions of Science, was not what most people would consider a success. However, the series still made its mark through its sexed-up and teched-out robotic host, Chrome. She’s no Crypt Keeper (but honestly, who among us is?), but there’s still such endless personality in this character that makes it so much easier to return to Perversions of Science even when an episode is a dud. Creeped Out, a British horror anthology series that’s available on Netflix and designed to skew towards younger audiences, turns its masked host, “The Curious,” into an abnormal enigma. It’s almost the reverse of the approach that’s taken with the Crypt Keeper where the absence of a personality turns this host into a mystery that the audience yearns to unravel. 

The hosts of these anthology series are typically disconnected from the stories in which they regale the audience with, but this isn’t always the case. The Tales From the Crypt episode, “Lower Berth,” which centers on a family of sideshow carnival attractions, turns out to be an origin story for the Crypt Keeper. It’s a detail that’s completely unnecessary and “Lower Berth” succeeds without this final “twist,” but it’s probably the best thing about the episode since the audience has inherently developed a natural relationship with the series’ host. “Lower Berth” works as well as it does because it arrives in season two, rather than during the show’s freshman year when the audience’s shorthand with the Crypt Keeper isn’t as pronounced. To go one step further with this idea, “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” the pilot episode of Freddy’s Nightmares–an anthology series that uses slasher icon Freddy Krueger as its host–also becomes a look into an untold chapter in Freddy Krueger’s life. These unexpected stories don’t become the lynchpins of their respective series, but they are some of the most popular episodes. 

The other major approach that can be taken with an anthology series’ host, which is the route that Cabinet of Curiosities takes with Guillermo del Toro, is that it’s an authority figure that the audience can trust. Alfred Hitchcock. Rod Serling. Jordan Peele. Forest Whitaker. There were even select episodes of Goosebumps that used R.L. Stine as a master of ceremonies who introduces his own fiction. In John Carpenter’s Body Bags (which was originally created as a TV series, not an anthology film), it’s John Carpenter himself who plays the Crypt Keeper-like Coroner character. What’s important here is that these hosts aren’t just respected voices in their fields, but they’re storytellers at heart. This isn’t just a narrator who spouts off voice over to open and close a spooky story. The strongest anthology series use their hosts as legitimate personalities who thrive upon the unpredictable, limitless nature of fiction, which is the perfect distillation of Guillermo del Toro. 

The melding between host and narrative is a clever way to marry form with storytelling that makes more sense for some anthology series than it does for others. That being said, it’s honestly a little surprising that The Twilight Zone never pursued an episode that posits that Rod Serling’s role as cryptic host is actually some eternal punishment that he’s forced to engage in. The most interesting episode of 2019’s Twilight Zone revival, “Blurryman,” specifically plays around with the series’ opening narration trope and finds a way to turn Rod Serling into its Cryptid-esque boogeyman. It’s an episode that draws inspiration from the very nature of its host and the reputation that accompanies this figure. In a way, it combines both host extremes with a character that’s both a prestige figure of authority as well as a creepy creature.

Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities is a comforting return to classic anthology storytelling that reminds audiences of the value of a host. This doesn’t mean that it’s a necessary ingredient for a show to work. Programs like American Horror Stories, Tales From the Darkside, Masters of Horror, and Nightmares & Dreamscapes would arguably benefit from a striking host figure that would give them an extra element of cache. Furthermore, Black Mirror is an anthology series that jumps right into its stories without any preamble, but some of the series’ more stylized installments like “White Christmas” and “Black Museum” experiment with the host format in a manner that doesn’t just work, but yields some exceptional twists. Black Mirror clearly works fine without a host that needs to spell things out for its audience, but these two episodes are at least deeply indicative of how the show could work with this structure. 

Alternatively, Inside No. 9 is top-tier anthology television that would actively be worse if it was forced to adhere to the host construct. In the end, it comes down to the audience’s desire to be told a compelling story. That’s a lot easier when there’s a storyteller front and center who not only thrives on the medium, but the act of presenting this tale to the audience. Anthology series have never been more prevalent on television, but hopefully Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities will reignite the genre’s relationship with dedicated hosts and the act of storytelling. 

“Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities” is currently streaming on Netflix

The post How Guillermo del Toro’s “Cabinet of Curiosities” Revives An Essential Anthology Trope appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The Conjuring has proven itself to be a worthy cinematic universe, delivering two proper sequels and a slew of spin-offs, with more creepy content on the way to further expand the multi-billion dollar horror franchise. The reception towards Ed and Lorraine Warren’s cinematic antics has somewhat cooled down in recent years and left audiences wondering if what’s currently on slate for The Conjuring universe will be its last hurrah or if “The Nun 3” or “Crooked Man Vs. Annabelle” are inevitable.

There are lofty expectations in place when it comes to The Conjuring IP, but there were also surprisingly ambitious plans in place even during the production of the original movie. A connected Conjuring universe may not have been on anyone’s radar yet. However, a sly piece of marketing for the first film, masquerading as a series of anthology shorts, technically functions as the start of a larger supernatural franchise. It also just so happens to include early horror contributions from Ti West, Nacho Vigalondo, and other emerging filmmakers who are now even bigger names in the industry.

“The Devil’s Hour” is said to be a haunted period of time, shortly after three in the morning, where the world is more susceptible to supernatural interference. It’s an idea that’s turned to in a number of horror movies, including The Conjuring. The first film even contains a cryptic reference to the mysterious time period in a short exchange between Lorraine and Ed Warren:

“She ran out to that tree by the dock, climbed up, proclaimed her love to Satan, cursed anyone who tried to take her land, and hung herself. Time of death was pronounced at 3:07 in the morning.”

“Well, that explains a few things.”

In this sense, it’s actually a compelling premise to use the fluid framework of “3:07 AM” as the basis of an anthology where directors can do whatever they want with “the most haunted time of the day.” This is exactly the approach that was taken by VICE for The 3:07 AM Project, a six-minute horror anthology that aired on the network to promote James Wan’s then-upcoming movie, The Conjuring (the collection even ends with an ad to see The Conjuring “this Friday”). The 3:07 AM Project isn’t anything revelatory and it mostly amounts to a fascinating experiment in minimalism. However, it’s still an interesting horror contribution that seems to by all means be forgotten and ignored. The 3:07 AM Project was never included as an extra on any of The Conjuring releases and even its IMDb listing remains incomplete. With contributions from Ti West, Nacho Vigalondo, Jason Eisener, and Max Landis, it’s absolutely worthy of discussion.

Each of the segments in The 3:07 AM Project are unconnected and tackle decidedly different corners of horror, each of which feel quite appropriate for these respective filmmakers, even more so now that a decade has since passed. Nacho Vigalondo’s (Timecrimes, Colossal) “This One, For the Lady” almost feels like a surreal VR experience. The short gets into the paralyzing confusion that exists when the lines between dreams and reality blur together. There’s a colorful, fun house aesthetic to it that speaks to Vigalondo’s filmography. Max Landis (Chronicle) is the directorial choice that’s perhaps the most from its time and his segment, “The Séance” is also given the most breathing room. The chaos that breaks out once the séance goes to hell is nothing new, but what’s interesting about the structure of “The Séance” is that it begins at 3:05 and embraces a few moments of normalcy before the clock switches over to 3:07 and all bets are off. This makes “The Seance” the lengthiest of the segments, but it’s frustrating that Landis doesn’t make better use of the limited time. 

Ti West’s “Box” is one of the more frustrating contributions to The 3:07 AM Project. It’s a simplistic static shot that progressively builds tension, only to culminate in an easy, predictable jump scare. It’s the type of scare and editing that punctuates some of West’s earlier works like The Innkeepers. To be clear, “Box” looks incredible and the old-fashioned aesthetic that West turns to here makes it easily the most stylized segment of the lot. West’s desire to immerse himself in a specific filmmaking style has gone on to become one of the director’s trademarks, whether it’s in the period piece touches in The House of the Devil, the glossy found footage presentation style in The Sacrament, or the more genre-blending sensibilities that have fueled his most recent works, X and Pearl. 

West has proven himself to have the most promise out of the filmmakers who are assembled in The 3:07 AM Project. “Box” comes across as a fitting piece to the larger puzzle of West’s filmography, but at the same time it feels like him punching below his weight here. “Box” works with its basic mission, but it could have aimed much higher. Finally, Jason Eisener’s (Hobo With A Shotgun, Treevenge, Turbo Kid) concluding entry, “One Last Dive,” is the most captivating and creative of the lot. The short largely plays out underwater and these murky visuals add a lot of atmosphere. “One Last Dive” gets a lot of mileage from the disturbing dissonance of seeing items like a baby carriage underwater and the final note that it goes out on is legitimately frightening. Curiously, the entire aesthetic to this short feels like a precursor to 2021’s The Deep House, an underwater horror film. Eisener’s short is close to being a decade ahead of the curve in this respect. 

Overall, The 3:07 AM Project feels pretty disposable, but VICE does an excellent job with the rising filmmakers that it recognizes. Any of these names would have actually been interesting choices to handle one of The Conjuring spin-offs and could have likely done some exciting things with them. None of the shorts in The 3:07 AM Project would make for strong spin-offs on their own, but the horrors of Ti West’s “Box” do feel comparable to what’s later done with The Conjuring’s Crooked Man. 

There’s such potential behind The 3:07 AM Project that it’s unfortunate that it didn’t amount to something more iconic, despite brief flashes of brilliance. Ultimately, sixty-ish seconds just isn’t enough time to create proper horror and even giving these directors three minutes apiece could have had transformative results. Considering that Ti West and the rest of the names assembled for The 3:07 AM Project have gone on to accomplish big things, this type of experiment would maybe be more worthwhile for them to attempt now that they’re all more seasoned storytellers. It would at least be interesting to see what the same filmmakers could do with identical restrictions after a decade of filmmaking and honing their craft.

If nothing else, Mia Goth contorting a twisted smile on screen for sixty continuous seconds would make for captivating cinema.

VICE’s ‘The 3:07 AM Project’ can be watched right here, on YouTube

The post Ti West and More Directed Segments for a ‘Conjuring’ Spin-Off Project You Probably Haven’t Seen appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“What’s your secret?”

The world is a superficial place and it’s hard to not get caught up in physical appearances. It’s no surprise that a wealth of horror films and social satires focus on plastic surgery, the cosmetics industry, and the pursuit of “perfection.” Crimes of the Future, The Neon Demon, or a myriad of Tales From the Crypt episodes like “Beauty Rest,” “Only Skin Deep,” or “Judy, You’re Not Yourself Today” all attack the subject matter from uniquely creepy perspectives. In fact, “Facelift” is one of the episodes of American Horror Stories that most closely resembles a Tales From the Crypt installment, which is high praise for a series that occasionally feels like it’s phoning it in. 

In “Facelift,” American Horror Stories has a lot of fun with the ludicrous nature and hypocrisy of beauty regimens and revitalization products, not that it’s necessarily saying anything new on the matter. “Facelift” playfully juxtaposes the ravages of age that are felt by its older protagonist, Virginia (Judith Light), with the comparable drain that her 30-year-old daughter, Faye (Britt Lower), feels in contrast to the 20-year-olds that run circles around her at school. It’s an effective way to highlight how this cycle never ends and these feelings are inevitable regardless of age or health. Nobody is perfect or without flaws and if Virginia could just accept this lesson then a whole lot of bloodshed would be avoided in “Facelift,” an episode of American Horror Stories that’s both strong in themes and disturbing visuals, but will no doubt be remembered for its absurd twist.

“Facelift” gradually becomes one of the weirdest episodes of American Horror Stories, but it begins in completely conventional territory when an innocent crush and nagging doubt get the better of Virginia. There’s such an intensity in Light’s performance when Virginia first sees Cassie and is confounded over her youthfulness. There’s a desperation that leaks out of Virginia that’s never overdone. This behavior helps set the scene for the many elaborate hoops that Virginia jumps through to replicate Cassie’s beauty. Her frightened fragility feels genuine and never stops reminding the audience that there’s a real person at the center of this story, which is frequently something that gets overlooked in American Horror Stories. 

The supernatural direction that “Facelift” heads down is a successful heightening of these ideas, but the episode would work just as well if Cassie didn’t have any sort of beauty secret and all of Virginia’s desperate efforts were predicated on paranoia. “Facelift” is an episode that at every opportunity preaches to its characters that beauty comes from within, but they purge the idea like it’s trans fat and refuse to accept the easy moral that would wrap up any other anthology horror episode on beauty or plastic surgery. It’s ultimately better that “Facelift” does dip into paranormal activity, but American Horror Stories picks subject matter that’s full of genuine horror stories that all stem from the same desire to “look better.”

It doesn’t take much for Virginia to fall for the alluring promises that Dr. Pearl (Rebecca Dayan) dangles in front of her as she pledges to turn “hideous people into beautiful people.” Virginia is literally ready to change everything that she thinks and feels if it means that she’ll qualify for Dr. Pearl’s mysterious miracle procedure. Dr. Pearl brags that her science is the Coca-Cola of plastic surgery and that her comprehensive work goes far beyond surface level skin care. In doing so, “Facelift” is one of the first episodes of the season that’s not overly predictable or formulaic when it comes to its specifics and the bulk of the episode is actually pretty cryptic as to what’s actually going on with Virginia. “Facelift” also benefits from how 2/3 of the episode feature Virginia in the inherently evocative visual of foreboding face bandages. A transformative story lies beneath it all, both psychologically, but also in a viscerally physical manner, too.

As is the case with many facelift horror stories, this episode basically turns into one big game of withheld gratification as both Virginia, and the audience, wait for the bandages to come off and witness the fruits of Dr. Pearl’s labor. This type of narrative faces a natural risk in the sense that there’s a tremendous amount of pressure on whether that post-bandage reveal satisfies these lofty expectations. “Facelift” is not Twilight Zone’s “Eye of the Beholder” when it comes to its payoff, but it’s still a surprisingly gratifying finish that hits harder than expected and is absolutely bonkers. “Facelift” at least attempts to do something different, regardless of whether it works or doesn’t, and in the end it’s arguably the most unabashedly fun episode of the entire season. This gonzo Island of Dr. Moreau/The Most Dangerous Game hybrid is ridiculous enough to work. This is the type of schlock that I want from American Horror Stories. 

”Facelift” also positions Virginia’s transformative reveal for its final act, which isn’t a surprising decision. However, it’s possible that the episode would be somewhat stronger if Virginia’s post-bandage journey were to begin earlier in the episode to allow her more time in her new skin. This would dramatically weaken the suspense that builds over Virginia’s “swelling” as the episode plays out, but it’s a different approach that could have subverted expectations a little further with all of this. Either way, “Facelift” still embraces impressive prosthetic effects that get to become the episode’s centerpiece and not just a flashy button that ends the installment.

“Facelift” is a bit of a mixed bag in execution and the mother-daughter bond between Virginia and Faye should be just as important as Virginia’s cloying quest for self-love. There are attempts to add depth to this dynamic, but it never fully comes together. The revelation that connects Faye to the “Beautiful Ones” is also completely unnecessary and tries to cram a little too much into the final act, but it’s also not a huge distraction that undoes the rest of “Facelift’s” work. Admittedly, any scene between Virginia and Faye works much better than it should simply because Light and Lower are such class acts that help elevate these simplistic roles. Neither actor goes wasted in this episode.

A lot goes on in “Facelift,” but at its core it’s really just a story about someone who wants to be able to truly love themselves, which is something everyone can understand. It’s heartbreaking that after everything Virginia sees and endures that she’s not even allowed a sad ending where she’s forced to live as some deformed creature. Virginia’s fate is more grim than that and she doesn’t get to live at all. “Facelift” hammers this cruel point in through surreal circumstances, but it makes for a memorable installment of American Horror Stories that’s the series’ new episode to beat when it comes to hog-wild lunacy.

In the name of the Pig, I declare “Facelight” a success!

The post “American Horror Stories” Review – ‘Facelift’ Performs a Makeover So Wacky That It Works appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Susan Price starts things off with the anthology’s namesake. A girl named Liz discovers what she thought were stray kittens, but she and her parents learn these are no ordinary felines. They partly resemble cats, yet other traits suggest they are somehow part dog. While the premise of “The Cat-Dogs” feels straight out of a cheesy “B” movie, the execution and writing are what sells the whole thing. A creature-feature film often shows the monster too much. Price, however, knows less is more if the audience is to remain scared. She also has the good fortune of being a writer, because her words are potent proxies for the feral antagonists. Price phrases their attacks and the characters’ dread with gravity.

The inevitable chase is drawn out into a display of humans hopelessly evading the rapacious shadows stalking the nearby woods. A readily available expert on these animals — an Icelandic guest reveals they are mythical fox-cat abominations known as skoffins or skuggabaldurs — is a timeless yet welcome trope. In the end, Price emphasizes an opinion other storytellers nary consider in tales of man versus nature; once humans fall off the top of the food chain, there is little to no chance of them getting out from under.

“Soft scuttering sounds of pads in the street behind, at night. A movement, low and quick, seen from the corner of the eye. It could be a fox. It might only be a cat.”

The Cat-Dogs is in fact a retooled version of Thirteen More Tales of Horror, which was released in the U.K. in 1994 under Scholastic’s Point Horror banner. For some reason the publisher chopped off the last seven stories for the U.S. market. In either version, Diane Hoh stands out as the sole American author. “The Piano” follows teenage pianist Laura, who feels trapped after her father’s death leaves her in the care of a callous stepmother, Sally. Having been denied a social life and forced to practice at all times, Laura’s frustration summons an unexpected friend. Her late grandmother’s piano has now come to life and is committing terrible acts to appease Laura.

Hoh, who is known for the series Nightmare Hall and various Point offerings, retreads a familiar idea; people are seduced by cursed objects. The author follows the same formula as others by having the demonic item do everything in its power to attain its own treasure. The piano’s dark sense of humor provides a touch of non-grisly amusement; it plays the Jaws theme when thinking or doing anything wicked. Laura herself is not a sympathetic character, seeing as she feels next to nothing when her human obstacles are done in by the percussion instrument. There is not a lot to ruminate on once “The Piano” is over, although it is entertaining enough in the moment.

Malcolm Rose’s “The Devil’s Footprints” looks back at an English phenomenon and puts a creative spin on its most popular theory. In February of 1855, in the Exe Estuary in Devon, an extensive and perplexing series of hoof-like patterns in the snow led to wild speculation about Satan himself coming to visit that unseasonably cold winter. Rose plays into the notion by having the goat-headed Devil crash a teen party in the same area 150 years later. Uninformed readers are brought up to speed about what happened in 1855 by Brian; the protagonist’s enhanced computer serves as a precursor to Alexa and other virtual assistants of today. So, what began as a teen slasher quickly transforms into a supernatural home invasion with a built-in history lesson.

“The personification of evil, the creature’s stance was roughly humanoid but the body was pure animal…”

Animals come into view again in Stan Nicholls’ “Softies”. This lone phase of the anthology has a distinct air of sci-fi to it, whereas the other stories are unequivocally horror in nature. In this fictional world, humans are bonded with Companions from an early age. These Companions are sentient animals — think of them as people-sized teddy bears — who then grow up with their humans up until death. The events here describe a surreptitious uprising in the making. “Softies” regretfully ends as things begin to get interesting.

Skipping ahead to the final entry, Colin Greenland‘s”The Station With No Name“, readers may be underwhelmed by this standard ghost story. Two young taggers step foot in an underground train station one night, and the one who stays behind is unknowingly haunted by the undead commuters. Greenland describes the eerie stage in great detail, but the author delivers a bland outcome.

Now, the collection would have been better off ending with Garry Kilworth‘s penultimate tale. In “The House That Jack Built“, a man named Caleb finds himself lost in Bodmin Moor. His only refuge is a lone house, but upon going inside, he is ensnared by the dwelling itself. The home is alive and seeks humans to maintain its appearance. When one servant dies, another is brought in. Caleb has the misfortune of being the latest victim. Gilworth waives any explanation for the house’s origin, but the absence of information is what makes his contribution so utterly haunting.

“Caleb saw in the cupboard what his eventual fate was to be.”

Any occasional dip in quality in The Cat-Dogs and Other Tales of Horror is hardly enough of a reason to pass over this impressive gathering of weird and uncanny stories. This anthology’s surprising maturity will also make it an enjoyable read for both teens and adults who sometimes like their scares in short bursts.

There was a time when the young-adult section of bookstores was overflowing with horror and suspense. These books were easily identified by their flashy fonts and garish cover art. This notable subgenre of YA fiction thrived in the ’80s, peaked in the ’90s, and then finally came to an end in the early ’00s. YA horror of this kind is indeed a thing of the past, but the stories live on at Buried in a Book. This recurring column reflects on the nostalgic novels still haunting readers decades later.

The post ‘The Cat-Dogs’: 1995 YA Horror Anthology Delivers Six Macabre Stories [Buried in a Book] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Enter writer/director Ryan Spindell’s The Mortuary Collection, which uses an effective workaround to address these issues with a bit of clever meta-commentary.

The collection is comprised of four “dark and twisted and scary” stories that are told via a wrap-around story as mortuary employee Montgomery “Monty” Dark (Clancy Brown) interviews new hire Sam (Caitlin Fisher). As he shows her around the mortuary’s various floors and spaces, filled with any number of odd and unusual artifacts, Morty entertains Sam with gruesome morality tales about bad people being punished for their sins.

First up is the 50s-set story of Emma (Christine Kilmer), a thief at a party who opens a medicine cabinet that should have been left locked. This is by far the shortest and least memorable of the stories, but it helps to set the tone and establish the visual aesthetic of the film. The intro is firmly drawing on Tales from the Crypt while this segment is period chic with a dash of A Series of Unfortunate Events. In some regards The Mortuary Collection is what last year’s Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark would have been had it adopted a more formal anthology format.

The next story, set in the 60s, is longer and despite still being period-appropriate, is clearly engaging with contemporary sex and gender politics. This second tale follows fraternity playboy Jake (Jacob Elori) who targets shy and bookish Sandra (Ema Horvath) for seduction and – you guessed it – pays the price for his hubris. It also features one of Spindell’s most clever sequences: an extended seven-hour sex marathon condensed into a brief montage, framed by a clock in the foreground with the many sex positions presented slightly out of focus in the background.

The 70s-set third story tells the sad story of Wendell (Barak Hardley) and Carol Owens (Sarah Hay), who are getting married. The tale then jumps ahead to the last days of Carol’s fatal illness. Extremely unhappy and facing bankruptcy, Wendell makes the ill-advised decision to poison his wife. To say that things don’t go exactly as planned is an understatement as electric meat carvers, bloody trunks and a broken elevator all wind up complicating Wendell’s escape.

Following this third entry, however, Sam challenges the storytelling notion that Monty is putting forth, namely the idea that these villains always receive their comeuppance. To prove her point, she launches into her own dark and morbid tale “The Babysitter Murders”, which plays like a subverted take on the traditional urban legend about the babysitter, their young charge and the escaped mental patient (Ben Hethcoat) who appears during the storm. This story, which was Spindell’s original short before it became the anthology’s lynchpin, is The Mortuary Collection’s best directed and most formally innovative narrative sequence.

And therein lies both the strength and the weakness of the film.

Throughout the framing device, whenever Monty wraps up one of his stories, Sam criticizes or undermines their familiarity. She mocks the simplicity and easy resolution of the first story; she initially declares the second has “everything a story should be and more” but then confirms she’s being glib. By the conclusion of the third story, she’s completely dissatisfied, announcing “I kinda hated that story.”

This is ironic because Sam is the audience surrogate, and in these instances, she might as well be speaking for us; she loudly and publicly denounces the familiarity and rottenness of these tales because we’ve seen them all before and we know how they’re going to end. It’s as though Spindell himself is suggesting that they’re not quite up to par, especially in light of what’s to come in the fourth and final story. “The Babysitter Murders” is the embodiment of the fresh and unexpected qualities that Sam – and by extension, the audience – isn’t getting from the others.

This is not to say that there aren’t joys or pleasures to be taken from the others. But there is an undeniable feeling of been there, done that vibe to all of them, particularly the black comedy stinger that resolves each tale.

The outcome of “The Babysitter Murders” feeds into the climax of the film and Monty & Sam’s storytelling showdown. The conclusion offers both a satisfying wrap-up, as well as future installments in the event that audience response is warm enough to merit a return visit to Raven’s End Mortuary.

At its core, The Mortuary Collection is a fun and entertaining anthology. While some narrative beats are too familiar, Spindell’s clever direction, the compelling art and production design and the lead performances by Brown and Fisher make this an easy sell.

Editor’s Note: This Fantasia review was originally published on August 28, 2020.

The Mortuary Collection is now streaming on Shudder.

The post [Review] Shudder’s Anthology Film ‘The Mortuary Collection’ Offers Meta Morality Tales appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The book, “The Horror Anthology Handbook”, is aimed at upcoming filmmakers who want to learn from the experience of others, or for those just curious about the filmmaking process behind some of their favorite anthologies from Bloody Disgusting’s V/H/S and Southbound to XX, The ABC’s of Death, Trick ‘r Treat, “Black Mirror” and more.

It features interviews with yours truly, not to mention Simon Barrett (V/H/S, V/H/S/2), Michael Mcquown (The Dark Tapes), Sofia Carrillo (XX), Ant Timpson (ABCs of Death, Field Guide to Evil), Al Jean (“Simpsons Treehouse of Horror”), Ron Oliver (“Goosebumps”, “Are You Afraid of the Dark?”),  Stephen Haren (“Black Mirror”), Andy Nyman (Ghost Stories) and many more.

Set for release on October 27th, the eBook is currently available for pre-order at Amazon.

The post [Book] “The Horror Anthology Handbook” Gets Filmmaker Perspectives On Making an Anthology appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

When you’ve been on television for over 30 years and turned out over 600 episodes, it’s not unusual to want to experiment with form and take some swings. In its more recent years, The Simpsons has attempted left turns like doing a conventional Halloween episode rather than purely a “Treehouse of Horror” episode. The Simpsons takes a similar risk here by turning Thanksgiving into another centerpiece for horror. There was once a time when this series treated Thanksgiving as a cathartic time for Bart to learn lessons about family, but we’re now at the opposite end of the spectrum. That being said, not only is “Thanksgiving of Horror” very funny, but as far as recent Simpsons episodes (and even “Treehouse of Horror” installments) are concerned, it’s a stronger entry in the series.

“Thanksgiving of Horror” very wryly begins in a moment of self-parody as it evokes the setting and atmosphere of the show’s earliest “Treehouse of Horror” efforts. Marge jokes about how the obligations and responsibilities of Thanksgiving can be a frightening thing, but her cursory warning that we now just generally live in dark times where everything is depressing and overwhelming does ring true. Make no mistake, this episode doesn’t try to tap into some deeper social commentary, but it does create a surprisingly poignant introduction to help segue into this anthology experiment when it just as easily could have done nothing at all.

Some of the later entries in the “Treehouse of Horror” series have lost their punch or embraced crazier ideas due to how there have been over two-dozen of these installments. Thankfully, “Thanksgiving of Horror” doesn’t suffer from this fatigue and manages to come up with some engaging stories that effectively balance silliness with slaughtering. This is perhaps best demonstrated in the episode’s first story, “A-Gobble-Ypto.” This is a tremendously bizarre idea that riffs on Mel Gibson’s battle epic, Apocalypto. The unique angle here is that the Simpson family and a good deal of Springfield become turkeys, while the rest of the town are rampaging pilgrims who are on the hunt during the very first Thanksgiving.

To this story’s credit, “A-Gobble-Ypto” plays out mostly without dialogue and is instead filled with the incessant warbles of turkeys. Just like in Apocalypto, all of this silliness is juxtaposed with abject carnage. It’s a little jarring to watch turkey versions of the Simpsons get their heads blown apart and become reduced to viscera. There are some especially brutal explosions here and a number of graphic beheadings, but it’s this heightened gore that helps make this story stand out. Also Helen Lovejoy’s, “Won’t somebody think of the Pilgrims?” makes this whole thing worthwhile.

“The Fourth Thursday After Tomorrow” is perhaps the weakest of the three installments, but it does verge into what’s eerily the most plausible territory as it plays around with A.I. Homer gets Marge a virtual A.I. assistant for the kitchen, but what initially seems like an advantage soon turns into something more sinister. The episode builds off of the idea that systems like Alexa get to thoroughly learn who you are, yet this goes one step further where the A.I. inside Marge’s kitchen assistant is actually a tiny virtual version of her. This turns into a fascinating struggle where Marge is competing against herself as Homer becomes more drawn to this less complex and “easier” version of his wife. It raises some scary concerns about where technology is headed and it actually succeeds in being thoughtful with its resolution. It’s also just an exceptionally strong Marge story by all accounts.

“The Last Thanksgiving” is the final entry in the episode and it shifts the focus to Bart, Lisa, and Springfield’s younger generation who wake up from their cryo-sleep on a space shuttle. “The Last Thanksgiving” initially feels like it might be playing around in Ender’s Game territory, but soon an innocent gesture to conjure the familiarity of a Thanksgiving dinner throws the crew of the ship in danger. “The Last Thanksgiving” is like a combination of both The Blob and Alien in the best possible ways. A gelatinous cylinder of cranberry sauce gains sentience and tries to steal the bones of everyone on board. The way in which this entity rips the bones out of its victims and reduces them to empty skin husks is genuinely disturbing. This manner of execution is much more upsetting than if it simply ate or murdered them. The way in which Martin pleasurably sacrifices himself to the growing mass is also particularly eerie.

“Thanksgiving of Horror” is absolutely one of the goriest and most graphic installments of The Simpsons, even in terms of their crazier non-canonical entries. In spite of the copious carnage and bloodshed that’s on display here, this oddly feels just as much like it’s a showcase for science fiction as it is for horror. Granted, previous “Treehouse of Horror” entries have included sci-fi in their larger umbrella for horror, but it almost feels like this is The Simpsons’ take on Black Mirror more than anything else. This is most rampant in the episode’s second installment, “The Fourth Thursday After Tomorrow,” which doesn’t try to hide these comparisons, but there’s a heavy sci-fi flair in the final story, too. This isn’t a negative thing, but if there are future “Thanksgiving of Horror” entries it should be interesting to see which genre it skews towards more.

“Thanksgiving of Horror” is a wonderfully fun installment of The Simpsons that is worth checking out even if you’ve been sleeping on the series for the better part of a decade. Dan Vebber, one of the stronger writers of both Futurama and The Simpsons is responsible for the episode’s script and he gives it his all here. It’s an entertaining episode that would make a fine addition to anyone’s Thanksgiving (or Halloween) viewing lists. There’s such an obvious amount of love and joy that went into this production; one of the best little touches is that all of the crew names in the credits are changed to food puns, rather than the spooky ones that are done for Halloween.

It’s unclear if “Thanksgiving of Horror” will remain a one-off fluke or if The Simpsons will attempt “Christmas of Horror” or “Mother’s Day of Horror” in the future. However, this endeavor is enough of a success and the material feels different enough from their Halloween fare that it will hopefully turn into a tradition for The Simpsons. More annual excuses for horror is never a bad thing.

The post [TV Review] The First Ever “Thanksgiving of Horror” is a Holiday Highlight for “The Simpsons” appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“She has crazy in her eyes. Even her daughter looks afraid of her.”

Castle Rock premiered as a show with a lot of promise that initially grabbed people, but seemed to have lost audiences by the end of the season. This year of the show course corrects in some regards while narrowing the series’ scope in important ways. It also just has more interesting characters in play this season, which makes Castle Rock’s sophomore year more cohesive and satisfying as a whole than its debut. Castle Rock’s second season absorbs texts like Misery and Salem’s Lot into its universe and it crafts a very emotional story that at its core is all about family.

This season also expands Castle Rock’s scope to beyond Shawshank Prison and incorporates other notable Stephen King locales like Jerusalem’s Lot and the Marsten House into its orbit. Castle Rock is very interested in the dark secrets that are buried figuratively and literally under Castle Rock and how they may finally be ready to come to the surface. In that sense, don’t go into this season expecting many—or any—connections to season one. Castle Rock truly embraces the anthology angle. While it’s not a completely new slate this year, this season is about passing the torch and extending this universe, not catching up with threads from last season (although that’s not to say that this could never happen).

The season’s premiere kicks off to a slow pace that informs the speed for the rest of the season, but this is far from a deterrent. It allows characters to get proper introductions that do them justice. A very big part of the season is the cultural and racial divide that’s growing to a boiling point in Salem’s Lot over the construction of new land. This work and progress is beginning to infect everything. This also brings in a slew of unexpected supernatural elements and the appearance of undead entities that add an interesting wrinkle to all of the personal drama. It’s the perfect ingredient to throw everything into chaos.

The central characters to this season are Annie Wilkes and her daughter, Joy, and the season’s premiere does exceptional work with Lizzie Caplan‘s take on the iconic Stephen King character. The premiere—but also the season as a whole—are incredibly efficient in regards to how they show you the insular, nomadic life that Annie’s led with her child. Suddenly, that’s all about to explode and come to a head during their stay in Castle Rock.

Castle Rock’s portrayal of Annie paints her as a worn-down addict who uses her RN gig as a ruse of sorts to re-up on meds more than a way for her to actually help others. This has created a very chaotic life for her. She and Joy get sidelined and held up in Castle Rock, but while they’re stuck there everyone begins to notice her eccentricities and wonder what she’s run away from. Included among those eccentricities are the severe hallucinations and other mental maladies that plague Annie. These also may or may not carry a supernatural connotation. It’s definitely not a good thing that she’s stuck in a place like Castle Rock right now. One of this season’s greatest strengths is how it excels at depicting Annie’s psychosis and paranoia in visually different and creative ways. It continually feels fresh and stressful.

A lot of this season is just watching Annie wander around in a bewildered fashion, but it’s consistently enthralling. You never want to take your eyes off of her and the never-ending breakdown that she’s caught in. Caplan does so much with just a detached stare here and it’s incredible to just watch her zone out and try to imagine what’s churning in her mind. It’s more than just the methodical drawl in the delivery of her lines. Annie simply doing menial tasks is fascinating due to what you know about this character. Alternatively, Annie’s bigger moments are also just as satisfying. Her rants about the dregs of Castle Rock rival Kathy Bates’ monologues in the Misery film. The camera hangs on Caplan’s face with uncomfortable close-ups where she looks increasingly unstable. The way she shifts into Annie’s blank, broken mode is also just as bone-chilling as Bates’ performance. Even in the first handful of episodes, she gives a season’s worth of range.

Digging into characters’ backstories and explaining their mystery can sometimes be a terrible idea. However, the details on Annie’s childhood and this expanded view on who she is and her youth is so damn good. I know this show is supposed to cover a whole community and connect many of King’s works together, but I’d have been very satisfied if this just focused on Annie and Joy trying to make it by. It shouldn’t be this satisfying to hear Caplan say “dirty bird,” her focus on her “laughing place,” and her mission to get her daughter there, but it so is. Much of this season is very much the Misery prequel that you never knew you wanted.

Caplan kills it as Annie, but Elsie Fisher as her conflicted daughter gives just as exciting and powerful of a performance. It’s horrifying to see Annie rope her young daughter into her mess. There’s a lot of focus on Joy getting pulled away by kids as she attempts to experience an actual life outside of her mother. Meanwhile, Annie struggles with all of this and tries to reclaim control. There’s an extremely complicated relationship and shifting power dynamic between the two of them, but it is one that is still based on love. However, that doesn’t make this situation any less volatile. This kind of story is usually disastrous for everyone involved, but with Wilkes, you know it will be worse. Annie Wilkes with an Internet connection is a particularly dangerous thing.

Outside of the Wilkes family, the other major stories that consume this season of Castle Rock involve Reginald “Pop” Merrill, a tired, dying junk shop owner played in a gleefully ornery fashion by Tim Robbins (the character originates in “The Sun Dog” from King’s Four Past Midnight). Pop tries to maintain the peace, cover up for past sins, as well as investigate the loss of his nephew. He becomes progressively suspicious of Annie Wilkes and her presence in the community and if anyone is going to catch or stop Annie, it seems like it will be him. He’s her biggest threat, other than herself, of course. In addition to Pop’s story, there is some very interesting material with the Somali population within Jerusalem’s Lot, their heritage, and how this is still currently causing stress in the form of family problems. The ownership of land and business starts to become increasingly important as construction on Jerusalem’s Lot moves forward.

To be fair, a lot of the actual “scares” in the season feel half-baked and pretty derivative. The season’s creepy, sure, but not explicitly scary at times. The triumphs are really in the acting and character work as opposed to visceral scares. This perhaps isn’t needed in this series, but it’s what some people are going to be looking for beyond the associations to King’s work. As the season goes on it does become more adept in constructing its terror. There may be plenty of human predators, but there are even more sinister, larger things bubbling underneath Castle Rock, as the first season showed us. There are some brutal, unexpected displays of violence that work especially well, but the moments of human conflict work even better than the supernatural ones. As King has proven countless times over, humans are the scariest monsters of all.

Castle Rock still expertly remixes and riffs on King’s iconic characters and their histories in reflexive ways that keeps all of this surprising and thrilling. The “remixing” aspect of Stephen King’s works is still successful more than it’s not and just the prospect of bringing characters like Annie Wilkes into haunted domains like the Marsten House from Salem’s Lot holds so much potential. Imagine how Randall Flagg would act in the Overlook. There’s just so much fun to be had here. All the while, gorgeous cinematography helps show off the town itself and highlights both the beauty and darkness of this haunted community.

Season two of Castle Rock weaves a more engaging story than its first season and crafts an impressive season that’s just as intimate as it is extravagant. This year approaches some high benchmarks from King’s universe, but it sticks the landing and succeeds in finding new, engaging takes on these characters. There are still areas to be improved upon, but this season of Castle Rock is an addictive, mind-bending assault that continues to refine its formula.

Editor’s Note: This review is based on the first five episodes of Castle Rock’s ten-episode second season.

Castle Rock’s second season debuts on October 23 on Hulu with the first three episodes. The remaining episodes will then air on a weekly basis.

The post [TV Review] “Castle Rock” Delivers the ‘Misery’ Prequel You Never Knew You Wanted appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“I hear that serial killers are more active in the months that are hot…”

American Horror Story is still one of the best magic tricks and brainwashing acts on television. Every year, it hooks in viewers, both old and new, with some radical new premise (even when keeping that premise a secret can be marketing in itself) and every season it rather quickly goes off the rails and turns into the messiest kind of messes. Perhaps that’s why we love the show on some level. We should know better at this point, but part of being a horror fan is trudging into something that by all means looks like trash, but hoping for the best. This season of American Horror Story doesn’t look like trash and in fact, it’s trying to lure hardcore horror fans more than it ever has before.

Reckless summer camps are just one of those locations that mesh together with the horror genre so well. Films like Friday the 13^th or Sleepaway Camp largely work as well as they do because they embrace the silly setting so well, short shorts and all. However, not only is this season of American Horror Story set at a summer camp where there’s a killer on the loose, but it’s specifically set back in 1984, a year that’s especially important for the horror genre (Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Silent Night, Deadly Night, and Children of the Corn all came out in 1984). American Horror Story: 1984 honors this formative year for the genre by creating a pastiche of slasher films that puts all of these bloody pictures into a blender and it makes for a wonderfully fun time.

Ryan Murphy and his team at American Horror Story have always attempted to remix classic horror films, regardless of the season’s theme, but they’re looking at a tall task this season. The scenario they’ve created for themselves at Camp Redwood and with the murderous Mr. Jingles is a dream come true, but films like The Final Girls have already reflexively approached this subject matter and done so incredibly well, at that. AHS: 1984 will really need to work hard to make Camp Redwood as iconic as other slasher camps and while it’s still far too soon to tell, the work done in “Camp Redwood” shows that they may be up to the task.

Before this season gets into its 1980s goodness, it presents a small primer that’s set back in the ’70s at Redwood that helps establish that a gruesome serial killer has wreaked havoc upon the camp in the past. It’s a very satisfying, extreme cold open that would definitely make Jason Voorhees smile out of appreciation. “Camp Redwood” initially looks like it may be a place where Emma Roberts’ Brooke and her friends can escape their pasts and start anew for the summer. It doesn’t take very long for everyone involved to realize that something isn’t right here and that perhaps this camp is the exact place that they need to be in order to confront the lives that they have run away from.

AHS: 1984’s tone is so much brighter, lighter, and stylized than previous seasons of American Horror Story (God, the opening credits this year are amazingly on point) that this almost feels like a stealth season three of Scream Queens, especially with Emma Roberts leading the pack as Brooke Thompson. Make no mistake, this is a good thing, and at least this first episode embraces that show’s gleeful murder-happy impulses. Neon titles fly across the screen to help identify the cast and it’s clear that servicing up the ‘80s is just as important to this season as paying respect to the horror that fills the decade. As the nostalgia-drenched advertisements for this season have highlighted, big hair, fuzzy legwarmers, and pastel outfits are unavoidable this year.

Roberts’ Brooke shares the spotlight here with Billie Lourd’s Montana Duke, a confident aerobics instructor who wants to become the world’s best in the field. The rest of the core cast is rounded out by the picturesque Xavier Plympton (Cody Fern) and his buddies, Ray Powell (DeRon Horton) and Chet Clancy (Gus Kenworthy). Glee’s Matthew Morrison also gets to make his American Horror Story debut this season and immediately stands out as Trevor Kirchner, a sexed out mustachioed camp counselor who Montana has her eye on.

Montana is the more outgoing of the characters and she helps Roberts’ meekish Brooke attempt to come out of her shell over the summer. Brooke is more reserved than the characters that Roberts is used to playing in American Horror Story, but it’s safe to say that her proper demeanor has a lot to do with the trauma that she’s survived in the past. Brooke’s encounter with the actual Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez, seems like a pivotal piece of the character’s history, but then it starts to look like everyone houses secrets that make them the ideal individuals for this camp.

“It’s L.A. Do any of us really know each other?” gets said in jest at one point, but it becomes a thought that’s truer than any of these people may understand. Everyone neatly fits into genre stereotypes, but as more time goes on they appear to be deeper than they initially let on. With a cast that’s not overly large, it should be interesting to see how many of these characters will be future Mr. Jingles victims and who will get a chance to develop and grow.

Someone that’s already done a great deal of growing is Margaret Booth (Leslie Grossman), the camp’s owner. Margaret pushes the camp’s chaste, religious undertone and the copious rules that accompany it. Margaret occupies a difficult position as she’s actually someone who survived Mr. Jingles’ slaughter at Camp Redwood back in the 1970s (and shares a survivor connection with Brooke, in a sense), but she’s also responsible for putting the killer away and acts as a major link to the camp’s past. This premiere pushes Margaret’s obsessive attitude and she already looks like a good contender for someone who could potentially orchestrate new murders, if there is a whodunit aspect present this year.

Speaking of which, the bulk of “Camp Redwood” takes place at the eponymous summer camp, but there’s also an extremely Halloween-esque sequence set at the nearby mental asylum that Benjamin Richter—Mr. Jingles—escapes from (even though his get-up totally channels I Know What You Did Last Summer). John Carroll Lynch‘s casting as the vicious Mr. Jingles may be a little on the nose for American Horror Story, but he already does impressive work as the lumbering character. It’s also fun to see just how much the series goes all-in with its Halloween allusions. The doctor that’s supposed to be looking after Richter is basically identical to Dr. Loomis. It’s not trying to hide the obvious parallels. This is a season that wants you to drunkenly shout out every slasher reference that you can correctly identify through the carnage.

“Camp Redwood” is patient, takes its time, and values the opportunity to explore its characters before they’re inundated with a bunch of young campers. The premiere’s main goal is to introduce the camp and tell campfire stories about the horrors that have plagued Redwood’s past and the alleged history of the deranged man who would become the infamous Mr. Jingles. This episode has fun playing into these various tropes, but then deconstructing them and going against the norm. ”Camp Redwood” has a rather fixed perspective, but it still finds the time to already throw some eccentric plot devices into the mix, like Satanists or an injured stranger who suffers from amnesia. As fun as this season may be, clearly it won’t be immune to some of the clunkier plot points that are prone to happen in this series.

“Camp Redwood” doesn’t try to overstuff itself and it creates a satisfying, above average season premiere. The episode plants the necessary seeds for what’s to come (it’s a fun idea to potentially have multiple killers out there and in the mix) and looks stunning at the same time. The outdoor cinematography of the camp is gorgeous, the synth-y score is perfect, and the aesthetic is totally nailed. There’s actually a pretty inspired sequence where the episode juxtaposes Brooke running for survival from Mr. Jingles with the torch lighting ceremony from the 1984 Olympics. These are the kind of visuals that I want from this season.

“Camp Redwood” is a strong, exciting way to kick off the season, but a commendable premiere has turned into a tradition that’s no barometer for the overall quality of the season. There are fun characters, a great setting, and a killer that’s actually frightening. If American Horror Story: 1984 can actually stay focused and not do random detours to things like a summer camp from Russia in the 1950s, then this could potentially be one of the show’s best seasons yet. It’s a delicate balance between finely toasting a marshmallow and setting the whole thing ablaze into a burnt, inedible crisp.

The post [Review] “American Horror Story: 1984” Season Premiere is a Bloody, Campy Good Time appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Seasonal horror has been around for as long as the slasher genre itself. It just seems like a natural combination to take the wholesomeness and togetherness of a holiday and then pervert it by filling it with murder. It used to be that this murderous holiday tradition was typically reserved for Christmas, but horror films have slightly strayed from this comfort zone and Hulu’s Into the Dark anthology series is certainly the culmination of that idea.

The twelve-part Blumhouse Television produced series designates a different holiday from every month to each installment. While quality has been across the board for this series and many installments have struggled to fill their 80+ minute runtimes, it’s still been a beautiful experiment and celebration of holiday horror. With the recent news that Hulu has commissioned a second season of this series, hopefully the next batch of holiday horrors from Into the Dark only improve upon season one’s foundation.

With the series’ final installment, “Pure,” now available on the streaming service, here’s our breakdown of which episodes we thought were the most and least effective.

12. “Pure” – Daughter’s Day

The final installment of Into the Dark’s inaugural season posits a story of female empowerment that’s set at a Purity Retreat for teens. “Pure” intermingles the supernatural with antiquated notions on chastity and religion. Then, it also layers on top of this the complicated relationship between fathers and daughters and the expectations that are in place with that bond and how that can be symptomatic of its own horror story at times. There’s a growing sense of dread that slowly consumes its protagonist, but “Pure” covers familiar territory and doesn’t feel like anything new. At its worst, it feels especially heavy-handed. It’s not even fun like some of the other misfires on here. There are still some uncomfortable moments throughout “Pure,” but they mostly come from the real-life creepiness of purity contracts.

The fact that “Pure” chooses the recent invention of “Daughter’s Day” as its unifying holiday at least speaks to the idea that there will likely be more variety as this show moves ahead. Picking unusual oddities from the calendar rather than designating a set holiday to each month allows writers and directors to really get crazy here and lets dates like Arbor Day or even Black Friday become viable episodes.

11. “The Body” – Halloween

“The Body” is the episode that kicked off Into the Dark in the first place and was given the freedom to play around with the rich holiday of Halloween, at that. “The Body” has a very good idea at its core, which makes the mishandling of the premise all the more frustrating.

It features a hit man who needs to dispose of a body, but since it’s Halloween, he just hides in plain sight and winds up at a Halloween party. Around the dark comedy, there’s also a nightmare Cinderella story that’s told here. In spite of strong performances, “The Body makes for a clunky debut for the series and many of the problems present in this episode—like a padded runtime—remain issues through the bulk of the series. This idea, more than any other, is the kind of thing that’s perfectly suited for a short film as opposed to a feature, so it’s not surprising to see that’s what this started as. It may have been better to keep it that way and tackle something different altogether.

It should be very interesting to see what next season’s October entry brings to the table.

10. “I’m Just F*cking with You” – April Fool’s Day

April Fool’s Day is one of the better holidays for a horror film and there are actually some very good ones available on the subject matter (April Fool’s Day, Killer Party, and Slaughter High are all worth your time). There’s a very delicate balance when it comes to pranking the audience and pulling the rug out from under them. It can elevate a film to a whole other level when done right, but “I’m Just F*cking With You” feels like it’s laughing at the audience, not with them, and delivers one of the most mean-spirited, nihilistic entries in the series.

This is an episode that at its core is all about “trolls” and the act of trolling, but it presents a story where nobody is exactly likable and everyone is guilty of awful things. Hayes MacArthur is usually a delight and he gives his all here as the prankster, Chester, but he’s perhaps a little too unleashed for his own good here. His games against Larry are just plain sadistic and it’s a clear situation where you don’t really want anyone to come out on top here, let alone Chester. There’s a kernel of a good idea here, but Chester’s whole operation makes The Strangers or Saw look like lighter prank films, in comparison.

9. “Down” – Valentine’s Day

Daniel Stamm of The Last Exorcism fame is actually one of the more accomplished directors to approach an Into the Dark episode and on paper all of this sounds like it could have worked. I’m a big fan of bottle episodes on television and “Down” tries its best to tap into that energy as it traps to people inside of an elevator for the show’s Valentine’s Day installment.

“Down” has some fun as it messes around with the formula of a romantic comedy before taking a sharp left into horror territory. The stripped-down nature of the episode—both figuratively and literally—is admirable, but it fails to make its limited setting as engaging as it needs to be. Other films like Devil have struggled in the same regard and even though the Valentine’s Day angle helps, the characters are never really elevated above the rom-com caricatures that they enter the film as.

8. “Treehouse” – International Women’s Day

There are a few entries of Into the Dark that certainly have a sense of humor to them, but “Treehouse” goes the furthest in this regard and allows James Roday (Psych) to flex his comedic muscles while still telling a very frightening story. Roday assembles an enviable cast of comedic talent (Stephanie Beatriz!) with Jimmi Simpson headlining this episode as a celebrity chef that gets swallowed by the #MeToo movement. It’s a very appropriate story to tell for International Women’s Day and this story about female empowerment incorporates witchcraft and torture to weave a dark morality tale.

There’s a lot to like in “Treehouse,” but its trajectory feels telegraphed right from the start and there’s nothing too surprising in it. Roday plays into the B-horror aesthetic and this could make for a very serviceable episode of Tales From the Crypt, but at feature-length it feels a little overdone.

7. “They Come Knocking” – Father’s Day

“They Come Knocking” looks at a grieving father who takes his two daughters on vacation after the difficult loss of their mother. He tries to properly raise them in a world that doesn’t seem so depressing and bleak, but soon he’ll need to fight to keep them alive when their trip is interrupted by supernatural creatures. “They Come Knocking” gets around to the frightening stuff just at the right time so there’s a proper mix of characterization and scares here and at its best moments it feels like a mix of Signs and Fright Night. It creates a moody, claustrophobic location with the RV and campground, both of which add a refreshing spin on the home invasion genre, too. There are some especially eerie shots that really take advantage of the RV’s layout and limitations, but the moonlit woods also make for the perfect setting for this story of extraterrestrial invaders.

“They Come Knocking” also conjures an effective Ils or Children of the Damned vibe with the monsters that terrorize this family. There are some scenes in this one that are genuinely frightening and suspenseful, plus there’s a well-orchestrated climax, but it’s an installment that’s still silly on a number of levels and suffers from stretching about an hour’s worth of story out to nearly 90 minutes.

6. “Flesh & Blood” – Thanksgiving

Longtime editor for Wes Craven and director of the My Bloody Valentine remake and Drive Angry, Patrick Lussier’s Thanksgiving-themed Into the Dark episode tells a much more intimate story than his previous works. There have been a number of films lately that explore the idea of “What if your father was a serial killer?” so even though “Flesh & Blood” isn’t exactly original in that sense, it’s still entertaining for the most part because of the memorable performances given by Dermot Mulroney and Diana Silvers.

“Flesh & Blood” gets into the inherently icky territory of this subject matter and Mulroney plays the part with an eerie calm that you’re just waiting to break. “Flesh & Blood” gets into some and rich and disturbing subject matter, both physically and psychologically, but once the cat’s out of the bag in this one it largely falls apart. “Flesh & Blood” doesn’t exactly stick the landing (and it even struggles to reach the landing at some moments), but the fact that you care about Silvers’ character goes a long way with this one.

5. “School Spirit” – First Day of School

Directed by Mike Gan and written by Patrick Casey and Josh Miller (the writers for the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog film), “School Spirit” deals with a bunch of kids who are stuck in detention over the weekend. During their punishment time, a vengeful—possible supernatural—serial killer stalks students who have been bad and found themselves in detention. The murderous “School Spirit” costume is actually pretty creepy here and each of the kills here are surprisingly well executed and heavy in the gore. The film is very much an ode to ‘80s slashers. It makes good use out of the confined location of the school and incorporates some inventive kills that make good use of the geography. It’s nothing incredible, but it fits in this mold well and is as fun as the aforementioned schlocky slashers of the past.

“School Spirit” functions as a very satisfying b-horror picture, but it’s also carried by an exceptional cast. All of these teenagers, especially the lead, Erica, do great work here, feel real, and sell their chemistry or animosity towards each other. They all very much fit the “The Breakfast Club…but with murder!” atmosphere that it’s going for.

4. “Pooka!” – Christmas

Nacho Vigalondo has been behind many films that are visually amazing and tell some of the most creative stories that you’ll come across. He’s definitely the biggest “get” in terms of Into the Dark’s season one directors and while his installment isn’t perfect, Vigalondo brings his signature style and doesn’t disappoint. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of “Pooka!” is that it’s a Christmas horror story that doesn’t involve a murderous Santa Claus. While I wouldn’t be surprised to see Into the Dark eventually turn to this trope, it’s definitely an angle that’s been done to death at this point and at least requires a fresh take. Vigalondo instead crafts a literal man-in-suit monster story that becomes a commentary on the commercialism of the holiday and the duality of man.

“Pooka!” is another entry that benefits from its talented performers and Nyasha Hatendi really sells the broken mental state of his character. As the episode goes on, the character slowly loses track of where he ends and where Pooka, the latest holiday sensation, begins. Even though the episode runs out of steam and spins its tires towards the end, Vigalongo keeps “Pooka!” consistently visually interesting and Pooka himself is a wonderfully creepy creation that deserves recognition.

3. “New Year, New You” – New Year’s Eve

There are some installments of Into the Dark where you’re just waiting for the big turn to happen, but then they suddenly lose all momentum. “New Year, New You” is one of the rare exceptions that actually becomes more complex and engaging once everything falls apart and it tells an angry story tethered together by a standout cast. Director Sophia Takal (go see Always Shine!) gets the most out of her actors, especially Carly Chaikin who bounces between extremes with ease.

There are some very strong emotional twists and turns, but more than anything it’s encouraging that this is an installment that’s all about the dangers of female toxicity and how women can sometimes drag each other down to make themselves feel better. The consequences of this story deal with things like teen suicide from the result of bullying and “New Year, New You” poignantly looks at very real problems and uses them to fuel its horror.

2. “All That We Destroy” – Mother’s Day

“All That We Destroy” looks at what happens when the bond between mother and child becomes toxic and co-dependent. It’s a really creative subject for the holiday of Mother’s Day, especially since it’s more about the dangers of a mother’s love. Chelsea Stardust’s installment tells a gripping story that begins to weave a larger mystery as soon as it starts. There’s a beautifully twisted dynamic between mother and son where they’re both awful individuals, but it attempts to handle this psychopathy with future science and a unique sci-fi angle.

This geneticist mother wants to help her budding serial killer son, so she continually creates an experiment to see if he will repeatedly resort to murder. She wants to understand why her son is a serial killer and unlock the reasoning behind his first kill by recreating it. The murder scenes get progressively vicious and are very hard to watch at times, which definitely plays into the brutal, scary nature of this story. On top of that, both performances are incredible, especially the mother’s frail attempts to understand her son and how she hopes that there’s a happy ending here.

1. “Culture Shock” – Independence Day

With her first feature here, Gigi Saul Guerrero truly rises to the occasion and delivers what is easily the most polished, effective installment of Into the Dark. It’s pretty poignant angle for a Fourth of July installment, as it revolves around a pregnant Mexican immigrant’s illegal journey into USA to get a piece of the American dream, but then it warps into a morbid “grass is always greener…” situation. There are shades of The Purge with the approach to its subject matter, but in the end it feels like a mash-up between Get Out, The Stepford Wives, and Groundhog Day, which is a pretty eclectic cocktail of sensibilities. It’s a dark story about when attempts for social justice and equality backfire.

Perhaps what’s paramount in this film is that Marisol is actually a character that you care about and want to see get out of the situation, which isn’t always the case with these installments. “Culture Shock” juxtaposes real-world racial and societal anxiety with more heightened and supernatural horror in a really creative way, wherein even the regular world is still terrifying for Marisol. Guerrero shifts from a grindhouse exploitation film look to that of a polished major studio picture as Marisol crosses over from Mexico to America. There’s a really effective use of simple American customs getting amplified and played like monstrous, disturbing acts. Or even how the American flag can turn into a terrifying symbol. It’s a good way to make gentrification scary in lieu of any actual monsters. It turns the loss of culture into a physical transformation.

“Culture Shock” takes a very surprising, sci-fi turn in its final act that continues to keep things fresh, even if it might not work for everyone. It also changes things up enough that this is one installment that doesn’t feel like it’s padding its runtime.

All episodes of “Into the Dark” are now available to stream on Hulu.

The post Ranking All 12 Installments in the First Season of Hulu’s “Into the Dark” appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Anthology horror series have never been more popular, but in an age where The Twilight Zone is back and kicking, there needs to be a higher standard set for episodic anthology horror. The CW’s announcement that they’d be getting into the anthology game could turn out to be incredibly fruitful for the young adult horror audience. That being said, there were some reservations in place over the news of Two Sentence Horror Stories, a series that almost seems counter-intuitive in nature since the whole point of the original viral sensation was to get in and out rapidly. It’d be one thing to turn these two-sentence stories into short films (which was originally what happened on CW Seed), but half-hour adaptations leave a lot of room for error.

In theory, some of these two-sentence writing prompts could inspire a great story with depth, but largely the results have been harmless, yet disposable fodder. However, last week’s episode, “Tutorial”, turned out to be a very satisfying endeavor that provides a sliver of hope for this series and what it could become. If there’s one episode of Two Sentence Horror Stories that you need to check out, it’s definitely this one.

Other installments of Two Sentence Horror Stories have played around with evergreen terrors like ghosts, evil children, and sinister brainwashing, but they’ve all been stories that play out through a standard narrative with a basic structure that doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. The premise of turning a dozen odd words into an episode of television is enough of a feat. What immediately makes “Tutorial” such a standout episode is that it does go further and finds a clever device to center its story around. On paper, this plot is nothing special: Karine (Aleyse Shannon), a vlogger, conducts a makeup tutorial while an intruder sneaks into her house. What helps make “Tutorial” shine is that the entire episode is presented like a YouTube makeup tutorial video that’s comprised completely of stationary camera setups.

There have been an increasing number of horror films that have played around with the idea that the “computer is the camera.” Missing, Windows, and the Unfriended films have all found inventive takes on this concept, but “Tutorial” triumphs by how it goes one step beyond and filters the story through a makeup tutorial. Director Tayarisha Poe and writer C.S. McMullen, both relative newcomers to horror, turn this into an opportunity to get the most out of shot composition and framing. It’s a highly planned piece, in spite of how it’s designed to look so off the cuff.

Poe also fills the episode with the typical visual flair, filters, and patterns that pollute YouTube videos. Aesthetically, this is nothing new for the genre (2016’s Nerve does a ton with this, in spite of how it’s not exactly horror), but it helps complete the image and push its message as far as possible. At a certain point, the silly visual touches intermingle with grisly reality and form a seamless product that comments on the dangers of sensationalism and desensitizing audiences.

Due to the nature of the episode, “Tutorial” largely plays out as one big monologue to the audience as Karine addresses the camera. This can be super hard to sell and make compelling, but Aleyse Shannon really delivers here as the vlogger in peril. It’s such a gradual, believable transformation that Karine undergoes as she shifts from beauty queen to scream queen. Beyond Shannon’s performance, “Tutorial” is actually unnerving and feels creepy. The episode builds tension during the calm of the tutorial, and then lets loose when the intruder lurks in the shadows and evades Karine. It’s a lot of fun to watch this dark tutorial transpire in juxtaposition to the cute one that starts the episode. Perhaps best of all, there’s a very satisfying ending here that’s worth seeing for yourself.

“Tutorial” ultimately pushes a message about how the taste of fame is worth whatever the cost to some and that the lines have been so blurred in society that murderers are simultaneously celebrities. It’s hardly an original concept for horror, but it’s one that’s incredibly relevant at the moment and hammered in even harder through the innocuous nature of the video. This isn’t someone live-streaming a torture via Twitch, it’s a makeup tutorial on YouTube. Unfortunately, it’s easy to picture something like this actually happening and the audience being numb or oblivious to what’s actually going on. “Tutorial” impressively taps into that free-floating fear and moral bankruptcy that’s becoming tolerated. This powerful message and the creative way in which it’s brought to life makes “Tutorial” easily the most worthwhile and the only must-watch installment of Two Sentence Horror Stories so far.

Tayarisha Poe has one more installment, “Little Monsters,” set for this season, so we’ll see if the same magic can be conjured there or if “Tutorial” remains Two Sentence Horror Stories’ high point.

The post If You Watch One Episode of ‘Two Sentence Horror Stories’, Make It “Tutorial” appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“What’s dumb about love?”

The need for approval can be a very scary thing, especially in the case of individuals who are starved for such affection. It’s a natural compulsion to want to please people and be loved, but this desire can also lead to the most toxic and conditional kind of love that hurts more than anything else. Recent crime-based projects on television have explored this topic to successful effect. There are certainly shades of Sharp Objects, The Sinner, or Dirty John in Hulu’s foray into this territory, but The Act tells a darker story than the lot of them. It’s also one of the strongest, most polished projects Nick Antosca has put together, and this is a guy who has worked on truly some of the best horror and crime projects of the past few years, whether it’s Hannibal or Channel Zero. It’s also the only true crime series you’ll encounter that can legitimately be distilled down to the love triangle between X-Men’s Jean Grey, Wolverine, and Cyclops.

Nick Antosca and Michelle Dean’s The Act effectively brings to life—almost too well, at times—many of the eeriest scenes from out of the Mommy Dead and Dearest documentary, which covers the true, unbelievable Munchausen-by-proxy story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her manipulative mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. Immediately, The Act excels at highlighting how much Dee Dee has programmed and tightly conditioned Gypsy. It’s a chilling example of just how far deception can really go or how a simple desire for freedom can get out of hand and pervert into something much worse. In fact, Dee Dee’s overprotective nature can funnel into Gypsy and manifest itself in dangerous ways through her with other people. This whole story is a cautionary tale on how shielding and repressing a person can sometimes be the worst way to “help” someone. It’s genuinely scary to see how Gypsy’s need for love and her natural defenselessness leaves her so open to grooming and manipulation from others.

The Act truly doesn’t shy away from showing Dee Dee’s negligence and how she’s been running these “schemes” for a while now. Dee Dee’s manipulation of her daughter is truly awful and it can easily be too much for some people. It starts at an awful place and then only gets worse. It’s a very hard watch at times. Like, a seriously hard watch, especially if you’re a parent. Many people may need to tap out after the first two episodes, but if you can make it through that, The Act then hits the brakes a little. As brutal and upsetting as this story can be to stomach, it’s also completely addictive as this “act” continues to balloon and unravel. You need to know more.

Both Joey King and Patricia Arquette are incredible here as these real-life characters, but King has such a wounded vulnerability during the beginning of the series. It’s like she’s worried over whether she has permission to talk or not. It’s insane to see the change in Gypsy between episodes as she continually learns the truth about herself and figures out how to manipulate her mother and be the one that’s really in control. It’s a staggering development and highlights how nuanced Joey King is in this role. It’s also uncanny just how much she acts and talks like Gypsy. Her transformation is astonishing.

As much as it’s easy to hate on Dee Dee and how she uses her innocent daughter, The Act also excels at showing just how empty Dee Dee is. Even though it’s not right, she truly has nothing else besides her daughter. Clearly, something snapped when her husband left her and the show is full of tiny, quiet moments of despair that try to help you occasionally empathize with Dee Dee’s actions. In addition to the Blanchards, The Act introduces their caring, but inquisitive neighbors, who aren’t crucial to this story, but provide a welcome outside perspective to the Blanchards.

These neighbors, played by Chloe Sevigny and AnnaSophia Robb, also act as the opening schism between Dee Dee and Gypsy. Gypsy finally gets a taste of life outside of her mother, which she loves, and it’s a slippery slope from there. Sevigny and Robb are great here in these roles. It’s so sad because there’s something so honest and pure about Gypsy’s desire to have normal friends—and there’s no reason why she shouldn’t be able to—but then her mom’s insecurity and fear continues to fester. It’s also fascinating to see the presence that men play for both Gypsy and Dee Dee and how they seriously impact both of their lives in major ways that ultimately pull them apart. The series lays particularly hard into Nick, Gypsy’s eventual love interest, which proves to be a messed up, yet enlightening development for the lonely girl.

Characterization is one of The Act’s greatest assets and the series presents complex, fully realized individuals. There’s such a curious sense of awe and beauty through Gypsy during the first few episodes or how she tries to live vicariously through her friend, Lacey (Robb), and her boyfriend. Some moments are a little on the nose and crushingly bleak, but they’re still believable, and never become too distracting. As The Act goes on, it turns into a real engrossing mystery and some episodes play much more like a detective procedural than an emotional horror story or family melodrama. It also teases enough suspects throughout the season so you’re not entirely sure just who the culprit will be if you’re unfamiliar with this story.

The scope of this story also helps out The Act in a lot of ways. There’s not some constricted, boiled down time frame here. Material is allowed to breathe it’s both empowering and terrifying to watch Gypsy slowly learn about life and get out from under her mother’s thumb. It’s also devastating to see her figure things out and realize that her one ally is actually her worst enemy. The moment that the first episode ends on is that of true terror and worse than the most unsettling moments from Misery.

It’s very powerful when Gypsy figures out just how much darker her situation is than merely having a debilitating illness. It’s also much more believable to think that this animosity gradually grows over nearly a decade. Each episode spans an important new period from out of Dee Dee and Gypsy’s lives over this seven-year journey of dissolution. The mental gymnastics that Gypsy has to work through as her life continues to change is just so intense. In fact, the scope of this eight-episode series covers much more than you might expect and the story is far from over once the big murder happens. As the show’s trailer indicated, The Act also touches on the legal proceedings and trial that follows, as well as the aftermath of this grisly story.

The Act simultaneously takes its time, but also fills each episode with plenty of conflict and effectively pushes the story forward. The pace here could easily be slower, so it’s commendable to see it clip along in the way that it does and that The Act doesn’t try to stretch this out to thirteen or even ten episodes. Gypsy makes some major moves and grows in some big ways before the first episode is even over in a way that should shock audiences. Each installment is full of gratifying, surprising turns that resonate in the same way.

The Act also wisely starts at the horrific, murderous conclusion of all of this in order to tease the audience, before it then jumps back to the start of everything. The way in which the series cuts back and forth between the past and the present is a little manipulative, but it effectively creates more tension. It does it to build a deeper mystery, not to string the viewer along.

It’s amazing how this show is full of so many beautiful and gut-wrenching moments and how they all begin to blend together into this surreal mirage. This is certainly something that Hannibal did well and that energy is present here at times, too. One of the best things about this series is how wholesome, sweet images of the Blanchard house start to look bone-chilling and terrifying in a new light. Aesthetically, there are foreboding, heavier moments that are reflected through The Act’s cinematography as well. The camera will linger on elements of Gypsy’s routine for just a little too long and these regular things begin to warp and look sinister. It’s a smart way to get under the audience’s skin and hint at the darkness that’s hiding underneath this suburban mother and daughter. Gypsy and Dee Dee’s fairy tale pink picturesque house is the perfect example for it all (that princess painting of Gypsy is also straight up nightmare fuel under the right circumstances). The series also features some really haunting, stylistic flairs that kick in during the second half of the series, particularly in respect to the murder plan.

The Act may be too much for some viewers to handle, but it’s a masterwork in true crime storytelling and one of the most exciting new additions to Hulu’s library. Those that can brave the darkness of this story will quickly find themselves addicted to this new series.

The first two episodes of Hulu’s ‘The Act’ premiere on March 20^th, with the remaining six episodes airing week-to-week.

This review is based on the first five hour-long episodes of ‘The Act’s’ eight-episode season.

The post [TV Review] Truth is Stranger and Far More Disturbing Than Fiction In Hulu’s True Crime Anthology, “The Act” appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“Happy fucking New Year!” 

New Year’s Eve is a time of self-reflection, looking towards the future, and hopefully starting off the new year with the best foot forward. It’s a time that’s meant to be optimistic and encouraging. These aren’t topics that are typically conducive to the horror genre, but Into the Dark‘s “New Year, New You” finds a dark way to weaponize them.

“New Year, New You” marks Into the Dark’s first female director, Sophia Takal, but the episode also features an entirely female cast, too. “New Year, New You” makes this gender slant part of the episode’s discussion as it tackles themes like society’s focus on superficial traits, the loss of identity, and the growing power that social media has in its ability to effect our equilibriums. The subject matter and absence of males in this episode aren’t accidents and Sophia Takal’s “New Year, New You” wants to say something important about the female experience. Not only does Takal get her point across, but she also turns out what feels like the most fully realized, mature installment of Into the Dark, yet.

This entry of Into the Dark looks at a group of millennial friends who reunite to hang out and reminisce on New Year’s Eve. However, once they begin to dig into their grudges and reopen old wounds courtesy of an innocuous game of “Never Have I Ever,” they begin to notice that their beef with each other may be manifesting in very real and very dangerous ways. Here’s the thing, this is the first episode of Into the Dark that actually has a disposable cast! Every other episode has either been a two-hander (with “The Body” being a slight exception), but this episode’s larger cast allows the installment to embrace its inner slasher film. This episode feels a lot like a more introspective, dark version of I Know What You Did Last Summer, and it’s exceptionally strong debut work from Sophia Takal.

Much of “New Year, New You” centers around Danielle Williams (Carly Chaikin). Danielle is a crystal-wearing social media influencer who peddles wellness cocktails and other products and Takal explores the phoniness of her image and persona in clever ways. She bombards Danielle’s videos with impatient pop-ups where hashtags and clip art invade what she says. It perfectly highlights what this character represents and Takal uses metonymic devices like that to shed light on all of these characters.

Alexis (Suki Waterhouse), on the other hand, is pretty much the opposite of Danielle, or at least wants to believe that she is. At one point Danielle catches herself in a mirror and can’t help but pose, whereas mirrors are a source of anxiety for Alexis. She leads an unglamorous life that’s been full of loss and perseverance rather than the cushy road that Danielle has found herself on. She makes for the more compelling protagonist and it makes for a better story to see Alexis unable to avoid Danielle’s social media presence and get inundated with alerts about how much everyone loves her. Alexis becomes even more insecure about her faults when she’s back in Danielle’s orbit. Kayla and Chloe, the other friends in this reunion, have similar feelings about their successful friend.

The chemistry between this group is wonderful, all of these actors click, and their dialogue feels incredibly realistic (right down to the fact that Elon Musk would hook up with one of them). They actually feel like friends, which is pretty fundamental to this story. Just simple moments of gossip and girl talk between these friends manage to be exciting due to how well they sell it. It’s such a natural atmosphere through this episode, so when the dread sets in and things start to go wrong, it’s especially chaotic.

Danielle is slowly able to win over her former friends, but Alexis remains distant and the animosity between the two of them is another major strength of this story. Alexis does not want to let Danielle into her life and as this story continues, the drastic nature of these feelings becomes increasingly apparent. Takal depicts Alexis’ instability through various editing tricks and camera fades that help the audience get inside her fragile state.

“New Year, New You” also plays with the audience’s perception of Danielle and just when it seems like she maybe isn’t so bad she’ll do something that’s incredibly artificial. It’s hard to peg down exactly what she thinks about all of this and it shows surprising depth to what looks like a shallow caricature. Suki Waterhouse gives a layered performance as Alexis, but Carly Chaikin really shines as the delusional Danielle (who’s kind of just an exaggerated version of her character from Suburgatory).

“New Year, New You” pushes forward a message of female empowerment, but it also looks at what happens when this idea gets perverted and the dangers of false female empowerment. Or what happens when the wrong female is the one that inspires others. It’s the perfect subtext for a story of this nature and although all of these friends enable and encourage each other, it’s not always for the best. The episode even viciously uses female beauty products as a means of torture to truly tap into the idea of toxic femininity.

“New Year, New You’s” script, which is written by Sophia Takal and Adam Gaines, is incredibly effective and efficient. It avoids exposition whenever possible and creates a strong mystery for the audience. It becomes clear that certain characters are conspiring against others, and that people are keeping major secrets about their past, but it allows the audience to dwell on these questions and generates suspense, rather than outright explain what’s going on. In a similar sense, the episode’s swooping cinematography stops and lingers on certain items in the home as a clever way to tip you off to the fact that they’ll be important later on, almost in a Hitchcockian manner. Every decision that “New Year, New You” makes respects the audience’s intelligence. It lets its story organically blossom over time and the episode’s bigger revelations hit with a greater impact as a result.

The episode is also sure to touch on many New Year’s Eve cultural touchstones like New Year’s resolutions, going over your accomplishments of the year, and the countdown at midnight. It’s nice to see how much “New Year, New You” plays into the New Year’s Eve angle rather than it being an incidental detail in the story, like how Thanksgiving was handled in “Flesh & Blood.” There’s also not enough horror that uses New Year’s Eve as its landscape, so Takal’s “New Year, New You” sets a strong standard here.

“New Year, New You” takes its time to build to the true horror and get to the meat of its story, but there are still enough creepy moments through the first act to maintain interest. Once things really get going, they don’t slow down and hold back and it’s all the better because of the incredible character work that’s gone down in the beginning. The turn in this episode really works and the way in which it reframes its characters in terms of who’s good and bad is brilliant. After the incredibly emotional first half of “New Year, New You,” it only makes sense that the monsters in this story are humans at their worst and not something supernatural. The ending injects the story with a tense cat and mouse dynamic that helps power it through until its finish. 

Into the Dark has also struggled to make its 80+ minute installments actually justify their runtime, but “New Year, New You” doesn’t struggle at all in this department. There’s more than enough material to last this story and at no point does it feel like the episode is padded for content. The structure and presentation of “New Year, New You” also feel the most like a feature film out of all of the Into the Dark episodes. This isn’t just an overly long episode that acts like a movie.

“New Year, New You” is a complex character study that explores the insecurities of all of these women, the dangers of manipulation through encouragement, and measuring yourself up to other people’s success. It’s a chilling story that only gets darker and more complex as it goes on. It also doesn’t shy away from an incredibly bleak ending that makes her point with eerie poignancy. Takal doesn’t try to overextend herself and this boiled down take on friendship and jealousy gone wrong is arguably the best addition of Into the Dark to date and hopefully just the start of Takal’s filmmaking career. With episodes like this and last month’s “Pooka!” delivering impressive, psychological pieces of horror, hopefully Into the Dark can carry this momentum and turn out another winner with Valentine’s Day.

‘Into the Dark’s’ “New Year, New You” premieres on Hulu on December 28^th.

The post [Review] Hulu’s “Into the Dark” Brings in the New Year With the Winning ‘New Year, New You’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“They can be a little unpredictable…”

The duality of man and our struggle to be good or evil is a classic theme to explore in storytelling, especially in something like horror where normal people transforming into monsters has been a staple of the genre since its earliest days. However, this is a theme that’s especially relevant to Christmas. This is, after all, a holiday where some shady all-knowing figure makes a sprawling list that keeps tabs on who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. Christmas has so many flashier signifiers that it’s easy to forget about this component of the holiday, which is what makes it such an inspired focus for this story.

With Christmas as Into the Dark’s designated holiday this time around, it’s frankly better that “Pooka!” doesn’t go the killer Santa route, as not only is it the obvious (and laziest) choice, but it’s been done to death at this point, too. Another factor in “Pooka!’s” favor is that the incredible Nacho Vigalondo is the director on board for this episode. Vigalondo never disappoints, whether it’s with Timecrimes, his VHS: Viral segment, “Parallel Monsters,” or his most mainstream (but still extraordinarily weird) feature, Colossal. “Pooka!” feels like it pulls from Colossal most out of Vigalondo’s previous works (although there is a hint of Timecrimes in its final act), but this is still incredibly different, even if they both do deal with people’s attempts to come to terms with the fact that they’re a monster.

“Pooka!” tells the story of a struggling actor (Nyasha Hatendi) who thinks he finally catches his big break when he nails the gig of Pooka, the holiday’s next big toy sensation. A professionally trained actor, Wilson is initially skeptical of his new job, but the company behind Pooka stresses that they don’t just want a man in a suit, they want him to be Pooka and bring this idea to life. Wilson really takes to the role, but the more time he spends in the costume as this character, the more he feels himself begin to slip and lose track of who he is. He starts to feel that Pooka is gaining a personality of his own; one that takes control of him and he’s increasingly helpless against. The whole novelty of the Pooka toy is that it has an unpredictable “naughty or nice” feature and it’s this classic Jekyll/Hyde dichotomy that begins to plague Wilson.

Vigalondo works hard to make Wilson stand out and connect with the audience early on. He’s immediately a sympathetic character and the installment painstakingly depicts his dedication to his craft and that he’s actually a talented actor. This makes it all the more depressing to see Wilson put his soul into intricate monologues and then end up in a glorified mascot costume for the holiday season. Vigalondo also isn’t afraid to let surrealness invade the story and there are frequent moments that become quite absurd, but it’s always done in favor of alienating Wilson and not just to get a cheap laugh. This feeling of not understanding what’s going on is part of the experience and Jon Daly really sells that dynamic as the person on the corporate side of all things Pooka.

“Pooka!” excels with its character work and it helps establish Wilson as a loner. He’s often isolated and his careful, little life is clear right from the start of the story. “It can be dangerous to be alone,” he’s told by his neighbor, yet the company he eventually finds isn’t exactly of the conventional nature. However, there’s also a subtle sense of dread that’s present from the beginning of the story and begins to swell and grow as more of Wilson’s life is shown.

Outside of Wilson’s Pooka-based responsibilities, he finds himself becoming smitten over Melanie, a single mother and real estate agent. The two have great chemistry and Melanie becomes Wilson’s source of joy, but it doesn’t take long for Pooka to become jealous over Wilson’s new fascination. Throughout “Pooka!”, Wilson’s furry alter ego continues to try to tear down his support systems and leave him alone and defenseless. Melanie and her son are so innocent through all of this and it’s difficult to see them get caught in the crossfire of this.

Another real strength of “Pooka!” is that it doesn’t waste its time. The story starts to play weird and disturbing tricks on both Wilson and the audience early on to the point that it becomes unclear what’s real. Furthermore, Vigalondo and Hatendi make Wilson’s pain over his confusion feel real and scary. You don’t know when the next “attack” may strike and the spiral that he falls down is horrible. The second half of “Pooka!” may become a little predictable at times with the direction that it takes and its lucid reality doesn’t always work, but it never stops being entertaining and you never stop caring about Wilson.

“Pooka!” finds success in its provoking story and its strong performances, but this is also easily the most visually exciting installment of Into the Dark to date. Vigalondo explodes the screen with color, frenetic lighting, and uses perplexing camera angles to accentuate Wilson’s slipping mental state. Not only does Vigalondo succeed in making this costumed critter legitimately scary, but he also puts together some of the most striking visuals that I’ve seen all year. “Pooka!” doesn’t just center itself around Christmas, but the story finds frightening ways to make use out of elements of the holiday like Christmas lights or trees.

“Pooka!” expertly juxtaposes shots of Wilson against similar frames of the titular creature. The story finds a lot of effective, disturbing ways to play these two parallel to one another and reflect that their two sides of the same twisted coin. It becomes an unhealthy symbiotic relationship where it feels like Wilson can’t live unless he’s in the Pooka costume. The idea of playing a cutesy kid’s song over menacing footage will also always be horrifying. Vigalondo relishes in finding new ways to splay out the peculiar Pooka costume and fill up the frame with its unintentional creepiness.

There are also many moments where Wilson sports half of the Pooka costume and looks like some bizarre creature out of Greek mythology that’s half man and half monster, which quite literally depicts the larger themes that the story is interested in. There are also some really great musical selections in this entry and the score also knows when it’s the right time to become more experimental and eerie. It just helps adds to the already strong package that’s in place here.

The previous two entries of Into the Dark have felt padded to fill out their 80-minute runtimes, but “Pooka!” is an entry that basically justifies its feature-length duration. If the series first episode skewed towards Tales From the Crypt and the second was more reminiscent of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, then this one feels like an actual movie. The story is smartly structured and it finds a pacing that works. Vigalondo does not squander this opportunity and treats this like a film rather than some episode of an anthology series. That being said, this story would still have more of a punch if it were done as a short.

“Pooka!” is also smart enough to hint at Wilson’s past and if these “episodes” have been a recurring thing for him, but it’s never overly indulgent in the matter. The story is confident enough to let the viewers make their own conclusions while not spoonfeeding them exposition and answers. Mysteries actually make this story stronger.

“Pooka!” isn’t perfect and it sometimes gets a little too melodramatic for its own good, but it’s satisfying to see Vigalondo let loose here with such a dark story. The ending in particular really goes for the jugular with a vengeance. Not all of the beats land and sometimes Hatendi doesn’t exactly rise to the occasion with Wilson’s more hyperbolized and aggressive material. He’s definitely better at playing the more fragile side of the character. That being said, there’s still much more good than bad here and the evil Pooka design alone is enough reason to check this out. It may not be Vigalondo’s best work, but it’s definitely up there and a very strong addition to his filmography. More than anything, “Pooka!” will definitely be one of the most unique pieces of Christmas horror that you’ll see this year. It doesn’t take the same bait that other stories do and it’s a creative, ambitious endeavor that deserves to be seen.

Now let’s please get Vigalondo loose on a new Critters film.

“Into the Dark’s” “Pooka” premieres on Hulu on December 7^th.

The post [Review] Christmas Comes Early as Nacho Vigalondo’s “Pooka!” Delivers ‘Into the Dark’s’ First Classic appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Edit: A previous version of this review misspelled Rebekah McKendry’s name as Rebecca and incorrectly listed her as the current Editor-in-Chief of Blumhouse.com.

On Christmas Eve, Max (Graham Skipper, Beyond the Gates, Carnage Park) and Jenna (Ashley Clements, Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party) meet for their first date at a local community theater to witness a production of the fictitious play “All the Creatures Were Stirring”. They are treated to five short plays, each with a horror-ish twist on a common holiday tradition (an office Christmas party, last-minute holiday shopping, A Christmas Carol, etc.). Those five plays make up the segments of All the Creatures Were Stirring.

Anthology films are usually an inconsistent lot, and All the Creatures Were Stirring is no different. Some of the stories work, and others don’t. The standouts are “Dash Away All”, in which a man (Matt Long) seeks help from two strangers (Catherine Parker and Mekeda Declet) when he is locked out of his car on Christmas Eve, and “In a Twinkling”, which starts off with a clever bit of lycanthropian misdirection before becoming something else entirely. “The Stockings Were Hung”, sees an office holiday party gift exchange gone wrong when a Jigsaw-like antagonist joins the game, but it fails to take advantage of its clever premise (this segment is the film’s biggest missed opportunity, as it should have been a blast). “Arose Such a Clatter”, inspires a few chuckles but barely registers in the grand scheme of things as it relies solely on a joke centered around a vengeful Rudolph. And “All Through the House” attempts to re-adapt A Christmas Carol with a game Jonathan Kite (2 Broke Girls), but other than a funny cocaine-turned-tinsel gag, it fails to add anything new to the oft-told story.

Where the film truly fails is in its editing. For a film that is only 80 minutes long, it moves along at a glacial pace. Almost every shot (not scene, but shot) goes on longer than it should. This is no doubt an effort to pad that scant 80-minute runtime, but it gives the feeling that you’re watching an amateur improv performance, full of awkward pauses as the actors try to think of something funny to say. You don’t have to be a film critic to know that editing is crucial to a film’s success, especially a comedy. Nearly every attempt at humor falls flat because the flaccid editing destroys the momentum at each and every turn. That the shots are too long makes it particularly ironic that some of the segments suffer from too much editing, particularly “The Stockings Were Hung”, which feels like it’s missing a scene.

This isn’t to say that better editing would have made the film funnier (though it might have helped), as the script, which was penned by the directors, also fails at actually being funny. The actors do what they can, but to no avail. The McKendrys do manage to work in a few creative visuals, however, especially during “In a Twinkling” with a Pleasantville-inspired black and white color palette, and “Arose Such a Clatter”, which frequently puts the camera in Rudolph’s POV. Other than that, the film is shot rather dully.

As much as I’ve harped on the film, there are a few bright spots. The aforementioned segments “Dash Away All” and “In a Twinkling” have legitimately creative premises. The cast is stacked with recognizable faces from the indie film community, some of whom fare better than others. The House of the Devil‘s Jocelin Donahue and Crazy Rich Asians‘s breakout star Constance Wu both stand out in their limited roles, while John Dies at the End‘s Chase Williamson is at the center of one of the more shocking moments in the film. Absentia‘s Morgan Peter Brown also gets one of the better character arcs (and plays off of Wu nicely) in “In a Twinkling”. Also, for a film that must have been filmed with a minuscule budget, most of the practical effects and creature effects are well done, particularly in “Dash Away All”.

It pains me to say that All the Creatures Were Stirring isn’t good, especially considering all of the talent involved. The McKendrys’ passion for the genre is obvious and infused in every scene, but hopefully these first-time filmmakers have learned from this experience. They have a lot of great ideas that just need better execution. Anyone expecting a new annual holiday viewing tradition should look elsewhere. Trick ‘r Treat, this is not.

RLJE Films will release All the Creatures Were Stirring on DVD, On Demand and Digital Video on December 4, 2018.

The post [Review] ‘All the Creatures Were Stirring’ is a Cinematic Lump of Coal appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“This whole thing is about trust, Kimberly…”

 Thanksgiving may seem like an “easy” holiday to make compatible with horror. There’s plenty of iconic imagery associated with the holiday and it even has a history that has a massacre baked right into it. However, in spite of this, Thanksgiving hasn’t been the centerpiece for horror that often. There’s Eli Roth’s faux grindhouse trailer for Thanksgiving and the infamous Thanksgiving dinner scene from House 3, but those are hardly staples of the genre. Curiously, the anthology horror film, Holidays, gruesomely tackles everything from New Year’s Eve to Father’s Day, yet it doesn’t indulge in Thanksgiving or have a full enough story to highlight the holiday.

These examples all have a tendency to fixate on the Thanksgiving dinner ritual, and more specifically, the dinner’s centerpiece of the turkey. ”Flesh & Blood” chooses to play against that stereotype and find all sorts of new avenues of horror from the confines of this holiday. “Flesh & Blood” instead focuses on how Thanksgiving is so often about the reunion of family. It finds a way to pervert and warp the closeness of this holiday, rather than focus on something as superficial and limited as food. This is a much more compelling story than say if some giant killer turkey that looks like a Pumpkinhead reject were chasing Kimberly and the cause of her fear. If Into the Dark’s first installment felt reminiscent of a mediocre Tales From the Crypt installment, then “Flesh & Blood” more closely resembles an adult version of Are You Afraid of the Dark? “Flesh & Blood” isn’t perfect, but there’s a strong idea at its core.

The episode look at Kimberly, a reclusive teenager who struggles with a crippling case of agoraphobia that developed after her mother was murdered by a serial killer, who just so happens to still be at large. Kimberly suddenly begins to freak out on Thanksgiving when she starts to suspect something from her father and fears that he might not be the ideal guardian that she thinks he is. In fact, he could actually be her worst enemy.

This is a solid starting point and the episode resists showing exactly how Kimberly’s mom died and doesn’t shove it in the audience’s face. It’s not quite subtle on the issue, but it could be a lot worse in terms of how Kimberly’s past is presented. A simpler story would show the murder from the start and then jump a year forward to when the film begins. Kimberly’s sordid lot has seen her seeking therapy, but her doctor seems curt and isn’t optimistic about Kimberly’s recovery. She basically attacks her and tells Henry, her father, that she might exhibit violent tendencies and that she’d be better off to be sent somewhere. This is all supposed to enforce the idea that Kimberly is going to snap in some way or that she might have even been responsible for her mother’s death. However, in actuality, there may be a more twisted story in play here where Kimberly is very much the victim.

“Flesh & Blood’s” introductory scene intentionally lingers on Kimberly’s happy family and her last pleasant memory back when everything was perfect before it all fell apart. This peace is juxtaposed against how lost Kimberly is in the present and the muted, medicated lifestyle that she leads. Her drowsy demeanor is played parallel to a hazy gaze through a clouded window and a warped sound design. All of this points to the idea that Kimberly is lost in her closed, tiny world.

For Kimberly, even a task as trivial as retrieving the mail from the mailbox becomes an insurmountable, dreadful ordeal. “Flesh & Blood” wisely seeds this trauma early on in the episode so when Kimberly really needs to go out of her comfort zone later on it’s especially powerful. The episode does a good enough job to depict the chaos that Kimberly feels when she’s outside and tempting her phobia. The world explodes and her faculties go all out of whack. That being said, something like the depiction of Chuck’s electromagnetic sensitivity on Better Call Saul has pretty much set the standard for this kind of internal fear of the outside.

“Flesh & Blood” builds as much sympathy for Kimberly as possible right from the jump. Even though she’s essentially by herself, there’s a surprising amount of humanity in Kimberly’s agoraphobia support group chats. It’s a smart way to show how she interacts with others while she’s still isolated. That being said, it’s still a problem that someone as young as Kimberly is trapped in this phobia as developmentally she doesn’t experience the stimulation that she needs. She basically depends on her father for every kind of outside support, which she seems fine with, but this obviously turns into a twisted problem.

Kimberly’s picture-perfect image of her father first starts to falter when a girl goes missing close to Thanksgiving and it triggers the idea in Kimberly’s head that the attacks that got her mother could be happening again. She gets especially suspicious when she sees that the victim has the exact same necklace as she does. Not only that, a slew of girls have gone missing in the area that all bear striking resemblances to Kimberly’s mom. Kimberly’s pent-up, paranoid mind runs wild with all of this. Whether Kimberly’s actually onto something here or not, her unpredictable actions in the past cause everyone to assume that she’s in a state. The idea of an unstable person who actually stumbles onto a murder or a crime isn’t exactly original, but “Flesh & Blood” handles the area reasonably well.

“Flesh & Blood’s” second act gains momentum due to how it basically plays out much like the first act, but now Kimberly’s suspicions are amplified so everything plays with a darker context to it. It’s an effective way to energize the episode and if the beginning has a bit of a Repulsion vibe, then the middle section resembles Rear Window or Misery as Kimberly goes into trapped detective mode. Finally, the episode doubles down on a Stepfather energy as it barrels to its conclusion.

Surprisingly, it feels like the story almost wraps up when it hits the halfway mark. Everything’s been revealed and the conclusion fast approaches, but the rest of the episode digs into this mental tug of war between Kimberly and Henry. It’s these moments that hit the hardest in “Flesh & Blood.” That being said, this comes across as a way to stretch out the story and take an hour’s worth of content and turn it into a feature-length endeavor. The story could be over much earlier, but it draws out the reveals. There’s still some satisfying stuff that follows, but it doesn’t quite necessitate this length.

Both performances in “Flesh & Blood” are great, but Dermot Mulroney really brings it as Henry, especially with how he slowly lets darkness creep into his performance. It’s subtle work at first where you can just sense uneasiness under his surface, but by the end of the entry he both chews and demolishes the scenery. Dana Silver also does good work as the consistently frail, unsure Kimberly, but it’s great to watch this fragile person grow stronger as she’s forced to overcome her fears. She gets a little too broad in her reactions sometimes, but for the most part she handles this well.

Furthermore, the story benefits by how this is so much of a two-hander and doesn’t overcrowd its plot with unnecessary characters. It’s basically just Kimberly and her father and it helps add to the restrained, isolated feeling that Kimberly experiences, too. Her world is cut off, so the audience’s is as well. Additionally, if these performances didn’t ring true the whole thing would pretty much fall apart. These aren’t groundbreaking roles here, but they still bring a lot to the table as these characters. While the performances are enjoyable and plenty of “Flesh & Blood” is thoughtfully handled, some of its plotting feels rather convenient and hackneyed. There are ample opportunities where the story could deepen, but it instead spins its wheels on the same ideas.

“Flesh & Blood” also does a reasonably good job towing the line between whether Henry’s guilty or not, but it could still work harder in this regard. If this were more ambiguous then the final act would hit with much more impact. The audience should feel as confused as Kimberly, but instead, it feels a lot more obvious. And hey, at least it fits in one extremely gory, bloody murder before all is said and done. This is much more a psychological outing, but in the end, it finally shows it’s more physical side and embraces its horror tendencies.

There’s plenty of potential in “Flesh & Blood,” especially since the installment references a bunch of classic horror, but it still feels like a pulpy pale comparison of those films rather than something that evolves the form. This is a little disheartening as the director, Patrick Lussier, isn’t new to the game. He’s responsible for schlocky but fun films like Drive Angry or My Bloody Valentine 3D and worked as an editor on many of Wes Craven’s pictures. This is still an engaging story that feels slightly more polished and effective than “The Body,” but Hulu’s Into the Dark is still just popcorn horror at this point. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but this could be so much more. Obviously there’s a lot of stakes riding on Christmas, so hopefully, the next episode will really go for broke with what this show can do. One especially moving set piece in “Flesh & Blood” sees Henry maddeningly talk to Kimberly about finally finding the courage to come out of her cocoon. Sure, it’s satisfying if Kimberly can make this transition, but what we really need is for Into the Dark to follow suit and break free of its cage.

“Into the Dark’s” Flesh & Blood premieres on Hulu on November 2^nd.

The post [TV Review] Thanksgiving-themed “Flesh and Blood” a Dry and Overcooked Episode of “Into the Dark” appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“Great costume.”

Anthology storytelling has turned into a relatively safe environment for horror. There’s something about the isolated nature and “reset” function of anthology television that caters to horror better than any other genre. Hell, an entire cast can be eliminated in a way that’s impossible in serialized television, which allows anthology horror to really feature a unique element of surprise. At the same time, this disconnected nature can make anthology horror feel “disposable” to some degree and there are plenty of films and series that squander the potential. It’s still early in, but Hulu’s Into the Dark feels like a more focused Tales From the Crypt and it definitely benefits from the fact that it comes from the horror juggernauts at Blumhouse Television.

There are many different frameworks that are applied to anthology horror, but a direction that feels consistently safe is using holidays as a structure. Films like Holidays have explored this “season horror” angle before to great effect, but Into the Dark truly invests in the idea. The show’s twelve-episode season frames each episode around a different month’s respective holiday. Unsurprisingly, the series kicks off with October and Halloween with its premiere, “The Body”.

One of the most impressive things about “The Body” is that it has a very strong premise to fall back on where a hitman has to dispose of a body on Halloween night. At one point a character says, “Halloween is the closest that people get to admitting that we’re defined by death,” and that’s largely the defining theme of this unusual character study. “The Body” wisely begins with Wilkes’ hit already completed and he’s just left with the disposal aspect of his job. This seems simple enough, especially since it’s Halloween and the public are largely oblivious to unusual behavior, but this expert assassin still has his work cut out for him tonight. He finds himself unexpectedly tagging along to a Halloween party for cover, but it also gets Wilkes mingling with a bunch of contrasting personalities.

This party presents a plausible situation where Wilkes can just leave the corpse of his victim in the middle of the festivities and because it’s Halloween no one even gives it a second glance. It’s great. He literally has blood and evidence on his face all night and isn’t even a little worried about it. Wilkes (Tom Bateman) is quite the character and he’s like if Zack Morris and Patrick Bateman had a lovechild. He’s a bitter hitman who waxes philosophical about the human condition. This is hardly a new idea, but the episode’s self-aware script handles it well. Wilkes even gets called a “British Patrick Bateman” at point.

Furthermore, Wilkes indulges in veiled conversations about how murdering has gotten easier through the years while he maintains a moral superiority over the rest of the party. He conflates his real-life issues into costume simplifications. Wilkes muses that “people think that killing is the hard part…” and that the difficulty for him lies in figuring out the cover stories for how his victims died. It shows that Wilkes is more cerebral than violent. That being said, he’s also pretty damn callous, aggressive, and couldn’t care less about the value of human life.

Wilkes is presented as quite an exaggerated personality that Bateman plays with a certain restrained glee. The character’s cocky and dripping in arrogant toxic masculinity. The script is full of character gems, like the Sardinian casu marzu scene, which is cheese that’s rotted inside out from the stomach acid of maggots. It feels like an excerpt out of a Hannibal episode as opulence tangos with disgust, which is basically the atmosphere that “The Body” wants their audience to get lost in. It’s all about juxtaposing different types of people against each other on a night where no one is as they seem.

During Wilkes’ destructive journey he encounters Maggie (Rebecca Rittenhouse) and an unexpected, “normal” romance blossoms between them through the evening. “The Body” wants its audience to worry if Maggie will be safe or if she’ll become Wilkes’ next victim and a lot of the episode gets by on the tension that this creates. The audience wonders how much Wilkes can take as his deadline ticks closer and if and when he’s going to snap. There’s a strange, reluctant chemistry between the two of them. The dynamic between Wilkes and Maggie definitely opens up a larger discussion on gender roles, which is a big part of the episode, but it’s handled well.

In addition to Maggie, there’s also Jack, the boisterous host of this Halloween party (Ray Santiago of former Ash vs. the Evil Dead fame), and this cast of misfits are actually likable, entertaining characters, which is crucial. All of these “normal” people work really well in contrast to Wilkes, who operates with Terminator-like precision. Maggie, Jack, and company all make a number of stupid, realistic mistakes that keep the story interesting, but aren’t insulting to the characters. There are cute asides on non-sequiturs like how homelessness is a complex issue that also really work and add depth to this cast. Another scene where they have to dispose of a body with acid—something they’re woefully unqualified to do—is another highlight of the film’s sensibilities.

As professional as Wilkes is, his night still gets a little out of hand, not that it slows him down much. There’s a moment where he calmly goes off the rails at the Halloween party that gets pretty broad, but it’s at least consistent with the character and brings up a larger conversation about morality, the purpose of life, egotism versus insanity, and David Attenborough. “The Body” is also smart enough to make its points and move on before it gets a little too derivative and indulgent. There’s a message that this episode wants to get across and it makes it very clearly.

“The Body” often exceeds exceptions because it doesn’t go in the typical direction that seems obvious. This is still a story about a hit man carrying out a job and getting away with murder, but it’s also very much about a shy individual waking up and figuring out that they want to take control in their life by murdering people. The story moves along very naturally, it continues to change and evolve, and it feels long enough to justify what’s going on. Never does the script run out of steam and it’s satisfying to see a 90-minute project of this nature actually necessitate such a runtime. It allows this film to play into many different sub-genres and remain unpredictable and varied. It’s worth noting that “The Body” is based on a short film of the same name, but this full-length installment allows the idea to flourish.

“The Body” boasts a strong story, but the episode also succeeds on a technical level. There’s very slick camerawork throughout the episode that moves with the same confidence as Wilkes. The episode makes a point to begin with a long, unbroken tracking shot that takes in the full effect of Wilkes’ carnage as ornate music swells in the background. “The Body” makes an effort to feel Hitchcockian in the way in which it subtly reveals plot and character details about this professional murderer. The installment additionally develops a personality through creative details, like how the audience never learns the identity of Wilkes’ victim, even though it seems to be huge news (we know that it’s at least not Elijah Wood).

“The Body” ultimately takes a brutal turn and contains a rather dour final act, but one that it earns. That being said, justice is still served. The episode features plenty of deaths, but they’re used more to punctuate actions and for effect, rather than to generate actual scares. The entry gets particularly gruesome towards the end and executes one of the worst deaths involving embalming fluid that you’ll ever see. Director Paul Davis (who writes the script along with Paul Fisher) does an impressive job with the material and it seems like a smart approach for Into the Dark would be to use the series as a launching pad for budding talent in the horror genre rather than a showcase of what the pros can do.

“The Body” marks an encouraging start to this series, but hopefully Into the Dark will still go to even more ambitious, dangerous places with its stories. As it stands, Into the Dark is good fun and a whole season’s worth of stories that are comparable in quality to “The Body” would be a great boon for the horror genre.

If nothing else, this will introduce many to the grossness of casu marzu, because really.

See you all in November!

Hulu’s “Into the Dark: The Body” drops on October 5^th.

The post [TV Review] Debut “Into the Dark” Installment ‘The Body’ Kicks Off a Promising Yearlong Horror Anthology appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“The Box”

Based off of a story by Jack Ketchum and written and directed by Jovanka Vuckovic, the film opens on a subway at Christmas time with the Jacobs family. Susan (Natalie Brown) has spent an active day with her children in the city, and is now corralling them back home. On a crowded train, her son, Danny (Peter DaCunha) spies an older man (Michael Dyson) carrying a large box, wrapped in festive red paper.  Curious, Danny asks what is inside. The man opens the box and tips it forward so that Danny can peer in. Danny becomes immediately subdued, and just after he has taken a peek, the train arrives at its next stop and the man departs.

That evening, as the family gathers for dinner, Danny sits quietly and ignores the food on his plate. When urged by his father, Robert (Jonathan Watton) to eat, he simply states that he is not hungry. This is the beginning of a tragic emptiness that quickly overtakes the family. One by one, they stop eating, giving no reason other than they are not hungry and are uninterested in food. All except for Susan. Always a bit distant from the others, she is left to stand by and watch as her family wastes away.

Before long, Robert and the children are all in the hospital, and pass away, one by one. In the final moments of the film, we see Susan wandering the subway trains, looking for the man with the package, desperate to know the secret that took her family.

On the choice to use “The Box” as the basis for her segment, Jovanka Vukovic says:

“I had written something else that turned out to be too expensive and impossible to do. And I was talking with Lucky McKee one day and he asked if I had ever thought of adapting one of Dallas’ [Jack Ketchum] stories and I remembered “The Box”. I had read it in his collection of stories, “Peaceable Kingdom” in the 90s and I remember it sort of stood out because Jack was known for writing splatter fiction and he had this one little beautiful existential horror story that read like an episode of the Twilight Zone. So I called up Dallas and we talked about it and I talked about how I had to change the gender of the protagonist to make the mandate of our anthology.

“Dallas gave his blessing. He and I talked a lot about  – he was so sweet. He recorded himself reading his own short story and he emailed it to me when it was writing to help me kind of find the spirit of the story…he was such an amazing guy.”

While the film stays close to Ketchum’s original story, Vuckovic’s decision to change the protagonist from the father to the mother caused the story to take on some fascinating new dimensions.

For instance, one of the most interesting aspects of the film adaptation is the domestic role reversal of the parents. Here, Robert takes on the role of the more active, involved caretaker of the family and Susan takes more of a backseat role. He prepares meals, encourages the kids to brush their teeth. He is the first to become really worried about Danny’s behavior. Where Susan acknowledges it as odd, she at first brushes it off as unimportant, suggesting that Danny must be sneaking snacks or that this might be some sort of a stunt. Robert is concerned for Danny immediately, and that concern only grows as time goes on. Susan, instead, becomes a mother who doesn’t really have a connection to motherhood.

“So just by switching the gender, this amazing thing happened. All these new storytelling possibilities emerged. And suddenly it became a  story about ambivalent motherhood, it became a story about all these sometimes negative associations that women have around motherhood and how some women genuinely have resentful feelings, but of course, we’re not allowed to talk about them.

“So then it became much more interesting to me. I met a women around that time who had told me that she had hit 40 and realized that she had married the guy from high school, she had gotten the job that she thought she should get, she had the two children…she did all these things because society and everyone else said that this is what you’re supposed to do. And she gets to 40 and all of a sudden she realizes that she hates all of them…it was so rare to hear someone speak so honestly about her resentment about the choices that she made and the pressure to do those things. And that’s what I brought to the character of Susan. Because she’s unable to make meaningful connections with her family, that’s what saves her in the end, but also tragically looking for the man with the box for the rest of her life.”

Though certainly not an abusive or hateful mother, there is definitely a separation between Susan and the rest of her family. This is shown physically at several points, with Robert sitting in closer proximity to them at the dinner table or on the couch, or just being a more active presence in the children’s lives. Robert is making dinners every night, and Susan is quickly packing lunches and handing out Pop Tarts every morning. She is not uncaring – she just doesn’t have the connection to parenting that he does.

Just before the Christmas scene, Susan has a nightmare where her family is sitting down to Christmas dinner and that Robert, Jennyk and Danny are all eating and enjoying the meal in front of them. The only catch is that the meal is Susan herself. In her dream, she is lying on the dining room table while her family cuts portions of her leg and passes them around, taking heaping forkfuls, smiling in between bites and nourishing themselves to their hearts’ content. All the while, Susan lays on the table with a smile on her face. Outside of the dream, her family may not be eating, but in their own way, they are devouring her. They share whatever this horrible secret is and leave her on the outside to watch.

It is this separation that is a driving force for her near the end. As her family is dying, she rides the train to and from the hospital each day, looking for the man who had started it all. Looking for him and hoping that he might impart the same secret to her that he first imparted to Danny. She desperately hopes that this knowledge will bring her closer to the ones that she lost.

“The Birthday Party”

Directed by Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) and co-written with Roxanne Benjamin, this segment stars Melanie Lynskey as Mary, a woman stretched to her breaking point as she tries to pull off a seventh birthday party for her daughter, Lucy (Sanai Victoria). Just an hour before the party, she heads into her workaholic husband’s study with coffee, intent on him joining in on the festivities, she gets a bit of a shock – her husband, David (Seth Duhame), is sitting at his desk, dead.

Not wanting to ruin her daughter’s birthday or expose her to the shock of her father’s untimely death, Mary ops to try to hide the truth for as long as possible. She moves the body around the house, first stashing it in the study closet to hide it from the nanny and from Lucy, then trying to move it elsewhere.

Soon, there is a knock at the door. When she opens it, a man (played to hilarity by Joe Swanberg) stands before her in a panda suit, rapping a birthday greeting for Lucy. She realizes that she has found the answer to her dilemma and offers him a thousand dollars for the suit. She puts David inside the panda costume and places him at the head of the dining room table. He will be present for Lucy’s birthday and the child will not have her day spoiled by the tragic news of loss. Innocence will be preserved a little longer.

In the final scene, Mary and her dead husband are seated at opposite ends of the table as the door is opened and a group of happy party-goers and their parents parade into the house in slow motion and begin to celebrate. When the nanny brings out the cake and places it in front of Lucy, she accidentally bumps David, causing his corpse to fall forward, face first, onto the table. The costume’s head is then removed, revealing to everyone present a dead body in the midst of their innocent celebration.

The surrealism at play in this piece really makes it work. At its heart, the story is a devastating tale of a family about to be torn apart by loss, but adding in the birthday party setting, the myth of perfection and lengths that Mary will go to in order to protect her child from a horrifying truth add a layer of absurdity that turns a dark premise into a comedic story.

Though Mary will go to any length to protect Lucy from the horrific truth, that doesn’t make it easy. As she sits at the table, still in her nightgown and her hair disheveled, she pours booze into a party cup and takes a much-needed drink, not even trying to hide it from the other parents. Mary takes on her task gladly, but it is a struggle. Early on, soon after discovering David’s corpse, she manages to land under it as it falls to the ground. David lands with his arm around her, and Mary takes a moment to enjoy the quiet – just the two of them together – before glancing at her watch and noticing that she must hurry if she wants everything to be ready for the party. Quiet moments are few, and her daughter’s happiness comes first and foremost.

The film’s final moment of hilarious irony is the fact that Mary’s best and well-meaning efforts to protect her daughter actually go toward creating what is possibly the worst trauma of the child’s life. Her maternal instinct to protect Lucy from the horrible truth of her father’s death backfires in the worst possible way. Not only does Mary’s plan ultimately reveal David’s death, but in doing so, Lucy’s birthday turns from a day of joy to not only the day her father died, but the day that her birthday played as the cruelest joke imaginable, masquerading as a moment of safe innocence before tearing away the curtain to reveal in one fell swoop just how horrific life can be. Even the maternal desire to protect one’s child does not guarantee that by doing so, everything will be okay.

“Don’t Fall”

Written and directed by Roxanne Benjamin, Don’t Fall is, interestingly, the only film in the anthology to diverge from the theme of motherhood. Instead, it offers up a more traditional creature feature with some interesting twists. In this story, a group of friends go camping in the wilderness. We quickly see that Gretchen (Breeda Wool), the timidest member of the group, is clearly outside of her comfort zone. Hesitant and fearful at every turn, she is uncomfortable with her surroundings, questioning the safety and purpose of every move, and suggesting repeatedly that the group needs to proceed with caution.

On their hike, the group discovers a strange painting on the wall of a rock face. It appears very old and seems to have been painted in blood. It depicts several humanoid figures, and one large, horned creature. As she examines the image, Gretchen cuts her hand on a sharp outcropping of rock. After studying the image for a few moments, the group moves on, heading back to the campsite.

That night, Gretchen awakens suddenly – not in the safety of the camper, but in a cave, far from the others. She looks down at her injured hand, and sees black markings – almost infection-like, expanding over her skin from the wound. She turns and sees a huge creature cornering her from the outside of cave, just before it pounces.

Back at the campsite, the others awaken to discover Gretchen’s absence. As they prepare to go out to look for her, they are besieged by a monstrous figure, attacking the camper and blocking any chance of escape. One by one, the members of the group are violently dispatched. As they are able to get a closer look at their attacker, they see that it is none other than Gretchen, undergoing some sort of horrific and violent transformation and becoming something no longer human. Her limbs and fingers have become elongated and frightening, and her spine has become sharply enhanced. After the Gretchen monster scales the face of a cliff and kills the last surviving member of the group, the film cuts to the painting on the rock wall, slowly focusing in on the creature before fading to black.

The dynamics at play in this story are interesting, in that, rather than having our lead female character stalked by the monster, she instead becomes the monster herself. Gretchen, by far the timidest member of this circle of friends, becomes the aggressor of the story. Whereas we might assume that the story would play on her timidity and see her running and hiding, Roxanne Benjamin subverts that expectation and instead creates an aggressive creature from that sense of fear. Gretchen isn’t put in the position of trying to toughen up and be the survivor at the end – she becomes the apex predator.

There is something very primal about this film. Out in the wilderness, surrounded by nothing, the group crosses paths with something very old, which cannot be explained. As they examine the rock painting, one of the friends remarks that it likely predates the time of Native Americans. Whatever it is that they encounter is older than our historical record, and far beyond our knowledge.

The creature design is very effective – giving us something that is clearly not human, but is not 100% monster yet either. We see Gretchen’s transformation and we see the way this creature seems to use what is already in front of it. Gretchen doesn’t turn into something else entirely; rather, the transformation uses the structure and form that she already has and morphs it into something new. That something new is vicious, fast, unrelenting and strong – everything that Gretchen wasn’t when she was human, which makes the transformation a terrifying step in evolution.

“Her Only Living Son”

Karyn Kusama’s contribution to this anthology is an unofficial twist on Rosemary’s Baby. It presupposes that Rosemary (played here by Christina Kirk) was able to escape the coven with the help of Dr. Hill before her baby was born, and that she and the child have been living in hiding ever since. As Andy (Kyle Allen) is about to turn eighteen, Rosemary (now living as Cora), is reflecting on the life that they have had together – a simple, but happy one.

As Andy approaches his eighteenth birthday, however, he begins to display some troubling behavior – killing small animals and attacking fellow students. Before long, Cora sees a version of her son that she has never seen – and one that frightens her. She wakes early in the morning to find Andy in the bathroom. He angrily demands that she go away and give him privacy. Before he can slam the door, Cora notices blood all over the counter and walls. In the morning, Andy angrily storms out of the house, and Cora, frightened and unsure,  plays the dutiful mother and cleans the blood from the bathroom and Andy’s clothes.

On Andy’s eighteenth birthday, he and Cora have a confrontation. The changes he has been going through can no longer be ignored – by either of them. Andy confesses that he often wants to hurt Cora – to rip her apart. He said that he dreams of an empire of misery, and demands that she kneel before him. She does, bowing down before two fierce, animal-like feet.

“I want to go live with Dad now.” Andy declares. Cora rises and takes her son in her arms. She tells him about her pregnancy, how difficult it was and how he had taken every ounce of strength that she had. His father was never there through any of it, and it was always just the two of them – bonded. She tells Andy that this is not his father’s choice, but his own. Andy embraces her back, and tells her that he loves her. The pair hold tightly to each other as something viciously strong and unseen crushes them together, squeezing the life out of them as they vow to stay together. As the sun dawns the next morning, we see the bodies of Cora and Andy, still holding one another, surrounded by a pool of blood.

This film is fascinating for a number of reasons – not the least of which is the fact that it takes a classic horror story and gives its characters an alternate fate. It asks the question, what might have happened had the story progressed differently? What might have happened to Rosemary had Dr. Hill believed her story in the first place? Rather than brushing off her claims as the fantasies of a hysterical woman, what if he had believed and helped her, rather than turning her back over to the very people she was frightened of? That question alone offers an interesting commentary on society and its treatment of women. If Rosemary had been given more trust by the men she was surrounded by, her fate and the fate of her child might have been different.

This story is also told through the lens of a self-sacrificing single parent. When Andy declares that he wants to go and live with his father (and obviously not the actor father that they had run from before his birth), Cora’s speech makes it clear that she has raised and cared for Andy on his own. Even the Devil himself can be an absentee parent, and Cora has spent the last eighteen years caring for and raising their son alone. She has been his sole provider, and they have been each other’s sole support. They rely on one another, and on no one else. As she said, from the time she spent carrying them until now, they are bonded.

Kusama expertly tells this story, leaning primarily on the emotional connection between mother and son and building the suspense from that anchor. Though definitely bloodier than Polanski’s film, there is a good amount of psychological tension woven in and it easily fits as a nice companion piece to the 1968 classic.

The Impact

In celebrating Women in Horror month each year, we hold up the amazing contributions to the genre from women storytellers, but we also acknowledge the fact that the film industry as a whole remains an uneven playing field. The opportunities for women are not the same as for their male counterparts. It was through this inequality that XX was first brought to life.

Says Vuckovic, “I had noticed that all of my women filmmaker friends were being passed over for jobs with all of these horror anthologies coming out. So I was thinking of crowdfunding an all women horror anthology, and then out of the blue, Todd Brown of XYZ films – he’s kind of the secret male feminist behind this project – he called me up and said the same thing – all of our women friends are being passed up – do you want to put our heads together and make something?

“That’s how I got into film in the first place. I was a magazine editor and I noticed how in the horror genre women were unrepresented behind the camera and misrepresented in front of it. And I was so tired of asking people to write women as actual human beings, that I just decided “Fuck it I’m just going to do it myself.” I think there have been enough stories told about men so my goals are to tell stories about women and to help to bring other women into the fold. That’s the whole reason we created ‘XX’ – to create jobs and opportunities where there were none. And that’s really the only way forward – if women help each other.”

XX was a milestone in filmmaking – the first of its kind. While we have obviously seen many directors come together throughout the years to celebrate their love of horror by contributing to an anthology feature, XX was the first to be driven by women filmmakers.

“We were part of this movement that was emerging and I couldn’t believe that it was 2017 and I was introducing this movie and saying that it was the first of its kind. It was really exhilarating to have a horror film be representative of the women in film problem. We were interviewed by Time Magazine and they asked me if this movie was a political statement. We literally made it as a reaction to the lack of opportunities for women in film – yes, it’s a political statement.”

After the success of XX and with the continuing demand from audiences to see more stories from women and better representation of women onscreen, it remains vital that audiences continue to seek out and support work from women filmmakers. For women hoping to break into the film industry, Vuckovic has some helpful advice:

“It’s taken me 10 years to get my first feature made, and the only reason I made it is because I didn’t give up. I just kept going. As demoralizing as it was sometimes, and hopeless as it felt, I just got up and kept going. That’s really the best advice I can give – is to keep going. And network! I belong to this group called Film Fatales – it’s an organization that has chapters all around North America. Women feature film directors that get together once a month and they talk about how they can help each other and get by in this crazy business. You’ll meet other women who might become allies, or creative partners, or producing partners. You’ve got to get out there.”

For those who have yet to see it, XX is available everywhere.

The post Celebrating Women In Horror Month with ‘XX’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

When A Christmas Horror Story was released back in 2015, it made the cut on both Brad’s “Top 10 of 2015” and Trace’s “Top 10 Biggest Surprises of 2015” lists.

“There’s all sorts of craziness in this anthology that delivers on so many different levels; it’s gory, but it’s also goofy, then all of a sudden it’s insanely scary,” Brad wrote. As for Trace, he called it “a very fun movie that knows how ridiculous it is.”

Personally speaking, it was also one of my favorite horror films of 2015.

Directed by Grant Harvey, Steven Hoban, and Brett Sullivan, and written by James Kee, Sarah Larsen, Doug Taylor, and Pascal Trottier, A Christmas Horror Story is set in the fictional town of Bailey Downs, which was one year prior rocked by a holiday tragedy. As radio host Dangerous Dan (William Shatner) guides the town through Christmas Eve, various evil forces wreak havoc on the peaceful community.

The interesting thing about A Christmas Horror Story is that all four of its tales are taking place concurrently, and unlike most anthologies, they’re not separated into individual segments or even presented in the traditional way. The film instead jumps back and forth between stories throughout; it’s jarring and a bit confusing at first, but the unique format eventually ends up working in this particular anthology’s favor.

While it’s not exactly the glue that ties the stories together, Dangerous Dan’s double shift on Christmas Eve is what could be considered the wraparound segment here, as the stories break every so often so that the always hammy William Shatner can crack jokes and do what he does best. The character gets progressively intoxicated as the film goes on, and a drunk Shatner – bathed in a holiday glow – is as delightful as it sounds.

As for the individual segments, we figured we’d rank them for Christmas this year!

1) SANTA VS. ZOMBIE ELVES

It’s common for horror anthologies to have one standout segment, and A Christmas Horror Story‘s best tale centers on Santa Claus himself. Set on the North Pole, Santa’s workshop runs red with blood when his diminutive elves start one-by-one contracting a nasty zombie virus, forcing this particularly badass incarnation of Kris Kringle to wield his staff like a broadsword and lay waste to his foul-mouthed helpers.

There’s just something endlessly entertaining about watching Santa Claus brutally kill zombie elves, and the segment is appropriately gory and indeed a whole lot of fun. The tale of North Pole carnage has the polished look of a film with a much higher budget than this one had, and George Buza is fantastic as the jolly old elf.

And just wait until you see the final battle, which paves the way for a delightfully cruel twist.

2) THE CHRISTMAS CHANGELING 

While Santa’s slaying of undead elves is the most fun segment in A Christmas Horror Story, writer Pascal Trottier’s tale of a family besieged by an evil force is easily the best bit of storytelling on display here. When a couple heads off into the woods to find the perfect Christmas tree, their young son briefly goes missing. And when he returns to mommy’s loving arms, well, he’s not quite the same.

I mentioned earlier that the initially frustrating format of this anthology ultimately works in its favor, and it’s this segment in particular that serves as a testament to that. The short is both suspenseful and genuinely creepy, and the frequent breakaways to other stories only add to that level of suspense. Those breaks allow for the tension to mount, and optimum terror to be squeezed out of the concept.

3) KRAMPUS SPREADS HOLIDAY FEAR

Another story sees a husband dragging his wife and two teenage children to his unsavory aunt’s mansion, where they learn the legend of Krampus. After the son intentionally breaks one of the woman’s valued collectibles, which just so happens to depict Krampus, the family of four is pursued by the monster from Alpine folklore… and he’s intent on dishing out healthy doses of brutal holiday punishment.

Beating Michael Dougherty to the punch, A Christmas Horror Story was one of the first horror movies to really focus on Krampus, and the character design here is pretty badass. The story leaves a little something to be desired, as it’s a pretty straightforward monster-chasing-people affair, though it’s just fun to see the hulking beast kick ass and take names. The ending, in particular, makes this one a real treat.

4) LOCKED IN THE BASEMENT

And that brings us to the anthology’s weakest segment. Set primarily in a school basement, where some pretty nasty things went down the previous Christmas Eve, the most lackluster story centers on a group of amateur reporters who are trying to figure out precisely what happened on that cold winter night. They soon find themselves locked in the basement, and hunted by a sinister paranormal entity.

This one is pretty generic horror movie fodder, and worse yet, it barely even feels like it belongs with the rest of the tales. Whereas the other stories are rich with Christmas imagery and themes, the sore thumb of the bunch is only tenuously connected to the holiday, and it never really develops into anything all that interesting. Thankfully, the film’s overall structure prevents the dull bits from dragging the ship down, as they never last very long.

I don’t think it’s out of line to suggest that the creators of A Christmas Horror Story set out to do for Christmas what Trick ‘r Treat did for Halloween, and I must say, they didn’t come up all that short in that daunting quest. What we have here is an anthology that hits the mark much more often than it misses, the four horror stories coming together to form a highly entertaining whole worthy of annual viewing.

All around, this is holiday horror done right.

The post Ranking the Segments in ‘A Christmas Horror Story’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

And we’re certainly not alone in loving the holiday horror anthology. Earlier this week we launched a poll designed to let you guys pick the best Christmas horror movie of all time, and now a few days into the poll, A Christmas Horror Story is ranking in an impressive sixth place with 147 votes. It’s neck and neck with the 2006 remake of Black Christmas, in fact.

“There’s all sorts of craziness in this anthology that delivers on so many different levels; it’s gory, but it’s also goofy, then all of a sudden it’s insanely scary,” Mr. Disgusting wrote last year. As for Trace Thurman, he called it “a very fun movie that knows how ridiculous it is.”

Pour yourself a glass of egg nog, spike it with some rum, and enjoy!

In A Christmas Horror Story:

It’s the season of joy, peace, and goodwill… unless you live in Bailey Downs. Last Christmas Eve, two teens came to a grisly end in a school basement. Now, one year later, a new set of horrors has come to town. As three friends explore the site of the massacre, a malevolent spirit is determined to keep them there forever. One of the first cops to the scene of the bloody murders has new complications as his seven-year-old son exhibits terrifying and violent behavior. And when a local family seeks reconciliation with an estranged aunt for the wrong reasons, they suddenly find themselves running in terror from Krampus, the demonic anti-Santa Claus. Not even St. Nick is immune to the terror as he fights back against a horde of zombie elves. This is destined to be a holiday no one will ever forget.

Directed by Steven Hoban (Darknet), Grant Harvey (She Made Me Do It) and Brett Sullivan (Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed), the film stars William Shatner and George Buza.

The post Last Year’s Awesome Anthology ‘A Christmas Horror Story’ Just Hit Netflix! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The show stars Paul Schneider as Mike Painter, a child psychologist returning to his hometown with the pretense of writing a book about his traumatic experiences there. However, things soon take a turn for the worst as it becomes apparent that the horrifying television show responsible for a string of tragedies in the town’s past is somehow resurfacing. With the help of his estranged mother, played by Fiona Shaw, Mike attempts to uncover the mystery of Candle Cove as he faces ghosts from his own past, all the while facing suspicion from his childhood friends.

Taking a few cues from Stephen King’s It, the story is told through two timelines. One of them follows Mike’s search for the truth in the present day, while the other tells the story of his childhood alongside his deceased twin brother, Eddie. This duality makes the show extremely suspenseful, as Mike’s backstory is told through gradual increments as we progress through the modern portion of the show. Fortunately, Channel Zero doesn’t spend too much time in the past, only resorting to flashbacks when absolutely necessary, in an effort to keep things fresh.

While there are a few deviations from the source material, it’s understandable that there would have to be some changes and expansions considering the short length of Straub’s original story. Most of these changes end up being benefitial to the show, and also make sure that fans of the creepypasta will still be surprised with the conclusion to these six chapters. In fact, the story’s original twist is actually revealed towards the end of the very first episode! Even so, there are a few pacing problems throughout this short season, though the show never quite gets to the point of being uninteresting.

Nevertheless, the phenomenal cast and well-rounded characters more than make up for these shortcomings. From Marla Painter’s conflicted feelings towards her son to Marina Stephenson Kerr as a creepy elementary school teacher with ulterior motives, every single character feels believable and fully developed. My only real complaint is the lack of focus on Mike’s family life, and his relationship with his wife and child. Their scenes felt a bit rushed, and the season finale could have had a bigger impact if we’d been exposed to some more tender moments in earlier episodes.

Visually, Channel Zero is one of the best-looking horror shows on television this year. The cinematography actually puts a lot of modern horror movies to shame, especially during the lingering shots of the Tooth Child and “Jawbone”. The scenes featuring footage from Candle Cove itself were also extremely well shot, with an underlying feeling of dread beneath an apparently child-friendly exterior. This was certainly helped by a subtle yet effective soundtrack that leaves the viewer in a constant state of unease.

Channel Zero: Candle Cove was certainly one of the best surprises in the horror genre this year, and is further proof that television has come a long way in genre storytelling, many times even surpassing the film industry. While last week’s finale might not have pleased everyone, it did feel like a well-earned and satisfying conclusion to the Candle Cove storyline. In any case, I’ll be looking forward to next year’s Channel Zero: No End House, as it seems like this show has a promising (not to mention terrifying) future ahead.

All of Channel Zero: Candle Cove is available for streaming on SyFy’s official website!

The post [TV Review] Here’s Why You Should Watch “Channel Zero: Candle Cove”! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

6. Coven

If there was one word to describe Coven, it would be “mess.” Coven’s first half is great and it has it’s fun parts (it also has the best cast out of all the seasons), but it’s all too clear that Ryan Murphy and Co. did not plan ahead when writing this season. In fact, it almost seems like they made everything up as they went along. I stand by everything I said in my article from last year. The season arc of the new Supreme’s identity was never all that captivating, character actions lacked motivation and were inconsistent (LaLaurie specifically) and it was loaded with too many storylines while somehow still finding a way to leave some unresolved. It may have had a plethora of hilarious bitchy quips, but it’s still a sloppy series of television and definitely the worst offering from the series yet.

5. Freak Show

A lot of people seem to hate Freak Show. While it certainly lost steam towards the end of the season (as most seasons in American Horror Story are wont to do), it at least had more focus than the season that preceded it and served as a decent send-off for series mainstay Jessica Lange. Freak Show’s biggest crimes were completely wasting Kathy Bates and peaking too early with the Twisty the Clown sub-plot before abruptly killing him off. Dandy, obnoxious as he was, made for a supremely entertaining villain (his comeuppance is one of the season’s highlights). One could say that Freak Show, as a whole, was somewhat forgettable. It wasn’t overtly bad; the whole just never amounted to more than the sum of its parts.

4. Hotel

While I maintain that Lady Gaga did not deserve the Golden Globe she won for Hotel (#JusticeForKirstenDunst, #NoReallySheIsAmazing), she did turn in an impressive performance in the series’s fifth season. Her story line as well as that of Kathy Bates’s Iris and Dennis O’Hare’s Liz Taylor carried the majority of Hotel. Unfortunately everything involving the Ten Commandments Killer and anything involving Chloë Sevigny ‘s character (can Ryan Murphy ever find a decent role for her?) dragged down the season. Angela Bassett’s vampire hunter and Sarah Paulson’s Hypodermic Sally felt like afterthoughts that never got their due, and don’t even get me started on that drill penis monster. Hotel was filled with plenty of good ideas, but had its fair share of bad ones too. If anything, it shows that a 10-episode season could benefit the show by forcing the writers to trim some fat off of the scripts. Speaking of 10-episode seasons, that brings me to…

3. Roanoke

Roanoke was so close to being great. Eschewing American Horror Story‘s penchant for pointless subplots and side characters, Roanoke used its shortest season yet (10 episodes as opposed to the usual 13) to the fullest. It was also the most focused out of all of the seasons. If only it had ended with Episode 9. The first half of the season focused on the show-within-a-show documentary “My Roanoke Nightmare”. Just when that shtick started to get old, the season pulled the rug out from under the audience with a devilishly clever twist in Episode 6. Those next few episodes put the first half of the season in an entirely new light, and it was fun to see the “actors” get to play themselves when put back in the house with the “real” people (Sarah Paulson’s grating Audrey was a highlight for me…she got some of the best lines!). It was gory, funny and (sometimes) actually scary. Too bad it petered out with a limp finale (as American Horror Story is wont to do, save for Asylum). Still, you have to give it credit for being the most focused out of all the seasons. And while it didn’t have a lot of depth or meaning over the course of the season, it sure was a lot of fun!

2. Murder House

Murder House is a strong season of American Horror Story, but the series was still working out a few kinks. It also represents American Horror Story before it really became American Horror Story. Still, Murder House is an effective piece of television that is marred only by a misguided finale that turned the entire season into a joke. It is definitely the most focused out of all the seasons. By concentrating on the Harmon family and relegating all other characters (including Jessica Lange’s Constance Langdon) to supporting roles, it allowed the series to build relationships effectively and naturally. The season just doesn’t have the same impact as Asylum, which is why it ranks just slightly below it.

1. Asylum

Asylum is a near-perfect season of American Horror Story. Had it jettisoned the alien sub-plot, it probably would have been perfect (it admittedly took a kitchen sink approach to the storytelling). Asylum is the only season to truly embody the horror in the show’s title all throughout the season. There is a sense of hopelessness in Asylum (though it still gives its protagonist a happy ending). It also has the most consistent narrative throughout the season when compared to the other four. Characters are well-defined and their actions feel earned. The villains are deliciously evil without becoming caricatures. Still, many people don’t like Asylum, and I’m not exactly sure why. It is hands-down the best season yet.

Does your opinion differ from mine? Let me know in the comments below or feel free to challenge me on Twitter!

The post A Definitive Ranking of the “American Horror Story” Seasons (Now With “Roanoke”!) appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

5. Coven

If there was one word to describe Coven, it would be “mess.” Coven has it’s fun parts, but it’s all too clear that Ryan Murphy and Co. did not plan ahead when writing this season. In fact, it almost seems like they made everything up as they went along. I stand by everything I said in my article from last year. The season arc of the new Supreme’s identity was never all that captivating, character actions lacked motivation and were inconsistent (LaLaurie specifically) and it was loaded with too many storylines yet still left some unresolved. It may have had a plethora of hilarious bitchy quips, but it’s still a sloppy series of television and definitely the worst offering from the series yet.

4. Freak Show

A lot of people seem to hate Freak Show. While it certainly lost steam towards the end of the season (as most seasons in American Horror Story are wont to do), it at least had more focus than the season that preceded it and served as a decent send-off for series mainstay Jessica Lange. Freak Show’s biggest crimes were completely wasting Kathy Bates and peaking too early with the Twisty the Clown sub-plot before abruptly killing him off. Dandy, obnoxious as he was, made for a supremely entertaining villain (his comeuppance is one of the season’s highlights). One could say that Freak Show, as a whole, was somewhat forgettable. It wasn’t overtly bad; the whole just never amounted to more than the sum of its parts.

3. Hotel

While I maintain that Lady Gaga did not deserve the Golden Globe she won for Hotel (#JusticeForKirstenDunst, #NoReallySheIsAmazing), she did turn in an impressive performance in the series’s fifth season. Her story line as well as that of Kathy Bates’s Iris and Dennis O’Hare’s Liz Taylor carried the majority of Hotel. Unfortunately everything involving the Ten Commandments Killer and anything involving Chloë Sevigny ‘s character (can Ryan Murphy ever find a decent role for her?) dragged down the season. Angela Bassett’s vampire hunter and Sarah Paulson’s Hypodermic Sally felt like afterthoughts that never got their due, and don’t even get me started on that drill penis monster. Hotel was filled with plenty of good ideas, but had its fair share of bad ones too. If anything, it shows that a 10-episode season could benefit the show by forcing the writers to trim some fat off of the scripts.

2. Murder House

Murder House is a strong season of American Horror Story, but the series was still working out a few kinks. It also represents American Horror Story before it really became American Horror Story. Still, Murder House is an effective piece of television that is marred only by a misguided finale that turned the entire season into a joke. It is definitely the most focused out of all the seasons. By concentrating on the Harmon family and relegating all other characters (including Jessica Lange’s Constance Langdon) to supporting roles, it allowed the series to build relationships effectively and naturally. The season just doesn’t have the same impact as Asylum, which is why it ranks just slightly below it.

1. Asylum

Asylum is a near-perfect season of American Horror Story. Had it jettisoned the alien sub-plot, it probably would have been perfect (it admittedly took a kitchen sink approach to the storytelling). Asylum is the only season to truly embody the horror in the show’s title all throughout the season. There is a sense of hopelessness in Asylum (though it still gives its protagonist a happy ending). It also has the most consistent narrative throughout the season when compared to the other four. Characters are well-defined and their actions feel earned. The villains are deliciously evil without becoming caricatures. Still, many people don’t like Asylum, and I’m not exactly sure why. It is hands-down the best season yet.

Does your opinion differ from mine? Let me know in the comments below or feel free to challenge me on Twitter!

The post A Definitive Ranking of the “American Horror Story” Seasons appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

In 1950, William Gaines, son of EC’s founder Maxwell Gaines, realized that he and his editor Al Feldstein both sought to create the same type of horror fiction in a post-World War II era when male readers had grown weary of the standard detective comic books that were being released at the time. Readers were demanding something more risqué. They wanted something with lots of gore. Gaines and Feldstein begane to inject elements of horror into their crime stories, and thus paved the way for Tales From the Crypt. No issue was more important than Issue #15 of Crime Patrol, titled “Return From the Grave!” This particular issue, which was the December 1949/January 1950 issue, served as the introduction of the Crypt Keeper, functioning as the host of the story. By the time issue #17 rolled around, Gaines and Feldstein had changed the title of the series from Crime Patrol to The Crypt of Terror. After three issues of that had been published, the series was renamed Tales From the Crypt in the October/November 1950 issue. The series would go on to publish 27 issues before ending in 1955. The final publication was the February/March 1955 Issue (#46).

Of course, Tales From the Crypt wasn’t the only horror series for EC Comics (It doesn’t make a lot of sense does it? That expands to Entertainment Comics Comics.). EC also had The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear to keep up with. Each series had their own host: The Crypt Keeper for Tales, the Vault Keeper for Vault and the Old Witch for Haunt. Each host would invade the other series and trade barbs with the other hosts, while constantly trying to one-up each other. Their sole purpose was to add some levity to juxtapose the sheer horror of the tales being told within the comics.

The Crypt Keeper didn’t always start out as the emaciated skeleton we know today. Hi initial appearance was that of a man in a long robe. He eventually grew more and more grotesque (and more humorous) in the comics before being portrayed by British actor Ralph Richardson in the 1972 film adaptation. It wasn’t until 1989 when HBO premiered their anthology series Tales From the Crypt that the Crypt Keeper took on his now iconic look.

Five Decades of Crypt Keepers

In the mid-50s, horror comics were criticized by authority figures and were thought to have caused delinquency among minors, which was becoming more of a problem in America. As a result, many restrictions were placed on comic books (they were forbidden from depicting zombies, vampires and other monsters), thereby making it nearly impossible to maintain the creative liberties they had once held. Gaines cancelled Tales From the Crypt and EC’s other horror series, releasing a final issue for February/March 1955 (Issue #46).

The world would go without another taste of Tales From the Crypt until 1972, when the aforementioned British film adaptation was released. Two of the five stories included in the film were adapted from Tales From the Crypt while the other three from from Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear. It received moderately positive reviews and was able to earn back its budget of £170,000. The following year saw the release of Vault of Horror, which served as the sequel to Tales From the Crypt. Oddly enough, none of the vignettes in Vault of Horror actually came from the Vault of Horror . Four of the vignettes were adapted from Tales From the Crypt, with one coming from Shock SuspenStories. In a questionable creative decision, the Vault Keeper was left out of the film.

On June 10, 1989, HBO premiered its adaptation of EC’s Tales From the Crypt, simply titled Tales From the Crypt. To fully understand the cultural significance of Tale From the Crypt, one must realize that in 1989 HBO was primarily known as a premium cable channel where you would watch uncensored movies. The channel didn’t have the amazing lineup of television series that it has right now. When Tales From the Crypt premiered, it was the first show put on television that was able to escape the censorship put in place by the network standards and practices and put as much profanity, gore, sex/nudity and drugs as they wanted on the screen. Because of this, it put HBO on the minds of television viewers everywhere. Not everyone was in love with the series, but enough viewers watched it to make it one of HBO’s biggest hits (which makes it even more depressing that it isn’t available on HBO Go due to rights issues). The pedigree of the show’s executive producers is quite impressive, made up of several talented film directors and producers: Richard Donner, Robert Zemeckis, Joel Silver, Walter Hill and David Giler.

In this adaptation of the EC Comics series, the Crypt Keeper was a ghastly skeleton puppet voiced by the superb John Kassir and operated by the late Van Snowden (who did the puppetry for Chucky in the original Child’s Play). Since the series premiered 27 years ago, HBO’s incarnation of the Crypt Keeper has become the definitive version of the character, with Kassir’s memorable high-pitched cackle permanently ingrained in people’s memories. As for the episodes themselves, the stories were taken not just from EC’s Tales From the Crypt, but their entire collection of horror comics (the aforementioned Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, Shock SuspenStories, as well as Crime SuspenStories, and Two-Fisted Tales).

My association with Tales From the Crypt is that of it being a taboo. Tales From the Crypt, Married….With Children and The Simpsons were the main three shows I remember my parents forbidding me from watching as a kid (I was born in 1989). Hell, I wasn’t even allowed to watch the animated series Tales From the Cryptkeeper and that show was made for kids, but I digress. Before I became more seasoned in the horror genre, I had actually thought that the television show was an adaptation of the films Demon Knight and Bordello of Blood (they used to play on Syfy, formerly Sci-Fi Channel, all the time). Silly me.

As many of you may know, a reboot is being planned for TNT under the supervision of M. Night Shyamalan. While that may sound like a terrible idea, anyone who watches Wayward Pines knows that Shyamalan can actually do very good television. Everyone had an initial scare when it was announced that the reboot would not feature the Crypt Keeper, but luckily those worries have been alleviated by Shyamalan himself.

Take some time today to celebrate the 27th anniversary of HBO’s Tales From the Crypt! The DVDs are selling for affordable prices on Amazon so there’s really no excuse not to! Don’t forget to share your memories of the series in the comments below. To read more on the subject check out our own Daniel Kurland’s 15 Best Episodes of the series,a television show he is extremely passionate about, since he so rudely stole writing duties from our own Jess Hicks. Have fun, kiddies!

The post Hello Boils and Ghouls: The Legacy of “Tales From the Crypt” appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Helmed by a smorgasbord of different directors, including but not limited to Kevin Smith, Nicholas McCarthy, Gary Shore, Anthony Scott Burns and Scott Steward, Holidays is comprised of eight independent holiday-themed segments. The stories themselves aren’t narratively connected, but share similar themes of holiday anxiety and fears that loosely tie them together into a larger picture.

The first segment, Valentine’s Day, directed by Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch, starts the film on a strong note, with unique visuals and a sympathetic protagonist that almost make up for a paper-thin revenge plot. The ending, however, comes too soon and doesn’t bring anything new to the table, despite the aforementioned presentation. The next story, St. Patrick’s day, directed by Gary Shore, is much heavier on plot, with a myriad of interesting ideas regarding paganism that eventually fizzle out in a disjointed tale of Irish faith. The ending, however, is probably one of the most memorable scenes in any film this year.

Next comes McCarthy’s Easter, my personal favorite of the bunch, featuring one of the most horrific depictions of Jesus Christ ever put on film. The short actually touches on a few deeper issues concerning children and faith, but the cenobite-like introduction of Jesus is still the best part. Nevertheless, Sarah Adina Smith’s Mother’s Day ends up feeling redundant, sharing similar themes with St. Patrick’s Day, and not having the latter’s creative insanity. It’s not a bad story by any means, it just doesn’t contribute much to Holidays as a coherent movie.

On the other hand, Father’s Day, directed by Anthony Scott Burns, a melancholy tale of loss and reunion, squanders almost all the potential it had to be the film’s greatest short with a rushed ending that doesn’t do any justice to the build-up preceding it, despite good ideas. This is Holiday’s greatest flaw, as almost none of the stories end on a high note.

Kevin Smith’s segment, Hollow Ian, is naturally a love it or hate it experience. If you’re familiar with the director’s style and like it, you’ll probably enjoy the story for what it is, as I did. Otherwise, it will probably fall flat. Smith’s daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, stars here as an unfortunate cam-girl employed by an ill-intentioned ‘director’ played by Epic Meal Time’s Harley Morenstein. It’s another revenge tale, albeit an extremely silly one.

The seventh story, Scott Steward’s Christmas, is a darkly humorous take on the brutality of Christmas shopping and gift-giving, starring Seth Green as a father willing to do anything in order to purchase his son’s promised gift, a mysterious virtual reality headset. Were it not for yet another rushed and slightly nonsensical ending that doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the short, this could have been one of the film’s highlights.

The last segment, Adam Egypt Mortimer’s New Year’s Eve, is easily the worst, resulting in an extremely anticlimactic finale. The short revolves around a serial killer who’s been forced to terminate previous relationships, and uses a dating website to find a new potential girlfriend/victim. The new girl, however, seems to have ulterior motives herself. Keeping in line with Holiday’s apparent curse, the ending again ruins what could have been a decent experience. And just like that, the credits roll.

As a whole, the film seems too consistent for the outright lame endings to be a coincidence, and though it’s possible that there’s some kind of subtle commentary on the nature of holiday expectations, that doesn’t make the movie any more entertaining. Viewing it as a mixed bag, there are many good ideas and intentions spread across the stories, and perhaps it’s worth watching just to contemplate the curious negative aspects. That being said, Holiday is only half as fun as it should have been, making this particular box of chocolates taste disappointingly stale.

The post [Review] ‘Holidays’ is the Epitome of Mixed Bags appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

There was another writer that was going to pen this piece. I had to write it though. I had to! Something had to be done to right thing wrong. So I used the powers of the Internet to find that other writer, learn their schedule, and was quickly able to murder them. Problem solved. And now with the competition out of the picture, the piece was safely mine. Not only that, the feature gained such recognition that I was even invited to a prestigious literary awards ceremony accordingly. However, when I showed up to receive my prize, I was told that it was “Cadaver of the Year,” as my head was swiftly cut off and turned into my trophy.

That’s Tales From the Crypt in a nutshell.

While distilling such a monumental piece of horror is an obvious disservice to it, the fact that it is capable of such simplification is also why it connected to people so well. Tales From the Crypt ran for seven seasons, and two/three films from 1989 to 1996 on HBO, making it one of the first original series for the groundbreaking network. This horror anthology saw unprecedented freedom in its storytelling, using the EC Comics umbrella (Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, The Crypt of Terror, Crime SuspenStories, and more) from the ’50s as its source material. With acclaimed film directors and producers Richard Donner, David Giler, Walter Hill, Joel Silver, and Robert Zemeckis backing the vehicle, A-list actors and directors were also eager to lend their talents to the series.

I have vivid memories of this series from my childhood, setting it up to record on the VCR and then watching it the proceeding morning. My local video store even had a few VHS releases from the series (containing three episodes a piece) that I voraciously checked out as often as I could. While an overabundance of anthology series have seen creation through the years (and there’s a particular boon going on right now for the format), Tales From the Crypt connected in a special way. Its simple, dark fables that showed the tables getting turned on unjust individuals or hapless fools is universally relatable. This deep library of pulpy stories was also the perfect material for Hollywood’s best to let their hair down and just have some goddamn fun (a feeling present in every single episode).

With news of M. Night Shyamalan’s revival of the series on TNT, we thought that we’d explore 15 of the series’ finest episodes, showing the warped morality that made this horror so much fun.

15. “Mournin’ Mess” (Season 3, Episode 10)

Directed by: Manny Coto; Written by: Manny Coto; Original Air Date: July 31, 1991

“Help? Mr. Sweeney, you need burial.”

Steven Weber plays one of the most delightful assholes that you’ll ever come across (and this is a series that specializes in delightful assholes) in this installment. He plays an alcoholic newspaper reporter that stumbles upon the story of a lifetime. As a trend in homeless people murders begins to plague the area, Weber’s apathetic reporter begins to connect the dots towards a local charity. The episode is both written and directed by Manny Coto, who the series is likely utilizing for his Dr. Giggles notoriety, even though now most people might be more familiar with him from his work on 24 and Dexter. His cavalier plotting on those shows is perfect for Tales From the Crypt’s pulpy vibe.

“Mournin’ Mess” might be far from the best episode of Tales From the Crypt, but its twist reveal at the end leaves me with some of the most glee that I’ve ever had with the series. While the show has run through the litany of A-list creatures like vampires, werewolves, and zombies, the monsters here turn out to be ghouls. Yet they treat them like they are just as popular of a threat as anything else. I always thought of ghouls to be more of a general term, so to see the embracing of the human-eating monsters so thoroughly here was always amusing to me. It’s like if a bunch of people ripped off their masks and said, “We’re boogeymen!” It also doesn’t hurt that the name of the charity association, the Grateful Homeless Outcasts and Unwanted Layaways Society, is a acronym for G.H.O.U.L.S., which is so ridiculously stupid that it turns back to brilliant.

14. “Death of Some Salesman” (Season 5, Episode 1)

Directed by: Gilbert Adler; Written by: A.L. Katz and Gilbert Adler; Original Air Date: October 2, 1993

“You take cash!”

Now this has all of the makings of a classic Tales From the Crypt episode. A conniving cemetery plot salesman takes his smart brand of conning to the very wrong house when he disturbs the Brackett household. Rooting for and against this corrupt protagonist (played by Ed Begley Jr., no less) is what Tales From the Crypt is all about. The real showpiece of the episode though is that the three members of the twisted Brackett family are all played by Tim Curry (Curry’s work is so incredible here, it nearly brought the show an Emmy for his performance). Tales From the Crypt mainstays A.L. Katz and Gilbert Adler (who would stay with the franchise all the way up to directing Bordello of Blood) bring this story to life, with lots of welcome backwoods stereotypes being played into and subverted simultaneously. There’s a lot to enjoy here—including the rug pull of an ending—but this one is all about Tim Curry. The sex scene with his repulsive Winona in juxtaposition to the hot scene that starts off the entry is brilliant, too. “Death of Some Salesman” would start off the season’s fifth season strong and act as an example of just what sort of vehicle this show could be for a performer.

13. “Cutting Cards” (Season 2, Episode 3)

Directed by: Walter Hill; Written by: Walter Hill, Mae Woods; Original Air Date: April 21, 1990

“Of course you gotta think. Thinking’s the fun part of it. Thinking about it. Thinking about what’s gonna happen. Listen to that little wheel of fortune click and turn into place when you ease back the hammer…What do you think, Sam? You gonna scream? Yeah, you will.”

A favorite amongst many fans of the series, “Cutting Cards” is just good old fashioned fun. Writer/director Walter Hill delivers a doomed story masquerading as a fun rivalry between two out-of-control gamblers who can’t stand one another. This episode is pure one-upmanship as Lance Henriksen and Kevin Tighe relentlessly ping-pong back and forth with each other. There’s not a ton of depth going on here, just marveling at these two unhealthy obsessives warring off against one another. Their rivalry barrels ahead, too, with the pacing being pretty relentless for a relatively short episode of the series. The performances are so alive here and even if the episode might not be the scariest at times, the tunnel vision on its simple premise becomes terrifying in itself. The ending here is also perfect and one of the better example of how hell truly can be other people.

12. “Dead Right” (Season 2, Episode 1)

Directed by: Howard Deutch; Written by: Andy Wolk; Original Air Date: April 21, 1990

“I loathe you, Charlie. Every day with you is like an eternity in hell!”

Tales From the Crypt would kick off its sophomore season with the Demi Moore-starring, “Dead Right.” Familiar, yet reliable, territory is turned to here as Moore’s character plays an unscrupulous gold digger who’s looking to cash in. She marries a slobbish oaf of a man (played by Jeffrey Tambour, in an impeccable “gross-suit”) after learning from a fortuneteller that she’ll become rich after his inevitable death, and things are off to the races from that point. A pre-fame Moore and Tambour do fantastic jobs here, and there’s such a delight to be taken from not only his total love for her, but also her complete disgust towards him. She literally vomits from giving him a peck on the lips at one point—that’s the sort of monster they’re billing this schlub as. Tambour taps into some genuinely terrifying anger in this episode, and it’s a little surprising that director Howard Deutch primarily works within comedy. With all of the supernatural terror that Tales From the Crypt would get into, there’s also something to be said for the completely human action of having a psychotic break over matters of the heart, too. The ending here is a welcome, intelligent twist that turns the tables in the appropriate manner. Vorna’s always right, after all.

11. Collection Completed (Season 1, Episode 6)

Directed by: Mary Lambert; Written by: Whitney Brown, Randolph Davis, and Battle Davis; Original Air Date: June 28, 1989

“I believe in using chloroform. Doesn’t shock the system, muscles don’t tense up, and they pull away from the bones like butter.”

If “Dead Right” is all about the horrors of marrying someone that you cannot stomach, then “Collection Completed” is about the dangers of realizing that your better half can just as easily turn into your worst enemy. A simple, innocuous story follows an elderly couple (M Emmett Walsh and Audra Lindley) settling into retirement life together. What should be a peaceful final chapter to their lives together sees the two of them driving each other crazy, with the main contention point being the unreasonable number of pets that have been brought into the home. With this still being the show’s first season, the places that the series would go to were still a mystery and there was hardly a real formula in place yet. This seems like a riff on All in the Family or something before the very, very dark turn is taken that rides the episode out. The final shot of the episode is one of my absolute favorites in all of Crypt history. The taxidermied version of the husband (with the make-up effects done by Thomas and Bari Burman, the people responsible for Sloth from The Goonies) is absolutely horrendous, and won’t be leaving your memory any time soon.

10. Top Billing (Season 3, Episode 5)

Directed by: Todd Holland; Written by: Myles Berkowitz; Original Air Date: June 26, 1991

“Perhaps I was wrong about the young man. He does have the look, after all.”

Something that Tales From the Crypt would repeatedly perfect was the art of casting celebrities in roles that felt tailor-made for their public personas. “Top Billing” is such an instance where Saturday Night Live’s Jon Lovitz is cast as a struggling actor hungry for his dream role in Hamlet. This casting decision feels more than a little influenced by Lovitz’ recurring SNL character, the Master Thespian, but surprisingly Lovitz’ portrayal of Barry doesn’t go for laughs but rather soul-crushing sorrow (the trajectory that Lovitz’ career has taken also adds some further poignancy to this depressing entry). Lovitz’ struggle is very real here, and rather than the self-entitled sycophants that fuel most Tales From the Crypt episodes, Barry feels like he’s being especially tested by the world. His decision to ultimately murder the actor that’s poised to “steal away” his role seems like the natural progression of this frustrated man rather than a string of shitty behavior that caught up with him. The final moments of “Top Billing” are some of Tales From the Crypt’s most spiteful. Not only is Barry’s winning of his role not what he expected (turns out he wasn’t auditioning for Hamlet, but rather Yorick—you know, the skull), his remains are unceremoniously thrown out a window into the streets. Many Tales From the Crypt episodes have seen a conclusion where the protagonist is at rock bottom, but this is the only one where the loser’s face is eaten by a dog, being recognized as a piece of trash.

Plus, it’s got the Cryptkeeper reciting iambic pentameter in the beginning, so how can you pass that up?

9. Yellow (Season 3, Episode 14)

Directed by: Robert Zemeckis; Written by: Gilbert Adler and A.L. Katz & Jim Thomas and John Thomas; Original Air Date: August 28, 1991

“To Martin – Let Courage Be Thy Name. Love, Dad.”

“Yellow” is without a doubt Tales From the Crypt at its most cinematic. Right from its incredibly ornate, expensive tracking shot that opens up the episode, this installment feels a little out of the norm. The episode chronicles Kirk Douglas and his son, Eric, portraying a father and son in the military, in a war story about courage, honor, and being able to perform soldierly duties set at the height of the first World War. The piece is also obviously riffing on Paths of Glory, adding a little more gravitas to Kirk Douglas’ performance (which also netted him an Emmy nomination here), too. “Yellow” feels tonally askew from the rest of the series, however many recognize it as one of the series’ stronger entries. It also likely doesn’t hurt that Zemeckis is the one in the director’s chair again for the installment.

If at any moment the episode sticks out (such as its 40 minute runtime, making it the longest episode in the series), it’s likely due to the fact that it was originally a third of Two-Fisted Tales, a pilot for a spin-off that aired on the USA network only once (Season four’s “Showdown” and “King of the Road” were the other two pieces). The pilot was still focusing on publications from the EC Comics line, but all with a war theme in place (and William Sadler hosting the joint as a phantom-like sharp-shooter, which would have been awesome). “Yellow” might not be the most surprising Tales From the Crypt episode, but it’s a very powerful one that’s bleakly to the point when it comes to its ending. Sometimes the bluntness of something can be the scariest thing of all.

8. Split Personality (Season 4, Episode 11)

Directed by: Joel Silver; Written by: Fred Dekker; Original Air Date: August 26, 1992

“Two’s the magic number.”

Shifting gears entirely, “Split Personality” is a (relatively) light-hearted romp that has Joe Pesci playing a deliciously slimy con man. Pesci is pretty perfectly cast here (although do yourself a favor and picture the casting choices for this and “Yellow” being reversed). He’s given many opportunities to lose his temper, having yelling fits, and act misogynistic (not to mention a wonderful/terrible striptease to “I’m Too Sexy”). The only thing that Pesci’s character seems to like more than money, is the number two (it’s weird…I know), and so wouldn’t you know it that he stumbles upon two gorgeous twins that are too eager to make his acquaintance. The episode is producer extraordinaire Joel Silver’s lone directing credit (and what a statement to be making in doing so), with a script by the always campily reliable Fred Dekker of House, Night of the Creeps, and Monster Squad fame.

What I love so much about this episode is the sheer greed of Pesci’s character. He could easily live happily ever after with one of these women, but he tries to pull off the absolutely outrageous con of pretending to have a twin of his own and marry both women. It’s such a ridiculous plan that’s only topped by the twins’ reaction to finding out the truth. The final image here is some truly messed up stuff that makes the “innocent” material before it all the more impactful.

7. Carrion Death (Season 3, Episode 2)

Directed by: Stephen E. de Souza; Written by: Stephen E. de Souza; Original Air Date: June 15, 1991

“All right. It’s been nice traveling with you cop, but this is where we go our separate ways. Believe me, this is going to hurt you more than it hurts me.”

This episode is just so much fun. Like it’s a really solid, suspenseful piece of television, even if you don’t have an unreasonable obsession with Kyle MacLachlan. Shifting the horror to a blistering desert, “Carrion Death” acts as a welcome homage to westerns like The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, and Sergio Leone in general, with the slight genre change paying off. Kyle MacLachlan plays bank robber/serial killer, Earl Raymond Diggs, who the law is on hot pursuit of as the criminal races towards the safety of the Mexican border. MacLachlan is an interesting casting choice here, and using him against type works reasonably well. Making him simply a bank robber would have been enough too, but the episode’s insistence on making him a worse person (he’s frequently monologuing about his murders) is a nice hyperbolized touch here. Kind of brilliantly, rather than the entire episode being a game of wits between Diggs and the law, Diggs deals with the police officer fairly early on. Only before he manages to do him in, the cop swallows the key to the handcuffs that are binding the two of them together. Now Diggs is stuck dragging dead weight through the aimless, sweltering heat, with no hope on the horizon. This all leads to some great “desert madness” rantings courtesy of Diggs to the vultures that continually follow him along.

The episode is written and directed by Stephen E. de Souza (acting as a reunion of sorts for The Flintstones screenwriter and his Mr. Slate casting choice), who had a legitimate career as a legendary action scribe, penning the scripts for things like Commando, The Running Man, and a little art house film known as Die Hard, and he takes to this hard-boiled thriller script like gangbusters. De Souza’s script is full of ingenious moments, like the ways in which Diggs uses the cop’s corpse as some sort of shelter from the elements at times, or even the makeshift blade he forges out of the cop’s sharpened badge (although the results there are hardly in Diggs’ favor). “Carrion Death” never lets up and is satisfying right up to its final, over-the-top moments.

It also effortlessly nails what the last episode of True Detective’s second season was trying to do with Vince Vaughn’s character. So there’s that, too.

6. Television Terror (Season 2, Episode 16)

Directed by: Charlie Picerni; Written by: Randall Johnson and G.J. Pruss; Original Air Date: July 17, 1990

“Rumors of ghosts, voices in the night weird lights and sound. Nonsense? Or is this modern day chamber of horrors truly haunted? Tonight, we’ll find out.”

Haunted houses. We’re getting into the staples of the genre here, and when Tales From the Crypt digs into the classics, it doesn’t hold back. “Television Terror” is a pleasing mash-up that wears its ‘90sness on its sleeve. Radio shock jock from the ‘80s and Jerry Springer prototype, Robert Morton Jr., headlines the entry playing a TV personality that’s not too far from home for him. Horton Rivers (Robert Morton Jr.) wants to investigate a house that a bunch of murders happened in five years ago and see if its alleged “haunted” status has any truth to it. Take a wild guess if it does? What’s kind of cool here is that the live filming technique that the episode employs ends up becoming one of the first examples of found footage horror, which is kind of incredible. In that sense, the episode fits the mold of traditional found footage horror quite effectively. Things take some time to get moving, but once they do the filming style ramps everything up to great effect. Not only is “Television Terror” one of the grislier installments of the series, it’s also commonly seen as one of its scarier episodes, hence its higher position here.

5. The Ventriloquist’s Dummy (Season 2, Episode 10)

Directed by: Richard Donner; Written by: Frank Darabont; Original Air Date: June 5, 1990

“I’m splitting up the act!”

 From one trope to another, the creepy ventriloquist’s dummy is another well that the series would draw from to great success. I’ve always thought the ventriloquist’s dummy was an effectively creepy tool (this episode gives Anthony Hopkins’ Magic a run for its money, which is saying something), but there’s a lot to get excited about in this episode beyond that. Bobcat Goldthwait and Don Rickles lead the cast, for instance, and both deliver great performances. There’s a supreme empathy underlying the whole entry as you truly feel for Goldthwait’s Billy Goldman. Then, on top of it all you’ve got Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon, Superman) directing, and the always reliable Frank Darabont (Nightmare on Elm Street 3, The Mist, The Walking Dead) writing the episode. “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy” does an expert job at tapping into the struggles of being a performer, and seeing the two comedy heavyweights playing this seriously has a lot more value to it. I’ve said this for a lot of these episodes (this is a look at the finest, after all), but the twist that goes down here is legendary, with the puppetry and effect work doing some phenomenal work here. This creature has such a distinct look to him. Oh, and the full-on Sam Raimi homage that goes down once Mr. Ingels’ brother is “let loose” is an example of how good a director Donner is, and the amount of unbridled fun that this show will allow itself to have.

4. Easel Kill Ya (Season 3, Episode 8)

Directed by: John Harrison; Written by: Larry Wilson; Original Air Date: July 17, 1991

“They lack one thing, one supremely important thing: the artist’s touch his ability to interpret the horror of the world through the darkness of his own soul. You have some of that darkness, don’t you Jack?”

 “Easel Kill Ya” is just fantastic. It’s Tales From the Crypt firing on all cylinders, and there’s such a perfect logic to everything here that gives its ending (which kicks ass) an extra oomph. It seriously feels like this is what a Larry David episode of Tales From the Crypt would look like, with how all of these events dovetail together so horrifically by the time that the credits roll. You could seriously cue up the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme over the ending and it wouldn’t seem out of place. The episode’s focus is on Jack Craig, an unsuccessful, addict of a painter who is tired of watching opportunities pass him by.

Craig is played by a largely unknown Tim Roth (this was pre-Reservoir Dogs), who does a wonderful pained, moody performance through all of this. Craig eventually catches a break in the form of William Atherton’s foreboding art dealer who is a collector of “morbid art.” When Jack realizes he has an incredible knack for painting the deceased, it’s not long until he’s taking matters into his own hands in order to keep the inspiration and pay checks flowing. This of course isn’t all that different from A Bucket of Blood, the premier film on artists killing for inspiration, but this actually came prior to the Corman film, so there.

The director, John Harrison in no stranger of anthologies by any means, helming a number of Tales From the Darkside entries (let alone, the movie), and the episode’s writer, Larry Wilson, would end up writing five Tales From the Crypt scripts by the end of his tenure, making him well versed in the medium, too (while also having a hand in Beetlejuice’s script, which can’t be overlooked). Watching Craig try to clean up his act as the world continues to push him into darkness packs a large impact that helps the narrative greatly. As mentioned earlier, “Easel Kill Ya’s” ending is one of the most brutal reversals that the show has ever pulled. It’s a terribly dark note to go out on, and it really leaves you wondering what will become of Roth’s Jack Craig now that he even has less to live for.

3. Abra Cadaver (Season 3, Episode 4)

Directed by: Stephen Hopkins; Written by: Jim Birge; Original Air Date: June 19, 1991

“Martin was wrong about one thing, the sense of touch isn’t the first thing to go… it’s the last!”

 A lot of people’s favorite episode, and one that causes me to cringe simply thinking about its horrid subject matter, “Abra Cadaver” is a real gem. Directed by (the underrated) Predator 2’s Stephen Hopkins, he’s injecting flair all over this piece, whether it’s through the black-and-white prologue, or the heavy stylistic device that the episode hinges itself on. See, “Abra Cadaver” is about the Fairbanks brothers (Beau Bridges and Tony Goldwyn), who are both doctors working on unlocking the secrets of resurrection (they’ve even got Frank Herbert’s glowing green Re-Animator serum to boot, apparently). Part of the fun here is watching how the two archetypal brothers essentially switch roles after the “incident” has taken place, giving each actor something meaty to chew on (when we’re not focusing on the ridiculous pot smoking Haitian morgue worker). As is the constant rug pulling that’s done to the audience through all of this. Seriously, the episode basically conditions you to not trust that anyone is actually dead until we’ve seen them flat line like five times in a row.

The real reason to get excited about “Abra Cadaver” though is that the whole thing nearly plays out through first-person perspective, as Dr. Carl Fairbanks becomes “trapped” in his “dead” body while we hear his interior monologue during the whole thing. It’s a brilliant conceit that’s used very well here and only makes this idea all the more frightening, and surprisingly the episode thinks of a number of fun variations on the structure, too. In fact, it’s an experiment that would work so well for the series that Robert Zemeckis would more or less remake the episode (or render it irrelevant, your call) for the ambitious sixth season premiere, “You, Murderer.”

“You, Murderer” succeeds in some areas where “Abra Cadaver” doesn’t, but the real difference between the two pieces is that “You, Murderer” is more interested in having silly, fun with this idea, whereas “Abra Cadaver” purely wants to make you uncomfortable. This entry can be very hard to watch at times, and is constantly reminding you of how fucking horrible of a situation that this would be to be caught in. Moments like Carl’s body being drained, hung up on meat hooks, or the blood that drips down his skull (and over the camera/POV) as he’s peeled open all twist your stomach in different ways. The ending might be a little reductive after everything that’s been gone through, but it by no means negates what’s gone on before it.

Watch this episode before going in for surgery. I just dare you to.

2. People Who Lives in Brass Hearses (Season 5, Episode 5)

Directed by: Russell Mulcahy; Written by: Scott Nimerfro; Original Air Date: October 13, 1993

“Brotherhood is kinda like a bond, isn’t it? The kind that you can’t easily walk away from.”

This episode might not end up on all of the “Best Of” lists, but it has an undeniable weirdness to it that it embraces from the start and never lets up. A familiar road for the series, some two-bit, get-rich-quickers are our lens here, as Bill Paxton and Brad Dourif do their best Of Mice and Men impressions. They star as two dim-witted, butter obsessed (a peculiar detail that’s never elaborated on, rather than being quirky for quirky’s sake, yet it works) schemers that set their sights on a kindly ice cream man because that’s obviously where all the big scores lie. The episode’s director, Russell Mulcahy earned the nickname “Bucket of Blood” on the Tales From the Crypt set due to just how violent and gratuitous this installment is. Faces are getting blown up with such ferocity that you’d think this was some screen test for The Hateful Eight or something. Add to the fact that the episode saw scripting by Scott Nimerfro, one of Hannibal’s head honchos, and it’s easy to see how this becomes such a viscera-flinging adventure.

As the DeLuca brothers get closer to their ill-gotten gains, the episode heads towards one of the series’ endings that I remember the most vividly and I’m sure will permanently be burned in my brain. Or at least flash through my mind’s eye whenever I hear ice cream truck music flitting by. I remember renting a VHS of this episode repeatedly, and it was the sort of horror magic that woke up my young brain and showed me what this show was really capable of. “People Who Live In Brass Hearses” is human, weird, terrifying, and unbelievable in the way that only Tales From the Crypt is capable of. Now are you sure you still want to investigate that ice cream truck that always smells bad?

1. The New Arrival (Season 4, Episode 7)

Directed by: Peter Medak; Written by: Ron Finley; Original Air Date: July 25, 1992

“Ignore it…Ignore it…Ignore it.”

This might not only be the best Tales From the Crypt episode in my opinion, but it’s a deeply unsettling piece of entertainment in general, whether it’s in the obvious ways that it paints an uncomfortable home life for Nora (a perfectly cast Zelda Rubenstein from the Poltergeist films) and her daughter, Felicity, or the more subtle, subliminal touches that get under your skin and start making your “madness meter” go off uncontrollably. “The New Arrival” tells the story of a self-help radio psychiatrist (think if Frasier Crane moved from Boston to New York, instead of Seattle) that is slowly losing his luster and in need of some ratings magic stat (his book, The Art of Ignoring Your Child isn’t the best-seller that it once was). These desperate times lead the good doctor Lothar and his crew to do a house call with a very particular “bad girl” who is in need of rehabilitation.

That alone is an appealing setup, and the number of angles that the episode could go in accordingly hold a lot of potential, yet “The New Arrival” comfortably finds the most messed up idea and runs with it. Felicity is creepy as sin to begin with (as is her bedroom, goodness), due to the weird porcelain mask that she runs around in. Seriously, less is more here, and when is something like this not the most terrifying thing? Felicity is only the tip of the iceberg here, as this slowly turns into a Rube Goldberg machine of murder as people get picked off one by one. Renegade ceiling fans, electrified doorknobs, and tight, dark hallways that are lined with razor blades aren’t just scary situations to be stuck in, they’re outright insane, and just seeing where this episode decides to go is where a lot of the fun lies. It’s easy to see how director Medak could become the man behind the camera that would work on such gorgeous television series as Carnivale, The Wire, and Breaking Bad.

Ultimately, Lothar decides that all of this has been a complicated ruse, with Felicity merely being a disassociated persona of Nora as she runs around in a costume. Surprise, surprise. It’s not. And the truth that the episode leaves you with, combined with Lothar’s grim fate, is a fantastic conclusion that manages to make Felicity even scarier than when she’s running around in that mask. Seriously, the end here is just a nightmare, and to think of this merely being part of a cycle that will never end is the scariest thing of all.

We’ll see what TNT and Shyamalan bring to the table here, and in spite of my heavy reservations, I’d like to remain optimistic. He’s going to have an uphill battle with his new Cryptkeeper character (the original is owned by HBO), but that’s not to say he couldn’t wind up with something interesting. It should be curious to see if any of the episodes highlighted here will see new life and exploration through the new series. There’s never been more incredible horror talent out there at the moment (there have been two anthology films with segments for every letter in the alphabet), and it could be fascinating to see what someone like Ti West would do with “The New Arrival” or Oren Peli with “Television Terror.”

Well you know what they say, boils and ghouls, be scareful what you wish for, it just might come boo!

More Macabre Madness For You Boils and Ghouls: “The Man Who Was Death” (Season 1, Episode 1), “And All Through the House” (Season 1, Episode 2), “Dig That Cat…He’s Real Gone” (Season 1, Episode 3), “For Cryin’ Out Loud” (Season 2, Episode 8), “Werewolf Concerto” (Season 4, Episode 13), “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Season 6, Episode 1)

The post The Dark Morality of “Tales From the Crypt” and Its 15 Best Episodes appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“Losing control can be a terrifying thing. But then again, it’s nothing to lose REM sleep over. At least, that’s what the man in my next playback keeps telling me, and he should know. I calibrated this off-kilter ode to insomnia under the name, ‘Dream of Doom’”

It’s hard to deny that Tales From the Crypt was a cultural phenomenon. Even if you had never seen the show before, you were at least aware of the property in some sense, whether it was its comic-based source material, or even its pun-loving host, the Cryptkeeper. With the footprint that this audacious anthology left on the television landscape, you would think that a sister series that embraced sci-fi rather than horror would be a natural hit. Perversions of Science would debut in 1997, a year after the conclusion of Tales From the Crypt. The public was assumingly hungry for more pulpy anthology storytelling, with Perversions swooping in nicely to fill the void, but in spite of this, the series would see cancellation within the same year. Perversions of Science is certainly an anomalistic oddball of a show, but its faults almost make the series a more fascinating case study. The fact that it existed for such a short time, and is virtually on nobody’s radar in spite of the pedigree that it comes from makes it all the more interesting, too. By all reasoning Perversions of Science should have been a huge success, and we’ll break down the reasons why this footnote is deserving of a second glance.

With Tales From the Crypt providing a winning formula for HBO for seven years, it isn’t surprising that they approached the same cabal of producers (Robert Zemeckis, Walter Hill, Gilbert Adler, A.L. Katz, Joel Silver…) for another stab at the format. In fact, this wasn’t the first time that a spinoff of the anthology series was explored. In the middle of Tales From the Crypt’s run, a war and action-based series titled, Two-Fisted Tales, still based on the EC Comics line, had a pilot produced but never ended up going anywhere (the episodes were even worked in Tales From the Crypt’s third and fourth seasons). While a war anthology might seem limiting, the topic of science fiction is certainly more universal and it was enough for HBO to get excited. Thus, Perversions of Science was born.

It’s kind of crazy to see just how similar Perversions of Science is to Tales From the Crypt, with the spinoff directly trying to invite the comparison. The series starts off with a gorgeous Möbius strip of an intro sequence that acts as even better walking guide to your destination than your descent into the crypt in Tales. The whole thing is paired with a deeply fun Danny Elfman orchestration that’s worth checking out the series for alone (and feels really reminiscent of his work on Ed Wood for what it’s worth). This impressive introduction is even concluded with the series’ own de facto Cryptkeeper, a sexy female robot by the name of Chrome. Whereas the Cryptkeeper would make puns based around death and the macabre, Chrome’s aim is all about sexual innuendo and pushing your buttons. Each story even begins from a projection stemming from her breast when she pushes her areola (I swear to God). HBO kept up the same airing strategy that they did for Tales From the Crypt as well, premiering the series as a three-episode event. There was no lack of fanfare going on.

Beyond all of the obvious visual allusions to the series’ predecessor, the show’s stories were still all originating from EC Comics (the Weird Science line, to be precise, but using that title for the series would have invited an unwanted association with the John Hughes comedy of the same name). On top of that, Perversions of Science also had an assemblage of directing, writing, and acting talent comparable to Crypt’s A-list talent. In spite of all of this though, the series mostly fell on deaf ears. It certainly was no fault of HBO and lack of exposure though, with the network giving the series a huge marketing push, and advertising choicely in Playboy and comics, where the ideal market would be looking.

Perversions of Science may fail to tap into the heights that Tales From the Crypt did during its first season (lest we forget that that remarkable year of television had the gems “The Man Who Was Death”, “And All Through the House”, and “Collection Completed”), but it does hit some pretty excellent highs that warrant the series a better reputation than it currently has. The ten-episode season kicks off with a Walter Hill directed entry called, “Dream of Doom” that’s basically Inception a decade before Christopher Nolan would go there. The episode sees Keith Carradine playing a beleaguered professor who’s unable to fully wake up from his dreams. Every time that he tries to escape, he winds up in another dream, increasingly losing touch with reality in the process. It’s even kind of nuts that the installment is scripted by Nolan’s constant confidant, David Goyer, and getting to see him playing around with this complicated concept so long ago. It’s a strong, unnerving premiere episode that director Hill doesn’t squander, and it ultimately ends up feeling more like Groundhog Day than Inception, but it still works.

“Anatomy Lesson” deals with a young guy with homicidal tendencies that’s continually plagued by visions of a bearded man (an on-point Jeff Fahey) that he’s been having since his childhood. The more psychological entry directed by Gilbert Adler is appropriately dark like most of his work, using a succinct script by Kevin Rock (writer of installments in the Warlock and The Howling franchises) to sell the material. “Boxed In” is the polar opposite tonally, presenting a sex-fueled slapstick farce staring (and directed by) William Shatner. While much of “Boxed In” just feels like an excuse to get Shatner back on the bridge of a spaceship, the segment is one of the weirder stories as Shatner struggles with his morality as he weighs the pros and cons of having sex with a sex android. These might have amounted to mediocre Tales episodes, but they do a good job at showing the varied scope of the “sci-fi” that the series would put under its microscope. Clearly this wouldn’t be all aliens and space fodder. These three episodes that made up the premiere night couldn’t offer up a more eclectic taste.

“The Exile”, much like “Dream of Doom” is another of the more worthwhile episodes of the series, largely due to its precise direction (courtesy of William Malone of The House on Haunted Hill remake) and cast (Ron Perlman and Jeffrey Comb, who is off leash here and gets to deliver delicious lines like, “That makes the tip of my dick cry”). The story is set against a World War II backdrop with a wartime scientist failing the rehabilitation process and being exiled from the world as he atones. There’s a very A Clockwork Orange mentality to the episode, as well as a certain socialmindedness that would so often accompany The Twilight Zone.

Even if several of Perversions of Science’s episodes would fail to connect with audiences in the same way that Tales From the Crypt would, this poignant social commentary was present in many of the entries, like “Given the Heir” (a woman achieves perfection in her body, only to be sent into the past and become an object of gaze), “Snap Ending” (a complicated look at sexuality as a mixed gender species tries to understand a new organism), and the season/series finale, “The People’s Choice” (a story on consumerism steeped in patriotism, as feuding robot housekeepers become the norm). This sort of reflection and dissection of society at large was an element of storytelling that was often absent from Tales From the Crypt, and in this sense Perversions did feel a little closer to Rod Serling’s classic series. Normally this wouldn’t be a bad thing, but when you’re towing the line between being jokey and putting on little silly spectacles, inviting this comparison can sometimes only highlight what you’re not.

Other episodes saw topics like moving between alternate realities to find loved ones that are dead in our timeline (something Fringe would invest heavily in years later), like in “Planely Possible” by Tales mainstay Russell Mulcahy and Peter Atkins (Hellraiser and Wishmaster series), or the concept of alien colonization and covert hybridization with the human race as a means to infiltrate the species, which sees exploration in “Ultimate Weapon.”

These all amount to very entertaining distractions, but the series’ episode “Panic” directed by the prolific Tobe Hooper and written by the selective Andrew Kevin Walker (writer of the incredible Se7en screenplay) is one of my favorite anthology shorts of all time. It might be campy as hell at certain points, but if this was a Tales From the Crypt episode, it would still rank up there with me amongst the best of them, mainly for the incredible twists that this economical piece of television pulls out at you. “Panic” is set on Halloween night in 1938, during the broadcast of Orson Welles’ infamous “War of the Worlds” prank (or rather Carson Walls, an approximate for story’s sake). Two friends (Jason Lee and Jamie Kennedy, no less) are having a nonchalant time at a Halloween party when suddenly the alien invasion news breaks out and everything changes.

I really don’t want to spoil the direction that this episode goes in, but it takes the premise of the “War of the Worlds” broadcast and subverts it with such a brilliant idea that it just fills me with such glee. Not only is this initial twist one of the smarter premises that I’ve seen used for an anthology show, but the ultimate twist that wraps up the episode is so in-your-face audacious, you just have to get on board with it. “Panic” is a bewildering experiment from top to bottom that never stops you from guessing what’s going on. This episode is deserving of some sort of elevation above its discarded series’ status. Perversions of Science might be a very mixed bag, but “Panic” is the series at its absolute best and won’t disappoint.

But on the topic of disappointment, it’s worth examining just why this series did crash and burn so unceremoniously. It’s possible that the final, British produced season of Tales From the Crypt left a bad taste in the audience’s mouth and rather than wanting more of this sort of thing, they were just burnt out. It’s also possible that sci-fi tends to have less of a success rate than horror, especially with how recent programming has been dictating. Not only is horror huge with results at the moment, but anthology horror is doing even better. Interestingly enough, Perversions of Science’s cancellation wasn’t because of it receiving tiny numbers due to some juggernaut of a competition. Granted, the series didn’t perform as well as Tales From the Crypt had, but it maintained solid numbers in its spot. What was more of an issue was the premiere of HBO mega-hit, Oz, also in ’97, and when it came to the time of cleaning slate at the end of the year it was clear which of the two wasn’t going anywhere.

With the complete lack of reputation that this series has, it almost feels more appropriate that this be the series that Shyamalan should revive for TNT. There’s considerably less stakes on something like this, you get around the issue of not having the rights to HBO’s Cryptkeeper, you still get the library of EC Comics at your disposal, and arguably Shyamalan has more a connection to science fiction than horror. The director could essentially create the same series, but under a title that doesn’t sully Tales From the Crypt’s name any, and as a result Perversions of Science gets a nice little publicity bump as well.

Or perhaps the series is just meant to always lie in obscurity. It did tell us that the whole universe all rests inside a piece of popcorn, after all.

The entirety of Perversions of Science is available on YouTube. God bless America.

The post That Time When ‘Tales From the Crypt’ Had an Unsuccessful Sci-Fi Spinoff Hosted By a Sexy Robot! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Home alone at night, a woman (Andrea Monier) finds a VHS tape on her doorstep that contains a series of eight films. Unbeknownst to her, a murderer known as Trickster (Damien Monier) is using the tape to find his next victims.

First up is “Jack Attack”, directed by Bryan Norton and Antonio Padovan. A boy named Jack (Tyler Rossell) and his babysitter, Elizabeth (Helen Rogers), eat roasted pumpkin seeds after carving a Jack-O-Lantern. Unfortunately for them, the pumpkin didn’t take too kindly to being carved up, and exacts revenge. At eight minutes, there’s not a lot to this short, save for the gory special effects. I did like Jack’s initial reaction at the pumpkin innards being used as a nice foreshadowing of what’s coming.

Following that is “The Last Halloween”, directed by Marc Roussel. In a post-apocalyptic world, a trio of trick ‘r treaters torment Jack (Ron Basch) and his wife Kate (Emily Alatalo). Despite the nice makeup effects, this one was boring. It wasn’t so much a self-contained story as it was a setup for the eventual payoff. Also to note that at this point, the theme of Halloween-centred stories gets put on the back burner.

The same can be said of Ryan Patch’s “The Offering”, where a sacrifice in the woods goes awry after Isaac’s father (Bob Jaffe) forgets a special ingredient. Again, less story, more a setup for the fact that Isaac’s father is a jerk.

In a change of pace, “Descent” has a far more robust development than the previous three stories. Directed by Jay Holben (of Jack Frost fame), the short focuses on Andrea (April Adamson), who after witnessing her friend being murdered by an unknown man and narrowly escaping, learns that the killer works at her office. Making matters worse is eventually meeting the killer while trapped in an elevator. This one is definitely the best of the bunch. Not only does it grab you with its moments of tension, the mini twists involving Andrea’s cellphone and eventual big reveal at the end make it something you could easily find on The Twilight Zone.

As you’ve probably guessed, James Kondelik and Jon Kondelik’s “M Is for Masochist” was intended for The ABCs Of Death, but didn’t make the cut. The short tells the tale of Sam (Finn Kobler), who with his two friends participate in a carnival game that reveals a dark secret. It’s over far too quick, and doesn’t really allow you any time to invest in the characters. Furthermore, you’re basically dictated to like/dislike characters with no backstory. I did have fun seeing Bill Oberst Jr. as Sade, the carnival barker.

I’m sure that I’m not the only one, who after seeing Elias Benavidez’s “A Boy’s Life” thought of The Babadook. The story has has Max (Griffin Gluck) trying to overcome his fear of monsters in his room. He succeeds in capturing a monster, and trying to show his mother, Loraine (Christie Lynn Smith), that it exists. Incredibly predictable, the short tries to develop the characters by slowing the story progression down to accommodate, but it just ends up being boring, and definitely feels out of place compared to the rest of the shorts.

With Mike Kochansky’s “Mr. Tricker’s Treat”, the film picks up the Halloween theme again, and has Mr. Tricker (Michael Serrato) setting up his Halloween display, with all-too-real accessories. Another quickie that throws in a bit of humour (loved the valley girl bit), but ultimately just didn’t gel with me. Probably because Serrato comes off as more bumbling than menacing.

Directed by Argentinian director Andrés Borghi, “Alexia” is the last short in the film. The short revolves around Franco (Sergio Berón) mourning the loss of his ex-girlfriend, Alexia (Pilar Boyle). After being persuaded to unfriending Alexia on a social media website by his new girlfriend, Melina (Paula Carruega), strange things start happening. To the point with a good presentation, the short reminded me of Ringu with the visuals. Another great ditty.

Finally, the wraparound segment doesn’t add much more other than the usual expected outcome when the woman tries to remove the tape from her VCR. Really, it’s throwaway filler that could’ve benefited from more than just bookending the film.

Apart from “Descent” and “Alexia” being the standouts, All Hallow’s Eve 2 fails to be memorable. The idea for the Halloween theme is wasted on so-so efforts, jettisoned and comes back for one more so-so short before being dropped again. So, what was the point of having that theme in the first place? The same can be asked of using the VHS tape. That worked for V/H/S and it’s “found footage” method, but not the tape used in All Hallow’s Eve 2. It neither behaved like a old VHS tape during transitions between shorts, nor did it feel like you were watching a VHS tape. True, the gimmick might not have worked if it were a DVD, but the thing could’ve easily been reworked to have been a mysterious show on TV.

While it’s not a total waste of time, All Hallow’s Eve 2 won’t be replacing the better-made horror anthologies from the past. It’s worth a watch to see some of the gore effects and creepier shorts, but it’s an appetizer before getting into the real goodies with the stronger anthologies.

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The film opens with a pretty cool animated title sequence, it reminded me a lot of something from a Monty Python skit. We meet our titular hobo who is searching through the trash for lunch when all of a sudden a woman assails him with a frying pan. When he grabs the frying pan a weird effect happens, he has a seizure, and we are teleported to a segment. This happens every time he gets a new item.

There are a total of 7 segments, including the wrap around, and it was a struggle to get through them all even at only 89 minutes. As I said the story behind each segment follows one specific item said hobo has dug out of the trash. Several of segments were actually pretty enjoyable such as “Frying Saucer” an alien tale and “CondomDemned” about a jealous lover. But the rest are difficult to get through.

I know this is extremely low budget and that factors in a lot to the quality of a film but an extra $500 or so would have made this a more enjoyable experience. I’m just not a fan of shoestring budget movies because I can see so much potential usually that could be fully formed.

Another issue I have with Hobo is the acting. Oh man are some segments really torn down because of the acting. Everyone seems to be having fun and that definitely matters when making a movie, but some of these actors are painful to watch.

Bloodybrit Productions and some of the writers involved have the potential to make decent movies with some polishing and budgeting. These guys had fun making Hobo With a Trash Can and I applaud that, but I’d really like to see what they can do when taking things a tad more seriously.

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Wild Eye has now announced an official release date of October 27th, so you’ll be able to snatch this one up just before Halloween. Created by Brian Dorton and Douglas Conner, this first volume of terror tales features segments directed by Dorton, Conner, Joseph Graham, Manuel Marín, Lee Matthews and Ignacio Martín Lerma.

“Serial killers, ghostly phone calls, inner demons, otherworld monsters and creepy stalkers collide in this frightening anthology. Five of horror’s most promising new directing talents join forces to pay homage to classic horror like Creepshow, Tales From the Crypt, V/H/S and The ABCs of Death, and weave an unforgettable, disturbing tapestry of terror.

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Anthology horror is more popular right now than a loose cheerleader at a haunted sleepaway camp. Between the nearly annual installments from the V/H/S and ABCs of Death series, the format has also proven to be very successful on television, where programming like American Horror Story, Fargo, and True Detective is beginning to dominate. As powerful as these bite-sized pieces of horror can be, with each passing anthology there’s admittedly less ground to cover (and less “big” directors to tap) and it’s easier for the collections to blend into the background. Tales of Halloween succeeds on a lot of levels, and a few of these stories are even great additions to your seasonal viewing, but as a whole the film struggles to feel like something essential.

Tales of Halloween presents the idea that all of these stories are occurring during the same Halloween night with there being some connective tissue and overlap between the stories, but honestly, they all still feel pretty isolated. There are devices like a radio station that acts as a flimsy narrator as it pops in and out of these segments trying to segue them together, and the same horror marathon playing on the TV of several characters, but it’s pretty fruitless.

There are ten stories culled together here with the quality being all over the place, but the majority of them are on the more competent side of things. David Parker’s “Sweet Tooth” and Axelle Carolyn’s “Grim Grinning Ghost” both tackle the topic of urban legends and Halloween boogeymen to success. “Sweet Tooth” looks at a ghoul of the same name, who used to be a poor child whose miserable parents never let him eat any of his Halloween candy. In time the boy learns what his parents have been doing with his candy, with the results being fairly horrifying and almost as sickening as what the child does to get back at them. Accordingly the legend of this candy-craving monster is born, and the Sweet Tooth lore is actually a pretty inventive modern boogeyman to inject into the holiday amongst the rest of the familiar haunts (pun very much intended) that the film gets into. A ghost that rips out your intestines to get to your candy is a great idea, and Parker has plenty of chilling visuals to make this story work beyond the messed up concept.

Carolyn’s segment presents a Bloody Mary-type figure in the form of Mary Bailey, a disfigured girl who was bullied her entire life. “Grim Grinning Ghost” deals more in atmosphere and appropriately feels more like a ghost story. There are some haunting images as the heroine wanders the streets alone, almost looking like Eva Green from out of Penny Dreadful. At other times shots feel like they’re right out of It Follows as Mary Bailey’s figure dips into frame, and the image of the enlarged shadows of Mary Bailey’s hands closing in on her as she comes home is beautiful. It’s certainly a case of style over substance though, and in spite of the razor-thin story, Carolyn does much with it. This honestly feels like one of the stories that could have benefitted from being longer. “Grim Grinning Ghost” seems to just be starting by the time it ends, and its short run time only highlights the concept’s thinness.

Neil Marshall was one of the two directors here that I was particularly excited about. The Descent is a straight up masterpiece, and the work he did on the third season of Hannibal is breathtaking stuff. Unsurprisingly, right from the start of “Bad Seed” Marshall makes an impression by getting some mileage out of the disgusting visual and sound design of carving pumpkins. We see them continually getting gutted, their death rattle a sickening squish as the blade goes in and out, almost as if these pumpkins were human bodies. Marshall knows how to establish atmosphere, and this, paired with the Carpenter-esque score is the perfect introduction to this world.

Marshall swings for the fences here by telling a story about killer jack o’lanterns without trying to make any sense out of it. He’s certainly capable of sophisticated horror, so to see him tackling something with such a campy edge to it–in spite of it still being so horrifying–is a great mix. There’s plenty of bonkers stuff going on here like watching police officers manhandle the serrated flaps of flesh from where the jack o’lanterns ate the heads of people, or the visual of a police officer pointing her gun at a bunch of inanimate jack o’lanterns, concerned that one might come to life on her. I’d also like to think the Clover Company who’s behind all of this might be a sly reference to the Silver Shamrock and their similar motives in Halloween III, and if that’s the case, some tremendous respect is due here.

These shorts certainly get the job done, but there are also a few segments that go above and beyond and could truly stand as inspired pieces of short-form horror on their own. Adam Gierasch’s “Trick” is incredibly simple as a bunch of stoners watching horror movies get victimized by a cabal of children. There’s something powerful in the complete randomness of the violence here, strengthened by the young perpetrators of it. In that sense “Trick” seems to be trying to say something about the nature of such violence and the corruption of youth, especially since we’re shown images from the horror film they were watching in juxtaposition with their real-life carnage. Gierasch is sure to shoot the hell out of the short (he might even over-shoot the thing), but it adds a sweeping chaos that adds to the sheer horror of what these children are doing. It feels deeply reminiscent of the French horror film, Ils (Them), which is never not a good thing, and it’s appreciated to see the director going for broke, never really holding back on the brutality of it all.

Mike Mendez’s “Friday the 31^st” goes in completely the opposite direction with its storytelling, but is just as compelling. You’re immediately thrown into the climax of some slasher film where our resident machete-wielding maniac lumbers after a Final Girl. Things proceed as you’d imagine as you essentially see the end of a horror film that you didn’t see the beginning of, but then all of a sudden a very magical thing happens. Instead of the piece ending, the Leatherface-like killer then gets invaded by aliens who are looking to get their trick or treat on. Of course this quickly balloons into a full-blown extra-terrestrial invasion. “Friday the 31^st” is a modern, inventive idea that looks great to boot, and it’s got a real sense of playfulness (in the right way) that the bulk of the other contributions are lacking.

The segment I was most taken with though was Lucky McKee’s “Ding Dong.” McKee was the other director (besides Marshall) that I was looking forward to in the film, and his effective short explores a couple mourning over the loss of their child. There’s some nice work going on where the wife’s abusive actions towards her husband are depicted by him seeing her as a demon. It’s terrifying stuff and a great way of representing trauma and loss in a visual way. McKee’s segment turns into a bizarre performance piece that this couple performs for their trick or treaters as the increasing amount of children that they see chips away at their psyches. “Ding Dong” perhaps gets a touch too comedic for its own good, and the same can be said for its focus on the wife’s cleavage, but it still largely works as a disturbing short and a commentary on grief. In spite of its flaws, this is the short that left the strongest lasting impression on me and the one that affected me the most in the end. It’s exactly the sort of thing that a short should be.

While these are Tales of Halloween’s many triumphs, there are also a number of rotting pumpkins amongst the litter, too. Saw franchise veteran, Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV) turns out a truly confusing piece in “The Night Billy Raised Hell.” The short looks at young Billy being told that he’s now too old for trick or treating and is officially the age to start pranking people, with their curmudgeon of a neighbor seeming like the best target. However, this concept gets derailed pretty quickly. Billy gets abducted by his neighbor (Barry Bostwick, hamming it up like crazy), who it turns out is a devil, who takes it upon himself to show Billy how to literally raise Hell. Bousman’s segment is obviously going for laughs, not only due to the clear sense of humor it’s having towards all of this, but there’s also beyond goofy, cartoonish sound effects that are peppered throughout the thing. The sound effects are a total misfire, and while the humor works in some cases, one can’t help but feel the piece would be stronger if it took it’s rather serious subject matter, well, seriously. There’s a rather confusing Adrienne Curry cameo and a discussion about Twitter followers that’s kind of weirdly emblematic of the whole thing. Bousman also can’t help but throw in a nice little twist at the end, too, in keeping in tradition with his style.

“This Means War” by John Skipp & Andrew Kasch has a similarly cute angle to it, and right from the start it’s clearly not interested in being the scariest entry here. The short looks at the concept of two neighbors dueling over who has the better Halloween decorations (and the onslaught that ensues), and it’s a perfectly cute, fun idea that’s a visual mélange perfectly suited for a short film. It’s a lot of fun but ultimately lacks impact in the end, especially when in comparison to some of the stronger offerings on display here.

Paul Solet’s “The Weak and the Wicked” and Ryan Schifrin’s “The Ransom of Rusty Rex” tackle similar ground—bullying and violence is actually a rather large theme through the film as a whole—the former examines a bunch of street toughs torturing people on Halloween until some sort of monster hunter comes to intervene and provide them with a fight their own size. The biggest strength of Solet’s vision is the very fable-like spaghetti western feeling that it conjures, right down to its amazing Morricone-y score. In spite of its interesting premise, it doesn’t do much with it all and fumbles the decent set-up with a very messy aftermath. That being said, I immediately raised this up half a grade because of how fantastic and Attack on Titan-esque the monster ended up looking.

Schifrin’s take on intimidation looks at some bank robbers-turned-kidnappers who are looking to make a big score vis-à-vis a juicy ransom. “The Ransom of Rusty Rex” focuses on Rusty’s tenure as hostage, but very early on it’s obvious that these criminals have gotten in over their heads; their hostage is clearly a werewolf or some sort of monster. The problem with shorts is that they largely do play into your expectations, even if they do pull it off reasonably well. A welcome turn is taken when the hostagers try to repeatedly off their ransom, finding the task impossible, with this beast actually being its own curse. Everything here just feels very average, right down to the look of the demon, which is fine, but is inevitably going to render the segment forgotten. Sure, it’s a nice subversion that obtaining this beast actually makes you his hostage when these guys are trying to use him for exactly that, but irony is not enough to save this one.

Tales of Halloween is certainly not the sum of its parts, but the stronger segments within it still make it feel worth checking out in some capacity. More than anything it’s put David Parker, Adam Gierasch, and Mike Mendez on my radar and I look forward to seeing what horror endeavors they take on next. This isn’t the sort of movie that you should over-analyze and brood over, but rather the perfect thing for a Halloween party with a rowdy audience and the macabre spirit being heavy. You’ll love the good bits, you’ll laugh at the bad ones, and you’ll have a great time in the process. Take that perspective into mind and you should have an okay time with this. One or two of the shorts will surely resonate with you.

“Sweet Tooth” 3/5
“The Night Billy Raised Hell” 1.5/5
“Trick” 4/5
“The Weak and the Wicked” 2.5/5
“Grim Grinning Ghost” 3/5
“Ding Dong” 4.5/5
“This Means War” 1.5/5
“Friday the 31st” 4/5
“The Ransom of Rusty Rex” 2.5/5
“Bad Seed” 3/5

‘Tales of Halloween’ begins playing in select theaters and on VOD October 16th.

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Check out the clip below for a sneak peek into the world of 80s homage!

Volumes of Blood will be screening as an official selection of the Colorado Horror Con & Halloween Film Festival, in Lexington, KY at The ScareFest, and has been selected to participate in the Maverick Movie Awards.

A sociology student gathers several friends at the local library on Halloween night to help him create a new urban legend with deadly consequences; Lily is in for a late night of researching and needs something to keep her going. It isn’t until she’s approached by a stranger that her luck may change – for the worse; a typical night of work for a librarian becomes a classic ghost story with a modern twist. Sometimes you can’t keep a bad book down; Sidney is allowed to stay after hours to study for a test. It’s not until she awakens in the darkened library that she realizes the truth of what lurks among the books after midnight. She better pray she doesn’t become the prey; Paige faces regrets that she’d do anything to take back. When an ancient and arcane spell book falls into her lap, she decides to make a grave decision. Be careful what you wish for, it might just kill you.

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‘XX’, a new horror anthology with a gender twist – all segments will be helmed by female directors and will star female leads.

Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Jennifer’s Body), Mary Harron (American Psycho, pictured), Jennifer Lynch (Hiss, Surveillance), and Jovanka Vuckovic have been tapped to direct the project, which is heading for completion in 2015

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Bo, Cephus and their cousin Lulu, three fun-loving, beer-guzzling hillbillies, pick out horror shorts from fresh directors from around the world for your viewing pleasure. The first short is “Franky And The Ant”, directed by Billy Hayes. In this short, Franky (Emmanuel Todorov) has been betrayed, and now he’s looking for more than just payback. The next short, Cuyle Carvin’s “Amused”, has a woman named Martha (Elise Rovinsky) returning home one morning to find something unspeakable munching on her daughter’s head. Martha flees but is now stuck navigating through the frozen countryside with the horror in hot pursuit. Theo Stefanski’s “Doppelganger” has a lonely skeleton on a journey to try and find one of his own kind, but gets more than he bargained for. Finally, Tim Zwica’s “The Nest” has a restaurant owner whose honey is wildly popular with people. However, the owner’s bees are of the giant type, and are more fond of flesh than of flowers.

Clocking in at 10 minutes, “Franky And The Ant” starts off with what feels like a rip-off of Vincent and Jules from Pulp Fiction, complete with banter that tries to be philosophical mixed in with more “f*cks” than Scarface. However, it’s hampered by the fact that the duo aren’t properly micked (remember your volume). The twist at the end was pretty cool, along with some nice shots (such as the view from inside a coffee can and a reflection in a toaster), but overall, it wasn’t anything special.

“Doppelganger” plays out like a tribute to Ray Harryhausen with it’s stop-motion effects. It’s not as smooth as the stuff from Jason And The Argonauts, but it’s still neat to see. This short is silent, but like all good shorts, effectively uses music to help build up the journey, with the twist at the end being punctuated nicely. The only weak spot is the short is drawn out for too long (the irony doesn’t escape me), and could’ve maybe had a trim.

“Amused” opens up with a neat quote by Stephen King, and quickly displays it’s strengths in showing off the beautiful winter landscape. Reminds me of back home. The camera work is the real strength of this short, along with the acting. This one again has a twist to it at the end, but it ends on a weird note that had me scratching my head. Still, some good foley work as well as a nice bit of gore to it.

Note to new filmmakers: Don’t be M. Night Shyamalan. Not every movie has to have a twist. It’s quickly becoming a cliché that doesn’t need to be happening (if it hasn’t already).

With “The Nest”, this is the longest short at 32 minutes. This one was by far the best of the lot. Slickly shot in a sepia filter, with some great acting by Jamie Newell as the restaurant owner. The rest of the cast does well, although Adam Shalzi’s wooden acting and dialogue makes his character kind of irritating. The CG unfortunately is the weakest part of the short, which is a shame because the sets like the diner and the nest really benefit from the use of the aforementioned filter. I genuinely would love to see this turned into a feature-length film, as it’s unique and delightfully twisted in the vein of Motel Hell.

As for the skits with our hillbilly presenters? They fall flat. Relying on the same redneck jokes you’ve heard before and ripping off “King Of The Hill” in the character of Cephus, the skits, plainly speaking, aren’t funny. The only consolation is seeing Rachel Faulkner as Lulu. She’s certainly easy on the eyes. Overall, the shorts are a mixed bag. Granted, they’re not terrible by any stretch of the imagination. A couple of them do feel like college projects, albeit well-done college projects. It remains to be seen what the next couple of volumes will have to showcase, but at least there’s entertainment to be found in these films. Just leave the hillbilly skits to a minimum.

Video/Audio:

Presented in 1.78:1 widescreen (though “Doppelganger” is slightly windowboxed), the various sources all vary in quality, but are still quite good. There are a few scratches and dirt here and there, with some minor chromatic aberration in “Amused”, but overall the image is acceptable.

Audio-wise, the LPCM Stereo is a mixed bag. For the most part, audio is clear and free of distortion, but for “Franky And The Ant” and “The Nest”, the audio levels are really low when it comes to dialogue. Have your remote handy for changing the volume back and forth, as you’ll have a hard time hearing what’s being said. Other than that, it matches the video in terms of quality.

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It’s an incredible read that deserves your attention. Horror and short stories have been together for ages for good reason. Rangel JR makes sure to start his stories at a point of high tension and he never let’s up. The result is a collection of shorts that are each disturbing in their own right, but read like a breeze. There isn’t a pacing issue to be found.

Look at this! It could be yours, get to kickstarter and start funding!

The art is all kinds of marvelous. Each story has it’s own artist who plays to their own strengths as well as the strengths of the story they are telling. There isn’t a dud in the mix. Instead you get an incredible series of adventures each better than the last.

The collection begins with “Blood & Snow.” A beautiful medieval fantasy that culminates in something so viscerally awesome that I don’t dare spoil it here. But Jonathan Brandon Sawyer channels a manga look to create an otherworldly beauty that isn’t found in most North American comics. “The Souls of Wicked Men” is a balls to the wall cowboy tale with a terrifying twist brought to life masterfully by Karim Whalen. Ricardo Venancio brings “No Stranger To Death” to life in a detailed and heartbreaking way. The showdown in the middle of this story will rock you, only for it to warm your heart by the final panel.

My personal favorite of the bunch is “Stinky” brought to life by Ramon Menendez. It’s a glorious 80’s throwback that oozes style and spins a familiar story in a brutal new light. Simply chilling in all the right ways. “When the Evil Came” will rock with Cody Schibi’s horribly detailed looks at personal insanity. I can’t give much else away, but the warped art will stick with you for some time.  “Our Own Wars” is a simple story brought to life by rising superstar Jason Copland that focuses on something I want to see more of, zombies in wars. It ends the collection on a deeply personal note.

“SIX” has already reached it’s funding goals on kickstarter, but that shouldn’t matter this is a collection that demands your attention. It’s haunting, and a shining example of a independent horror anthology. Support indie comics, and support great horror, funding this means everyone wins.

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The new tape features segments directed by Marcel Sarmiento (Deadgirl, the incredible The ABCs of Death segment “D Is for Dogfight”), Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes, Extraterrestrial), Gregg Bishop (The Other Side, Dance of the Dead), as well as Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Resolution, Spring).

Break out the video nasties and press the eject button, it’s time to be unkind, rewind! Following two successful horror anthologies so far, the V/H/S anthology series continues with another screamsome roster of edgy genre directors and five more frightening yarns that drip blood. This threequel is geared around some fame-obsessed teens who all unwittingly become stars of the next internet sensation. No spoilers here, but the uncanny house of horrors includes such tales that witness madness as ‘Vicious Circles’, ‘Bonestorm’, ‘Parallel Monsters’, Gorgeous Vortex’ and ‘Dante the Great’. It’s another vault of asylum horrors from beyond the grave going further into the dead of night.

The event takes place from Thurs 21 August to Monday 25 August, where the UK’s leading event for genre fans will be at the Vue West End, Leicester Square, to present sixty-four films plus twenty shorts across five screens. There are sixteen countries representing five continents with a record-breaking thirty-eight UK or European premieres and eleven world premieres.

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On Friday, July 11 @ 9pm, Chiller presents the next installment in its Chilling Visions anthology film series, Chilling Visions: 5 States of Fear. The film comprises five shorts inspired by five basic human fears, with each short set in a specific location across five different U.S. states. 5 States follows 2013’s inaugural installment, Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear, which included a film by critically-acclaimed young director Emily Hagins.

The five short films are:

– Ego Death (“Sandy”) Written & Directed by Brett Simmons Produced By, Brett Simmons, Andrew Ducote, Kellen Moore for Brett Simmons Productions
– Separation (“The Trouble With Dad”) Directed by Glenn McQuaid Written by Glenn McQuaid & Clay McLeod Chapman Produced By, Larry Fessenden, Jennifer Wexler for Glass Eye Pix
– Mutilation (“Tick Warning”) Written & Directed by John Poliquin Produced By Dan De Filippo, Dave Marken for Pipeline Entertainment
– Extinction (“Ghost Daughter”) Written & Directed by Zao Wang Produced By Zao Wang, Andrew K. Li for Chilling Coastline, LLC
– Loss of Autonomy (“The Caregiver”) Written & Directed by Graham Reznick Produced By Larry Fessenden, Jennifer Wexler for Glass Eye Pix

5 States of Fear is produced by Andrew Gernhard, Zach O’Brien and Colin Theys for Synthetic Cinema International.

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Ahead of Cannes Bloody Disgusting just discovered that The Midnight Mean Train and No One Lives‘ Ryuhei Kitamura, as well as WER and The Devil Inside‘s William Brent Bell have both joined the impressive line-up including Joe Dante (Gremlins, The Hole), Xavier Gens (Frontier(s), Hitman), and Timo Vuorensola (Iron Sky).

“Fear Paris is the first of a new kind of journey into cinema fantastique. Five wildly original, interwoven storylines culminate in a single, brilliant and epic finale, a Paris unlike anything ever seen or experienced.”

Casting is under way as the film will go into production this Summer/Fall.

Laura Rister (Untitled Entertainment) and Ehud Bleiberg (Bleiberg Entertainment), together with Steven Schneider (Vicarious Entertainment) join Darryn Welch (Instinctive Film) to produce the film.

Tony Noble (Moon) is the production designer. Kristyan Mallet (Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter) is onboard for special effects makeup and prosthetics. The imaginative world will be created in collaboration with the great visual effects minds at Pixomondo (Hugo) and Prime Focus (Gravity, Judge Dredd). Richard Raaphorst (Frankenstein’s Army) is the concept designer.

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There’s no wraparound story, but the five shorts are all loosely connected by a mysterious, omnipotent company that seems to have it’s fingers in a slew of bizarre shit. Characters from one short can be seen in the background of others and the film is full of little in-jokes, but these connections are flimsy and each short manages to stand on its own.

In the first story, “Smell,” a Stepford-looking saleswoman from the company drops in on Seth (Corey Scott Rutledge), a miserable sap stuck in a dead end job. Her sales pitch is that he’s lacking the proper pheromones to get ahead in life. She presents him with a free bottle of cologne, but warns him to use it sparingly, for there are some side effects. Seth sprays a bit on himself at work and soon finds himself the target of aggressive friendliness and adoration – particularly from women. The down side is that wherever he sprays himself, the flesh starts melting away. Of course, by the end he’s practically bathing in the cologne and becomes the incredible melting Seth. The effects in this one are fantastic – especially when his face starts drooping of his skull. It’s a fun short that manages to inject some real emotion amidst all the gross-outs.

“See” marks the directorial debut of Miko Hughes, best known as Gage from Pet Sematary and that smart-mouthed kid from Full House. The premise of “See” is really cool, but the short fails to live up to its potential. It’s about an optometrist who collects his patients’ short-term memories (or something like that). He gets overprotective of an attractive female client of his who has an abusive boyfriend. The confrontation between optometrist and wife-beater is pretty anti-climactic, but there are some fun trippy parts to enjoy.

“Touch” was my favorite of the bunch by far. Directed by Emily Hagins (My Sucky Teen Romance), it’s a simple story about a blind boy who wanders into the woods to seek help after his parents are injured in a car accident. As he methodically counts his steps, noting hunting traps along the way, he finds himself at the cabin of a serial killer. The execution and restrained style of “Touch” pay off really well, even if there are some implausibility involved. There’s nothing over the top though and the child actor is really good. Child actors normally irritate the piss outta me, but this kid is great.

Gore hounds will definitely like “Taste,” from Madison County director Eric England. A charismatic hacker is brought into the company’s headquarters for a job interview. When he declines their offer, the manager doesn’t take it too well. England has fun building up to “Touch’s” absurd climax, but it’s an excruciating journey filled with terrible dialogue and a shallow story.

“Listen” is Chilling Visions‘ found footage entry, from YellowBrickRoad filmmakers Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton. This one involves two young researchers attempting to piece together footage of a piano performance that allegedly drives people to kill themselves in fits of madness. There’s some effectively creepy footage of the performance and they were kind enough to cut out the audio at times so us viewers won’t tear our own guts out. Gotta admit, I got caught up in this one and let out a relieved sigh when the audio dropped out. “Listen” makes for a nice final bow.

Overall Chilling Visions is worth a watch. The ratio of decent shorts to misfires is four to one – a most impressive average than most contemporary anthologies. And “Touch” alone makes it worth at least a rent.

A/V: The 1080p HD transfer is solid throughout. Each short has its own look, but the quality of detail and definition remains strong for the entire running time. The DTS-HD 5.1 and 2.0 mixes are also perfectly fine. “Touch,” which takes place entirely outside, benefits the most from the 5.1 ambiance.

Special Features: This is a barebones release for Scream Factory. There’s a one-minute deleted scene from “Smell” and some trailers. That’s all.

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“The Witching Hour” anthology was originally published between 1969 and 1978, as hosted by the three witches, who would later become important characters in the Vertigo Universe in books like “The Sandman” and “House of Mystery”. Below, we’ve got an exclusive preview of “The Witching Hour” #1, courtesy of Vertigo Comics.

WRITTEN BY: Kelly Sue Deconnick, Lauren Beukes, Cliff Chiang, Matthew Sturges, Toby Litt, Annie Mok
ART BY: Mark Buckingham, Cliff Chiang, Shawn McManus, Emily Carroll, Steve Beach
COVER BY: Jenny Frison, Julian Totino Tedesco
PUBLISHER: Vertigo
PRICE: $7.99
RELEASE: October 2, 2013

The secret spell to controlling the universe is contained in this anthology! Also included are nine new supernatural tales by a coven of the best writers and artists VERTIGO could cram into 70 pages. Practice witchcraft with VERTIGO and destroy all men!

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First up is Smell, directed by Nick Everhart. Smell has Corey Scott Rutledge as Seth, a guy whose life kind of stinks (no pun intended). Work sucks, he misses his ex and his confidence is in the crapper. One day a strange woman shows up at his door selling a cologne that she says will turn things around for him, so long as he doesn’t use too much of it. Soon after trying it, Seth’s life takes a turn for the better, including a promotion and adoration. Unfortunately, Seth doesn’t follow the directions, and the cologne’s side effects kick in. Despite some humourous moments from Rutledge and a twist at the end, the short is pretty predictable. Nevertheless, any time you get reminded of Rob Bottin’s makeup from Robocop, it’s worth a view for that alone.

Following Smell is See, directed by Miko Hughes. Yes, that Miko Hughes from Pet Semetary and Spawn fame. The short concerns an optometrist named Dr. Tom (Ted Yudain) who has a habit of stealing memories from from his patients through their eyes and collecting them in liquid form. Dr. Tom is then able to relive these memories by taking the liquid drops in each eye. Dr. Tom learns that one of his favorite patients is being abused by her boyfriend. In retaliation, Dr. Tom sprays the boyfriend’s eyes with bad memories. Unfortunately, things backfire and people end up quite dead. Despite some gory eye trauma and an appearance by former pro wrestler Ox Baker, the short is hampered by some rather goofy CG effects and some rather hammy acting by the boyfriend played by Lowell Byers. Overall, it’s nothing too earth-shattering.

I’m not sure if the next entry, Touch, can be seen as being a sign of bigger things or just an idea that’s half-baked. Directed by 20-year-old Emily Hagins (of Pathogen fame), the short involves a family of three geting into a car accident in a rural area. The parents are badly injured, so their blind son Henry goes for help. Henry eventually stumbles upon some abandoned buildings, and a killer who doesn’t like to be touched. Unfortunately, this short wasn’t great. The story drags in spite of it’s short runtime, and is generally a convoluted mess with things coming out of left field for story’s sake (where did the killer get firecrackers?) and generally nonsensical.

In Eric England’s Taste, Aaron is a hacker who is picked up by a limo and driven to a sprawling corporate campus. In spite of not knowing why he’s there, all the secretary can tell him is that Lacey Sharp, a head hunter for a company called Watershed, wants to interview him. At the interview, Aaron is presented an offer to lead a project and work with two teams to recover a “treatment”. Unfortunately for Aaron, he declines the offer. What follows involves some unique headgear and a lot of red stuff. Starting out as being a bit of a mystery, Taste ends with a bang of black humour and the next candidate.

Finally, in Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton’s Listen, we have a found footage motif that involves two guys hired to document and piece together a song that once completed, kills people. Again, the sense of mystery about the whole thing is what drives this short, along with the increased tension being given off by the two filmmakers as they realize just what they’ve gotten themselves into. Plus there’s a part about purposely rupturing eardrums that made me wince, as well as reactions from test subjects once they’re forced to listen to the song in its entirety.

Overall, the anthology’s weakest segments (the first three) really don’t make the entire package worthwhile. Between Smell and See‘s run-of-the-mill predictability and the mess that is Touch, you could literally watch Taste and Listen by themselves and get more out of those than you could watching the entire anthology. It’s a shame, since there’s an overarching theme that was kind of a nice twist when it was revealed. But for that to really get through, you’d have to sit though the first three segments, which threaten to ruin the experience before you get to the last two. Hopefully Chiller tries again, but next time gets more consistency from all of it’s participants.

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