Tag Archives: Slasher

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When Enough is Enough: Halloween II and the Curse of the Horror Sequel

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When is enough enough? In an era of reboots, prequels, sequels and expanding cinematic universes, it seems that the answer is never.

Sequels have been around in some capacity for as long as mainstream cinema has existed. The golden age of horror would set the proverbial ball rolling, monsters such as Frankenstein returning time after time to meet popular demand. If something is marketable then let’s make more of it. It’s standard business practice.

Inevitably, people would tire of Universal’s revolutionary […]

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This Boy’s Knife: Ranking the Original Halloween Series

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In the weird and wonderful annals of horror filmmaking, few have left a cultural impression quite like Michael Myers. In the hand’s of creator John Carpenter, Haddonfield’s most infamous offspring was a colossal figure: patient, elusive and as swift and brutal as they come.

Down the years, it all got just a little bit silly, but in spite of The Shape’s dwindling mystique we followed him through thick and thin, hoping that a movie would one day come along and revitalise the franchise. Almost half a century later and we are still clinging to that hope, a series of sequels, prequels and reboots unwilling to let Carpenter’s creation rest […]

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Halloween Resurrection (2002)

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Much has been made about what New Line Cinema did to the Friday the 13th franchise.

In their pursuit of a money-spinning Freddy vs Jason crossover they ignored the key ingredient of the series: simple repetition. The Friday the 13th was the first horror series to make the ‘more of the same’ concept key to its success, but with their body-swapping debut Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday all that went out of the window. Some feel their second effort Jason X was another insult to the Paramount formula, while others disagree. Whatever you may think, though it shot Jason into space and tried something novel for the most part it went back to basics and retained many of the ingredients that made the original series a success. The same can not be said about Dimension Films […]

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Phenomena (1985)

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There’s something about Dario Argento’s work that seems to transcend time and place.

Some of this has to do with location and setting, as well as an absence of modern cultural trends, but it is mostly due to the director’s visual style, movies such as Inferno and Suspiria sending us spiralling down a rabbit hole of fantastical terror. Along with Goblin’s nerve-shattering accompaniments, those movies work on a purely visceral level. They startle and excite in equal measures, a series of elaborate murders drenched in the grisly palette of deathly expressionism […]

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