My trailer for Evil Dead 2, the best horror movie ever made. It was the first thing I cut on a computer (after my graduation film, but we don’t talk about that) – I needed a project to practice on so I did this.
That’s right! We’ve chosen to highlight “Evil Dead” today! It was directed by Sam Raimi (see clips below). It’s Wednesday…so this won’t be a 2000 word essay on Evil Dead…just some fun clips and some links to interesting Evil Dead info. Enjoy!
Christopher Franchi, an amazingly talented artist has shared his latest poster work with us featuring the Ladies of the Evil Dead and the upcoming 30th.
Sam discusses how he raised money to make Evil Dead (including a funny story about Bruce) and his regrets over the infamous “tree rape” scene. Source: The Incredibly Strange Film Show (1988)
A clip from the Incredibly Strange Film Show (circa 1988) where Sam and Bruce discuss their early super-8 films and the influence of the Three Stooges. Includes clips from “Six Months to Live.”
George A. Romero is often credited with being the godfather of modern horror and rightfully so. However, there is a little known horror film that came out a good six years before Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and served as a big inspiration on Romero’s work -Carnival of Souls.
Carnival of Souls is a creepy, atmospheric horror movie about a woman caught in a traumatic accident who finds herself wandering around a strange abandoned carnival. Carnival of Souls deserves a spot in MVP’s Guerrilla Filmmaker’s Pantheon as both the writer John Clifford and director Herk Harvey waived their earnings on the movie in order to get the film made on a minuscule budget of $17,000. That’s guerrilla filmmaking at it’s finest.
Check out the trailer:
And watch the entire movie here:
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 4:58 pm. Add a comment
There have been rumblings about an official trailer for MVP’s supernatural thriller coming from the Mutantville offices for the past month. Fans on Facebook have been privvy to constant updates about work on a “trailer” for weeks on end with little else being offered in the way of explanation. This morning – a video marked “G.H.O.S.T. trailer” has appeared on the Mutantville Players Youtube channel and the internet seems all abuzz about this sneak peek at the latest full length feature from the MVP team.
No official word yet on a release date as writer director J.T.”Streebo” McRoberts states that “there are still a lot of visual FX and music to be done – but we’re making progress every day. The performances we captured were amazing and we’ve put every little horror movie trick we could think of in the movie. In the end – it will be worth the wait.”
G.H.O.S.T. stars Kathy Butler Sandvoss, Clint Jones, Dave Tunik, Jack Stecher, Scott Thomas, Jason Wheeley, Kayli Tolleson and Matthew Ewald. Check out the offical trailer at the link below:
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 1:43 pm. Add a comment
That’s right, The Crazies is being released on DVD on June 29th, 2010. I’m sure I’ll remember this film for a long time because we (Mutantville) saw it in the theater with the legendary Matthew Ewald.
For the most part I liked it. The camera angles were good. Nice camera movement. Great zombie or infected make up though. It is a remake of the George A. Romero film. You’ll notice on the credits that Romero was an executive producer on the film. The original film came out in 1973. To make the new film period, everyone walks around in bell bottom pants to the disco soundtrack. Ok, none of that last sentence is true.
If you’re thinking about picking it up on DVD, Help us out and get it here. We greatly appreciate the assistance!
With its lurid title and anti-government paranoia, The Crazies bears the stamps of the 1970s original from the start, but it fits our times remarkably well. We’re discovering poison in baby formula from China, so how much of a leap is …
Brett Erlich and Ellen Fox join forces with bloggers, comedians, students and citizen critics to review “The Crazies.” For more from the Rotten Tomatoes Show: rottentomatoesshow.com VIEW more Rotten Tomatoes & SUBSCRIBE to the YouTube Playlist here…..
Dario Argento’s film “Suspiria” is one film I always remember from my crash course in horror films from Streebo. During pre-production, production, post production of “C for Chaos”(and even now), Streebo has educated me on horror from around the globe. While filming we would sometime let me be really intense with the colored light. He would often cite “Suspiria” as a source of inspiration. So I was looking around and thought I’d provide some information about the film to those that may not be familiar with it or those wanting to hear other’s opinions.
Susperia, directed by legendary Italian horror director Dario Argento, is the first film in the Three Mothers trilogy along with Inferno (1980) and La Terza Madre (2007). Argento, along with Goblin who wrote the musical score, …
Suspiria is considered by many to be the best work ever by Dario Argento. The use of lighting, camera angles, close-up and music (performed by The Goblins with input from Argento himself) create a sinister and surreal shroud of dread …
He’s a great director but I don’t think any reimagining will match the 1977 masterpiece that is Dario Argento’s SUSPIRIA. If you haven’t seen this horror classic for some reason, take a chance on it and watch it more than once. …
I use eBay to track down rare, exciting, cheesy or just plain bad posters from time to time. I rarely buy anything – but I enjoy watching them. I’ve decided to share a few of these images with you. Today’s watched poster is the atrocious The Night of Bloody Horror one-sheet! I just love how some designer somewhere thought that all this poster needed was a skull face wearing a Tina Turner wig – and voila! Instant TERROR!!!
From eBay: You will enjoy this 11″ x 17″ Style B print featuring 1969 The Night of Bloody Horror . Perfect for your home or office! Also makes a great gift.
CAST: Gerald McRaney Gaye Yellen Michael Anthony Gerald C. Arnato John Barber DIRECTED BY: Joy N. Houck Jr.
From Fangoria.com: After watching hundreds (or thousands?) of horror movies over the course of decades, how many horror fans still get scared after watching a horror movie? I’m not talking about merely feeling tension because a character is in danger, but actually feeling frightened by a film.
All too often, it seems that people complain that a horror film was “bad” because it wasn’t “scary”. Without any context, this is essentially meaningless. For example, when was the last time a movie scared them, and what was it?
I feel that this “problem” has less to do with the quality of a film than it does with someone’s having built up a tolerance. Besides being a horror fan, I’m also a fan of very spicy food, and I have an assortment of hot sauces made from habanero and scotch bonnet peppers in my refrigerator at all times. My tolerance of spicy food is significantly higher than average, but my fiancee would argue that just because I don’t feel a dish is spicy, this doesn’t necessarily make it so.
Curiously, when horror films aren’t being accused of being bad because they’re not scary, it’s because they’re “not fun”. This seems to be a by-product of the ’80s, when so many horror films were glutting the market that the genre largely descended from “fright films” into horror-comedies – intentional or not.
I’m not talking about films that use comic relief to briefly release tension, I’m talking about films where you’re laughing at the film more than you’re laughing with the film – or are scared of the film.
With that, if a horror film isn’t “fun” is it a bad horror film? I don’t remember Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre being a particularly fun film, but does this make it a bad horror film?
I also find it puzzling when people suggest that I’m “immature” when I don’t find a film that emphasizes shadows, noises and even action from off-camera “scary”. It may simply be a by-product of getting older, but I stopped being afraid of the dark – and creaky houses – decades ago, though I hardly feel that this is a sign of my immaturity.
So have at it – are horror films supposed to be scary or fun? Both? Neither?
From Fangoria.com: If you want to talk about badass crap, you really can’t do a hell of a lot worse than the horror genre. Whether it’s crazy Eastern Europeans with slicked-back hair and overly developed canine teeth chomping down on the necks of scantily clad maidens or demented, murderous psychopaths running around in body armor made from human skin and carving X’s into the chest cavities of wayward coeds with gasoline-powered gardening implements, horror never seems to disappoint when it comes to violent homicide or paint-bombing dungeon walls with a thick coat of crimson substances. Therefore, in an effort to promote my new book BADASS: A RELENTLESS ONSLAUGHT OF THE TOUGHEST WARLORDS, VIKINGS, SAMURAI, PIRATES, GUNSLINGERS, AND MILITARY COMMANDERS TO EVER LIVE (in which I talk about such real-life badasses as the notorious Vlad the Impaler; see the trailer here), I will attempt to discuss some of the toughest heroes and villains the genre has to offer.
Now, I would never for a moment presume to try and dictate a definitive list of anything horror-related to a fan base as rabid as FANGORIA’s, so please allow me a brief caveat before I get too much further along in this process. I will say only that these are among my own personal favorites, and in no way an attempt to quantify or rank horror-movie badasses in any order other than chronologically. In the presumably likely event that you disagree with my decisions, I strongly encourage you guys to utilize the comments section below to express how brain-crushingly unfathomable it is that I didn’t include your favorite movie, character, fictional person, artificial construct, clothing article or food product on this list.
Abraham Van Helsing (DRACULA, 1897)
badassesofhorror1vanhelsingThese days, it seems like you can’t chuck a crucifix into a crowded room without accidentally impaling some crappy vampire-centric romantic comedy/drama about a dark, brooding, impeccably dressed blood-chugging metro douchebag flitting about in the woods with his whiny high-school girlfriend and talking about forbidden love ad nauseum, until pretty much everyone watching wants to barf up whatever is left of their rapidly shriveling brain cells. Well, back in the day (and by “the day,” of course I mean the late 19th century), everybody just thought vampires were complete bastards good for only one thing: getting pointy wooden stakes rammed through their chests at high velocity by Abraham Van Effing Van Helsing. This grizzled, hardass old Dutch physician/cryptozoologist/crazy occult genius dedicated his long and single-purposed life to training his mind and his body in the fine art of murdering the undead with extreme prejudice all the way up their cadaverous asses, and he was so good as his job that nowadays, his name is pretty much synonymous with stomping vampires’ balls into a thick marinara-like sauce smelling faintly of garlic and failure.
Halloween is a week from now, and there’s one very special way to celebrate it in Evans City, Pennsylvania this year, at Gary Streiner’s 2nd Annual Living Dead Festival. Recently, I interviewed Gary about his role in the production of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Through Gary, I was able to interview another of the key people involved in the film: his brother, the producer and the actor who played Johnny, Russell Streiner.
Russ was an important part of the Latent Image, a commercial filmmaking company which he founded with George Romero. He’s since gone on to work on many films with another NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD collaborator, John Russo. Russ was gracious enough to take some time today and discuss the legacy of the zombie classic with me, for his fans at Icons of Fright.
Phil Fasso: How did you first get involved with George Romero?
Russ Streiner: I started off wanting to be an actor, which I pursued through high school. And after high school, I went to the Pittsburgh Playhouse School of the Theatre, and graduated from their two-year acting program. While I was there, I was working in stage shows at night, and at one of those, I was cast with another fellow. His name was Rudy Ricci, and we shared a dressing room. Rudy had been attending classes at Carnegie Mellon University (back then it was called Carnegie Tech). He was taking art classes there, and he met George Romero in an art class. George was transplanted, from the Bronx to Pittsburgh, to go to Carnegie Tech’s School of Painting and Design. Rudy brought George over to one of our shows one night, and that’s how I first got to meet him. Then, within maybe six or eight months, George called me and asked me if I would be willing to be an actor in a movie that he was putting together, called EXPOSTULATIONS. And I told him I would. I showed up for my very first day of production, and really became intrigued with the whole film production part of the business, which I knew nothing about. I stuck with EXPOSTULATIONS as an actor, and then also helped out on the crew. That’s how George and I first met. And we went on to set up a business and worked together for about 10 years.
PF: How did your experience in commercials and industrial films help you to put together a feature film?
RS: Any time you get a chance to practice your craft, whether it’s in short form like TV commercials or longer form like industrials, all of that goes to help you refine your craft. And that’s certainly how our whole group got helped out, all of which led up to 1967, when we did the actual filming of NOTLD.
Read the rest of this interview with a piece of Night of the Living Dead history click the link below.
From Fear.net: Making a horror movie can be a surreal experience. You spend long hours performing terrifying atrocities in front of the camera. Then the director yells “Cut!” and suddenly you’re headed over to the snack table to have a cup of coffee with the person you just disemboweled.
But sometimes, the line between making a realistic horror film and finding yourself knee-deep inside one gets a little too blurry and bloody for comfort. Here are ten of our favorite examples:
PEEPING TOM (1960). Here’s the good news: you get to star in your own movie. Here’s the bad news: the director likes to film his stars as he kills them, so he can capture their true expressions of fear. Talk about method acting. But hey, a gig’s a gig
DEMONS (1985). This Lamberto Bava/Dario Argento production is an example of how even watching a horror movie can get you in trouble. A late night crowd enters a cavernous Berlin movie theater to enjoy a special midnight screening of a new horror film. However, thanks to the presence of a cursed mask from the set of the movie, the monsters of the film come alive inside the theater itself, where they bypass the popcorn and start gnawing their way through the audience.
WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE (1994). ”One, two, Freddy’s really coming for you!” While filming the next installment of the lucrative “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise, the actual actors and crew members (Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon, director Wes Craven, etc. all playing themselves) discover they’re being stalked and killed by what appears to be a real life Freddy Krueger in Craven’s mind-bending twist on the creative process.
from Icons of Fright:
