Archive for November, 2008
Clint Eastwood To Direct… A Horror?
Clint Eastwood has tackled pretty much every genre you can think of as a director, from Westerns to sci-fi (who can forget Space Cowboys?) to cop thrillers and even war movies.
But the great man has never taken on horror – and if you think that we’re about to say ‘until now’, you’d be on the money.
Eastwood is in talks with DreamWorks to direct Hereafter, a spec script by the so-hot-right-now Frost/Nixon scribe, Peter Morgan.
Vampire tale gets it frighteningly ‘Right’
Based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, this cold, cracking Swedish noir centers on a misfit boy, Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), befriended by a strange 12-year-old girl who recently moved in next door. However, as Eli (Lina Leandersson) explains it, she’s been 12 for “a very long time.” She also isn’t bothered by the frigid Scandinavian winter – maybe because her body temperature is already running at zero.
And now and then, she shows up with blood all over her mouth.
Filmax to produce horror Exorcismus, following success of [REC]
Filmax is to produce horror film Exorcismus with Luis De La Madrid directing and The Devil’s Backbone writer David Munoz working on the script.
Currently at the pre-production stage, the film will explore the popular horror theme of exorcism, focusing on a young girl, Suzy, whose erratic behaviour forces her family to bring in a priest to try and resolve the problem through hypnosis. The disturbing results are recorded on a secret camera.
Romero’s 40 years of death
“THERE ARE two types of people in the world,” a friend of mine once said, “those who get zombie movies, and those who don’t.”
My friend and I both love zombie movies, and conversely don’t understand people who don’t “get” them. My friend was talking about the modern zombie genre–which is characterized by bloody “gags” (heads exploding, intestines being eaten, chewing on human arms as if they were turkey legs) as well as social criticism and satire.
Early zombie movies were something else entirely. They were chock full of colonial ideas based on wildly misinformed and racist prejudices. Take for example, the 1932 film White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi as the “voodoo master” of (Black) Haitian zombie slaves.
The modern zombie genre began in 1968 with George Romero’s low-budget black-and-white masterpiece Night of the Living Dead. Romero continued the genre he created in the four decades that followed with Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985) and Land of the Dead (2005).
The DVD release of Romero’s latest zombie flick, Diary of the Dead (2008), provides an opportunity to review those 40 years of death.
In 1968, with a crew of friends and colleagues from Pittsburgh (where he worked on local television ads as well as on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood of all things) Romero headed to rural Pennsylvania to make the movie that turned zombie films (and horror movies more generally) upside down.
It was this film that created the “rules” of the zombie genre–which are often broken, but provide the baseline for understanding elements of future horror films as widely divergent as 28 Days Later and Zombie Honeymoon.
Some social catastrophe (often of unknown origin) has suddenly animated the recently dead, causing them to murder the living and feast on their flesh, creating an ever more widely expanding army of the undead–resulting in what amounts to a zombie apocalypse. A horror genre in which society becomes an (apparently) unthinking army of walking death is pregnant with potential for social criticism.
Shortcut Poster
If you hear the name Sandler, what’s the first thing you think about? Horror movies, right? No, I’m only kidding, however, as time goes by, the idea of a “Sandler Horror Movie” may not seem so far-fetched. The reason? Mr. Sandler’s first foray into the scary business, a flick called THE SHORTCUT that will soon be hitting the big screen.
No, the Adam will not be starring in this flick, but a new extension of his production company, Happy Madison, will be producing it. The new branch is called Scary Madison and if Mr. Sandler has created an entirely new branch, you can bet your ass that it won’t be for just one movie. Anyways, the first poster for SHORTCUT is up top. It basically looks like your typical horror/suspense poster, which at least shows that Scary M. is off on the right foot. The plot for SHORTCUT walks like this:
Two brothers come upon a rarely used shortcut in their new town-and soon discover the reasons why it’s so rarely used.
Well, if done right that synopsis could turn out to be pretty terrifying. I’m interested to see how Sandler’s crew handles it. The script was written by Scott Sandler and Dan Hannon with Nicholaus Goossen on as director. The cast includes Shannon Marie Woodward, Katrina Bowden, Andrew Seeley, Dave Franco, and Nicholas Elia.
Source: http://www.joblo.com/arrow/index.php?id=14468
Days of Darkness
People may scoff at what they see as a life wasted watching horror movies but come the apocalypse and the moment that the dead rise to walk the earth, it will be I who have the last laugh. While others, who are not so familiar with the living dead, nonchalantly stroll up to reanimated corpses to engage them with a cheery, “Hello there!” only to find a shambling ghoul chowing down on their vital organs, I will be the destroyer of zombies. I will lead a makeshift army in hatchbacks, ice-cream vans and tractors up and down the country, leading them into battle with a, “Shoot to the head! Only to the head!” And when the ammunition runs low and we’re left with nothing but knives, we will be safe in the knowledge that decapitation is as sure a means as any of survival. Failing that, it will be, as The Evil Dead had it, complete bodily dismemberment. Such is my knowledge of the undead that I will be prepared even for those unexpected moments in life when one might be troubled by the undead. Should we come upon an oasis, I shall be aware of the Nazi zombies that lurk at the bottom of it. And should I ever go swimming with sharks in the Caribbean and see a crusty-faced zombie coming our way along the seabed who seems to be more agile than his landlocked brethren, it’ll be a harpoon to the temple. Or to simply let the sharks have their way with him.
Artist turns horror novel into ‘hyper-serialized’ multi-media platform
A struggling artist from Sandgate has found a way to transform his unsold sci-fi horror novel into a ‘hyper-serialized’ multi-media platform. VPR’s Susan Keese talked with Hasso Wuerslin about his series, “The DeadBooks,” which spans 150 chapters, and includes 100 actors and lots of avant-garde world music set in the strange town of Landsgate, Vermont. The first 10-hour ‘season’ is now available on DVD.
Source: http://www.vpr.net/news_detail/82861/
[REC]: The review
The Plot- A TV reporter and her cameraman follow a crew of Barcelona fire-fighters during their night shift for a show called “While You Were Asleep”. I guess while we all were asleep some heavy, heavy stuff went down in an apartment building in Spain. Stuff like possible viral contagion, dead-ish people attacking and biting live-ish people, and a few other ghastly surprises. I was half-worried about even revealing the plot to [REC] but I realize that I knew most of the plot going into the film, (through advertising and most horror fan sites) and it didn’t spoil the film for me at all. In fact let’s get to…
Christian horror film is devilishly dull
“House” is a thriller that ponders the question: Can you make a Christian-themed horror movie?
Horror movies often play around with the big themes of guilt, sin and redemption, and are set in a sort of purgatory of freewill and moral choices. What would the “Saw” franchise be without the guilt and punishment ethos at the heart of it?
So “House” isn’t a stretch. Take away its absurd R rating — it barely warrants a PG-13 — and this adaptation of a Ted Dekker novel would seem right at home at any B-movie horror convention.
Horror King still lurks
Before Stephen King became the franchise he is, in the early 1970s, he was a high school English teacher who supplemented his meager earnings by writing short stories for now long-dead men’s magazines: Cavalier, Dude, Adam. But as he became a successful writer, he concentrated mostly on the novels that regularly vaulted him to the top of bestseller lists.
There were still forays into short fiction – most recently “Everything’s Eventual,” a collection published six years ago. But it wasn’t until he was asked to edit the “2007 Best American Short Stories” that his enthusiasm for the genre was rekindled.
