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“Monsters do exist; in us and among us. They walk in our shadow. They can prey on us more as we fear them less. We should know. We created them.” --- George A. Romero

Horrorphile - January 2007

Horror QUIZ #7: Ghosts

January 31st 2007 13:29
a ghostly figure
At one time or another we’ve all been scared by the things that go bump in the night, the apparition we thought we saw, the weird movement behind the curtain we caught from the corner of our eye, even though we know we’re alone in the house at night, the door knob we hear slowly turning as we slink deeper under our sheets, hoping somehow, someway, we’ll escape the doom of the spectre!

1. In the movie Trick or Treat which “metal” star appears as a reverend?
a) Alice Cooper
b) Jimmy Page
c) Tommy Lee
d) Gene Simmons
e) Ozzy Osbourne

2. One Dark Night is also known under which title?
a) By the Cold Light of the Moon
b) Forced Entity
c) Mausoleum
d) Night in the Tomb
e) Rest in Pieces

3. Fred Astaire co-starred in which movie?
a) Stir of Echoes
b) Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things
c) Sleepy Hollow
d) Ghost Story
e) The Legend of Hell House

4. In Don’t Look Now the parents are haunted by a girl in what colour raincoat?
a) Green
b) Blue
c) Red
d) Yellow
e) Pink

5. Which of the following movies has not been remade?
a) Ringu
b) The Curse of the Cat People
c) Ju-On
d) Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara
e) 13 Ghosts

6. Prison was one of which Hollywood director’s early low-budget efforts?
a) Oliver Stone
b) Jan De Bont
c) Renny Harlin
d) Tony Scott
e) Richard Donner

7. Which movie features a ghost which dwells in the woods?
a) Candyman
b) Darkness Falls
c) The Others
d) Nang Nak
e) The Blair Witch Project

8. Which actor is not in the remake of House on Haunted Hill?
a) Jaime Pressly
b) Taye Diggs
c) Peter Gallagher
d) Famke Janssen
e) Geoffery Rush

9. Which movie begins with a nasty snow-laden road accident?
a) What Lies Beneath
b) The Grudge
c) The Amityville Horror
d) White Noise
e) The Changeling

10. In Pet Sematary the animal’s graveyard is located in front of what haunted site?
a) A Satanists’ retreat
b) An old demolished hospital
c) An abandoned circus of the dark arts
d) A derelict mortuary
e) An Indian burial ground

11. The Entity featured what kind of spectre?
a) An incubus
b) A poltergeist
c) A warlock
d) A manitou
e) A succubus

12. What movie featured a room numbered 237?
a) The Changeling
b) Silent Hill
c) The Turn of the Screw
d) The Shining
e) Ghost Story

13. The ghosts of dead sailors return to terrorise a township in which movie?
a) Ghost Ship
b) Dark Water
c) Death Ship
d) The Fog
e) The Frighteners

13 … Yikes! I just saw you pass right through that brick wall!
9 – 12 … As a teenager I bet your "energy" bent a few kitchen utensils!
5 – 8 … You have garnered a fine selection of antique Ouija boards!
1 – 4 … Best you stick to throwing a white sheet over your head, whispering “Ooooo! Ooooooo!!”
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Ginger Snaps

January 30th 2007 00:26
Ginger Snaps movie poster
Sometimes being a girl can be such a bitch … a howling, snarling, hair-bristling bitch. It helps when you have a sister who’ll do anything to make those teething problems a little less painful for you.

Ginger Snaps (2000), a Canadian production, is up in the small pantheon of killer werewolf flicks. It’s a smaller league than vampire flicks, frustrating, but a reality. The lycanthrope is a beast that doesn’t seem to translate as enthusiastically up on silver screen, as the fetid-breathed undead.

Personally I really dig werewolves. There’s a sharp bite to their supernatural core. Sure, they don’t perhaps have the same slinky, suave sex-appeal, but for werewolves the sex is more carnal, more primal. As Ginger herself spits rather bitterly, “I thought I had a craving for sex, but it’s to tear everything to fucking pieces!”

Oh, what big green eyes you have! Katharine Isabelle as Ginger
The Fitzgerald sisters (Ginger, nearly 16 and Brigitte, 15) are a little unusual as neither have begun menstruating yet. Their mother (Mimi Rogers) isn’t too concerned; it will come in good time. Father just looks and acts confused (he’s the most ineffectual character in the whole movie). None of the males in the film manage any real kind of heroism, except the handsome local drug dealer, but he’s doomed anyway.

The sisters are ridiculed at school, which only aggravates their general misanthropy (hello, lycanthropy!). They are inseparable and spend much of their free time staging their own highly elaborate death and suicide scenes (Harold and Maude, anyone?), which they photograph and archive. They even put together a slide show for class presentation which, of course, disgusts, but mostly confuses, their dorky male teacher.

No one seems to understand them. Puberty is playing havoc with their sensibilities. And that pretty bitch Trina Sinclair with her damn dog, she’s gonna get hers one day! Just you wait! But fate plays a bitch of a card when the two girls are attacked near the woods and Ginger is savagely mauled. They escape only to discover back at home that Ginger’s wounds are healing at an alarming rate. Uh-oh.

Arghh!! Damn these period pains!!
Karen Walton’s tidy screenplay plays with the notion of lycanthropy being a physical metaphor for adolescence and, more precisely, puberty. It’s not so much the full moon to watch out for, but that 28 day cycle, the “curse”, as Ginger affectionately calls it when she and her sister notice she’s got blood on her thigh, and it ain’t from the mangled dog in the park they just found.

Director John Fawcett has elicited two superb performances from the two leads; Emily Perkins as “B” (Brigitte) and Katharine Isabelle as her afflicted older sister, Ginger. Mimi Rogers turns in a decent job as the slow-witted mom (funny to think she was first married to Tom Cruise, a werewolf in sheep’s clothing if ever there was one!)

The werewolf strut, Ginger is hot to trot!
It’s a race against time for the two sisters, as Ginger’s self-confidence and appetite for all things fleshy and sweet grows, her mood swings escalate, and to make a girl really upset, she’s growing a damn wriggling tail she has to tape to her thigh!

Brigitte needs an antidote, a cure, urgently. Druggie Sam (Chris Lemche) seems the best option, as he knows a little about the properties of Monkshood, and can reduce the crushed petals into a hypodermic solution.

It seems most werewolf flicks are part comedy, not sure why that is, perhaps it has something to do with baying at the moon, an inhairant gnawing of the funny bone. Ginger Snaps has some great dialogue, mostly exchanges between the sisters (eg while they look for a suitable box of tampons Brigitte asks Ginger “Are you sure they’re just cramps?”, Ginger, doubled-over in pain sarcastically replies, “Just so you know, the words ‘just’ and ‘cramps’ do not go together.”), but amusingly - almost pointedly - there’s a very keen use of the word “fuck” too …

One of the more potent scenes from the movie (and very unsafe for the workplace!):
The special effects are pretty decent for this none-too-monstrous-budgeted film (especially in the mock suicide polaroids), however the werewolf design itself is a bit hokey - which frequently seems to be the case in these movies. Still, the editing does the best it can to keep the menace frighteningly alive and frothing at the mouth, and there are some genuinely unnerving scenes.

Ginger Snaps is a kind of twisted date flick; it pokes intelligent fun at our adolescent woes, teases our lust, plays around with supernatural thrills, while keeping the horror edge sharp and glistening in the fat moonlight. It’s hip without being self-conscious, and that’s a delicate balance to hold.

The movie was followed by two lesser sequels shot back-to-back, Ginger Snaps: Unleashed (2004) dealt with Brigitte’s further plight, while Ginger Snaps Back (2004) was a "period" piece (muah-ha-ha!) …

* images on this page were taken from the following wikipedia page:
Ginger Snaps (film)
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Killer ENDINGS

January 29th 2007 00:49
WARNING! CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Sometimes we feel horribly ripped off, and sometimes we find ourselves quietly hooting with sadistic glee. I’m talking about the endings of horror movies. Where the menace seems to have been destroyed, yet somehow manages to slip through the Good Net.

More often than not, there’s some kind of set-up for a sequel. Generally this sucks! Occasionally a movie has an open end, which wasn’t specifically designed as a sequel-cum-hither ploy, and still captures the movie’s nightmare essence.

As a rule of thumb the whole “It was only a dream …” denouement is a cop-out too. But sometimes it just works. Here are a few that play by the rules, but work a treat.

Carrie (1976)
Susan Snell, who survived the prom carnage, is recovering at her home. Her mother is by her bedside. The telephone rings and Susan’s mother goes to answer it. Susan appears to be dreaming. In her dream she is visiting the site of Carrie White’s home where it burned to the ground. A large white cross has been erected in a bed of rocks with Carrie White’s name on it. A vandal has scrawled “Carrie White burns in Hell” across it. Susan places a wreath of flowers down at the foot of the cross … and suddenly Carrie’s blood-streaked hand bursts through the stones and grabs Susan’s wrist! Susan screams and sits bolt upright in her bed, her mother rushing to her aid …. She continues to scream hysterically. Camera pulls away.

Michael Myers about to get coat hangered
Halloween (1978)
Laurie has only just managed to keep her brother Michael Myers at bay, after he has been steadily trying to kill her. She has stabbed him in the eye with a wire coat hanger. Doctor Loomis finally arrives at shoots Michael several times at point blank range. Michael stumbles backward out onto the balcony, and over the side of the railing, down onto the lawn some ten feet below. There is a collective sigh of relief from the audience. Sheesh, for a moment there we thought he might have been unstoppable. Loomis goes over to check, and low and behold, the body is gone! The Shape is on the loose again. Loomis looks very concerned. Cut to black.

The Tall Man is calling
Phantasm (1978)
Young Mike and Reggie, the friend of his dead older brother, are consoling each other by the fireside. Reggie keeps telling Mike he’s been having bad dreams. Mike is certain the Tall Man who claimed the lives of his parents, and his older brother, is now after him. “Jody died in a car crash, we went to his funeral”, Reggie insists. Mike has a vision of himself at the grave of his brother. Finally Mike realizes that maybe Reggie is right. They agree to leave the house and go traveling together, get away from the memories and dark thoughts permeating the house. Mike goes up to his room to get his gear together while Reggie strums away on his guitar. Mike closes his wardrobe door with floor length mirror and reveals a reflection of the Tall Man. Mike turns and gasps in horror, as the Tall Man calls out; “Boy!!” Suddenly arms come crashing through the mirror and pull Mike back into the dark void that was the mirrored wardrobe. Cut to black.

Dressed to Kill (1980)
The killer, Dr Robert Elliott, has been caught. Liz and Peter are enjoying lunch and wondering what they will do next. Meanwhile at the local asylum a nurse approaches the bed of Dr. Elliott. He pretends to be asleep, and then strangles her as she leans over the bed. The inmates looking on from the upper levels all cheer him on as he slowly undresses the nurse. Cut to a point of view of a house. Someone is stalking it. Inside Liz is showering. The stalker has entered the house unheard. But Liz notices a pair of nurse’s shoes, someone hiding outside the bathroom. It’s the killer waiting. Liz carefully climbs out of the shower and goes to the medicine cabinet where a straight razor is, but as she opens the mirrored cabinet door, the audience sees the reflection of the “nurse” in the background, and next thing Liz knows is the nurse’s razor neatly slicing through her throat. She screams and wakes up, in her bed, with Peter at her side. He tries to comfort her, but she is hysterical. Camera pulls away.

MacCready trying to stay warm
The Thing (1982)
After having set fire to the Antarctic base, which has now destroyed most of it, MacCready sits by himself, exhausted. Childs approaches. Have they destroyed the alien thing which systematically consumed all of their colleagues? It’s unclear. More to the point, has the thing infiltrated either of them and is not letting on? “How are we gonna get out of this?” Childs asks, “Maybe we shouldn’t,” MacCready surmises. They stare at each other. Childs is about to insist he’s not infected, but MacCready interrupts, “If either of us has any surprises left, we’re not in much shape to do anything about it.” and Childs agrees. “So what do we do now?” “Let’s just sit here for a bit,” replies MacCready handing Childs a bottle of whisky, “And see what happens.” Both men manage an ironic chuckle. They know the alien thing is smart enough not to expose itself straight away; it wants to survive, not freeze, so it must be careful what it does. With the fires burning in the background and the dark night still surrounding them all they can do is sit … and wait … and wait some more. Fade to black.

Nancy and friends still trapped in Freddy's dream Hell
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Nancy no longer believes Freddy Krueger can harm her. She tells him directly that she thinks he is shit. Freddy Krueger lurches at her, his bladed gloves outstretched, but he simply dissolves into nothing as Nancy reaches for the front door. She steps out into sunshine, her mother behind her. A car pulls up to take her to school, with all her friends inside laughing. She joins them, her mother waving goodbye. But the car door locks by itself. Something is wrong. Nancy starts screaming, banging on the window in panic, but her mother doesn’t seem to notice. The creepy nursery rhyme begins again; “One two, Freddy’s coming for you …” and as the car, which now sports the Krueger colours, drives off up the road, Freddy’s arms smash through the small front door glass pane and pull Nancy’s mother back through it. Cut to black.

What other horror flicks have killer endings?
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Outback

January 26th 2007 00:52
original movie poster for Outback
A wee ripper of a strine flicker, this dark lil’ gem was lost for thirty years until some bugger (Veteran Aussie producer Anthony Buckley who edited the movie) found the negative in a warehouse in Pittsburgh marked “For Destruction”. Fair bloody dinkum!

Outback was adapted from the novel Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook and directed by Ted Kotcheff (First Blood) in 1971. But the film never received a proper Australian release. Ironically it was nominated for the Palm d’Or at Cannes despite the controversy it yielded (more on that later


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Carrie

January 25th 2007 00:17
Original movie poster for Carrie
It was Stephen King’s first novel, and it was Brian De Palma’s first real box office success as a director. It gave Sissy Spacek huge exposure, launched John Travolta's career, and provided Piper Laurie with her first big screen role since The Hustler (1961).

Carrie was a roaring success when it was released in 1976. Moviegoers throughout America made it one of the most attended “proms” in years. It cost under two million dollars and made well over $US30,000,000, with a further $US15,000,000 and more in video rentals (it was one of those early VHS releases


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graves in the mist
All the best screenwriters and directors have at different times followed the rules and made conventional movies and broken the rules and made subversive films.

So just what are the elements that make up a good, even great, horror flick? Are there strict rules you should follow? Should you always try and break convention


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MADE on the SMELL of an OILY RAG

January 22nd 2007 23:45
Bolex 16mm motion camera
Ahhh, yes, the trials and tribulations of low-budget filmmaking, sometimes referred to as guerilla filmmaking, or as I like to quip, making a flick on the smell of an oily rag.

Almost as a rule, horror films work best on smaller budgets. But there are some key factors that need to be in place way before the cameras start rolling. In fact, way before even pre-production begins


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What subject matter is still TABOO?

January 21st 2007 23:43
The Kiss by Francesco Hayez
When the Hays Production Code came into practice in Hollywood during the 1930s a great list of things were blacklisted from being shown on screen. For example excessive or lustful kissing was considered too risqué, especially as it might “stimulate the lower and baser element”.

“Revenge in modern times” was not to be justified as far as the Code was concerned. So imagine showing film censors in the Hays office Salo, 100 Days of Sodom (1975), Cannibal Holocaust (1980) or Irreversible (2002). They’d have a heart attack, the poor suckers


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What should the DEAD do next?

January 19th 2007 01:28
“Zombies, man, they creep me out.” --- Kaufman, Land of the Dead

one of Dawn's dead enjoys a disco nap
This is one for all the zombie lovers out there, especially the Romeroheads. And a twitchin’ nod o’ the rotting head to Cibby for the nudge


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into the burning heart of darkness
I have a list (I have dozens of lists, I’m a geek; it’s something I get a kick out of doing). It’s a list of my 101 all-time favourite films (106 actually, but the last five are either shorts or featurettes). I update it once every couple of years, although it doesn’t really change that much, certainly not the top 30 or so.

Once in a blue moon I see a movie that immediately ticks all my cinephilic boxes, but that is rare. Every couple of years or so a film will enter into the top 100, and knock another title out that for one reason or another has lost a certain je ne sais quoi


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In one of my early posts (August last year) I talked about how Dario Argento had finally succumbed to the pressure of fans and was in production on the final part of his witchcraft trilogy known as "The Three Mothers".

Masters of Horror - Dario Argento's Jenifer
Last night I watched his contribution to the first season (2005) of the US cable television series Masters of Horror (13 hour-long tales each concocted and directed by a so-called master of horror). Argento’s was called Jenifer, based on a short story by Bruce Jones, with a screenplay by the lead actor Steven Weber


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Horror QUIZ #6: Psychos

January 16th 2007 05:03
The abstract eyes of a psychopath

A staple of the stalk’n’slash genre, psycho killers have been roaming the cinematic streets for decades. They have it easy a lot of the time; they don’t have to say much, or even do much, apart from relentlessly stalk their victims (usually at a slow steady pace), and once their victims are cornered or surprised, the psycho will generally murder them in a particularly brutal and gruesome fashion. And it’s all logically excused in the name of insanity.

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The HEART of horror

January 15th 2007 03:08
a human heart
A basic rule of thumb in any good movie is the more emotionally involving the story and characters are, the more effective and affecting the movie will be.

This is not always the case with horror movies. In most slasher flicks the victims are a bunch of obnoxious teenagers whom one couldn’t care less about, although there are exceptions to the rule


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9 HEINOUS HORROR HUMANOIDS

January 11th 2007 22:40
Here’s my pick of some of cinema’s most notorious creatures of pure and utter evil. These hideous, vengeful, scheming and relentless killing machines of modern horror have been slaughtering, devouring, and destroying, generally tearing to shreds poor, mostly innocent, victims for more than thirty years! The body count stretches into the hundreds.

Some of these outrageous killers are still at large, some have been captured and have escaped, one of them has been killed en mass, yet it still returned, while a couple has been supposedly killed, only to return as a zombie and a demon


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Land Of The Dead

January 11th 2007 00:26
1968: Night of the Living Dead … 1978: Dawn of the Dead … 1985: Day of the Dead.
Land of the Dead US DVD cover

2005: Land of the Dead
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The Proposition

January 9th 2007 23:29
“Australia … What fresh Hell is this?”
Charlie and the Great Aussie Outback
There hasn’t been an Australian film as darkly poetic as this in years. This is unquestionably a modern classic, a masterpiece of period horror, a mutant western.

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ROALD DAHL's Pig and Swan

January 8th 2007 23:52
Roald Dahl
I was reminiscing about one of my favourite authors with my brother the other day; Roald Dahl. The author, that is, not my brother. I grew up voraciously reading his children’s books, my favourites being Fantastic Mr. Fox and Danny the Champion of the World (I loved both books themes of poaching and eating game).

Then one birthday I was given his short story collection The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. As a young adult I progressed through to his adult stories found in the classic collections Kiss Kiss, Someone Like You and Switch Bitch. Furthermore I thoroughly enjoyed his sexy romp of a novel Uncle Oswald
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Scream movie poster

I watched Prom Night (1980) last night. I’d never seen it. One of those slasher flicks that slipped through the net. I can see why now. It’s a terrible movie. Even by slasher standards. I have no idea why it features on numerous so-called horror fans favourite slasher flicks lists??

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Fire In The Sky

January 5th 2007 05:14
Fire in the Sky DVD cover
An alien abduction happened on November 5, 1975, at 5:49PM in the White Mountains of North-Eastern Arizona. Apparently a true story which, years later was turned into a gripping film based on The Walton Experience by Travis Walton. Fire in the Sky is a solid little tale about a rather unpleasant close encounter of the third kind.

Made in 1993 and directed by Robert Lieberman it had a modest impact on its original release, but since went on to enjoy a healthy life on the shelves of video stores around the world, where it has garnered some what of a small cult following. This is not immediately apparent while sitting through the film’s first fifteen to twenty minutes, but soon enough the viewer is hooked into the film’s extra-terrestrial intrigue


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Horror QUIZ #5: Aliens

January 4th 2007 02:25
chestburster from Alien
They can infiltrate your body as parasites, they can change shape as xenomorphs, they can slither and slime, fly and climb, they are next to bloody invincible! Sometimes they attack Earth in vast numbers and sometimes they invade your mind. And always remember … in space no one can hear you scream!

1. The movie Shivers is also known as …?
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Rob Zombie's Halloween
You’ve probably heard about it, or read something somewhere, and it’s true: John Carpenter’s seminal “Boo!” machine is being remade. That’s right; Halloween, arguably one of the greatest modern horror films ever made, and certainly in my hallowed top 3 all-time favourite horror movies.

The man at the helm of the remake is Rob Zombie, frontman for progressive metal outfit White Zombie, and director of House of 1000 Corpses (2003) and The Devil’s Rejects (2005), who claims to be a huge fan of the original movie and all-round horrorphile. Hmmm


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