Category: Son of 31 Nights, 31 Frights
-
Son of 31 Nights, 31 Frights: Insidious
By no means a spectacular horror movie but it is a nice little ghost story. Director James Wan, rather than relying on cheap gore and torture, as in the Saw movies that he launched, opts here for old fashioned mystery and suspense. Read more
-
Son of 31 Nights, 31 Frights: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
There are very few decent childrens’ programs for Halloween outside of the classic, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Having already broken ground with Chicken Run, director Nick Park and Aardman Entertainment cast their signature duo, Wallace and Gromit, in a wonderfully playful horror spoof in their first feature-length motion picture. Read more
-
Son of 31 Nights, 31 Frights: Quarantine
Nearly identical to its progenitor, [REC], this American remake gets a slight edge over its predecessor by stripping away the supernatural elements and giving the zombie outbreak a more terrifying, earthly origin. This also gives Quarantine an element of whodunit that’s missing from the Spanish original. Read more
-
Son of 31 Nights, 31 Frights: Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Another excellent remake worthy of its predecessor. This time around the Red Scare overtones have been jettisoned in favor of a post-Nixon/Vietnam paranoia that sees the enemy as the establishment, conformity, and psychoanalytical self-centeredness. The film circles slowly around an ever-decreasing perimeter of safety as the protagonists first discover then try to escape from the… Read more
-
Son of 31 Nights, 31 Frights: Tremors
Tremors didn’t get much love when it was initially released in the winter of 1990. Over time, it has garnered a respectable following, spawning three sequels and one television series, and putting it nearly on par with Planet of the Apes. Writers Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson, and director Ron Underwood nicely infuse the classic… Read more
-
Son of 31 Nights, 31 Frights: The Fog
After John Carpenter’s highly successful Halloween, he tried his hand at horror once again with this eerie ghost story. Adrienne Barbeau’s small town deejay serves as a kind of narrator to the events that unfold in the unsuspecting town of Antonio Bay as townsfolk prepare for its centennial. Though it’s quite a comedown from his… Read more
-
Son of 31 Nights, 31 Frights: Psycho
What is quite possibly the first slasher film (unless you want to get all semantic with The Lodger, another Hitchcock classic). Psycho‘s unusual story structure caught audiences off guard when the star of the movie resolved to be not the top-billed actress but the legendary scene in which she appeared. The nefarious proprietor of the… Read more
-
Son of 31 Nights, 31 Frights: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Director Tobe Hooper was inspired by both a hardware store and a famous serial killer when he wrote what would become The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Filmed on a shoestring budget under an unforgiving Texas sun that overexposed most of the film, the end product is a film with a tone that looks and feels so… Read more
-
Son of 31 Nights, 31 Frights: The Lodger
It’s easy to see how Alfred Hitchcock earned his moniker of “Master of Suspense” with this, his first surviving film, wherein he pays homage to the mystery that was Jack the Ripper. This adaptation of a play by Marie Belloc Lowndes has a mysterious lodger appear at the home of a couple with a room… Read more
-
Son of 31 Nights, 31 Frights: Hellbound: Hellraiser II
This follow-up to Clive Barker’s original is a far more interesting examination into the paradoxical concept that pain is pleasure and vice versa. Barker has an oddly intoxicating fascination with the flesh (as can be said of genius Seth Brundle). In this film that fascination is on full display, in particular his affinity for skinless… Read more