The filmed-in-lockdown screen horror Host has taken the horror world by storm, nabbing the top spot (as of this writing) on Rotten Tomatoes’ list of Best Horror Movies of 2020. As fans go back to watch for a second or third time, they’re starting to notice some of the many Easter eggs the filmmakers have scattered throughout the movie. We asked co-screenwriter/executive producer Jed Shepherd to share a few of his favorites to get you started…
After releasing a statement about the systemic racism and police brutality that has cost the lives of countless Black American men and women, we announced a fundraiser with Fright Rags. You can pre-order the monochromatic Shudder logo tee from today until Monday, June 8th. 100% of the proceeds will be donated to Black Lives Matter, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the National Bail Fund Network.
Horror belongs in our movies, not in our streets. This week’s issue of The Bite is dedicated to providing resources and information to help the horror community stand up and support organizations who are working to help bring an end to police brutality at the expense of Black lives and to make ours a more just world.
Black Lives Matter.
You’ve heard the familiar song and dance about found footage: it isn’t scary, it’s too prevalent, and you can’t see anything through the shaky camera. But to see found footage as just a collection of tired tropes is to dismiss a revolutionary style of filmmaking that is quick to adapt to the changing technological landscape. Filmmakers are able to creatively tell unique stories through handheld cameras, security footage, and webcams. They create fear not with CGI or elaborate effects, but with lingering shots of darkened doorways and quiet bedrooms. Found footage is all about tension and changing how the viewer watches a film, making the experience an active rather than passive one. Blink and you may just miss something.
Depicting the natural world as a terror-in-waiting, humanity its cowering subjects, writer-director Jeffrey A. Brown’s The Beach House evokes the cosmic madness of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories The Colour Out of Space (1927) and Till A’ the Seas (1935).
The drive-in movie theater was invented 88 years ago in a driveway in Riverton, NJ. Industrial heir Richard Hollingshead Jr. experimented with equipment and screen materials in his driveway, and a year later opened his drive-in theater (25 cents a car) on the Pennsauken-Camden border with a screening of Wives Beware. The theater closed 14 months later, but drive-ins exploded in postwar America, and by the 1950s there were over 4000 of them.
