3 Reasons We Love ROGER CORMAN, JORDAN PEELE Breaks Another Record, and More!
In this issue:
- 3 Reasons We Love Roger Corman
- Image of the Week: Behind the scenes of Child’s Play 3
- Tiny Bites — The Week’s Best Horror Headlines
- States of Horror: Wisconsin + Wyoming
- Things We Love: Buffy on Vinyl
- Hey, That’s Us! – Shudder In The News
3 REASONS WE LOVE ROGER CORMAN
By Lisa Morton
On April 5th, Roger Corman — affectionately known as “The Pope of Pop Cinema” — turns 93 years young.
Corman’s claim to fame is as the greatest B-movie producer of all time (with 415 producing credits!) and the director of the best string of Edgar Allan Poe movies ever (most starring Vincent Price), but he’s so much more than that. Here are three reasons — other than the films themselves — we love the guy:
He always did whatever it took, and he did it to win. That Corman’s 1963 pic The Terrorgot made because he found out Boris Karloff still owed him two days work after The Raven is but one sign of his determination, but he wasn’t afraid to get down and dirty himself. When he could only afford to hire one stunt driver for his 1954 racing flick The Fast and the Furious, he got behind the wheel himself to play the second driver … then blew the scene by winning when he was supposed to lose.
He’s always up for a cameo, especially if he gave the movie’s director their start in the biz. He was a Congressman in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, a Senator in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, the head of the FBI in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, and an irritated phone booth customer in Joe Dante’s The Howling. His bit in Sharktopus is especially rich: after watching a bikini-clad blonde get dragged into the surf by the title monstrosity, he casually retrieves a coin she dropped.
He’s a champion problem solver. When he was shooting his historical epic Atlas, only 50 extras showed up for a battle scene that called for 500, so Roger quickly inserted new dialogue about how “a small band of efficient, dedicated, highly trained warriors could defeat any number of rabble.” In his perfectly-titled autobiography How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Corman says his theory of filmmaking is embodied in that dialogue.
Happy Birthday to our favorite one-man rabble-defeater!
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
7 Deadly Dollmakers
Back in 1991, it took seven people to bring the miniature murderer Chucky to life, as you can see in this behind-the-scenes photo from Child’s Play 3.
TINY BITES
GODZILLA GOES OVER THE RAINBOW, CTHULHU GOES UP IN SMOKE & MORE
Jordan Peele’s Us, which one fan theory says takes place in the Halloween universe, had the biggest opening ever for a movie headlined by a black woman.
Meanwhile, RogerEbert.com raved about Peele’s new Twilight Zone reboot, saying it “lives up to the original” and “would get Serling’s approval.”
Probably no one would have guessed that “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” would make a fitting soundtrack for a new Godzilla: King of the Monsters trailer — but it turns out to be perfect.
Chinese censors apparently have a problem with Cthulhu — they burned the entire print run of a Cthulhu RPG.
Joseph Pilato, whose unhinged Captain Henry Rhodes met a horrible but well-deserved end in George Romero’s 1985 Day of the Dead, died at age 70.
Stephen King says seeing all the new adaptations of his work is like “like being tied to the hood of a car that’s going really fast.”
If we can trust this Netflix job posting, we’re going to be seeing more interactive shows like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon photobombed a Congressional confirmation hearing. Really.
A couple claims their nanny cam caught a poltergeist attacking their baby.
Here’s a list of everybody who deserved death in The Purge movies, ranked by who deserved it most.
Why do we love even bad horror movies? One reviewer believes it’s because they fulfill “a subconscious need to feel superior.”
Jim Jarmusch boasts his upcoming movie The Dead Don’t Die will have “the greatest zombie cast ever disassembled.”
While some don’t like the term “elevated horror,” a mainstream critic watched a bunch of elevated horror movies and decided “I wasn’t a horror fan but these movies have won me over to the genre.”
Blumhouse is rebooting the 1996 movie The Craft.
The first trailer for The Silence has a Bird Box meets A Quiet Place feel, but it’s actually based on a 2015 book that predates both of those movies.
THE STATES OF HORROR: WISCONSIN + WYOMING
Today’s final States of Horror bring us our second Romero redo and one of the rare jail-set terrors.
Wisconsin: Dawn of the Dead
Way back in the States of Horror we talked Breck Eisner’s remake of The Crazies, which relocated the action from original director George Romero’s beloved Pennsylvania to the midwestern state of Iowa. Zack Snyder & James Gunn’s much loved reimagining of Dawn of the Dead similarly distances itself from Romero’s regional specificity, creating a madcap, fast paced (both in style and in zombie) new vision of an old tale: the undead taking a shopping mall. Also heading to the midwest, Dawn of the Dead 2004 lives in the fictional Everett, Wisconsin. There’s not a whole lot that’s particularly Wisconsin about the film (especially considering it shot in Canada), but hey, that’s where it’s set.
Wyoming: Prison
Before bitchin’ action gems like Cliffhanger and The Long Kiss Goodnight, Finnish director Renny Harlin made his Hollywood debut with two horror delights in Prison and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. The former is where we’re focused today (and a good showcase for why he’d go on to direct the latter). Though not explicitly set in Wyoming, this FX-heavy tale of an executed convict enacting supernatural revenge, shot at the Wyoming State Penitentiary, used real inmates (from a nearby prison) as extras and filmed in what was once the actual gas chamber.
Thanks for taking the trip with us! I hope some of the more truly local horror piqued your interest and if so, allow me to point you to Stephen Thrower’s crucial book, Nightmare USA, a vivid and in-depth look at independent American terror. And finally, though Washington D.C. is a district, not a state, is there any other movie we’d suggest than The Exorcist?
THINGS WE LOVE: ONCE MORE WITHE BUFFY
TV dramas switching things up with a musical episode happens so often it’s become a trope. But the best of the bunch was Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s game-changing 2001 “Once More with Feeling,” which spawned a cast album as well as theatrical sing-along screenings. Mondo and Fox Music are making it available again after 15 years, for the first time on vinyl, with new liner notes from Joss Whedon. And that gives us something to sing about.