ARMY OF DARKNESS and Other Horror Movie Game-Changers, HELLBOY Beer, and More!
In this Issue:
- Horror History: 3 Best Horror Movie Franchise Pivots
- Image of the Week: A Stomach for Horror
- Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
- The States of Horror: Oregon + Pennsylvania
- Things We Love: Hellboy Brew
- Hey, That’s Us! – Shudder in the News
HORROR HISTORY: 3 BEST HORROR MOVIE FRANCHISE PIVOTS
By Joshua Lyon
Army of Darkness turns a groovy twenty-six today! (In North America, that is.) Happy birthday, Ash (and Evil Ash, and all those Mini Ashes).
Infamous for taking the horror comedy of Evil Dead 2and cranking it up to eleven, the film is set in 1300 AD and packed with slapstick nods to everything from theThree Stooges to Gulliver’s Travels. The scariest thing in it is Lord Arthur’s home-cut bangs, and while it’s hardly the first horror franchise to delve into outright comedy (see Freddy and Chucky), its evolution from a cabin-in-the-woods gore fest to fantasy film send-up was such a one-eighty that its original title, Medieval Dead, might have better prepared audiences.
But reinvention is the lifeblood of horror, and whileArmy of Darkness is possibly the best tonal pivot in horror history, there are some others we also love.
Creative differences between Night of the Living Deaddirector George Romero and co-writer John Russo left the latter with rights to the phrase “living dead.” In 1985, the same year Romero’s Day of the Deadpremiered, Dan O’Bannon released The Return of the Living Dead, based on Russo’s 1978 novel. The two films share an origin story and that’s about it: Romero’s grim take sees a bunker of soldiers and scientists struggling with zombies and rapidly deteriorating mental states, But the gleefully punk ROTLD kept its tongue planted firmly in rotting cheek as it turned into a delightful and now legendary horror comedy.
Instead of returning home with his sequel to House of 1000 Corpses, Rob Zombie brought the Firefly clan into broad daylight with the western-influenced revenge shocker The Devil’s Rejects, and the sweaty, sun-soaked atmosphere makes the horror unleashed all the more terrifying. The film also strips its leads of the campiness that came with the first film. “The performances are really for the most part pretty real. They’re not over the top,” Bill Moseley, who stars as Otis, told AboutFilm. “I think that really speaks to Rob’s maturity as a writer as well as a director that this time he thought, ‘Instead of doing the same thing over again, let’s find out what makes these characters tick.'”
The most famous about-face remains Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which ditched the continuing adventures of Michael Myers for a world where the original Halloween movie exists, and pure evil comes in the form of a sci-fi plot to murder thousands of children via masks that dissolve kiddie brains into bugs and snakes, thanks to television airwaves and the power of Stonehenge. It bombed, the producers brought back The Shape, and the movie now stands as a beloved cult classic.
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
A Stomach for Horror
Director David Cronenberg makes a gutsy move with actor James Woods behind the scenes on 1983’s Videodrome. Long live the new flesh!
TINY BITES
STRANGER THINGS D&D, EVIL DEAD ESCAPE & MORE
Because the Are You Afraid of the Dark? movie coming this October won’t be enough to satisfy our hunger for horror, Nickelodeon has announced an Are You Afraid of the Dark? TV series.
Rob Zombie shared a few pics from 3 From Hell, his long-awaited sequel to The Devil’s Rejects, as proof it’s almost done.
Scout Taylor-Compton, who portrayed a young Laurie Strode in the 2007 and 2009 Halloween reimaginings, says she’s “kinda glad” a third didn’t happen, because “it was not from loving hands.”
If you ever thought you could break free from the haunted cabin in Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, now’s your chance to try — an authorized escape room opens in Seattle this summer.
The first trailer for the latest Blumhouse horror filmMa is freaking everyone out.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is rumored to be getting a live-action adaptation. (Please be true.)
You’ll soon be able to fight the Demogorgon yourself in a Stranger Things-themed Dungeons & Dragons set.
Take a spin if you dare in 13 of horror’s most famous cars (and trucks … you know the ones).
Mixtapes unleash a cosmic horror in the first trailer forStarfish.
A third installment of the Vampire: The Masquerade game is apparently being teased with a Tinder-like app called Tender. Unless it really is a way for like-minded people to bond over maggots and demonology.
Proving that airport security lines really are a nightmare, some poor Freddy Kreuger fan had his glove seized by the TSA.
THE STATES OF HORROR: OREGON + PENNSYLVANIA
Today, we go coast to coast, hitting the undead and backwoods killers along the way.
Oregon: Just Before Dawn
Let’s talk lush Pacific Northwest woods, where groups of friends find themselves in all sorts of unexpected danger. Vastly underrated horror filmmaker Jeff Lieberman makes his second States of Horror appearance after Georgia’s Squirm, with Just Before Dawn. Lieberman shot his gem of a 1981 slasher in Oregon’s Silver Falls State Park. Much like Squirm,JBD has a real sense of place thanks to that distinct Pacific Northwest atmosphere, which lends an air of tension to the tale of hikers being killed off. Just a few years ago, the terrific Jeremy Saulnier told his own Oregon horror story in Green Room, in which a touring punk band unwittingly play a rural white supremacist venue and find themselves under attack. When outside, the viciously taut thriller makes great use of surrounding forest, as well as the harsh juxtaposition of dangerous ideology lurking just outside of a famously progressive metropolitan area like Portland.
Pennsylvania: Night of the Living Dead
This is Romero territory, both onscreen and off. Night of the Living Dead is maybe the most quintessential Pennsylvania movie there is, horror or not. Romero and his crew of Pittsburgh-based industrial filmmakers in the Image Ten revolutionized independent film all from Western Pennsylvania, where they set and shot an intended B-horror that became an all-time genre classic, a reinvention of fictional zombiedom, and a layered reflection of its turbulent era. The second most Pennsylvania horror movie? Probably Dawn of the Dead, whose location at the Monroeville Mall has since become a Mecca for horror and film fans attempting to be close to one of the greats. Bonus shouts to M. Night Shyamalan, who has stayed loyal to his home state, setting and building many of his films within it, from the more urban Philadelphia landscapes of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakabletrilogy, to the rural creeps of The Village and The Visit.
THINGS WE LOVE: HELLBOY BREW
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the publication of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, Dark Horse Comics teamed up with Gigantic Brewing to create six different flavors of Hellboy beer — for a total of 666 cases. Included are Indigo Blue Fruit Ale (for Abe Sapien), Maple Syrup Pancake Beer (for Hellboy himself), plus four more character-themed flavors. It’ll first be available to fans at next month’s Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle, but will later be on sale in select locations across the U.S.
HEY, THAT’S US! – SHUDDER IN THE NEWS
Horror Noire shines a much-needed light on the history of African-Americans in horror films
Season 1 Details Emerge For Shudder’s Creepshow
Episode 1 wrapped CREEPSHOW!!!!