THE DESCENT’S Horrific Alternate Ending, PHANTASM Revisited, and More!
In this Issue:
- Horror History: Alternate Nightmares
- Image of the Week: Scary Selfie
- Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
- The States of Horror: Illinois + Indiana
- Things We Love: Cheesy Chills
- Hey, That’s Us! – Shudder in the News
HORROR HISTORY: ALTERNATE NIGHTMARES
By Lisa Morton
Warning: This article is one giant spoiler.
At the end of Get Out, our hero Chris goes to prison!
Okay … so that’s not what happened. We all know Chris escaped when his friend Rod rescued his ass, but we got to see the original prison ending on the Blu-ray.
Get Out certainly isn’t the first horror movie to get a totally different, happier ending. It’s somewhat of a tradition in a genre that regularly trades in the world of bleakness and dark:
In the U.S. cut of Neil Marshall’s The Descent (2005), Sarah, the last survivor, crawls out of the caves, makes it to her car, and seems to have escaped …until the ghost of Juno shows up beside her. In the U.K. cut, though, the ending continued to reveal that the escape was a dream, Sarah was still trapped underground, and a final hallucination of her daughter showed her to be (blessedly, for her) mad.
Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness (1992) ended with Ash being sent from medieval times back to his job in S-Mart, where he finds the deadite contagion has followed him. After dispatching an acrobatic she-demon, he plants a kiss on a comely co-worker and adds, “Hail to the King, baby.” That wasn’t always the ending, though: originally Ash was given a sleeping potion and instructions, but after (in typical Ash fashion) miscounting the required number of potion drops, he awakens in a destroyed, post-apocalyptic world.
Perhaps the biggest, most expensive unused ending belongs to Frank Oz’s 1986 horror musical Little Shop of Horrors. What we saw in theaters was the nerdy protagonist Seymour electrocuting the evil plant and leading Audrey off to a happily-ever-after life in a suburban house, complete with an Audrey II hidden in the garden. But test audiences saw the original ending, where the evil plant devours Seymour — just as in both the original film and Broadway versions — then spawn across the country, demolishing New York, and finally twining around the Statue of Liberty before bursting through the screen. That ending was too much of a downer for a mass audience.
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Scary Selfie
Forty years after director Don Coscarelli filmed his horror classic Phantasm (released a year later in 1979), he returned for a visit to the Morningside Mortuary … where we sure hope he didn’t run into the Tall Man!
TINY BITES
GEORGE ROMERO’S UNSEEN HORRORS & MORE
Author Daniel Kraus got the chance to watch the rarely seen George Romero filmThe Amusement Park, and calls it the creator’s “most overtly horrifying film.”
One reason Alan Moore is the greatesthorror graphic novel writer ever is his “haunting approach to creating fear, dread and despair.”
Here are the 50 scariest movie moments in horror. Or if it’s endings you prefer, then relive (spoiler alert) the 31 best final shots in horror.
You can compare the guacamole recipes of Boris Karloff and Vincent Price. (One of is “horrifying” in a bad way.)
The Atlantic explains why Child’s Play succeededwhere its creepy doll predecessors failed.
Vogue complains horror isn’t as good as it was supposed to be this year. (We disagree.)
Rolling Stone examines why 1992’s Candyman is scarier than ever. And at Cosmo, the screenwriter ofGirls Trips asks: Where are all the people of color in today’s horror movies?
Would two Stranger Things characters be able to afford their lifestyles in real life?
Learn about the true events which inspired Suspiria,The Exorcist, Psycho, and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The Purge TV series has been renewed for a second season.
American Horror Story is as great as its ever been, which is why one critic says it should end).
Here’s which whiskey you should drink when watchingThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and the proper pairings for five other horror films).
Meet three iconic women (other than Jamie Lee Curtis) who shaped the face of modern horror.
Somebody turned their kitten into a Demogorgon. (And we don’t think the kitten likes it.)
THE STATES OF HORROR: ILLINOIS + INDIANA
This week’s States of Horror bring us both suburban anxiety and concrete jungle, the latter the Windy City, whose distinct personality and sense of place adds to the horrors of it all.
Illinois: Candyman and Child’s Play
Is Haddonfield the most famous town in horror? That’s quite likely, but while Halloween is set in Illinois, it was famously shot in Pasadena (some say all too clearly, but really who’s looking for palm trees?) And as Haddonfield is more a symbol of any-place suburbia, let’s look at two movies more firmly rooted in the state: Candyman and Child’s Play, which focus in on specific neighborhoods and well-known landmarks of Chicago. Candyman finds its now-iconic supernatural villain/urban legend striking fear and caution into the residents of Cabrini Green, a once-infamous housing project on the Near North Side of Chicago, demolished in 2011. Child’s Play, which launched another genre favorite, Chucky, takes a more noir-ish look at the city, especially in its opening gun fight and alley transactions. Much of the action is in main character Andy and his mother Karen’s home, a unit in Brewster Apartments, a famous high-rise in the Lake View section of Chicago.
Indiana: The Desperate Hours
Directed by all-time great William Wyler, and starring another titan of film, Humphrey Bogart, 1955’s The Desperate Hours is an early iteration of one of the most frightening and taut subgenres, Home Invasion. Likely preying on fears of postwar suburban expansion, The Desperate Hours sees Bogart as the leader of three escaped convicts who hold a family hostage in their Indianapolis home. Home invasion sequences had of course been onscreen before, but The Desperate Hourswent on to help popularize the concept as plot alongside contemporary titles like Dial M for Murder, Lady in a Cage, and Wait Until Dark.
THINGS WE LOVE: CHEESY CHILLS
Michael Gingold loves those schlocky newspaper ads horror movies used run when he was a kid so much that he wrote a book about them. Ad Nauseam: Newsprint Nightmares From the 1980s collects the ads the former Fangoria editor-in-chief started clipping out and saving back when he was in Junior High School, including one for Mother’s Day, about which his parents said after they spotted the brutal ad, “There’s no way you’re going to see that.”
HEY, THAT’S US! – SHUDDER IN THE NEWS
[Trailer] “Joe Bob’s Dinners of Death” Brings Joe Bob Briggs Back to Shudder on Thanksgiving Night!
Streaming on Shudder: The Crow Isn’t Dated, It’s Timeless