Horror News

James Wan, horror auteur and director of Insidious, Insidious 2, The Conjuring and a bunch of the Saw movies, dropped two trailers at the 2016 San Diego WonderCon this weekend. And I gotta say they both look incredible.

The Conjuring 2: The Enfield Poltergeist

It looks as though Ed and Lorraine Warren are back at it again. The famous paranormal detectives travel to England to investigate The Enfield Poltergeist, based on real events that hit the Hodgson family in the late 70’s. Written by Wan, David Lee Johnson, Carey and Chad Hayes (Oregon natives!) the quartet responsible for the first Conjuring film, with Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga reprising their roles as Ed and Lorraine Warren (respectively), I’m hoping that this sequel will further develop these two incredibly fascinating characters, and carry the same emotional resonance and feelings of desperation that helped make the first film so terrifying.

Lights Out

As the trailer for Lights Out tells you, you were right to be afraid of the dark. After Rebecca(played by Teresa Palmer) moves away from home, she comes back when she finds out that her little brother Martin(played by Gabriel Bateman) is being haunted by the same nightmarish presence that drove her to leave in the first place. It is revealed in the trailer that this presence, in the form of a woman, is weirdly attached to their mother (Maria Bello) and they have to keep their shit together long enough to somehow survive this entity that seeks vengeance.

Lights Out is directed by David F. Sandberg, who wrote and directed the short film of the same name that Lights Out is based on. Although Sandberg has quite a number of short films under his belt, this will be his feature length debut. And while the premise of this film reminds me allot of the 2003 film Darkness Falls (directed by Johnathan Liebesman.) But I’m going to give this film the benefit of the doubt, and hope that Sandberg’s first feature flick will be as terrifying and inventive as the original short film.

Release date: July 22, 2016  

Bonus

Lights Out short film (2013) 

                  Happy Easter Horror Fans! 

Adventure time/Horror movie mash up art!

Found this on the @UnusualHorror on InstaGram and I'm kind of in love with it so I thought I'd share :) 

Last Shift (2014)

One of the first lines of this film is "Mom its fine, most cops go their entire career without seeing any action" How foreboding is that? Directed by Anthony DiBlasi, Last shift is about Jessica Loren(played by Julianna Harkavay(walking dead fans would know her as Alisha) who is starting her very first night shift as a rookie cop, and boy do things start off weird. She enters this sterile police department and finds...no one. As she calls out she finds police sergeant Coen, played by a grizzled Hank Stone, who screams at her to turn around suddenly (What a great way to introduce yourself!) They discuss the new department, and Coen informs her that she has the privilege of working the last night shift in the old police department before it shuts down for good(can anyone say Five Nights at Freddie's?!) Her job: from 8 pm to 6 am she has to guard the seemingly empty and eerily quiet building and she can't, repeat cannot, leave until then. 

Things start off slow, reading turns to sleep, and then a strange call comes in. A girl asking for help wakes up the young rookie. (Who’s forgotten what Coen said, that all the emergency calls were being rerouted to the new department. Spoooooky!) Everything in the department, all the rooms, the halls, the ceilings are bright white with giant florescent lights which emphasizes how empty this giant building is, and how alone our protagonist is. 

After hearing a knock on the front door, Officer Loren goes outside to investigate and finds nothing. When she turns around to go inside, she finds a grizzled and dirty man who appears either to not notice her asking him to GTFO or just doesn't care. But the real question here is: how did this man get inside in the first place? Considering that she closed and locked the door behind her.

Strange noises, echoes from the old pipes, sound like arthritic bones crackling and create a real sense of unease and a good deal of suspense. As she explores through the vacant rooms and hallways, things move on their own, doors open suddenly(and in unison), heavy shelves sway impossibly, all when she's not looking, and she continues to receive calls from the distressed girl. Things really hit the fan when she discovers that the back door broken open and her police radio begins to play children's music.

About Halfway through the film she's joined by officer Ryan Price(played by actor insert here) who comes to check on her and tells her about “the wannabe Manson family”, a religious cult that killed Jessica’s police officer father, but nothing is at it seems in this mindfuck of film. As music and sound bounce off the white walls, yells of people, singing girls, and masked individuals appearing and disappearing just in the periphery, out of the corner of the eye, the viewer is left asking: Is she going crazy? Is this all in her mind?

Disappointments: why do cops never fire their weapons in movies? Or call for back up? Why is that not a thing?! Also, if your phone rings and it’s a dead parent that usually means your speaking to a demon/ghost thing. I mean, come on.

Diblasi makes amazing use of camera angels and lighting, (or the sudden lack of lighting) to put the viewer through the ringer and back. The echoey soundtrack and rhythmic bass tones help the tension to rise until it's almost too much. It has amazing gore and practical effects, some excellent cinematography, a perfectly moody soundtrack and had just the right about of jump scares. This is a really scary and well done horror film. It’s definitely worth your time.  

Overall, I give this flick 4.5 out of 5

-Leslie Rae 

Hi, my name is Leslie Rae and  I should be doing math homework, but I'm not (obviously.) Last year was kinda utter shit for me. 2015 didn't treat me kindly. My shitty ex broke up with me the day before valentine's day(like a real winner), I dropped out of school, moved back in with my parents and lost my grandfather a week before Christmas. It was a bad year over all(although there were some highlights, I'm looking at you Mel, Tahni and Neil.) This year I've decided that I've had enough with the shitty times, I'm done with them, shitty times are boring and I just dont feel like doing that anymore, so I've decided that while I'm going back to school(hence math homework) and work on getting my GPA up I might as well doing something productive in regards to something I'm passionate about, maybe it'll help point me in the right direction.

So I sat down and wrote out a list of things I love. Origami came up, as did corgis, baking, crafts, etc etc... but I circled back to the first on my list: movies, specifically horror movies.
I LOVE horror movies. I've loved horror movies since I was eight years old and I watched  A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) while home sick from school. I remember the feeling of bile rise to my throat as Freddy stretched out his arms so wide he could scrap the metal fences with his gnarly clawed hands as he chased Tina through her nightmare. I remember being amazed as Freddy dragged her all around the ceiling of her bedroom with some wire work that, to this day, still looks soooo realistic. I remember these scenes and more, but most of all I remember feeling a beautiful mixture of terrified and absolutely excited! The feeling of experiencing Tina's fear while knowing deep down, that I was safe at home, was intoxicating, and eventually turned into an addiction.

Every time my parents and I went to the blockbuster a few blocks away(that's an old sentence, like a great uncle talking about the wild days of radio, but I digress) I would run to the horror section and look at the dvd/vhs covers. Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Shinning, Autopsy, Night of the Living Dead... I would beg my parents, "Please, this looks so gooooooooooood!!!! Please, I know its rated R but but but...pleeeeeeeeeease." My mom almost never budged on this, it was PG13 fares for me. My dad on the other hand... he was a rebel. He grew up watching World War 2 footage on cable TV,"no horror movie was as bad as war", was his thought process. But my friends could hardly ever make it through the films I choose. "Cant we watch A Nightmare Before Christmas?". "But... its made by Tim Burton" was all I ever said in reply.

When I got to the 8th grade I met Caroline. No longer was I alone in my love of horror movies. Friday and Saturday nights were spent in movie theaters, watching the latest PG 13 flicks, and occasionally a Rated R film if her dad felt like taking us. We watched Silent Hill, The Grudge, The Ring, The Village, The Ring 2, Dark Water, The Omen (remake), and soooo many more. Caroline always had a love of Asian culture(especially Japanese culture) so all our sleep overs were spent watching the original Japanese films all our favorite american horror films were copying at the time(a very big trend in early 2000's horror you'll notice). It was amazing. Even my friends that didn't like horror still loved me enough to watch horror with me. My wonderful friend Suzanne(now married and mother) watched MANY horror movies with me that nearly made the two of us ill(Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake effected our 15 year old sensitive stomachs rather harshly) and I can honestly saw that I've never dated anyone who hasn't liked horror. Its a large part of my life, to say the least.  
But enough of my rambling!! Its time to get down to business! This is my horror blog, I will be using this blog to discuss all things horror. It'll probably be mostly horror film reviews, maybe some horror book reviews, I'll be reposting horror fan art I see online, and prehaps some updates on horror movies in development and stuff like that. I'm gunna try my hardest to make this fun and interesting(with the fewest grammatical errors as possible.)