So long, 2022 – you dirty rotten egg! Oh, but wait! 2022 wasn’t all bad. Yeah, we still had the Covid around – and Trump still exists – and Bob Saget died…….but in my opinion, it was a great year for horror movies! Here’s my Top 3, followed by my ‘honorable mentions’:
Continue readingI won’t lie – I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the horror offerings in 2022 so far. And I’m going out on a limb here when I say that I am pretty sure I will be pleasantly surprised with the new movie Barbarian coming out on August 31st. The trailer snuck up on me when I saw it before The Black Phone (another nice surprise), and it did what a trailer should do: Don’t give too much away, make you interested in exactly what the hell is going on, and serve it up with a side of creepy imagery….loud noises….and an anxiety-inducing score.
Speaking of trailers real quick…..(begin rant) I’m sure everyone has seen the TEASER trailer for Halloween Ends. It’s gotten high praise for not giving too much away. But…..we all remember how much the official Halloween Kills trailer gave away, right? Now, either the brainiacs over at Blumhouse finally figured out how to cut a trailer to actually keep you interested and intrigued and not give us too much…..or there will be a full blown new trailer coming that shows everything. Just had to put that out there for everyone that’s so excited that the Halloween Ends TEASER trailer didn’t give away everything in the movie. But anyway…….where was I?
Oh! Barbarian! Yes, I’m excited. And it has been screened already and the buzz is good. Good buzz is better than bad buzz or no buzz. A lot of mentioning in review blurbs about ‘going in blind‘ and ‘what the fuck did I just watch?‘, so my advice is to see this as soon as you can on or before August 31st to avoid your Instagram friends plastering up spoilers and ruining everything. Peep the trailer below for Barbarian:
Vera Farmiga was in the 2009 horror movie Orphan. She sure is a pretty lady. Oh man, I remember watching that movie and seeing her and thinking……….
Wait, what? The twist?? Yeah, Chubby Checker created that dance. Ohhhh, the twist from the movie! Right, that’s what this post is supposed to be about. And what a twist it was. It’s been 13 years, so if you consider this a spoiler then I sincerely apologize. You see, the big twist was that Esther (the psychotic lead in the movie, played by Isabelle Fuhrman) was not a 9-year-old girl….something that was set up earlier in the movie. She was actually a 33-year-old woman! There was a reason for it (rare hormonal disorder), but it didn’t matter because what a doozy of a twist it was and still is.
It’s hard to get a good twist going nowadays by the way. And even harder, is keeping it secret and not having social media rugrats spoiler those twists. But anyway, I kinda love Orphan for what it is and the twist is kinda amazing if you think about it. The main reason I was thinking about this movie is because after 13 years, Esther is back in real prequel form! Once again played by Isabelle Fuhrman, the prequel Orphan: First Kill will showcase Esther with de-aging makeup as we see how she became psycho-cuckoo-nuts in the first place. Color me intrigued, and check out the trailer for Orphan: First Kill below, then go back and check out it’s predecessor for some sweet twist action!
Eh, you know when I put a pun in the post’s title that it’s pretty much all downhill from there. But let’s try and get this back on track and talk about my unbridled enthusiasm for the upcoming horror film The Black Phone. You may recognize that title as a short story in Joe Hill’s 2004 book 20th Century Ghosts, or maybe you yourself have an actual black phone and that’s why the title interests you. Whatever the case, writer/director Scott Derrickson has supersized that short story for the big screen, and even teamed back up with his Sinister chum Ethan Hawke for it!
Hawke plays a serial killer in the movie (donning that creepy mask in the pic up there) who kidnaps a child that he locks in a soundproof basement. The only chance the child has to escape, is by communicating with the killer’s past victims via a…….you guessed it – black phone! Let’s take one more opportunity to admire the killer’s mask again, as it was created by none other than the great Tom Savini. Besides the mask, the other reason I’m writing this post is that The Black Phone was screened recently at Fantastic Fest and the hype is real. Meaning that the reviews have been good. So naturally because of that, my personal hype meter has risen.
The Black Phone won’t unfortunately hit theaters until January 28th, 2022…..but I bet a trailer is right around the corner. Stay tuned for more info on that and the release date, and don’t worry – you can still be excited for the movie even if you don’t have a black phone.