“You play a good game, boy, but the game is over. Now you die.” Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm is a lot of things. It’s incoherently plotted, poorly edited, the acting is wooden across the board...
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6 Minutes
1 Minute
31 Days of Fright starts tomorrow!
I know, I know. I’ve screwed this up the past couple times I’ve tried to do it. But thanks to this stupid pandemic, I got laid off, so now I’ve got plenty of time,...
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4 Minutes
31 Days of Fright: Saw
“I want to play a game.” It’s hard to think of a horror film with a more misbegotten legacy than that of Saw. It somewhat unfairly is looked upon as the forebearer of the...
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6 Minutes
31 Days of Fright: The People Under the Stairs
“Can’t get out. No one ever has.” The People Under the Stairs would be a largely forgettable slasher for any number of reasons. It’s certainly not up to snuff with director Wes Craven’s best...
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7 Minutes
31 Days of Fright: Honeymoon
“Something bad happened to me in the woods.” How well do we know each other? Any of us? How well can one human fully understand another, no matter how deep their connection, or how...
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6 Minutes
31 Days of Fright: The Amityville Horror
“Houses don’t have memories.” On November 13, 1974, Ronald Defeo Jr. killed his entire family – four siblings and both parents – with a shotgun. A year later, the Lutz family moved into the...
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6 Minutes
31 Days of Fright: The Strangers: Prey at Night
“Why are they doing this to us?” I was followed once. I was taking a nighttime walk right on the border of Burbank and North Hollywood, CA, not going anywhere in particular, just ambling...
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7 Minutes
31 Days of Fright: Event Horizon
“This place is a tomb.” Space is terrifying. There’s no better summation of that unfeeling void than the tagline for Alien: In space, no one can hear you scream. It is close as we...
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6 Minutes
31 Days of Fright: Night of the Living Dead
“They’re coming for you, Barbra.” The word “zombie” is never said once in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. We hear “flesh eater”; we hear “ghoul”; sometimes we hear “those things.” Nevertheless, Living...
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5 Minutes
31 Days of Fright: The Monster
“Monsters are afraid of the light.” This was a rough one. The Monster is an accomplished piece of filmmaking, beautifully shot, and anchored by two terrific lead performances. But none of that prepares one...
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7 Minutes
31 Days of Fright: I Know What You Did Last Summer
“We’re gonna make a pact, right here and now. We take this to our grave.” Scream changed things. Teenagers have been the victims in slasher movies since time immemorial, but Scream is the point...
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5 Minutes
31 Days of Fright: Idle Hands
“I cut off my hand, and not it’s gonna kill you all!” We like to switch things up here at 31 Days of Fright. For every Rosemary’s Baby, you have to include a Little...
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