Horrors, 10/23.

"[Darren Lynn] Bousman and [Rob] Zombie are both members of an emerging and collegial band of horror auteurs - unofficially known as the Splat Pack - who are given almost free rein and usually less than $10 million by studios or producers to make unapologetically disgusting, brutally violent movies," writes Rebecca Winters Keegan in Time. "If they get it right, there's a fervid fan base, composed mostly of people far too young to take death seriously, who will send those movies into almost gruesome profitability (some of the films have made more than $100 million). The group is loose knit, and other members include the director of the first Saw movie, James Wan, and his co-writer, Leigh Whannell; Hostel writer-director Eli Roth; The Descent's Neil Marshall; and Alexandre Aja, who remade Wes Craven's 1977 cannibalistic film, The Hills Have Eyes."

"So how did it happen, actually?" asks Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "Where indeed did Tobe Hooper go wrong?"

Joe Leydon on The Cabinet of Dr Caligari: "[N]either director [Robert] Wiene nor producer Erich Pommer felt altogether comfortable with the ramifications of the original script. They feared retaliation by any powerful people who might interpret the allegory as a personal attack. More important, they worried that audiences would respond unfavorably to anything that reminded them, even indirectly, of the everyday horrors lurking just outside the movie theater."

At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Ian Johnston considers each of the four stories of Kwaidan. Also, Teddy Blanks: "Frenzy is funny. Something about dry British wit launches Hitchcock's ever-present dark humor to laugh-out-loud status. Or maybe he was just having a hell of a time."

Robbiefreeling at Reverse Shot: "[T]here's really no finer example of Carpenter's elegance than... The Fog. A more effective example of how setting and composition can make a scary movie than even Halloween, The Fog is one of just a handful of horror films I would call 'beautiful.'"

Posted by dwhudson at October 23, 2006 9:48 AM