Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: Daybreakers Will Suck Out Your Brain Cells and Smear You With Blood (And Not in a Good Way) @12:00 PM
I like gore. It’s a good equalizer. At the end of the day, we all exist in the same corporeal bodies that can be sliced, hacked, carved, and eviscerated in any number of creative ways. (Oh, I’m sick, you say? Well you’ve been reading Tila Tequlia’s Twitter feed for the past week—so judge me not.) The only problem is that somewhere along the line between The Little Mermaid and Hostel, gore became the new black. Mainstream Hollywood now relies on it, mostly to compensate for garbage scripts and awful acting. “Sorry, no decent concepts or plot lines on the menu today, but we do have a grisly melange of shofar-shaped organs in a bloody reduction, sprinkled with bush-league dialogue.” Which is a shame, because good gore really shouldn’t be wasted on crap movies—it’s like having an Oscar-worthy performance in Cheaper By the Dozen 2. READ MORE 5
The End of the 00s: All of The End of the 00s @10:40 AM
We are both in awe of and profound debt to everyone who contributed to our End of the 00s series. I know how much you love it when I get earnest, so I'll just keep it brief and say that we were overwhelmed by both the willingness of so many people to provide these pieces and the quality of the material they gave to us. Anyway, because of the vagaries of the holiday weekends and our brilliant idea to switch servers in the middle of a gigantic, ongoing project, it's a pretty fair bet that you missed at least one of the 49 essays in the series. Here's a list of every single one of them, which we encourage you to dip into at your leisure; there is almost certainly something here for everyone. Enjoy. READ MORE 23
The End of the 00s: Bad for Humanity, but Great for Horror, by Melissa Lafsky @10:00 AM
I'm skeptical about this whole "decade from hell" business. I mean, just because financial karma finally arrived to kick the U.S. in its bulbous consumer-driven ass, that means the entire decade is somehow linked to Satan? The last four months of 2001 were from hell—that's certainly true. And the entire summer of 2009 (when hell's photogenic spawn ruled the media with her red heels). But seems to me this ten-year span should have been dubbed "The Decade We've Been Setting Ourselves Up For During the Three Previous Decades, and Now We Act All Shocked That We're Broke and the Rest of the Developed World Wants to Lob a Shoe Up Our Ass." Anyway, fuck politics—let's talk about horror movies. READ MORE 8
Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: The 10 Most Terrifying Unintentional-Horror Movies (Part Two) @11:00 AM
Think horror always comes with axes and monsters and hockey masks? Think again. Not long ago, we brought you the the first five of the ten most gut-wrenching unintentional-horror films. Here, after a short hiatus for turkey and excessive vodka consumption, are our top five. Watch and be afraid. READ MORE 56
Horror Chick, with Melissa Lafsky: The 10 Most Terrifying Unintentional-Horror Movies (Part One) @4:30 PM
What makes a movie horror? There are the obvious indicators: chainsaws, spurting viscera, genital smashing and other tricks in the bloody menagerie of unapologetic depravity. But some of the scariest films sneak in under the radar, infecting your thoughts and slaying your peace of mind without showing a single oozing polyp or rotting corpse. Think about it: The point of horror is that it's all metaphor—a pictorial display of the fears, anxieties, and disappointments that thrash and roil in our consciousness. Those flesh-devouring zombies and skull-munching monsters are just physical manifestations of the Inner Human Pain that can't be defined in language (except by David Foster Wallace) but still manage to crawl in our ears and tear our guts with corrosive acid-froth. It's THIS pain that's the real killer—after all, you can always bandage that severed arm or pop an antibiotic for that flesh-eating virus. Healing the ragged wound in your soul, the nameless chasm where Darkness gnaws on your psyche… well, that's a little harder. And so we have movies! Those fuzzy celluloids that take away the emptiness and lull us into complacency with their pulchritudinous stars and pat dialogue and flashy explosions. You pay your $11.50 and laugh at sweet-as-pie Kate Beckinsale or oh-so-funny-Jim-Carrey and then WHAM – without even realizing it, you're hit with a Nightmare, fed to you in the form of a bubbly romantic comedy. THESE are the real horror movies. They catch you by surprise. At least Saw is honest. READ MORE 18
Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: Why 'The Fourth Kind' Needs to Suckle at the Teat of Malcolm Gladwell @11:45 AM
Collectively, we think alien abduction is dumb. I mean really dumb. Like, if I came home one day and said, "Hey, I was abducted by aliens," somehow that would launch me deeper into Fucking Nutcase Territory than "Hey, I was possessed by a demon who's been stalking me since childhood," or "Hey, I was screwed six ways from Sunday by a modern Dracula who looks like Fabio after a brief stay at Auschwitz," or even, "Hey, I turned an entire investment bank into a giant vampire squid." But really, why is alien abduction so much nuttier than demon possession or vampire sex or Matt Taibbi's anti-Goldman rage? It's simply a matter of agreement—we all agree that it's crazier, so it is. It's the same reason why, say, Scientology is grounds for unbridled derision, while Catholicism is a "legitimate" religion. At least Xenu lets you wear a condom. READ MORE 4
Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: 'Antichrist' Might Give You a Penis-Ache, But That Doesn't Make It Misogynistic @11:09 AM
I don't have to tell you that Antichrist sucks. Plenty of highbrow places like the New York Times and Slate have already done so, their writers leaping to slather disdain on this latest morsel of art-horror crap. Oh, it's so distasteful! And offensive! And (gasp) misogynist! Though that all raises a question: if this audience-chafing, Cannes-enraging glob of rubbish is so irredeemable, why the hell is every publication still in existence racing to write about it, as opposed to, say, The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror (now out on DVD)? The answer is twofold: Antichrist was made by Lars Von Trier, and it's probably the only film ever screened at Cannes that centers entirely on penis mutilation. READ MORE 37
Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: Why the 'Saw' Movies Are the Most Important Films Ever Made (No, Really) @12:15 PM
There are many, many things more fun than watching the Saw movies. Like eating acid-coated glass shards. Or starring in Japanese vomit porn. Or dating a novelist. All of these rank infinitely higher on the enjoyment scale than actually sitting through the unholy torture-fetish buffet that is Saw. And yet it's the most popular horror franchise in history. Seriously, it is—at this point James Wan could slice open his tongue, lick blood on a page, Lionsgate would produce it, and it'd do $60 million in domestic box office alone. READ MORE 35
Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: 'Paranormal Activity' Is the SCARIEST MOVIE EVER (About Suburban Yuppie Starter Homes) @12:30 PM
We all have irrational fears. Random terror at things that, in reality, have little to no chance of killing us. Spiders, clowns, snakes, commitment, wet bread—the list goes on. My irrational fear is that I'm being watched. Ever since I hit puberty, it's been the same: there's a camera behind my bathroom mirror, or a telescope pointed at my window where some cackling dipshit is observing everything I do (and judging me the whole time). Yes, it's silly—;though back when I lived in SoHo it turned out to be truer than I'd like. (Note to self: Never take the ground floor apartment.) READ MORE 17
Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: See 'Zombieland' Or I Will Eat Your Brain @1:00 PM
Vampires are still so in right now. They're like the peephole platform heel of the horror world. Everywhere you turn, they're frolicking in orgy-prone Cajun towns or masquerading as brooding (read: constipated) adolescents who awe their high school classmates and destroy feminism. Good times. But want to know what's a far better time? Zombies. (No spoilers ahead.) READ MORE 7
Horror Chick, with Melissa Lafsky: 'Pandorum' Is Bullshit In Spaaaaaace! @9:45 AM
I thought about reviewing Tucker Max's new filmmaking atrocity this week, since let's face it, that thing is scarier than 90% of the torture-porn child-killing slasher flicks out there. But doing so would require one step not even I am willing to take: actually watching the fucking thing. So instead, we're going to talk about the genre of sci-fi horror instead. Because space is friggin scary. READ MORE 24
Horror Chick: 'Jennifer’s Body' Is Garbage, But You'd Tap It Anyway @9:44 AM
Today's lesson from the Tao of Horror: If a B horror flick has the world's most fuckable star and the only screenwriter who can A) show up in her own movies and B) be recognized when she does, is it still a B horror flick? Yes, my people. Yes. Case in point: Jennifer's Body, which, despite a level of media attention unusual for horror openings (attributable to said star and said screenwriter), bombed on opening weekend, not even scraping $7 million. (For comparison, All About Steve did $13 mill, and critics likened it to perforating your eyelids with safety pins for two hours.) READ MORE 17
Horror Chick: 'Sorority Row' @4:20 PM
Admit it: you laugh a little when the horror movie killer turns out to be a girl. You think it's funny. Ha ha! The BIG twist…it's a chick! Doesn't really matter which chick it is, or why a 100-pound brunette with Hawaiian Tropic skin and an altered proboscis chose to become a homicidal maniac—it's funny. Gives a film immediate camp status. You know it's true. You raging neosexist pig. Just kidding— I laugh too. Plus I'm a lousy feminist who's pro-Brazilians and anal scenes, so who am I to judge. READ MORE 10
Horror Chick: 'The Final Destination' Blows Only As Much As You’d Expect It To @1:00 PM
Given that the Summer of Death ends in a few days, it's only fitting that Death's own star vehicle-well, technically, the fourth in a franchise—dominated the box office, and seems poised to better its (better) forerunners. What better escape from Kennedy funerals and nonstop MJ histrionics than watching a redneck's internal organs ooze through a chain link fence (in 3-D!)? READ MORE 6
