Why does Fright Night, the 1985 vampire teen horror-comedy curio, endure as a great movie long past its expected sell-by date? Because writer/director Tom Holland’s Fright Night extends its core subject matter, vampiric transformation, into a studied allegory for the painful, violent uncertainty of adolescence. And because it unflinchingly tackles the two underlying themes at the…
With Halloween fast approaching, this writer wanted to unpack one of his all-time favorite horror movies, Evil Dead II (a.k.a. Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn). The first time I beheld the original The Evil Dead (1981), I found myself utterly terrified by the movie’s grisly carnage, completely charmed by its obvious lo-fi origins, and wholly…
TFH Fearless Leader Joe Dante very astutely tip-toes around Larry Cohen’s stylistic filmmaking identity early on in King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen. Dante notes, “I would hardly call him the John Cassavetes of exploitation movies, but he does have a certain raw, visceral, realistic style.” Indeed, Larry Cohen’s signature film, Q:…