Few directors have undergone a more drastic shift in perception than M. Night Shyamalan, who went from being seen as a wunderkind with his breakthrough directorial effort, the remarkable The Sixth Sense, as well as supremely ambitious films like Unbreakable and Signs, both of which have a lot of merit in spite of some clear…

Television has always been promoted as the medium through which anything is possible – depending on your interests, there is some programming to fit your every need and desire, particularly as we have seen the medium flourish into a seemingly endless stream of ideas in which every niche is given a place. However, if we…

To recapture the genre that they helped define nearly a century ago, Universal has been actively working over the years to reconstruct their monster movie department, setting out to revive their reputation for making wildly entertaining horror films that hearken back to the studio’s heyday, when they came to be known as the pioneers of…

Being a devotee of classic cinema can sometimes be a challenge, considering how much the industry has grown to be dependent on legacy sequels and reboots, which is particularly rife within the horror genre since it seems like every great horror film needs to be revisited in some way, whether through starting from scratch or…

Some horror films make you question whether it is a good idea to remain seated or retreat from the very first moments. They’re rare but they certainly exist, and from the first haunting note of Jerry Goldsmith’s score for The Omen, we are immediately plunged into a state of terror and despair, with the carefully-constructed…

One of the more unfortunate casualties of the contemporary cinematic landscape is that we have not been given iconic horror characters on the same level as we did in previous decades. Jigsaw in the Saw franchise is perhaps the only one that carries any cultural cache, with all efforts to launch new characters not manifesting…

While most filmmakers will usually tend to craft stories around subjects that are accessible and not too overly disturbing, there are a few that will intentionally push boundaries, perhaps not to court controversy but rather to establish a more challenging style of storytelling, or simply to provoke some kind of a reaction. Antonia Bird certainly…

When we speak about horror across both film and literature, there are two names we cannot ignore – Mary Shelley, the incredibly talented young writer who conceived of the subject of a mad scientist who decided that he would use all of his skills to bring his creation to life, and James Whale, who took…

The key to a truly successful horror film is to do something original but also not lose sight of the films that came before, since this is a genre that rewards innovation, but also depends on the artistic dialogue between works, especially when it comes to establishing a strong connection between concepts. Michael Dougherty is…

The majority of contemporary horror filmmakers may be consistently trying to overtake one another to create the most terrifying, unhinged works imaginable and earn the title of being the modern master of the genre, but there is very little doubt that the best horror films are those that were produced much earlier, when intrepid directors…