Universal Pictures unveiled a packed trailer for its upcoming Blumhouse horror thriller “The Black Phone” this past week, during a presentation to the annual convention of movie theater owners in Las Vegas.
Reuniting Ethan Hawke with his “Sinister” writer-director Scott Derrickson, the project is adapted from a short story by Joe Hill. Hawke delivers a bone-chilling performance as an unnamed villain, a character he said breaks with his “no bad guys” rule while introducing the clip.
“The Black Phone” follows an abducted boy “locked in a basement that’s stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. In the cellar with him is an antique telephone, long since disconnected, but which rings at night with calls from the dead,” according to a synopsis of the short. So we’re already having fun.
Universal Pictures has announced a bit of a surprise for Halloween fans as they’ve revealed that Halloween Kills will be released day-and-date in both theaters and the Peacock streaming service on October 15th…
The streaming service will run you either $4.99 or $9.99 a month depending on if you want the ad-free plan, and Halloween Kills be will available for free to subscribers
Fear Street did great on Netflix.. Scream and Chucky are being heralded..
Halloween Kills will slash into October box offices unless a Covid variant does first.
But are these slashers worth the hype and hope?
Is it really even needed.
There is a ton of nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s when slasher was king—but some amazing horror films developed since then that didn’t include bloodbaths ..
Sure slashers had a place and a moral lesson in each flick.
But were they really worth the effort of redoing them again and reintroducing them to a new generation of horror fans ??
And if they are going to bring them will they improve it just quickly try capitalizing on a genre that should be cemented into history???
The limited thriller series “Clickbait” is coming to Netflix globally on August 25.. The official press release has it billed as “a compelling, high stakes thriller that explores the ways in which our most dangerous and uncontrolled impulses are fueled in the age of social media.”
That sounds pretty good, it compares nicely with modern life, right?
One of the best shows series on Netflix has been BACK MIRROR.
Hopefully this series has the same feel and works on that same high level..
Netflix details, “An eight-episode limited series told from revolving points of view, Clickbait is a compelling, high stakes thriller that explores the ways in which our most dangerous and uncontrolled impulses are fueled in the age of social media, revealing the ever-widening fractures we find between our virtual and real-life personas.”
This is the synopsis:
“Nick Brewer (Adrian Grenier) is a loving father, husband, and brother, who one day suddenly and mysteriously disappears. A video appears on the internet of the badly beaten Nick holding a card that says “I abuse women. At 5 million views, I die”. Is this a threat or confession? Or both? As his sister (Zoe Kazan) and wife (Betty Gabriel) rush to find and save him, they uncover a side of Nick they didn’t know existed.”
Netflix finally dropped a new promotional ad for STRANGER THINGS 4 — but it wasn’t much to see..
You can judge for yourself;
The ‘teaser’ was more of a clip-by-clip rehash of seasons 1 through 3–even a little promo was included to remind viewers that those first three seasons were still on Netflix..
But the real news, if there is any, is a very much alive and thinner Hopper holding what appears to be a weapon in one second of the clip, and Eleven with long hair …
The show will be dropping in 2022.
That’s right, 2022.
The biggest obstacle Netflix may now face is lack of interest.
With the crew from Hawkins aging quickly, how much more can these delays do to hurt a potential season 5? Or ..is four it and then the branch off shows with side characters and other stories?
As always we will happily watch season 4. But .. it sure gets tough waiting when the last time we saw the gang was Fourth of July so many years ago now.
This could be the first $100 mil box office weekend I. A year..
Heading into this Memorial Day weekend, more than 70% of theaters are open and Hollywood has two blockbuster releases: “Cruella” and “A Quiet Place Part II.”
The last time the box office topped $100 million over the weekend was March 6, 2020. In non-pandemic times, Memorial Day weekend has averaged around $200 million in ticket sales.
It is very fitting that horror will bring back box office life again!
Krasinski cites the movies that influenced both A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II, how that journey transformed him into a major horror fan, and why he now believes horror is the best medium for storytelling. “Following the deadly events at home, the Abbott family (Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe) must now face the terrors of the outside world as they continue their fight for survival in silence. Forced to venture into the unknown, they quickly realize that the creatures that hunt by sound are not the only threats that lurk beyond the sand path.”
The newest film in the “Saw” horror franchise is expected to top the weekend box office, likely bringing in twice as much money as the top movie last weekend amid a broader rise in moviegoing!
“Spiral: From the Book of Saw,” a film from Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. and Twisted Pictures, is estimated to generate $14.8 million in domestic ticket sales this weekend. That’s expected to lift the overall box office, pushing it to one of its strongest weekends in 2021, according to research from Boxoffice Pro.
The original claimed it was banned in 48 countries! But that didn’t stop your friend but somehow getting a hold of the VHS and sneaking your classmates into his living room to get grossed out for 113 minutes. The childhood rite of passage of the 1980s, though disjointed and horrid, is making a strange comeback.
Legendary Entertainment, currently basking in the box office glow of hit Godzilla vs. Kong, has picked up the rights to the title with the goal of launching a new horror franchise. Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber, the team behind the 2018 psychological thriller Cam, will write and direct, respectively. Producing will be Susan Montford and Don Murphy of Angry Films, who are behind Legendary’s fast-tracked multiplatform Buck Rogers reboot, are producing. Cory Kaplan will co-produce while Rick Benattar of BT Productions will exec produce. John Burrud, the producer of the original movies, will also work on the new iteration.
The original version filmed in 1978 had the premise of traveling the world to see the most gruesome and detestable ways to perish. Death abounded in the film. .While many of the scenes of the movie were staged, it did not matter for the mostly young audience of kids in the Reagan era. And with each parental or adult warning to stay away from Faces of Death..
Much has changed since the 80s. While the revulsion of this film shocked parents who found out their kids saw it, the internet has opened the door to countless chances to see even worse. And real .. So how will the filmmakers create a new plotline that relates to our modern age of the 21st century? This is the possible plotline outlined by the Hollywood Reporter:
The new plot revolves around a female moderator of a YouTube-like website whose job is to weed out offensive and violent content and who herself is recovering from a serious trauma, who stumbles across a group that is re-creating the murders from the original film. But in the story primed for the digital age of online misinformation, the question is: Are the murders real or fake?
x x x
Those who did not live through the last two decades of the 21st century may not realize how both magical and stunningly limited it was. Few who watched the Faces of Death actually knew the movie wasn’t real.. we all squirmed and closed our eyes thinking what we were seeing was some elicit footage of actual murder and death from the planet. Little did we know how amazing the marketing was even then.
At the time, the movie got awful reviews. Really, really bad reviews. But then the film made more than $35 mil in the box office and become a 30-year cult classic that most kids watched in groups secretly as they became a teenager.
The ‘banned in 40 countries’ claim probably was not true. Plus the idea that everything in the movie was real footage also was not true. But In their book Killing for Culture, authors David Kerekes and David Slater note that the movie had the inclusion of an extreme fatal accident; “the shattered remains of a cyclist are seen under a semi-tractor trailer. The camera pans long enough to capture paramedics scooping up blood clots, brain matter, and clumps of hair from the tarmac – this incident is authentic and culled from newsreels.”
The film was banned in the UK. It was banned in New Zealand. Australia refused to classify it.
One of the events that created a firestorm of controversy happened in November 1986, when a fourteen-year-old Rod Matthews bludgeoned his classmate Shaun Ouilette to death with a baseball bat. The idea to kill Ouilette was supposedly conceived after Matthews viewed Faces of Death, curious what it would be like if he were to actually kill someone..
And the rest.. was history..
The 1980s were a run time, mostly filled with antsy feelings from adults over the Satanic Panic and movies like this.
This newspaper article from 1986 shows how people were worried about teenagers being infatuated with some of the more horrendous sides of life.. An ‘expert’ quoted in the article summarized it by saying that since we live in a violent time, this is just another example of symptom of that.
Compared to our time now, some may consider this film to be tame.
But it sure wasn’t then… And to this date, debate about the film and its legacy live on….
