You have to hand it to director and writer Fred Dekker. Not only has he made some of the most straightforwardly entertaining films of the past forty years or so, but those films are – for many people – forever wedded to the 1980s, so forming part of people’s nostalgia for a decade when many […]
How many of us really felt we needed another Predator movie? It’s been 31 years since Arnold Schwarzenegger and co first battled that ugly motherfucker in the South American jungle, and while the 1990 sequel has its share of devotees, I daresay most would agree John McTiernan’s original has never been topped. For myself, my […]
The Monster Squad holds a distinctive and relatively unique position in horror fandom. Released in 1987 back when it was still pretty early days for the PG-13 certificate, it was a box office bomb, and neither its director nor the bulk of its cast went on to do much of note. However, as with a […]
Spectacular Optical books really seem to be cornering the market when it comes to diverse, broadly academic but accessible collections of essays linked by a horror theme; this time around, we have an incredibly varied compendium all about that strange phenomenon, Christmas horror. Or, as you’ll realise after reading, it’s modern culture that’s the strange […]
By Ben Bussey You don’t need me to tell you what a distinct period the 1980s were when it came to horror movies. Coming off the back of arguably the most revolutionary era in the genre’s history (if not cinema overall) the previous decade, the artistic and intellectual advances of the 70s gave way to […]
by Ben Bussey READER ADVISORY: spoilers ahead (though perhaps that’s a given on a retrospective…) 22nd August 1986; a day that will live in… well, I can’t honestly say I have any conscious memory of that particular day. I was six years old and living in North-East England. As such, I certainly wasn’t aware that it was the […]