Love Bites, Literally Olivier Beguin’s Chimères is one of those rare horror films that doesn’t just want to drink your blood — it wants to hold your hand afterward. Equal parts love story, tragedy, and quietly vicious nightmare, this 2013 Swiss-Romanian vampire drama delivers a strange, intoxicating mix of melancholy and mania that feels like … Read More “Chimères (2013): A Bloody Good Romance” »
Found Footage Goes to Church If you’ve spent years trudging through the swamp of bad found-footage horror — the shaky cams, the fake jump scares, the overacting teenagers who drop the camera every five seconds — The Borderlands (a.k.a. Final Prayer in the U.S.) is the baptism you didn’t know you needed. It’s a film … Read More “The Borderlands (2013): Holy Hell, It’s Good” »
Hook, Line, and Stinker There are horror movies about monsters, and then there are horror movies that are monsters. Beneath (2013), directed by Larry Fessenden, firmly belongs to the latter category—a 90-minute swamp of bad decisions, worse dialogue, and a fish that looks like it swam straight out of a rejected Sharknado spin-off. The premise … Read More “Beneath (2013): A Deep Dive into Stupidity” »
A Bloodbath in Search of a Point Every decade deserves its own terrible slasher movie. The 1980s had Sleepaway Camp and The Mutilator, the 1990s had Urban Legend, and the 2010s gave us Babysitter Massacre — a film so unapologetically cheap and tasteless it could double as a dare. Written and directed by Henrique Couto, … Read More “Babysitter Massacre (2013): Death, Duct Tape, and the End of Babysitting as We Know It” »
The Horror of Waking Up — to This Movie If you’ve ever woken up from a nap and felt disoriented, confused, and vaguely angry at the world, congratulations — you’ve already experienced Awakened in spirit. Directed by Joycelyn Engle and Arno Malarone, this 2013 supernatural horror film stars Julianne Michelle as Samantha Winston, a woman … Read More “Awakened (2013): When Death Would Have Been the Better Option” »
The House That Boredom Built There are bad horror movies, and then there’s The Amityville Asylum, a film that crawled out of the cursed soil of direct-to-video hell and decided mediocrity was a lifestyle. Written and directed by Andrew Jones, this 2013 British production dares to ask the question: What if we took the most … Read More “The Amityville Asylum (2013): Welcome to High Hopes, Where Horror Goes to Die” »
The Tape Nobody Asked For If you ever wanted to feel like you accidentally ate a handful of expired candy corn and washed it down with rusty tap water, All Hallows’ Eve is your movie. It opens with a babysitter finding an unmarked VHS tape in the kids’ candy bag—because nothing says “family Halloween fun” … Read More “All Hallows’ Eve (2013): A Darkly Comic Descent into VHS Hell” »
Hoot Goes There? If you’ve ever wanted to see a man slowly lose his mind while being stalked by a guy in a tuxedo wearing an owl mask from Spirit Halloween, Lord of Tears is the cinematic experience for you. Lawrie Brewster’s 2013 Scottish horror debut is the kind of movie that insists it’s deeply … Read More ““Lord of Tears” — When the Only Thing Scarier Than the Monster Is the Budget” »
The Devil Went Down to New Orleans (and Apparently Got Bored) “The Last Exorcism Part II” is proof that not every horror movie needs a sequel — especially one whose entire charm came from pretending to be real footage. This follow-up takes the faux-documentary creepiness of the original and replaces it with… nothing. Just a … Read More ““The Last Exorcism Part II” — The Demon Possessed This Script First” »
The Pit Wants What It Wants There are two kinds of small towns in horror movies: the ones with quaint diners and quirky sheriffs, and the ones that worship bottomless pits demanding human sacrifices. Jug Face (2013), written and directed by Chad Crawford Kinkle, thankfully belongs to the latter. It’s part Southern Gothic nightmare, part … Read More ““Jug Face” — Hillbilly Horror Meets Existential Guilt and Ceramic Artistry” »