Halloween for People Who Think Michael Myers Talks Too Much In 1986, the slasher genre had been bled nearly dry. By then, audiences had endured masked maniacs, supernatural killers, and more teenage corpses than a small-town morgue could count. Into this oversaturated landscape crept Torment, a psychological horror film that critics at the time compared … Read More “Torment (1986): Family Ties You Wish You Could Cut” »
The Art of the Hustle Fred Olen Ray’s The Tomb is not a great film. It isn’t even a good film in the conventional sense. But it is a great Fred Olen Ray film — a scrappy, shameless hustle that alchemizes two nights on a rented Wrangler Jeans commercial set into a feature-length supernatural romp … Read More “The Tomb (1986): Raiders of the Lost Paycheck” »
The Film That Couldn’t Decide What It Wanted to Be Some horror movies are cursed productions. Spookies isn’t cursed so much as it’s the cinematic equivalent of a family argument at Thanksgiving: everyone brought their own dish, no one coordinated, and someone thought it was funny to slip Ex-Lax into the stuffing. What began as … Read More “Spookies (1986): A Haunted House of Studio Notes” »
Aunt Catherine’s Death: Lights, Camera, Strychnine The film begins with wealthy Aunt Catherine Boyle downing strychnine on camera like she’s auditioning for Faces of Death: The Home Video Edition. She dies dramatically, leaving behind an estate in Pennsylvania, $8 million in missing cash, and a film that feels like Knives Out if Rian Johnson had … Read More “Rest in Pieces (1987): Death Cult, Cash Grab, and a Plane Full of Nonsense” »
When Freud Meets the Outback Australia has given the world some wonderfully unhinged horror films: Picnic at Hanging Rock with its dreamy ambiguity, Long Weekend with its eco-terror paranoia, and Cassandra, Colin Eggleston’s 1987 gothic melodrama wrapped in slasher packaging. If The Omen and Peyton Place had a baby—and then that baby was promptly locked … Read More “Cassandra (1987): Nightmares, Incest, and the Family Tree from Hell” »
When Film Noir Takes a Left Turn Into the Abyss Some movies slip into your mind like smoke. Others hit you like a hammer. And then there’s Angel Heart, Alan Parker’s 1987 neo-noir psychological horror film, which does both while also whispering in your ear, “By the way, you’ve been Satan’s plaything all along.” It’s … Read More “Angel Heart (1987): A Stairway to Hell, One Gumbo at a Time” »
A Ouija Board Walks into a Party There are two kinds of horror movies: the ones that try to be respectable (The Exorcist, The Omen), and the ones that show up at your house party with a six-pack and a cardboard Ouija board. Witchboard belongs proudly in the second category. Written and directed by Kevin … Read More “Witchboard (1986): The Party Game That Refuses to End” »
A Low-Budget Dare That Pays Off Every so often, a film emerges from the primordial ooze of the 1980s direct-to-video swamp that shouldn’t work, but somehow does. Truth or Dare? is one of those freak miracles. Written by Tim Ritter when he was barely old enough to buy beer, directed (well, hijacked) by Yale Wilson, … Read More “Truth or Dare? (1986): A Copper-Masked Catastrophe Worth Watching” »
A Vacation You’ll Wish Ended Early There are bad slashers, and then there are slashers so devoid of menace, tension, or even basic competence that they feel less like movies and more like extended dares. Terror at Tenkiller, a 1986 straight-to-video outing directed by Ken Meyer, belongs proudly in the latter camp. It’s the kind … Read More “Terror at Tenkiller (1986): Murder at Lake Mediocrity” »
A Civil War, a Fog Machine, and a VHS Relic When people say, “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” I’m convinced they’ve never seen The Supernaturals. This 1986 zombie-horror relic—directed by Armand Mastroianni and written by Michael S. Murphey and Joel Soisson—proves that yes, they do make them like they used to: cheaply, … Read More “The Supernaturals (1986): A Zombie March into Mediocrity” »