Feature Articles

“I’m caught in a dream. So what! You don’t know what I’m goin’ through” Alice Cooper “Chopper don’t hurt nobody unless he wants to.”    Dee Everyone has dreams. It’s our personal wishes, visions, and goals that make up so much ...

The Clown Murders is a title that excites the senses and promises a carnivalesque display of technicolour gore. A Canadian production filmed in 1976 and directed by Martyn Burke, the film seems as though it should be a product of ...

Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) is proof that positive controversy sells. When the infamous slasher film was released to theatres it was immediately met with outrage. The American public wasn’t quite ready for a beloved holiday icon to join the ...

A majority of ecological disaster films and natural horror movies depicted nature’s attack (either inexplicable or caused by man in some way) as a direct linear attack; in other words, nature targets humankind and humankind has to defend itself from ...

As a little girl, an older and wiser neighbour – a worldly preteen to my naïveprimary-school child – promised me that at night, once I had fallen asleep, my toys would come to life and have secret, thrilling adventures in ...

“What kind of ‘hyper-realism’ was it? It was just an effort to tell more truth about the war.” — Aleksei Y. German There are countless anecdotes about Russian filmmaker Aleksei German’s demands for historical accuracy. Some classics involve him suspending production ...

Recently in Heather Drain’s excellent piece on Count Yorga, Vampire, she referred to Robert Quarry’s character as a “leisure suit Lugosi,” which is a phrase I’ve been unable to get out of my head. It’s so apt because we all ...

As one of the most prominent American producers and distributors of exploitation cinema of the 1960s & 70s, the name Harry Novak (1928 – 2014) should be familiar to anyone with an affinity for grindhouse and drive-in cinema from that ...

Need and desire are twin forces that often intertwine around each other, sometimes coiling so tight that it’s hard to see where one begins and the other ends. This is often how addictions can be nurtured, but it is also ...

OK. Here’s a quick pop quiz to see if you should subject yourself to the early John Waters effort Mondo Trasho. A monochrome image wobbles up on the screen (your downloaded print is taken from an ancient VHS) as the ...