If you’re going to infringe on someone’s copyright, go big or go home.

Horror is one of art’s oldest genres. It also happens to be one of the most lucrative ones. There’s an incredibly simple reason for this: For every original success story within the genre, there are a hundred copycats just waiting to dig their claws into the coattails of their inspiration and ride their way to a quick buck.

Though it’s been largely forgotten in the wake of a newer crop of devilish thrillers, BEYOND THE DOOR (also known as THE DEVIL WITHIN HER internationally) will ultimately endure for a number of whacky reasons. Its original surprise success was very likely the reason for its notoriety–namely that it ended up being one of the only films you’ll ever see that had its ass sued off by the rights owners of the “inspiring” source material.

Warner Bros. took one look at the head-turning, vomit-blasting, profanity-filled possession romp and immediately phoned their attorneys. Sure, they had a point (and won the case, to boot), but let’s look at the two real reasons BEYOND THE DOOR made more than 20 times its budget in the US alone.

First, let’s talk marketing. You gotta admit director Ovidio G. Assonitis worked fast, getting his “tribute” into theaters less than a year after THE EXORCIST first exploded onto the horror scene. Even more admirable were its original TV spots. These should have won some kind of early Clio Award for destroying the minds of an entire generation of American children. Just imagine the shitstorm this created when it popped up in the middle of something like “The Waltons”. 

Next, we’ve got to take a peek at the casting. Just a few years earlier, Emmy Award-winner Juliet Mills was playing a proper, yet keenly intuitive English nanny on TV’s “Nanny and the Professor”. Here, both her head and her career take a 180-degree turn. When she’s not having violent mood swings and eating discarded bananas, Mills is levitating and doing kooky things with her eyes (trust me, you’ll know it when you see it). Talk about going against type!

But if we’re going to talk about casting, there’s no way we can ignore Mills’ two kids, who are hands-down the best thing in the film. These tots are barely out of kindergarten, but they curse like they’re already enrolled in the Samuel L. Jackson School of Technology. Also, the film’s seven writers pulled their collective genius to give these little semen demons arguably the most entertaining dialogue of the mid-70s, which, in hindsight, might be more normal than you might think if you have to endure a devil-possessed mother. The line “Man, if you don’t quit crying, you’re gonna have a real bad trip!” is so righteous, I hang out with unstable people just so I can work that ripper in conversation.

To celebrate a half-century of all this nutty bullshittery, go treat yourself to the Code Red or Arrow Films release of BEYOND THE DOOR on Blu-ray. Why? Because it not only contains the original cut of the film, but also the extended European version suitable for all of you who have absolutely no shame (and that’s basically 93% of the people reading this article–bless all of you and your perverted little hearts).

#horrorhappenings #beyondthedoor #thedevilwithinher #ovidiogassonitis #theexorcist #warnerbrothers #copyrightinfringement #julietmills #nannyandtheprofessor #arrowfilms 

Here’s something amusing to get your Monday started off right.

If I’m remembering correctly, this is a review of William Lustig’s grindhouse classic, MANIAC, taken from People Magazine back in early 1981. We’re going back over 40 years here, so forgive me if I’m wrong.

The poor reviewer who was saddled with this assignment didn’t seem to find the entertainment value in scalping people and then letting your mannequins take first crack at modeling them. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all. As Alan Thicke once sang, “It takes different strokes to move the world, yes it does”.

#fearflashbacks #maniac #moviereview #williamlustig #alanthicke

Suspenseful and intense, DEAD CALM is Australia’s buried treasure just waiting to be found.

It’s an age-old story: entertaining and well-constructed films that flounder at the box office. Even horror’s great directors couldn’t escape this phenomenon in the 80s. Carpenter’s THE THING was indeed too much of a good thing for audiences. Cronenberg’s prescient VIDEODROME might still be ahead of its time. The walls of Tobe Hooper’s THE FUNHOUSE fell in on itself in the face of stiff competition, and even Argento’s razor-sharp classic, TENEBRAE, couldn’t get asses in the seats. They were flops one and all in their day before finding their audience in later years.

Though it was a highwater mark for 1980s Australian filmmaking, DEAD CALM is still awaiting its renaissance. 

Later making bank with the Tom Clancy adaptations PATRIOT GAMES and CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER, director Phillip Noyce opts to open his story with a stark, near-wordless exposition. We’re witness to a shattering car accident that takes the life of John and Rae Ingram’s young son. Afterward, they set sail on the open sea, taking refuge in the vast isolation of the Great Barrier Reef in an effort to finally heal from the tragedy. 

Everything seems placid, even hopeful, until a desperate man named Hughie shows up in a rowboat begging for help. His friends have died of food poisoning on a nearby pleasure craft and, in the wake of their recent trauma, the Ingrams are at first reluctant to believe or investigate his story. Eventually John checks out the dilapidated craft, only to find all of Hughie’s friends have been hideously murdered, not poisoned. This jumpstarts a nail-biting and artfully-balanced game of cat-and-mouse that finds Rae using all her cunning to survive the loony and devilishly persuasive Hughie while her husband fights to stay alive on the madman’s ship, a floating blood-stained murder scene bloated with corpses and slowly beginning to take on water. 

Few films of its era are able to sustain suspense better than DEAD CALM, and there are numerous people to credit for its success. Noyce and editor Richard Francis-Bruce keep both settings hopping as Graeme Revell’s score huffs and puffs in the background. Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman (in one of her first major roles) breathe humanity and tenacity alike into their roles as the Ingrams, while a pre-TITANIC Billy Zane chews the scenery admirably as Hughie. The smart, kinetic screenplay was written by Terry Hayes and adapted from the novel of the same name by Charles Williams, who took inspiration from the Bluebelle, a Florida-based ketch that was the site of multiple murder in the early 1960s. 

Another of the film’s most interesting footnotes is that it was slated to be made 25 years earlier by none other than Orson Welles. The project, initially entitled THE DEEP and similarly adapted from Williams’ novel, unfortunately fell during the CITIZEN KANE auteur’s lean 60s era, which found him continually plagued by hubris and bad business decisions as he became an aging, fading star.

Though Noyce’s project fared better than Welles’, its box office receipts were underwhelming on both sides of the Pacific–it barely made back its AU$10 million budget at home while only eking out a US tally just shy of $8 million. Though critics have been historically fond of the film, and in recent years The New York Times even tagged it on their best 1,000 films list, DEAD CALM still floats out there on the horizon as a treasure waiting to be found by international terror film fans.

#unclean&unseen #deadcalm #phillipnoyce #samneill #nicolekidman #tomclancy #billyzane #bluebelle #titanic #thedeep #citizenkane #orsonwelles #graemerevell #richardfrancisbruce #terryhayes #charleswilliams #australia #thething #videodrome #tenebrae #thefunhouse

Ah, the dog days of summer in the 80s always remind me of sprinklers, camping, box fans, tight suntanned bods, and of course…ELM STREET 2!

My stepsister and I must have watched this about 500 times during the summer of 1986. I remember her saying years later that she still can’t watch it because over our Freddy overindulgence back in the day. I guess you *can* have too much of a good thing.

Yes, it’s probably the least essential entry from the first three Freddy flicks, but it’s full of you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it moments. The exploding bird. The bare-assed gym teacher getting towel-whipped. The Limahl poster. That “Touch Me All Night Long” dance. They’re all here–just as tacky and wonderful as you remember them.

This is a full-page Media Home Entertainment advert I saved from that memorable summer trumpeting Freddy’s home video return.

And remember, you may have the body, baby, but Krueger’s got the brains.

#fearflashbacks #anightmareonelmstreet2freddysrevenge #mediahomeentertainment #summer

It still amazes me that this sequence made it into the film at all. Yuck! This is disgusting, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Taken from Fangoria Poster Magazine #2 (1988).

#onesheetwonders #videodrome #davidcronenberg #fangoria #rickbaker

Let’s face it–Romero and King are slumming it here, but there’s still a lot of fun to be had.

There are always plenty of things to be thankful for in life. A loving family, robust health, a loyal pet, and a good job all qualify. 

But let’s get stupid about this, shall we? 

Forget about the usual blessings you rattle off every Thanksgiving as your turkey and stuffing are getting cold. Let’s talk about the little joys in life that are the real reasons you get you out of bed every morning. A Starbucks frappuccino? A blowjob? Marlboro 100s? And don’t tell me you wake-and-bakers don’t know what I’m talking about.

When I was in junior high, one of my reasons for getting out of bed was the Boulevard Cinema. It was a disgusting grindhouse theater on Topanga Canyon Boulevard that showed two movies for 99 cents. 99 cents! You could scrounge up that admission price just by kicking quarters out of the cigarette machines at the nearby mall. 

There seemed to be three things these kinds of theaters weren’t known for. First and foremost was cleanliness–I’m assuming it was just one step above the porn theater just down the block. If you stood in place too long, your feet would literally stick to the floor, and the less said about the men’s room, the better. Second on this shit list was security. On some days, kids outnumbered adults during the showing of R-rated films. Third, the place wasn’t exactly concerned with variety. 

This is where CREEPSHOW 2 comes in. They must have paired this fucking movie with at least four other things during the summer of 1987. Just when you thought it was gone, up it would pop again, sometimes hilariously paired with some incongruent, PG-rated family film. For this reason, CREEPSHOW 2 still holds the distinction of being the movie I’ve seen the most times in a theater. 

Director George Romero and first-time screenwriter Stephen King struck a small but lucrative vein of gold with the original CREEPSHOW (1982), a candy-colored pastiche of old EC horror comics. It was a surprise box office success that brought five gory tales to the table while doubling-down on the giggles, to boot. 

Though its first sequel is lacking a lot of the tongue-in-cheek laughs (and, quite frankly, short changes its audience with only three stories this time around), there’s still a lot of fun to be had. Sure, the tales are flimsier in CREEPSHOW 2, but the absence of giddy laughs gives it the space to play out as more of a straight horror anthology. No better evidence of this is its middle offering, “The Raft”, in which things get sticky for four college kids squaring off against an oil slick from hell as it slithers around the surface of a remote lake. The story’s terror comes from its simplicity, and King makes the right call by remaining faithful to his own source material. Before you know it, this unknown blob is drowning and disintegrating people right and left until the story’s only survivor is left to try and make it back to shore. 

In hindsight, I can now appreciate seeing CREEPSHOW 2 about four more times than I needed to at the Boulevard Cinema all those years ago. Tacky, crappy, and just this side of dangerous, it turned out to be the perfect horror rollercoaster to experience in a grimy, pitch-dark grindhouse theater. 

Thanks for the ride, indeed.

#letsallgotothelobbytogetourselvessomemeat #creepshow2 #georgeromero #stephenking #grindhousetheaters 

Here’s a simple one-page advert for THE KINDRED, which debuted in theaters back in January 1987.

Though I’ve always been a bigger fan of their earlier film, THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1982), this offering from directors Jeffrey Obrow and Stephen Carpenter is one worth seeking out for those of you who like your horror films with a side of sci-fi tentacles.

Though it disappeared for a while due to legal issues, THE KINDRED has been back on the market again thanks to Synapse Films. In recent years, they released it as an impressive three-disc steelbook, which features a rare, unrated version of the film!

#fearflashbacks #thekindred stephencarpenter jeffreyobrow #thedormthatdrippedblood #synapse films #unratedversion #steelbook #scifi

Wendy Torrance has left the building.

With heavy heart, I have to relay the passing of actress Shelley Duvall, who died Thursday at her home in Texas from complications from diabetes. She had just turned 75 years old.

Duvall made an indelible mark on horror history in the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of Stephen King’s bestseller, THE SHINING, but also enjoyed similar success in both large and small-screen projects from noted directors. Her early career was highlighted by such classics as Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE (1975) and Woody Allen’s comedy landmark ANNIE HALL (1977). Though some critics balked at her casting in THE SHINING, she was a perfect fit as Olive Oyl in Altman’s POPEYE (1980).

Duvall’s later career saw her turn to television production, supervising critically-acclaimed programming for kids such as the popular FAERIE TALE THEATRE, as well as the Emmy Award-nominated TALL TALES & LEGENDS and SHELLEY DUVALL’S BEDTIME STORIES.

Though her horror output was limited after THE SHINING, she was responsible for producing the short-lived NIGHTMARE CLASSICS, and just recently returned to acting in the 2023 thriller THE FOREST HILLS.

Rest in peace, Shelley. The Overlook will leave a light on for you.

#grimgoodbyes #shelleyduvall #theshining #stanleykubrick #stephenking #robertaltman #nashville #popeye #oliveoyl #wendytorrance #faerietaletheatre #talltales&legends #shelleyduvallsbedtimestories #nightmareclassics #theforesthills

“But it’s not really Jason, so we don’t like this one!” Yeah, whatever.

Look, I know it’s not a great film, but Demon and his enchiladas alone are worth the price of admission. See it again, preferably drunk or stoned. Maybe both.

From the Fangoria Poster Magazine #1 (1987).

#onesheetwonders #fridaythe13thpartvanewbeginning #royburns #jasonvoorhees #oohbabyoohbaby #damnenchiladas

For that special SLEEPAWAY CAMP fan in your life, or just maybe a way to celebrate Pride Month next year?

No matter how you slice it, Angela seems really excited that the lights are on, doesn’t (s)he?

By the way, if anyone knows who made this or where they’re sold, let me know and I’ll pass it on.

#fearflashbacks #sleepawaycamp #lightswitchcover #felissarose