Nearly everything about this series seems cribbed from the Halloween movies.
#Movie serial killers movie#
Really, there’s no reason they can’t keep making these movies forever, since Death is the one horror movie baddie that really will never run out of victims and that actually will come one day for us all. And it doesn’t dispense tasteless wisecracks every time it claims a new victim. In a way, Death is an even better monster than Jason ( Friday the 13th), Freddy ( Nightmare on Elm Street), or Michael ( Halloween) – it’s just as implacable and impervious to bargaining, reasoning, and negotiation, but what’s more, it can’t even be seen or spoken to. The inventive part comes via the elaborate Rube Goldberg-ian processes by which Fate turns seemingly benign arrangements of random objects into sources of horrible freak accidents.
They’re saved briefly, but Death will not be denied, and stalks the surviving teens one by one, claiming its due. Sure, the formula is the same - some youngster has a premonition that a group of pals are about to die in a horrible accident. Here’s a series that remains reliably scary because its Big Bad is the Big Kahuna himself, the Grim Reaper. Warning: This clip may not be safe for work
The series was rebooted this year, with Raimi and Campbell’s blessing, but the new Evil Dead, while surely the goriest of the lot so far, lacked the amateurish, homemade charm of the original. He essentially remade the movie as Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn, with a bigger budget and the same protagonist, chainsaw-handed Ash (the invaluable Bruce Campbell), followed by an out-of-left field third installment, Army of Darkness, that saw Ash transported to medieval Europe to fight more demons. The film moves at a relentless pace, unleashing increasingly gruesome shockers every few minutes.Īn archetypal college-kids-at-a-cabin-in-the-woods tale, Evil Dead was the calling card to Hollywood for a then-unknown Sam Raimi (who’d eventually go on to make the first Spider-Man trilogy and Oz the Great and Powerful). It’s most surprising monster is a tree, and its most terrifying effect is generated by a camera mounted on a two-by-four, with a guy holding each end of the beam and running through the woods. The initial Evil Dead is a marvel of low-budget filmmaking, of ingenuity triumphing over lack of resources.
Warning: Many of the clips that follow are NSFW. The sequels keep offering diminished returns, and yet we keep buying the tickets, in the hope that something will scare us the way the first installment did, when we truly didn’t know what was hiding there in the dark.Ĭheck out the list below of some of the most terrifying and enduring horror franchises ever. Okay, there’s also the fact that sequels are easier to conceive than originals, and that they’re lucrative, but that’s because audiences crave familiarity, even when they’re being shocked and frightened. In the supernatural realm, where ordinary rules of logic and physics don’t apply, the writers can always find some excuse to bring the demon back and make the nightmare a recurring one. Maybe that’s the reason so many horror films generate franchises. It always rises again, maybe to terrify someone else instead of you, but it will be waiting and lurking, as sure as light creates shadow. You may defeat the monster and vanquish your fears, but you can’t kill the undead. You can’t keep a good horror-movie antagonist down.
0 kommentar(er)
