Posts by Chris Justice

After viewing Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, horror fans will struggle to view slasher classics like Halloween, Friday the 13th, or Nightmare on Elm Street the same way again. Black Christmas solidified the template that established many of the subgenre’s conventions and tropes, and with Halloween, laid the groundwork for Carpenter’s future success. In fact, Clark claims he gave Carpenter the idea for Halloween to direct as a sequel to Black Christmas. Each film is important, and each added new layers and dimensions to the prototype, but due to chronology alone, Black Christmas deserves serious props for being ahead of the pack.(read more...)

What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.

Those words begin The Devil's Backbone (TDB), and unlike most conventional ghost stories that seek only to frighten, those words and the film itself force us to think long and hard about the definition of ghosts and their purpose in our lives. Carried by the poignancy of that luminous voice-over, those words and TDB breathed new life into the classic ghost story.(read more...)

The Greek orator Cicero wrote, "Law stands mute in the midst of arms." British Director J. Lee Thompson's 1962 Cape Fear pushes that idea one step further: Law stands mute when confronted with its own overbearing shadow, and when that shadow is outlined with vengeance, all systems of jurisprudence are rendered impotent. The only force that can undermine the law is knowledge of the law itself, and when the latter neutralizes the former, the result, ironically, is chaos and violence.(read more...)

I can't remember exactly when I first saw The Fog, but I know the experience was within a year or so of its original 1980 release. As a kid growing up in the 1970s, I had the good fortune of having my formative years molded by one of the most powerful, prolific chapters of American cinema. All right, let's face it: I was truly blessed. I didn't know it then, but I sure do realize that now. The Fog is one of many films that forever embedded the power of cinema in my impressionable, adolescent brain. The movie freaked me out when I was a kid, and that experience is probably one of the reasons why I currently write for Classic-Horror. Although released in 1980, the film bleeds with everything that is wonderful about 1970s American cinema.(read more...)