Haunted Newsreel

He sleeps in a freezer, not a coffin.  He gets his blood from his dealer, a guy who works at a blood bank.  He doesn't burst into flames in the sun and he can't be killed with a stake through the heart.  He likes golf, Steve McQueen movies, classic Star Trek and Miles Davis.  That's the modern vampire as seen on the new fall show Moonlight (airing Fridays on CBS at 9PM EST/PST, starting September 28th).

Mick St. John, played by Alex O'Loughlin, is the latest vampire detective to hit primetime TV.  It's a subgenre that most people equate with Joss Whedon's prematurely cancelled Angel.  Executive producer Joel Silver says that Moonlight will not be Angel 2.0.  "It's just a different world," he says.  "There are no demons, there are no other entities.  It's a world where there are vampires, and they're around, and they're living among us.(read more...)

Warning: The following article contains spoilers for the third season of "Supernatural".

"They're hidden among us, they could be anybody, we don't know who they are, they're among the towns in America and they're waiting to wreak as much havoc as possible. "

That's not the latest warning from Homeland Security. It's creator/executive producer Eric Kripke talking about the upcoming season of "Supernatural," a show which he describes as "two brothers battling the things that go bump in the night in a cool muscle car." He's at San Diego Comic-Con to discuss the show, along with star Jensen Ackles (Dean Winchester) and writers Sera Gamble and Ben Edlund. Jared Padalecki, who plays younger brother Sam Winchester, was filming in Vancouver all night and missed his flight down to San Diego.
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The camera slides on a track, following actor Michael Weston as he pontificates to his fellow pathologists.  A murder victim lies on a slab in the center of the room.  Like so many detectives before them, these characters are trying to figure out the cause of death.  Unlike most murder mysteries, though, they're not trying to bring the killer to justice.  In fact, the killer is sitting in the room, drinking a beer and watching the proceedings with a smug look.  For these pathology students, killing is a game - a way to show off their smarts.  Who among them can commit the perfect murder; a death so subtle that their fellow killers can't even detect the cause?(read more...)

Sometimes, we get contacted to do an article to coincide with the release of a theatrical film or DVD. Most of the time, we don't do it because we either don't have any ideas or there are no good ideas for that particular movie. The PR folks for Universal's recent remake of The Hitcher (coming out on DVD May 1st -- check the cover art at the bottom of the page) had something different, however -- a good idea. They said, "Hey, guys, we have somebody getting yanked apart by two semi trucks in our movie. What about listing off some other brutal and/or sadistic deaths?" I was intrigued, which is often enough to get me to put fingers to keyboard, so here we go.

The list presented below isn't definitive. These aren't necessarily the ten most brutal or sadistic deaths in a horror movie, just the ones we thought were notable. Your mileage may vary. Each entry is accompanied by a screencap that can be accessed by clicking the thumbnail icon below the film title.(read more...)