Tags: alfred hitchcock

On June 16, 1960, a film premiered in New York City that would change the face of the horror film -- nay, film in general -- forever. Psycho's effect on filmmaking is incalculable, even if you only track the influences of its most famous sequence, the shower murder. Over the past half-century, various movies and television shows have parodied, pastiched, paid homage, remade and ripped-off Alfred Hitchcock's "clean kill." I've spent the last two months piecing some of these clips together into a meta-homage. May I present to you, the Psycho shower sequence, rebuilt almost entirely from other films.

(read more...)

There is some good news of sorts if you were despairing of ever again seeing anything original at the cinema. The HorrorSquad website is reporting that Michael Bay's production company Platinum Dunes has apparently dropped plans to remake Hitchcock's The Birds and Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby.

In an interview with Brad Fuller and Andrew Form, the duo behind the recent Friday the 13th and Texas Chainsaw remakes, as well as the upcoming new version of Nightmare on Elm Street, both appeared to suggest that the overwhelmingly negative response on the Internet was a factor

On The Birds remake, which had been slated for a 2011 release with Naomi Watts in the Tippi Hedren role, Fuller is quoted as saying "As you guys know, we lay ourselves out there and get annihilated out there online all day long, and that movie just opens us up to a whole different level of annihilation."(read more...)

It's a sight both thrilling and familiar -- the winding staircase, especially when seen from directly above or below. Many directors and cinematographers use such shots for their guaranteed visual punch -- the landings create artificial frames, the spirals imbue the center of the screen with a sense of the infinite. Plus, the practical purpose of the stairway suggests a journey and not an easy one. Different films have used the winding staircase to evoke different things -- vertigo, insanity, a descent into hell, and even female genitalia. This Thanksgiving weekend, we give our gratitude to one of the great visual tropes in the horror-thriller by presenting six films with staircases we love.

As usual, click the thumbnails to open a larger version of the picture in a new window.(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...)