Horror Boom’s Ten Most Anticipated Fright Flicks For Summer/Fall of 2014! (Part One of Two)

Note: Mrs. Horror Boom apologizes for the delay in this article to post.  For the explanation, which I’m pretty confident be more interesting than you’d think (otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered to explain and just given you a boilerplate apology) scroll down to see the footer at the end of this piece. Now, let’s do this!

 

So! Memorial Day is over and June is just around the corner. I guess technically I shouldn’t call our list for ‘the second half of 2014’, since that’s not till the end of June. Not all of our picks are for Summer/Fall 2014, there’s a couple in the winter, but I could probably stretch “Fall” until Thanksgiving. These ten should all be released by then.

Therefore, here are our ten most anticipated horror movies for the rest of 2014 (more or less), which we present in two parts (we did not list them in order of importance or top most anticipated, just made a list, mixed it up, and let it go). Here’s Part One: (#1-5) of our list of horror’s most anticipated, the ones most people cannot WAIT to open in the theater.  #6-10 should follow shortly, and we’ll probably make a list of runners-up, too. Ready?

1.  Deliver Us From Evil

First, may we present you with the recently-released Trailer 2 for Deliver Us From Evil? Oh, and it’s perfectly peaceful, so put on those headphones and crank the volume!

That wasn’t so scary, was it? That’s OK, I hadn’t planned on sleeping tonight either! We’re guessing that this one is going to creepy– and probably terrifying– as hell.  It’s the follow-up from director/co-writer Scott Derrickson, whose previous movie was the very effective Sinister. Sounds like the soundtrack is similar to that of Sinister, no surging violins (which I don’t have a problem with personally; many critics really dislike them) but sounds that create an ambient sense of dread.

Official plot description from Sony:

In DELIVER US FROM EVIL, New York police officer Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana), struggling with his own personal issues, begins investigating a series of disturbing and inexplicable crimes. He joins forces with an unconventional priest (Edgar Ramirez), schooled in the rituals of exorcism, to combat the frightening and demonic possessions that are terrorizing their city. Based upon the book, which details Sarchie’s bone-chilling real-life cases.

Written by Sony Pictures Entertainment

We keep hearing rumors that DUFE is rated PG-13, but so far, cannot locate a definitive answer to this. Well, the trailer doesn’t seem to be for a PG-13 horror movie …but that’s not always the kiss of death. There’s PLENTY of great PG-13 horror flicks out there. The Woman in Black, The Ring (remake), Drag Me to Hell, and I lost track of how many times I screamed during Mama and Insidious. I distinctly recall my throat feeling a little scratchy (and my voice wasn’t on its A-game either) driving home after seeing Mama, into the next morning. Not to mention ,director James Wan planned for The Conjuring to be PG-13. When he went for his meeting after it was screened by the uptight shitbirds MPAA, he was prepared to take notes; they told him that there was no one thing or moment that could be edited and trimmed down, it was the intensity and terrifying tone of the entire movie. Still a PG-13 hater?

Deliver Us From Evil opens on July 2, 2014, not soon enough! Did you see that awesome creep and possibly haunted zoo in the trailer? How cool is that? We’re looking into picking that book up, too.

No official site as of yet, but the official Facebook page can be found here, with lots of media (and buzz building up in the horror community). This will definitely be a movie we’ll be writing about more before it opens!

See, there's nothing hiding under your bed, so --AAAAH!

See, there’s nothing hiding under your bed, so –AAAAH!

 

#2- Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno

Sorry, we can’t help ourselves on this one. Over the last several years I’ve come to be more impressed with Eli Roth. I really used to think he was some poser kid who hadn’t paid his dues, but he knows his stuff and he’s a horror fan. Some of the best genre flicks are made for horror fans, by horror fans. Plus, he writes great pay-offs… and loves gore.

Looks like he knows and is true to his source material on this one (Cannibal Holocaust, Make Them Die Slowly). Also, we don’t have to worry about a live animal being suddenly butchered; sometimes even tortured or abused before the kill onscreen. (don’t get me started on that subject). This time, it’s just buckets of human gore… provided by Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger!

Official plot description:

A group of college activists travel deep into the Peruvian jungle to try and save a lost tribe’s habitat. When their plane crashes, the students find themselves at the mercy of the tribe, who- unbeknownst to them- are a pack of murderous cannibals.

Boy, Roth sure knows how to kill people. I mean, we knew that but it’s been four movies now and he’s coming up with innovative ways. Of course, he has a few new toys compared to the Hostel movies and Cabin Fever. I don’t want to spoil any of the good stuff but there are many new implements of death specific to the jungle. I wonder if I’ve seen a pre-MPAA version at the Toronto International Film Festival because there are a few kills that may not pass the American ratings board, even for an R.

-From the Crave Online review by Read the entire review here (he quite enjoyed the film).

Release Date: September 5th, 2014 and we can’t wait!

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#3: Dead Snow 2 – Red VS. Dead

Come on, we don’t need to sell you on this one! Here’s the Red Band trailer…

No firm release date yet (making the film festival circuit now) but we have been promised by the end of 2014.

#4 As Above, So Below

Here’s a found-footage horror movie that shows promise and could be genuinely frightening. We first got interested when we saw the below trailer:

Like the Paris Catacombs aren’t goddamned creepy enough! Here’s the plot description:

Miles of twisting catacombs lie beneath the streets of Paris, France, the eternal home to countless souls. When a team of American and British explorers venture into the uncharted maze of bones, they uncover the dark secret that lies within this city of the dead. All members experience seeing past memories in these terrifying catacombs as their past comes back to haunt them as paranormal vision. With the terrors grasping their reality they journey through their acceptance of their past to overcome the fears of the catacombs.

Let’s just hope all the cool stuff isn’t in the trailer (and yes, fellow Mad Men fans, that’s the actor who plays Michael Ginsberg). Directed by John Erick Dowdle and co-written by Drew Dowdle (AKA The Dowdle Brothers).

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Release Date: August 15, 2014

#5 The ABCs of Death 2

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Fuck yeah!

Last year, the “26th Director Contest” (sponsored again by the Alamo Drafthouse) was brought back for the sequel, this time for the letter M (“M is for Masticate” won; more on that later). Release date-wise, all we can dig up is that the sequel will be released by the end of 2014, a promise I hope they intend to keep. [August 2014 UPDATE: Click here for release dates and more-good news] !Here’s another one that I highly doubt we need to sell you on. Alas, we have no trailer yet (we’re watching for it on a near-daily basis), but we do have some recently released stills to get you interested. Thought you were hyped-up for the movie before? We don’t know the stories (or the letters) behind them, though somehow that makes them more fascinating.

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Source: Dread Central. We do not own the rights to this (awesome) image.

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The next piece on this seriously anticipated anthology sequel will include the names of the directors… and more goodies.

Stay tuned for Part Two of Horror Boom’s Ten Most Anticipated Fright Flicks For Summer/Fall of 2014!

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Here’s that footer about why this article was delayed longer than originally intended. More on at least two of the films will be mentioned in pieces to come.

So, Monday night I start in on this piece. I decide to chop in into two parts because I realize that while I’ve been writing away and piecing media together, the sun is out. Oops! I figure I’ll finish my write-up on As Above, So Below after I roll out of bed Tuesday afternoon (some people need 8 hours of sleep to be fully functional, I need ten.  You think I’m lazy, wait’ll you hit your late 30s, then imagine that, like me, you don’t drink coffee).  After dinner, I set back and start in again. As I begin to write about As Above, So Below I decide to see if this is the director’s first feature, look into some background, etc.  What’s he done before? IMDB it… OK, Quarantine (the lame Hollywood remake of [REC], though to their credit, they stayed true to most of the film and could have fucked it up much worse). Oh hey, he directed Devil! I actually loved that one. Saw it for free on premium cable and was surprisingly enthralled, even ended up buying a used copy and re-watching. Oh hey, what’s this, The Poughkeepsie Tapes? I’d heard about that one for years, recall reading some reviews and the trailer- it sort of falls into found-footage, but is closer to “mockumentary” style. I poke around the usual haunts to see it, Netflix, Amazon, etc., then read IMDB trivia that says, quote:

As of 2014, despite the film having been completed and its theatrical trailer attached to several widely released horror films in 2007, the film has never received an official theatrical, DVD or Blu-Ray release.
Wait, what? I figure the above information can’t be due to how shitty the film is; the grade is too high and I’ve seen movies way, way worse on VOD (many with 1-2 star averages, but there they are, shameless). I also know about the production delay nightmares a finished project can run into*. Why not find out for myself?  I found the movie pretty fast on You Tube, and decided to watch it since “mockumentary” found-footage features seem to have less clichés. Another good sign was that there were dozens of cast members/characters listed (see our recent “Found-Footage Horror Movie Drinking Game” here), plus it might end up influencing our decision to watch or even recommend As Above, So Below… and it was free. I’d read some good and bad reviews; almost all of the good ones were warnings that this movie will stay in your head after viewing whether you wanted it to or not.
Well, guess what.
Hours after viewing, it is still stuck in my head. I read more about it online, noticing this time that while many intelligent reviewers were impressed by the effectiveness of the film, they honestly could not think of anyone to recommend it to, including friends of theirs who had voluntarily watched Martyrs.  It took me another couple of hours to calm down enough to finish this piece. I regret the decision to watch it alone in the dark, even on my laptop (though I get the feeling it would have also turned my nervous system into a shitstorm during daylight). The last movie that caused my appetite to screech to a halt for at least twelve hours was Megan is Missing, (another ‘mockumentary’ which was also much too realistic and that I was caught completely emotionally unprepared for) which I saw in 2012.
Aaaand that’s why this piece is posted over a day later than I wanted it to be.  Let me know if you want to hear more about The Poughkeepsie Tapes (even if it’s so you don’t have to watch it to find out why it’s so disturbing). There’s plenty more to come on the ABCs of Death 2! I couldn’t have fit it all in here even I wasn’t short on time.

Six Chilling New Clips From The Scariest Film of The Summer, The Conjuring!

Doubt that we’re going out on a limb (so to speak) when we predict James Wan‘s The Conjuring will have you screaming louder than anything else you see in the theater this summer (notice we didn’t say ‘this year’ – Mama came out in January, so we’ll reserve judgement on that).

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We wish we could embed these here, but so far the clips are only up on the slightly clunky Movieweb.com site. We have links for you, however… and an image or two. Brave enough to watch these after dark with the MUTE button off? We weren’t, and still had our heartbeats sped up at the jumps AND the ‘fridge scares’*.

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Hopefully your browser won’t be as buggy as ours was with MovieWeb, and the clips will show up on YouTube soon. We’ll embed them when they do. Until then, you still don’t want to miss these six (six six)! Here’s the links:

The Conjuring -“The First Clap”
The Conjuring -“He’s Always Sad”
The Conjuring – “Getting Something”
The Conjuring- “Wardrobe”
The Conjuring- “Bedsheet”
The Conjuring- “Behind The Door”

 

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…until now.

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*We’re pretty sure you can understand our complicated lingo, but even Mrs. Horror Boom didn’t know the terminology for ‘fridge scare’ until a couple of years ago, so here goes. “Jump Scare” you don’t need a definition for (if so, see: Ellison in Sinister deciding to see what’s on the 8mm reel marked with the title YARD WORK. I almost fell out of my fucking theater seat like Ethan Hawke‘s character in the movie). A fridge scare (and I’m not sure who coined this term) is closer to a chill than something that causes you to scream in panic, and usually involves quickly putting two and two together (if it takes you a few scenes to put things together, that’s closer to a reveal, such as a main character finally seeing photographic evidence of why his neck has been aching for most of the movie–movie title removed for spoiler reasons).  Classic example: in classic ghost movie The Haunting (the 1963 film, NOT the shitty remake), a character is in a dark room, unable to sleep because she’s staying in a clearly haunted house, comforted by her friend holding her hand next to her. When the hand holding starts to get too tight, she turns on the light… to see her friend across the room. In bed. Asleep. Done right, as in the scene in the first Conjuring trailer where Valerie is playing clap-clap hide-and-seek with her daughter, and two hands come out of the stand-up wardrobe, but she finds nothing there, only to take off her blindfold and see her daughter walking in the room, the viewer feels a cold chill run up their spine. These take more skill to pull off than just suddenly blasting a loud noise to make the viewer jump (especially if it turns out to be a false alarm, like a cat leaping out …unless, of course, you’re watching anything in the Ju-On series).

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The Editing Room Does “Sinister” (2012) The Abridged Script – You’ll Laugh Whether You Liked The Movie Or Not!

ETHAN HAWKE
Uh-oh, everything’s suddenly quiet. That can only mean…
JUMP SCARE
(shattering the AUDIENCE’s eardrums while giving them THE FINGER)
ETHAN HAWKE
Okay we’re leaving.

(excerpt written by and© Chris W. on Feb 19th, 2013, The Editing Room)

Sinister: The Abridged Script | The Editing Room.

On one hand, this movie threw me more than a couple jumps that made me scream so loud I sort of lost my voice the next day. On the other, I can’t argue with too much stuff in here, I was too busy laughing. Someone else said the Demon looked more like Ace Frehley than a Chriss Angel reject, though. Guess it’s probably a combination of the two…

Enjoy!

 

18 More Days Till Halloween, Halloween, Halloween… October Update!

Wow, I’m going to really have to step up my game. Halloween is coming up sooner than I thought!  I’m going to post every day, I know that. I’ve had lots of ideas for the month of October. Yeah, it took me a couple weeks to realize we were well into October—hey, every month is sorta Halloween when you’re a horror fan!*  Then October shows up and kicks the fucking door open.  I love all the horror releases this time of year. Plus, we’re seeing  Sinister  at some point over the weekend, which I’ve heard nothing but good things about. Trying not to get my hopes too high, I just want to see a decent horror movie in a full theater –especially one that earns a couple genuine screams.

Here’s how that came to happen.  A friend comped us tickets for a Patton Oswalt  show at a semi-local casino, which was already a great night. I played a nickel slot machine—oh yeah, I’m a REAL high roller when I’m broke. While we were waiting my for last comped drink, I told my husband (not for the first time this week, either), “GOD I want to see Sinister,  it got really, really good reviews,” not really expecting him to go for it when money is so tight.

Him: Nope, we can’t.
Me: But it’s not found footage.
Him: It got two and a half stars in the Seattle Times.
Me:  Yeah? Did  [name of reviewer who I tend to dislike for reasons I’m not going to go into here, redacted] review it?
Him:  (shakes head “no”)
Me:  Because [redacted] hates horror movies. I don’t give a fuck what [redacted] says.
Him:  Not going to happen.
Me:  I can’t see it by myself, I know I’m going to scream a couple of times and that’s, like, really embarrassing when you’re sitting alone, even if you’re a chick.
Him:  (I can’t remember, I’d had three comped lemon martinis and was feeling no pain, probably him patiently explaining to me again why we can’t).
Me:  OK, not to jinx it, if I win enough to pay for the tickets for us?  Then  we’re going.
Him:  (sighs)

Full of confidence and comped drinks, I picked a slot machine called “Haunted House”. Yep, that’s where I’m sitting till I lose my money.   Twenty minutes later, I won enough to go see Sinister Woooo!   I was waving my arms around like Kermit The Frog after he introduces a guest on The Muppet Show and hugging everyone I knew. My ecstatic reaction wasn’t due so much to the fact that it was the first time in my life I actually came out a little ahead on a slot machine (though they were probably thinking ‘that’s not a big enough win to get that excited about’) but because I wouldn’t have to wait for Sinister  to show up on DVD in six months. OK, and those fine comped lemon martinis contributed some to that reaction, too.

Back to Halloween, I was thinking of posting one scary movie review a day, then one very scary short a day, but I’ve been searching around and saving all the most frightening horror shorts over the last couple months,  and so far I’ve only got a dozen or so good enough and scary enough to post. I don’t want to use them all up in a row, then have the rest of the year be boring. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, and I’m hoping I can apply myself enough to write a recap/review of American Horror Story: Asylum every week. Oh, and Halloween weekend–or on Halloween if I can get the timing right– I’ll post the scariest J-horror short of the month, if not the year.

Heads Up!

Heads up! It’s that time of year again!

Also, I’m either going to put up a FAQ page or a Q&A page to the site. I look at the WordPress dashboard when I check my stats every day to see what Google search terms were used, and while some of them are really disturbing— “free snuff movie real blood” —is one of the ones that makes me glad I coughed up a little extra money to stay mostly anonymous on the blog— other are questions I instantly know the answers to.  Here’s an example.  Search term: who ripped off yokos jaw in grudge.  Kayako Saeki, in the attic!   Search term: what are some fuckedup scary movies from france  Answer: Frontier/s, Martyrs, and Inside to start. Don’t watch them all in a row, or even on concurrent nights, though…

Anyway, if you want to see more of something, tell me. I’ll post a poll later. Thanks to every single person who has checked out the site when I told them about it, ANYONE who has left a comment, and you know what? Thanks to every single person who has been here (especially regularly –I hate to sound sappy, but it always makes me smile, even on a shitty day).  Plus, if you have a question —pretty much ANY question— about a horror movie,** I’m your online go-to woman!

Oh yeah,  I almost forgot the point of this post— Horror Boom is now on Facebook (under “Horror Boom”, with the explode-y vector that’s the featured image of this post, plus the monster-hand-in-the-popcorn-box photo below. You’ll know it when you see it. If you’re on Facebook and want to give Horror Boom a ‘like’, it’d be really cool of you and appreciated. Right now there’s three likes, and one is my brother  (thanks bro, I know you’re not a horror fan). If you hate Facebook and don’t want anything to do with it, I totally understand and certainly would not even consider asking you to join just to like Horror Boom. Just saying, if you’re already there and have a minute, please check it out. Thanks to Andrew for the first like, by the way. All you guys rock!

Scariest Short Horror Movie of the Week will be posted soon…

*Especially these election year Halloweens!
**or horror-related book, or comic, or icon, or TV series, or …okay, you get the idea.

Sinister (2012) – Disturbing New Red Band Trailer Will Put Asses In Seats!

The Red Band trailer for  Sinister is unnerving because we’re used to dialogue–or voice-over narration– telling us the set-up for the film. Here? No such thing. We simply see all the increasingly scary images, and the tension builds to freaky levels...

I think I first saw the Sinister  trailer this summer, and it definitely and swiftly was added to my “must see”  list.These days, that doesn’t always equate to “must see in theater”,  sometimes it’s “must watch as soon as I can obtain it, as long as it costs less than ten bucks”, but you get the idea. However this, THIS  new Red Band trailer, may very well get my ass in a movie theater seat!

OK, I’m not above admitting the main thing that sold me was that ten-word review from Eric Walkuski at JoBlo.com:. SINISTER IS GOING TO FUCK UP A LOT OF PEOPLE.  DEAL,  Sinister!  I am ON BOARD! If it were up to me, that’d be the tagline. Sinister: It’s Going To Fuck Up a Lot Of People.  OK, before I write about what else for this trailer has a lot going for it, check out this pair of short but promising HD clips:

Not too shabby …and if you go to the official website for the movie here,  they’ve got loads of even more impressive and creepy media there. Whup! Time-out, let me clarify. The description of the media as ‘creepy’ only applies if you watch it in the daytime. Watch it after dark and the scare level ratchets up to very frightening. The site keeps the official plot description short and sweet:

SINISTER is a frightening new thriller from the producer of the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY films and the writer-director of THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE. Ethan Hawke plays a true crime novelist who discovers a box of mysterious, disturbing home movies that plunge his family into a nightmarish experience of supernatural horror.

Supernatural horror can be one of the trickiest things to pull off successfully. To really sell it, you don’t just need scares and a storyline, you need to set the tone right with the soundtrack, camera choices, staging, score, and general atmosphere. Oh, and characters that we care about or identify with.  Two other supernatural horror movies that got a wide release this summer had me looking forward to them: The Possession,  which seemed to have a fresh take on the familiar exorcism theme (according to reviews from many critics and friends I trust, it really didn’t, but worse yet, wasn’t scary) and The Apparition,  which…OK, not so much excitement on The Apparition,  especially as it got closer to the screening date (and I didn’t even consider putting up a ‘milestone’ countdown to the release date, as I did with The Possession).  My point is, the general consensus was that they were a let-down.

The Red Band trailer for Sinister  is unnerving because we’re used to dialogue–or voice-over narration– telling us the set-up for the film. Here? No such thing. We simply see all the increasingly scary images, and the tension builds to freaky levels simply because we (like Ethan Hawke’s character) don’t know what we’re looking at.

We do get familiar images of a family settling into their cozy home for the evening, tucking the kids in …then the father find an old storage box with mysterious reels of Super-8 footage.* He sets it up and starts calmly watching what appears to be a cheerful family enjoying their pool party on a playful sunny day, having snacks, then the next footage we see of the family–after dark– looks like two bodies bound to sun-lounge pool furniture, roughly pulled into the deep end of the same family pool by something off-screen (I assume with bricks or cinderblocks attached to them).  Wait, WHAT?  Then it just gets freakier. We’re not sure what we’re seeing, but we become increasingly confident that whatever it is, it’s going to be fucked up.

By the time we get to the really  disturbing shots at the end of the trailer, there’s no music shoved in our faces as the home movie footage reel shows an entire family of four being hung (it looks less like a suicide and more like a lynching by some invisible force). No music at all, in fact. There’s just the quiet whirring of the film projector, then a cut to black.  Boom.



I also was impressed that the trailer did something different for a contemporary horror trailer (besides no dialogue), which was to toss the ‘seat jumper’ moment (if that upside-down shirtless kid unfolding weirdly out of the cardboard box, then stretching his mouth open and letting out a demonic yet terrified screech at the top of his lungs didn’t make you jump,  I’m pretty sure you temporarily felt like your blood run cold) into the mix 2/3 of the way through, rather than after the title card. One TV spot is guilty of that, but I doubt that was a conscious choice by the filmmakers.  By now, I was automatically cringing after the title card, waiting for an in-your-face loud jolt, that never came …just the card ominously melting through.

I don’t think I’m the only one fed up with this cookie-cutter format for genre trailers. I was sick of the trend–which first turned up in TV spots, then spread to theatrical trailers–over ten years ago. EVERYONE is ready for that jump. The vast majority of US horror trailers now take this by-the-numbers approach: Establishing scene, plot exposition, a creepy (or what they think is creepy) moment, building to a flurry of images while the music speeds up along with it, then TITLE CARD, then wait for it… LOUD NOISE, CHEAP JUMP! followed by a voice-over such as  The (insert vague and shitty title here)… Opening in theaters (insert date here).

Speaking of release dates,  Sinister  will be hitting theaters on October 12th. The website has enough cool content to check out now (just the font they chose is original and creepy), but also certain pages are “Coming Soon”. I’m guessing we’re going to get quite a bit more information (hopefully not so much we go in partially spoiled) and press on Sinister   between now and then), and I’ll be passing on all I can!


*thank God that for once, this is as close to ‘found footage’ as the movie comes –since later in the trailer the projector bursts into flames, apparently after the projector starts running on its own in the middle of the night. Love the shot of Ethan Hawke stepping in front of the screen,  foreshadowing him turning into a character on one of the doomed family’s reels.