sundance

Sundance is gonna scare the sh*t outta you this week

Halloween is just around the corner, and if you don’t have your costume ready yet let us inspire you with a line up of seriously scary movies. Seriously. I mean it. Like if you really wanted to dress up as some of the characters in these movies you could probably just pour of bucket of fake blood over your head and call it a night. Or, if you’re like me and prefer to leave the gore onscreen, there’s no better way to drown out the sound of your doorbell ringing and scare away the trick-or-treaters on the other side by tuning into Sundance Channel and turning the volume wayyyy up.

Don’t know what to watch first? Allow me to break it down quick and dirty:

POSSESSION OF DAVID O’REILLY: Scary-as-hell supernatural demons in a ”shockumentary” that will haunt your dreams.

COFFIN ROCK: Go ahead, sleep with your stalker, psychopathic neighbor. What’s the worse that could happen?…

Take This Lollipop: personalized scary movie generated by your Facebook account

Take This Lollipop is an entertaining, interactive viral marketing site for a brilliantly “executed” upcoming horror film that also smartly addresses issues of privacy, or the lack thereof in our modern, digital era where pretty much every new website or app tries to gain access to our personal information stored in Facebook…

Almodovar’s new film nods to a chilling classic

Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In—based on Thierry Jonquet’s novel, Tarantula–is officially described as being about a brilliant plastic surgeon who’s “haunted by past tragedies” involving his daughter and “creates a kind of synthetic skin that withstands any kind of damage” to deal with that old horror.

Well, you certainly can’t say that’s been done!

But hold on to your foreheads…

More on tone, and how THE HOST pulls it off

Cannes is approaching in late May, and as bloggers and journalists speculate about what will splash along the French Riviera, I recalled the festival’s hit of 2006 — Bong Joon-ho’s THE HOST. Part satire, part sit-com, part horror and mostly monster, THE HOST is hailed as Korea’s ‘biggest film ever’ and was certainly a critical darling. If you haven’t seen it – do – if nothing else, as a balm to ready yourself for the barrage of mostly bad summer blockbusters that are gearing up to piss you off.

Happy Birthday, PSYCHO!

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 chiller-thriller PSYCHO still makes me crazy, in a good way. No, it’s not a perfect movie. The handling of the mystery solving isn’t nearly as passionate as the murder itself, and I always hated the way Norman and his mother talk in overlapping dialogue so you’re made to think he really must be hanging with a live woman.

But even BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN has a few low points—or so I hear. Gimmickry aside, PSYCHO jolted America into the ‘60s and we haven’t really been the same since. On the 50^th anniversary of its release year, we can look back and see how profoundly the movie—dismissed by some lunatics as exploitive trash at the time—is a landmark in delicious arthouse perversion, a daring auteur curio which still manages to disturb and entertain.

Interview with the creators of THE CAPTIVE

Sundance Channel recently sat down for an interview with Karin Diann Williams & Stuart Hynson Culpepper, creators of THE CAPTIVE. Watch THE CAPTIVE now at Sundance Channel Digital Shorts.

What was the inspiration for The Captive?

Karin: Believe it or not, we started with just the idea that we wanted to make a web series. We had an inkling that the microseries was about to find its audience and really explode as a popular form.

Stuart: We saw all the activity blossoming on YouTube and sites like it and knew a huge audience was there and they were wanting something beyond the user-generated content, something thoughtful and well produced. So we took the plunge. Part of the idea for the themes and action in The Captive came from studying the kind of person we thought were going to engage: someone fairly tech literate and independent in their thinking.

Dario’s Inferno

More interested in creating mood with imagery both creepy and beautiful than in following a logical narrative, Dario Argento’s Italian horror films have become masterpieces of gore. Plot lines tend to revolve around young artists and students who find themselves in situations way over their heads, like attending a cursed ballet school (SUSPIRIA, 1977) or [...]

Things that go bump in the night

Photographer Joshua Hoffine latest series is his vivid interpretation of childhood fears. Such “classics” include the monster under the bed, the monster in the basement, and the not-so happy scary clown in the vein of Pennywise that I’m sure resulted in many night terrors everywhere. With a pinch of Gottfried Helnwein‘s morbidity, there is an aspect of Hoffine’s work that dances a fine line between cartoony camp, psychological anxiety, and childhood nostalgia.

Interview: Don DeLillo talks about Underworld

If you search YouTube for videos of Don DeLillo, you won’t find much. The author of White Noise and Underworld is not a public man, and he rarely does tours or events. But an enterprising fan known as the Donologist has been uploading DeLillo radio interviews to YouTube. The presentation of these interview clips leaves [...]