Horror Scenes That I Love: Some Vampire Fun From House of Dark Shadows

Posted on October 27, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

From 1970’s House of Dark Shadows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkQpQYedYBQ

4 Shots From 4 Dan Curtis Films: House of Dark Shadows, Night of Dark Shadows, The Norliss Tapes, Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Posted on October 27, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking.

This October, we’ve been using 4 Shots from 4 Films to pay tribute to some of our favorite horror filmmakers! Today, we honor the one and only Dan Curtis!

4 Shots From 4 Dan Curtis Films

House of Dark Shadows (1970, dir by Dan Curtis)

Night of the Dark Shadows (1971, dir by Dan Curtis)

The Norliss Tapes (1973, dir by Dan Curtis)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1974, dir by Dan Curtis)

Insomnia File #47: Downhill (dir by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash)

Posted on October 27, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable or Netflix? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

If you were having trouble getting to sleep at two in the morning last night, you could have turned over to HBO and watched Downhill, the remake of Force Majeure that was released in February.

Downhill tells the story of annoying family taking a ski vacation in Austria. Billie Stanton (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a high-powered attorney who gets annoyed when things don’t go perfectly. Pete Stanton (Will Ferrell) is …. well, he’s Will Ferrell playing a typical Will Ferrell role. He’s a big. annoying dofus who spends all of his time on his phone and who is constantly telling the same long, boring, faux profound story about his dead father. They have two annoying sons and it’s pretty obvious from the start that neither Billie nor Pete is particularly happy with how their marriage or their lives have turned out. When Pete abandons his family during a minor avalanche, it leads to Billie realizing that Pete doesn’t really seem to be that much into his family or his marriage. But, since that was obvious from the start, it’s not really that big of a revelation for the audience.

Downhill is a frustrating film to watch, especially if you’ve seen Force Majeure. Downhill takes the basic storyline of Force Majeure and all of the issues that were raised by Force Majeure and then it explores them in the shallowest way possible. A lot of the trouble comes down to the fact that Will Ferrell is a good comedian but he’s an inconsistent dramatic actor. The film tries to work as a dramedy but Ferrell approaches each scene as if it were a sketch on Saturday Night Live. As a result, Downhill is less like Force Majeure and more like an episode of The Office where D’Angelo Vickers takes everyone skiing. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a little bit more grounded in reality but there’s really not much to her role, beyond being annoyed.

I did like the performance of Zach Woods, playing a pretentious friend of the couple and bragging about how he went skiing on shrooms. Woods has a talent for suggesting the oddness that often hides behind the most straight-laced of facades. And the scenes with Miranda Otto as a decadent libertine would have been funny if they didn’t feel as if they belonged in a totally different move. For the most part, though, Downhill fell flat.

Previous Insomnia Files:

Horror on the Lens: The Lodger (dir by Alfred Hitchcock)

Posted on October 27, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

A serial killer known as “The Avenger” is murdering blonde women in London (which, once again, proves that its better to be a redhead). And while nobody knows the identity of the Avenger, they do know that the enigmatic stranger (Ivor Novello), who has just recently rented a room at boarding house, happens to fit his description. They also know that the lodger’s landlord’s daughter happens to be a blonde…

Released in 1927, the silent The Lodger was Alfred Hitchcock’s third film but, according to the director, this was the first true “Hitchcock film.” Certainly it shows that even at the start of his career, Hitchcock’s famous obsessions were already present — the stranger accused of a crime, the blonde victims, and the link between sex and violence.

Also of note, the credited assistant director — Alma Reville — would become Alma Hitchcock shortly before The Lodger was released.

4 Days Until Halloween

Posted on October 27, 2020 by Dazzling Erin

At Night by Erin Nicole

“There are horrors beyond life’s edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man’s evil prying calls them just within our range.”
The Thing on the Doorstep (H.P. Lovecraft)

Bryce Martin’s Ultra Weird “Ultra8”

Posted on October 27, 2020 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Ryan C.'s Four Color Apocalypse

Falling somewhere between what we — or at least I — think of as an old-school underground mini and a Garo-esque “alternative” manga, Bryce Martin (who’s on a real roll this year, having produced five comics in 2020 by my count) has produced a uniquely curious item with his self-published Ultra8, a philosophical treatise on emerging and becoming told by means of a team-up between Japanese pop culture icons Ultraman (who, for the record, isn’t real) and Tadanori Yokoo (who, equally obviously, is).On paper, then — which is what this printed on, after all (and very nice paper, at that) — what we have here is at the very least a study in contrasts between a pair of incongruous figures, but in reality is more than that, in both theory and practice. Possibly even a lot more. But I’m not entirely sure what that “something more” consists of.

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