It’s that time of year again, folks: Art House Theater Day, the now third annual celebration of the craft of fringe, independent movie-going and the weird, beautiful spaces where it happens, will soon be upon us. Organized every year by the Art House Convergence, the nation-wide event—scheduled for September…
Examining the list of highest grossing movies of 2017 in the U.S. reveals a common thread: nine of the top 10 films are either sequels, remakes, or films based on existing intellectual property, the sole outlier being Dunkirk. Looking at the top 10s of the past few years doesn’t wield drastically different results…
John Landis was already an accomplished director when he was called on to direct Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” heading up The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, and An American Werewolf In London. But even famous directors get starstruck. In the video above, Landis talks about working with Jackson and being awed by his…
John Landis has a number of classic films under his directorial belt, including The Blues Brothers, Coming To America, and An American Werewolf In London. He’s also responsible for two music videos in Michael Jackson’s repertoire, “Thriller” and “Black And White,” and got a look at the role fame played in the pop…
John Landis has directed a number of noteworthy movie comedies in his career, including The Blues Brothers, Coming To America, and Trading Places. We thought it would be appropriate to get Landis’ picks for the five best comedies of all time, but he wasn’t having it. In the video above, he schools us on the concept of…
The Blues Brothers is among the most iconic Chicago films, and the story of how it got made is an interesting one. At the time, the city wasn’t really a destination for many filmmakers, so when John Landis and company came into town for Blues Brothers, then-mayor Jane Byrne practically gave them free reign over the…
After watching An American Werewolf In London, Michael Jackson contacted John Landis to direct the music video for “Thriller.” The resulting video was iconic—it changed the media landscape, breaking down MTV’s color barrier and reinvigorating the home video market. John Landis debuted a remastered and 3D converted…
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video was inspired by John Landis’ movie An American Werewolf In London. Jackson, according to Landis, loved the visual effects from the film and wanted to turn into a monster onscreen. The resulting video ended up sparking change across the media landscape, breaking down MTV’s color…
It’s fairly common knowledge that Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video was inspired by John Landis’ movie An American Werewolf In London. After watching the film, Jackson contacted Landis, who agreed to direct the video. In the video above, Landis talks about the conceptualization of “Thriller,” his experience…
Movie ticket sales have been abysmal this year, with summer box office revenue failing to reach $4 billion for the first time since 2006 and movie theater attendance estimated to reach a 25-year low. There’s plenty of blame being passed around, toward review-aggregators, as well as the studios churning out uninspired…
Max Landis is a fairly polarizing figure in the film industry, partly because he’s the son of John Landis and will continue to get opportunities even when his projects flop and partly because he tends to have awful opinions about Star Wars characters, but now he may have finally landed a film that will prove once and…
This August will mark the 35th anniversary of the release of An American Werewolf In London, John Landis’ tale of two young Americans who don’t heed the warning to “keep off the moors and stick to the roads” and are viciously attacked by a werewolf as a result. In the film, Landis seamlessly mixed horror and…
Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by the week’s new releases or premieres. This week: In honor of the American Idol series finale, we’re revisiting our favorite television episodes featuring a talent competition.
Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about.
In between showing up in every documentary ever made, John Landis stopped by a Halloween Horror Nights Q&A in Orlando, Florida last night, where he dropped an interesting tidbit about a galaxy far, far away. According to the American Werewolf In London director, the original theatrical cuts (i.e., no Jabba The Hutt in…
It’s been a few months, which means it’s time for another horror anthology film hoping to land in that magic middle ground between the exhausting ADD of The ABCs of Death and the run-it-into-the-ground of VHS: Viral. In short, to be something akin to the solid fun/spooky ratio of Trick ’R Treat, which—along with the …
John Landis, John Carpenter, and David Cronenberg: Together, they represent a broad spectrum of horror cinema, and this clip of them talking shop on an early ’80s public access television show is unassailably great. (It shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with film history that the show, Take One, appeared on Z Channel…
An upcoming horror anthology has landed some very excellent directors, though sadly, they’re appearing within the film, not behind the camera. Tales Of Halloween—no, not another V/H/S. No, not the next ABCs Of Death, either. Not Trick ’R Treat 2, XX, The Gathering, or… you know what? Let’s start again: Neil Marshall…
John Landis, a man who never met an interview he didn’t like, recently sat down for an interview with the New York Daily News about Michael Jackson’s Thriller, because it’ll be unavoidable soon enough. Landis, who directed the 13-minute music video beloved by everyone except Jehovah’s Witnesses, filed a lawsuit…
For his detractors, it may not be as satisfying as watching him getting slapped, but there is a video where Max Landis spends two and a half minutes writhing in pain. Landis stars in a reenactment of the famous transformation scene from An American Werewolf In London for the Cinefix YouTube series “Homemade.” The…
