James Karen, the actor who brought about The Return Of The Living Dead and indirectly blew up The Little House On The Prairie, has died. A massively prolific performer with an expressive and instantly recognizable hang-dog face, Karen appeared in more than 200 film and TV projects over his 70-year career, and was 94…
It was a long time ago, in a universe not so unlike our own, that two men entered the pop-culture firmament with projects that actually came out the same day. April 5, 1974 saw the publication of Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, and Steven Spielberg’s first theatrical release, The Sugarland Express. And never the…
Tobe Hooper, a director who radically reshaped the landscape of American horror in 1974, when he took a shoestring budget, a cast of unknowns, and an unflinchingly brutal cinematic sensibility, and transformed them into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, has died. According to Variety, Hooper was 74.
The Poltergeist franchise is famously cursed, supposedly due to the real human skeletons that were used as props in the original film. Stars Heather O’Rourke and Dominique Dunne both died young under tragic circumstances, and spooky happenings occurred on the set not only of Tobe Hooper’s 1982 movie, but on the set of …
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…
HBO has a pretty big October ahead of it: The premium network is debuting a number of new shows next month, including the J.J. Abrams-produced Westworld, and web star Issa Rae’s Insecure. All of those new series—including Sarah Jessica Parker’s Divorce and the debut of its nightly newscast, Vice News Tonight—will be…
Jump scares are an effective way to startle the audience, but are they useful in establishing a more terrifying atmosphere? The technique of suddenly scaring viewers with a quick glance or a sharp sting of music can be a great way of goosing that audience to expect the unexpected, but usually it’s just a lazy or…
A harried Winona Ryder, ax gripped firmly in hand, is an unlikely visual representation of maternal love. And, yet, she is.
Starting in the 1960s, RCA spent many years and a reported $600 million trying to develop a physical media format it called the VideoDisc, essentially an LP-sized black plastic disc capable of holding an entire feature film. The company boldly (and wrongly) predicted that the technology would reach half of American…
Johnny Depp has been disguising his matinee idol handsomeness beneath wigs and makeup for decades now, stretching back to at least Edward Scissorhands. In recent years, thanks to films like Black Mass and Alice In Wonderland, the actor has taken an almost perverse pride in rendering himself unrecognizable, affecting…
It’s a staple of the horror genre: the doomed house built on an ancient Indian burial ground and now haunted by those whose final resting place has been rudely disturbed. The Indian burial ground trope is seemingly so pervasive in films and television that many viewers may not have even paused momentarily to ponder…
A new documentary on the “Poltergeist curse” is coming from filmmaker Adam Ripp. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the new film will follow former child actor Oliver Robins attempting to bring closure to a “dark chapter” in his life. (Robins portrayed Robbie Freeling in both the original Poltergeist as well as the …
Earlier this week, The A.V. Club reported on Wes Craven’s original draft for A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. It was of note that the novelization, released in 1987, was actually based on Craven’s draft, not the final script. This kind of thing happened all the time when tie-in novels of films were a…
Deadline is reporting that Rosemarie DeWitt (Kill The Messenger, Olive Kitteridge) has signed on to sing along with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land. The musical film centers on a jazz pianist (Gosling) and an aspiring actress (Stone) who fall in love in modern-day Los Angeles. The couple…
In an innocuous bit of entertainment news that would probably be a lot more startling if it leapt, screaming at you, from out of a darkened corridor, the planned film adaptation of stunningly successful camera simulator Five Nights At Freddy’s has found its writer-director. Poltergeist and Monster House director Gil…
1982 was a different time. The Weather Channel was new on the air, Cal Ripkin Jr. had just begun his 2,632-game streak, and Ron Hendren was one of the hosts of Entertainment Tonight.
The 2015 edition of Poltergeist would be a decent horror movie if it didn’t already exist. There’s the 1982 edition, for starters, a masterful collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper that sends a suburban family through the haunted-house wringer. But the new Poltergeist also recalls James Wan’s Insidious…
The horror remake train pulls into Poltergeist station this summer with a modern-day update of the 1982 classic. Despite some tragic coincidences surrounding the original film (and its later sequels), director Gil Kenan (Monster House) ain’t afraid of no ghost —or supposed curses, for that matter. Bringing some indie…
The summer of 2015 is brimming with big stars who want to be your superhero, teaming for epic adventures, side-splitting comedies, and sweeping romances that will stir your heart from its winter slumber. There are also some movies that aren’t Entourage. And so, as Vincent Chase and company prepare to enter theaters,…
The first trailer for the Poltergeist remake has arrived, and as expected it appears to be building an entirely new revenue stream on top of the dusty bones of the original series’ corpse. Some things have changed—the family’s name has been changed from the Freelings to the Bowens, for example, and Speak & Spells went…
Advertisement
