Forget Westworld and the disappointing movies we sometimes write about in these monthly roundups, because HBO’s HBO GO and HBO Now streaming services are getting some legitimately good stuff in June. Have you heard of a little movie called A Cure For Wellness? It had leeches or something. How about The Mountain…
At 21 seasons deep, it’s becoming harder and harder for South Park to push the envelope with Mr. Garrison. Even before he was officially elected President of the United States, he had ascended to power by fucking the Canadian President to death—an act that was always going to be tough to follow in terms of shock value.
With the release of It and The Dark Tower (and, hell, even Gerald’s Game), more and more casual Stephen King fans are hearing tell of the “dark universe” that connects so many of his books. Pennywise and the Losers’ Club, for example, not only appear in It, but are also either referenced or seen in King books like The…
It’s Pennywise is, by all metrics, a scary clown: He eats children, has rows of hideous teeth, and can turn into your worst nightmare at the honk of a red nose. Ah, but he also claims to be a “dancing clown,” a trait that’s decidedly less scary. Unless, of course, you’re doing so in a makeshift circus stage in the…
Well, that didn’t go well. Surprising absolutely no one who’s seen the batshit crazy thing—even, apparently, the suits at Paramount—Darren Aronofsky’s chaotic, allegorical chamber thriller Mother! flopped hard at the box office this weekend. Unleashed onto a whopping 2,368 screens, and onto an audience that was surely…
In Podmass, The A.V. Club sifts through the ever-expanding world of podcasts and recommends the previous week’s best episodes. Have your own favorite? Let us know in the comments or at podmass@avclub.com.
Similar to trying to explain what makes a particular joke funny, it can sometimes be difficult to describe what exactly about horror movies makes us so scared. Sure, it’s easy to point to a gruesome monster or a well-timed jump scare and say, “That’s the scary part.” But what is it about those elements that makes our…
It can be horrifying to merely be alive in 2017, for myriad reasons. Hell, the endlessly sensationalist American Horror Story even set its current season in our world. Perhaps this increasing anxiety and paranoia is why we’ve flocked to horror films like Get Out and now It in record numbers—there’s something almost…
In addition to smashing box-office records for horror and again demonstrating that R-rated films can be wildly profitable no matter how many times studio execs join hands in prayer and murmur “four quadrant appeal,” Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of Stephen King’s It also bears the necessary hallmarks of a heavily…
Well, the analysts predicted it and the analysts were right: Everybody saw It this weekend. Even better? Andrés Muschietti’s film adaptation of Stephen King’s freaky, meaty novel is not just a commercial success, but also a critical one—our review, for example, praises the film’s “nightmarish imagery” and careful…
The House That Freddy Built is now counting its Pennywises, as It—co-produced by New Line Cinema, Brett Ratner’s Ratpac Entertainment, and Warner Bros.—easily shot to the top of the domestic box-office charts with a $123 million opening weekend. That’s a new record for a horror movie, more than doubling previous…
The small town of Lititz, Pennsylvania, home of some charming cafes and America’s first commercial pretzel bakery, is a lot like Derry, Maine, the setting of Stephen King’s It—minus the whole “clown eating local children” thing. Local law enforcement is also way more responsive to the threat of child-eating clowns…
Watching the big-screen version of It only emphasizes how strange Stephen King’s novel really is. Adapting a more than 1,000 page book into a feature film—or half of it, as director Andrés Muschietti has done here—is a daunting task in and of itself, let alone a novel that features a cosmic turtle and an immortal…
The long-awaited new adaptation of Stephen King’s clown-terror classic It will finally be released a week from today, and analysts have predicted that it will be a pretty major late-summer hit. Stephen King has banned Trump from seeing it; the powerful clown lobby, pissed as they are about the film’s likely impact on…
After the disappointment of The Dark Tower, there’s a lot of pressure on Andrés Muschietti, director of the upcoming feature-film version of Steven King’s sprawling doorstop of a novel It, to get his adaptation right. All signs so far point to a monster (no pun intended) opening weekend for the film, with a series of…
Hey, remember when the Alamo Drafthouse announced a screening of Wonder Woman open only to people who identified as female, and some very fragile dudes on the internet freaked out about it, as if there weren’t literally thousands of other screenings of the film open to them at theaters across the nation (including at…
True cases of culrophobia are vanishingly rare, so no matter what your friends might claim on social media, they can still see the upcoming film adaptation of Stephen King’s It. And Variety’s box-office analysts seem to think they will, estimating a relatively massive $50 million opening weekend for the Andrés…
Given that Tim Curry’s performance as Pennywise was clearly the best part of the 1990 TV mini-series version of Stephen King’s It, there’s been a lot of scrutiny surrounding Bill Skarsgård’s performance as immortal child-eating clown/shapeshifting manifestation of primal fear Pennywise in It’s upcoming big-screen…
Comic-Con has begun teasing the attendees of its 2017 gathering with the sorts of exclusive footage and behind-the-scenes tidbits meant to stoke anticipation for upcoming movies and TV shows. But nothing gets the heart racing and the pulse pounding quite like hearing all about the kinds of jaw-dropping imagery…
In our monthly book club, we discuss whatever we happen to be reading and ask everyone in the comments to do the same. What Are You Reading This Month?