A man attacked by a rabid bat in the Mojave National Preserve will probably die if not found and treated by health officials. Eyewitnesses say the bat landed on the mystery man's neck outside the desert park's book store at the Kelso Depot between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The man wandered off, oblivious, and the bat…

Jamestown was a gruesomely failed start to the English colonization of America. The people were malnourished and disease-ridden and too dumb to eat the bountiful fish and fruits all around them. Most of the settlers were dead within the first year, and in the second hungry winter of 1609-10, the starving survivors …

The idea that there are no new ideas is an old idea, but a true one; there are no new ideas. For confirmation, look no further than the state of horror movies–remakes and a bunch of found-footage clones (in which the camera is part of the story, characters are doing the filming and the movie is supposedly assembled…

Fede Alvarez's remake/reboot/reimagining of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead and Evil Dead II respects its source material in a manner that feels perfunctory at times. It flashes to references like it's ticking off a list. Sentimental necklace, check. Chainsaw, check. Necronomicon, check. Flying camera, check. Mirror scare, check…

Somewhere in Stoker's gorgeous heap of near-absurd imagery, jaw-dropping transitions, domestic melodrama, and suggestive narrative half-threads is a metaphor for the career of its South Korean director Park Chan-wook. In staggers, loops and layers, Stoker's story follows the passage into adulthood of India Stoker…

This week sees the release of three new horror movies: Warm Bodies, Girls Against Boys (both in theaters) and The ABCs of Death (on demand). But it is not enough anymore merely to be a horror movie — now horror movies, in conversation with what came before them in their respective subgenres, must add something new to…

Here is how stupid John Luessenhop's incompetent sixth installment in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise is: An alternate sequel, the film picks up where the 1974 original left off (literally with the police responding to a call from the pickup truck driver who rescued final girl Sally) and concerns a baby who is…

Horror movies make death easy. Lots of people find them hard to watch, of course, but they ultimately make the loss of life a consumable commodity – with the swipe of a machete, the slash of a knife, the plunge of a handful of razors, humans expire. A series of these makes for a fast-moving popcorn picture.

"We always had to make a conscious decision to make the same movie over again, only each one would be slightly different," says Steve Miner, the director of the second and third Friday the 13th installments (and associate producer of the first), in the franchise's oral history, Crystal Lake Memories. Indeed, by 1982's …

The walls rot like flesh. A man in an engraved triangular iron helmet is the protagonist's guardian-slash-executioner. He manually operates a carousel where people suspended by chains through their pierced bodies are the horses. A princess party in a mall led by a creepy clown disintegrates to snarling children with…

Paranormal Activity 4 runs on cheap thrills. After some time set aside for exposition that can be summed up as, "Something weird is going on in a house inhabited by at least one person who is tech-savvy enough to set up surveillance," the movie starts pummeling us with jump scares. If you've ever seen a horror movie,…

Maybe the craziest thing about American Horror Story's second season, which premiered last night on FX, is that it isn't a second season, really. The series is an anthology, meaning that despite the likes of Jessica Lange, Lily Rabe, Zachary Quinto and Evan Peters returning, we're getting a whole new set of characters…

Sinister, which opens wide on Oct. 12, has a perfect 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of this posting. Granted, it's early still, and only 20 reviews are in (notorious horror hater Roger Ebert has yet to weigh in), but the film is inspiring gushing notices. There's no question that Scott Derrickson's film is…

In William Friedkin's Killer Joe, Gina Gershon's character Sharla is forced to give head to a chicken leg, a penis stand-in held at the crotch of Matthew McConaughey's anti-hero Killer Joe Cooper. Like the peeing scene in Last House on the Left, the marathon gang rape of I Spit on Your Grave, the wire torture that…

To love horror movies is to live a life searching for a fix like your first highs and rarely getting it. For me, those first loves were slashers like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween. Since I saw those movies, I've had hopes for every over-hyped horror film, and those hopes are almost always…