IT Trailer Breakdown

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This might be an uncouth statement, but I’ve never really understood the big deal about clowns.  I mean, we all collectively agreed that zombies and vampires are overdone, with the days of the werewolf being indisputably numbered, but for some reason clowns just keep on hanging in there as a reliable boogeyman.  

Maybe that’s because there aren’t actually that many clown horror films to see really.  There’s Killer Klowns from Outer Space, certainly, but that was more of a horror-comedy while more recent offerings like Clown or 31 seem to have flown completely under the radar. 

Honestly, I’ve never even been that on board with the idea of clowns being inherently scary.  I understand the mechanism by which they can be twisted to invoke dread but most of the time when people say they’re afraid of clowns they really just mean they’re afraid of creepy clowns and, spoilers, it’s the creepy they’re afraid of.  

All of this is part and parcel to why I’m not terribly on board with everyone’s new favorite Horror trailer for the remake of IT, the Stephen King novel whose original TV adaptation put killer clowns on the horror landscape back in 1990.  As I probably already gave away I’ve got some harsh words about both the original and this trailer for the remake but let’s watch said trailer before going forward. 

Film Land - The Collector (2009)

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Edited by Robert Beach

One of the big trends of 2016 is that horror, as a popular genre, is back with a vengeance. This particular shift has been building for a while now with a lot of recent horror output being new films or modern series. The Purge franchise has roared through three installments to wave the banner of political horror; The Conjuring and Insidious have become a dynamite double feature complete with spin-offs. What’s more, art house horror has been a major force lately with popular hits like Babadook, It Follows, The Invitation, and VVitch making a major splash. 

Home invasion horror reared its head as a major genre force this year, not having been present since the 2013 horror boom with You’re Next. 2016 gave us the Netflix original Hush, the tense indie thriller Green Room, and this week’s studio hit Don’t Breathe.  Now, I can’t stand the genre most of the time, and I didn’t like any of the three films I just mentioned. Instead, I’m focusing on my favorite home invasion horror flick of all time and one of the best horror films of the 2000s: The Collector. 

Week of Review - Vacancy

We are 3 installments into this shorter Week of Review as American Horror Story: Hotel looms ever near, rumbling towards us all like a kind collective, television based prostate cancer.  Today I’ll be looking at another 2007 horror film, because apparently that was just a really good year for hotel horror.  However, unlike Saturday’s 1408 today’s topic skews much more in line with the key trends and themes of horror in the mid-2000s.  As much as I like to talk about the amazing 4-year period of 2007-2010 as the time when the 2010s truly began I’m thoroughly aware that change doesn’t happen over night. 

As I mentioned 2007 was a horror landscape dominated by the twin success of Saw and the blossoming trend of horror reboots.  Texas Chainsaw and Amityville Horror had both come out in 2005 and made a ton of money with Rob Zombie’s Halloween picking up steam to complete the hat trick that same year.  Haunted house movies wouldn’t pick up again till the twin success of Paranormal Activity and Indisious and zombies didn’t fully enter the mainstream till 2010.  Combine all this with the still lingering impact of Eli Roth’s Hostel, also from the truly terrible year of 2005, and horror was in bad shape.  Which makes it all the more impressive that Vacancy, which conforms to all the horror tropes and standards of the day, is really good.