Spooky Movies: The Devil’s Backbone
Many people know Guillermo del Toro from Pacific Rim, Hellboy, or Pan’s Labyrinth, but his less well-known stuff—especially The Devil’s Backbone—is well worth a look. The story takes place at a dusty, run-down orphanage in a remote part of Spain during the Spanish…
Spooky Movies: Trick R Treat
If you judge Trick R Treat by its cover, you’ll probably guess that it’s another boring, cliché-ridden slasher film. Although there is a fair amount of blood spilled, this isn’t your run-of-the mill b-grade horror flick. The film contains five interwoven stories about…
Spooky Movies: Call of Cthulhu
If you’re at all a fan of H. P. Lovecraft, the pulp horror story writer whose work has influenced everyone from Roger Corman to Guillermo del Toro, you know that films made from his works are pretty hit and miss—emphasis on the miss.…
Spooky Movies: Shadow of the Vampire
What if Max Schreck, who played the vampire Count Orlock in the iconic silent 1922 film Nosferatu, had been a real vampire? Shadow of the Vampire is a fictionalized account of the making of Nosferatu. Director F. W. Murnau, played by a scenery-chewing…
Spooky Movies: The Descent
Marshall followed up Dog Soldiers in 2005 with The Descent. Six women go caving and are trapped as a passage collapses behind them. Juno, the competitive leader of the group, admits that the cave they’re in is unmapped, even though she had told…
Spooky Movies: Dog Soldiers
Next up are two under-appreciated, low-budget monster movies produced and written by Neil Marshall. In the first, Dog Soldiers (2002), a squad of British Army soldiers is sent to the Scottish highlands for a training mission against a Special Air Service unit, but…
