Ah the 1980′s! The era of big hair, happy non-threatening metal bands, tight jeans, and satanic panic! Back in the 1980′s I can still remember the panic over anything that seemed satanic. whether it be music, movies, or people the parents were all over it like white on rice. Even in my home town we had the usual rumors that every small town no doubt had about satanic cults that met under bridges, in cemeteries, or in the darkness of the woods. Looking back on it now 20 years later it seems really surreal that we actually worried about that kind of thing. The Satanic panic fizzled out in the 90′s and is pretty much dead today. For all the rumors and speculation there was little to no proof that such practices in worship of the devil ever occurred anywhere. Nor that anyone was ever hurt or killed because of it. Its in this world that Ti West (The Roost, Trigger Man) has set his latest film, House of the Devil. A film that captures the look and feel of every satanic panic film from the period so well that it you might thing its a long lost gem from the 80′s!

Ti West’s latest independent film ‘The House of the Devil takes us back to the early 1980s and the height of the satanic panic that gripped communities all over the country. It’s the early 80′s and Samantha, played by Jocelin Donahue, is a college student looking for a new place to live off campus. She finds the perfect house but has to come up with the $300 to move in before the following Monday. Luckily a babysitter position out in the middle of nowhere turns up on a campus bulletin board. Samantha’s friend Megan (Greta Gerwig), worried that she might be walking into a horror movie, offers to drive Samantha to the house and make sure its ok before leaving. Of course everything is far from ok. Upon arriving to the Victorian home, Mr. Ulman, played by the always creepy Tom Noonan, explains that the job isn’t babysitting a child but rather a invalid woman who’s bed bound and hardly a bother. Samantha’s reluctant to stay but is eventually won over by the offer of $400 for one nights work. Megan tries to talk Samantha into leaving but she refuses. Mr. Ulman and his wife leave for the evening and then strange things begin to happen.

Ti West’s films have always been an acquired taste. Films like the Roost and Trigger Man have been throwbacks to previous decades of cinema and they burn slowly. House of the Devil is no different. Samantha spends much of the films running time creeping around the house and discovering bits and pieces of the mystery to keep things moving. Do the Ulmans really live in this house? Are they who they say they are? How does the lunar eclipse play into the evenings events? All these questions are eventually answered but only after a slow build up. The events of the night manage to pull you to the edge of your seat ever so slowly as the dread mounts. But, many may find that the films finale doesn’t quite match with the level of build up and it feels like a bit of a letdown.

One could argue that that House of the Devils conclusion is true to many of the Satanic Panic flicks of the 70′s and 80′s and I tend to agree. I grew up watching these kinds of films and rarely did they end any bigger or explain things as well as House of the Devil. The film works because of the setting. Even though it takes place in the early 1980′s it doesn’t dwell on the time period trying to make a statement or poke fun at it. Instead it just happens to be a story that takes place in that time period. Everything from the performances, the wardrobe and even the credits of the film will make you feel like you watching a lost film from the 1980′s. I’m convinced if you saw this without knowing what it was on TV one night you would assume it was made in 1983.
In Jocelin Donahue, West has the perfect 1980s heroine. She’s equal parts Margot Kidder and Karen Allen. Her portrayal of Samantha and her journey is what the whole film is built upon and with a lesser actress House of The Devil could have been a disaster.

Unfortunately I doubt most modern horror fans would get what the movie is even about or would find it boring. For fans of grindhouse cinema, devil films from the 80′s, or just those who want to take a trip back in time, House of the Devil is a great trip down memory lane.

John Carpenter’s The Fog was released in February of 1980 but the story takes place in April 21st 1980, the 100th Anniversary of the small Town of Antonio Bay. So with Today being the 21st of April it seemed like a good time to go back and pay tribute to this great film!

After the success of Halloween Carpenter decided to take on the classic ghost story after seeing a distant fog bank while on vacation one night. That planted the seed that would become The Fog. The film is about the small seaside town of Antonio Bay that’s about to celebrate their 100th anniversary. However the anniversary mysteriously falls on the same anniversary as the sinking of the Elizabeth Dane, a clipper ship that followed a false fire on the shore to their doom and crashed on the rocks and sunk taking the entire crew with her.

The Fog has some great players. The somewhat legendary Tom Atkins, Jamie Lee Curtis, the sultry Adrienne Barbeau and Janet Leigh (Jamie Lee’s Mom and star of Psycho). Atkins is apparently a fisherman, though that’s never made clear, who finds Curtis hitchhiking along a dark stretch of road outside Antonio Bay. Its after midnight and the whole town is experiencing some very strange occurrences. Chairs move on their own, buildings shake, alarms go off without warning and so on. Even with all this going on somehow Atkins manages to take Curtis home and bed her. He is the silver fox after all.

If you haven’t seen the Fog then I won’t ruin it by telling you all about what happens but needless to say there’s a major connection between the founding of Antonio Bay, the sinking of the Elizabeth Dane, the vengeful Fog that seems to be making people die or disappear. What makes the Fog a great ghost story is its such a slow burn that oozes atmosphere from every orifice. The Fog takes its time but its a creepy time lit beautifully by cinematographer Dean Cundey and who also worked on Halloween and The Thing.

The Fog is the type of movie that simply doesn’t get made these days unless its an indie film. 2009′s The House of the Devil is the last film I can remember that paced itself so deliberatly. There aren’t many kills in the movie and it really relies more on its tone and atmosphere than on a bunch of jump scares. There’s just an overall creeping dread permeating throughout the film. Carpenter’s wide anamorphic camera creeps around building tension in the very opening moments of the film. Even during the brightly lit wide shots there’s always a sense that something spooky is going on. Like many of Carpenter’s films, he performs all the music making the score a major part of why the film works. From its haunting piano to its pulsing beats during action oriented scenes the score drives the film and elevates it above being just another horror movie.

Probably the most amazing thing about this movie is the fog effects which are very low tech. Some of the shots are matte shots while others are simply fog machines pushing copious amounts of fog into the scene and back lit. However its far more effective to see shadowy figures in real fog then see big CGI faces jumping out and doing completely unrealistic things. Something the horrible and extremely unnecessary remake failed to understand.

I realize that there’s a lot of young people that would probably find this movie to be boring because its slow but what do they know? I could probably write volumes on what’s wrong with the horror films coming out of major production houses these days but that’s for another post on another day.

The great t-shirt company Fright Rags has also just released a Fog T-shirt to commemorate the film that like all Fright Rags shirts, looks stunning! Be sure to pick one up and be sure to avoid any glowing fog banks you might see this weekend.

If you’re a HDSLR fan then you probably have heard about the latest from Canon, the EOS 5D Mark III. If not then Let me bring you up to speed quickly. In 2008 Canon released the still amazing 5D Mark II, the first Canon Camera with HD Video capability. Canon intended the camera to be used by photogs who needed to get video content while working on their projects for new media. But much to everyone’s surprise Indie filmmakers started picking up the camera and shooting movies with it. The 5D Mark II was responsible for a boom in HD video filmmakers who could now buy a reletively cheap camera and start making pictures. Since then the camera has been used not only in independent films and countless online videos but also in major Hollywood productions and TV shows. Most recently the camera was used for the vast majority of filming on the Navy Seals movie “Act of Valor”.

But the camera has its faults. SInce it wasn’t intended to be used as a movie camera there were major issues with the sound quality and audio out capabilities. HD video out was also a problem and the small viewing screen was affixed to the camera meaning you had to get on the floor with the camera when you needed to get low angle shots. So when rumors started about the release of the Mark III everyone was getting excited. So was the 5D worth the wait and more importantly is it worth the $3500 price tag? The answer is mostly yes.

Lets start with the good: The Mark III’s biggest improvement for me is its low light capabilities. As someone who is always filming in dark places with little light, the ISO ability of the Mark II was not exactly the best it could be. When you cranked it up to the maximum 6400 you got a lot of noise in the image. Now the Mark III will take you as high as 12800 and if your feeling adventurous you can take it higher in extended modes. But the quality of the image is far and away better than that of the Mark II. In fact its just flat out amazing how great the video looks at high numbers. For filming dark scenes this camera is a must. The only thing better would be the Canon C300 which is a actual movie camera weighing in around $15,000.00. The video below shows some shots from the Dent Schoolhouse using only the light in the room and the ISO set at 12,800. The shots of the beakers and flasks are from a scene with only a few lights and a flashing overhead light that goes on and off. Even in that environment the camera behaves admirably.

If you using the Canon 5D Mark III to take photos then your going to be very happy. The quality and options for still photography have gotten a major upgrade. You have the high ISO options but also new HDR abilities, duel memory card slots for splitting up files, a rating system, silent shutter mode for when you need to be sneaky and lots more. I’ve been very excited to take this camera out for some HDR photography which I did at the Dent Schoolhouse over the weekend. You can see some examples in this post and on my Flickr page. Filmmakers will also be happy to know there’s a headphone jack on the camera now, finally!

The Bad: The in camera HDR option seems useless for me. It doesn’t offer any real control over the final combined photo and I found myself doing my HDR photos the old fashioned way and just taking my own exposures and combining them later in the studio. Though I did like the ease at which I could chose the number of exposures I wanted. The video quality of the mark III isn’t all that. In fact you’d be hard pressed to see the improvement in video quality over the Mark II with your naked eye. The video still looks kinda soft with no sharpness to the small details. However Canon did fix the Moire and aliasing issues that made sharpening an impossibility with the Mark II. Now you can take the Mark III’s footage into your editing suite and sharpen it to bring out more detail. Its an extra step that seems like it should have been included in the camera but the finished video looks pretty good.

Filmmakers that like using HD monitors when filming are going to be dissapointed to find that Canon still hasn’t given us full HD video outs. For me this has never been an issue so I don’t really care. There’s still no 1080 mode for 60 fps mode and that sucks.

The BOTTOM LINE:
The Canon 5D Mark III isn’t going to be for everyone. In fact the Mark II is still an amazing camera and I still plan on keeping mine and using it for shoots. Buying a Mark III made sense for me because of how often I find myself shooting in Available Light and running through dark haunted houses. I heard in advance about the ISO capabilities and for me that was the biggest factor in my purchase. For filmmakers you will not see a huge difference in the video. But if you hated the lack of a headphone jack, the bad moire and aliasing issues or the horrible sound problems from the Mark II then you’re going to love the Mark III. If you’re a photographer then you’ll probably want to do the upgrade because the biggest improvements seem to be all in the Still photo functions of this camera. Bottom line for me was that I needed this camera for my work, but the Mark II is still amazing and now has dropped in price to $2100.

It’s kind of amazing where filmmaking is today thanks to Canon and while the Mark III isn’t all it could have been, its still an amazing camera that’s worth the upgrade for professionals.

If you were at the Transworld Haunted House Show this weekend then you got a look at the latest issue of Haunted Attraction Magazine and its awesome new look! But best of all it features a photo spread of Pennhurst photographed by Rogues Hollow Productions! The cover photo is my favorite and one I use in the design of this site as well as my 2012 Promotional flyers I handed out at the show. I think it really compliments the new look of the HA magazine and I’m proud that my photos are gracing the cover for the introduction of the new HA logo and layout! Big Thanks to Randy Bates and Richard Chakajian of Pennhurst and to John Kennedy, owner of Haunted Attraction Magazine. If you don’t already have a subscription to HA then get one now! Click here for more information!

Source: Haunted Attraction Magazine

Transworld’s Haunted Attraction & Halloween show was this past weekend and I’m exhausted! Its always a race to get everything done in time for the show and then its 3 days of insanity that goes by way too fast! I had a great time and picked up quite a bit of business as well! I made a new video for the show detailing some of the work I’ve done in the last year. The music comes from a somewhat famous movie and I will give the first 2 people who can email me with the title of that movie a Free 2012 Rogues Hollow T-shirt! Watch the video below then email me at christopher@rogueshollow.com if you know the score!

Why do people seem to like this movie? There’s been some positive reviews from some horror sites that I thought should have known better. The first Laid to Rest is a passable slasher flick with bad acting, a interesting killer and amazing gore effects. While its nothing to write home about it is a fairly fun film though far from a great one. So I finally got around to watching the sequel and Its like a completely different movie. The killer somehow survives the end of the first film and is picked up by an shadowy organization of people that seem to be there solely to support Chromeskull with his mission. Apparently the company motto is: Step 1 Kill people, Step 2 ?, and Step 3 profit. Its never really clear why this organization exists or why its supporting ChromeSkull. The lead douche CEO is terrible actor, Brian Austen Green who wants to take over ChromeSkull’s place and be head of the organization for some reason. Danielle Harris is along just to egg on Green to be the top killer.

Meanwhile the only survivor of the original film is Thomas Dekker who showed up at the very end of Laid to Rest. He’s gone from being a Frat boy character to a tight jeans wearing emo constantly moping around in front of the camera. When he’s not acting all dark and tortured he’s doing his best emo music video vamping.

Seriously this is just an example of everything that’s wrong with horror today. There’s nothing interesting going on here. In fact it feels like the film makers just put in all these mysteries just for the sake of having mysteries. It never feels like it actually means anything. If you told me the story was written by a 15 year old kid I wouldn’t be surprised because that’s exactly what it feels like. The tone and narrative of this movie feels like its coming from someone who thinks their being edgy and clever but in reality are just taking ideas from everything else and stirring them in the pot. Its too bad too because the first Laid to Rest had some potential and the beginnings of a back story that could have been strong. But ChromeSkull just squanders all of it and makes the whole plot some big mysterious conspiracy theory. There are a few decent gore scenes in here but that’s hardly worth the 90 minutes I wasted watching it.
1 out of 5 stars

About 2 years ago one of my clients needed a piece of art for a Valentine’s weekend promotion. I shot some cool photos of a bloody heart in a box of candy and that became their art for the show. This year they are doing it again so I thought I’d take a stab at making a video to go with the artwork just to see what I could come up with. So one evening I took my camera, some Valentine’s Day trappings, such as candy, bubbly, love letters, and the like to a nice run down location I had access to. I was inspired by the opening of American Horror Story and even mimicked their flashlight in the dark effect for the very beginning of the short. I’m very happy with the result and It does tell a pretty dark story in less than a minute. Unfortunately the client decided they didn’t need it this year so I’m just releasing it here on the site and on YouTube. Watch it below and let me know what you think!

Comment on YouTube or here on the blog. I’ve also made some wallpapers for the video for a variety of formats including Ipads and Iphones which you can download here!

My first viewing of John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing destroyed me. It absolutely terrified me with its insane creature design and the overwhelming feeling of dread and hopelessness was mind blowing for me at 9 or 10 years old. It had a lasting impact on me and as I got a little older It became one of my favorite all time horror films. When it was rumored that there would be another remake of the film the fans were enraged over it and for good reason. John Carpenter’s original was a bomb when it was originally released in the summer of 1982. However it soon found its audience on home video and has rightfully taken its place as the masterpiece film of Carpenter’s career. The film was overwhelmingly paranoid and dark and the special effects are still unrivaled.

Later it was announced the new film was to be a prequel to explain what happened to the Norwegian camp that discovers the The Thing in the first place. This gave us fans a little bit of hope that this might be something different. Having finally watched the film I can say that while it can’t hold a candle to Carpenters film, The Thing (2011) is entertaining, has a little dread and even has some pretty great sequences in special effects.

The Story begins with Mary Winstead’s paleontologist character being brought in from the US to the Norweigian base in Antartica to consult on a find. Once she’s there we’re introduced to a camp of fairly anonymous Norweigians who are hard to tell apart. Seriously they all have beards and Norweigian names that you forget as soon as you hear them. We’re shown the crashed ship and the Thing’s body frozen in the ice. If you’ve seen JC’s original then you pretty much know what will happen. They dig up the Thing, it escapes and tries to kill and take the place of people in the camp. Chaos and distrust ensues and we have a big climatic battle back at the ship.

(SOME SPOILERS AHEAD)

Let’s get what doesn’t work out of the way first. The Thing’s motivation seems scattered to say the least. At first I thought perhaps this was on purpose and the writer was trying to give it a “Scared animal” mentality. First it escapes, Soon it starts imitating people and then it tries to escape out of the camp but freaks out in mid flight causing the helicopter its on to crash. Then in one scene it takes out half the cast of the film and then goes back to imitating people again. Its like the writer couldn’t decide if he wanted the Thing to be clever or just monster out and kill everyone. Why is it careful to conceal itself one minute then freaking out and killing everything the next.

Mary Winstead’s character is basically the Macready character from the Carpenter film but she apparently has a dog eared copy of the script in her back pocket. We see her figure things out way to quickly and too accurately for it to be believed. She’s not the only one either; Another character named Lars has also read the script and just shows up out of nowhere with a flame thrower exactly when its needed. There’s never any explanation given so he must have read the script. The Carpenter film is pretty tight with an explanation for everything that needs one and in fact people still debate who was and was not being imitated. No one will be having discussions like that for the 2011 film.

The work put into to matching events up in the prequel and Carpenters film, while admirable, sometimes hinder the film. It felt at times like more work was being put into matching up events than in writing good characters and a solid story. There were a couple times where characters did things just because that’s what they had to do to explain what we see in Original film.

OK so what does work? The creature design is pretty good. It manages to take the amazing work done in the original and add some new twists on it. Overall the effects work, though there were a couple dodgy CGI moments. Surprisingly they melded digital and practical effects together and it was a fairly successful endeavor. It didn’t really WOW me like my first viewing of the original but there are a few moments that are pretty damn impressive!

The film doesn’t have the slow burning dread and hopelessness of the original but it does manage to be suspenseful and I found myself totally getting into it. Visually its a pretty film and its very entertaining. But its more of a big flashy monster movie than it is a well paced movie of distrust and building dread. Its worth watching and I think most people will enjoy the film even if you hate the idea of a prequel to John Carpenter’s original.
3 out of 5 stars

I’m a huge fan of 70′s and 80′s horror movies and I still run across the occasional retro flick I haven’t seen. Recently I came upon a great forgotten slasher gem called Night School starring the very beautiful Rachel Ward. Someone is beheading women and leaving their heads in some strange places. A detective assigned to the case soon finds a link between the victims, they all attended night school at a local girls college. Suspicion falls upon a college professor who apparently spends all his spare time having affairs with as many students as possible. He’s also diddling his research assistant played by Rachel Ward. The story takes some twists and turns and has some amazing kill scenes. You’ll probably see the twist ending coming long before its revealed but its still well worth your time.

The film was the last film directed by Ken Hughes who directed the Disney flick Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Spoof James Bond film titled Casino Royale back in the 1960′s! However Hughes turns in a slasher movie that’s entertaining and stylistic but a little light on blood and gore scenes. Sorry gorehounds. I think A lot of people today think a good slasher movie is just having a good killer but that’s far from the case. It takes great cinematography, interesting locations and decent acting to make a good slasher film and Night School delivers on all these points! Night School has been released for the first time on DVD from Warner Brothers Archive collection. These are the DVD’s that are made when they’re ordered and not mass produced. Its interesting that this film hasn’t gotten more attention since it’s one of the better Slasher films from the period. I recommend it highly to any slasher aficionados like myself.

So Bloody Disgusting.com has released a Spanish language film called Atrocious. I’d heard some good things about it and was more than a little interested in seeing it. BD has a bit of a reputation as one of the best sites for horror movie news so if they are getting behind this film is must be something cool right? No, not so much. Atrocious is a boring Blair Witch knock off with less woods and more house with a big twist ending that when finally revealed will make you say: “oh, that’s kinda neat I guess..”

The story is that of a family taking a vacation in the country at the childhood home of their mother. The two oldest siblings, July and Christian, are into ghost hunting and urban legends and decide to document their investigation into a local legend about a girl who was lost in the woods. With two high end documentary grade cameras the kids find a big labyrinth behind the house that they spend several boring days investigating. Finally things start to amp up a bit when the family dog goes missing. The brother and sister duo go into the labyrinth to investigate and finally find the dog dead at the bottom of a well. Then more boring stuff happens before finally in the last 15 minutes someone goes missing and we get the requisite “Twist-ending” that is supposed to shock us.

Like almost every “found footage” film ever released, Atrocious suffers from the problem of a lot of boredom for an hour and a half before we finally get some spooky payoff. The Blair Witch Project tried to avoid this by having the investigation of the legend of the Blair witch play a role in the narrative so we learn some stuff along the way that hopefully won’t bore us to tears. However even that didn’t save the film from being a bore. Atrocious comes up with a half assed story about a lost girl that haunts the woods near their vacation home for the Brother and sister to investigate along with a big ass labrynth for them to run around in. However nothing at all of interest happens for most of the films running time. It just comes off as yet another example of why “found footage” films need to go away and never come back. If the filmmakers had made Atrocious a 30 minute short film I think it could have been a riveting and exciting ride but in a 90 minute movie it just takes forever to do anything.

I’ve never been a fan of “found footage” movies because even if they are done well, you still won’t want to sit down and watch it again. You’re watching something that once it blows its load you have no reason to revisit it. There is no cinematography or interesting camera angles or decent dialogue. Its just a shaky camera with a bright light blowing out everything in front of the lens and that’s boring. If that entertains you then by all means check out Atrocious but I’ll stick to films by directors that actually care about whats in the frame.