Fan Picks

If you're feeling filthy and want a limited edition, leather bound, coffee-table-sized book that compliments your degenerate lifestyle then step away from the corpse paint and look no further! Fab Press has teamed up with Cradle of Filth vocalist, Dani Filth and music journalist, Gavin Baddeley (Dissecting Marilyn Manson, Lucifer Rising), to bring you a compendium of black metal decadence and more, The Gospel of Filth. Oh the dank darkness of my danky doom!

The history of Cradle of Filth is the focus of this title but it includes over 500 pages of other debaucherous content as it relates to culture, media, literature, art, film and music. The book will cover topics like our fascination with vampires, werewolves, serial killers, and the occult -- looking at everything from folklore to pop culture.

Dani Filth, describes the book further:

"This book is the result of five years of painstaking research and investigation into the far-flung corners of the occult, the realms of literal darkness and all things fun, fearful and macabre. From scream queens to fever dreams and everything in between, this black grimoire uncovers the secrets and history of the esoteric and forbidden and is an absolute must for any lost soul curious about the darker side of life – be it a craving for vampirism, witchcraft, horror movies, serial killers, femme fatales, illicit fiction, exotic sex and drugs, black masses, or gothic fairytales. Making Halloween last all year or just a passing interest in the musical macabre, this book stands like a roadmap to Hell and beyond."

Growing up Freddy wasn't cheap, but the allure of his sinister voice and pizza face kept us coming back for more. Throughout the years there were some cuckoo products and marketing strategies to promote the five-fingered fiend, some of which you can check out after the jump. Until we can determine if Samuel Bayer's Nightmare on Elm Street remake is a complete disaster or not, enjoy this little stroll down Elm Street.

Hello, friends. We're trying out a nifty new chat service that will allow our writers and our readers to join hands in blissful movie geekery. For example, we're hoping to do our Movie Club with this service, but before we can do that ... we want to see how this Cover It Live program actually works!

So in a way, you're like Horror Squad beta testers! Go put that on your resumé!

The topic of the evening shall be "slashers," so feel free to share thoughts, links, pics, and videos to the discussion. If you have ANY questions, comments, complaints, or council (I wanted the four-way alliteration) just let us know. Here's the doo-hickey!

I found this year's collection of horror films to be relatively lackluster. In the first incarnation of this list, which was posted on my own personal site, I was only able to come up with nine films I genuinely believe should be on a Best Of... list for the year. My list is similar to Peter's, in a way, as it contains many of the same films, yet one of the films he included (Antichrist) ended up on my Worst Of... list, and I'm still in awe over how he could include the Friday the 13th redux as number one despite his explanation.

This list took some time to compile, and for the sake of conformity, I have added a tenth film. At the end I've included my Worst Of... list just so you can get an idea as to why I'm relentlessly teased for my vastly superior taste in horror films. So without further adieu, my Top 10 Horror Movies of 2009, rewritten and tweaked for Horror Squad.

10. House of the Devil My ex post facto entry to this list, House of the Devil was not an enjoyable film for me. I found it incredibly slow and lacking a sufficient payoff, all while only giving AJ Bowen approximately ten minutes of screen time. So why am I including it on this list? Because Ti West didn't make an homage to an 80's Satanic Panic film, he MADE an 80's Satanic Panic film. House of the Devil captures the look and feel of the time period perfectly, from the way it was filmed to the soundtrack. It is based on that alone that he deserves a spot on this list, even if it's number ten.

Even though I got my start writing about horror by creating a blog called Horror's Not Dead, I don't jive with the idea that good horror is becoming an endangered species. Sure, who is actually making and delivering good horror is always in a state of flux, but considering the sheer crop of films to choose from is constantly on the rise, there will always be gems to found. Now before getting to the list proper, let's explain my own personal criteria for what qualifies as a 2009 film.

Basically, what matters is if the film was given its widest release during the course of the year. For example, despite being first shown publicly years ago, I consider Trick 'r Treat an eligible title, as 2009 finally found it going wide (albeit straight-to-video). Daybreakers, on the other hand, played a few festivals in 2009 but will not have its wide release until 2010. Conversely, most people in America won't see [REC] 2 until 2010 or beyond, but it went wide in its native Spain in 2009, thus it is eligible. Make sense? On to the show!

10. Paranormal Activity
I went back and forth on excluding Paranormal Activity from my Top 10 list because, really, it didn't do much for me in the scare department. I found it pulse pounding to watch for the first time, but it has scarcely popped into my brain since then. However, I do remain in awe of what Oren Peli accomplished with a mere $15,000. I have a lot of respect for the process that goes into engineering any thrill ride, so to speak, so even if it didn't severely impact me, it still commands a placement.

9. Thirst (my review)
Chan-wook Park's Thirst is, hands down, not only the best vampire film of the year, but I'd put it in league with another similarly atypical fang-set film, Let the Right One In. It's not particularly scary, but it is a deft, engrossing blend of lust and violence that gets back to the eroticism of the vampire that no film (or TV show) has properly explored in years. If you're feeling burned out on vampires these days, and that would be perfectly understandable, at least put this in your Must Watch queue simply because it's another brilliant film from the mind of the man who gave the world Oldboy.

When the first trailer for Shutter Island hit, I believe the universal response was "Holy Crap, Martin Scorsese made a horror movie!" Sure, it had been known beforehand that his latest re-teaming with The Departed star Leonardo DiCaprio was going to be a thriller, but I don't think many (including those who have read the book) were expecting his 'cops investigate wrong-doings at a mental institute' film to look like a stylized, cold-blooded, psychological chiller. Though, in retrospect, if anyone had access to this list for Scorsese's "11 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time", that prediction would have been a lot easier to make.

The Daily Beast has the full run down of Scorsese's picks, so I'll not copy and paste it here, but I would like to point out some interesting observations. First, his youngest selection, The Entity, was made in 1981, which begs the question as to what the director thinks of today's crop of horror movies; I'm guessing not a whole lot considering he's already excluded the mid-80s sweet spot of horror.

Second, more than half of his hat tips are to black-and-white films, which makes me wonder how differently Shutter Island might have looked without its meticulous color palette. Third, the majority of his picks revolve around fear of loss and isolationist settings, which are two favorite elements of mine that now have me jonesing for Shutter Island even harder than before.

Click over to The Daily Beast to see the complete selections, including scenes from all of them. And, of course, feel free to bemoan below about Martin Scorsese not giving any love to Troll 2.

When I was a wee lad, I remember Halloween as a time of mystery and danger, the one night of the year when I was allowed to wander the streets with a fake knife through my head and was encouraged to approach complete strangers and ask them for candy. I don't remember all of my costumes, but I do remember often dressing up as one superhero or another before graduating to the darker side of things around, I'm guessing, age 9 or 10. I'm sure there was much I was naive about at the time, but I also remember distinctly respecting Halloween night as a time when we were supposed to pretend that innocence was gone.

Kids today, though, they are just plain innocent; at least that's what I gather from these survey results from Comcast and ActivityTV.com. The poll was intended to cull "the opinions of more than 600 youngsters on all things pertaining to the season of scary", but their answers couldn't be farther from anything considered scary. Apparently the most popular masks were Hannah Montana and President Obama, followed closely by Britney Spears, Star Wars, and the Jonas Brothers. Actually, I take it back, those results are a different kind of scary.

Other hard-hitting question categories included gag-inducing Halloween treats (brussels sprouts taking the win), and Halloween tricks that yield the loudest scream. Now I know that youngsters aren't supposed to have diabolical imaginations outside of horror movies, but "shocking my grandparents by hiding in their closet" is not something I remember doing as a kid during the darkest of holidays. I do, however, remember trying to make it look there were dead people everywhere, but maybe I'm just old fashioned.

The recent retail release of Wrong Turn 3: Left For Dead got me wondering what it is about the rolling, forested hills of America that lend the setting so well to backwoods horror movies, particularly those featuring deranged families. Obviously the endless, looming trees make it easy to get lost and the proclivity of locals to have only enough teeth to open a beer can with makes for a batch of kin best left alone, but psychotic inbred families must also live outside West Virginia, right? Surely America doesn't have a monopoly on city folk out of their element.

So I started squeezing together my mind grapes and came up with a list of the best murderous hillbillies from all over the globe:

Oooh, a twist in the Fates Worse Than Death formula! That's right, fans of painful, drawn-out, memorable exits from this mortal coil, I'm straying from the movie picks and going with a literary horror choice; more specifically In The Hills, The Cities from Clive Barker's The Book of Blood, Volume 1.

Not only is this my favorite short story of all time, but it also features some of the most indelible imagery my mind has ever assembled out of mere words on the printed page. If you haven't read the story, it's about two lovers traveling across Europe who encounter a mind-boggling scene: two rival villages, Popolac and Podujevo, have begun an ancient tradition in which thousands upon thousands of individuals work together to form all the limbs and joints of a human being. Both cities have assembled their entire populations into colossal 'men' comprised of all their citizens (women and children included).

Collectively they have become two massive giants that are, despite their city-sized building blocks, single entities ready to engage in traditional battle. Except something has gone wrong and Podujevo collapses, disintegrating into wave after wave of bodies that writhe and squirm into mush under the pressure of the thousands of people above them.

I know what you're thinking. Yes, having a girl you're trying to date drug you, paralyze you, stick pins in you, and then slowly amputate your limbs using piano wire is a fate worse than death. And you're right, it certainly is, but it's not the fate of Aoyama, the lonely protagonist of Takashi Miike's classic film Audition that's the topic of today's Fate Worse Than Death. Sure, Aoyama is going to have a limp for the rest of his life, and he's probably going to have an even harder time getting back on the dating circuit, but his life is a cake walk compared to The Man in the Sack.

That's right, the Man in the Sack, the casually mentioned missing record producer from Asami's past who we learn is confined permanently to living in a burlap sack in Asami's apartment. And if being kidnapped and forced to live in a sack isn't already a fate worse than death, how about having both of your feet, three fingers, a tongue and an ear chopped off before being put in said bag?

Plus, what happens to the Man in the Sack at the end of Audition? Asami clearly can't take care of him anymore, which means that poor man is not only mutilated to hell and back and shoved into a burlap sack, but now he's been denied the only meal source he had: someone else's vomit.

Yep, I'd say slowly starving to death in a burlap sack because you can no longer eat your mistress' vomit is a Fate Worse Than Death.