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Stay Home, Watch Horror: 5 Horror Gems from the 2000s to Stream This Week

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Horror Fairy Tales - fragile 2005

The first decade in the 21st century marked a boon of exciting new horror. Zombies sped up and became dangerous again. Remakes were back in style, found footage went into overdrive, J-Horror waxed and waned, and new voices emerged. The decade marked the rise of brutal films known as “torture porn” and broader accessibility to international genre films.

2000-2009 had something for every type of genre fan, getting the new century in horror off to a stellar start. So much happened in the genre, and there’s still plenty of underrated or underseen gems to seek out from the early aughts. This week’s streaming picks belong to those lesser discussed favorites. 

From haunted hospitals to clever creature features, here’s where you can stream these five titles this week.


House of Wax – Tubi

House of Wax

Creative kills are crucial to the slasher, and House of Wax brings the goods. Jaume Collet-Serra (OrphanThe Shallows) insisted everything be as practical as possible for his directorial feature debut, which pays off dividends. For the teens that take a shortcut to their college football game and instead wind up in a backwoods little town of wax, they pay for their mistakes with their lives in the most brutal fashion. The death scenes are remarkable in this loose remake. House of Wax, with its gruesome deaths and stellar production design, didn’t deserve its multiple Razzie Award nominations. It offers slasher fun and fantastic set pieces in spades.


Black Sheep – Tubi

If you’re in the mood for a completely over-the-top splatstick horror-comedy from New Zealand, watch this one. As a child, Henry developed a sheep phobia after his brother Angus played a cruel prank on the family sheep farm. Fifteen years later, Henry returns to the farm to sell his share, unaware that Angus covertly carried out a series of genetic experiments to transform the sheep into ferocious carnivores. B-movie sheep zombie mayhem ensues, complete with fantastic creature and gore effects by Weta Workshop (KrampusDistrict 9Meet the Feebles). If you’ve been missing Peter Jackson’s early works but love modern special effects, Black Sheep should scratch that itch.


Splinter – Pluto TV, Tubi, Vudu

A young couple sets off for a romantic camping getaway but instead gets car-jacked by an escaped convict and his girlfriend. Then they get a flat tire that prompts them to seek help from a nearby gas station. Something is very, very wrong there, and the foursome must team up against a bizarre parasite infecting everything. A parasite that spreads and turns its hosts into deadly beings. Brutal, suspenseful, and with a highly cool creature concept, Splinter hides its low budget well. This underseen creature feature deserved a sequel.


Them – Prime Video (IMDb TV)

Them, also known as Ils, predates the more well-known The Strangers by two years yet rivals it in terms of bone-chilling suspense from start to finish. Lucas and Clementine live quietly alone in their rural countryside home. Their peaceful existence gets shattered one night by the arrival of hooded assailants that begin to terrorize them throughout the evening. This French-Romanian home invasion movie brings intensity and nail-biting tension. While touted to be “based on a true story,” it also rivals The Strangers in its unsettling one-liner in terms of the killers’ motivation.


Fragile – Prime Video, Vudu

Before Jaume Balagueró teamed up with Paco Plaza to unleash one of the most terrifying movies of the decade, [REC], he proved an aptitude for delivering chills with this underseen haunted hospital fairy tale, Fragile. Calista Flockhart stars as Amy, a nurse brought on to the nightshift in the children’s ward at an old hospital in the process of closing down. The problem is that the hospital’s closing means a ghost is very, very unhappy about the children leaving, and Amy has to somehow find a way to keep the children safe from unseen attacks. Fragile is creepy and atmospheric with effective scares, but even better is that Balagueró gives this ghost story an emotional center that resonates.

Horror journalist, RT Top Critic, and Critics Choice Association member. Co-Host of the Bloody Disgusting Podcast. Has appeared on PBS series' Monstrum, served on the SXSW Midnighter shorts jury, and moderated horror panels for WonderCon and SeriesFest.

Editorials

‘Phantasm’ – Why the Horror Classic’s Exploration of Death Still Resonates 45 Years Later

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As Benjamin Franklin famously wrote, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

The horror genre offers a controlled environment in which viewers can reflect on their own morality, whether it be via catharsis or escapism, but a personal loss can complicate one’s relationship with horror. Even the most hardened of fans may struggle to find comfort in the genre after experiencing the death of a loved one.

45 years ago today, Phantasm helped viewers confront death head-on while subtly exploring the grief that accompanies it. In the film, 13-year-old Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) convinces his older brother-turned-guardian Jody (Bill Thornbury) and their affable neighborhood ice cream man, Reggie (Reggie Bannister), to investigate a mysterious mortician dubbed The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm).

Phantasm was the third feature from writer-director Don Coscarelli (The Beastmaster, Bubba Ho-Tep). The seed was planted upon witnessing the audience react to a small jump scare at a preview screening for his previous effort, the 1976 coming-of-age tale Kenny and Company. Chasing that jolt of adrenaline, he challenged himself to make a movie that delivers scares regularly throughout.

The independent production was shot in 1977 on weekends over the course of nearly a year in and around southern California’s San Fernando Valley. The 23-year-old Coscarelli shrewdly rented the film gear on Fridays and returned it Monday morning, getting three days of work out of a single day’s rental fee. When all was said and done, the film cost an estimated $300,000.

Unable to afford a full crew, Coscarelli also took on director of photography and editing duties. His father, Dac Coscarelli, receives a producer credit for providing a large chunk of the film’s funding. Additional financing was invested by doctors and lawyers, accruing a total estimated budget of $300,000. His mother, Kate Coscarelli, served as production designer, wardrobe stylist, and makeup artist under different pseudonyms, and she later wrote the novelization.

Hot off the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween, AVCO Embassy Pictures purchased Phantasm for distribution. It was released on March 28, 1979 in California and Texas before expanding to other territories and becoming a box office success. It spawned four sequels, with Coscarelli and the core cast on board throughout, along with a cult following that counts Quentin Tarantino, Rob Zombie, Snoop Dogg, and JJ Abrams (who named Star Wars: The Force Awakens‘ Captain Phasma in its honor) among its ranks.

PHANTASM Remastered

The film embraces nightmare logic – in part by design, as Coscarelli drew influence from Suspiria; partly the result of extensively editing down an overlong first cut to a tight 89 minutes. The it-was-all-a-dream ending is a rare one that doesn’t undermine the entire movie that preceded it. Not every plot point is spelled out for the viewer, and some dots may not completely connect, but the narrative is conveyed in such an engrossing manner that it hardly matters.

A particularly striking pair of back-to-back sequences occur at the conclusion of the first act. Following a late-night graveyard excursion, the camera pulls out on a shot of a sleeping Mike to reveal his bed in the cemetery with The Tall Man poised over him while ghouls attack from their graves. The next day, Mike witnesses The Tall Man affected by the chill of Reggie’s ice cream truck via a spine-tingling slow-motion zoom.

The special effects also shine, from flying metallic spheres that suck the blood out of victims’ heads to lifelike severed fingers that bleed viscous yellow gore. The visuals are supplemented by progressive music composed by Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave, to whom Coscarelli recommended electronica maestro Vangelis and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Despite its repetition throughout the film, the power of their haunting musical theme is never diluted.

The cast was populated by amateurs, but occasionally hammy performances are far outweighed by naturalistic character moments, best exemplified by the scene in which Jody and Reggie jam on their guitars together. In addition to serving the plot by introducing the tuning fork that plays an integral role in the finale, it allows the viewer to better connect with the characters, thereby making their peril all the more frightening.

It’s character building like this that makes Phantasm‘s exploration of death so effective. The film is ultimately about Mike coming to terms with the passing of Jody, portrayed as the cool older sibling every adolescent wishes they had. Mike confronts his fear by dreaming up a final adventure with his dearly departed brother in which they manage to defeat death itself, represented by The Tall Man. Upon doing so, he’s awakened to the harsh reality that Jody died in a car accident, allowing Mike to reach the final stage of grief: acceptance.

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