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Posts Tagged “

Horror

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horrorhead

More Terrifying Than Space is Space Madness

Welcome back to Horrorhead, a biweekly column where we explore the intersection of scifi and horror. If there's one thing more terrible than having a zombie eat the tongue out of your head by breaking your jaw, it's imagining that zombies are eating you when they aren't. That's why one of the best veins to mine in scifi-horror is madness. What makes insanity worse in many ways than giant drooling monsters is that you can't kill the monsters in your head with ice or swords or cold viruses. You want to escape the horror of your own crazy? You've got to drill your own brain out, like the protagonist does in Pi. And that, my friends, is what makes scifi-tinged madness so tragic as well as frightening: there's no way to set things right. Without further ado, let's take a dark psychological tour of most horrifying examples of space madness. More »

Feature

11:08 AM on Wed May 14 2008
By Annalee Newitz
2,436 views, 48 comments

Latest by monkity: I'm just glad that sugar frosted milk stays lumpy in cereal. more »

found footage

Lady Frankenstein Builds a Biological Love Machine

Lady Frankenstein is an early-1970s spaghetti horror flick that's all about what happens when you let ladies into the lab. They build the ultimate love machines, combining their favorite male brains with their favorite male bodies. At least that's what Tania, Dr. Frankenstein's daughter, does. She returns home from medical school only to see papa murdered by his monster. Then she falls for this old dude, whose brain is great but whose body isn't as young and bouncy as she'd like. In fact, she'd rather make it with this hot retarded guy who works as their servant. So she hits on a brilliant idea: Why not continue dad's work by killing brain guy and body guy, then combining the best of both? In this scene, we see her raising the brain-transplanted dead and then . . . feeling up the undead. Ladies in the lab make for way better mad science, don't you think? [Lady Frankenstein]

11:11 PM on Wed May 7 2008
By Annalee Newitz
2,088 views, 11 comments

Latest by SigmundTheSeaMonster: See, I could kill this film idea by just giving the old, wise, man a prescription to Cialis. Then she could be "satisified"... more »

found footage

Most Disturbing Kaiju Transformation Scene Ever (NSFW)

I am disturbed on so many levels that I'm practically in ecstasy. Watching Meatball Machine made my day because it includes goofy human-sized kaiju fights, an alien invasion, barfing, drooling, piles and piles of blood, and a tender love scene (in the clip you see here) gone terribly wrong. Our hero, a shy nerd, is just about to start making out with the nice girl he's been crushing on when the shit hits the fan. Because our boy, unbeknownst to himself, has brought home a piece of alien technology. When his girl starts freaking out on him, demanding that he hold her after she confesses that she crippled her father with a lead pipe, the mecha-alien bursts out of the bag he's been hiding it in and attacks the girl. What happens next is really weird, really gross, and full of tentacles going you-know-where. Please, for the love of Korn, do not watch this unless you are prepared to see things you can never unsee. [Meatball Machine]

6:47 PM on Thu May 1 2008
By Annalee Newitz
10,441 views, 68 comments

Latest by tallboy: WARNING: do not watch this scene if you suffer from epilepsy, or good taste. more »

dead space

What If You Ripped a Planet Apart and Something Was Inside?

Electronic Arts has a new game coming out for Halloween called Dead Space whose backstory sounds as good as any scifi book. On an Earth with scant natural resources, mining companies go to remote planets, and rip them apart for any and all natural resources. The problem is that one mission has discovered that something isn't too happy about its planet being ripped apart. We've got exclusive video, below, of some of Dead Space's developers talking about creating the backstory for the game. More »

11:52 AM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Annalee Newitz
5,965 views, 40 comments

Latest by volve: @tamoko: Hell yeah it's got that vibe. Especially when you see the artwork of a medical bay with nothing but blood splattered around it, or when there are corpsey monsters randomly showing-up around every corner in a dark spaceship. WTF more »

the dark lurking

Shockingly, Project Necromancer Turns Out To Be A Bad Idea

The Dark Lurking, a film which just finished shooting in Australia, is described as "Aliens Meets Evil Dead," but looks more like a better remake of Doom, judging from the new trailer. A team of soldiers goes into the research station a mile beneath the Antarctic to find out what happened to the scientists down there. And soon, there are eight survivors left alive, with "ten levels of terror" to traverse on the way back up to the surface. Note to self: If you're ever asked to go work on a project called "Project Necromancer," it's probably best to decline politely. Click through to watch the trailer. More »

11:14 AM on Thu Apr 17 2008
By Charlie Jane Anders
3,174 views, 36 comments

Latest by Silver_Back: All I ask for in this movie is alot of the Supersoldiers to yell, "Crikey!!" Alot. Like whenever a zombie rears its head around the corner...CRIKEY! more »

horrorhead

Five Reasons to Watch Movies that Hurt You, Haunt You, and Make You Want to Vomit

Welcome back to Horrorhead, a column where we explore the intersection of horror and scifi. I wasn't born a horror movie fan, I made myself one through years of careful practice and studious watching. Everybody has an origin story, and mine begins with the pulsing, gooey strands of sludge that enveloped and destroyed every single point-of-view character in the 1970s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I was so young that I missed the political allegory about Nixon, and the joke about how Spock plays one of the pod people. I crunched down into the fake velvet movie theater seat, wondering if there was a way to worm out of the narrative but still make it through. My first discovery came then: If I plugged my ears, blocked out the heart-beating soundtrack, I could survive the alien invasion. More »

Feature

11:19 AM on Wed Apr 16 2008
By Annalee Newitz
8,979 views, 50 comments

Latest by Garrison Dean, King Awesome: @Signal: To be honest ever since I moved to Seattle a year ago and read World War Z I feel that it is a great place to be. Surrounded by Water and the Cascade and lympic Mountains (hell non more »

quarantine

Vampirism is a Virus

In the flick Quarantine, a U.S. remake of a Spanish horror movie hitting theaters in October, vampirism is a disease. A disease that a Homeland Security-style group is bent on containing at all costs. And hey, if a few journalists are killed along the way, that's all the better. There's the premise of the movie in a nutshell. A house in an urban area is quarantined by "rescue forces," who don't seem to mind that they've trapped a couple of reporters inside with the snaggle-toothed scaryfaces. More »

8:20 AM on Fri Apr 11 2008
By Annalee Newitz
2,432 views, 35 comments

Latest by Dier: REC is really coll, but for me thy´re more zombies tha vampires... more »

repo the genetic opera

More Opera, More Repo Men, and More Guts

The website for Repo The Genetic Opera has gone live, which means we must be closer than ever to seeing this film in theaters instead of in dribs and drabs on the interwebs. I've been excited about this movie for a while, partly because it stars Buffy's Anthony Stewart Head as a freakish organ repo-man and partly because it's a bunch of people wearing fetish clothing, singing, and bathing in blood. It's sort of like Doomsday, but with more singing and fewer Scottish people. [Repo the Genetic Opera site via Whedonesque]

2:28 PM on Tue Apr 8 2008
By Annalee Newitz
1,460 views, 22 comments

Latest by Jesse Mrozowski: I'm conflicted. On one hand it has Anthony Head. On the other hand Paris Hilton is in it and the music didn't do much for me, and it might be too cheesy, or perhaps not cheesy enough. more »

hellboy 2

More Monstery Goodness in New Hellboy II Trailer

Yahoo's got the full theatrical trailer for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and once again it's clear that director Guillermo Del Toro won't be skimping on the monsters. Here we get to see more of the Golden Army itself, and the plot arc becomes clearer. Creatures from one of those other hellish dimensions have come to our world to reclaim it as their own. And of course Hellboy is brought in to fight them. Along with Abe Sapien, who is now more intriguing to me than ever because Hellboy creator Mike Mignola has just given Abe his own spinoff comic. [Yahoo]

1:11 PM on Thu Apr 3 2008
By Annalee Newitz
4,806 views, 73 comments

Latest by lukeoneil47: There is no difference between sci-fi and fantasy. It's a pointless, nitpicking distinction. This site should broaden, rather than narrow, its scope. more »

horrorhead

The Most Shocking Science Caught on Film

Welcome back to Horrorhead, where we explore the intersection of horror and science fiction. I talk a lot here about "science horror," which I usually mean as the opposite of supernatural horror. Science horror is basically the dark side of science fiction, whereas supernatural horror can be anything from reality TV bunk like Ghosthunters to really excellent spirit flicks like The Ring or dark fantasies by Stephen King. What makes science horror scary is science itself, and the mad doctors who steer it into the crawly places full of reanimated bodies and reality-warping physics. But some kinds of science are more terrifying than others. That's why I've delineated four branches of science most likely to show up in the next science horror movie in your queue. More »

Feature

11:20 AM on Wed Apr 2 2008
By Annalee Newitz
9,721 views, 36 comments

Latest by Smeagol92055: I saw The Brain That Wouldn't Die years ago, and what made me laugh is that they couldn't figure out what to call it.In the opening credits, it's called "The Brain That Wouldn't Die", but in the end credits, it's more »

found footage

Frankenhooker Teaches You Probably the Best Way to Get Through Your Homework

Poor Jeffrey's girlfriend has been chopped up by a lawnmower, but luckily he's saved some of her parts (including her head) in a special rejuvenation broth in his mad scientist lab. In this scene from Frankenhooker, Frank "Basket Case" Henenlotter's bloody fun riff on Frankenstein, Jeffrey needs inspiration. He's got to get female body parts to rebuild his girlfriend, and he's got to get them fast. So of course, he drills his brain to "relax" and get some ideas. Maybe next time you're struggling with homework or a big project, you should try this too! It's cheaper than Provigil. [Frankenhooker]

11:52 AM on Fri Mar 21 2008
By Annalee Newitz
2,167 views, 8 comments

Latest by BigViper: remember that time when you tried to drill that hole in your head? Yea and it would have worked too if you hadn't tried to stop me more »

found footage

Zombie Rat vs. Zombie Penis -- Who Wins? [NSFW]

Yesterday we talked about the battle of the genitals in science horror films, and today I've got the best example of a horror movie penis ever created. It's the zombie rat vs. zombie penis moment from Beyond Re-Animator, the third in a series about a mad doctor (played with vigor by Jeffrey Combs) with a glow-in-the-dark serum that turns dead people into mind-controlled zombies. This flick takes place in a Spanish prison, where our mad doctor has been zombiefying everybody, including the rat-like warden and a zillion prisoners hanged for rioting. In this scene, the zombied warden tries to molest a zombied lady, while a zombied rat watches hungrily. More »

5:15 PM on Thu Mar 20 2008
By Annalee Newitz
4,357 views, 17 comments

Latest by Optimistic Prime: Black Sheep has the best penis moment on film. The New Zeland movie, not the Chris Farley one. more »

horrorhead

Battle of the Genitals in Science Horror Movies

Critics are always saying that horror movies are about fearing vaginas, but they're wrong. Sure there's vadge imagery aplenty in horror (just watch the run of Alien movies if you don't believe me), but the scariest science horror flicks of the last thirty years are actually about everything that can go wrong with a dude. I'm not just talking about the malfunctioning penis that blows up Tokyo in Legend of the Overfiend. I'm talking about something deeper. And yes, maybe even . . . harder. More »

Feature

10:41 AM on Wed Mar 19 2008
By Annalee Newitz
10,688 views, 79 comments

Latest by SigmundTheSeaMonster: Let us not forget the ever so vaginal orifice of the Dune "spiced" Navigator. more »

found footage

In the Vampire Mad Scientist Lab

Blade II has got to be one of the best movies ever, not the least because director Guillermo "Hellboy" Del Toro goes where no genre bender ever has before. He manges to combine the biotech science fiction flick with the gothic vampire flick. I don't think you realize quite how awesome that really is. There is actually a vampire mad scientist who lectures hero Blade about recombinant DNA. Plus, check out the concept design in this clip, which perfectly blends gothic imagery with high-tech creepy lab stuff straight out of some X-Files episode. More »

5:41 PM on Thu Mar 13 2008
By Annalee Newitz
3,012 views, 35 comments

Latest by Darkweave: Own B2&B3 not too bad, sure they didnt change my life but they are great comic books on film, thats all I wanted thats all I get :) Same with Ultraviolet, guy was givin me crap for watchin the movie more »

advertising

Stealth Marketing Campaign for "Shutter" Promotes Bullshit Science

Shutter, a horror flick opening next week, is a purely supernatural tale about spirit photography (taking pictures of ghosts). But it turns out the Shutter viral marketing crew is trying to suck in the sciencey/gadget geek crowd with a stealth media campaign: Fox reps are urging journalists to write about the "scientific causes" of ghosts, and push expensive spirit-photography cameras on people interested in the movie. An anonymous source passed me a fairly creepy email about this that was sent to a large, glossy magazine's editorial staff. More »

10:20 AM on Thu Mar 13 2008
By Annalee Newitz
2,249 views, 43 comments

Latest by Skeptic: "This might make a very powerful tool for understanding this phenomenon and the possible scientific causes" Ah, a classic case of presuming ones premises. Before we can examine the scientific reasons behind a phenomena one must first establish that it exists more »

horrorhead

The Seven and a Half Rules for Making Scary Aliens

Welcome back to Horrorhead, a fortnightly column where we explore the intersection of horror and scifi. For every bland, friendly Star Trek alien with a crinkle-cut french fry nose or waffle forehead, there are dozens of insanely scary aliens that could rip your face off. Certain alien characteristics, whether physical or psychological, are enough to put you into "no I will not jump during this dark corridor scene - shit I am now jumping" mode. But what exactly makes an alien truly horrifying, as opposed to just, you know, alien? Aided by Hollywood movie history, we've put together a definitive set of rules for making aliens that are guaranteed to freak you out — or at least make you queasy. More »

Feature

10:20 AM on Wed Mar 5 2008
By Annalee Newitz
7,265 views, 74 comments

Latest by Kanamit: Read the story, saw the episode, ripped the name. Where were the bugs in Independence Day (the movie, not the original novel--jk)? @Huxleyhobbes: I pretty much agree with you. Greatest scary alien aspect: inhuman thought process. Alien perspective = The Unknown = more »

entropist

On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space

It's another installment of Entropist, a scifi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDG BLOG. In his 1936 short story "The Shadow Out of Time," classic weird fiction author H.P. Lovecraft describes a man who takes "long visits to remote and desolate places." These places include the "vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia - black labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered," and the "unknown deserts of Arabia," wherever those may be. But he visits them looking for evidence of a long-lost religious cult - a cult which, like "the horror" it once worshiped, had something to do with grotesque gods from "out of time," ancient germ lines that preceded the origins of human biology, astrophysical space, and the subterranean Earth. And, should all of that raise your eyebrows, let me add that it's actually a good story. More »

9:00 AM on Fri Feb 29 2008
By Geoff Manaugh
3,174 views, 21 comments

Latest by Jeff-Minor: Good article. Altered States of conciousness is the stuff of many stories. Jesus took 40 days in the desert, Moses walked the hard mountains of Sinai. Native Americans have their Visions Quests. I think if you're attracted to the dark more »

planetcrackers

Planet-Mining And Giant Parasites In "Dead Space"

Dead Space, a new game from Electronic Arts, brings parasitic "we want to kill you, kill you, kill you" aliens back into fashion just in time for next Halloween. In the far future, humans have depleted all of the natural resources on Earth, so private corporations begin sending out enormous ships called "Planetcrackers" that carve off enormous chunks of planets, and then mine them down to their bare essentials. Of course, as often happens in these games, this pisses off an "ancient and malevolent force" who decides to start unleashing hell. In space. More »

4:00 PM on Thu Feb 28 2008
By Kevin Kelly
2,163 views, 27 comments

Latest by RogueJustice: It looks pretty good, but I hope it doesn't turn out to be cheesy. more »