horror

Respected Italian comic book artist Francesco Francavilla will team with writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa on the new zombies-invade-Riverdale series “Afterlife With Archie” — Francavilla’s cover for the first issue, due out in October, can be seen here in its exclusive debut. The Eisner Award-winning artist (“Batman,” “Black Beetle”) will provide interiors for the title as well. Aguirre-Sacasa, currently a writer-producer on the TV series “Glee” and the writer who crafted the recent four-part “Archie Meets Glee” crossover, was inspired to pen the story after seeing Francavilla’s striking cover image. In the new comic, Sabrina the Teenage Witch inadvertently brings about the zombie apocalypse with a spell-gone-wrong, and the gang has to deal with the fallout while she attempts to restore order to Riverdale. With credits involving teens, horror and comics, Aguirre-Sacasa brings a unique set of credentials to the project. In addition […]

“The Mist,” Frank Darabont’s 2007 Stephen King adaptation about a group of people stranded in a market after a strange fog settles over their New England town, concludes on an undeniably bleak, profoundly heartbreaking note. Even star Thomas Jane seemed rattled by it when he took his seat on stage beside writer-director Darabont following a screening of “The Mist” at the Hero Complex Film Festival earlier this month. “I just slipped in and caught the last 10 minutes or so because I got here a little early,” the actor, a surprise guest, told the crowd. “I kind of wish that I hadn’t.” Darabont points out that the ending — which we’ll refrain from revealing here — has roots in King’s 1980 novella, though it differs from what the author wrote. (“The Mist” was the Oscar nominee’s third King adaptation, following […]

Australian director James Wan and actor-screenwriter Leigh Whannell have found plenty of good box-office fortune in the horror genre. Their debut feature, 2004′s “Saw,” launched a grisly movement, and their 2011 film “Insidious” turned out to be one of the surprise hits that year, grossing more than $97 million worldwide on a production budget of around $1 million. “Insidious” offered restrained supernatural thrills with its tale of a young family whose son (Ty Simpkins) becomes pursued by a red-faced demon that inhabits a ghostly dimension called the Further. For the follow-up, due in theaters Sept. 13, Wan and Whannell reunited with “Insidious” cast members Rose Byrne, Patrick Wilson, Barbara Hershey and Lin Shaye with an eye toward playing up the domestic drama on screen. It’s a busy time for Wan — “Insidious: Chapter 2″ actually will be the second film […]

For fans of survival horror, “The Evil Within” might rank as one of the most anticipated games of 2014.  Set for release for PC, Xbox 360, PS3 and as-yet-undetermined next-gen consoles, the title marks the return of “Resident Evil” creator Shinji Mikami, the godfather of the genre. Judging from an early look at the game ahead of its Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) debut in Los Angeles next month, “The Evil Within” aims to marry supernatural thrills with hard-core horror violence — with an eye toward crafting a truly unsettling experience for players. “Mikami is the guy who has defined survival horror, the genre,” said producer Masato Kimura, who spoke to Hero Complex via a translator. “It is a very difficult genre to create for because you have to create scariness and fear. Then you have to create a sense of achievement […]

Taking his chair after the intense, haunting ending and solemn credits of “The Mist,” its star, Thomas Jane, seemed newly rattled by it. “I just slipped in and caught the last 10 minutes or so because I got here a little early,” the actor, a surprise guest at the Hero Complex Film Festival, told the crowd Saturday afternoon. “I kind of wish that I hadn’t. … That was really hard. That’s powerful, man.” “You know this movie came out on Thanksgiving weekend?” he asked, to audience laughter. “Nothing says the holidays like flesh-eating tentacles,” added the film’s writer-director, Frank Darabont. The 2007 horror film follows a group of people trapped in a shopping market after a mist envelopes their town. As they learn of the presence of deadly, unearthly creatures outside, debate over what to do splinters the survivors, with […]

The Hero Complex Film Festival kicked off Friday evening with a 25th anniversary screening of “They Live,” a 35th anniversary screening of “Halloween” and an onstage conversation with the filmmaker behind both movies, John Carpenter. Carpenter discussed his motivation in making “They Live,” a campy but subversive sci-fi flick that starred professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper as the film’s blue-collar hero Nada, who discovers an alien conspiracy to mind-control the people of Earth using invisible messages. Carpenter called “They Live” his most political film and said it was his response to consumerism and class disparity in the 1980s. “By the end of the ’70s there was a backlash against everything in the ’60s, and that’s what the ’80s were, and Ronald Reagan became president, and Reagonomics came in,” Carpenter told the sold-out theater at the Chinese 6 Theatres in Hollywood. […]

“The Lords of Salem,” the latest feature from writer-director Rob Zombie, just might surprise fans of the musician-filmmaker’s grittier, gorier outings, “House of 1000 Corpses” and “The Devil’s Rejects,” his two “Halloween” movies. For his fifth live-action film, Zombie adopted a strange, subtle approach to horror, replacing the extreme bloodletting of his earlier projects with a nightmarish weirdness that’s hard to shake off. Opening Friday, “The Lords of Salem” tells the story of a radio DJ (his wife, Sheri Moon Zombie) who finds herself the victim of an ancient curse, unleashed after she plays a screeching, droning song by a mysterious band known as the Lords on her show. Soon she begins to experience headaches and night-terrors that bleed into the daylight hours. Her increasingly erratic behavior causes her friends to worry that the recovering addict might have succumbed once more […]

With his new book, “Peter Cushing: A Life in Film,” out on Tuesdsay, author David Miller charts in detail the rich and varied career of the distinguished English actor, who perhaps remains best known to American movie fans for his roles opposite Christopher Lee in the many horror movies produced by Hammer Films in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, and of course, for his turn as Grand Moff Tarkin in “Star Wars.” Miller’s account not only spends considerable time on the Hammer productions, but also chronicles Cushing’s early years in Hollywood, his work on BBC teleplays, including an adaptation of George Orwell’s “1984,” and other memorable performances — he played the famous Time Lord in  “Doctor Who and the Daleks” and “Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.,” not to mention Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic investigator, Sherlock Holmes. Hero Complex recently caught […]

Walking by the gated façade of the Los Angeles Theatre downtown, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the glamor of the historic movie palace, which hosted the premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 film “City Lights,” had been lost to the past. But behind the wrought iron bars that seal off the entrance is a French Baroque-inspired marvel, with a six-story lobby wrought in gold and red, decorated with dazzling chandeliers and winged cherubs. When musician and filmmaker Rob Zombie was searching for a location for the climactic scene in “The Lords of Salem,” his new movie about a cursed radio DJ that opens in theaters April 19, he found the theater’s threadbare grandeur perfectly in keeping with the movie’s visual aesthetic — part Argento, part Kubrick, a grindhouse tale funneled through an art-house lens. “You could have made a quickie […]

In “Evil Dead,” Fede Alvarez’s remake of Sam Raimi’s cult classic, Jane Levy plays heroin addict Mia, whose friends (Shiloh Fernandez, Jessica Lucas, Lou Taylor Pucci, and Elizabeth Blackmore) sequester themselves with her in a cabin to help her kick the habit. As in Raimi’s original, they discover and read from an ancient book bound in human skin — the Necronomicon — and unintentionally awaken a demonic force. As Mia begins to experience the consequences, her friends assume she’s going through heroin withdrawal. Levy, 23, has been making a name for herself in comedy, starring as sharp-witted Tessa Altman in the ABC television series “Suburgatory” as well as taking on film roles in “Fun Size” and “Nobody Walks” last year. But “Evil Dead” is Levy’s first foray into the world of horror, and the actress said nothing could have prepared […]