Permalink | Email this | Comments

Gallery: Halloween Costume Contest -- Adult Finalists!

Gallery: Halloween Contest 2007 -- Kid Finalists

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Gallery: Halloween Contest 2007 -- Kid Finalists

Gallery: Halloween Contest 2007 -- Adult Entries, Batch One

Gallery: Halloween Contest 2007 -- Adult Entries, Batch Two

Gallery: Halloween Contest 2007 -- Adult Entries, Batch Three

• The contest opens today at 2 p.m. EST. All photos must be received by midnight EST on Wednesday, November 7, 2007. Entries received after the deadline will not be considered. We are not responsible for delays caused by technical difficulties, uncooperative costumes, slow mail servers, ghoulish weather, mistyped email addresses, etc.
  

• You must be a U.S. resident to win.
  

• Your picture must include you, the entrant, (or your child under the age of 13, if you are submitting a picture of your child's costume) wearing a costume inspired by a film, filmmaker, actor, director, etc. The photo must be your own photo and not the work of a professional shooter (i.e., please don't send us a photo taken by a paid Sears photographer).
  
  
• Costumes that are obscene or show nudity will NOT be entered into the contest. (These images will be passed around our offices, however.)

• Group entries are acceptable, but the entrant must affirm that (s)he has obtained permission from every person shown in the image. If a group is chosen as the winner, only one prize will be awarded to that group. The prize will be awarded to the person submitting the entry.
  
  
• Email digital photos in .JPG, .PNG, .GIF, or .PSP format to the following email address: contests AT cinematical DOT com, with the subject line "HALLOWEEN COSTUME CONTEST." Please tell us who you are dressed as, in case we can't figure it out.
  

• Every entrant must download, sign, and send along with your photo a release form (Word version here; text version here). Any entry received without the release form will be disqualified. If you are between 13 and 17 years old, please complete the first portion of the release. If you are over 18 years old, please complete the second portion of the release. If you are under 13 years old, please ask your parents to submit your photo for you.

• You may submit multiple images of your costume, but we reserve the right to post only one image.
  
• All photos submitted become the property of Cinematical, and by submitting them you agree that we can use the photo for promotions.
  

• Cinematical staff will narrow the submissions to a field of 15 adult and 15 kid finalists based equally on creativity and originality. Cinematical's readers will then vote for their favorite costumes in both the adult category and the kid category.

• If your entry shows an adult and a kid (like last year's winner), your entry will be entered into the adult category.

Don't forget to send us the (Word or text) release along with your photo. Good luck, and get those entries in!

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Gallery: Greatest Movie Monsters

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Later on tonight, we here at Cinematical will shovel out our last two Halloween-related features for you to read. When that happens, we'll officially be done with our 31 straight days of original scary movie content (with one notable exception: our very awesome Halloween Costume Contest, which will continue on through early November), and for that I am grateful. You really do not know how hard it is to round up a group of writers, come up with tons of ideas and ask them to meet specific deadlines for 31 straight days. In order to succeed, one needs the greatest team of movie writers ever assembled. Thankfully, we have that here on Cinematical. And while I intend to thank them privately for all their hard work, I'd also like to thank them publicly for entertaining our millions of readers all month long with some of the finest Halloween content I've ever seen. Feel free to check out our entire collection of tricks and treats over here, and in the meantime I'll point you toward a few of my personal favorites:

From Patrick Walsh: Non-Horror Movies that Scared the Crap Out of Me As a Kid: "You kids today don't know how lucky you have it with your wussy Shreks and your lamewad Pikachus! Children of the 1980s are still in therapy over what Hollywood deemed "family films" back then. The following non-horror mind-screws should prove my point. "

From Monika Bartyzel: The Horror of Fairy Tales: "What is creepier than kids, parents, evilness, sorceresses, wolves, and cannibalism? Before the stories were ripped from their horror roots, they were just right for scary, gory films."

From Scott Weinberg: Best Horror Movies You Haven't Seen Yet, Parts 1, 2 and 3: "If you're a regular reader (Hi Mom!) then these titles will no doubt look a little familiar -- but the flicks haven't been released yet, so that makes 'em eligible for inclusion."

From Eric D. Snider: An Obsessive-Compulsive's Guide to the Friday the 13th Movies: "A few years ago, I decided a good way to spend my time would be to watch all 10 Friday the 13th movies and keep track of the statistics: how many kills, how many heroines taking showers, how many people falling down while trying to run away, etc. I was fond of the Scream series' deconstruction of the slasher genre, and it occurred to me that the Friday the 13th films -- most of which I had not seen at that point -- were probably the source of some of the oldest, ripest clichés."

From Jeffrey M. Anderson: Hottest Chicks of Horror: "Sexy is as sexy does, I guess. Picking the hottest chicks of horror is a pretty tricky business. Not only are my picks completely subjective, slaves to my personal whims and moods, but also they are likely to change from day to day."

From Christopher Campbell: Movie-Related Candy to Hand Out to the Kids: "So, I thought about some other movie-related candy to hand out on Halloween, and I have paired them up with the recognizable movie character(s) they go with. Because what would be more fun when you have to stay home giving out candy than to dress up in a costume appropriate to the treat you're offering?"

From Matt Bradshaw: Cool Horror Films of the 80s: "Since the 1980s was a time of truly horrifying fashions and some downright scary hairdos (pass the Aquanet, please) it's no surprise that it was also a boom period for horror films. Some of the biggest horror franchises in history came into their own then, and the decade was marked by the emergence of home video, the greatest thing ever to happen to horror."

From James Rocchi: Worst Stephen King Adaptations: "He's the sultan of screams, the head honcho of horror, the duke of disgust -- whether you measure by the sheer metric tonnage of his output or the harder-to-quantify level of his influence, Stephen King bestrides modern American horror like a colossus."

From Kim Voynar: Movie Tricks and Treats for Kids: "When it comes to picking "scary movie" fare for kids, you want to walk that line between "just scary enough to be fun" versus "gives them nightmares for weeks." Of course, the appropriateness of any of these picks depends on your particular child and their tolerance for all things spooky, but here's a list of picks that I think my own brood (ages 10, 8, 6 and 4) would enjoy."

From Richard von Busack: Horror Movie Gimmicks that Always Work: "Well, the gross-out is king in current horror. It's a lever is pumped 'till the handle breaks, and no one ever tires of it. The jack in the box pop-up followed by the explosion in the strawberry jam factory ... not that I'm complaining, mind you, but a more rarefied sense of terror is what floats my boat. Using some examples from America's first horror master Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) I'd like to try to describe easy ways to get it ..."

From Peter Martin: Best Asian Horror Films That Haven't Been Remade: "The answer is not in the avoidance of remakes. The plain fact is that remakes of very good original films sometimes fail because they have not been remade by people as talented as those who made the first versions." -- David O. Selznick, 1956."

From Ryan Stewart: Why I Don't Care for Zombie Movies: "I realize that this problem can largely be laid at the feet of George Romero, and I'll accept that, but every time I watch a Romero movie I feel like I'm being smashed in the face with the symbolism bat. It's not that he's an unskilled filmmaker -- although some have argued as much after seeing Diary of the Dead -- it's just that he's all-too-eager to use his zombies to advance whatever cause he wants to flog at the moment."

From Jessica Barnes: The Most Evil Children of Horror: "Now I'm not saying all kids are evil, but if you take this list as an example of just how bad children can get, you will never look at those trick-or-treaters on your doorstep the same way again."

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Permalink | Email this | Comments

It must have been something to be a filmmaker in the 1920s, trying to imagine ways to scare people; you had a huge blank slate in front of you. Hardly any of it -- ghosts, vampires, werewolves, mummies, zombies, cat people, maniacs, monsters, homicidal killers -- had been done yet. Moreover, the negative connotations of horror had yet to take hold. Whereas most modern horror films are ashamedly snuck past reviewers, Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was released to rave reviews. The great critic Carl Sandburg, writing in the Chicago Daily News, called it "the most important and the most original photoplay that has come to this city of Chicago the last year." We can only imagine what Sandburg would have said about F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922); he may have seen it, but he didn't review it. For my money it is the superior of the two films, made by a far greater cinema artist.

Like Wiene, Fritz Lang, Joe May and many German directors of his era, Murnau (1888-1931) worked in German Expressionism, finding ways to manipulate the images in the frame to a point beyond reality for maximum emotional effect. But Murnau was unique in that he used these images to express his personal fears and desires; he also intermingled realistic, nature shots with his bizarre, artificial Expressionist shots. He completed just over 20 films in his short career, and almost half of them are said to be lost. He was gay and constantly struggled with all the conflicting pros and cons of his emotions in his films. He moved to Hollywood in 1927 and made his masterpiece Sunrise there. Just a few years later, after completing his final film, Tabu, he died in a car accident.

It makes sense that he would have been drawn to the horror genre and its dark, physical properties, the way it affects the body. He made a handful of horror films in his career, including the lost films The Hunchback and the Dancer and a version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as The Haunted Castle (1921) and a sinister, extraordinary version of Faust (1926). But Nosferatu (sometimes coupled with the subtitle: A Symphony of Horror) is singularly impressive, a standout in the genre, in the vampire film in particular, and in the history of cinema in general. It was based on Bram Stoker's "Dracula," but Murnau famously never obtained the rights to the book. He changed all the characters' names and hoped that would be enough. However, Stoker's estate noticed and ordered all prints destroyed. Luckily they were unsuccessful, and the film survives for us to enjoy today.

It begins as the grinning goofball Hutter (read: Jonathan Harker) (played by Gustav von Wangenheim) is dispatched to the castle of Orlok (Max Schreck) to sell him a new home in the city. Hutter leaves behind his pretty, sullen wife (Greta Schröder, in the "Mina" role), who seems to sense that something is wrong. Of course, something is wrong, and Hutter is soon complaining of twin mosquito bites on his neck. After signing the papers, Orlok leaves Hutter trapped in the castle, packs up several coffins filled with earth (apparently it's earth where victims of the Black Plague were once buried) and heads off to the city, bringing with him a new plague. Unlike Tod Browning's later, official version of Dracula (1931), Orlok doesn't arrive until the final stretch of the film, and there's little real interplay between him and the other characters. Browning's version was actually based on the stage play rather than the novel, and its focus was more on a dialogue-heavy, drawing-room drama. Murnau had something else in mind.

Nosferatu has many highlights; if you've seen any clip shows about horror movies or vampire movies, you've seen them. In one, Nosferatu rises, stiff as a plank, from his coffin. He just rotates upward on his toes without moving a muscle. It's absolutely chilling and I still don't know how they did it. Perhaps even creepier is the scene in which the vampire arrives via coach to pick up the traveling Hutter. Murnau films the coach moving in fast-motion, giving it a skittering, nightmarish quality. And one shot famously turns into a negative exposure, with the blacks appearing white and the whites appearing black. But a closer look at this shot reveals something really spooky: the coach and the vampire are still black, even though they should be white.

In other shots, the creature emerges from darkness and walks toward the camera, towards us, as if it were our own personal fever dream. This vampire, far from being a slick seducer, is more like a rat, with pointy ears and teeth, a bald head and impossibly beady eyes, ghoulish eyes that can somehow see into your soul. His scissor-like fingers round out his personage and the result is far more at home casting a shadow on a wall than appearing in person. Murnau juxtaposes these images with more natural images, such as Hutter looking out the window of his room at the inn and watching some wild horses, or merely empty frames of nature passing by (the ocean, or the wind). This is perhaps Murnau's way of suggesting that nightmares don't just happen in your sleep; they can just as easily encroach on real life.

On a technical note, Nosferatu has fallen into the public domain and there are several cheap DVDs available. I have two copies in my library: the 2000 release from Image Entertainment and the 2002 release from Kino. The Kino release runs 93 minutes, as compared with 81 minutes on the Image DVD, and the authorized Kino version is apparently restored from a film negative (the picture quality is much better). Both DVDs come with two optional audio scores (four different ones), but the scores on the Image DVD are far better than the ones on the Kino DVD, and the Image DVD comes with an excellent audio commentary track by Lokke Heiss.

And two footnotes: Werner Herzog remade Nosferatu in 1979 with Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz, and Klaus Kinski as the monster (with similar makeup). It's faithful in spirit and tone, but is not a shot-for-shot remake. And in 2000, writer Steven Katz and director E. Elias Merhige released the fun, intelligent, well-made Shadow of the Vampire, which imagines what the making of Nosferatu would have been like if Max Schreck were a real vampire. John Malkovich plays Murnau and Willem Dafoe was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Schreck. All of these are worth seeing: perhaps in a Halloween night triple-bill.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Rogue

I don't care how many times they push it back, or how much potential for hackneyed disaster there is in a film about a killer crocodile -- I'm looking forward to Rogue, mostly because there was a lot that impressed me about Greg Mclean's debut film, 2005's Wolf Creek. For one thing, it was bold enough to defy several horror cliches, such as foreshadowing dread in the early scenes -- the first thirty minutes of Wolf Creek could be part of an Aussie road drip dramedy, with three aimless kids taking their rickety car way too far into unsafe areas of the Outback. It's also a film that's completely unrelenting in the psychic trauma it wants to inflict on the audience. By the time the slaughtering starts, we know these characters -- we care about them. Frankly, Mclean seems like he'd be completely bored with making a standard slasher/monster film with paper-thin characters. Therefore, I'm going to be first in line for his killer croc movie, and wait for my enthusiasm to blow up in my face.

Friday the 13th

I have no idea if this will get to theaters by late 2008, but I know that Platinum Dunes does have the gears grinding, so it's a possibility. In fact, a little birdie recently told me something hilarious -- Corey Feldman went in and pitched himself as the star of this thing. For those who don't remember, Feldman played Vorhees foe Tommy Jarvis in two installments of the original series, and he apparently had designs on making the Friday remake his newest comeback vehicle. There's really nothing you can do with Jason at this point other than remake him, but how? Word is that PD wants the remake to feature both Jason and his trademark mask -- two elements that didn't congeal until Part III of the original series, so I'm imagining a smelting together of the first three films, set in modern day and with a lot of in-jokes. I guess it will be a film about a little boy who drowns in a lake and immediately morphs into an overgrown, lumbering killer with a machete. Sounds intriguing.

Bigfoot

Again, this is only a script right now, but it's a script that a white-hot writing and producing team -- Steve Niles and Rob Zombie -- want to get into production as soon as possible, so place your bets. The concept, in exact words spoken to me by Steve Niles -- "This Bigfoot has had it." This is going to be Harry and the Bloody Carcasses of the Hendersons. This is Bigfoot as a rampaging, rip-your-arm-off-and-brain-you with it monster who won't stop killing until someone drops him. If it's done right, it could be one of the freshest monster movies in a while, and there's a lot of mythology here to work with. Bigfoot as a concept has had a few years to rest -- no one is really looking to see him on screen, so there are a lot of old staples and new approaches to explore here. Rob Zombie had the opportunity to take this on as his next project after Halloween, but passed to do something else, so a good director is needed.

Funny Games

I know a couple of industry people who've seen this film, which is being released in the dead of February, and it's apparently very brutal. The concept is pretty simple: two psychos take an upscale family hostage in their vacation cabin and make them act out sadistic little games and and scenarios with each other. Sort of like Last House on the Left meets Cache -- the latter being from the same director as this film, of course. I haven't seen the original Funny Games -- this is the English-language remake -- but the concept is intriguing and I'm anxious to actually like Naomi Watts in something. Apart from King Kong, which I thought she was okay in, she seems to have a habit of picking movies I don't care about. It's almost like she and I have the exact opposite taste in projects. Tim Roth is also in this thing, and that's usually a plus. As long as the film doesn't cop out on its concept, I think we could have a winner here.

Slaughter

The sheer law of probability tells us that one of the eight films Dominique Swain currently has in the pipeline might have a chance at a theatrical release. If that's the case, place your bets on Slaughter, her upcoming slasher film that's being helmed by Victor Garcia, a director who is known to Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures (he did those 30 Days of Night short films) as well as Joel Silver, and who is rumored to have some chops. This guy has to know that if he pulls out all the stops on this movie and does something interesting with it, it's going to get noticed by all the right people. And really, the concept isn't terrible -- an actress, played by Swain, accepts what she thinks is a part in a movie and then discovers that she's signed up to be part of a snuff film. There are a million ways for that to work, as well as a million reasons for it to suck, so we'll just have to see how it shakes out.

Repo! The Genetic Opera

Give Lionsgate some credit for even funding Repo! The Genetic Opera, which has no spoken dialogue whatsoever. This is a filmed opera with wall to wall singing and it will be a bigger bitch to market than Sweeney Todd, you better believe. The story concerns an evil corporation called GeneCo that offers futuristically casual organ transplants -- want some new eyes? no problem -- but once you sign on the dotted line, you also empower them to take those organs back if you fall behind on your payments. Darren Lynn Bousman, the film's director, was gifted with this, his passion project, after unexpectedly turning the mediocre film Saw into an ultra-lucrative horror franchise for Lionsgate. Judging by this weekend's take, there seems to be no end in sight to that gravy train. Bousman's cast includes Paris Hilton, and the filming had to be done in a music video way since the singing was in the can before shooting began. Watch for this film to be a crucial test of Bousman's talent, or lack thereof.

Hostel III

What are you, nuts, Ryan? Maybe. I know Eli Roth is off in a monastery somewhere, texting apologies to Nikki Finke for all the terrible choices he made in life, but I think after the strong pull of Halloween and Saw IV, the weird failure of Hostel II is going to start to look more and more like what it was -- a fluke. For whatever reason, the audience just wasn't available that opening weekend and so the film tanked. It tanked so bad that Roth lost the chance to direct Cell, in fact. And now here he is, with nothing solid lined up for the future. His 'trailer movie' smacks of desperation -- since when did Grindhouse have coattails? -- and I think as 'torture porn malaise' starts to wear off over the next few months, he's going to magically start getting ideas for Hostel III. Then he's going to take those ideas to the studio and they're going to tell him they've already found another director for the project, and it's being rushed into theaters in the next six months.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Permalink | Email this | Comments

• All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
• Borderland
• The Devil's Chair
• Diary of the Dead
• End of the Line
• Exte: Hair Extensions
• Five Across the Eyes
• Frontiere(s)
• The Girl Next Door
• Hell's Ground
• Inside
• The Living and the Dead
• The Mother of Tears
• Mulberry Street
• The Oprhanage
• S&Man
• The Signal
• Stuck
• Teeth
• Them
• Wrong Turn 2

Permalink | Email this | Comments