I Am Legend

When Scream came out in 1996, fifteen years had elapsed since the slasher heyday of the early '80s. Enough time had gone by where Scream was able to be the right film at the right time - appealing to Gen-Xers who had nostalgic memories of that disreputable slasher cycle (even if they had been too young to actually see the films in theaters) and Gen-Yers who had found themselves frustratingly late to the party in the '80s - coming of age just as the prevailing slasher franchises of the decade had devolved into shtick.

Scream was that younger generation's first opportunity to witness a horror phenomenon as it unfolded - to create it, even, as they contributed to Scream's sleeper success - while Gen-Xers responded in kind to Scream as a love letter to the horror movies they grew up on. In hindsight, it shouldn't have been a surprise that Wes Craven's comeback film would spur a new wave of slasher cinema.


Of course, it wasn't quite like the old days. Compared to the deluge of copycat slashers that had flooded theaters in the late '70s and early '80s, the slasher wave of the mid-to-late '90s was more like a light splash. Even the most dedicated slasher aficionado has to consult their notes to give a complete list of all the Halloween and Friday the 13th imitators that descended on theaters back in the day but Scream's progeny constituted a much more modest number.

Most famously there was I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and its 1998 sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer; the latest Halloween got more care from Dimension Films than it would've gotten otherwise with Scream and IKWYDLS scribe Kevin Williamson penning 1998's Halloween: H20. That same year, additional slasher royalty - Norman Bates and Chucky - returned to keep Michael Myers company with Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake and the most archly funny chapter yet in the Child's Play saga, Bride of Chucky.

There were other teen-centered horror films at the time that spun out of Scream's success but films like Disturbing Behavior and The Faculty (both 1998) and Idle Hands (1999) had more to do with sci-fi or the supernatural than with slasher formula. Aside from the I Know films, the only original post-Scream slasher film to be a hit of its own was 1998's Urban Legend.


Set on a secluded New Hampshire college campus, the students and faculty of Pendleton University find themselves stalked by a parka-clad psycho who patterns their murders on (da-dum!) urban legends.


Urban Legend was written by Silvio Horta, directed by Jamie Blanks, and - in true post-Scream fashion - was packed with attractive young actors already well on their way to stardom - including Alicia Witt (Citizen Ruth), Jared Leto (TV's My So-Called Life), Rebecca Gayheart (best known for her appearances in Noxzema commercials), Joshua Jackson (TV's Dawson's Creek), Michael Rosenbaum (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), and Tara Reid (The Big Lebowski).


In a twist on standard slasher convention in which the Final Girl usually remains unaware of the killer's activities until she's the last (or nearly the last) of her friends left alive, Witt's character of Natalie Simon is an early witness to the killer's handiwork and she spends most of the film desperately trying to convince the likes of Leto's Paul Gardner - a serious-minded journalist on the school newspaper - that something sinister is really going on.


Whereas many slasher films isolate their young casts out of a matter of narrative necessity - placing them in locations far from easy rescue - Urban Legend keeps its characters on campus (and with school still in session - rather than having the action taking place during holiday break, a la Black Christmas) but has the forces of authority so concerned with bad publicity they'll do anything to discredit any theories about a serial killer. And it doesn't help Natalie's case that she can never produce any evidence to her claims.

Her plight gives Urban Legend an added element of a paranoid thriller wherein we know that the heroine isn't lying or crazy but most of the characters around her insist that she is.


Given its premise, Urban Legend is more about its creative, oddball kills than the Scream and I Know films but yet there's no spectacular splatter on display. It's more about the clever ways in which the killer recreates each urban legend. Horta and Blanks milk their premise for as much fun as they can and keep as many red herrings in play as they can before they have to come clean and reveal their killer. That last part doesn't go so well as UL's final act is a mess. It's bad enough that they reveal Rebecca Gayheart's character to be the killer (not to underestimate a woman's abilities but it's impossible to believe that Gayheart has the physical strength to accomplish many of the killer's acts in this film) but at least they should've refrained from having her overact her psycho bitch role.

But hey, I guess it's all supposed to be in fun. It's Urban Legend, not Seven, right? This was meant to be a fun night out at the movies for young horror fans and on that count it (kind of) got the job done.


It's a little odd to watch Urban Legend now and realize that from the vantage point of 2011, it's as dated as the early '80s slashers had been to the Scream era. It doesn't seem possible that so much time has gone by but, yeah, it has.

Take a look at the proof:

While it's a recent enough film that characters surf the net:


...It's long enough ago that research was still done in the library:


Vital information was still best found in books, not on Google:


It wasn't usual to see a character using a pay phone:


Or to see characters getting their news through newspaper headlines, rather than through their Twitter feed:


And references to '70s pop culture were expected to induce chuckles of recognition:


Man...1998 - where the hell did you go?

Being a sucker for college-set slashers (The Dorm That Dripped Blood, The House on Sorority Row), I love UL's campus setting. That right there buys the film some instant affection from me. And Blanks takes full advantage of his film's sizable budget (reported as $14 million) to make this one handsomely mounted slasher pic. No one walks the grounds of Pendleton University in this film without it being the subject of an elaborate crane shot.

Another thing I like about UL is that Blanks shows his stripes as a horror fan. Sure, Scream gave the genre lip service by exhaustively name-checking classic slashers and a Linda Blair cameo was tossed in as well but Blanks gives his film better street cred by casting Danille Harris of Halloween's 4&5 as Natalie's goth roommate Tosh, The X-Files' Well-Manicured Man John Neville as the school's sour-faced Dean, Brad Dourif as the stuttering gas station attendant who tries (and fails) to warn a young driver of the danger in her backseat, and Robert Englund as the film's prime suspect - Professor William Wexler.


I'm just surprised that Blanks didn't cast Prom Night's Robert Silverman in the role of Pendleton's creepy janitor!

Today, it's common for the likes of Rob Zombie and Adam Green to throw as many people as they can from the horror con circuit into their films but Blanks did it before them. He even snuck in a subtle shout-out to Texas Chainsaw Massacre - strain your eyes to check out the background pic in the flier for the Massacre Bash:


It's too bad that Blanks wasn't able to (or willing to) hang on in Hollywood after the failure of his next film, 2001's disappointing Valentine. Back in his native Australia, he's continued to work in the genre and while I didn't see his well-regarded 2007 thriller Storm Warning, I did see Nature's Grave, his 2008 remake of 1978's Long Weekend, and I liked it a lot. He's become a better filmmaker so it seems like that much more of a shame that he'll probably never direct a movie as high-profile as Urban Legend again.

In the thirteen years since its release, time has not turned Blanks' most famous feature into a cinematic legend but as a memento of a horror era long past and seldom celebrated (at least not openly), it's still worth remembering with a smile.

If This Movie Doesn't Make Your Skin Crawl...It's On Too Tight!

When it comes to ad campaigns for horror films, the art of hyperbole went out of fashion a long time ago. I guess as audiences got more "sophisticated" (not so sophisticated that they've stopped flocking to crap, but whatever...) it became detrimental to pitch a film by promising terror like you've never experienced it before. Still, I think it's a shame that horror movies aren't promoted with such bold claims anymore. You know, stuff like this:


That was always part of the fun of following the genre - up until around the mid-'80s or so, every horror movie was marketed to the hilt. I'm thinking about all this at the moment thanks to the new ghost pic Insidious - an old fashioned fright fest that really deserved an old-school promotion. You know, because the poster they went with just doesn't do the movie justice:


Sure, a more lurid ad campaign might've turned off potential viewers by making the movie seem cheap or corny but I'm telling you - if there was ever a modern horror film that warranted a '60s or '70s-style one-sheet with the promise that the movie would deliver "Shock After Shock After Shock...." and dire warnings that this is NOT for the faint of heart, it's Insidious. There's so many jolts packed into its 102 minute running time that if Insidious utilized the Horror Horn and Fear Flasher from 1966's Chamber of Horrors, you'd never be able to hear or see the actual movie in the ensuing cacophony.


The latest collaboration from director James Wan and writer/actor Leigh Whannell, Insidious finds the duo further shedding their image as the creators of the grim, hyperviolent Saw series by following up on the seeds planted in their mostly unsuccessful 2007 attempt at old-school terror, Dead Silence. Here, freed of the studio interference that reportedly hampered that film, they dive full-on into making Insidious a classic spook show.

Sam Raimi went after a similar goal two years ago with his 2009 return to horror, Drag Me To Hell, but while that film has its devoted admirers (myself among them) Raimi's patented flourishes didn't click with most audiences (or with many horror buffs, for that matter). Hardcore Raimi fans ate up such sights as a possessed character suspended on wires and doing a Deadite jig but most others said "I'll pass, thanks." With Insidious, I think Wan has succeeded in crafting a better Raimi-esque "spook-a-blast" than Raimi himself.

Even the most casual fan genre will find that Insidious is not a terribly original movie as Whannell's screenplay cribs freely from The Shining (1980), Poltergeist (1982), Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), and Paranormal Activity (2009) - whose director, Oren Peli, is on board here as a producer. But its preponderance of influences aside, Insidious is convincingly acted and directed by Wan with an innate knack for maximizing each scare. Wan and Whannell also sprinkle in just enough quirky touches of their own (like how the psychic investigators use a converted View-Master to look for ghosts) that the movie doesn't just feel like a pastiche of other films.

Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne star as Josh and Renai - a not-terribly happy couple who are the parents of three children. Their youngest is just a baby but their two older boys - Dalton and Foster - are both of school age. When Dalton (Ty Simpkins) mysteriously lapses into a coma shortly after taking what appears to be a minor fall, Josh and Renai are at a loss. Doctors tell the distraught parents that no brain damage can be detected but yet Dalton won't wake up. After several months of hospital stay, the still-comatose Dalton is moved back home. That's when Renai starts to see things that she can't explain and comes to the conclusion that their house is haunted.

Josh isn't as convinced the house is haunted as Renai is but he agrees to move the family anyway. Shortly after the new move, even more dramatic paranormal activity takes place, prompting Josh's mother Lorraine (Barbara Hershey) to put the couple in contact with Elise Reiner (Lin Shaye), an old friend of hers who happens to be a psychic.

Once Elise and her two assistants Specs (Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) arrive, the story takes a slightly awkward shift but not so much as to derail the movie. Wan and Whannell use these characters - particularly Specs and Tucker - to bring some humor into the film but the pair's banter mostly falls flat. For me, though, this wasn't a sticking point and I found it easy to stay engaged in the film.

The climax of the film takes place on a spiritual, or astral, plane and either you'll go with it or you won't. I loved it myself and thought some of the movie's best moments were reserved for the finale. Without getting into heavy spoilers, I'll just say that I loved how Wan and Whannell didn't back down from trying to realize this sequence on a limited budget. It reminded me of the climax of another frugal production, The Night Flier (1997), where Miguel Ferrer's character finds himself in a nightmarish black & white vision of an airport populated by the undead victims of a vampire. There was a slightly hokey quality to that scene as it couldn't disguise its bargain basement means but there was also a great sense that director Mark Pavia wasn't shying away from that - that he knew genre fans would respond to it in the right way. It seemed like a perfect approximation of something that one would've stumbled across while flipping channels late at night during the '70s or early '80s and that's how the climax of Insidious feels to me, too.

Wan and Whannell bust out the fog machines, the candles, and they put their actors in antique clothes with their faces thick with pasty, Carnival of Souls-style make-up. And as if that isn't enough, they give some extra screentime to their film's main boogeyman, a creature listed in the credits as Lipstick-Face Demon (Joseph Bishara). Far out!


For some, it all might be too much or too silly but I found it to be emblematic of what Wan and Whannell were striving for - a Haunted House ride put on film. Insidious' climax brought back fond memories for me of my times as a kid riding through this funhouse that was once located in Riverside Park in Agawam, Massachusetts:


While I'll jump to defend its climax, I did find fault with Insidious elsewhere. As I said, the film's humor mostly fell flat with me. I guess Wan and Whannell felt obliged, following horror movie tradition, to give the audience some funny moments to break the tension but the problem is that these moments just don't score the laughs that they're aiming for (not with me, at least - your mileage may vary).

I also thought the portrayals of Renai and Josh misstepped once or twice into making them too unsympathetic. For instance, there's a scene where Renai is waiting for Josh on the front steps of the house as he comes home exceedingly late from his teaching job (by the way, how Josh is able to afford to keep his family afloat - and in a sizable home to boot - solely on a teacher's salary is a supernatural feat of its own) and Renai berates him about how she's scared to be in the house. Fair enough to a point but when you have a mother saying how she's scared to be in a house and she's sitting outside while her three children - including one baby and one child who's in a coma - are completely alone inside it makes the character look like a thoughtless idiot. You can be damn sure that Diane Freeling wouldn't have made a parenting lapse like that in Poltergeist.

Speaking of Poltergeist, I also wish that the cast of Insidious would've had as strong a chemistry between them as the cast of that earlier film. There's no bad performances in Insidious but outside of Lin Shayne, no one jumps out as being memorable in their own right. Josh and Renai are supposed to be a much more divided couple than Steve and Diane Freeling (we see them suffering marriage woes well before the supernatural intrudes) so having them showing a tighter bond would be out of place but yet there's such a believable rapport between all the characters in Poltergeist - from Steve and Diane and their kids to the trio of psychic investigators and Zelda Rubinstein's iconic Tangina Barrons - that Insidious just fails to compare in that regard.

That said, I actually think Insidious is a better film overall than Poltergeist. Next to Poltergeist's cast, Insidious' players are accomplished but not outstanding but judged as a ruthless scare machine, Insidious handily trumps Poltergeist. Sacrilegious as it may be to say so, and as well as some of its scares still hold up, Poltergeist has not dated well. The first forty minutes or so are great but once the tree outside Robbie and Carol Anne's bedroom window comes to life and the tornado touches down in the Freeling's backyard, the FX starts to become the cart leading the horse. In the end, its great performances and Jerry Goldsmith's classic score aside, I find it to be just barely better than Steven Spielberg's other haunted house production - his bloated remake of The Haunting (1999).

"Bloated" isn't a word that can be applied to Insidious, however. While as horror fans we've recently had cause to lament the reluctance of studios to fund big budget genre productions, Insidious is a timely reminder of how the efforts of indie filmmakers historically lead the horror pack. And coming off the previous decade's protracted fascination with torture (a fascination fueled in part by Wan and Whannell themselves), Insidious is also a much-needed affirmation that there's still a place for horror films that seek to leave their audience exhilarated and ready to take the ride again.

Blogging Beyond Belief

There was a lot of classic terror on the tube in the '70s but anyone who grew up then can tell you that the scariest TV show of the decade was In Search Of, hands down. To older viewers, the show's quasi-scientific investigations into Bigfoot, U.F.O.'s, haunted houses, and other strange phenomena must've seemed like hooey but for younger viewers like myself, who easily accepted the contents of each episode as real reportage, it was instant goosebumps.

Decades later, long past childhood and much more jaded, I found myself hooked on Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction - a program devoted to plumbing the paranormal that managed to make In Search Of look like a boring slave to the truth.

Airing on Fox from 1997 to 2002, each hour-long episode of Beyond Belief presented five dramatized tales of incidents so improbable that they begged for supernatural explanation. The challenge for viewers was to decide which of the program's stories were fact and which were fiction with the "answers" revealed at the episode's end by the host (James Brolin for Season One and Star Trek: The Next Generation's Jonathan Frakes for Seasons Two through Four).

With each episode's stories kept to a taut length, ensuring that there'd be no lagging on the way to their ironic closing stings and the directors (among which was Hellbound: Hellraiser II's Tony Randel, who helmed twenty one episodes - the most of any BB director) steadfastly refusing to wink at the audience, the show made for addictive viewing. And famed voiceover talent Don LaFontaine handled the narration for the first three seasons (Campbell Lane took over for the last season), calling back fond memories of his indelible voiceover work for horror film trailers.

Watching BB as an adult, I thought the show played perfectly as comfort food but for younger viewers, I imagine it was as much a source of sleepless nights as In Search Of had once been for me - as they really had to wonder: Fact or Fiction?

Insidious Dreams

I've currently got my fingers crossed tight for Insidious, the latest collaboration between director James Wan and writer/actor Leigh Whannell, that opens in theaters tomorrow. So far I haven't been a fan of, well, anything that the pair have done (although I've liked aspects of all their films - especially 2007's Death Sentence - none of them have been entirely satisfying to me) but Insidious looks like a promising spook show.

Thinking about how much I'm rooting for Insidious makes me think about the long slump that the horror genre has been suffering through lately. It's not as bad as the Great Horror Drought of the '90s but it's still bad. We're going into April now and I can only give a legitimate rave about one film so far this year - the grittily atmospheric, period-set shocker Black Death. It's not a real robust time for horror as the most intriguing new stuff - films like The Woman, Hobo with a Shotgun, I Saw the Devil, and Rubber - is frustratingly relegated to limited release (although I believe Rubber is coming to VOD soon, thankfully).

As far as wide releases go, though, it's rough. I reviewed the exorcism misfire The Rite back when it came out in January but haven't done the same for other recent theatrical offerings like Season of the Witch, The Roommate, Drive Angry 3-D, Red Riding Hood, and Battle: LA because, well, none of them seemed worth the effort. I didn't bitterly hate all of them (except for Battle: LA, a film I believe is capable of inflicting brain damage) but I sure didn't love any of them (surprisingly, of the bunch, I enjoyed Red Riding Hood the most - it was overripe and silly but fun). Bad movies aren't limited to the horror genre, of course - it's a poor time right now for movies in general - but as horror is where my main interest lies, it's hard waiting for the tide to turn. Especially when last year was so weak itself, I had to struggle to find five films for a Best Of list.

Will Insidious be the film to turn things around? Here's hoping. A few weeks later, on April 15th, Scream 4 will also have a chance to give the genre a boost. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that there is a Scream 4, though, so I have given much thought to its box office prospects or how I feel about that franchise's return.

Horror had been so hot in the previous decade that a drop-off was inevitable. By 2010, the torture-porn fad had petered out, all the A-class picks for remakes were used up (except for those that no one was fool enough to attempt, like Platinum Dunes' aborted Birds remake) and the only successful new franchise was Paranormal Activity. While last year had its share of hits - like Paranormal Activity 2, Devil, The Last Exorcism, and Black Swan (though many would categorize that as drama) - it still felt like the genre had lost its momentum.

There's a serious case of fright fatigue going on that I'm feeling myself and if Insidious can't cure it in audiences this weekend, I hope it can at least cure it in me.

First Rate Fango

In Fangoria #293, when Chris Alexander stepped into the role of Fango's first new editor-in-chief in over twenty years, the changes were slight (new columns, like Trash Compactor, Sound Shock, and Monster of the Month, made their debut) but they were enough to indicate that a new sensibility was at the helm. Over the course of the next few issues, the new direction became bolder, more solidified. But #298, with its illustrated, Famous Monsters-flavored Gene Simmons cover, is when the new era of Fango really started to feel like an official new era.

Whereas the first few issues of Alexander's reign were generally in step with what was expected from Fango, issue #298 was an issue that never would've occurred under the stewardship of former E-I-C's Tony Timpone or Bob Martin. #298 is where Alexander really started to make Fango fully his own - while still showing reverence for the mag's traditions.

After several issues of experimenting with the cover design, issue #299 settled on the perfect combo of new and old. The new logo won out over the classic Fango font but the much-missed filmstrip was finally back. And again, #299's striking cover choice of Black Swan showed a willingness to go where Fango wouldn't have gone before (they would've covered the movie, surely, but not made it the main cover feature).

Since the subsequent celebratory installment of #300, two new issues have been published and having just had the time to catch up on #301 and #302 back to back, I have to say it's amazing what a different mag Fango has become. Fango was never less than a polished production but in recent years its format had begun to feel calcified. What Alexander has brought to the mag - besides the kind of enthusiasm that only someone newly taking the reins could have - is a natural eclecticism and a willingness to throw the readership some curves. The old Fango standbys are still in place - Monster Invasion, Dr. Cylclops, Nightmare Library (even the M.I.A. Postal Zone has returned, along with a revivied version of The Pit and the Pen) - but there's an unmistakably personal stamp on the magazine that there hasn't been in awhile.

The strength of the Timpone era was that it refined what had been established previously by Bob Martin and Dave Everitt and took it to the next level. Under Timpone, Fango wasn't as quirky as it had been in its earliest years (no more articles on horror in wrestling, for example) but it was like the difference between Ditko's Spider-Man and Romita Sr.'s Spider-Man - both great runs but one more idiocyncratic and the other much slicker and with broader appeal. But while Timpone's approach had carried the mag through many eras of horror, the time had come for Fango to be a more unpredictable, more offbeat publication again and Alexander has delivered that.

From a reader standpoint, the biggest problem Fango faced pre-Alexander is that it had become easy to take for granted. As the senior horror mag on the stands, it often felt as though it was creatively lagging behind younger competitors like Rue Morgue and Horror Hound. That's not the case anymore. In #302 alone (whose cover appears at the top of this post), alongside coverage of Scream 4 and Insidious are looks at Hobo with a Shotgun and Rubber, an interview (begun in #301) with Wolfen director Michael Wadleigh, interviews with pioneers of German splatter like Violent Shit director Andreas Schnaas and Nekromantik's Jorg Buttgereit, an interview with exploitation queen Sybil Danning, Luigi Cozzi interviewing Dario Argento, the first installment of an ongoing short fiction feature, and a pull-out poster reproduction of the original US Deep Red poster. It's a hell of an issue.

If you're not reading Fango, you're missing out on the best horror mag on the stands. And if you haven't sampled Fango lately, next issue's incredible cover ought to convince even the most stubborn hold-outs to give it a try:

You'll Enjoy Mr. Barlow...

For the first time since our holiday roundtable for The Curse of the Cat People (1944), the Horror Dads have reconvened - and this time we've rented the Marsten House to discuss Tobe Hooper's 1979 TV movie adaptation of Stephen King's second novel, Salem's Lot. A nostalgic touchstone for Gen-X horror fans who watched the two-night miniseries during its original airing on CBS in October of '79, Salem's Lot is often offered up as proof that Hooper's legacy in the horror field isn't just limited to the early triumph of Chainsaw. But how well does it hold up now, after over thirty (!) years?

Click here to join Dennis Cozzalio, Greg Ferrara, Paul Gaita, Nicholas McCarthy, head Horror Dad Richard Harland Smith and yours truly for a return to that quiet Maine town of Salem's Lot...

The Uncertain Future Of Big Budget Horror

With Paramount's in-development adaptation of Max Brook's zombie novel World War Z now looking to be the second case in recent weeks - after Universal aborted Guillermo del Toro's At The Mountains of Madness - of skittish studios abandoning ambitious horror projects in the face of cost concerns, one has to wonder if big budget horror has any future at all.

For the most part, I'm actually sympathetic to studio execs for not having the nerve to back a project as expensive as ATMOM. While it was practically a lock to have been a great movie - I think del Toro and producer James Cameron would've ensured that it lived up to all expectations - I doubt that it would've been profitable. Fans eager to see that project realized can proclaim that it would have been a guaranteed hit - but to be a hit as huge as it would've needed to be to justify a $150 million production cost? I don't know. And $125 million for World War Z seems damn high as well. But if - as reported - Paramount is aiming for that film to be PG-13, maybe it's just as well if that project fails to continue (although, to be fair, The Walking Dead gets away with as much gore on basic cable as I really need to see in a zombie movie these days).

Whatever the commercial chances of these two films, they were definitely projects that fans were hoping would raise the bar of artistic ambition on the current genre scene. Now that it looks like they're going to be shelved - likely permanently - it may be a clear sign that big budget horror is dead in Hollywood and that's a shame. While the lifeblood of the genre has always been found in independent cinema, big budget, studio-produced horror has its own vital legacy - as seen in The Exorcist, Alien, The Shining, John Carpenter's The Thing, and other classics.

As much as I love the raw, scrappy likes of The Evil Dead and The Blair Witch Project and the resourcefulness that they embody, I also love it when filmmakers get to make a horror movie with real money and top-shelf talent (both in front of and behind the camera). The Birds, for instance, couldn't have been done without groundbreaking FX work; Gore Verbinski's remake of The Ring took excellent advantage of its expanded resources without ever becoming crass; Zack Synder's Dawn of the Dead remake delivered apocalyptic sights that no other zombie movie had before; and I'm forever grateful that Cannon Films gave Tobe Hooper the money to make his sprawling, messy, utterly daffy Lifeforce.

That last example, of course, is one reason why studios won't automatically foot the bill for a lavish horror picture - because the risks can be catastrophic. These days, to play it safe, high-end horror films either have to be action/horror hybrids (like this year's Priest) or they have to be Twilight movies (or wanna-be Twilight movies like Red Riding Hood) and even those aren't nearly as pricey to produce as ATMOM or World War Z would've been. Which leads me to ask - why do those two films have to be so insanely costly? I know the price of everything is going up these days but $150 million for ATMOM? Really?

I admire del Toro for not wanting to compromise his dream Lovecraft project but isn't the history of horror - the history of filmmaking - largely defined by compromises? Many would say the fact that the mechanical shark in Jaws wasn't good enough to withstand more than the most limited of screen time helped that movie be the classic that it is. And in making The Shining, Stanley Kubrick had to substitute a hedge maze in place of hedge animals when it was determined that the special effects technology of the time couldn't successfully bring that element of Stephen King's novel to life but yet that maze proved to be one of the most memorable aspects of Kubrick's film.

If del Toro can't make ATMOM for less than $150 million, I'd love to find out what kind of ATMOM adaptation Stuart Gordon would be able to make with, say, a paltry $50 million. Somehow I bet he'd prove it could be done. I mean, I'm sure he would've loved to have had more than just under $5 million for Dagon but that movie still kills. He made it work, rubbery fish faces and all.

But del Toro thinks big and - in the horror genre, especially - that kind of grandiose vision has to be admired. It's just too bad there may not be many more opportunities for that kind of vision to flourish. I'd like to think that we won't be forever deprived of any ambitious, big-budget horror projects in the future but when a film like Paranormal Activity can be made for $15 million and make back almost $200 million, as far as Hollywood is concerned, the best kind of scare will always be a cheap scare.