Welp, the usual live thread ain’t up so why not use this one?
Penultimate episode!

First movie: Body Bags (1993)

Second movie:

Just wondering how I can watch the special tonight on the Roku channel add on? The guide shows a different special playing before 9

It keeps logging me out my account and then when I log back in it says sorry something went wrong, and then when I try and play a video for example, Dragula it keeps stopping and then start saying sorry not available in your territory or something :( help

These photos were shot by a photographer named Sam Emerson, but only one was utilized for Hatcher's appearance in an episode of Season 2 - The Thing from the Grave.

dance dance dance, heartbeat and death tone were all what i liked.

but the wraparound was just gory and disgusting without a point then another cabin and premature burial do not fit into a found footage movie. Maybe I'd be more interested in them if they were placed into just a horror compilation movie and not a found footage movie.

But still i liked the movie a lot, the parts that were interesting were good and everything that took me out of it didn't stay on too long (other than premature burial, i skipped that part.)

I find this to be better than vhs: viral because in this one there's still something that i actually like and could return back to.

IMO one of the best 90s Horror films. Often described as a hybrid of Evil Dead and Night Of The Living Dead, which is very fitting. Lots of great in-camera monster and gore effects, a killer soundtrack and an impressive ensemble of actors including the always good William Sadler and Billy Zane as the respective hero and villain, with the latter chewing up the scenery as if his very life depended on it. And anytime you've got the late, great Dick Miller, that just elevates it. Such a perfect movie for Spooky Season every September/October. Be great if Shudder added it to their line-up at some point along with the TFTC TV series, which anyone who knows me will tell you I'm a major fan of.

I organized an AMA/Q&A with actress Milly Shapiro. You may know her from her breakout role in Ari Aster's 2018 Hereditary, or from her Tony Award-winning performance as Maltilda on Broadway in 2013 in Matilda the Musical. She stars in Hallowarrior, her first film since Hereditary (!), which is a Halloween-themed horror thriller that premiered at Tribeca a few months ago and was just released last weekend.

It's live here now in r/movies for anyone interested in asking her a question:

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1xbl9fe/hi_reddit_im_milly_shapiro_from_hereditary/

She will be back at around 3 PM ET today to answer questions. I recommend asking in advance. Please ask there, not here. All questions are much appreciated!

Hallowarrior info:

Synopsis: Halloween-obsessed Pumpkin thinks she's the last person alive. But when scavengers show up at her doorstep, Pumpkin has no choice but to tap into her deadliest survival instincts.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORjn6ox53_U

Thank you :)

What are some suggestions for a new V/H/S them? We had Halloween,Aliens etc but what are some good ideas you guys think would do?

I personally would love to see a V/H/S based off Marine life/Mermaids/Water spirits.

Saw it last night, and I am not dissapointed! It might be 3rd/4th place in my personal ranking, with VHS Beyond being the best in my opinion.

Let's address first the elephant in the room: The wraparound of the tapes!

GWAR (the gross and weird music program): The context of the tapes. It was a surprise, getting this old MTV style of program with very gross and gory jokes. It made me laugh, but it is a bit hard to watch. I know people that got turned off by this immediatly. It kinda reminded me a bit of some stuff of Warhammer 40k chaos stuff. Don't let it gross you out! Probably the worst part of the film, but I don't hate it.

Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance (A.K.A the puppet segment): is quite good. The song here is probably the one that goes the hardest, and my new ringtone at the moment, lolol.

Another Cabin (A.K.A the stop motion segment): Probably the odd one here, it doesn't "directly" has a lot to do with Mixtape's premise, but it is entirely mute of voices, and there's only music, so that is that. The stop motion style is always interesting, and it doesn't overstay it's welcome, being very short.

Heartbeat (the bunker one): The most realistic, and that carries a special horror on itself. No supernatural threat is neccesary here. I always thought that what happens if you stay too long in one of those places is mindfuck material.

Premature Burial (the heavy metal music video): My fiance started shaking it's head to this tune. If you like metal, you probably will live this. The story is fairly simple, with a lil' twist. Cool stuff.

The Music of Mr. Sze (the one with the violinist): I LOVED this one, it's my personal favorite. I read somewhere that it is an adaptation of a less known Lovecraft story. When you get a glimpse of what Sze's background is, the visuals are just so damn good!

Death Tone (the musician's daughter segment): Oh, the gore! The goriest of them all, made me squirm and squint my eyes at some parts, damn. The music resulting is hauntingly good. DAMN the final death is... a choice for the person involved. There's getting nailed, and there's that.

The segments are quite ok, bear with the wraparound. If you have seen it, please let me know what do you think or if I missed something! I hope you give it a chance if you haven't seen it, and have a happy Halloween everyone!

P.D: By the way, I am trying to create a reddit community of the saga, since I couldn't find one! r/VHS_HorrorFranchise if anyone else loves VHS on general.

I have found that the newer films, say the last year or two, have had a lot of conflict. People loved the concept or hated it. My vote is for Buffet Infinity and In A Violent Nature. I loved Buffet Infinity and I have friends who think I'm insane for even watching it. Conversely, I hated In A Violent Nature and consider it one of the worst and most over-hyped pieces of crap to come out in ages.

So tell me what films you loved or hated.

Anyone catch this film yet?

No idea if this is just their Amazon extension or for all versions of AMC+ but I got a renewal email this morning that said Shudder is no longer part of AMC+.

Easy cancel I guess!

I was paying for the version with ads. I was considering upgrading for a month to no ads to catch up on all the new stuff, but I guess not anymore! The amount of ads they were cramming in their programming was getting ridiculous.

I cancelled my AMC+ membership from Amazon after getting the email and was going to just sign up through amcplus.com directly, but I noticed that there is no mention of Shudder anywhere on the website anymore. I don't think this is an Amazon issue.

THE ORDEAL PROJECT:

SUMMARY:
3 friends try to revive a discontinued survival-fighting game they worked on by updating it until something wrong happens to them.
They get trapped inside their own game and they are hunted down by murderous, robotic riot or swat agent-like entities from said game.

(The game in the segment has the same name as the segment itself, “The Ordeal Project.”)

So… tell me, what do you guys think of this? Is it good or bad in your own opinion?

October Horrorwatch Day #20

Watched VHS Mixtape today. I caught half on my lunch hour and just finished the rest after work.

I thought it might be interesting as the theme is horror involving music of some sort.

Nah, not this time. I wasn't really a fan of last year's VHS Halloween and I liked this even less. Some of the segments aren't even found footage and the wraparound is just the band GWAR doing the goofy things they do.

There's one really good segment titled "The Music of Mister Sze" that adapts a lesser known Lovecraft story and the first story about some Jim Henson style puppets who dance and sing about death then start murdering people is entertaining enough, but the movie as a whole is never really scary, it has a been-there-done-that feel and, at one point, instead of a story with a plot one of the segments is literally a music video by a black metal band. I'm not kidding. They just shoved a music video in there and called it a segment. I guess given that the premise is music based horror I understand why, but it still sucks, particularly when a title card with the name of the band shows up at the end.

Honestly, I've noticed that since Shudder took over this franchise, the films have gotten further and further away from the original premise of the first two, which was people finding a collection of VHS tapes no one was meant to see. Starting with VHS 85 and on, these movies have increasingly lost that vibe, and while I actually enjoyed VHS 85 and VHS Beyond, this time the distance between the best entry in this series - VHS 2 - and Mixtape is just too substantial to ignore. The thrill is gone.

Individual viewers may find their mileage varies, but after VHS 99 ( which I still think is the worst of the bunch) , this is my least favorite to date.

Honestly? If they never make another of these, I'd be fine with it. With The Last Drive In leaving the service this year it's highly unlikely I'll ever subscribe to Shudder to watch a new one if they release it next year.

** out of ***** stars. This franchise is running on fumes and it really shows in Mixtape.

For those that have read Chuck Palahniuk's 'Invention of Sound', did anyone else suspect RZA or Matt Landsman knew about this novel or perhaps even read it? RZA allegedly said in an interview the idea came to him from his own experience trying to make new sounds as a hip-hop producer but the entire time, I just really couldn't unsee the Palahniuk novel, published in 2020, which I always felt would make a good movie anyway. I wonder what Chuck would think?

And now a message from Joe Bob about the last Halloween special he'll ever do on Shudder! Joe Bob's Halloween House Party airs Friday, October 23 at 9pm Eastern and will go on demand 10/25

Spoiler Alert

I’m not a fan of Gwar but I respect that they have their own thing and it’s enjoyed by a lot of people, it’s just not my deal.

That said, their intro to the movie with the weird incest, masturbation gross out factor was so upsetting and I don’t know, childish? I pretty much hated every single transitional segment they have between the main segments. I just feel like they were unnecessary and I wasn’t amused.

The first segment with the puppets was ok. I personally don’t like the tv show characters are actually dark monsters. I watched “Buddy” and I was just not super into it. I think it’s a creative idea and I loved the part in the segment where the puppets were coming alive as the POV person was trying to escape. That was my favorite part and it made it very creative and interesting.

The sound room segment, which was music adjacent, was ok. I was kind of bored with it.

The violin music segment was also just ok. I liked the idea of the music summoning the an eldritch God. But once again I was just bored with it.

The weird music video murder was strange and I just didn’t get it. I mean I understand the idea of music assisting the music video but I just didn’t care for it. Probably doesn’t help I’m not into metal.

The serial killer musician lady segment was good actually, cool premise and idea and I feel like it fit along what I would assume Mixtape would be all about.

I think there were a couple of other minor segments inside of that but I don’t even remember them. I was bored or just not paying attention.

Really sad and just so disappointed. I always look forward these every year and it just really killed some of my Halloween mojo.

I think this was the general consensus among the “shudderians” but just thought I’d throw this out there in the hopes that the big wigs see these reviews and try to not fuck it up again. Hopefully next year’s VHS is better.

I've spent most of my free time this year working on a horror film search engine. And one of the cool ways to use it is to filter down to what's available on a specific streaming service (like Shudder) & then do specific filters or searches. (This link pre-filters to the Shudder catalog, so you'll see the Shudder streaming filter is active.)

There's dropdown filters for basic stuff like genre or decade or country, but you can also type "/" into the search box to bring up advanced search options, so you can search for director:"Ti West" or fx:"Tom Savini". Or if you wanted to get really specific, stuff like composer:"Jóhann Jóhannsson".

You can also search multiple streaming services at a time, so you can filter by all the services you use, & then do complex searches for whatever you're in the mood for.

There's tons of other features... you can create an account & rate films by both quality & intensity, you can keep a watchlist of films you want to see, you can log films you've seen, you can add films to the Community Lists. And there's also a really detailed browse section if you want to dive deep into a specific horror genre or horror from a particular country. (Every film in the database is sorted into subgenres.) And a bunch more.

Something I was unsure about at first but has become one of my favorite parts of the site is browse by country & the country-specific genres. I've learned so much building those pages out... recently overhauled the J-Horror genre page based on Sarah Appleton and Jasper Sharp's excellent "The J-Horror Virus" documentary (streaming on Shudder), & really got a much better sense of what the J-Horror genre specifically is, as opposed to horror released in Japan during that same era. https://horrorcodex.com/genre/movements/j-horror

I'm actively working to fill in all of my blind spots, but the goal is to eventually (once the site builds an audience) have folks with specific niche horror expertise edit those pages.

There's currently 68,651 films in the database (horror & horror-adjacent), so it's pretty exhaustive, but there's also a "request a film" feature for users if you find that something's missing.

It's been a real labor of love. Would be thrilled to hear any thoughts/feedback. Love to hear what people discover & add to their watchlist.

Went to All Movies for a good perusal and I just find this a nightmare to navigate, I don't want to have to click on every individual film just to know what it even is.

This tier list is from worst to best and if you want i can explain my position decisions in the comments