Director Tobe Hooper is best known for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre . I admit to never really having been a big fan of TCM, instead I was more partial to Hooper’s TV miniseries of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot , which aired in 1979. And while there was a bit of a controversy over whether he or Steven Spielberg actually directed 1982’s Poltergeist , the success of that film, which brought supernatural horror to the suburbs, enabled Hooper to swing for the fences with Lifeforce , a science fiction horror extravaganza that was released in 1985, forty years ago this year. Based on the book Space Vampires by Colin Wilson, the screenplay for Lifeforce was written by Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby--with O'Bannon being a writer on the first Alien film. Taking place in 1986, when the real life Halley’s Comet was due to return to Earth, Lifeforce has Steve Railsback ( The Stunt Man ) in command of a tricked out space shuttle with an American/British crew of astronauts called the Chu...
Presence, the latest film from director Steven Soderbergh ( Sex, Lies and Videotape, Out Of Sight ), is based on his real life experiences with what he believes is a ghost in his own home. Inspired by his spectral roommate, Soderbergh wrote a few pages of a script, which he handed to David Koepp ( Panic Room, Jurassic Park ), who finished it. The film was shot in a house in Crandall, New Jersey, over just eleven days in September 2023 (they received an interim SAG-AFTRA agreement during the strike that year). Soderbergh shot this in the ‘found footage’ style, using only one camera, with himself as the camera operator. The result is that Presence is a haunted house story that is told from the point of view of the ghost. And it’s marvelous. But instead of the typical ’found footage’ movie, which is supposed to be culled together from film or video that is literally found after the fact, we see everything that’s happening in this house through the ‘eye...