The View From The Mountain

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...

There have been many horror movies over the years that have been hailed as “a new horror classic,” but so few of them actually live up to that title. It Follows is that rare film that is truly a classic. Released to theaters ten years ago this year, It Follows very quickly proved that it wasn’t just another tired rehash of the tropes found in the slasher genre, and wound up becoming a horror film that’s truly scary and unnerving. After a tense opening scene showing a teenage girl (Bailey Spry) running in a panic from an unseen threat--only to be found dead the following morning, the movie then focuses on Jay (Maika Monroe), a nineteen year old college student who’s trying to find some fun in her mundane life. But after a sexual encounter with her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary), things get very weird. Hugh knocks out Jay with chloroform, then ties her to a wheelchair in an abandoned building. And it gets even stranger ...

Director Robert Eggers remaking Nosferatu is a perfect fit. Eggers, whose films are all period pieces that are expertly researched down to how people speak in a specific time period, manages to entice the viewer into his stories by making them believe they are really in the era they are watching onscreen. The mundane complaint that Hollywood is running out of ideas is constantly being proved wrong by Eggers, who is telling his stories from across the breadth of time. And his take on Nosferatu is no exception. The original 1922 silent film Nosferatu was born out of the desire of telling the Dracula story from Bram Stoker’s seminal novel, but without paying for the rights. So certain names and locations were changed, and presto: we wound up with a classic silent film that still holds up exceedingly well, thanks to its extremely creepy vampire that became an enduring menace in his own right. Egger’s Nosferatu is a ...

Halloween is coming. We’re still in the throes of summer right now, but not for long. It’s already getting cooler, and I’m seeing some slight color in the trees. I thought I’d give an early welcome to my favorite holiday by watching three new horror films that were released this year. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire -- I really enjoyed Ghostbusters: Afterlife for two reasons: the introduction of a new, younger cast to the franchise, and the fact that it takes place in the completely different setting of Oklahoma. Frozen Empire takes place back in New York City, eliminating the freshness of having the story be in a new place, and the new cast is basically reduced to being guest stars. There are just too many people, here. The old Ghostbusters are shoehorned into the story, along with new characters who have been introduced in Frozen Empire. This doesn’t give the new cast much room to shine. And the nostalgia factor is getting very annoying; we have to see Slim...

The Last Voyage of the Demeter literally takes a chapter from Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula . This chapter in the legendary novel that details Dracula’s arrival in England via a sailing ship named the Demeter is pretty scarily effective. It shows the ship beaching itself on the shores of England, with its crew all dead--and, with Dracula apparently on the loose ashore. It creates a dreadful, ominous tone that informs the rest of the story. And I haven’t given anything away by revealing the ending, because the film itself opens on that very same scene: the Demeter beached on the rocks, with the police and locals gathering around the stricken ship and discovering its horrors. This opening serves as a framing device for the rest of the film, which is told in flashback. But while that chapter shows what happened after the voyage, The Last Voyage of the Demeter attempts to fill in the gaps of the voyage itself. Or, at least it tries to. Horror fans--both fa...

Released in June of 1973, The Legend of Hell House was a supernatural gothic horror movie that was based on the book, Hell House , written by Richard Matheson. On the surface, The Legend of Hell House can be seen as a remake of The Haunting , the 1963 classic ghost story movie that was adapted from The Haunting of Hill House , the equally classic Shirley Jackson novel. Both films deal with paranormal investigators probing a legendary haunted house, but Matheson’s take on the story was different in that science played a stronger role, and Hell House had a very nice twist at the end. Directed by John Hough (he also helmed Twins of Evil , and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry , among others), Hell House abruptly begins when physicist Dr. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill) is called to the estate of a millionaire (Roland Culver), who makes him an enticing offer: take a paranormal team to The Belasco House, otherwise known as “the Mount Everest of haunted houses,” to determine if ...

I came across a movie on Amazon Prime called Schizoid, starring the infamous Klaus Kinski, who is maybe better known for his starring role in the 1979 German remake of Nosferatu (as well as his strange and inexcusable behavior). In Schizoid, released in 1980, Kinski plays a Los Angles psychiatrist who runs a group therapy session that features Julie (Mariana Hill, from Blood Beach), a newspaper columnist who is receiving threats in the mail from a stalker. Things heat up when people in Julie’s group therapy start turning up dead. For what it is--a low budget horror thriller--Schizoid is not bad, not bad at all. Despite it’s slasher trappings, writer/director David Paulsen manages to create a decent murder mystery amidst the gory kill scenes. The cast of suspects include Donna Wilkes (Angel) as the doctor’s volatile daughter, Craig Wasson (Ghost Story) as Julie’s ex-husband, Flo Gerrish (Don’t Answer The Phone), and Christopher Lloyd (Back To The Future), as anoth...

I first saw Bram Stoker’s Dracula when it was initially released in theaters in November of 1992, and I recall expecting to see a serious, solemn drama that was based on the classic horror novel that was written in the 19th century by Stoker. But I also remember being pleasantly surprised by the luscious, imaginative cinematic dark fairy tale that was weaved onscreen by Francis Ford Coppola, the visionary director of the Godfather trilogy, along with The Conversation , and Apocalypse Now (the latter being my all-time favorite Coppola film). Um, Coppola also gave us the lame Jack , with Robin Williams as a boy who pre-maturely grew into a man, but nobody's perfect. While Coppola presented the Dracula story with complete seriousness, he also seemed to have a great deal of fun with the subject matter, as well, presenting the movie as a lurid fever dream by using every in-camera movie trick in the book (even a few from the silent film era), with the lone ex...

Even as a kid, I was never that crazy about werewolves. A monster that only appeared during the full moon seemed like a pretty easy creature to beat. Just like how sharks stayed in the ocean, rendering them impotent as long as you stayed out of the water, werewolves could also be easily avoided just by staying inside during nights of the full moon. It didn’t matter what the werewolf movie was--from the original Wolfman, to An American Werewolf in London--werewolf movies never really held an allure for me. But then The Howling was released. Director Joe Dante’s Little Werewolf That Could was released in 1981, and in honor of it being released in 4K this month, I decided to revisit The Howling. I first watched it on video (VHS!) back in the day, and enjoyed it. The main reason was because it was the first werewolf film that I saw that presented the big, furry bastards with a twist: they could change into a wolf any time they wanted; to hell with waiti...