Chad Collins

3 days ago | dreadcentral.com | Chad Collins

Mike Flanagan is undoubtedly my favorite horror filmmaker working today. In the best ways, he reminds me a great deal of the late Wes Craven. While their styles might be different, the humanity innate in their work shares profound parallels. I’m a bit of a sap, so humanistic horror filmmaking is always going to win me over. When vampires take over a small island, I want some tears with the bloodshed, okay?

3 days ago | dreadcentral.com | Chad Collins

We can thank Stranger Things for the renewed interest in slasher films. After all, Stranger Things might be a genre hybrid, though aside from a brief Halloween II homage in the third season, it’s decidedly not a slasher series. The show is set in the 1980s, however, and if there’s one consistent horror variable from the decade, it’s the stalk-and-kill slasher. For almost a decade, we’ve had low-budget pantomimes and big-budget remakes of the best slashers the era had to offer.

1 week ago | dreadcentral.com | Chad Collins

I love a good killer shark flick. I wish there were more of them, but I could probably rattle them all off in under a minute. Now, if I were rattling off just the good ones, I’d probably finish before I wrap writing this sentence. It’s a shame, too, since it’s one of my favorite horror subgenres. Too often, however, I have to scrape through the liminal, end pages of Tubi to find something like Camp Blood Clown Shark to scratch that itch. Real movie, by the way.

1 week ago | dreadcentral.com | Chad Collins

Tobe Hooper was one of the greats. If you haven’t read it yet, allow me to recommend Poltergeist by Jacob Trussell from DieDieBooks for some profound (and heartbreaking) insights into Hooper’s late career. Fans will know that after Poltergeist, Hooper’s career stagnated. Sure, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was released a year later, but his final decades were strictly direct-to-video stuff, and it’s a shame for one of the pioneers of the modern horror genre. Prime Video is here for the rescue.

1 week ago | dreadcentral.com | Chad Collins

There’s a lot of talk around town about disturbing horror movies. I’m not talking cineplex scares, either, the kind you can snag a $10 ticket for and watch with a popcorn and cherry, vanilla Coke. I’m talking about the deep cuts, the movies whispered about online, the ones a friend of a friend saw that scarred them for life. Disturbing an audience isn’t as easy as it sounds, either. Even the most disturbing movies ever made are operating with a thematic heft that far exceeds mere exploitation.