Posts Tagged ‘THE HILLS HAVE EYES’

Metro Canada: Horror streaming service Shudder is coming to Canada

screen-shot-2016-10-25-at-10-29-29-amBy Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

Jason Zinoman says one of the pleasures of getting scared at the movies is “that it focuses the mind.” The author of Shock Value, a book about horror films, uses the example of a baby being born.

“Try to imagine the shock of one world running into another,” he writes. “Nothing is familiar and the slightest detail registers as shockingly new. Think of the futility of trying to process what is going on. No wonder they scream.

“Overwhelming terror,” Zinoman continues, “may be the closest we ever get to the feeling of being born.”

Whether it’s as deep seeded as that or not, there is no denying terror is a primal feeling. It’s part of our DNA but, counter intuitively, it isn’t horrible when experienced at the movies.

Sam Zimmerman, the co-curator of the new horror streaming service Shudder, says watching scary movies is, “a beautiful way of confronting our anxieties and fears and laughing at those anxieties and fears. It’s a way of touching the void without actually stepping foot in it.”

Zimmerman, along with long time Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes, have populated Shudder with a comprehensive collection of horror films from around the globe, everything from classic horror like The Hills Have Eyes and newer shockers such as Sadako vs. Kayako.

“We are a curated streaming service and we’re trying to find the perfect medium between the streaming service and the best aspects of what we got out of video store days.”

In short, Zimmerman says, there are four main criteria when programming the service: Is it really cool? Do we think our members will love it? Is it contextually or historically interesting? Or is it just awesome?

“We want you to really trust us,” he says.

“Whether the movies are under the radar or mainstream, we want you to feel like we’re looking out for what’s going on the service as opposed to just filling the service with an old thing just because it is horror.”

Available in the U.S. since last year, Shudder makes its Canadian debut on Oct. 20, just in time for Halloween.

“I think horror fans are optimists,” Zimmerman says. “I think we find the good in things even when the movie doesn’t come together as a whole, we’re really excited to point out what stuck with us within it. Horror can be made up of such striking imagery. Even when we watch movies as kids and perhaps now re-watch them and think, ‘It wasn’t that great a movie to begin with,’ we still remember those images that grabbed us. You can’t deny the power of that. I think we are inherently excited about what’s good about a movie.

“I also think horror fans are really film fans. Horror, at least for me, was a real gateway into experimental cinema and really surreal, strange work because of the nightmare logic of them.

“But I think it’s an avenue into all other sorts of arts and media.”

At the end of the day horror fans will check out Shudder not for a lesson in horror history but for the variety of chills and thrills. But why do people like to be terrified while watching movies? Alfred Hitchcock summed up the appeal of the scary movie in one brief sentence: “People like to be scared when they feel safe.”

HALLOWEEN SPOOKTACULAR DAY 23! THE HILLS HAVE EYES: 3 STARS “not for the easily disturbed”

hillsHorror fans must have an almost permanent feeling of deja vu these days. It seems that the horror films that we grew up with in the 1960s and 70s, like The Amityville Horror, Dawn of the Dead, The Fog and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, are all being re-made, which makes the new releases list in the newspaper occasionally seem like it came from the Twilight Zone.

The latest cult horror film to find a new life in 2006 is The Hills Have Eyes, the 1977 Wes Craven film that gave us the immortal line, “We’re going to be French fries! Human French fries!”

The 2006 version is directed by the French director Alexandre Aja who gave us the deeply unpleasant, but rather effective thriller High Tension last year. For the most part Aja takes his lead from the original film about an unfortunate family of vacationers who get stranded in desert of New Mexico, falling prey to mutant cannibalistic hillbillies. The bad guys are descendents of miners who worked in this remote location and continued to live there even after the government started testing nuclear bombs in their backyard. A generation later they have mutated into some very unpleasant creatures with bad tempers and a taste for human flesh.

Aja’s version takes one major liberty with the source material. In the original Craven established that the mutants, although they were evil, were a family. In fact they mirrored the poor family they were terrorizing—all American verses Americans all messed up by their own country’s experiments. I thought the contrast was one of the strong points of that film and lent a tone of social commentary about nuclear testing to the piece.

Aja forgoes social comment for shocks, and although he takes his time getting to the hard-core action, once the thrills arrive they’re worth the wait. This movie is not for the easily disturbed or the faint of heart, but if you like your scares gruesome and fast paced the Hills Have Eyes is for you.

THE HILLS HAVE EYES: 3 STARS

hills-have-eyes-3Horror fans must have an almost permanent feeling of deja vu these days. It seems that the horror films that we grew up with in the 1960s and 70s, like The Amityville Horror, Dawn of the Dead, The Fog and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, are all being re-made, which makes the new releases list in the newspaper occasionally seem like it came from the Twilight Zone.

The latest cult horror film to find a new life in 2006 is The Hills Have Eyes, the 1977 Wes Craven film that gave us the immortal line, “We’re going to be French fries! Human French fries!”

The 2006 version is directed by the French director Alexandre Aja who gave us the deeply unpleasant, but rather effective thriller High Tension last year. For the most part Aja takes his lead from the original film about an unfortunate family of vacationers who get stranded in desert of New Mexico, falling prey to mutant cannibalistic hillbillies. The bad guys are descendents of miners who worked in this remote location and continued to live there even after the government started testing nuclear bombs in their backyard. A generation later they have mutated into some very unpleasant creatures with bad tempers and a taste for human flesh.

Aja’s version takes one major liberty with the source material. In the original Craven established that the mutants, although they were evil, were a family. In fact they mirrored the poor family they were terrorizing—all American verses Americans all messed up by their own country’s experiments. I thought the contrast was one of the strong points of that film and lent a tone of social commentary about nuclear testing to the piece.

Aja forgoes social comment for shocks, and although he takes his time getting to the hard-core action, once the thrills arrive they’re worth the wait. This movie is not for the easily disturbed or the faint of heart, but if you like your scares gruesome and fast paced the Hills Have Eyes is for you.