Brian Collins's blog

Ask the average genre fan what their favorite Christmas horror film is, and you'll probably hear "Black Christmas" as the answer more often than not. And for good reason: it's a scary, suspenseful film that helped kickstart the slasher sub-genre, but also contains a lot of humor that helps make it an all around easy choice to pull off the shelf every holiday.

"At least there's a commentary..."

While I obviously didn't know who he was at the time, the first Wes Craven movie I ever saw was DEADLY FRIEND, thanks to frequent cable showings when I was about seven years old. I'm not sure if anyone else did this, but I would frequently watch the end of movies on HBO or whatever; if it started at 3pm and I turned it on at around 4, it didn't matter to me that I had no context for anything I was seeing (sometimes I'd even RECORD the films like this, which is why I have seen the last 35 minutes of SPACEBALLS about 100x and the first hour maybe three times).

One of the many things I learned thanks to the two historian commentary tracks on Scream Factory's blu-ray of THE DEAD ZONE is that the 1979 novel was Stephen King's first one to hit the New York Times Bestseller list. Since the book followed the likes of THE SHINING and THE STAND, I was surprised and even kind of charmed to see that DEAD ZONE was the one to break that barrier for the author, as it is barely a horror story and - forty years and over fifty books later - remains one of his more atypical selections.

Among "can't miss" prospects, few in horror history ever seemed as promising as when it was announced that Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson would reteam for a werewolf film in the same vein as their original SCREAM, the trend-setting slasher that continues to draw audiences and inspire horror filmmakers today, 25 years later. Unfortunately, that resulting followup, aptly named CURSED, would be met with total indifference when it was released in February of 2005, grossing less than even the SCREAM wannabes that their previous success had inspired.