For all the trash talking I do on modern horror, I tend to enjoy the films of Scott Derrickson. From The Exorcism of Emily Rose to Dr. Strange and Deliver Us From Evil, his films have come from a unique place and have had surprises packed within them. The two Sinister films — he only co-wrote the sequel — are darker and stranger than mainstream 2000’s horror films have any right to be.

Ellison Oswalt (named for Harlan Ellison and Patton Oswalt; played by Ethan Hawke) writes true crime and to get the material he needs for his next book, he’s moved his family into the home where a family was lynched in their own backyard. He hopes that by living there, he’ll discover the fate of the one family member who survived.

Inside the house, there’s a box that contains a Super 8 projector and several home movies. They’re actually snuff films of various families being wiped out as an unseen cameraman records the death, always concentrating on a mysterious symbol. These movies are the true heart of this film, shot on real Super 8 and appearing to come from another universe thanks to stark lighting and ambient music from black metal bands Ulver and Aghast, as well as Boards of Canada.

In fact, the creature behind all of this throat slashing, drowning and burning is named Bughuul, a strange masked demon that also looks like he walked out of Helvete. He’s a Babylonian demon that coerces children to kill their families and then give their souls to him.

Ethan Hawke had never seen the films prior to filming the movie, so all of his reactions are 100% genuine.

Thanks to the Sheriff (Fred Thompson) and Deputy So & So (James Ransome, who would return for the second movie), Ellison soon learns that these ritualistic murders have been going on since at least the 1960’s.

After leaving the projector on one night leads to all of the missing children entering his house and Bughuul physically attacking him, Ellison decides to leave the house behind. He connects with occult expert Professor Jonas (Vincent D’Onofrio), who tells him that the image of the demon is how it can possess children and enter our world.

The real insight is that every murdered family had previously lived in the house where the last murder took place, and each new murder occurred shortly after the family moved from the crime scene into their new residence. By moving, Ellison has doomed his family, as the projector and the films appear in his new house.

Now, the missing children appear along with each murder on film, as Ellison’s daughter Ashley methodically murders each of her family members with an axe before the demon lifts her into his arms and disappears, leaving behind a new film labeled “House Painting ’12” so that the cycle of death can continue all over again.

This is but one film franchise where Ethan Hawke was killed in the first installment and I ended up liking the next movie much better. The other would be, of course, The Purge.

You know, I love the movies Ideal Home and Bad Dreams. I’d never guess that they were both written and directed by the same person, Andrew Fleming. You may not know the man, but chances are you know his 1996 film, The Craft.

Producer Douglas Wick (he produced Stuart Little and also co-wrote the sequels) wanted to create a movie that mixed the high school experience with witchcraft, which he worked on with screenwriter Peter Filardi (Flatliners). Well, he sure did it. This is a movie that was a quiet hit but has never gone away. Take it from someone who has dated plenty of goth girls.

Sarah Bailey (Robin Tunney, wearing a wig as she had shaved her head for Empire Records) is the new girl in town, having moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco with her father (Cliff DeYoung, Shock Treatment) and stepmother. She soon becomes friends with a group of outcasts who are rumored to be witches: the scarred Bonnie (Neve Campbell), trailer trash and totally awesome Nancy (the legit Wiccan Fairuza Balk, who was also in Return to Oz) and Rochelle (Rachel True, CB4), whose black skin in a nearly all white school makes her a target of ridicule. The witch rumor? Yeah, it’s true. They all worship an entity they refer to as Manon.

Sarah becomes attracted to the popular Chris Hooker (Skeet Ulrich, who was very much a thing in 1996), but he claims that they slept together and ruins her reputation before it gets started. That leads to the girls finally completing a big spell that gives them everything they want: Chris falls in love so hard that he can’t live without Sarah, racist bully Laura Lizzie (Christine Taylor) loses her hair and popularity, Bonnie becomes gorgeous and Nancy’s abusive stepfather dies and she gets rich.

However, it’s not enough. After a rite called the “Invocation of the Spirit,” Nancy gains even more power because, you know, she got hit by lightning (actual Wiccan Pat Devin was the on-set advisor, so maybe this really does occur). Now she can’t be stopped and all of the girls other than Sarah have gone wrong. The coven turns on her, but Sarah ends up stronger than all of them.

Of course, Blumhouse is remaking this, with Zoe Lister-Jones directing. There was talk of another remake and a direct to video sequel which never happened. I had hoped that that luck would have stopped this new version, but it’s already finished production.

I learned a really important lesson from The Craft. The girl I was dating at the time asked me which member of the coven I found most attractive. I said none of them. She kept pressing and begging for my answer. Of course Fairuza Balk is the right answer, but I kept quiet until finally, after an entire meal of her asking, I told her. She instantly grew angry and said, “The right answer is none of them!” Somewhere inside this story is a lesson.

I love the scene where all the fish wash up and the coven realizes how much power they have. You don’t know how many times the women in my life have made me watch this movie. I have grown smarter and not said a single thing about Nancy.

There was a time where Disney did not care at all whether or not they gave nightmares to kids. Or so it seemed. They were concentrating on films with more mature themes in an attempt to break free from their stereotype as an animation and family film studio.

Yet when this film was being made, it was really two movies. On one hand were writer Ray Bradbury and director Jack Clayton, who were trying to stay faithful to the novel. And on the other was Disney, who wanted a more accessible and family-friendly film.

Bradbury wrote the screenplay in 1958 as a directorial vehicle for Gene Kelly before rewriting it as a novel. In 1977, he and Clayton produced a completed script before the project went into six years of stops and starts.

That’s why it’s so sad that Bradbury and Clayton lost their friendship after Bradbury discovered that Clayton had hired writer John Mortimer to do an uncredited rewrite at the studio’s urging. And after disastrous test screenings, Disney fired Clayton and the film’s editor before throwing out the original score. They spent $5 million and even more time basically remaking the film.

Disney added a new director, Leo Dyer, and a new spoken beginning that was narrated by Arthur Hill. There was also a long CGI sequence — one of the first-ever filmed — of Mr. Dark’s circus train pulling in to Green Town. The sequence was incredibly complex —  the smoke from the locomotive would form ropes and tents, tree limbs would make a Ferris wheel and a spider web would become a wheel of fortune. There was also a scene where Mr. Dark would send a hand into the house to attack the two main characters, but this scene was seen as fake by Disney execs who replaced it with a scene that had hundreds of real tarantulas.

Everything that was right about the project pretty much went away, from the original themes of Bradbury’s novel to the darkness of the original cut and the very human relationships that director Clayton loved. In its place was that new narration and a new ending.

What remains is still stranger and better than nearly any kids movie — and hey, let’s throw in just about any movie — that you will see this year.

So what’s it all about? Well, it’s about autumn. It’s about a small town called Green Town. And it’s about two kids, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, who find themselves at odds with Mr. Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival.

Mr. Dark’s (Jonathan Pryce) goal is to give the people of the town exactly what they’ve always wanted and take their souls in the process. The scene where he takes years off of the life of Will’s father (Jason Robards, great as always) has more resonance every year that I watch this movie.

Plus, you get great acting from Diane Lane and Royal Dano, and an appearance from noted little person actor Angelo Rossitto, who has been in more movies that I’ve watched than nearly any other actor.

They’re planning on remaking this movie, but you know how that goes. Luckily, you have this dark reminder of what could have been, way back when Disney was trying to be something more than a kid-friendly movie house.

Before Independence Day, Universal Soldier and Stargate, Roland Emmerich made Joey, which was released in edited form in the U.S. as Making Contact. Another of his movies, Hollywood-Monster, was also released here as Ghost Chase.

9-year-old Joey’s father may have died, but he thinks that he can talk to him on his phone. He’s also being attacked by Fletcher, a ventriloquist dummy possessed by a demon that is now calling on an army of demons to take over reality.

Joey must use his telekinesis to go into the spirit world to battle these demons. Luckily, he has a droid-like robot named Charlie and his dog Scooter to help him — even if he must enter the Bates Motel to save his canine best pal. Oh yeah — and there is also a gang of kids who dress like Spider-Man and Darth Vader who use toy tanks to attack Joey, but end up being his friend at the end. There are a lot of moments here where you just have to realize that no one was interested in explaining how to get from story beat to story beat, so they just said screw it and made it was strange as they possible could. I have no issues at all with this choice.

Imagine if you were watching E.T., Poltergeist and The Goonies all at the same time. This movie is a mash-up of influences and completely all over the place. Yet it’s well-made and anything but boring. Isn’t that what you’re looking for in a movie?

You can get this movie from Kino Lorber.

For its time, The Sinister Urge was pornography. Today, it could probably play on normal television.

In 1959, Ed Wood finished writing The Racket Queen and got producer Roy Reid of Headliner Productions to cough up the dough. Obviously, Ed was influenced by Psycho, just like every exploitation filmmaker at the time.

If you’ve watched more than one or two or, like me, nearly every Ed Wood film, you’ll see a fight scene that Wood had shot for his unfinished project Hellborn, AKA Rock and Roll Hell. Ed Wood was an early believer in being green, as he recycled that very same scene for Night of the Ghouls.

This would be the last film that Wood would make with William C. Thompson as his cinematographer, who some sources say was colorblind and others say only had one eye. Regardless of how many working eyes he had, they weren’t working too well so he retired.

The sleazy filmmaker, Johnny Ryde, is pretty much Wood just writing himself into a film. In his office, you’ll see posters for Jail Bait, Bride of the Monster, The Violent Years and Plan 9 from Outer Space. There’s a really telling line here, as Ryde yells, “I look at this slush, and I try to remember, at one time, I made good movies.” That said, Wood never made good movies. He made interesting ones. But man, I don’t know if he ever made a good movie. Yet, I love him and his work still.

This movie is about the “Mary Smiths” from “Everywhere, USA” who graduate at the top of their class, were great in the school play, then come on out to Hollywood hoping to be discovered yet are afraid to go back home a failure. Throw in “The Syndicate” and some murder and well, we have an Ed Wood movie.

This $20,000 wonder was the last mainstream film Wood would make. He did have an idea of a sequel that he called The Peeper, but it never happened. After here, it was all adult films. The dirty picture racket, as they say. Movies like Take It Out in Trade, Necromania and The Young Marrieds. And yes, you just know I’ll get to those soon.

You can also see this movie on an episode of Mystery Science Theater (season 6, episode 13) after the short educational film Keeping Clean and Neat. Obviously, with the name of his 2001 solo album, Rob Zombie is also a fan of this movie.

When a gang of outlaws attacks a small homestead in the middle of nowhere, killing a husband and wife before kidnapping their teenage daughter, the law has to come down hard on them. After the criminals get lost, they find their way to Eminence Hill, a town run by a group of deeply religious men and women.

Welcome to, well, Eminence Hill, which is directed by Robert Conway, who has directed three different Krampus themed films: Krampus: The Reckoning, Krampus Unleashed and Krampus Origins.

This movie is packed with stars. There’s Barry Corbin, Harv from Critters 2 and perhaps better known to normal folks for being in No Country for Old Men. Dominique Swain, who was in the 1997 version of Lolita and Face/Off, as well as recently reviewed films like Blood Craft and The 6th Friend. Even Brinke Stevens shows up!

Probably the name that will get most people looking for this movie is Lance Henriksen, whose resume contains such stand-outs as Hard Target, Aliens, Near Dark, Pumpkinhead, Stone Cold and many, many more.

He’s only in it for a few moments, but come on. If you’re reading this site, you know all manner of films that relied on that one name to get the movie made and sold, an actor who barely shows up in the actual film.

If you’re looking for a modern take on a western, Eminence Hill is available on demand and on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR department but that has no impact on our review.

With Closet Land, Radha Bharadwaj became the first director of Indian descent to have a film released by a major Hollywood studio. This movie was produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer and basically only features two actors, Madeleine Stowe as Victim and Alan Rickman as Interrogator.

In an unspecified country and time, Victim is taken from her home in the middle of the night and accused of putting anti-government messages into her children’s book Closet Land, a tale of a badly behaved girl who has been locked in a closet as a punishment. However, the totalitarian and anti-woman government assumes that the book is filled with anarchy.

The Interrogator believes that the author is guilty of propaganda created to stir dissent in the hearts of children, while Victim knows that she wrote it to cope with a childhood assault. Worse, the Interrogator later claims that he was the one who abused her in her chldhood, but it’s never explained if he’s telling the truth or trying to assert his will over her.

By the end, no matter what tools the Interrogator attempts to use to get the truth, Victim refuses to sign a confession and instead goes to her death.

This is a movie that has survived based on word of mouth, as it was only released on VHS in the United States. It’s never come out on DVD or blu ray, which is incredibly surprising.

Alan Rickman said of the film in Empire magazine. “Somewhere in there I made — and have continued to do — films that disappear without a trace. You still care about them…while I was doing that [bigger budget films], I’d also done Closet Land, which I should think almost nobody saw.”

In 2009, Bharadwaj said, “If the film has currency today, it is because of viewers like you. You have kept my film alive. You had the ingenuity to put it up on YouTube. You have engaged in chats and discussions about it. So the fact that the film is alive, and its influence is growing, is very much a testimony to what you can do.” You can read more of her thoughts on the film on her personal website.

Seeing as how this film is impossible to get legally in the U.S. — unless you still have a VCR — I’ve decided to share it. My biggest worry is that this is the future our country is headed toward unless we learn empathy and limit the powers of those who crave it most.

Following the James Bulger murder in Liverpool in 1993, Mikey was banned from the UK. Unlike plenty of other movies that have been since re-released (like, for example, our three different Video Nasties articles — follow the links for 1, 2 and 3), this movie is not allowed to play across the pond.

Mikey (Brian Bonsall, who was Andy Keaton on Family Ties) starts the film off by drowning his sister Beth and throwing a hairdryer into the bathtub while his foster mother Grace is just trying to let Calgon take her away. If you’re like, “Mikey, top that!” he soon answers by tripping his foster dad with marbles and beating his brains out with a bat while videotaping the murder. Oh Mikey — you’ve won me over before the credits even ran!

He gets a new family and plenty of friendly victims, which include Josie Bisset from Hitcher In the Dark as a 15-year-old girl who he falls for and Ashley Laurence from Hellraiser as a teacher who pays the price for caring about Mikey’s emotions. Lyman Ward — Ferris Bueller’s dad — and Mimi Craven — second wife of Wes — appear, along with Mark Venturini, Suicide from Return of the Living Dead.

If you’ve ever yearned to see a pre-pubescent child annihilate people with slingshots, crossbows and shoving them through rails and off the second floor of a house — not to mention Molotov cocktails — then you should pretty much watch this one.

You can watch this for free on Tubi.