Thompson on Hollywood

Trailer Watch: Joss Whedon's "Cabin in the Woods" Finally Hits Screens in April

Video

The new trailer for Joss Whedon's horror-thriller "The Cabin in the Woods" dropped this week, giving a glimpse into the sci fi scribe's take on the classic friends-trapped-in-the-woods horror plotline.

By Jacob Combs
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December 12, 2011 3:56 PM
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Claymation T is for Toilet Wins Next Great Horror Filmmaker Contest, Joins The ABCs of Death

News

Drafthouse Films, Magnet Pictures and Timpson Films have named Lee Hardcastle's "T IS FOR TOILET" (watch it below) the winner of their “next great horror filmmaker” contest, which now finalizes the lineup of "The ABCs of Death," their film anthology with segments directed by over two dozen filmmakers. With 26 chapters each designated to a letter of the alphabet, the film was inspired by children's education books and allows each filmmaker to chose a word to represent a form of death based on their given letter. Magnet Releasing will debut the film in 2012.

By Sophia Savage
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November 18, 2011 2:58 AM
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AFM News Briefs: Seyfried as Lovelace, Farrell & Rapace's Violent Spree, Lautner Gets Van Sant

- Amanda Seyfried and Peter Sarsgaard are now in talks to star as porn star Linda Lovelace and her pornographer husband, Chuck Traynor, in Lovelace, an adaptation of Eric Danville’s book The Complete Linda Lovelace, from Howl directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. W. Merritt Johnson (TV's In Treatment, Temple Grandin) and Andy Bellin (Trust) wrote the adaptation. After Lovelace and Traynor’s notorious Deep Throat became a porn classic, she left her husband and accused him of forcing her into pornography and prostitution.

By Sophia Savage
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November 2, 2011 5:47 AM
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Halloween Video: Nosferatu with New Graham Reynolds Score

Check out this special Halloween video from the Alamo Drafthouse and Austin-based composer Graham Reynolds. The video features an exclusive track from an original score Reynolds composed for F.W. Murnau's 1922 German Expressionist classic Nosferatu, which will be performed live by Reynolds and The Golden Arm Trio at a screening of the film in Austin on October 30. Here's more.

By Sophia Savage
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October 28, 2011 5:29 AM
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Almodovar Picks Horror Thrillers as AFI FEST Guest Artistic Director, Heads for LA

As you would expect, Pedro Almodovar's selection of films as guest artistic director at this November's AFI FEST is absolutely fabulous. (His current release The Skin I Live In, starring Antonio Banderas, is playing well in art houses.) Besides Almodovar's already planned screening of his own Law of Desire, which will play during AFI's Evening With Pedro Almodóvar Gala presentation on Monday, November 7, accompanied by Banderas, the flamboyant Spanish auteur's program of classic horror films and thrillers are all must-sees for any cinephile: Eyes Without a Face, (Georges Franju, 1960), Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970), Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947) and The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946). And they all make perfect sense as movies that influenced Almodovar's own aesthetic.

By Anne Thompson
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October 25, 2011 7:47 AM
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Elizabeth Olsen-Starrer Silent House To Open March 9; Impeccably Choreographed but Underwhelming

Open Road and Liddell Entertainment wisely waited for Fox Searchlight to spend their marketing and PR energy to promote Elizabeth Olsen in Martha Marcy May Marlene before scheduling the opening of their own Sundance Olsen-starrer, Silent House, for March 9. Directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (Open Water) shot the horror thriller--which places a young woman locked inside her family's isolated lake house with no contact to the outside world-- in one seamless 79-minute shot. (How they did that is another story.)

By Anne Thompson
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October 24, 2011 10:45 AM
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Daniel Radcliffe's Woman in Black Looks Like Standard Period Scare Fare

The Woman in Black, Daniel Radcliffe's film foray into leading man status sans Harry Potter, has released a teaser and poster.

By Sophia Savage
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October 19, 2011 5:33 AM
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IN THE WORKS: Theron's Career Comeback Includes Horror Remake; The Departed Prequel; Night Train

Don't be surprised if Charlize Theron decides not to interrupt what looks like a promising career revival-- via Young Adult/Prometheus/Snow White and the Huntsman--with an ugly step-sister. It's a remake of Zwart Water, a Dutch horror film about a little girl whose new friend is the ghost of her mother's dead twin, in which Theron (her production company Denver & Delilah bought the rights; they also produced Young Adult) is set to play the mother. Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) will direct. This sounds like the kind of project Hilary Swank would do (see: The Reaping). We're betting that Theron won't end up in the film.

By Sophia Savage
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October 18, 2011 11:25 AM
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The Walking Dead 2.1 – Darkness Visible

David Chute leaves Atlantic City behind to re-locate in Atlanta and follow the post-zombie-apocalypse refugees on the road to Fort Bening.It isn’t the most original show on television. In fact, the post-apocalyptic survival epic The Walking Dead could be written off, if you were so inclined, as a mash up of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its sequels and Stephen King’s The Stand, as a plague of flesh-eating zombies gnaws the human race down to a bloody stump, to a close-knit band of hardy survivors. (Romero is the Bram Stoker of the flesh-eating-zombie sub-genre.) Feature films from The Day of The Triffids to Children of Men and I Am Legend, and the current TV shows Falling Skies and Terra Nova, and many others, are all built on much the same template: world-ending horror as a catalyst for interpersonal conflict and bonding and eventually, in the more optimistic variations, for an upsurge of world-re-building resourcefulness.

By David Chute
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October 18, 2011 6:06 AM
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And the Nobel Prize for Film Goes To...

Seeing that the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded last week, to Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, Matt Brennan got to thinking: What if there were a Nobel Prize for Film? This week’s “Now and Then” column revels in some of the possibilities. Check out the trailers and post your own picks in the comments section below: