It seems that zombies are here to stay.  Sure I'm not the first to make this observation, but it seems one can't turn around without seeing a new zombie movie, book, game, comic, t-shirt...the list goes on.  But I'm not complaining, the living dead are always welcome in my house.  Provided there is a good story, or good effects, I'll probably give it a whirl.

One thing that is a crucial element in stories of the undead is the classification of the zombies.  Are they dead?  Undead?  Merely “infected”?  People will argue about what's truly “a zombie,” but these arguments aren't as important as the one we should be having:  Is the story effective? Another essential feature in zombie stories is how the infection initially begins.  Some stories choose not to say what happened, which is fine, and some have the characters speculate on the subject about three or four different ways.  Sometimes you get to see it unfold right in front of you, which is the case for the first issue of Alpha Girl.

“Loud” does not equal “scary.”  That’s something no one seemed to have told director James Watkins before he embarked on The Woman in Black, a film that is being described as an old school ghost story.  And yes, it is indeed old school; however, it all too often relies on tiresome modern scare tactics to the point where it becomes laughable.  

Seasoned horror fans will find themselves filled with ennui and creating a mental checklist of every genre trope imaginable the film calls upon - usually with ear-piercing vigor.  Newcomers to fright fare – and I imagine that is this PG-13 film’s draw – will likely enjoy the supernatural assault it offers and seeing former Potter, Daniel Radcliffe, pushing his way through a house of horrors.

A new Ti West movie is almost an event film for horror fans. He is that rare young genre director who receives adoration from both genre fans and the mainstream media. Last Friday, none other than The New York Times featured a story on West, focusing on his talent for slow-burn horror.

The praise is well-deserved. West is an enormously talented writer/director with a talent for crafting somewhat retro tales that build tension very deliberately and effectively (not counting Cabin Fever 2). If The Roost showed a lot of promise, The House of the Devil announced him as someone worth paying attention to. 

West’s latest, The Innkeepers, ably showcases the filmmaker’s abilities. A potent ghost story packing genuine thrills and chills, it should satisfy fans of the director and possibly win him some new ones. 

According to Q, if you break down a narrative you will find at its heart seven essential conflicts: man against man, man against nature, man against himself, man against God, man against Society, man caught in the middle, and man and woman. Any one of these is more than enough grist for a storyteller's mill, and has been the root for our most archetypal narratives.

Or you could go the other way and try to jam as much of that as you can into one plot, the way Joe Carnahan (The A-Team) has done in his modern Jack London-like adventure, The Grey.

John Ottway (Liam Neeson) is a master at going his own way and has done so for probably his entire life, as far as we can tell from the small snippets we get at it. A soldier, or possibly even a mercenary or terrorist (we'll never know for sure), in his early life, in the loneliness of middle age he now finds himself a professional killer of a different stripe tasked with keeping wolves and other predators from attacking oil field workers in the frozen wasteland of northernmost Alaska. A place, in Ottway's estimation, fit only for men who have discovered they can't live in the civilized world. That's an assumption which will be tested for him and a small group of oil workers who survive a plane crash and must make their way through the elements away from a pack of territorial wolves and back to safety.

Two historically dubious filmmaking forms come together in V/H/S, a horror anthology comprised entirely of found-footage vignettes and which chillingly showcases both the breadth of interesting ideas still available to explore within the genre, and the considerable talent of some of its most promising filmmakers. Bloody Disgusting’s Brad Miska conceived the project and recruited David Bruckner (The Signal), Glenn McQuaid (I Sell the Dead), Joe Swanberg (Silver Bullets), Ti West (The Innkeepers), Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die), and directing team Radio Silence to write and direct segments of various technical fidelity, in the process creating a consistently fun and scary journey across the landscape of contemporary horror.

There are certain things in the horror genre that filmmakers should learn to shy away from.  Generic and bland titles is one thing, because if you go to any video store that does trade-ins, you'll see a mountain of films with similar or the same titles and their $2.99 price tag.  Needless to say when I saw I was going to be watching a film entitled Rage I immediately thought about The Rage: Carrie 2, but quickly tried to quell any comparison away and go in watching this movie blind.

The film's story revolves around an interesting idea: What happens when a driver takes their road rage one step too far? (That's why it's called Rage, get it?) But you won't be able to comprehend fully what the story is until about 30 minutes in and, mind you, the movie is only 80 minutes long. There were a few things I noticed while watching the first act: I had no idea what the names were for any of the characters (they were mentioned but I quickly forgot them), I had no idea what the story was, and I was wondering why I was reviewing this for a horror website.