Black Gate

I have made no secret here of how I feel about Twilight; books, and movies. To be fair, I only made it through two of the books, understanding I was far from the target audience. Over the years since their release, I have managed to watch most of the movies piecemeal, taking them in ten-minute micro-bites, which is about all I could stand to stream in one sitting. Again, I realize I am not the target audience. But to lifelong devotees of vampires in literature, on screen, and in folklore, watching what Twilight did to our favorite monster was more than any fang-fan can be expected to endure.

I mean, would Bela Lugosi ever, EVER trade his cape for a flannel shirt? Or London for Washington state? Or (I can barely type this) sparkle…?

If you must imagine what vampires are doing in the 2000s, for crying out loud binge-watch What We Do in the Shadows.

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Vamp (New World Pictures, released July 18, 1986)

Over the next few weeks I will be taking some trips that are not leisure-related. When traveling alone these days, I most often spend the evening ordering in food and streaming. There was a time when I would to go down to the bar for an adult beverage at the end of the day, but I tend to attract weirdos, and not the fun kind. So these days I hunker down with my laptop and spend a couple of hours watching things I would normally reject at home. The criteria are usually fun (no hack-and-slash), somewhat mindless (I’m usually fried from the day’s activities and/or jet lag) and definitely not rooted in reality (I get enough of that in airports).

And as I never seem to be able to think of any appropriate titles in the moment when determining an evening’s entertainment, I decided to start making a list now. Of course you can find lists of anything with a bit of searching, and this particular search brought me straight to one of my favorite websites Bloody Disgusting, and a list called “Five Underseen Vampire Horror Movies to Stream This Week.”

Well, that’s just about perfect.

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The Blair Witch Project Cast: Heather, Mike and Josh

I have long since been an awed admirer of the genius behind The Blair Witch Project (1999). With a production budget of around $60K the film grossed nearly $250M: roughly a return of 4000x. Considering a movie is labeled “blockbuster” if it returns 3x The BWP was a flipping phenomenon. Not to mention the writers/directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez kicked the project off while they were still film students at University of Central Florida, and the three 20-year-old stars, Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard, who showed up at an open casting call, had never acted in a movie. It also introduced us to the concept of a “found footage” film.

Unbelievable, “lightning strike” kind of success.

With 2024 being the 25th anniversary of BWP, I assumed there would be some press attention in various forms, though this particular form wasn’t what I was expecting.

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If you just sang the title, we can definitely be friends.

There has been Hollywood buzz for more than five years about whether or not a movie version of Stephen King’s 1983 novel Christine would be getting remade. Finally, in June 2021, our favorite horror production company, Blumhouse (The Invisible Man, Black Phone, Insidious), announced they were in, and a script was in development. At that time, King had been on a tear with the success of IT and IT: Chapter 2, not to mention a reboot of Pet Sematary, and by December of that year King was reading over a draft script for a new Christine. However, by February 2022 King was going on the record as saying he had cooled on the idea of a Christine remake.

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The found-footage short Exposure, now available on YouTube

I dearly love guerilla marketing.

The formal definition of guerilla marketing is a marketing strategy that uses unconventional methods to attract interest in a brand or business through viral social media messaging, and the master of this approach in my opinion is J.J. Abrams. For his films Super 8 and Coverfield, Abrams sent fans on Easter egg hunts through fake commercials and misdirected websites. LinkedIn even wrote an article about it, and at the time I thought it was just about the coolest way to generate buzz for a film, which I had ever encountered.

Whether or not this is what writer/director Kris J. Cummins intends with his latest horror short is unknown, but he is definitely generating online buzz.

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