Mainstream Makes Me Scream
Some Less Known Movies to Fill Your Fright Nights!
Bradley Drew Brereton (Production Manager)
Hello, horror fans old and new, it’s the month of October and it’s time to get the scare on! What better way to do this than some horror movies and games that will scare your pants off? Or, if you’re the person who laughs at Saw, you’ll find some comedic gold in this list of less known horror.
Penumbra: Black Plague is a game developed by Frictional games. Penumbra was released in 2008 and is a horror game about a man sending his friend an email, begging him to finish the work he could not. This game is packed with tight scares and an atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a knife… and later you may get stabbed with that same knife!
The Wrong Turn franchise is comprised of movies filled with stupidity and “I’m a horrible person” laughs. The movies begin by following a group of people who took a “WRONG TURN”, and
later get hunted down by cannibals.This movie spanned off into five more sequels, each of them getting more and more stupid, eventually making a main character out of the cannibal “Three Fingers”. These movies are filled with ridiculous gore and plots that can be summed up in three words… Cannibals kill people!
Nier… now, many people have not heard of Nier, and those who have heard of it are probably saying: “But how is that a horror game?” Excellent question. Here’s how: It’s disturbing on every emotional level and contains elements of horror games long past. It may be a hack and slash by first view, but at its heart you have a massacring, soul-crushing level of depth here. Even the weapons that you can wield in the game have horror elements tied to them! Grab the tissues and the Doritos as you go on an adventure with Grimoire Weiss, and find out how many children (and entire civilizations) were butchered in the making of this game!
Next, we have 1408, a movie
based on a short story by Steven King… and might I say, it’s amazing! This film is very much a psychological horror, with the spirits in room 1408 destroying the mind and warping the reality of Mike Enslin (John Cusack). As the clock ticks by and it gets closer to the end of the time he’s supposed to spend in the room, the frights get more intense and the action gets louder.
Finally, we’ll end with a movie that is an old classic among horror fans, The House on Haunted Hill (1959) starring Vincent Price. This movie is about a group of people sleeping at a mansion in hope of managing to go through the entire night without having to run away from the building, dying from fright, or being murdered by the “spirits” of the building. It’s very intense, and if you’re into slowerpaced movies where the plot is thick and the special effects old but still quite enjoyable, definitely watch and end your October with a tale of horror by the master himself, Vincent Price.
Other honorable mentions: include Jacob’s Ladder, Eternal Darkness: Sanities Requiem, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, any of the Hammerfilms (Dracula, She, etc), and finally: Condemned: Criminal Origins