Category: Motor City Nightmares

Interview: A Grandmother on The Evil Dead

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A possessed woman otherwise known as a Deadite, writhes in agony as her body decomposes.

|Benjamin Jarman| My mom doesn’t like horror movies much, but she is open-minded enough to sit down and watch Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead with her son. I wasn’t expecting her to become the newest fan of the franchise, but I was interested in what could keep someone from thinking positively about the horror genre. One of the clearest memories… Continue reading

Hey Bud, Let’s Make a Movie! — The Evil Dead as the Demonic Incarnation of the DIY Filmmaking Spirit

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Five men stand waist deep in water with film equipment

|Andrew Neill| When I was 22, I wanted to be Samuel Marshall Raimi. You probably know him as Sam Raimi, director of The Evil Dead. I was a young, eager kid just out of film school, and he was my hero. His story seemed so close to my own, so attainable. In the fall of 1979, he and his buds Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell wrangled up a small cast and a skeleton crew, descended upon… Continue reading

Gender Bias and the Horror Film That Was Eaten by Disney: Zach Cregger’s Barbarian

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A brown-skinned woman with medium long, loose hair stands on an illuminated front porch of a house, facing the door. It's dark and raining outside, and the woman's hair and coat are wet.

|Penny Folger| “Your movie is like the Jaws of Airbnbs,” jokes Korey Coleman, host of the Double Toasted podcast to writer/ director Zach Cregger for whom Barbarian, in 2022, was his solo feature debut. For those who don’t remember the cultural impact of that record-breaking 1975… Continue reading

Trailers from Heaven: How Barbarian’s Advance Publicity Made a Good Film Better

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A photograph of a young woman mostly in silhouette looking down a dark stairwell. She is wearing a white blouse and blue jeans and has her right hand on the doorframe

|Jay Ditzer| Half the fun (well, maybe a quarter of the fun) of going to the movies is the trailers shown before the main event. Do I want to see—or avoid—a new release? Well-made trailers are almost like tiny little movies themselves, and indeed, there’s an art to making a good trailer. The first rule of good trailers is … Continue reading

The Terror of Timelessness: Screens and Screams in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows

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Olivia Luccardi as Yara Davis, a young long-haired white brunette wearing large black-rimmed glasses and a teal hospital gown, sits up on a hospital bed at a tray with a plate, juice box, jello cup, applesauce, and a banana. In one hand is a sandwich on white bread with a bite taken out of it, and in the other is her pink clamshell e-reader, which is she is staring into. A wrinkled periwinkle pillow and bed sheet are behind her, as are white vertical blinds and a calm blue curtain.

|Chris Polley| I was lucky enough to see David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows in the theater when it was originally released a little under 10 years ago today. At a movie theater that no longer exists, playing hooky from work after lunch but before daycare closed, I was already a bit anxious, being a goody two-shoes… Continue reading