Rewind of the Living Dead

When John Carpenter was first contacted about potentially directing a remake of the 1951 classic “The Thing from Another World,” he was reluctant to sign onto the project. 

The studio had already hired and fired “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” director Tobe Hooper and Carpenter didn’t really see a path to a creative remake from a film he admired so much. 

But it was his first chance to move from independent cinema to do a studio film so Ca...

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean something isn’t really happening. That’s the premise behind the new film “Watcher,” which just opened in theaters as director Chloe Okuno teams up with “It Follows” star Maika Monroe for a thriller that feels like something that should have Alfred Hitchcock’s name attached to it. 

In addition to “Watcher” opening in theaters, David Cronenberg’s latest film called “Crimes of the Future” is al...

Horror has always found a home on television but it’s hard to imagine anything capturing the attention of the pop culture zeitgeist like “Stranger Things” has done over the past few years. 

Developed by the Duffer brothers, the series based in the 1980’s was equal parts nostalgia and great storytelling while making titles like Eleven and the Demogorgon household names across the globe. 

When “Stranger Things” season 3 ended, the evil...

It was 15 years ago when writer and director Alex Garland first got an idea for a new script that he wanted to develop. At the time, Garland was only a screenwriter because his directorial debut didn’t come until 2014 with his film “Ex-Machina.” 

The original idea that haunted Garland was a straight forward horror film centered around The Green Man — a creature of folklore that often appears in architecture around the world yet the ...

The latest episode of Rewind of the Living Dead features short reviews for two new horror films that just dropped over the past week as we tackle the controversial new movie “The Sadness” as well as “Firestarter.”

“The Sadness” is being hailed by many as a visionary next step in the zombie film evolution while others have said the movie goes too far with gore and extreme images. We’ll give our thoughts on the film and whether or not...

The wild success of the first Friday the 13th movie had Paramount Pictures frothing at the mouth for a sequel but the initial idea was to essentially treat the franchise as an anthology where each movie would involve an entirely new scary story. 

Some of the producers on the original film had a much different idea that the sequel should involve Jason Voorhees even though his appearance in the original film was essentially done in a ...

Writing partners Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski had already managed to get several scripts made into films but there was plenty more left on the cutting room floor from projects that never got picked up or pieces of stories that were deemed too ambitious that the pair called their “murdered darlings.” 

Armed with those ideas along with an intense desire to write something that would scare each other, Collins and Piotrowski started ...

In a special episode of Rewind of the Living Dead, David Charbonier and Justin Powell —the writers and directors behind “The Boy Behind the Door” and “The Djinn” — join the show for a far reaching conversation about how they got involved in the film industry after growing up as lifelong friends since kindergarten. 

They’ll detail how a delay in making “The Boy Behind the Door” actually led them to creating “The Djinn” almost out of ...

When writer and director Miriama Diallo attended Yale University, she referred to the person in charge of her residential college as ‘master’ — an incredibly outdated term that the school tried to explain away as nothing more than a way to pay homage to a British system on which it was based while stating it had nothing to do with the ugly history of slavery in America. 

Diallo just went along with the university’s rules but a few y...

Combining a modern tale of terror with a 1980s video game, first-time director Toby Meakins and writer Simon Allen decided to tackle a horror film that feels like it’s one part ‘Jumanji’ and another part ‘Black Mirror.’ 

The premise centers around a down-on-her-luck computer programming enthusiast named Kayla, who cleans buildings at night to help support her family, as they continue to grieve the loss of her little brother. When sh...

As she prepared to direct her first solo feature, future Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow wanted to film a Western movie but she found it difficult to secure financing and a studio to back up her vision. 

So alongside co-writer Eric Red, who also penned the horror film “The Hitcher,” Bigelow shifted gears to combine her idea for a modern Western with the vampire genre that had become increasingly popular in recent years, especially afte...

With ownership over the entire “Spider-Man” catalog and the characters surrounding the friendly neighborhood webslinger, Sony announced plans to develop several new films that would branch out and expand the whole universe. 

Following the surprising success around “Venom,” the studio moved swiftly to begin developing even more projects including one centered around Morbius The Living Vampire — a character that started out as a villa...

Thanks to the reception from their first film titled “Patchwork,” writers Tyler MacIntyre and Chris Lee Hill were commissioned to rework a script that had similar overtones as a horror-comedy with female leads. 

They eventually got inspired to transform the script into a slasher movie but MacIntyre and Hill wanted to tackle the project from a different angle than the typical point-of-view from the victims and instead put the killers...

Director Ti West had made several horror films throughout his career but he got to a point where he felt like he said all he needed to say in the genre. 

Following a nearly 10-year-long break, West finally got inspired to return after realizing that he had never made a slasher movie but he was still trying to find the right idea that would inspire him to make another horror film. As a lifelong fan of filmmakers and filmmaking, West ...

A less than enthusiastic reaction to 2002’s “Halloween: Resurrection” left the famous horror franchise in limbo as producers tried to figure out the best way to go forward. 

Numerous scripts were produced that included Michael Myers facing off with the Cenobites from “Hellraiser,” another featuring the return of Jamie Lloyd and even one that would serve as a prequel of sorts to take place during the events of “Halloween III: Season ...

Writer Lauryn Kahn grew up loving horror movies so she was very excited for the chance to actually make one of her own. When she was looking for inspiration, a friend who had previously written a horror film said that she based the script around “the scariest thing” possible for her. 

That gave Kahn the idea to write her story from the female perspective in the world of dating while also addressing the fears that women deal with eve...

Throughout the 1980s, the “Nightmare on Elm Street” film series was one of the most popular horror franchises with fans regularly flocking to the theaters to see what new group of teenagers would be sliced and diced in their dreams by the demonic Freddy Krueger. 

After three films with a fourth on the way, New Line Cinema — the studio that produced the “Nightmare on Elm Street” films — decided to take a stab at bringing Freddy to th...

There’s never been a shortage of ideas when it came to making more sequels, reboots or remakes of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” but the latest incarnation didn’t start taking shape until 2018 when Legendary Pictures obtained the rights to the iconic horror franchise. 

Following the success of his “Evil Dead” remake along with the breakout hit “Don’t Breathe,” Fede Alvarez got interested in the project and...

After he got car-jacked near his home in South London, future writer and director Joe Cornish started to wonder what would have happened if a meteor fell from the sky and came crashing down to the ground at the same time he was being robbed. How would that change the dynamic of that situation? 

Cornish believed that he would probably turn to his tormentors to ask them to have his back in such an unpredictable and potentially dangero...