BayView Entertainment, LLC have a big catalogue of titles featuring many genres and below we have selected 5 titles we think you should watch.

Many of their releases are on various streaming platforms including Amazon Prime Video and select titles on physical media (Region FREE).

PALE HORSE

Art, Love, and Dark Magic come together in this gothic tale of an eccentric man who summons a vengeful spirit to manifest his desires and make him a great artist.

Blu-ray (Region FREE)

THE OMICRON KILLER

It’s November 7th, 2020. New York is dealing with a vicious serial killer who has eluded law enforcement for months and on this night, this serial killer’s reign of terror is about to come to an end. He lets his guard down and walks into a trap that proves to be a fatal mistake. Detectives finally take him down. But the trouble is not over yet. A copycat serial killer has emerged and continues with the senseless murders. His killings are more brutal, so the media re-dubs him The Omicron Killer.

Blu-ray (Region FREE)

Amazon Prime Video

NIGHT OF THE DEAD SORORITY BABES

When two villainous entities initiate gorgeous sorority babes, will any pledges survive? The college girls want to join the sorority Gamma Rho Kappa but discover it hides a dark secret. It’s Party ’til you drop… dead!

Blu-ray (Region FREE)

Amazon Prime Video

PESADILLA

After a house robbery fails, a group of thieves decide to try again in a house with a grieving family… but something sinister lurks in the darkness.

Blu-ray (Region FREE)

Amazon Prime Video

THE DARK ROOM

As murders grip a small town, a photographer uncovers something sinister while developing pictures for a local religious leader. While the body count rises around him, the photographer is pursued by a mysterious woman and also finds his sanity questioned by his own doctor.

Blu-ray (Region FREE)

Amazon Prime Video

Keep up to date with all things BayView Entertainment, LLC by following them on social media and via their website.

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About BayView Entertainment, LLC

BayView Entertainment, LLC is a leading independent distributor of feature films, fitness, and special-interest content. With hit narrative films Skinamarink and Robot Monster, plus legendary documentaries On Any Given Sunday and The Endless Summer leading the way, BayView is one of the fastest-growing names in the field.

Peter 'Witchfinder' Hopkins

horrorscreamsvideovault.co.uk

The post 5 genre titles to watch from BayView Entertainment appeared first on Horror Asylum.

The horror genre is thought, among other things (they are always called things) to give its audience a cathartic experience of release. I heard this comment on a recent award program broadcast on a streaming service that went further to say this helped with viewer’s mental health allowing them to cope with the troubles that we all know have manifested because of the Pandemic and other life factors.

I find that a hard sell as I have yet to understand how watching someone plunge a blade into someone or eat someone alive allows someone to cope with the fact that they cannot meet their friends at a park. That is a somewhat simplistic example of what others may feel in their lives as well, all have our own stories both pleasant and not-so-pleasant.

Some horror media people will also say that seeing people overcoming problems and triumphing in the case of ending the threat in the film is uplifting.  One would hope that the audience will understand what they are seeing is a created story or something based on the fact that I believe most people no matter how effectively the images appear.

My idea is that these feelings stem from the desire of the audience to belong to something. In watching years of horror media documentaries, one finds the theme that horror fans are outsiders some in their own families. Traumas happen in life be it being laughed at, physically attacked or the online as I call it ‘death by a thousand texts’ that happens today. One of my own family memories is of my enraged father storming in ripping my copy of Warren publications of Monster World issue number 3 magazine in half while seven-year-old me was reading it on the floor of our living room. The mint copy of that issue would be worth a bit more than the astonishing 35 cents I paid for it. I moved past that or at least I think I did although I can still recall it in all its detail. This is not to say that my reconciliation of that moment is something all can do since some incidents go into darker places in people’s lives.

We enjoy the media of Horror because of a sense of community that many don’t want to feel alone, even introverts or the so-called Alpha people not because it allows you to conquer your problems. Conversely, I don’t quite understand this idea of inclusion of race or sexual orientation. I understand I wear what some call the ‘skin of privilege’ as I am a white, Anglo-Saxon heterosexual male that accepts other ways of doing things. I am not a ‘woke’ person as I find literature and art are products of their time. I fail to see how seeing a person of color in say for example Candyman series or someone in a Jordan Peele film shows someone they can do the same. My suggestion is that the fact that non-white people can make films and be on the screen inspires career decisions.

Yes, I understand that there are people that watch the ‘Kills count’ of films and how they are presented. Laugh during gory moments and think it’s fun to put themselves to an endurance test by watching a film such as the notorious German film Nekromantik (1988), A Serbian film (2010) or even moments from Terrifier 2 (2022). They enjoy shocking their non-horror friends and simply want to piss off older folk.  Difference for difference’s sake is waste as I see which is the online equivalent of posting  on social media simply to inflame. This to me indicates something else in their personalities that belonging would cure in them.

In conclusion wise Horror is all-encompassing and has many aspects of it that appeal to many ages, nationalities, religions, and sexual orientations which is what makes the system work. Stories, folklore, and current events no matter how heinous the sources and will always come from people and society even when the battle of AI is about to begin.

If I may borrow a slogan from a North American print magazine.  ‘We all scream in the same language.’

By Terry Sherwood

What are are your thoughts on this subject?

Let us know in the comments.

Terry Sherwood

The post Shock & Cheese: ”IS THERE SOMEONE INSIDE YOU?” appeared first on Horror Asylum.

Yes, the Zombie genre “shot its load”. The Masters of Horror TV series episode titled “Clive Barker’s Haeckel’s Tale” directed by John McNaughton showed the Dead doing that on screen. The Zombie genre has been dead for a long time time. The carnivorous dead started by George Romero has always been about the ultimate consumer society be it consuming people or haunting a mall.

The Zombies of “Classic Horror” reflected the time as the term referred to those that “blindly” followed orders be it by signing up to fight a War, doing someone’s evil bidding or working in a sugar cane field.

Today, Zombies are self-made monsters anyone can costume themselves up as and walk about mindlessly. Zombies have lost their precociousness as eating machines and turned into reflections of human characteristics. They scheme, they talk, and they have raucous sex, particularly in Garth Ennis’s comic series “Crossed.” The shown level of violence, depravity and the panorama of the story of that series along with gore has yet to make it into a film. The closest to ‘”Crossed” is The Sadness (2021) revealing human frailty, lust and delight in bashing or inserting things into parts of bodies shown in the subversive Comic series. The Sadness (2021) does it because it makes us cringe, laugh, turn away and look back again. In life, we all look at car wrecks and accidents as we pass them. Self-pleasure can’t be all bad as shown literally in that film.

On the tack of illuminating humans’ frailties, why not have The Ambivalent Dead? Dialogue such as “Oh I don’t know if I want to run that far to get the girl. I mean she is tasty. Running makes me sweat and I have no pores.” Make the zombies create affordable housing before some other mindless creature can’t make up their minds as to how and why to do it.

In its present form yes the Zombie should have retired a long time ago. A form that has reached the end as in a moment from The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) that came from the nadir period of Hammer Studios. The creature was dissolved in acid while giving a finger salute.

By Terry Sherwood

Do you think the zombie genre has lost its shock value? 

What is your favourite underrated zombie movie?

Let us know in the comments.

Terry Sherwood

The post Shock & Cheese: I LOVE YOU BUT PARTS OF ME ARE FALLING OFF appeared first on Horror Asylum.

With Halloween just around the corner, you might be tempted to settle down as a family to watch some spine-tingling celluloid.

But unless you want to give a youngster nightmares, you might want to give Haunters of the Deep, a sinister British flick from 1984, a miss.

So says Dr Noel Brown, a Senior Lecturer in Film at Liverpool Hope University and author of the recent book British Children’s Cinema: From the Thief of Bagdad to Wallace and Gromit.

He’s been sifting through his favourite fright films designed for youngsters.

And Dr Brown says Haunters of the Deep – about a tragic horde of ghost children who torment a group of kids on holiday in Cornwall – is an unsung classic. Seek it out, if you dare…

He explains: “Haunters of the Deep is a really interesting film from a British organisation called the Children’s Film Foundation. It was funded by the Government through a tax on cinema admissions. So, anyone who bought a cinema ticket between the early ‘50s and the mid-80s helped to fund the production of low-budget, small scale films intended for children who attended Saturday morning pictures.

“These films weren’t really intended to make money, though some were later shown on TV, and they’ve sort of been forgotten about by an entire generation of people.

“Some of them – particularly Haunters of the Deep and Daemon, a nightmarish tale about a young boy being possessed by a demon, are really, really good.”

Haunters of the Deep was shot in various locations in Cornwall, particularly Boscaswell and Trewellard.

You can watch Haunters of the Deep, Cert PG and directed by Andrew Bogle, by visiting the British Film Institute’s ‘Player’ video rental service. You can also watch the intro to the film via the Children’s Film and Television Foundation’s YouTube channel.

And Dr Brown – who recently wrote about the Hollywood habit for happy endings in children’s films, and how anxiety-ridden British cinema from the 70s tried to buck that trend – says Haunters of the Deep is full of atmospheric dread.

He adds: “It’s a really creepy story about a group of kids who go on holiday to Cornwall.

“There’s a tin mine – the ‘Devil’s Mine’ – underneath the surface of the ground. At some point in the past, child workers were sent down into the mine to work but the seawater broke through the cavern walls and killed lots of them.

“In the film, some of those children come back as ghosts. And the results are really chilling. You get these eerie shots of dead children standing on hills looking completely white, shrouded by mist. It’s really atmospheric. Of course, the kids on holiday don’t know what’s going on and are terrified out of their wits.

“In the end, the ghost kids are not unfriendly, and there’s a resolution of sorts. And the film also makes an important social comment on the practice of child labour. Of course, you don’t have to look at it at that level – it still works just as a short, scary movie without the social commentary.”

Here Dr Brown, who edits upcoming book The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film, which is due for release in May next year, talks us through his other choices for scariest – and most important – children’s horror flicks of all time.

The Witches (1990, directed by Nicolas Roeg).

Dr Brown says: “This is an adaptation of a Roald Dahl novel, recently remade by Hollywood but which is nowhere near as good as the original, British version. Before The Witches, Nic Roeg was already a notable director of adult horror films. He directed Don’t Look Now, one of the creepiest films ever made. And this raises a really interesting point about the way lots of people think about children’s films as being ‘separate’ from films for grown-ups. I don’t think Nic Roeg felt that – The Witches was an extension of the kinds of films he’d been making for adult audiences. So he doesn’t hold back in the cinematography and he uses some of the conventions of horror films – including tight framings and lingering shots on the witches’ horrible transformations, as well as jump scares – or in the dark themes being explored. He doesn’t try to juvenilise the source material either. The parents die early in the film, the boy has to be looked after by his sick grandmother, and the witches themselves are grotesque. They’re not comedic. And it’s this seriousness and conviction which makes The Witches so frightening.”

Gremlins (1984, directed by Joe Dante)

“This is a really important film within the context of contemporary Hollywood cinema because it basically brought in the PG-13 rating in America. Up until this point, there was the ‘G’ rating for children, a ‘PG’, which meant younger children might need to be accompanied by an adult, but they didn’t need to be, and then there was the ‘R’ rating, which meant children under the age of 16 shouldn’t watch.

A lot of the family films being made by Disney at this time were very juvenile, only for children. But then George Lucas and Steven Spielberg came along and started producing films like Star Wars, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and Back to the Future, which re-invented the traditional idea of the family audience, but which also pushed boundaries in trying to appeal to a slightly older audience. Spielberg did this with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which got a PG rating but was really scary in places – you had a death cult pulling out people’s hearts! Shortly afterwards, Spielberg produced Gremlins, another film rated PG. People started saying, ‘We can’t have this rated PG – it’s scaring the kids!’ You have the Gremlins being destroyed in really grotesque ways, including being exploded in a microwave. And this is when authorities decided they needed to introduce a PG-13 rating, which was the precursor to the 12A rating here in the UK. And don’t forget that director Joe Dante also knew his way around a horror film before making Gremlins, having also made cult werewolf movie The Howling. With Gremlins, Dante wanted to have his cake and eat it – he wanted to appeal to children but also to teenagers and adults. PG-13 provided a bridge between the children and adult markets – and it changed Hollywood forever. Most of Hollywood’s biggest hits now, from Lord of the Rings to the Marvel movies, are PG-13.”

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993, directed by Henry Selick)

Dr Brown recently published the book Contemporary Hollywood Animation, and there’s a chapter on animated children’s horror films – of which The Nightmare Before Christmas is a classic of the genre.

He says: “It’s such an influential film in contemporary animation. This was a Disney film, but the studio was worried about alienating its traditional audience and so put it out through its more adult distribution arm, Touchstone. Tim Burton wrote the script and devised the concept art and, up until this point, most of his films had a dark, Gothic sensibility, full of grotesque humour. And one of the things that’s so important about The Nightmare Before Christmas is that it redefined the kind of thing that mainstream Hollywood animated film could do. It could be dark, it could have non-conformist characters, it could have moments of disgusting humour. Burton and director Henry Selick created this subgenre of animated features that would appeal to children but which had comic horror tropes within it – including nightmarish settings and bits of body horror – all of which also turn up in Burton’s Frankenweenie and Corpse Bride. A genre of creepy, dark animated horror films for children was born.”

Paranorman (2012, directed by Chris Butler)

“I think this is one of the best Hollywood animated films. It’s got lots of iconography that we associate with adult horror films but it uses humour to diffuse a lot of the tension. It’s about a boy, Norman, who can see dead people. It’s obviously playing on The Sixth Sense. Norman has very friendly conversations with ghosts in the movie but everyone else thinks he’s odd. He’s really good hearted and kind and he turns this idea of being weird into being a badge of honour that he wears with pride. He likes being weird. And he’s another unconventional child protagonist of the kind that have been celebrated in recent years. They never were in the classical Disney films. Like The Nightmare Before Christmas, this idea of non-conformism as being something to be celebrated really comes to the fore in films like Paranorman. There are jump scares and references to lots of adult oriented horror films. The zombies look just like the undead from George Romero’s films. When Norman sees horrible things coming at him, we see it through his eyes – and that’s a technique that’s used in adult-oriented horror films. But there’s also something important the film does to alleviate those moments of horror – they’re made comedic. There’s this famous scene where Norman – who is trying to lift a curse that has been placed on the town – tries to pry a book from the hands of a dead man. Rigor mortis has already set in with the corpse, and Norman ends up pulling the body on top of him accidentally… just as the dead man’s tongue flops out and onto Norman’s face. It’s a moment that could be played for pure horror but it’s also played for laughs. There’s also a social comment going on in the film, too. The main villain is the spirit of a teenage girl who’s been burned at the stake for being a suspected witch. Basically, she’s been the victim of child abuse. Norman has to talk her down and appeal to her humanity. Again, it’s about children who don’t conform to social expectations being victims – it’s a parable of accepting difference.”

And ones for the adults….

“When it comes to adult horrors, the scariest for me are Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and John Carpenter’s The Thing. What I really enjoy about horror films is the atmosphere of dread. And both The Shining and The Thing just have a mounting sense that something awful is happening and it can’t be stopped. There’s an incredible sense of doom. The stop-motion special effects in The Thing are also just amazing.”

** To learn more about studying Film in the School of Creative and Performing Arts at Liverpool Hope University.**

Peter 'Witchfinder' Hopkins

horrorscreamsvideovault.co.uk

The post Creepiest children’s movie of all time – and chances are, you’ve probably never even heard of it. appeared first on Horror Asylum.

But shooting times don’t usually connect with the season, so behind the scenes a good deal of work may have to take place to ensure the outside locations look suitably autumnal.

The most famous film in the genre, John Carpenter’s 1978 classic Halloween, is set as everyone knows in the fictitious town of Haddonfield in Illinois, on Halloween itself. However, it was in reality shot in May 1978 in Los Angeles.

This meant that the trees – seen clearly throughout the film as being a fresh, springlike green – were not losing their leaves. This forced the crew to use artificial leaves for the pavement, and scooped the fake leaves up after a take, so they could be reused at the next location.

London-based actor Roman Wood, who appeared in microhorror Halloween Girls, knows the downside of creating that Halloween glamour, even down to the added leaves. The short was shot half in Los Angeles outside the famous house where Halloween’s heroine Laurie Strode sits, and half in London at midnight.

His character is on his Iphone to his LA friend, who is about to discover – to her cost – that Michael Myers is more than just a festive horror story. Roman’s scenes were shot supposedly on Halloween, but was in reality in January in London. This saw him, like Laurie, surrounded by leaves, in this case collected by the producer the previous autumn, to add the correct seasonal touch.

The actor admits that pretending it was a balmy October night in nothing more than a Tshirt and leather jacket in the depths of winter was less than easy – especially when a hailstorm struck.

Roman says: “My character doesn’t know anything is wrong with his friend in LA while she’s sightseeing in this famous horror location, so he’s just enjoying a mild Halloween walk in the park while they’re chatting.

“In reality, we were shooting in early January so we were all freezing and when a hailstorm suddenly hit, and knocked over the camera, we were worried it would stop filming. But after we’d wiped hail off the film gear, the show went on as it always does!”

Carpenter was involved four decades later in 2018’s Halloween, this time shot even earlier in the year in January and February in Charleston, South Carolina. This again saw all the fake “fall” leaves (and pumpkins) having to be created from scratch.

“Carpenter’s latest instalment (Halloween Kills, still in cinemas) boasts a cameo from Charles Cypher who appeared in the original as Brackett. He returns with his reprised line – delivered in the ’78 version to Laurie but given this year to Myers himself – “It’s Halloween. Everyone’s entitled to one good scare.”

So as you kick your way through a pile of leaves to the local supermarket to get your pumpkin for this festive weekend, at least you won’t have to create any movie magic to get that authentic look.

Happy Halloween!

Nina Romain

Nina Romain is living proof that small children shouldn’t be taken trick-or-treating in Alabama in the 1980s – they tend to end up obsessed with the creepier side of Halloween! Her horror shorts tend to be shot half in the seedier side of Los Angeles and half in the darker side of the UK. She’s spending this Halloween dressed as a creepy clown at various London horror events and planning to eat her own weight in festive treats. You can find her on www.girlfright.com and IMDB.

www.girlfright.com

The post Creating that Halloween look – at any time of the year appeared first on Horror Asylum.