Thursday night, October 26th, this year’s New York City Horror Film Festival (NYCHFF) took over the Cinepolis Chelsea in Manhattan. It’s year 15 for the festival, which was started by the late Michael J. Hein. The festival, which ends Sunday night, will feature over 40 feature length and short genre films. The highlight will be the presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Award to Chucky himself, Brad Dourif on Saturday. Thursday night kicked off with two film programs, Q&As with directors and actors, and trivia giveaways by the hosts.

Fall is here and Halloween is only days away, which means it’s time once again for All Hallows Read! That means “sharing the joy and spreading the terror” of giving and receiving some scary books this Halloween season.

As usual, my book-loving counterparts here at GoD, Olympus Athens and Waerloga69, helped me pull together some reading recommendations for this year’s list. We have titles from Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, and many more, along with some Audiobook picks as well.

See below for our All Hallows Read: Halloween 2017 Book Recommendations…

This week’s The Drill Down podcast, Google floats the internet over Puerto Rico, Twitter comes clean with political ads, Snapchat‘s big fail, Amazon gets fresh inside your front door, tons of Tesla news, Netflix‘s “˜Binge racing’? and much more.

Suburbicon
Director: George Clooney
Screenwriter: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, George Clooney, Grant Heslov
Cast: Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe, Leith M. Burke, Karimah Westbrook
Distributor: Paramount Studios
Rated R | 105
Release Date: October 27, 2017

On the surface, Suburbicon is supposed to be this social satire set in the heart of late 1950s suburbia, where the little quiet idyllic neighborhood is the epitome of the American Dream. Even in the film’s opening, we see a sales pitch that tries to convince the audience that Surburicon is the place to live with its family-friendliness, perfect homes, and genuinely idyllic atmosphere. At this point, the film turns itself into a satiric commentary on race relations. From there it morphs into a murder-mystery comedy. And neither of these plots has anything to do with each other. So rather than working together cohesively, the two plots are at war with each other, making the film feel like it was shot separately and then stitched back up together for whatever this monstrosity is.

Check out the full review for Suburbicon here below.

Two days before Christmas in 1985, a pair of young Judas Priest fans from Reno, NV went to a Lutheran church playground and attempted suicide with a 12-gauge shotgun under the chin. One of them died instantly while the other survived with facial disfigurement but died from an overdose of painkillers three years later. Their parents brought a civil action suit against the members of Judas Priest, alleging that their sons had been compelled to kill themselves after hearing what they believed to be a subliminal message hidden in a cover of Spooky Tooth’s 1969 song “Better by You, Better than Me” that Priest recorded for their 1978 album Stained Class.

Since the origins of rock & roll, any music that wasn’t family-friendly sock-hop fodder sung by Bing Crosby or Peggy Lee was considered to be the work of agents of the dark lord Satan, and groups of self-righteous religious nuts and power-mad authority figures assembled protests and burned thousands upon thousands of copies of these records in effigy. Horror filmmakers in the latter half of that narcissism-fueled decade cashed in on the raging hysteria by producing several low or medium-budget features with hard rock and/or heavy metal tunes not just occupying space on the soundtrack albums, but actually figuring prominently in the plots.

Horror and metal have always enjoyed a cozy relationship that endures to this day. Since no celebration of Halloween is complete without a juicy fright flick marathon to enjoy with that bag of candy you pilfered from your nieces and nephews, here’s my list of the 5 best heavy metal horror classics to ever grace a theater screen or the shelves at your neighborhood mom & pop video store that closed down ages ago and was replaced with a Verizon Wireless retailer.