A good beginning credit sequence is really all it takes for me to like a movie. That seems like a really stupid thing to say – but when you think about it, while not all good movies have creative credits, almost all creative credits belong to good movies. It shows that the filmmakers actually cared enough to do something meaningful with their title sequence as opposed to just throwing out some stock effect… After all, the beginning credits are the opening number to a film – the handshake – and if it doesn’t make you excited about what you’re about to watch then there really isn’t a point is there? Here are a collection that got be friggin’ pumped right from the start.

It’s that time of year again, time for candy and masks and bats. I’m not sure why I singled bats outs, especially when we have them year-round here in Austin. But they fit right in during Halloween, the holiday that seems to be everyone’s favorite these days. So what better time than now to bring to you a Commentary Commentary on John Carpenter’s horror classic, Halloween? It doesn’t hurt that Halloween is my all-time favorite film, a film I’m sure I’ve seen more than 100 times, no exaggeration. Okay, maybe a little exaggeration, but I’d be shocked to learn the number of times I’ve sat through it is far South of that. So here, presented in all its black and orange – but really just black – wonder, is the list of things I learned from the Halloween commentary.

Editor’s Note: We’ve spent a while searching for a fitting replacement for Ashe (who we still miss), but we’re elated to welcome David Christopher Bell to our team. He’ll be writing insightful lists for us every Thursday from now until we stop blackmailing him for that thing he did in Florida in 1986. Please give him a warm welcome! It’s funny. After Anthony Perkins first appeared as Norman Bates there was absolutely no going back from it. No matter what role he was put in after Norman, when audiences looked at him all they could see was the shower-interrupting taxidermologist that they feared so deeply. This proved to be a major hindrance in his career, causing him never to land any major role in the industry afterward. Now if only he had worn a mask. After all, if horror films have taught us anything it’s that no matter how effective a performance is, if you have a bunch of rubber on your face, mainstream audiences aren’t going to end up learning your name or recognizing your face. So in the interest of giving credit where credit is due, the following are some of those very names and faces that are responsible for some of the greatest movie nightmares of modern horror. People who you could walk right by on the streets and never know that they are to thank for all those times your childhood-spawned neuroses forced you to double-check under your bed.

Previously, on Boiling Point… I bitched about Hollywood not releasing enough horror movies in October. This week, I’m taking aim at them for not releasing any monster movies – pretty much ever. I’ve come to ask where all the monsters have gone. Monster movies have a special place in any horror fan’s heart. Whether you’re a fan of giant mutated ants, hybrid beasts, strange aliens, or any crazy old weird thing someone dreamed up that crawled out of a swamp and raped a cheerleader, monsters are awesome. The bigger, badder, and bloodier the better. It seemed for years that even if you weren’t looking for a monster, one would come out of the darkness and tear your face off. Nowadays, you’re hard pressed to get your shit packed in by a mythical beast even if you go defecating on Native American burial grounds.

When the calendar page turns to October, we Rejects have only one thought: horror. To celebrate this grandest and darkest of months, we’ll cover one excellent horror film a day for the entirety of the month. That’s 31 Days of Horror and 31 Films perfect for viewing on a dark, chilly, October night. If you, like us, love horror and Halloween, give us a Hell Yeah and keep coming every day this month for a new dose of adrenaline. Synopsis: Picking up immediately after the events of the first film, or more accurately, starting during the last few minutes of the first film, Halloween II follows an injured Laurie Strode to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, where no amount of ambulance drivers, doctors, or nurses can keep her safe from the relentless Michael Myers.

It’s October and that means one thing in Hollywood: not releasing horror movies. It’s become sort of a yearly tradition for me to bitch about the lack of horror movies released in the month of Halloween and so far, Hollywood hasn’t yet disappointed in disappointing me. People love Halloween, they love scary movies, and they love combining the two. During the month of October, more people than ever are interested in seeing scary flicks and having fun in a theater. You can look at positively mediocre movies, like most of the Saw franchise, Rob Zombie’s Halloween movies, and Paranormal Activity, that are released in October and make oodles of money — money they wouldn’t make at any other time. It’s sort of like when poker started appearing on television, everyone started buying poker sets. Poker movies started coming out. SyFy Channel and The Asylum make a living off of making rip-off movies that play around the release of huge movies, when people are most interested in that subject. If only there were a way to know when people would be interested in what…

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a collection of news that fell through the cracks, will make you crack up, or that’s addicted to crack. How can movie news be addicted to a controlled substance? It’s unclear, but it’s a harsh world out there when the sun goes down. We begin tonight with the vague news that Ghostbusters (the original) will be hitting theaters again in October. No, not a version of Ghostbusters III that’s been secretly filming for the past year amidst empty press releases. The original flick will play. But when? Where? The movie’s Facebook page is short on answers, and when I checked with Columbia/Sony, so were they.

When I was talking with some friends a while back about how much my wife and I enjoyed Insidious (probably one of the first genuinely well-made horror films in ages), I started thinking about how they’re almost sure to greenlight a sequel any day now (still waiting on that) for some studio to run into the ground like James Wan and Leigh Whannel’s previous collaboration, the Saw series. Saw got dumber and shittier as it went on, probably due to the fact that by fourth film or so the plot was incomprehensibly stupid. What’s the point of all this again? And Jigsaw had how many apprentices now? By the end of the series, I was expecting him to have solved the financial crisis by employing the majority of Americans to set moronic traps for each other. But the thing that’s easy to forget is that the first Saw movie was actually a pretty damn good movie. It wasn’t unique by any means. It owes a lot to Dario Argento and his fellow Italian Giallo filmmakers, but that’s not the point. The point is, Wan and Whannel paid attention. They actually put forth an effort to make a film that wasn’t a remake or a sequel or a cheap knockoff. They showed their hand as far as influences go, but fuck, so does Quentin Tarantino. Hell, even Saw II and Saw III weren’t bad. So maybe that’s the secret to making a horror film that’s not ball-crushingly idiotic. Maybe it just [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

I like these twitter Q and A’s. The best one so far to speak of is the video Q and A with Werner Herzog, a man that could probably still give existential and out there answers to the dumbest of questions. He’s a guy I could listen to all day. Another guy I could listen to all day? The very friendly John Carpenter. From 2:00-3:30 p.m. (PST), the director behind too many to count classics will be participating in a twitter Q and A. Sadly, this not a video one like the Herzog’s. But considering it’s been quite some time since the horror icon’s Ghost of Mars(…) and the fact that it may be a few more years until we get a followup to The Ward, it’s still a rare treat. Here’s all you have to do to throw a question to Carpenter: Send your questions to @ARC_Entertain and make sure to include #theward in your tweet. And for those of you who didn’t know, Carpenter is already an active participant on twitter: @TheHorrorMaster The Ward is now in limited release and on VOD.

Despite the fact that their plates are pretty full already, director Patrick Lussier and his co-writer Todd Farmer are chomping at the bit to get the opportunity to make Halloween 3. In a chat with MTV, the duo have said that once their insane dive into 3D with Nic Cage, Drive Angry 3D, gets it’s home release, and they get through work on a reboot of the Hellraiser franchise, a continuation of the new Halloween franchise that director Rob Zombie started is next on their wish list. “We would love it to go through,” Lussier said. “We would make that the second somebody said, ‘Yes, go make it,’ because it’s a script that we love and a script we’re really passionate about and it’s an amazing character and an incredible franchise, and it would just be a great experience for us to go back to the roots.”

As a note of caution, you should probably not google “Fun Size” with the safe search off, but if you haven’t (and your eyes still work properly), feast your virginal eyes on the news that Josh Schwartz will be directing a comedy set on Halloween night featuring a sarcastic young girl and her stupid brother that she’s forced to take trick ‘r treating. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the little brother goes missing, and his sister has to find him before mom finds out about it (and about the babysitter being dead). Schwartz is the executive producer of Chuck, one of many co-writers on the X-Men: First Class script, and a musician whose work can be found on movies as diverse as Undercover Brother and Happy Feet. The point? The guy is awesome. He’ll be producing under his Fake Empire banner alongside Paramount who wants it ready to roll by this Halloween despite not officially greenlighting it. The script was written by Max Werner – a writer on The Colbert Report – but no actors have been cast yet.

Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema: where the tricks and the treats are indistinguishable. This is the internet’s spookiest of bad movie columns dedicated to digging up the corpses of long-dead schlock. I’m tempted to do a Vincent Price laugh, but that doesn’t come through in text too well. Every week I slash a bad movie down to size and then, through a seance of praise, invite its spirit into my own heart. The result is truly terrifying. I will then pair the film with a supernaturally tasty junkfood item to haunt your waistline as the movie haunts your brain! So, as it turns out, horror sequels win the month of October here at JFC. And being that we are just two days removed from my favorite holiday, I thought it best to wrap up the year’s creepiest month with another film in the Halloween franchise. Today’s film is Halloween H20.

What if William Shatner had played Dare Devil in a 1970s exploitation flick? What if Alfred Hitchcock had gotten the idea for Halloween and made it with Kim Novak and Robert Mitchum? What if Mickey Rourke played Superman? These are the questions that haunt me in the moments just before I close my eyes to go to bed. Fortunately, someone else out there is even more obsessed with the possible worlds out there where Boris Karloff was Freddy Krueger (and the resulting movie posters).

For those not keeping up with the times, it’s October. Which means that everyone has horror fever. Scary movies are being played in dark rooms, nubile coeds are being given manly arms upon which they can grasp when the brown note kicks in, and people like Brian Salisbury are busting out VHS copies of Demons 2 in a ritual that is as old as evil itself. For some — many of you, I would venture — it’s the most wonderful time of the year. And while I’m slightly more inclined to celebrate the beginning of bikini season, who am I to rob you of your fun? With that in mind, I browsed on over to Yahoo Movies today to find this fancy new infographic. I’m told these are all the rage in Europe. This one pits three of cinema’s most prolific slashers together in a good ole fashioned kill-off. Who killed more in their cinematic careers, asks the graphic, Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees or Freddy? According to this, it’s Jason by a landslide victory. More impressive is his victory when you consider the fact that he took his first movie off, letting Mama Voorhees do all the slicing. So here’s my question, horror lovers: are there any more prolific killers out there? Also, which of these fine hellions had the most interesting series of kills? Check out the full infographic after the jump if you need a reminder as to which movies these kills came from.

This rant is entitled “Hey, Horror Movie Characters” for three reasons. One, 31 Days of Horror is in full effect and we’re talking horror every day. Two, it’s directed at characters in a horror movie. Three, I can’t put “Kill the Mother Fucker” in the subject header. I love horror movies. This much is true and obvious. That doesn’t mean I give them a blank check written out to idiocy. There are plenty of bad things in horror movies, even in good ones. Primarily, people making bad decisions. Granted our victims are almost always young teenagers, unwise in the ways of the world, potentially inebriated, and often thinking with their sex organs rather than their central nervous system. Still, even in my most obliterated of states I know that I’m not going to fit through the doggy door in the garage. So hey, horror movie characters. Quit making dumb decisions and kill the mother fucker.

For 36 days straight, we’ll be exploring the famous 36 Dramatic Situations by examining a film that exemplifies each one. From family killing family to prisoners in need of asylum, we brush off the 19th century list in order to remember that it’s still incredibly relevant today. Whether you’re seeking a degree in Literature, love movies, or just love seeing things explode, our feature should have something for everyone. If it doesn’t, please don’t stab us numerous times with cutlery. Part 32 of the 36-part series takes a look at “Slaying of a Kin Unrecognized” with John Carpenter’s Halloween.

With the clear dawn of a new decade, we say goodbye to a once-great innovation that’s been reduced to a scummy fad. R.I.P. 3D.

Carpenter seems untouchable these days, and he’s only getting started. See what he’s got up his sleeve inside…

In a video that should make horror fans throw up, cry, laugh, and rejoice all at once, the star of the rebooted Halloween flicks gives some info of how they want to make the third. Hint: without a script or director.

1960 changed horror filmmaking forever. Don’t believe me? Read on.