Latest news with #ANightmareonElmStreet
Newsweek
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
Internet Stunned at What Girl, 5, Picks As Bedtime Plushie: 'Obsessed'
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A 5-year-old girl with an adorable collection of plushies has chosen a rather terrifying bedtime companion—a life-sized Chucky doll. Katelyn McCormick Nevin (@katelynnevin), 23, from Monaghan, Ireland, shared footage of her daughter, Georgia McCormick, cuddled up with the infamous horror character, drawing over 59,400 likes and 650,200 views on TikTok. The mom, a professional makeup artist who specializes in SFX makeup, explained that she has a long-standing obsession with Halloween, one she's clearly passed on to Georgia. In October 2019, she took part in a challenge to create a different Halloween makeup look every day. "On day 12, I had created the look of the nun Valak from The Conjuring.. Day 12 being the day Georgia was born, so as you can see Georgia being a Halloween baby herself and growing up with me being her mum one day and possibly being Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers the next, that's where her obsession began," she told Newsweek. A split image showing Georgia cuddling Chucky the doll. A split image showing Georgia cuddling Chucky the doll. @katelynnevin/@katelynnevin For context, Freddy Krueger is the claw-gloved dream stalker from A Nightmare on Elm Street, while Michael Myers is the masked killer at the center of the Halloween film franchise. Georgia's attachment to Chucky, however, has stood out above the rest. "It has mainly been Chucky she has really clung to, every Halloween she HAS to be Chucky, Chucky birthday cakes, and even when she was 2 for a good six months she wouldn't let me bath her unless the water was 'Chucky water,' (which was a dash of orange facepaint in the bath)," she added. In the video, Nevin pans across Georgia's bed, which is filled with soft toys including Dumbo, Stitch, a unicorn, and several cuddly bears. Nestled among them is Georgia, fast asleep with her arms tightly wrapped around her Chucky doll. Nevin clarified that her daughter has never seen the films. Chucky, originally introduced in the 1988 film Child's Play, is a possessed Good Guy doll inhabited by the spirit of serial killer Charles Lee Ray. Though he looks like an ordinary children's toy, Chucky is known for his foul mouth, wild red hair, and violent tendencies—making him one of horror's most renowned villains. "Many don't agree with her having the doll which I understand to a certain extent, but all it is is a little girl with a little more out there obsession and no fear which I think is great," said Nevin. Her daughter's horror obsession struck a chord with fellow TikTokers, who flooded the comments with similar stories. "My daughter used to sleep with Abomination... way before social media arrived lol," said Shannen. "My son's obsessed with horrors at 7 he's starting with FNAF," said another user, referring to Five Nights at Freddy's, a survival horror video game featuring haunted animatronics. "My daughter sleeps with an Annabelle doll," shared another viewer, referencing the haunted doll from The Conjuring universe. "He makes her feel safe and she knows no monster is a match. Love it," said Misaki. "I used to be obsessed with Chucky whenever I went for a sleepover at my grandmas house I would always sleep with Chucky even when I was insanely young," said Hollie. Do you have any viral videos or pictures that you want to share? We want to see the best ones! Send them in to life@ and they could appear on our site.
CBC
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Controversial '80s holiday horror gets (another) Winnipeg reboot
For the second time in 15 years, a controversial 1984 horror film is getting a made-in-Manitoba reboot. Casting is currently underway for Silent Night, Deadly Night, currently in pre-production from Cineverse, the company that produced the hard-core horror franchise Terrifier, with StudioCanal handling global sales outside North America under their new genre label Sixth Dimension. In Winnipeg, it will be produced under the auspices of new production company Bear Paw Studio, a partnership between local producer/filmmaker Jeremy Torrie and Erik Bernard. The original film of the same title created a wave of mass consternation in the '80s with its advertising campaign, which depicted a demented axe-wielding Santa climbing down a chimney. At the time, the image of Santa Claus tended to be more sacrosanct in film. The reaction to the film was perhaps best exemplified by Gene Siskel. On an episode of Siskel & Ebert at the Movies, the Chicago critic pointedly named the film's distributors, writer and director to shame them. Of course, the effort to tarnish the film made it more successful than it might have otherwise been. Upon its release, it out-grossed the more revered horror film from the same year, Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street. (Silent Night, Deadly Night has a major fan in no less than Quentin Tarantino, who called it "the only [holiday horror film] that truly bears a discussion.… I'm a big fan.") The film was rebooted in 2012 with a shortened title — Silent Night. It was filmed mainly in Winnipeg and Selkirk and produced by Los Angeles-based Richard Saperstein's the Genre Company, in conjunction with local production company Buffalo Gal Pictures, under its in-house genre imprint Insidious Pictures. That film altered the plot, focusing on a traumatized small town cop (Jaime King) and an unhinged police chief (Malcolm McDowell) attempting to track a psycho in a Santa suit during a seasonal festival in which half the town is wearing Santa costumes. (Winnipeg actor-stuntman Rick Skene played the killer in an unnerving Santa mask.) The new reboot will be directed by genre up-and-comer Mike P. Nelson (V/H/S/85 and the 2021 reboot Wrong Turn) and will follow the original more closely — no surprise, since it is being produced by Scott Schneid and Dennis Whitehead, executive producers of the original film, said Torrie, who also highlights producer Jamie R. Thompson. "He was the one who put it all together," Torrie said. "We had the director and the U.S. producers in town a couple weeks ago scouting, so we're forging ahead on that." Scouting locations included Selkirk, Carman, Stonewall and Steinbach, Torrie said. The plan for the film is that it will be turned around for a release in late 2025, just in time for the holiday season. Torrie said he hopes Cineverse follows the release pattern for last year's Terrifier 3. "They released it in 2,500 theatres and made $90 million US," Torrie said. "That would be huge for us." Busy spring It may prove to be a busy spring for film production in Winnipeg. A previously announced film, purporting to tell the inside story of the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy, is likely heading to Winnipeg in May, with an impressive cast that includes John Travolta (Pulp Fiction), Mandy Patinkin (The Princess Bride) and Dermot Mulroney (My Best Friend's Wedding). November 1963: The Killing of a President will be directed by Roland Joffe, who was twice nominated for Oscars, for his work on The Killing Fields (1985) and The Mission (1987). November 1963 's screenwriter is Nicholas Celozzi, the nephew of notorious Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. The story is based on the eyewitness account of Giancana's brother Joseph (Pepe) Giancana, who was with Sam during the two days preceding the 1963 assassination. Later in 2025, Winnipeg may expect to see yet another blood-stained Santa with the planned sequel to Violent Night (2022), which starred David Harbour (Stranger Things) as the real St. Nick, obliged to return to his bloodthirsty ways when defending a wealthy family from a gang of murderous thieves.
The Guardian
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Novelist Susan Barker: ‘I started watching horror when I was five years old'
Everyone has a horror film they saw too young. Or perhaps just one disturbing scene that made them too jittery to sleep at night. A set of dining chairs stacking themselves into a table-top pyramid as a housewife's back is turned. A woman's discovery of a neighbour's slumped corpse, his eyes pecked to bloody sockets by murderous birds. A boy on a tricycle seeing twin girls at the end of a corridor, interspersed with flashes of their brutal axe murder … I started watching horror back in the early 80s, when I was five. A mature student, my dad would record late-night Open University lectures on BBC Two, and, once the bearded academics finished scribbling equations on blackboards, the Betamax kept rolling and the melodramatic titles for a Hammer horror would start up. From these tapes I remember hopping plagues of alien locusts from Quatermass and the Pit, Christopher Lee baring his blood-soaked fangs, and young women in Victorian nightgowns, screaming and fleeing or becoming mesmerised. As a five-year-old, could I differentiate between these supernatural fictions and reality? I saw a chiller called The Watcher in the Woods and began to creepily insist that 'the Watcher' was stalking our family, following at a distance, lurking just out of sight. This coincided with the time my parents were separating, and the Watcher now seems to me the exteriorisation of some inner anxiety and sense of threat to the family unit. These films were 'just pretend', I'd been told. But even at a young age the Hammer productions seemed to express to me a fundamental truth: that just beyond the edges of what is safe and known are destabilising forces that can throw everything into chaos. My best friend at primary school saw A Nightmare on Elm Street when we were seven. We gathered around her in the playground to hear about Freddy Krueger slaughtering teenagers in their dreams. I begged permission to watch it too, but, frustratingly, had to wait until I was 'a bit older', which turned out to be 10. How many hours of sleep did I lose to imagining Krueger leering around my bedroom door? The long blades attached to his leather glove tapping on the windowpane? Thanks to lenient parenting, secondary-school sleepovers often featured Puppet Master, Child's Play and other video nasties whose power wasn't diminished by their low-budget awfulness. Nor did the regular exposure desensitise me; it only made the monsters more persistent in my consciousness. Then I got into Stephen King novels, which were no reprieve. I was often awake until 2am with a spine-cracked paperback of Pet Sematary or It, too scared to go to the toilet, in case Pennywise was waiting to pounce down the hall. Have I mentioned yet, that this was exhilarating? Fun? It's what film theorist Noël Carroll calls the 'paradox of horror' – the enjoyment of fear and disgust, the thrilling of the sensation-seeking parts of the psyche as we vicariously experience horrifying situations and confrontations with entities both evil and grotesque. And there are none more evil and grotesque than Pipes of the infamous Ghostwatch, which I saw with my younger sister when it was broadcast on Halloween 1992. Like most of the audience of 11 million, we fell for the mockumentary hoax, and, like approximately 1 million viewers, we called the phone lines to tell the BBC we'd spotted the ghoulish Pipes fleetingly in shot, in the corner of a bedroom. Too petrified to go to bed, we stayed up until dawn, under a duvet on the sofa, watching the Halloween programming on BBC Two – Creepshow 2, The Curse of the Werewolf, The Bride of Frankenstein, Death Line – until exhaustion finally overrode our fear. As well as its ingenuity and authentic script, maybe another reason Ghostwatch was so real to us was because the setting was so close to home: the London suburb, the frazzled working-class single mother, the two highly strung adolescent daughters. I've always had the irrational sense that my Essex childhood home is a haunted place. It's familiar at the level of nook and cranny yet can sometimes be unheimlich and strange. If the house is haunted, perhaps it's by ghosts of our former selves: by second-generation teenagers clashing explosively with the first generation's authoritarian parenting style. Recently, I came across the word 'transliminal' to describe someone swayed by the supernatural. People high in transliminality tend to be introspective and fantasy-prone – the boundaries between the mental and the external world more porous, so the imaginary has a stronger grip on 'reality' and emotional states. The way terrifying scenes lingered in my mind and contaminated my post-film reality when I was younger suggest this trait in me. It suggests why, as a teenager, rain tapping my windowpane in the night became Danny Glick from Salem's Lot, hovering vampirishly outside. Why bin bags heaped in an alleyway, glimpsed walking home from a late-night screening of Scream, became the masked slasher, crouched with a 10in knife. The psychological disturbance of a film used to stay with me, rippling out into subsequent days, filling my head with imaginings of the Blair Witch or the serial killer from The Poughkeepsie Tapes, creeping about my flat at 3am. Ridiculous, my rational mind scolds. But on some more visceral, irrational level, I am spooked. And I enjoy being spooked. It's part of the draw of the genre for me. Fear heightening my senses, so I am hypervigilant and alert. Fear waking me up. Since I began writing 23 years ago, my fiction has always contained elements of the supernatural, and my latest novel, Old Soul, is an out-and-out horror: my monstrous female protagonist must make human sacrifices or she literally begins to rot. Her internal organs putrefy. Her hair falls out. Her fingernails falls off. She becomes the walking undead – all my fears of evil, ageing and mortality, rolled into one. My north star while writing Old Soul was to make readers feel the way I did when first turning the pages of The Shining or Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves: frightened, disturbed and utterly beguiled. The experience of reading horror is vastly different from watching a film. Books can't do jump scares the way films and TV can. But they are more adept at inhabiting a character's interiority – their fear and confusion as they mentally scramble to make sense of the door slamming in the night or the shadow flitting down the hall. A horror novel is a collaboration between author and reader; the words on the page are stage directions for the reader's imagination. The monsters are unique to every reader, too, constructed in part from your own mental archive of terrifying images and experiences. The horror I saw too young definitely had some warping influence on my growing mind. For me, the genre will always represent the disintegration of the safe, known world: the threats that lurk at its periphery metamorphosed into the poltergeist smashing vases in a suburban home, the witch cackling in the woods, the demon-possessed little girl … Horror became linked to unhappy events in my life, a grotesquely distorting mirror held up to my childhood, somehow reflecting a greater truth. But this is by no means a wholly bad thing. In fact, I feel a strange kind of gratitude for all I was exposed to at an early age. For, amid the heart-thudding terror, I've been comforted, too, by horror's metaphorical powers, and the dark recognition of all the ordinary horrors in an ordinary life. Old Soul by Susan Barker is published by Fig Tree (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Little Bites review – something wicked this way noms in mum-snacking horror
This one starts very strong. Mindy Vogel (Krsy Fox), a single mother, is summoned to her basement by the ringing of a bell. A barely glimpsed monster with a lugubrious but threatening voice demands that she feed him. They engage in a dialogue from which we infer this is something of a long-term dynamic, with the grim beast nibbling from her arm on a regular basis. She tells him she'll need to go to the hospital if this carries on much longer; the abusive relationship parallels are not accidental. This monster is dangerous, but he's also a parasite, standing in contrast to the horror genre's typical one-munch-and-you're-done type beast. Unfortunately, from this point on the drama sags. Fox's performance is top-notch, but there are a number of plot points that don't really stack up. That might not matter in a loopier story-world, but Little Bites is a horror movie where everything is fairly grounded, other than the actual creature. Chief among the dud notes is the unlikely idea that Child Protective Services would so aggressively hunt down a single mother on the flimsy grounds given here (seemingly amounting to the fact that Mindy's child is staying with her grandmother). This kind of writing is frustrating, because it feels like another round of script drafts could have fixed things. Surely there is an opportunity for more insidious monster-related problems that give the legitimate appearance of something very wrong at home, such that horror icon Barbara Crampton, who plays the CPS officer, would have no choice but to plausibly intervene. The flaws are a shame because the casting is fabulous, including Crampton (Re-Animator), Chaz Bono (American Horror Story), and Heather Langenkamp (A Nightmare on Elm Street). Luckily, despite the narrative issues, the tension picks up again as the film oozes towards its climax. What could have been a real contender with a few relatively minor tweaks is still a serviceable morsel for those with the right kind of appetite. Little Bites is on Shudder and AMC+ from 21 February.
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
When Nora Ephron Met Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger: Meet Horror's New Iconic Killer in ‘Heart Eyes'
What do you get when you mix Nora Ephron with Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers? The combination might seem antithetical, but it works scarily well in director Josh Ruben's sweet, funny, terrifying rom-com/slasher movie mash-up, 'Heart Eyes.' Working from an inventive script by Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon, and Michael Kennedy, Ruben somehow deftly satisfies fans of both 'Sleepless in Seattle' and 'A Nightmare on Elm Street.' An iconic new horror villain is born in the form of the movie's Heart Eyes Killer, a slasher who stalks young lovers each Valentine's Day. More from IndieWire At Annual AFI Lunch, the Hollywood Awards Circuit Reboots as Netflix Enters Recovery Mode Ke Huy Quan on 'Love Hurts' and Being #1 on the Call Sheet After a 20-Year Absence: 'There's a Lot of Catching Up to Do' Ruben, as he explained to IndieWire, wanted the movie's two sides to be equally strong so that the horror would deepen the romance made all the more terrifying because of our investment in the two young lovers (Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding) fleeing from the Heart Eyes Killer. In studying films of both genres, he quickly realized that the common thread was the importance of music. 'You look at a movie like John Carpenter's 'Halloween,' and it's wall-to-wall score,' Ruben told IndieWire. 'Without the score, it would be something completely different.' Ruben found something similar in the comedies he referenced while preparing 'Heart Eyes.' 'Then, you look at something like 'Father of the Bride' and see what Alan Silvestri brings to that, or what [Marc Shaiman] brings to 'Sleepless in Seattle,' and it's always beautiful and orchestral,' he said. 'It's a bit sugary, but it never winks.' Ruben wanted something heartfelt like Silvestri and Shaiman's work that could slide into shrieking strings and assaultive percussion when necessary, hence his choice of composer, Jay Wadley. 'I knew Jay could deliver something as romantic and vulnerable as Silvestri, but I also knew that having worked with M. Night Shyamalan, he could ratchet it into something horrifying.' If Holt and Gooding provide the movie's romantic heart, the terror and gore come courtesy of a slasher as immediately memorable as the 'Friday the 13th' sequels' Jason — an appropriate reference point given Ruben's key influence on the movie as a whole. 'Weirdly, it was 'Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives,' Ruben said. 'It's got blue moonlight, it's got falling leaves, it's as dreadful as it is silly.' While Ruben didn't want 'Heart Eyes' to be silly, he did want to 'lull the audience into complacency' with the Nora Ephron-esque elements before going in for the kill. The killer himself started with the mask, which Ruben knew would be the greatest subject of scrutiny in the film. 'The very minimal slasher description in the script was something to the effect of 'a twisted version of the heart eyes emoji,'' Ruben said. 'So then you go to legends like Tony Gardner and Bryan Christensen, who've worked on everything from Chuck Russell's 'The Blob' to 'Darkman' and the 'Chucky' series and say, 'What's your take on the most twisted version of the heart eyes emoji?'' Keeping Freddy Krueger in mind as an influence, Ruben wanted the Heart Eyes Killer's mask to look like it was made in a workshop, with asymmetrical eyes and imperfect metallic rims that give the villain a slightly sad, puppy dog look without undermining the terror. 'And then Chris Landon said, 'What about age?'' Ruben said. 'The more you can age this thing, the more terrifying it becomes because you look at it and go, 'What the hell has that thing seen before? Where has it been?' So we talked about oxidized blood and this Joker-like smear across the mouth, and that kind of put it over the edge for us.' For the killer's physicality, Ruben went back to his primary influence. 'I told stuntman Alex McColl to watch 'Jason Lives,'' he said. 'I said, 'Bring whatever you want to it, but you'll get the idea.'' Ruben also told McColl to emulate Michael Myers' classic head-cock at key moments, a tip of the hat not only to John Carpenter but all the other movies Ruben loves that were influenced by 'Halloween' and its monster. 'That simple, iconic head cock, everybody does it. Even in 'Kiss the Girls,' it was great.' During the mixing process, Ruben also revisited his beloved 'Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives' when it played on the big screen at a revival house, and he brought a couple of his collaborators along. 'I took my editor and producer to see it, and they went, 'Did you just rip everything in this movie off?'' Ruben laughed, acknowledging that 'Heart Eyes' is not just a love story, but a love letter to all his favorite movies. 'Wes Craven is in my blood. I'm a 'Nightmare on Elm Street' kid. I'm a 'Jaws' kid. But 'Jason Lives' was the one I kept going back to,' the filmmaker said. 'Heart Eyes' opens in theaters Friday, February 7. 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