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FIND A HAUNTED HOUSE NEAR YOU!

Hauntworld is an interactive map of Halloween attractions in every state (and in Canada, too!).

Find Haunted Houses near you using our online haunt finder directory. Hauntworld also helps people rate and review haunted attractions. Hauntworld helps you find haunted houses by city, state, or zip code. 

Hauntworld has reviewed more than 200 haunted houses across America and Canada. Hauntworld features over 7,500 different haunted attractions near you including haunted houses, hayrides, corn mazes, pumpkin patches, escape rooms, ghost tours, real haunted houses, and Halloween attractions. Hauntworld also reviews and rates the scariest haunted houses open near you with our annual Hauntworld Top 13 Haunts, America's Scariest Haunted House list. 

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DID YOU KNOW THAT THERE IS A WEBSITE THAT DELIVERS HALLOWEEN NEWS ALL YEAR LONG?

Halloween Daily News delivers Halloween-related podcasts, news, trivia, interviews, and movie information every day, all year long!

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TEN THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THE MOVIE HALLOWEEN

10. The Production Budget Was A Mere $325,000

The 2010s were the height of Hollywood escalation—ever bigger budgets chasing after diminishing box office returns. However, in 1978, Halloween blurred the lines between independent film and blockbuster. Though shot for a mere $325,000, it earned a total of $70 million worldwide.

The sheer gulf between budget and profit made Halloween one of the most profitable independent films ever made, so it's not surprising Hollywood has been trying to recapture its lightning in a bottle ever since.

9. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee Were Both Offered The Role Of Dr. Loomis

Donald Pleasance made an illustrious career as a character actor, but the role most associated with him is Dr. Samuel Loomis, Michael Myers' psychiatrist. He played the role five times until his passing in 1995, shortly before the release of Halloween 6. Yet he wasn't the first choice for the role.

Peter Cushing was the first choice, who the previous year had starred as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars—this career boost put Cushing out of the film's budget. Christopher Lee, Cushing's close friend and old Hammer horror co-star, also turned down the part. Lee later expressed regret for this decision. It worked out for the best though—it's hard to picture two screen presences as dignified as Cushing and Lee offering the same befuddlement that Pleasance brings to Loomis.

8. Michael Myers' Mask Was Made From A Captain Kirk Mask

Devoid of color, feature, or emotion, Michael Myers' mask is the perfect visage for an avatar of evil as unknowable as the Shape. That said, the origins of the mask are right in line with the low budget of Halloween. The design of the mask was the work of production designer Tommy Lee Wallace, a frequent Carpenter collaborator who later directed Halloween III.

Wallace purchased a Captain Kirk mask from a costume shop on the Hollywood Boulevard; from there, he widened the eye-holes, replaced the hair on the mask, and spray-painted the latex mold of the mask white. The ghoulish result hid the mask's origin.

7. The Film Was First Titled "The Babysitter Murders"

Halloween perfectly captures the spooky, festive atmosphere of the eponymous Holiday. It's this flavoring that makes the film stand out from many later slasher films, including several of its own sequels. However, John Carpenter and Debra Hill's earliest drafts did not have this element, with the story bearing the blunter title of "The Babysitter Murders."

Producer Irwin Yablans suggested setting the film on Halloween night, and Carpenter, feeling this idea brought a unique flavor to the "haunted house" feel he wanted for the film, agreed. The rest is history.

6. Debra Hill Was From Haddonfield

Though Carpenter is—as the film's director—the artist most commonly associated with Halloween, the film's success can't be taken as his sole accomplishment. One of the other most important behind-the-scenes voices was Debra Hill, the film's producer, co-writer, and Carpenter's then-partner.

One of Hill's greatest marks on the film is Haddonfield itself, named for her birthplace of Haddonfield, New Jersey. That Halloween's Haddonfield is in Illinois instead only helps the "Anytown, USA" feel of the film's setting.

5. The Film Was Set In Illinois But Shot In California

Haddonfield being an invention of the script wasn't the only thing preventing the crew from shooting on-location. Despite being set in Illinois, the film was primarily shot in the suburbs of Pasadena, California. With the meager budget and the production being based out of Hollywood, the crew couldn't exactly afford to find an authentic Midwest location.

It mattered little, but it meant the crew had to go the extra effort of hiding palm trees and collecting fallen autumn leaves for use onscreen.

4. John Carpenter Composed The Score In Three Days

Though most renowned as a director, John Carpenter is a capable composer as well—most of his films are self-scored, and Halloween was no exception. After a test screening of the film cut with no music, an executive told Carpenter the film wasn't scary. In three days, Carpenter wrote a piano score for the film—the short time frame meant he couldn't even compose to the film's images.

It paid off; the music adds incalculable effect to the film's atmosphere and plays well even divorced from the images. One of the most iconic parts of the film is the open, slow zoom-in on a jack-o-lantern while the "Halloween Theme" plays.

3. The Film Was Inspired By Black Christmas

Four years before Halloween released, there was Black Christmas, another film set on a holiday about a faceless killer picking off young women. While working on a project with Black Christmas director Bob Clark, Carpenter asked him if he had any intention of doing a sequel—Clark responded in the negative. When Carpenter asked further what a sequel would look like, Clark said the killer would escape a mental institution on Halloween night and go about killing again. Clark had this to say in a 2005 interview:

"The truth is John didn’t copy Black Christmas. He wrote a script, directed the script, did the casting. Halloween is his horror movie...He liked Black Christmas and may have been influenced by it, but in no way did John Carpenter copy the idea."

2. Debra Hill Wrote Most Of The Dialogue For Laurie and Friends

Another reason Halloween succeeds where many of its imitators fail is that the film makes the viewer care about the doomed teenagers. Laurie Strode is the horror genre's best-acted Final Girl, and her interactions with her friends before the killing begins have a likable authenticity.

Much of the dialogue between Laurie and her friends, Annie and Linda, was written by Debra Hill, who'd worked as a babysitter herself and had firsthand experience as a teenage girl Carpenter obviously lacked.

1. Michael Myers Was Inspired By Carpenter's Visit To A Psychiatric Ward

Psychiatry wasn't advanced in the 1970s as it is now, nor were serial killers as much of a national past-time. Thus, Halloween dispels any complex motive for Michael Myers, characterizing him instead as an unknowable, unsolvable force of evil. While in college, Carpenter had visited a psychiatric ward and shared eye-to-eye contact with a patient there, a young boy with an unnerving stare.

It's clear this moment was the genesis for the blank face the young Michael has after killing his sister, and Loomis' description of the boy having "the Devil's eyes."

See more HERE

By Jack King

Trust Nicholas Cage to turn up and do weird shit. Not that we're complaining. Far from it: with his golden years on the horizon, the 60-year-old Longlegs star has undergone a renaissance, evolving into a genre legend before our very eyes.

Take last year's dark satire Dream Scenario, in which he played a man who found himself unwillingly smuggled into people's dreams. In the years preceding, he played himself in meta-buddy-comedy 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a vengeful chef in 2021's Pig, and a dad overcome by Lovecraftian evil in 2019's Color Out of Space. If it's weird, kooky, surreal and/or strange, Cage wants to be in it. And now comes Longlegs, which early reports suggest to be his weirdest, kookiest, strangest spin of the wheel yet.

Critics who saw Longlegs early have bent over backwards for months not only to talk up its brilliance, but how terrifying it is. “[It's] a film that lingers in your thoughts, under your skin, and in the pit of your stomach well after it's over,” one wrote on X. “No exaggeration,” wrote another: “It could be the best horror film of ‘24.” Many reactions on social media have revolved around what the experience of watching Longlegs will do to you physically, taking control of your body like a haunted marionette: “You will not be able to control your emotions. You’ll laugh at weird times. It's a fucking trip,” for example.

This rampant hyperbole has reached fever pitch, which is when it has started to feel a bit silly, taking on a whiff of memedom. “At this point Longlegs is gonna have to come out of the screen and kill me himself with how you guys are talking about it,” wrote critic and GQ contributor Brandon Streussnig. As to what it's actually about, think Silence of the Lambs, or so the especially generous responses go: Maika Monroe plays an FBI agent assigned to track down Cage's titular killer.

But what is it about Longlegs that is sending everyone into hype train overdrive? Is it really that exceedingly brilliant? Aside from reviews, its 94% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes suggests the consensus around it is pretty positive.

There are a couple of other factors that seem to have come into play. First off, the Cagenaissance, a period in which the actor— who fell into the critical doldrums in the 2010s after a series of duds—has won back a lot of credit among cult movie fans. This is primarily because he has been brave and bold enough to break away from studio churn, trying out new ideas on the independent circuit, such as in the aforementioned Pig, for which he won ample acclaim. The product of this is that Cage, leveraging the (somewhat cruel) meme status that he acquired in the dog days, has found a loyal following of genre enthusiasts who will, quite happily, watch everything he does.

But also, horror has enjoyed a huge boom over the last couple of years, and has become one of the few genres that is consistently bankable at the cinema in the age of Marvel and streaming. In 2022, gnarly thriller Smile made back over ten-times its budget for a $217.4 million total worldwide. The same year saw Zach Cregger's Barbarian take $45.4 million on a budget between $4 and 4.5 million. 2023 teemed with nasty hits, too, from Skinamarink to A24's Talk to Me, the latter of which became the filmbro fave studio's highest grossing horror movie to date. Even in an age where we're often sticking with Netflix, there's real appetite for shared scares. After all, who wants to watch a horror movie alone?

And this ain't your grandad's horror, no no. Palettes have adjusted in recent years, and new audiences have developed a taste for inventive takes on the genre, such as with the craze around auteurs of evil Ari Aster (Midsommar, Hereditary) and Robert Eggers (The Witch, the forthcoming Nosferatu remake). As the studio behind the pair's cultiest hits, this style of filmmaking is most associated with A24. Now, it seems like Longlegs distributor Neon—kind of like A24's cooler schoolyard nemesis—wants a nice, bloody slice of the weird-out pie.

So, there it is: film heads would live for nothing less than Cage doing his creepy, gnarliest best. The scale of the rewards are yet to be seen, but as far as we can tell? If you want to build buzz in Hollywood, make a horror flick with Nic Cage.

See the original article HERE

THIS MONTH'S WEIRD NEWS

A robot gets a face of living ‘skin’ that allows it to smile

If humanoid robots make you a bit queasy — would it help if they had fleshy faces that can smile at you?

The uncanny feat is the result of new technology using engineered living skin tissue and human-like ligaments to give robots a more natural smile, according to Tokyo University researchers who unveiled their work this week.

To overlay and connect the lab-produced skin on a robotic skeleton, a layer of collagen gel containing cultured human dermal fibroblasts (a type of connective tissue cell) binds to an innovative system of tiny V-shaped perforations in the surface, letting the skin move with the underlying structure without tearing or peeling. The work of muscles — creating a smile, and other motions — is done by actuators.

The approach promises to make robots more lifelike — and in the future, the researchers say, similar techniques could also be used on humans, in the cosmetics and plastic surgery industries. Their findings were published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

To see the entire article and learn more, go HERE

24 Of The Worst Kid’s Halloween Costume FAILS

Go HERE to see the 24 worst children's costumes of all time

Jeani Rector queried folks on facebook (probably you!) to ask what their favorite horror movies of all time were. Below are the top 20 picks, in order according to the amount of votes they each received.

Also listed is trivia about each film.

The number ONE movie chosen by the most votes

THE THING (1982)

John Carpenter's The Thing didn’t go over well when it was released in 1982. Ignored by movie-goers, it was a box office failure. Reviled by critics, it even saw Carpenter being labeled a pornographer of violence by some reviewers. It was such a disappointment for the studio, they took another project away from Carpenter as punishment. But it gradually found its audience, building up a cult following. And soon, a legion of fans and critics alike began calling it one of the greatest horror movies ever made. It didn’t take long for The Thing to go from being known as reprehensible trash to being considered an all-time classic.

Actor Kurt Russell would take drags off of cigarettes to make his breath visible as though he were in cold temperatures. It has become a tradition in British Antarctic research stations to watch The Thing as part of their Midwinter feast and celebration held every June 21.

TWO

HALLOWEEN (1978)

The 1978 horror film Halloween was not an immediate success, but it eventually became one of the most successful independent films of all time. The movie, directed by John Carpenter and shot in Southern California on a budget of $325,000, had disappointing sales numbers during its first weekend. However, word of mouth helped the film gain popularity, with audiences telling their friends to see it. By the following weekend, sales had doubled, then tripled, and eventually increased tenfold.

Because of the film's tight budget, the production designer Tommy Lee Wallace had to use whatever he had at his disposal, or had to buy materials cheaply. When he created the Michael Myers mask, he made two versions. The first was an Emmett Kelly smiling clown mask that they put frizzy red hair on. They tested it out but it didn't achieve the desired effect. The other mask was a 1975 Captain James T. Kirk mask that was purchased in a costume shop on Hollywood Boulevard for $1.98. It had the eyebrows and sideburns ripped off, the face was painted bluish white, the hair was spray painted brown, and the eyes were opened up more. After testing out the mask, the crew decided that it was much more creepy because it was emotionless.

THREE

JAWS (1975)

Jaws, the American suspense and horror film of 1975, was directed by Steven Spielberg and is considered the first summer blockbuster ever due to the fact that over 67 million people in the USA went to see this film when it was first released. Based on the 1974 novel of the same name by author Peter Benchley, the film not only broke box office records at the time of its release, but also changed the way Hollywood marketed and distributed films, especially those released during the summer.

Peter Benchley himself can be seen in a cameo in the film as the news reporter who addresses the camera on the beach. Benchley had previously worked as a news reporter for The Washington Post before penning Jaws. Steven Spielberg also makes a cameo in the movie: His voice is the Amity Island dispatcher who calls Quint’s boat, the Orca, with Sheriff Brody’s wife on the line.

FOUR

THE LOST BOYS (1987)

As filming began, the comedic points in the movie were made up on the spot. The comedy confused Warner Brothers, and they would ask Joel Schumacher (the director) if he were making a horror film or a comedy. He responded with “yes” every time. The executives seemed confused about the combination of those two genres, and weren’t sure that a horror-comedy would work. The city of Santa Cruz, California, did not want to be connected to the crime that happens in the movie, so they asked the production to change the name of the town in the film. So the movie takes place in the fictional city of Santa Carla. 

See movie trivia about The Lost Boys HERE

FIVE

ALIEN (1979)

Certainly the character of Ripley, played by Sigouney Weaver, would have appealed to readers in the Golden Age of Science Fiction. She has little interest in her employer's orders that it be brought back home as a potential weapon. After she sees what it can do, her response to Special Order 24 (Return alien lifeform, all other priorities rescinded) is: "How do we kill it?"

The blue laser lights that were used in the alien ship's egg chamber were borrowed from the rock band The Who. The band was testing out the lasers for their stage show in the soundstage next door.

SIX

HELLRAISER (1987)

Based on the Clive Barker book titled The Hellbound Heart, Hellraiser was an orignal film in an era of cliches. Famous critic Roger Ebert panned it HERE, but moviegoers loved it. The movie was originally going to be called Sadomasochists from Beyond the Grave or Hellbound, but producer Christopher Figg suggested Hellraiser instead.

Since the movie was filmed in England, there was a law that stated that cockroaches of both sexes were not to be allowed on movie sets because they could cause an infestation. So, Barker decided to hire someone who could manage the cockroaches. He explained, “They were all male. And we had a fridge…we chilled the maggots and the roaches.”

SEVEN

THE FLY (1986)

Directed by David Cronenberg and starring Jeff Goldblum early in his career, the movie is about a scientist who accidentally merges with a fly during a teleportation experiment. Although most people prefer the 1986 version because of the lead character's charm and also because the film has great heart and soul, there can't help be some comparisons to the original 1958 version.

The first The Fly (1958) was a film that surprised even its producers. They knew the original story was a little silly and expected only a modest return on the film from a mostly young audience. Even the film’s name stars, Vincent Price and Herbert Marshall, could not take The Fly seriously. The audience, on the other hand, found that there was much to respond to in the film. The Fly cost $350,000 in 1958 dollars and only took 18 days to make, yet it grossed $3,000,000 (also in 1958 dollars), considerably outstripping any expectation at the time.

EIGHT

THE HAUNTING (1963)

The 1963 horror film The Haunting had a budget of $1.05 million in 1958 dollars but only made $1.02 million at the box office. The film was shot at MGM-British Studios near London, with exteriors filmed at Ettington Park in Warwickshire. It was based upon Shirley Jackson's famous book The Haunting of Hill House.

At the time it was released, The Haunting was considered to be a flop because it originally lost money. But over the years, it became a classic because of word of mouth and because of TV showings. There were some clever uses of lensing effects to heighten the strangeness of Hill House. By adjusting the props in the sets so that they are off by a few degrees, it helped to unsettle the viewer.

NINE

FRANKENSTEIN (1931)

Frankenstein is a Pre-Code film. Pre-Code movies are American films produced between the late 1920s and mid-1934, before the Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) censorship guidelines were strictly enforced. The term "pre-Code" is a misnomer because the Hays Code was adopted in 1930, but Hollywood filmmakers often ignored it, and oversight was poor until July 1, 1934. Before then, local laws, negotiations between studios, and popular opinion had more influence on movie content.

Universal Pictures exists today because of the monster movies. In 1930, Universal lost $2.2 million in revenues (over $36 million adjusted for inflation). Then, in February 1931, Dracula was released and made $700,000 (1931 dollars) in sales. It was clear to Universal producer Carl Laemmle Jr. that horror movies were what the public wanted. By November of that same year, Frankenstein was released. Bela Lugosi, who had shot to stardom at the studio following Dracula, assumed he would be playing the Monster. However, makeup tests showed the actor didn’t have the right look. Instead, the studio went with English actor Boris Karloff, and the rest is history.

TEN

28 DAYS LATER (2002 UK, 2003 USA)

28 Days Later took the traditional zombie movie horror formula and gave it a fresh coat of paint by changing the location, the tone, and of course, the monster in question. To properly give the feeling of a dead Britain shrouded in chaos, the filmmakers had to be careful with how and when they shot. Shots on the M1 motorway were done early in the morning between 7 and 9 AM under police guidance.

A real hospital was used for the filming to create a sense of authenticity. The hospital in question was open during the week but shut on weekends which allowed Danny Boyle and his crew to rent the space for shooting when nobody was around.

An extra benefit of this arrangement was that rental fees went directly towards the hospital's trust fund, representing one of the best kinds of business transactions one could wish for. Nothing like shooting a bloody horror movie and having a portion of the budget go towards a good cause.

See more HERE

ELEVEN

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

Written by George Romero and John Russo, Night of the Living Dead only had a $114,000 budget. It changed the movie world of how zombies were portrayed by using dissociation. Since the film was shot in black and white and had a really low budget, the crew never had to worry what color the blood was, so chocolate syrup was used. For the scene in which Karen Cooper (Kyra Schon) begins eating her father’s corpse, the crew’s leftover lunch was employed.

Both Romero and Russo played cameos in the film. Russo played one of the ghouls who managed to reach into the farmhouse only to be struck with a tire iron, while Romero can be seen in the Washington D.C. sequences as a reporter.

TWELVE

THE SHINING (1980)

Directed by Stanley Kubrick, it is widely known that this movie is not loved by its creator, Stephen King. But not many know why. According to David Hughes, one of Kubrick’s biographers, Stephen King wrote an entire draft of a screenplay for The Shining. However, Kubrick didn’t even deem it worth a glance, which sort of makes sense when you consider that the director once described King’s writing as “weak.” Instead, Kubrick worked with Diane Johnson on the screenplay because he was a fan of her book, The Shadow Knows. The two ended up spending eleven weeks working on the script and ignoring King's version.

THIRTEEN

PHANTASM (1979)

Phantasm (released as Never Dead in Australia) is a low-budget cult classic horror film produced in 1977 and released in 1979. The film was originally rated X by the MPAA because of the silver sphere sequence, and due to a scene involving a man urinating on the floor after going down dead. After Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin made a telephone call in a favor to a friend on the board, the rating was changed from the (commercially non-viable) X-rating to R.

This movie was number 25 on the cable and streaming channel Bravo's list of the "100 Scariest Movie Moments."

FOURTEEN

THE EXORCIST (1973)

William Peter Blatty’s novel is supposedly based on the real-life 1949 exorcism of a young boy, known by the pseudonym Roland Doe. The story became national news, and caught the interest of Blatty, who was a student at Georgetown University at the time (hence the change in location). For the 1973 movie The Exorcist, the possessed child was changed to that of a girl.

Though it’s never stated in the film, the demon that takes possession of Regan MacNeil has a name: Pazuzu, which is taken from the name of the king of the demons in Assyrian and Babylonian mythology. Much of Regan’s moaning and grunting were created by remixing pig squeals. When the demon is finally exorcised from her body, the sound you hear is a group of pigs being led to slaughter.

FIFTEEN

CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1963)

Amateurish in many ways (the film does include some stilted performances, bad lip-synching, clunky editing and a few continuity errors), Carnival of Souls nevertheless continues to exert a strange fascination for many viewers. Not a conventional horror or ghost story, this film explores the psychological state of Mary Henry after a car accident as she emerges from the murky depths of a river. 

Carnival of Souls was the only feature film to be directed by industrial and educational filmmaker Harold (Herk) Harvey. After completing Carnival of Souls, Harvey was to return to making industrial and educational films before retiring in the late 1980s (he died in 1996). Assembling a crew of just five – himself, cinematographer Maurice Prather, editor Dan Palmquist, assistant director Reza Badiyi, and production manager Larry Sneegas (all of them his buddies at Centron), Harvey managed to generate a budget of $33,000 after approaching local Kansas businessmen, who invested in packs of the production’s stock. He found his lead in the form of up-and-coming actress Candace Hilligoss, who turned down a role in Psychomania (1963) to star in Carnival Of Souls. “I was paid $2,000 for doing the film,” she later recalled. “At the time, it seemed like a fortune.”

SIXTEEN

TRAIN TO BUSAN (2016)

Roger Ebert called Train to Busan "a wildly fun action movie, beautifully paced and constructed, with just the right amount of character and horror. In many ways, it’s what World War Z should have been—a nightmarish vision of the end of the world, and a provocation to ask ourselves what it is that really makes us human in the first place."

Filming began in April 2015 and finished in August 2015, for a total of only four months. The movie is based on an original story created by Park Joo-suk. The film team tried to reference the movements of the zombies from the game 7 Days to Die, and also from the movies Ghost in the Shell and Silent Hill. 

Train to Busan received a 94% rating from Rotten Tomatoes, and British filmmaker Edgar Wright, director of the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead, highly applauded the film. He personally recommended it on Twitter and called it the "best zombie movie I've seen in forever."

SEVENTEEN

ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

This wildly entertaining nightmare, faithfully adapted from Ira Levin's best seller, stars Mia Farrow as a young mother-to-be who grows increasingly suspicious that her overfriendly elderly neighbors are in a pact with Satan. With a comparatively small budget of just $3.2 million (1968 dollars), Rosemary’s Baby grossed over $33 million worldwide upon its release, making it by far the most commercially successful of Polanski’s ‘Apartment Trilogy’ films. 

According to Mia Farrow, the scenes where Rosemary walks in front of traffic were spontaneous and genuine. Director Roman Polanski is reported to have told her that "nobody will hit a pregnant woman." The scene was successfully shot with Farrow walking into real traffic and Polanski following, operating the hand-held camera since he was the only one willing to do it.

EIGHTEEN

RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

Re-Animator (also known as H. P. Lovecraft's Re-Animator) is a 1985 American comedy horror film that is loosely based upon the 1922 H.P Lovecraft serial novelette titled Herbert West: Reanimator. Originally devised by director Stuart Gordon as a theatrical stage production and later a half-hour television pilot, the television script was revised to become a feature film. Filmed in Hollywood, the film received an R Rating at the box office, but it garnered its largest audience through the unrated cut's release on home video.

The special effects department went through twenty-four gallons of fake blood during the shoot, and makeup effects artist John Naulin said that Re-Animator was the bloodiest film he had ever worked on. In the past, he had never used more than two gallons of blood on a film. The building used for the Miskatonic Medical School is the same one as the Cyberdine Headquarters in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

NINETEEN

PSYCHO (1960)

Psycho was seen as a departure from Hitchcock's previous film North by Northwest since it was filmed on a small budget in black-and-white by the crew of his then-television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Initially, the film divided critics due to its controversial subject matter, but audience interest and outstanding box-office returns prompted a major critical re-evaluation. Psycho was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Director for Alfred Hitchcock and Best Supporting Actress for Janet Leigh.

When the cast and crew began work on the first day, they had to raise their right hands and swear an oath not to divulge one word of the story. Hitchcock also withheld the ending part of the script from his cast until he needed to shoot it.

TWENTY

NOSFERATU (1922 Germany, 1929 USA)

Nosferatu, also known as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (German: Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens) is a 1922 silent German Expressionist vampire film directed by F.W. Murnau and starring Max Schreck as Count Orlock. Even with several details altered, Bram Stoker's heirs sued over the adaptation, and a court ruling ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed. However, several prints of Nosferatu survived, and would resurface through second-generation reels. The movie was banned in Sweden due to excessive horror. The ban was finally lifted in 1972.

The vampire's unblinking stare was central to the unnerving effect the creature cause for audiences. Count Orlok is only seen blinking once on screen, near the end of Act One.

Today, the film is regarded as an influential masterpiece of early cinema and the horror genre, as reported by Deadline. That’s Friday the 13th. 

Jeani Rector’s Advice on Writing is a folksy, easy to comprehend step-by-step process that covers in detail such techniques as character development; substance, structure and style; pacing suspense; suggestions about promoting your work and other valuable information.

What makes an editor choose one story over another for publication? What are the secrets to make your work stand out from the pack? How can you bring out the best in your potential? This book shares insider information to help you succeed in the competitive world of writing.

It is on sale for a low price of $8.99 paperback and $2.99 kindle HERE

THE HORROR ZINE IS PUBLISHING BOOK REVIEWS 

The Horror Zine welcomes book review requests.

To learn how to submit your book for review, go HERE.

Did you know that BloodyDisgusting has a horror forum? Post your thoughts about horror HERE

Take the Plague Quiz HERE

Would you survive the bubonic plague? Find out HERE