CineNiche

March 29, 2021 - April 4, 2021 Hello readers. Born in 1982, I was a 90’s teen. For me, my sacred ritual was the weekly rotation of video stores. There was no Blockbuster, but there was Box TV, LTD, Spotlight, Music Unlimited, and one other I always forget the name of. From junior high on, I’d walk the rotation of stores. On Tuesdays I rented new releases from Box TV, LTD, and Music Unlimited. For the weekend I’d rent the 4 X 4 from Spotlight which was four movies, four days, and four dollars. It’s not an exaggeration that I usually had up to 10 tapes rented at any given time. And I recently mapped out the walk on Google Maps, it was 2 miles to hit all the stores. But that was a small price for my passion. Freshman year of High School was 1996 for me. It was the same year Scream came out. I was 14 and I was livid. I didn't have a certain clique at school, so I floated from table to table during lunch. I kept hearing 'experts' talking about slasher movie rules. They had a...

Poster from Alamo Drafthouse Reviews and essays abound for Drew Goddard & Joss Whedon's Cabin In The Woods . Some compare Cabin to Scream while others are convinced that Cabin exceeds Scream as a post-modern text. We belong to the latter camp. If you haven't seen Cabin then you shouldn't be looking at reviews so long after the the film's release. In 1996 Wes Craven along with a brilliantly written script by Kevin Williamson breathed new life into the slasher film. They took all of the archetypical constructs of the slasher sub-genre and directly exposed them to the audiences while staying within the confines of the genre. This was not new, parodies had done this in the past, but Scream kept a straight face and managed to produce fear. Spoof and parody of horror has been around since the days of Abbot & Costello, but more direct to our discussion is the 1982 classic Student Bodies . Made in the midst of the early 80's slasher boom, Stu...