Black Gate

If you can get your brain around this fact, it has been nearly 30 years since the release of James Cameron’s iconic horror / scifi movie Aliens.

The film has been the subject of a lot of web-chatter of late, not simply because of its pending milestone birthday, but also due to the on-again-off-again sequel project by Neill Blomkamp that would have reunited Ripley and Newt, but which is now permanently and possibly terminally on hold.

But hardcore Aliens fans are still holding out hope. Speaking with Icons of Fright in November, Michael Biehn (Corporal Hicks) confirmed that Blomkamp’s film would have wiped the Alien third and fourth films out of continuity, while showing confidence that the project wasn’t entirely dead. According to him, 20th Century Fox would be downright foolish to not pursue this project once Ridley Scott is done with Alien: Covenant:

The basic idea is acting like Alien 3 and 4 never existed. I know Ridley Scott is doing his movie first and is going to be the executive producer on this one, so I’m really looking forward to that. I know that Ridley’s focus is on [Alien: Covenant] and I’m sure that he and Fox both don’t want that and Neill’s movie to come out right next to each other, because they’re kind of two different worlds, with Aliens taking place thousands of years later, which is how they explained it all to me, but at the same time, they want to give them a similar feel. I know they’re putting the brakes on Neill’s movie just for a little while, but I really think that it would be embarrassing to Ridley and Fox and Sigourney [Weaver] if they just didn’t make the movie.

So while we all wait to see what happens, let’s get a jump on the Aliens birthday celebrations with a couple of early gifts.

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Two years ago at Days of the Dead in Chicago, during a brief chat with Sean Young, the actress revealed she was just signed to do another indy horror flick following the then-recent-release of Jug Face (VOD).

Of course, she also shared that she was moving to New York and having a garage sale — did I want a second-hand, 1950’s patio set for $1,500, and could we all just boycott any new iteration of Blade Runner since Ridley Scott would not return her calls?

Though we do not know the eventual fate of the patio furniture, and the yet-to-be-titled Blade Runner project remains in pre-production, we now know the identity of that other indy horror film, and it looks pretty darn interesting.

Late last week, Screen Media Films released the official trailer and theatrical one-sheet for Mickey Keating’s new thriller, Darling, on VOD and in limited theaters April 1, 2016.

Keating’s psychological horror story, “Begins as a lonely young woman (Lauren Ashley Carter) moves into an old, mysterious Manhattan mansion. Hired as a caretaker, it’s not long before she discovers the estate’s haunted reputation and troubling past. These stories slowly transform into a backdrop for her twisted and violent descent into madness…”

You’d think by this time, everyone would know it’s a bad idea to accept the caretaker job in a creepy old mansion, even if it’s located in the heart of the city rather than on a lonesome Colorado mountainside.

But go ahead, see for yourself…

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The story I’m about to tell you gets a little confusing, but it contains J.J. Abrams, one of my all-time favorite modern-day monster films, Cloverfield and an entire movie filmed right under the noses of the people whose business it is to keep tabs on this sort of thing. So stay with me, I think it will be worth it.

Our tale begins early last week when the internet exploded with the news that a new Cloverfield film was not only confirmed, but that it was already filmed and would be coming out in just under two months. Titled 10 Cloverfield Lane, the film is a. “…blood relative of Cloverfield,” according to J.J. Abrams, who produced the original film, and stars John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and John Gallagher, Jr.

Before we go on, let’s take the way-back machine to 2008 in the months before the release of the original Cloverfield, which was also kept very much under wraps and was credited with being the object of a new concept in millennium marketing; “guerilla campaigns.”

The film appeared to feature a mysterious monster of unknown origin ravaging a large city in the style of Godzilla movies from decades past, but what really made it notable as far as big-budget movies are concerned, was its seeming lack of any promotion at all. The film was ushered into theaters with an incredibly simple teaser trailer that didn’t even feature the title of the film. It only contained the release date – 11/18/08. Beside the fact that it starred a cast of unknown actors and featured a monster doing something in a city that had yet to be identified, almost nothing was known about the film prior to its release. It initially wasn’t even clear if Abrams himself was even involved.

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Sofia Boutella as the Mummy of Cleopatra, perhaps?

This is the sort of news that should actually make me smile… a bit.

Instead, I’m pouring myself an adult beverage and doodling the word “why” all over the back of my 2015 Edward Gory calendar.

Before I explain cause of all the sadness, let’s peer into the black depths of Hollywood history…

As a fledgling movie studio in the early 1920’s Universal began to gain real public attention with its first two horror films The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and Phantom of the Opera (1925).

But it wasn’t until 1928, when studio founder Carl Laemmle made his son, Carl Jr. head of Universal Pictures as a 21st birthday present, that the studio found what became its most popular genre. Carl Jr. took his childhood taste for the “penny dreadfuls,” mixed it with Daddy’s money and created a niche for the studio, beginning a series of horror films which extended into the 1950s, affectionately dubbed Universal Horror.

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