HorrorBound 2020 March Madness, Sweet 16, Coronavirus canceled everything, Spring Break Horror Movie Watchlist Part 1: The Beginning of the End
Well, 2020 certainly started with a bang hasn’t it? We're coming up on the start of Spring and suddenly the world has been dragged into chaos with all the Coronavirus panic! Flights shut down, events cancelled, toilet paper out of stock and everyone gets a murderous look in their eyes whenever a coworker coughs. It’s madness! Don’t worry, the crew over here at Horror Bound has you all set for whatever happens with this global pandemic with our first annual...
HorrorBound 2020 March Madness, Sweet 16, Coronavirus canceled everything, Spring Break Horror Movie Watchlist
In this special event we will be giving you the 8 horror double features to watch while you're practicing “social distancing”. So, grab your hand sanitizer, surgical mask and popcorn and enjoy these great, easily streamable films.
Public hysteria!!
News about this thing is coming fast and this is causing a bit of public hysteria. It’s spreading, it’s deadly, it’s not deadly, it’s contained, it’s escaped and so on. What’s going on? NO ONE KNOWS! And we can tell from horror movie history that public hysteria and utter confusion is not a good combination.
Sleepy Hollow is a perfect example of this public hysteria as the headless horseman storms into town, choppin’ heads and no one knows why. Ichabod Crane is deployed to the area armed with science to sort out the situation but finds himself buried in misinformation and mystery, much like the scientists dealing with Coronavirus. If you peek into the memes on this thing you will see all sorts of wacky conspiracies. Bat soup, armadillo heads, a doctor in Wuhan who is a supposed whistleblower saying that the virus is a man-made chimera released by the government to wage biological warfare on the enemies and my fav; it’s a hoax.
The horror fam or mutant fam or whatever hashtag you're hashtagging about find themselves like Ichabod Crane, buried under an avalanche of false information, trying to deduce the deadly reality behind what's going on. Our only relief is to be distracted by Christina Ricci’s beauty for 100 minutes. But be cautious, rumor has it she’s a witch and she might put a spell on you.
Sleepy Hollow is now streaming on Amazon and Tubi.
The perfect pairing for a movie like Sleepy Hollow about the ill effects public hysteria can have on a population is Plan 9 from Outer Space which shows just how dangerous utter confusion can be. So, here’s the plot:
There are a bunch of aliens who want to stop the human race from making weapons powerful enough to destroy civilization. Seems nice enough, but their plan to stop the humans is to resurrect the dead to terrorize the humans into listening to the aliens’ advice. If the humans don’t listen to the aliens, then they will use the resurrected dead to destroy all humanity. Basically, if you don’t stop killing yourself, we’ll do it for it.
Why? What logic is there behind this? About the same logic as droves of zombie like consumers storming grocery stores to stock up on toilet paper. You walk right by the aisle with the canned meat and vegetables and buy butt wipes? If you aint eatin’ what are you goin’ to be shittin? Maybe you need all the toilet paper to wipe your nose? I don’t get it. I don't know what they are thinking but it’s way worse than Plan 9.
Plan 9 from Outer Space is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
This new thing can't be that bad? Can it?
Just look around your news feeds and there are a bunch of people with the same meme.
I survived mayan calendar, SARS, H1N1, Ebola, HAARP, Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, blah blah blah.
100% it seems like we are stuck in the same type of cycle over and over and over and over again. We’re always dying of something. It’s always the end of the world. THE SKY IS FALLING DANGER WILL ROBINSON!
But the big question is, is this new thing really that bad? In the horror world we are a little more pessimistic about remakes than the general public, we know how bad remakes can be.
Let’s take the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street as an example. This movie is, in a word, terrible. A lot of people have various gripes about it, but let’s be honest, the only opinion that really matters is mine and here’s my issue…FREDDY KRUEGER DON'T NEED NO BACKSTORY! He’s the bastard son of 100 maniacs. His nun mother was accidentally locked up in Arkham Asylum over the weekend where the crazies had their way with her. Where the remake of the movie messed up was they gave Freddy a backstory that humanized him. He was a child murderer! Why would they want to humanize him? “Oh, it’s clear he was a product of his environment. We need to understand the psyche of the killer.” Uhm, duh, no shit, he’s the son of 100 maniacs. Regardless of my or anyone else's opinions of the film, it’s well worth another watch. Bask in its flawed glory.
A Nightmare on Elm Street is currently streaming on Netflix.
Social media is the real plague. A whole bunch of armchair scientists who probably got a C- in high school biology who took a break from posting memes with motivational quotes paired with a picture of Tupac suddenly know EVERYTHING about virology.
“Oh, this is no different than the yearly flu which kills way more.”
Or
“Ackchyually, there have been numerous other coronaviruses in the past, this is no different.”
Guess what Susan, the 1998 version of Psycho is the exact same as the original version and it is WAY worse. Much like the flu, you could watch Alfred Hitchcock’s classic annually with no negative side effect, but get one glance at Vince Vaughn in a blonde wig and start coming down with a fever. You wouldn’t think that you could do a scene for scene remake and it be that much of a drastic difference but it is, why? Because people and their tastes much like pandemic diseases evolve and mutate and what worked in 1960 doesn't necessarily work in 1998.
Psycho is available for rent/purchase on your fave VOD platform.
Italy is on lockdown!
During the first week of March Italy announced that they were putting a majority of the country under lock down. Apparently outside of Asia, Coronavirus hit the Italian Peninsula the hardest and everyone on the outside is looking around going…
Uhm, is this what’s going to happen to us next?”
People are worried that when they see Italy, they see the future of whatever country they live in but the horror fans know that if anything, the Italians are always upping the ante and doing things their own way. Take for example Michele Soavi’s The Church which is technically a sequel to the 1985 Lamberto Bava classic Demons aka Demoni in which a group of strangers are trapped inside of a movie theatre and are killed by a bunch of demons who are basically zombies who transmit demon-itis through scratching or biting people.
Close your eyes. Imagine that movie but with a different cast and set in a church and BOOM. You have The Church. You see some crazy priests accidentally unlocked a hidden catacomb of the church which triggered an event that locked all the people in the church now they are stuck to fend for themselves against the hordes of demons and the living machine that is the church that is transforming around them. Yeah, it’s fairly crazy.
The Church is now streaming on Amazon Prime.
Contamination is an obvious choice of a double-header not just in name but in terms of Italian’s doing things their own way. While the rest of the film world was making alien films about xenomorphs and such, Italian filmmaker Luigi Cozzi was making a film about green gooey eggs that if you touched them they made your entire body explode and they sang, and they were controlled by a giant rubber alien squid thing and the whole thing was so bloody that their European neighbors the UK said, “enough with this nonsense” and banned the film outright.
We horror fans could have expected Italy to take the most extreme measures, we’ve been watching the most extreme, gore filled, insane plotted horror movies in existence for the past 30 some odd years. It only makes sense that the current government would make the leap they did, the only question is who will be next? Or will Italy be unique like it is in the world of horror?
Contamination is currently streaming on Shudder.
Stay in the house...but what if it’s haunted?
This goddamn coronavirus is cancelling more things than a furious Twitter mob, and it’s amazing. No basketball, no hockey, no lent special fish fry Friday at the local Elks club. We are not allowed to form in groups. We must practice social distancing. STAY HOME! The talking heads in suits tell us during their 24x7 news cycle. Yeah, OK Mr. Anchorman what if there’s ghosts?
As an extrovert the idea of locking myself up in the house seems crazy, but not understanding the normal things that human beings enjoy I’m not missing out on much and don't mind being at home. But what if my house was haunted like the one in We Are Still Here? This Barb Crampton led film is the standard story of a family moving into a farm house that has spooky ghosts, but while most movies have these free roamin’ vapors, We Are Still Here has these crispy fire demons made of cinder and ash that will melt your fucking face off faster than an Iron Maiden riff.
What am I supposed to do? Go out into the wasteland and take my chances of enjoying societal comforts of the local Foosball tournament? Or do I stay cooped up in the house with fucking fire demons who want me to leave because a Pilgrim murdered them or something? Oh, the decisions!
We Are Still Here is currently streaming on Shudder.
So, I’m a man of many hobbies, I like painting and wood work and gardening and movies and Jiujitsu and star gazing and fishing and investigating conspiracy theories of the global elites who are trying to supress vital information on the nature of humanity from the population to ensure we don't rise up and overthrow our technological elites who are trying to enslave the population with mass hypnosis. I am also a man of many hats.
When I am not wearing my pessimist nihilist hat that is pissed about no public events, I wear my optimist hat that says to me;
“Hey, if we're all shut in. Maybe we can have an event at the house with my closest friends?”
Woot! This sounds like a plan! Well then, my pessimist hat pops up, which I imagine looks like the hat Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit wears, and says to me:
“Hey bro, what if you go to your friend’s house and there’s like this creepy doctor who really invited you there to scare you but it turns out the house is haunted by ghosts out to kill one of you like in 1999’s remake of The Haunting?”
You know, I don’t normally take advice from hats and even though this one makes salient points, I’ve learned over the past couple of years to never trust red baseball caps.
The Haunting is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and Tubi.
Friends. Comrades. Fellow survivors of the global pandemic, if you are reading this communication fear not, there is a part 2. Come back to Horror Bound this Friday for Part 2 of the HorrorBound 2020 March Madness, Sweet 16, Coronavirus canceled everything, Spring Break Horror Movie Watchlist where we have 8 more films to help you get through this thing.
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