This bloody take on The Breakfast Club has inspired us to take a look at the great high school horror films of our time. As if school wasn’t bad enough without people getting shot, stabbed, eaten, possessed, hit by buses, or a combination of all of those.

The Craft

A girl with a troubled past moves to a town where she befriends a clique of three girls who happen to dabble in the occult. The four begin casting spells together which brings them unimaginable power. However, power corrupts and soon Fairuza Balk goes totally psycho just witching the crap out of everyone. It’s like Mean Girls with lightning fingers.

Heathers

Another high school horror that deals with the subject of popularity and social hierarchy, Heathers goes to some dark places. When a prank leads to the accidental death of the school’s Queen Bee, it’s believed to be a suicide. Before you know it, everyone wants to get in on this teenage suicide craze. This film features one of the first appearances of Christian Slater, who America would fall for as the crazed, kill-happy mastermind behind it all.

Jennifer’s Body

Diablo Cody‘s follow-up to Juno is a far cry from teenage pregnancy and lost youth. The story centers around Megan Fox’s Jennifer, a high school student (yeah, right) sacrificed to a demon. Not one to let hot teen ass go to waste, the demon possesses her and uses her form to seduce and eat the boys in her class. Largely underrated, the film was poorly-received by critics and girls who aren’t as pretty as Megan. But it gave us some genuinely memorable scares and scenes. And this picture:

Thumbs up.

The Faculty

A mix of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Breakfast Club, The Faculty centers on six students discovering that their school is being taken over by alien invaders. The unlikely allies (nerd, jock, Goth, hot girl, hick, and rebel) team up to save not only themselves but Earth itself. Starring Elijah Wood and Josh Hartnett. Remember him?

Final Destination

Though we don’t see any action in the halls of the high school, Final Destination tries to take us along with a group of students on their senior trip to Paris. Tries being the key word. Before their flight disembarks, a student has a premonition that the plane will explode, killing them all. He fights his way off the plane, inadvertently taking a few others with him. Moments later, the plane actually explodes. From there, the survivors find they are being stalked by death as they are killed in the most grisly and random accidents. The film has spurred four sequels. Some good, some insultingly bad. But all feature completely gnarly death scenes for all of the gore hounds.

Scream

The instant classic that brought horror back to the box office, for better or worse. This sly, self-referential slasher film kept us guessing and screaming with intense scares and hidden motives. In addition to carving up students at Woodsboro High, the film also carved up and dissected the horror genre itself by laying out and then subverting the rules of Hollywood horror filmmaking. Scream is arguably one of the most important and influential films of the 90′s.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

If high school horror were a contest, Wes Craven‘s original A Nightmare on Elm Street would be the clear winner. Students experiencing vivid nightmares featuring the same burn-covered ghoul discover that when they die in their dream, they die in real life. Pulled into a nightmarish wonderland, it’s a fight for survival and sanity as buried secrets refuse to stay that way. And then there were all those hokey sequels, but hey, whatevs.

This weekend sees a “prequel” to one of the best horror films ever made coming to theaters. The Thing (an excellent remake itself) is a classic, and though the new film isn’t technically a remake, early reviews are pointing to the fact that it pretty much is. Does it belong on a list of worst horror remakes? We’ll hold judgment until we see it for ourselves. But in the meantime, we can steer you away from these insultingly-bad horror remakes that failed to live up to their predecessors.

A Nightmare On Elm Street

While this was in production, we were promised a gritty re-imaging of Elm Street. The promotional materials promised us everything every fan always wanted — more focus on Freddy’s back story. However, what we got didn’t deliver on any of those promises. Instead, it was mostly a lame retread of scenes we saw in the original re-imagined to include vlogs and other already-dated modern trends. This film showed the most promise when it focused on the scenes that questioned whether or not Krueger was innocent before his execution. But in the end, all of that was squandered to make way for more dumb jokes and toothless scares.

The Amityville Horror

The back story gets re-imagined here to disastrous effect. Ryan Reynolds stars as a dad who goes all Shining on his family after moving into a house that was once used to torture Indians. More time should have been spent on making he house actually scary rather than showing off the cast’s stomach muscles. Though those were nice too.

The Fog

This remake of John Carpenter‘s awesome pirate ghost story was more concerned with having a pumped up, poppy soundtrack than it was with turning in any genuine scares. In Carpenter’s original, you could hear undead pirates ripping the skin off an elderly babysitter as if it were fabric. Here you only hear Fall Out Boy.

Scream 4, his latest directorial effort, hits Blu-Ray and DVD next week. While promoting the release, the horror master recently took some time out of his busy schedule to talk with our writer Gabriel O’Friday about his films, his career and more.

Gabriel O’Friday: Thank you for taking the time to do this interview, Wes. I really appreciate it.

Wes Craven: You’re welcome. Happy to do it.

GO: With the upcoming release of Scream 4 on Blu-Ray and DVD, you have really come a long way with the franchise. When you first began work on the original Scream film, did you ever envision it becoming what it is today, in the same way that A Nightmare on Elm Street took off?

WC: At first and even about halfway through Scream, I just thought it was a one-off. Typically when making a film, you just have your head down, and you are working away, and you don’t really think about sequels. You are just so focused on getting the first one right, that you really can’t afford to be thinking about anything beyond that initial goal. Then as we neared completion of the film, and then after we saw the finished product, we were really blown away. It wasn’t until most of the hard work was behind us that we realized we could have something on our hands here.

GO: When I was younger, I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street, and I couldn’t sleep for weeks for fear of Freddy Krueger coming after me in my dreams. That element really sets Freddy apart from the other slasher flick villains. How did you develop that concept of the nightmare stalking character?

WC: Well, it all goes back to a story I read in the newspaper years ago about this kid who was frightened about going to sleep, because he thought something bad was going to happen if he did. And apparently he kept himself awake for a few days, and then finally he fell asleep, and sure enough he died. The story shook me, and that story planted the seed in my mind for what would become the character of Freddy Krueger.

GO: Many of your films, including one of my favorites, New Nightmare, deal with life imitating art. In the case of Scream, the idea of horror movie “rules” and the concept of films within the film adds much more depth than the typical slasher movie. Do you usually set out to add some sort of philosophical or social commentary to your work, to give it an edge over other films of the genre?

WC: Well, the way that story line developed in terms of New Nightmare was basically the studio wanted another film after The Final Nightmare, but we couldn’t really figure out what to do. There was really no coherent story. Then I got to talking to Robert Englund and Heather Langenkamp, and I realized how these films had really shaped all of our lives off of the set. That with the fact that the film industry was fighting censorship issues at the time, and the idea for that film just blossomed out of that. As far as the concept of touching on social issues in my films, I find an effective method for horror is to take very real things and to take real fears and to put a face on them in the form of the movie villains.

GO: Also in New Nightmare, playing yourself, you put forth the concept that the only way to destroy Freddy is by capturing his essence in a work of art, in other words, by making another movie about him. This strikes me as particularly interesting, because as a writer, I feel a connection to the concept of finding catharsis through placing personal demons and fears onto the printed page. Does this idea tap into your own creative process?

WC: Well, you have to put yourself in very dark place to write this sort of thing. I mean, it’s really trying to find the darkest stuff you can come up with and, as in the Scream films, having to put yourself in the place of a killer to really make it effective. And in order to do that, yes, I think you have to use your own fears in order to make it as real and as terrifying as possible.

GO: Several of your films, such as Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, have been remade in recent years. You produced Last House and The Hills Have Eyes remakes, so you were obviously on board with those projects. But how do you generally feel after the first viewing of films in which others have taken your work and put their own creative spin on it?

WC: With Last House and Hills, I think the filmmakers really did a great job, and I was very proud of what was accomplished on those. But then there is a secondary feeling in which you are concerned about the original films getting buried and losing their uniqueness.

GO: So would you say you are worried about people associating those titles with the remakes instead of the original films?

WC: Sure, that’s one possible fear, but more I think you are worried about losing the uniqueness of something that up until that point was solely associated with your work. Of course, we had much different budgets, so there will be those who compare them in that light, but I think they stand up pretty well next to each other.

GO: Ingmar Bergman seems to be an influence on your career, as Last House on the Left was based on his film, The Virgin Spring. And there are aspects of New Nightmare that are reminiscent of the identity crises faced by the lead characters in Bergman’s Persona. Specifically I mean the scene in which Langenkamp and Saxon begin to lose track of where their characters end and their actual selves begin. First of all, am I on the right track with the weight of his influence on your work, and what other filmmakers have influenced you?

WC: Yes, certainly Bergman and a lot of the European filmmakers of the 50’s were enormous influences on my career. Of course, I was forbidden by my church to see films growing up, so when I discovered Bunuel, Truffaut and Fellini among others, I was inspired to drop everything and go into film. Polanski is another director whose films had a profound effect on me early on.

GO: Just off the top of your head, what are a few of your favorite films of all time?

WC: Getting back to Polanski, Repulsion and The Tenant were two films that had a big impact on me when I first saw them. The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are some of the really gritty horror films that impacted me. Of course before I got to know some of the guys who made these films, I thought they must be really screwed up for making movies like this. Now I suppose that’s what people think about me.

GO: Speaking of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, that is a film with a lead character who is female. You cast females in empowering lead roles in films like A Nightmare on Elm Street. Would you say that was a conscious decision on your part, in which you decided beforehand, or do things just sort of work themselves out that way during the creative process?

WC: There’s a story to that. When I made Swamp Thing, my daughter was watching it with me, and I had a scene where a female character was running away, and as in all such situations in horror movies, she stumbled and fell. My daughter turned to me and said, “Dad, girls don’t always fall down.” This made me realize I had fallen into the old horror cliché of the girl running from the villain and tripping on a rock or some other debris. I didn’t really care for that, so it got me thinking about taking it in the other direction and creating some strong female characters. I certainly did that with A Nightmare on Elm Street, and then of course we got to revisit that again in the Scream films with Neve Campbell and some of the other female characters.

GO: I like that. “Girls don’t always fall down.” You should have a female character declare that in one of your films.

WC: That’s right. Sometimes the girls are the strong ones, and it’s the guys who need the girls to help them up.

GO: Wes, thanks again for your time. It’s been great talking to you today.

WC: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Also, kudos on casting another eery-looking actor who will ruin my sleep patterns. I’m pretty sure that’s the kid from The Sandlot. Child actors, man. They can’t be trusted.

Check out all the Sony “Action Unleashed” DVDs!

9 Paranormal Activity (2007)

Paranormal Activity tells the story of a young couple living in a new home who are stalked by a demonic presence. In order to capture evidence of the supernatural being, they deploy surveillance cameras, which give the film a documentary-like feel. The film was well received by audiences and critics alike, but as the most recent entry on this list, I felt obligated to place it at the bottom. Only time will tell how this modern take on a classic premise holds up.

8. The Haunting (1963)

In an effort to prove the existence of the supernatural, Dr. John Markway, along with three companions, sets out to investigate the Hill House. It isn’t long until strange occurrences begin to plague the group. But like most good horror films, all is not what it seems.

7. The Devil’s Backbone (2001)

When a young boy named Carlos is made parentless by the Spanish Civil War, he becomes the newest resident of a local orphanage. But after spening some time in his new home, Carlos realizes that humans aren’t the only inhabitants roaming the grounds. If you like Guillermo del Toro, you owe it to yourself to check out this often overshadowed entry in his filmography.

6. The Changeling (1980)

The Changeling tells the story of Dr. John Russell (played by Oscar winner George C. Scott), who is trying to piece his life back together after the death of is wife and child. While renting a Victorian-era home in the Seattle area, the ghost of a murdered child begins haunting him. His investigation of the child’s death leads Russell to many unanswered questions involving a powerful local family that is desperate to let sleeping dogs lie.

5. The Legend of Hell House (1973)

Belasco House is refereed to as the “Mount Everest” of haunted houses. This is due in no small part to the fact that is was the site of a mass murder which is thought to have been carried out by the home’s now-missing owner, Emeric Belasco. At the behest of an eccentric millionaire, physicist Lionel Barrett sets out for the home in order to prove the existence of life after death, but ends up risking his own life in the process.

4. The House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Vincent Price plays eccentric millionaire Fredrick Loren in this horror classic in which five people are invited to spend the night in Loren’s haunted mansion. If they live through the night, they will receive $10,000 each (it was a lot of cash back in 1959). In order to up the ante, the guests are all armed with handguns. Add the threat of the supernatural to the mix, and it’s not hard to imagine what could go wrong with this scenario.

3. The Amityville Horror (1979)

Based on a book by the same name, Amityville Horror was reportedly based on a “true story.” And like most horror films that are based on a “true story,” the story in question turned out to be absolute bullshit. Even so, the film is one of the creepiest of all time. When the Lutz family buys their supposed dream home, they are fully aware that it was the site of a mass murder. But what can go wrong? After all, houses don’t have memories, right? If that were the case, it would have made for a very boring film.

2. The Poltergeist (1982)

Steven Spielberg‘s addition to the horror genre tells the story of the Freeling family, and the supernatural forces attempting to drive them from their new home. As the film progresses, the paranormal activity increases, and experts are called in to asses the situation. As it turns out, the home was built on the site of a grave yard, and while developers moved the gravestones, they neglected to move the graves. This doesn’t sit will with the ghosts of the graves’ inhabitants, and it doesn’t bode well for the Freeling’s youngest daughter.

1. The Shining (1980)

This Stanley Kubrick classic has become one of the most influential horror films of all time, casting its shadow not only on the horror genre, but throughout pop-culture. Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic who agrees to take a job as the winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. While he plans to use the job’s extensive free time to further his writing career, the ghosts who inhabit the hotel have other ideas. Apparitions plague Jack and his family, pushing him beyond the brink of homicidal madness.

They’re making a horror movie about a mashugina (crazy) Jewish extremist named the Hannukiller who slaughters people during the eight nights of Hanukkah. Judah Lazarus is killed by the police while trying to sacrifice his son Obediah on the last night of Hanukkah. Once Obediah is a grown man, instead of feeling all l’chaim, he decides to become intolerant of non-Jews, "bad Jews," and those he perceives to be enemies of the Jewish faith. He unleashes eight nights of mishigas (madness). 

A group of Jewish schlemiels (teenagers) are getting ready to kibitz (party) for the holidays, but are in for a Festival of Oy Gavalts (Frights). With the help of a mensch (wise) Rabbi, they deduce that the murder victims have falshed (violated) Judiac law and that their only chance at survival is to embrace their faith.

Oy vey, a need a schvitz after yiddishizing that synopsis. So needless to say, Hanukkah will be a must see this holiday season. You bring the latkes, I’ll bring the gafilte fish. (JoBlo)

Check out the posters for the film after the jump. And the Punimbook page here.

_{A lady in the street, but a freak in the bed.}

A trailer for The Last Exorcism has hit the interwebs, and we couldn’t help but notice that the Eli Roth production looks a lot like the first Exorcist.

Just like the original, the film follows a young girl possessed by the devil who is walking on the ceiling, contorting her body in horrifying ways and acting like an all-around *sshole. But don’t worry. Rumor has it that the film has at least one modern twist. Instead of vomiting split pea soup, the victim upchucks Healthy Choice Hearty Vegetable Barley, a low-calorie alternative for today’s health-conscious horror fan.

Watch The Last Exorcism trailer below.

The Last Exorcism Trailer – Watch more Movie Trailers

Fourfour put together a compilation of all those cheap scares in movies when someone pushes the medicine cabinet mirror closed after grabbing their Xanax/roofies for the evening, and someone/something APPEARS BEHIND THEM IN IT! It’s quite amazing how many movies have actually used a gag that I’m quite positive was first on screen back when people thought Cary Grant was straight. 

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Every new image or clip of The Wolfman gets me less and less excited for the film’s release… and now comes the second full trailer, which ends up playing out like some sort of Victorian version of The Fast & The Furious.

There’s so much dried poop stuck to the hairy butt of this trailer you’re gonna need to resurrect Billy Mays to figure out a solution for getting it out. C’mon Joe Johnston! Not since Jumanji have we had to deal with hairy CG animal poop clumps. The only convincing part of the trailer was Hugo Weaving, and he pretty much fapped around all day on set (see photo):

Director: Kevin Greutert

Cast: Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Betsy Russell, Tanedra Howard, Karen Cliche

Synopsis: Special Agent Strahm is dead, and Detective Hoffman has emerged as the unchallenged successor to Jigsaw’s legacy. However, when the FBI draws closer to Hoffman, he is forced to set a game into motion, and Jigsaw’s grand scheme is finally understood.