Mixed Martial Arts, or MMA for short, is the fasting growing sport in the United States today.  Combining the flash of professional wrestling with the brutality of boxing, MMA draws thousands to live events and sells millions of pay-per-view orders.  MMA is also the subject of a new documentary from Vlad Yudin (who also made the bodybuilding doc Generation Iron) called The Hurt Business.

With about forty feature films to his credit over a sixty year span, director Robert Wise was a fairly prolific filmmaker.  He also was extremely versatile, with a resume that includes everything from Hollywood musicals such as The Sound of Music and West Side Story to science fiction epics like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  He also did more than merely dabble in the horror genre, with credits like The Curse of the Cat People, The Body Snatcher, and Audrey Rose to his name.  His crown jewel, at least as far as fright flicks are concerned, is the 1963 spookfest The Haunting.

JT LeRoy was a real-life Cinderella: an androgynous boy with a truck stop prostitute for a mother who lived a life of drug addiction and sexual abuse before becoming a literary phenomenon when his first autobiographical book, Sarah, was published in 1999.  JT LeRoy was also a fraud: an identity manufactured by writer Laura Albert as a way for Albert to write about taboo subjects that she normally wouldn’t dare approach.  Albert’s deception was exposed in 2005, and the entire drama is documented in the fascinating film Author: The JT LeRoy Story.

It would seem as if 4k restorations are all the rage in the horror world.  Last year, Tobe Hooper’s classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre got one, as did George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and there’s one for Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm on the books as well.  Well, not to be outdone, it has recently been announced that one of the most controversial horror films ever made, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, is also getting the 4k treatment for its thirtieth anniversary.  It’s as good a time as any for Cinema Fearité to take a look back at the 1986 shock film classic.

In retrospect, it would appear as if Universal Studios owned the American horror cinema market in the 1930s.  In actuality, however, nearly every studio in town was making horror films just as prolifically during that decade, with RKO Radio Pictures (King Kong, The Most Dangerous Game), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Freaks, Mad Love), and Columbia Pictures (Black Moon, The Man They Could Not Hang, The Black Room) all releasing quality fright flicks.  Columbia was especially productive, even managing to convince some of Universal’s stars to moonlight on their movies.  That’s what they did in 1933 with the great Bela Lugosi, just two years after he became a household name in Dracula, with Night of Terror.

Former New Orleans Saints safety Steve Gleason’s football career can be defined in a single play.  On September 25^th, 2006, in the Saints’ first home game since their city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, Gleason blocked a punt by the Atlanta Falcons that was returned for a touchdown, the first score of a game which the Saints would go on to win.  It was more than just a football play.  It was a symbol of resilience, a statement about the resurgence of a city that had been nearly destroyed.  Gleason provided a spark of hope which turned the city around.

Although they’re not always considered horror films, there can be little doubt that rape-revenge movies are horrifying.  Some of them, like Wes Craven’s debut film The Last House on the Left, are well-crafted artsy experiences.  Others, like Meir Zarchi’s infamous shocker I Spit on Your Grave, are more exploitive in nature.  And some, like 1975’s Poor Pretty Eddie, are a crazy combination of both.

Ever since George Romero turned the horror world on its ear with Night of the Living Dead, the words “Night Of The” have become staples of fright flick titles.  Whether it’s a creature feature B-movie such as Night of the Lepus or a tense crime drama like Night of the Juggler, those three words can really let the audience know what they’re in for.  Cinema Fearité has already sung the praises of a couple of these aptly-named movies - Night of the Creeps and Night of the Demons.  And now, we’re doing one more – the 1984 horror comedy Night of the Comet.

Whether one considers him one of the freshest voices in modern cinema or just a hack Hitchcock imitator, there’s no doubt that Brian De Palma has made some of the most important movies of the last half century.  Now, fellow directors Noah Baumbach (Mistress America) and Jake Paltrow (“NYPD Blue”) turn the camera around on the iconic filmmaker in the simply titled documentary De Palma.

It’s common knowledge that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was the result of a friendly writing competition between herself, her future husband Percy Shelley, the poet Lord Byron, and author/physician John Polidori.  While stuck indoors during the unseasonably rainy summer of 1816, the four writers took turns trying to scare each other with stories of ghosts, ghouls, and goblins.  Only the four participants know for sure what happened over the course of those isolated and secluded days, but director Ken Russell (The Devils, Altered States) posits one theory in his 1986 movie Gothic.

When most people think about classic horror writers, two names usually come immediately to mind: Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.  But there is a third name that deserves to be there.  The prolific French writer Guy de Maupassant had every bit as much imagination and talent as Poe and Lovecraft.  There just haven’t been enough movie adaptations of Maupassant’s work for him to have gained household name status.  There have been some Maupassant movies, however - the best known being the 1963 chiller Diary of a Madman.

A lot of weird stuff can be found on the internet.  The general rule is that just about anything – and I do mean anything – is just a Google search away.  For example: who would have thought that Competitive Endurance Tickling was a thing?  Well, if you believe the new documentary Tickled, apparently it is.

The biggest news coming out of last weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con was, arguably, the announcement that the upcoming Adam Wingard/Simon Barrett movie The Woods is, in fact, a sequel to The Blair Witch Project.  With all the hoopla and hub-bub, some fans seem to have forgotten (or perhaps have been trying to forget) that there already has been a Blair Witch sequel: 2000’s Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.

In 1994, Blizzard Entertainment released the game "Warcraft: Orcs & Humans," which created a universe so popular the company created three more games in the series; the most widely known and arguably the most popular being "World of Warcraft (WOW)." The "WOW" phenomenon has had its ups and downs in popularity among gamers, but it continues to have a solid following. The most shocking part of the games' story is that it took over 20 years to have a movie based on them made. Warcraft has finally arrived, rolled up in an action-packed, CGI-filled fantasy spectacle that will surely have "WOW" devotees grinning from ear-to-ear.