Opening in theaters on February 3rd is the new horror film from director Ti West (The House of the Devil) called The Innkeepers. Set in a haunted inn on its final weekend before going out of business, the movie stars Sara Paxton (Shark NIght 3D), Pat Healy (Dirty Girl), Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture), and Kelly McGillis (Top Gun). 

IAR's Managing Editor Jami Philbrick recently had an opportunity to sit down and speak with director Ti West, as well as actress Sara Paxton about The Inkeepers. The duo spoke openly about the new movie, West's goal to make a "charming ghost story," casting Paxton in her role, what it was like for the actress to play a nerdy character for a change, "going Costanza," and what it was like for both of them to shoot a haunted house movie in an actual real-life haunted house. 

More than maybe any other genre, contemporary horror tends to be dominated by passing fads and formulaic stories that rely on cheap jump scares and one-dimensional hardbodied coeds who are nothing more than victims-in-waiting.  Right now, found footage titles are impossible to miss, and the shaky cam aesthetic has become so common that old-school horror fans are doubtless feeling burned out.

For anyone looking to mainline a more simultaneously old-fashioned and daring vision, though, there is an antidote to all these shaky cam stylings.  It's The Theatre Bizarre, an anthology horror film that uses one woman's venture into a seemingly derelict theater as a framing device for seven individual tales directed by seven different horror luminaries (Richard Stanley, Tom Savini, Douglas Buck, David Gregory, Buddy Giovinazzo, Jeremy Kastain, and Karim Hussain).

Taken as a whole, The Theatre Bizarre is an audacious, phantasmagoric Grand Guignol trip that surprises, amuses, digusts, and generally rewards any daring viewer.  Though every featured director contributes something unique, the project's primary architect is David Gregory, who conceived of the film, as well as wrote and directed the final segment, "Sweets," a singular portrait of strange addiction.  Gregory is the co-founder and CEO of Severin Films, and is known for his directorial debut Plague Town and having directing literally over a hundred making-of documentaries.

The film has earned big reactions on the festival circuit, including screenings at  Fantasia International Film Festival, Frightfest, Sitges Festival De Cine Fantastic, Toronto After Dark.  With midnight showings starting this Friday, the loquacious, funny, and knowledgeable Gregory engaged in an exclusive interview with IAR.  Read on for Gregory's thoughts on anthology movies, the beauty of resourceful low budget filmmaking, combining beauty and revulsion, as well as the eventual The Theatre Bizarre sequel.

Fans of the Paranormal Activity franchise will soon be able to possess their own copy of the third film in the series as Paranormal Activity 3 becomes available on Blu-ray and DVD beginning January 24th. In honor of this monumental event, the creator of the series, and several actors from the franchise assembled at Hollywood’s legendary Roosevelt Hotel recently (on Friday, January 13^th in fact) to discuss the success of the series and drop a few hints about the unenviable Paranormal Activity 4.

Along with several other members of the press, IAR attended the “Tea with Toby,” which is of course named after the demonic entity featured in the films. Tea, coffee, cheese and dessert were served while we all sat down at a table that had seating cards with our individual names printed on them. A special spot at the table was reserved for our host – Toby, but he never made his presence known.

On hand was series creator Oren Peli, as well as actors Katie Featherston, Micha Sloat, and Chris Smith. Also in attendance were Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown, the young actresses that play Katie and Kristi, respectively, as children in the most recent film.

After spending the last weekend of 2011, and the first weekend of 2012 atop the charts, Tom Cruise’s extremely successful Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was unseated as the champion of the box office by an unlikely competitor … The Devil Inside. Paramount’s documentary-style, found footage, supernatural, horror film cost less than $1 million to make yet it earned $34.5 million in its opening weekend and has gone on to earn over $46 million in just two weeks at the box office. While the film has done quite well financially, it has also received some complaints from fans regarding its abrupt ending and use of a website to tie up the film’s loose ends. None-the-less, that hasn’t stopped audiences from seeing the new movie, which is currently playing in theaters across the country.

The Devil Inside is directed by William Brent Bell, and co-written by Bell and producer Matthew Peterman, the duo behind the 2006 horror film Stay Alive starring Adam Goldberg, and Sophia Bush. The film features a cast of basically unknown actors including Fernanda Andrade, Simon Quarterman, Evan Helmth, Ionut Grama, Suzan Crowley, and Bonnie Morgan. The Devil Inside tells the story of Isabella (Andrade), a documentary filmmaker, and her mother Maria (Suzan Crowly), who committed a triple homicide over twenty years ago as the result of an exorcism gone terribly wrong. The Catholic Church intervened and Maria has been in a Catholic psychiatric hospital in Rome ever since. But when Isabella decides to make a film about exorcism and travels to Rome to find out more about her mother’s condition, she discovers a horrifying truth about the Catholic religion that she never could have imagined.

I recently had an opportunity to speak with William Brent Bell and Matthew Peterman about The Devil Inside and their work on the project. They discussed the film, its surprising opening weekend, the controversial ending, found footage, the Catholic Church, and the possibility of a sequel.

Synopsis: In 1989, emergency responders received a 9-1-1 call from Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley) confessing that she had brutally killed three people. 20 years later, her daughter Isabella (Fernanda Andrade) seeks to understand the truth about what happened that night. She travels to the Centrino Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Italy where her mother has been locked away to determine if her mother is mentally ill or demonically possessed. When she recruits two young exorcists (Simon Quarterman and Evan Helmuth) to cure her mom using unconventional methods combining both science and religion, they come face-to-face with pure evil in the form of four powerful demons possessing Maria.

Pop quiz time, kids.  You're designing a poster for an action movie that stars a very recognizable actor.  How do you incorporate said actor while also informing audiences that he's starring in an action movie?  According to time-honored tradition, you make the movie star the central ingredient of the poster and be certain that he's conspicuously holding a gun.  That's the case with the new poster for Contraband, starring Mark Wahlberg as a former criminal who must get back in the smuggling game to protect his family.  That poster leads off a One-Sheet Roundup that also includes The Grey, a survival thriller in which Liam Neeson leads a bunch of grizzled oilmen against feral wolves after a crash in the Alaskan wilderness.  And lastly, there's the latest poster for 11-11-11, the upcoming apocalyptic horror tale from Saw II-IV director Darren Lynn Bousman.

There are two basic types in the current wave of 3D movies*: those event movies that use the format ostensibly to create immersive worlds and impressive visuals, and those that happily revel in the gimmicky potential inherent in 3D.  Alexandre Aja's Piranha remake released last, was definitely in the latter category, going so over the top that it was difficult not to enjoy on some level.  At last night's SpikeTV Scream Awards, Dimension Films took the opportunity to air the first footage from the sequel, Piranha 3DD, in the form of a teaser TV spot.  Based on that title, one could guess that the sequel is taking the self-aware exploitative cheese to the next level, and this spot indicates that one would be correct. 

The story, such as it is, finds the prehistoric piranha infiltrating a waterpark, where they encounter a multitude of surgically-enhanced women in bikinis, David Hasselhoff appearing as himself, and Ving Rhames, a holdover from the first film, whose replacement legs are also, conveniently, rifles.

Imagine for a moment you've spent months hanging out at a remote Antarctic research base with a bunch of Norwegian guys.  If you heard that a paleontologist grad student who looked like Mary Elizabeth Winstead was headed to the facility, you'd probably be pretty thrilled about it.  Now imagine that your rare chance to flirt with a beautiful woman is ruined by an extraterrestrial that impersonates humans, leading to lots of grotesque horror and no end of paranoia.

There's no grotesque horror in the second clip from The Thing, but there is plenty of paranoia.  While the first clip showed a glimpse of the actual creature emerging explosively from a block of ice, this one sticks with the notion that anybody could really be an alien just waiting for a chance to jack you up.  Despite carrying the exact same title of John Carpenter's 1982 remake of The Thing From Another World, this is not a remake, but a prequel that will apparently contain almost identical scenes.

Paramount Pictures effectively gave notice that the campaign promoting Paranormal Activity 3 is beginning in earnest with the first official one-sheet, revealed last week.  Just in case you didn't get the message loud and clear, there's now a full-on teaser trailer for the found footage horror movie, which is actually a prequel, taking the story back to 1988, when Tom Cruise reigned supreme with Rain Man and Cocktail, neither of which has any bearing on Paranormal Activity 3.  Not only is there now a trailer, but the studio also rolled out the “Tweet To See It First” campaign, whereby the film will debut three days early in those cities that Tweet the hardest for it.

The first Paranormal Activity movie, as written and directed by Oren Peli, cost around $15,000 to make, was purchased by Paramount for somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000, and went on to gross more than $100 million when it reached theaters in October of 2009.  Last year, Paranormal Activity 2, made for just a few millions dollars, grossed just under $85 million. 

Given those ratios of expense-to-profit, it was guaranteed that another entry in the found footage franchise would roll around this Halloween, and probably for the next several Halloweens as well.  The first poster for Paranormal Activity 3 premiered online today, sticking to the style of its predecessors while claiming that audiences will "Discover how the activity began."