The poster for this film should be hanging in the Whitney, or Tate Modern for that matter. It's truly a work of art. Like most Corman titles there's always a scantily clad female in the clutches of some strange creature.

Roger Corman is a cinematic genius in many ways. To some he’s produced absolute celluloid drivel, and to others the best hammy camp cult classics a movie goer ever hopes to see.

Without him there would be no Tarantino or Rodriguez, let alone Kevin Smith or Rob Zombie. These directors grew up on a diet of his films in the salad days, where they shone at midnight shows or drive-ins. The movies he produces are brash, trashy and flashy – like great big pair of heaving breasts covered in glitter. 

As a kid, I’d sneak into his films and marvel at his production skills. Sure, the acting was over the top at times, and the woman were always equipped with a luscious double D-cup, that often spilleth over. He effectively wrote the book on B-movies and cult-schlock classics; genres that later created the genre of the video nasty.

Galaxy Of Terror was such a film. A cult classic and a necessary addition to any horror aficionado’s library. Also released under the title Mind Warp, it was shlock rip-off of sci-fi films – particularly Alien. This was the film that helped Erin Moran shed her Happy Days Joanie Cunningham goodie-goodie image. Starring horror staple Sid Haig, Robert “Freddie Krueger” Englund and David Lynch-regular Grace Zabriskie. The film also credited a then unknown James Cameron as Production designer before his days for Titanic and Avatar. What’s not to love?

A stranded astronaut is killed on a dust bowl planet named Morganthus, all the while mighty mystics, playing a game of new-age chess, instruct a military troop to visit Planet Deathtrap. They’re led by a captain more apt to a mental ward than a military operation. The team sets out to look for survivors, while dealing with their own personal and professional issues. (Think Gilligan’s Island without ultra-hot Ginger and with bigger jugs.)

Greater forces are at work on the planet, and the group, captured by the force of the planet, come to a pyramid-like structure where they are forced to confront all of their deepest fears without any means of escape from Scary Space Mountain. FYI, Taaffe’s Character has a phobia of creepy crawlies.

Released in 1981, hot on the heels of the of Alien phenomenon, GoT received a huge amount of controversy for a particular scene – one that will forever burn a permanent image into your mind. Yep, it’s the infamous bit that set Taaffe O’Connell on course to forever be a trailblazer in celluloid inter-species erotica. The infamous Worm Rape scene. This scene has even spawned a website paying homage to the notorious scene where pervs round the world make works of art out of their interpretations of the clip.

The MPAA slapped the filmmakers with an X-Rating upon certification but with editing allowed the film an R-rating in US theaters. Some theatres refused to screen the film because of this scene, and it never saw a release in some countries.

Trust me – seeing this video was NASTY. When I was a kid, this scene moved me so much, I was later suspended from catholic school for reennacting it in the school yard, with Father Montoya playing the worm. Anyway, that’s a different story – maybe more appropriate for the psychologist’s couch.

Yet I could never get Taaffee’s forced moans down pat, as I can’t imagine being aroused by a horny maggot slathering me in jizz. Well, not without buying me dinner first. It’s a great film even in spite of its B-movie status, relying heavily on man-made SFX which are in some ways more effective than modern CGI. I for one wish movies would go back to those heady days of hands-on film-making. That time that has definitely gone by.

Galaxy of Terror was long out of print for many years and was highly collectible, particularly if you came across a VHS copy with the scene still intact. Yet not to worry Shout! Factory have given Galaxy Of Terror a new lease of life with a release on both DVD and Blu-Ray. So those of you into inter-species erotica can get an HD eyeful, in all its Technicolor Gory (I meant to type that).

• View the trailer on the FYH tumblr

Watch here

Many people blame Eli Roth’s Hostel or the Saw series for sparking the “torture porn” genre. But the damage was done by another …

I don’t want to oversimplify, but something sinister happened in, and to, horror in the last decade or so. It began in 1996 with Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s Scream. 

The original Scream was a great film. Here was a true mainstream horror crossover: smart and funny, with enough fidelity to the slasher genre to keep horror fans happy. It converted a lot of fans to the horror genre, people that until then had thought the genre inaccessible.

Williamson’s writing was typical of the smart-teen trend of the late 90s that spawned the likes of Buffy, Dawson’s creek and I Know What You Did Last Summer (etc – NB the latter two were also Williamson’s work). The philosophical smart-ass college-kid wave eventually broke – smashed forever in fact, by the events of early September 2001.

There’s little to add to a critique of the first couple of Scream films. They have very healthy Wikipedia pages. But in opening up and dissecting a lot of the “rules” of horror that had gone before, it destroyed those rules. Unwittingly, Scream, with it’s sexy and groundbreaking approach to horror, opened a door and let in “torture porn” / “gorenography”. It terraformed the strange landscape of horror we have in this foul year of our lord, 2011.

The terms ”torture porn” and ESPECIALLY “gorenography” are banned (inasmuch as anything can be “banned”) from this site, unless they’re being used self-reflexively. Apart from the unhealthy and uncomfortable connotation of finding graphic scenes of torture and killing sexually arousing, The terms themselves are problematic.

The dictionary definition of “pornography” is “obscene writings, drawings, photographs, or the like, especially those having little or no artistic merit.” Film of any genre should have artistic merit, even if it’s just to be entertaining; film is an artform. Yet I’d take issue with those who say porn can’t be an artform. And obscenity certainly has its place in art.

Should art shy away from inflaming the propensities, whatever they may be? Never. But it shouldn’t make you uncomfortable for the hollow sake of being uncomfortable. Art should always have a soul, if not a message.

In a sense, the original definition of pornography is dead, or at least outdated. Today “pornography” refers to the stuff people trawl the internet for, in order to get their rocks off. So tightly are the terms bound to the concepts of sexual arousal, it’s impossible for them to sit comfortably in a splatter/gore horror context. The thrills you get from good horror aren’t explicitly sexually arousing (although this doesn’t mean horror can’t be sexy).

The terms do great damage and disservice to the horror genre. ”Torture porn” was a term attributed to David Edelstein, chief film critic for New York Magazine. It makes for a great headline, but it was never intended to be a genre by serious film-makers. In creating that catchy label, many exploitative film-makers and films came along with it to cash in. Empty, cynical, and in some cases, morally bankrupt.

Those rules that the Scream series ended up destroying gave horror a moral framework. It meant that the Final Girl ended up killing the killer (even though he’d inevitably be resurrected for another instalment). It meant that college kids who drank, fornicated or otherwise “sinned” would get their comeuppance. Going anywhere was folly, and claiming that you’d return soon was a genre motif equivalent to a hard-bitten cop in an action movie being one step away from retirement. It meant you could subject child-characters to incredible peril, but children (those sacred cows) often escaped death, if not trauma.

It was fun to bend those rules, even break them if there was sufficient need – it would usually be a shocking incident integral to the plot. But still they remained. Then the Screams came along and chopped them to pieces. Hollywood horror realised the jig was up – raising the stakes would not be enough (this had gradually happened in terms of levels of violence, as the idea of what was shocking diminished). The game would need to change altogether.

Dr. Howard C. Adelman is a pathologist who does private consultations for police, private investigators, and local morticians. To a horror-movie fan and true-crime fan, the guy is also a living legend. He was the deputy chief medical inspector at the original Amityville murders on Long Island in 1977. The story that was bastardized again and again for books and movies, the six people shot in one night by a family member? This is the first guy who walked around that crime scene with the cops checking stuff out.

We showed him clips of kill scenes from some iconic slasher flicks and then asked him, “Is this bullshit or what?”

Not that I’m pointing out any shenanigans, it’s a good article. Read the whole thing here.

Japanese Friday the 13th poster

This is the new website for Fuck Yeah Horror, AKA FY Horror, AKA FYH. It started life as a lazily (and often drunkenly) updated Tumblr blog in 2009, quickly gained about 400+ followers and some industry interest, and then … stagnated. 

One of the problems with the original site was that it was hacked together before Tumblr added all their bells and whistles (like pages!). This made it seem like a lot of effort for not much gain. Then Tumblr added features and it was like, really? I’m going to have to start from scratch to avoid this looking like bowl of dicks? Nah, you’re all right, cheers … Also, I got really ill during 2009 and stayed that way for most of last year. I write more about that over here.

Either way, FYH had potential, but it wasn’t really in the spirit of Tumblr. Tumblr is, at its best (and sometimes worst), a bottomless pit of visual brick-a-brack. The FYH Tumblr will remain, but as a repository for large scans of horror/exploitation/video-nasty posters and photos. It’s an ideal medium for visual art without the need for too much exposition. Expect plenty of links back and hopefully a revival of the old site in its purest form.

The art of the video nasties era is something I wanted to explore with FYH, and remains a part of its goal. Gawping at bizarre and beautiful VHS cover art in video shops of the 1980s and 90s left an impression upon young Jimboeth, for better or worse. They were deeply and weirdly anachronistic – movies will never be promoted that way again.

This new site represents the direction that FYH was increasingly moving towards. A magazine-style site with a greater thematic exploration of horror, written by people willing to see in the genre what most still do not. And what Tumblr is to imagery, WordPress is to prose.

A new platform – or rather a split between them – shouldn’t mean FYH loses its irreverence. I don’t undertake any project without my lifelong mantra firmly in place: “Do stupid things in a clever way, and clever things in a stupid way.” Not, I hasten to add, in an ironic “hipster” way. If we were interested in fad and fashion, we’d try to be the VICELAND of Horror. And er, we probably wouldn’t choose something as unfashionable as paracinema.

For me, that’s the essence of this blogging malarkey. Let’s create a community, a dialogue, around stuff we love and chill the fuck out. A place where you’re welcome to academically critique Dario Argento’s use of stark lines in the mise-en-scene of Tenebrae, and giggle like an idiot when Nick Frost says “cunt” in Shaun of the Dead.

Still confused? We’ll be posting a mission statement soon to clear up any other business, then it’s down to messing about in rivers of blood.

Toxic Zombies (1980)
AKA Bloodeaters (UK)

Dir: Charles McCrann
Starring: Charles McCran (as Charles Austin), Beverly Shapiro, Dennis Helfend, Kevin Hanlon

A perfect example of what the FYH Tumblr does really well. And at that very site you can view an archive of all the posters so far.

Splice (2009)

Written / Directed: Vincenzo Natali

Starring: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chaneac, Brandon McGibbon, David Hewlett

BINZUME JIGOKU (1986)

AKA: Hell in a Bottle / Bottled Hell

Director: Yoshihiro Kawasaki

Starring: Chiyako Ogura, Minako Ogawa, Hitomi Kobayashi, Jun Numaoka, Saori Shinbori, Esumi Eimei

VHS scan – THE VIDEO DEAD (1987)

Thanks scandyfactory for the VHS scan

This is 1980s horror in one image, no? Brilliant hand-drawn and airbrushed bespoke cover art that probably had sod all to do with the plot of the film. This was designed to lure you in when browsing the shelves for something thrilling in your local video store. Nowadays you might read Rotten Tomatoes or watch a trailer at Apple’s site. You’re more likely to see this as a tattoo on someone’s body nowadays than as promo material for a film. Hi fi MONO. Get in.