Certified Forgotten
Only the forgotten are truly dead.
What do you get when you cross Fede Álvarez‘s Evil Dead remake with Christopher Nolan‘s Memento? If you’re first time writer-director David Yarovesky, the answer is The Hive, a heady sci-fi and horror hybrid that also manages to turn every summer camp trope on its head. With makeup special effects from Gary Tunnicliffe of Hellraiser franchise fame, The Hive manages […]
There was a time not so long ago when Jeremy Sisto was the James Badge Dale of the horror industry. In the early 2000s, Sisto starred in a wide range of indie classics, including titles like Matthew Leutwyler‘s Dead & Breakfast and Lucky McKee‘s May. But it was Population 436—the Shirley Jackson-esque thriller from future Breaking Bad luminary Michelle MacLaren—that […]
When you’re asked to premiere a special video episode for a film festival, you pull out all the stops. So this week on the Certified Forgotten podcast, you’re not only being treated to a conversation about Joachim Hedén’s Breaking Surface – one of the more underrated thrillers of 2020 – you’re also getting to watch the entire episode unfold as […]
When you think of the prototypical Certified Forgotten film, you probably don’t think of a movie like Crimson Rivers 2: Angels of the Apocalypse. The big-budget sequel to an international success, Angels of the Apocalypse featured a stellar cast, a high-profile screenwriter, and Jean Reno, an actor almost as popular in the United States as he is in his native […]
What kind of a movie does $20,000 buy you? If you’re writer-director Tomas Street, it buys you a sharp little thriller about memory loss and heists gone wrong. In his 2018 debut feature Fugue, Street and a team of motivated actors were able to stretch every dollar and craft a surprisingly sharp thriller in the vein of early Christopher Nolan […]
Last week, we presented our listeners with a unique proposition: what if we turned the microphone back on ourselves and shared our own horror origin (horrorigin?) stories for a change? The result was the Matt Donato Origin Story, where Donato opened up about the experiences and friendships that helped shape his relationship to the genre. This week it’s Matthew Monagle’s […]
Last month, one of our listeners asked us a very good question: when are you going to take a deep dive into your horror origins? While we may talk all things horror with our guests, we’d never really turned the microphone back on ourselves. So what better time to share some of the experiences that shaped us as hosts? In […]
It isn’t often that a low-budget horror film tackles the concept of parallel historical timelines. Then again, very few horror films also recognize the potential of a character named the Honey Baron, an evil slaveowner whose acts of cruelties reverberate across centuries. This is the premise behind The Devil Lives Here, a 2015 horror film from Brazilian filmmakers Rodrigo Gasparini […]
Every self-respecting geek knows that something special happens when separate fandoms intersect. Like vinyl collecting and horror fans. Or wrestling and horror fans. Or t-shirt design and horror fans. Really, maybe the message here is that everything goes better than horror fans. Even accounting for all of the above, there is no greater marriage in popular culture than horror fans […]
In the years since The Blair Witch Project, the found footage horror film has gone through every possible permutation. But like any other subgenre, nothing livens up a well-worn premise quite like the introduction of another Big Idea™. This explains the unexpected brilliance of Webcast, the 2018 feature from writer-director Paul McGhie that adds a heavy dash of folk horror […]
Turn back the clock, my child, to a time when new movies released on premium subscription services were a thing of wonder. When second-tier leading men and up-and-coming Hollywood stars would work together to tantalize and amaze adolescent movie fans everywhere. Welcome to the era of HBO Originals. READ MORE: Cast a Deadly Spell Captures a Bygone Era of HBO […]
Behold, the untapped potential of the 2000s direct-to-video market. Like the current landscape of streaming releases, the direct-to-video market of old offered viewers a potential goldmine of underseen and underappreciated releases. You may have to dig – and dig, and dig, and dig – but true horror fans know that any amount of dumpster-diving is worth that one unearthed gem. […]
Here at Certified Forgotten, we’ve been known to cast a pretty wide net when it comes to the definition of horror. Not all films that deal with dread or terror fit neatly into the horror carousel on a Netflix page. Sometimes, some of the movies that hit the hardest are the ones that sidestep most genre conventions entirely. READ MORE: […]
It has been over ten years since Jaume Balagueró‘s Rec reinvigorated the found footage genre. Balagueró’s film – in addition to a number of Spanish filmmakers – helped launch Spain to the top of the international marketplace. Horror fans who had already grown to love Japanese horror films or the French New Extremity were thrilled to have a new national […]
When it comes to the horror genre, it’s important to cast a wide net. If, for example, you are presented with a movie like Funky Forest: The First Contact that has some of the most unique and grotesque depictions of body horror in contemporary cinema, but it is done through a comedic and absurdist lens, would you turn your back […]
Brian Collins of Horror Movie a Day fame joins Certified Forgotten to discuss Norwegian slasher ‘Cold Prey.’