Remember when vampire movies were actually scary?
Sorry, Twihards and "Underworld" fans, but your brooding romantic neck-biters and your leather-clad Eurotrash vamps may be cool, but they're not frightening. If you want scary, go back to the likes of Bela Lugosi in the original "Dracula," which turns 85 this week (it was released on Feb. 14, 1931). Or Christopher Lee as Hammer's Dracula, or the pack-hunting bloodsuckers of some more recent films.
Here are 11 vampire movies that are actually terrifying.![the 11 most terrifying vampire movies ever made]()
Sorry, Twihards and "Underworld" fans, but your brooding romantic neck-biters and your leather-clad Eurotrash vamps may be cool, but they're not frightening. If you want scary, go back to the likes of Bela Lugosi in the original "Dracula," which turns 85 this week (it was released on Feb. 14, 1931). Or Christopher Lee as Hammer's Dracula, or the pack-hunting bloodsuckers of some more recent films.
Here are 11 vampire movies that are actually terrifying.
That 
Truth is, the pundits have been off their game for at least a year when it comes to surprise blockbusters. They lowballed predictions for such 2015 hits as "
To date, there have been only a handful, most of them based on less-than-mainstream titles such as "300," "
The former Green Lantern is generally considered talented, charming, and handsome, but he's never been a big box office draw. Most of his movies that opened well have done so with either Reynolds appearing in a rom-com, or playing second or third banana to a bigger star.
To attract the older audience it needs, it helps if an R-rated movie wins over the critics. "Deadpool" did, scoring an 82 percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes and 65 percent at Metacritic. "Deadpool" also earned an A from audiences at CinemaScore, indicating very strong word-of-mouth recommendations from viewers, both men and women.
This weekend's other two new wide releases, "
That's an accident of timing that's easily overlooked. But if it had fallen on a Friday, the romantic comedy "Single" would have made for a stronger date movie than it did with Valentine's Day coming at the end of the weekend. That also helped "Deadpool," which didn't have to worry about losing the couples audience on Friday night.
Fox seems to have been teasing this movie for at least a year, with red-band trailers that played up the movie's humor, violence, and raunch. The message -- this is not your grandmother's superhero movie, unless your grandmother is 
When it comes to 
"
In the statistics-based reckoning, the BAFTAs usually don't figure at all. (The Hollywood-based Academy may love British actors and British movies, but do its voters really care what British film professionals choose as their favorites?) The American Academy has agreed with the British one on Best Film only 26 out of 68 times. In the recent past -- in the years since the BAFTAs moved their ceremony to precede the Oscars -- the BAFTAs anticipated the Oscar winner for Best Picture eight out of 15 times. The Brits have called six of the last seven Best Picture Oscar contests correctly; the only one they got wrong was last year's when 
Sure, "Big Short" has the all-important PGA victory. But it doesn't have momentum, having lost big at the SAGs, the DGA, and BAFTAs (where it picked up only the writing prize out of its five nominations). "Spotlight" won at the SAGs, but that was three weeks ago. Since then, it's won the two writing awards, but otherwise, not much momentum there, either.
Iñárritu now seems a lock for Best Director, but there's still a chance that "Big Short" or (less likely) "Spotlight" might win Best Picture. It's just a matter of whether the strong statistics in those movies' favor are stronger than the wave of awards love that "Revenant" is currently riding.
No one expects much to happen at the box office in February. And that's how we get a surprise smash like "
"
All that acclaim is unusual for a horror film, and it led indie distributor A24 to go all out with its first big wide release for "The Witch." Opening on 2,045 screens, "Witch" earned an estimated $8.7 million, good for fourth place. It also had the best per-screen average ($4,245) of any new wide release this weekend. Paradoxically, "Witch" didn't impress ticketbuyers nearly as much as it did the critics; it earned a poor grade (C-) at CinemaScore. Guess the chilly atmospherics that impressed the reviewers didn't do much for a horror audience that prefers frequent jolts and gore.
Thirty years have passed since the release of "
1. Hughes wrote the role of Andie Walsh for Ringwald, but even though she'd starred in his hits "
3. Hughes and Deutch almost chose the then-little-known 
5. Cryer (pictured left) was not Ringwald's ideal Duckie. She wanted 
7. 
9. Hughes ultimately chose 
11. As most "Pink" fans know, the film originally ended with Andie and Duckie getting together, but test audiences rejected that ending, so McCarthy had to return well after the film wrapped to shoot an Andie-and-Blane ending.
14. Other now-classic songs composed for the movie include Suzanne Vega's "Left of Center," New Order's "Shellshock," and Echo and the Bunnymen's "Bring on the Dancing Horses."
The ballots are in and on Sunday, the 
Voting may have ended on Tuesday, Feb. 23, but groups will keep handing out precursor awards -- the Costume Designers Guild, the Motion Picture Sound Editors, the Independent Spirits, even the Razzies -- all handed out after it's too late for them to influence the Oscar balloting. There's a nice irony in the notion that 
That's the famous line about Hollywood attributed to screenwriter William Goldman. It's true about Oscar forecasts as well.
"Revenant" is a big hit ($166 million earned to date in North America), but not as big as "
Yes, there have been complaints about 
Think about this: More black performers were nominated in 1940 (the year 
For once, we have an 
Legendary Italian composer 
This prize honors a movie's overall soundscape. This should go to the team from "
"The Revenant" has a shot for turning 
It's a horrible cliché, but the movie about the Holocaust tends to win. This year, that's Hungary's "
"
As with the feature length cartoons, Disney and Pixar tend to win, so the obvious favorite is "
Three of the five contenders just won prizes at the Art Directors Guild awards. The award for contemporary design went to "
For the sheer, headlong pace of it, the award should go to editor Margaret Sixel for "Fury Road." Besides, it won the American Cinema Editors' Eddie award -- a strong predictor of Oscar gold.
"
The sentimental favorite here is 
This one has been Leo's to lose even before "The Revenant" opened. Maybe you're tired of hearing about all the hardships he endured during the shoot (he ate raw bison liver!), but even if you don't admire the effort, it's hard to argue with the results. More important, he's been nominated six times in 22 years but has yet to win. The whole town thinks he's due. So, DiCaprio will win this contest, as he has every prize he's been eligible for this winter.
Forget "
This was the even bigger problem with the casting: that the main roles were almost entirely played by white actors. It's not just an #OscarsSoWhite thing; the time seems to have passed when you could get away with casting an Egyptian story with so few brown performers in it.
How did Lionsgate think this was going to be the next "Hunger Games" or "Divergent?" Two things those franchises had in common: they were based on best-selling book series, and they had likable teenage-girl heroines. "Gods" has no literary pedigree and is pretty much a sausage fest.
Alex Proyas used to be considered a truly visionary director, thanks to cult hits "
With a team like that, it's no wonder that "Gods of Egypt" received such dismal reviews (13 percent fresh at Rotten Tomatoes, 24 at Metacritic). But even audiences gave it poor word-of-mouth, judging by the film's B- grade at CinemaScore.
No doubt Lionsgate was hoping that the movie's 3D bookings would bring in more money, but by many accounts, "Gods"' visuals weren't that impressive -- with creatures and sets that would have been more at home in a video game than on the giant screen. American audiences have shown that they're not willing to pay extra for 3D unless the movie offers a real treat for the eye.
Not only was positioning the movie a week before Butler's "London Has Fallen" (above) a bad idea, but so was putting it in the sights of "Deadpool," which earned another estimated $31.5 million this weekend. In fairness, everyone underestimated "Deadpool." Still, when action/fantasy fans have a choice between a contemporary Marvel superhero movie and an unfamiliar adventure set in the ancient world, it's not hard to guess which one they'll pick.
At times, while directing 
1. "Birdcage" was already the seventh incarnation of the story, which started out as the French play "La Cage aux Folles" in 1973. It became a celebrated international film hit in 1978, spawned two movie sequels, a failed American TV pilot (called "Adam and Yves"), and then a hit Broadway musical in 1983. But Nichols' film was the first version to transplant the story to an American setting and insert topical political jokes.
3. Originally, the movie was to star 
5. The songs performed in the film are original or previously unheard songs by no less than Stephen Sondheim. The Broadway legend composed "Little Dream" (the song Albert sings in rehearsal) for the movie, and he gave the filmmakers two other songs cut from some of his acclaimed stage musicals. The song "Can That Boy Foxtrot," which Albert sings in the club, was a tune cut from Sondheim's "Follies." And "Love Is in the Air," sung by Armand and Katherine (
7. Playing a character who is supposed to be an 18-year-old college student, Flockhart was actually 30 at the time of filming. The exposure she earned from "The Birdcage" helped her land her star-making TV role on "
9. The film cost a reported $31 million to make. It opened at No. 1 on the box office with $18.3 million, a record at the time for a movie with an openly gay protagonist. (That record stood for 13 years, until broken by "
This was the weekend that adults came back to the multiplex. And, for the most part, what brought them back was a Disney movie about a city of talking animals.
Disney also smartly marketed the movie to grown-ups, by attaching trailers to "
Has it really been 20 years since the release of "
1. The opening title card claims the movie is based on a true story, but in fact, it's almost completely fictional. There was, however, a real-life crime with some superficial similarities. The victim was Helle Crafts, a Connecticut woman who disappeared in 1986. Her husband was ultimately convicted of her murder; investigators determined that he'd used a wood chipper to destroy her remains.
3. McDormand became a mom shortly before filming began -- after a decade of marriage, she and Joel adopted a baby they named Pedro -- but her massive pregnancy bump in "Fargo" was a prosthetic, filled with birdseed. McDormand did research by meeting with an actual pregnant cop from the Twin Cities. "In St. Paul, I met Officer Nancy, who was seven months pregnant and still working," McDormand recalled at the time. "She was on the vice squad doing search and seizure. She was going to go into the office and do a desk job in the middle of her eighth month, but until then, she was still out there doing it."
5. Distributor Gramercy drummed up interest among critics with a promotional gift: a snow globe encasing a diorama of the wood chipper scene, complete with bloody red flakes that would scatter when you shook the globe. By the way, the Fargo, N.D. visitor's center claims to have the wood chipper from the film 
7. At the 1997 Oscars (above), McDormand won Best Actress, while the Coen brothers won Best Original Screenplay. Also nominated were Macy (for Best Supporting Actor), cinematographer Roger Deakins, Ethan (for Best Picture, as producer), Joel (for directing), and editor Roderick Jaynes. Since Jaynes was a pseudonym for the writer/director/producer brothers themselves, the Coens wanted to have their "
9. In 1997, 17 years before the FX series debuted, there was an early, failed attempt to launch a "Fargo" TV spinoff. 
Two months ago, no one had heard of 
By now, the "
The 2008 found-footage monster movie helped make Abrams' reputation as a master of viral marketing, able to sneak up an audience with a movie thanks to his Mystery Box. When it was first advertised, no one knew what the movie was about, who was in it, or even what it was called -- until shortly before it appeared in theaters. The first trailer ended with a mic-drop of a last scene -- the Statue of Liberty's head rolling to a stop on a NYC street -- and a release date. That's it.
Abrams' movies are often a throwback to the kinds of films the 49-year-old enjoyed as a kid, whether it's the Spielbergian "
It's worth noting that the movie's predominantly male audience had no problem identifying with a strong, heroic female lead, played by Winstead. That's not a new idea to Abrams, whose multi-layered, hard-charging heroines range from Sydney Bristow in "
"10 Cloverfield Lane" was fortunate in its choice of competitors. Sure, it wasn't going to pose any threat to "Zootopia," but it wasn't really going after the same family audience anyway. And new releases "
None of this would matter if viewers didn't think the movie delivered. Inevitably, some were disappointed with the twists and potentially mislead by the marketing campaign's "Cloverfield" tie-in, hence the B- CinemaScore. Audiences tend to give lower grades when they find something other than what was promised, or they expected. But again, expectations were low, so most critics and many ticketbuyers were pleasantly surprised.
"
1. After making three "Matrix" movies, Andy and Larry Wachowski (now Lilly and Lana, respectively) dusted off a screenplay for "Vendetta" they'd written years earlier, before they had the clout to make it. Wanting a break from directing, they produced the film, but handed over the director's chair to 
3. Portman, whose orphaned Evey is rescued and indoctrinated by V, gets her head shaved in the film. And Portman did indeed get shorn for real on camera.
6. The movie's climax (pictured), involving thousands of masked rebels marching in London's Whitehall area, required the neighborhood to be cleared after midnight for four nights of filming. It was a first for the district, home to Trafalgar Square, the prime minister's residence and the Houses of Parliament. Co-star Stephen Fry joked that production assistant Euan Blair, son of then-prime minister Tony Blair, pulled strings to get the necessary clearances.
8. As he had with other movie projects based on his writings, including "
10. The Guy Fawkes masks Lloyd designed for the book -- and the film -- became a symbol and tool beloved by protesters the world over. They were especially prominent during 
In its 
The tactic of splitting a franchise finale into two parts, which made some sense with the plot-heavy "
The third week in March may have worked well for the first two movies, but this time around, "Allegiant" ran into tough competition. There was "Zootopia," of course, which was built to appeal to older audiences -- as well as tots. There was also the new "