Gabe Powers

Few things are as patently offensive as the Third Reich and the concentration camps that Hitler’s goons concocted in order to systematically murder millions of people. As such, it’s not surprising that there is a substantial exploitation subgenre devoted to these historical atrocities. Nazisploitation sprung from reputable movies, like Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), and less reputable S&M softcore and roughies, such as Joseph P. Mawra’s Olga...

At the center of a decade of heavy-hitters stands Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) – a modest production compared to its studio-backed counterparts that is nonetheless the funniest, sweetest, most efficiently told, and, arguably, most subversive of the bunch. Looking for a Frankenstein-like story to tell, Gordon, along with writers William J. Norris and Dennis Paoli, culled their script (which was initially intended to be a six-part TV miniseries) from H.P. Lovecraft’s shockingly racist...

A group of independent, maverick horror directors rose to prominence during the late ‘60/early ‘70s. We’ve since dubbed them the Masters of Horror (there was a TV show and everything). As distribution models changed alongside audience tastes and the years turned to decades, the quality of the Masters’ work began to falter with exceptions for those lucky few that ended their careers working with studio money, like Wes Craven, and those that broke into the mainstream via other genres, like...