Eye Candy

by Leo Charney

Buried Alive
DVD
What: Straight-to-DVD teen horror.
Why: “There’s a strange feel to this place,” says the hot, dim sorority girl. Ya think? But you don’t need originality in a story about college stoners, a haunted house and a demented local. This one’s got everything you need for a happy Halloween: studs on a road trip, sorority pledges getting hazed, a nerdy computer geek with allergies, dark family secrets and a Freddy Krueger clone for some creepy class conflict. It’s horror at the crossroads of teens, violence and raunch—so you can laugh and scream at the same time.

The Last Winter
On Demand: IFC in Theaters
What: Alaskan enviro-horror.
Why: “I’m telling you, there’s something out there that is trying to drive us out of here!” How’s that for another standard horror line? In this story it’s linked to the vengeance of the Earth itself, rising up against marauders who are looking for oil in pristine Alaska. Out of theaters yet still available On Demand, it’s spooky, cerebral horror—with no horny frat boys in sight—that plays like a mashup of Into the Wild’s pastoral vistas, Blair Witch Project’s claustrophobia, An Inconvenient Truth’s politics and The Birds’ revenge of nature.

Catacombs
On Demand: Free Movies/Fearnet
What: Dead souls horror.
Why: Don’t you hate it when you go to a rave and a dead guy shows up? That’s the clever premise of Fearnet’s first original movie, set in the underground tunnels of Paris where thousands of dead bodies are supposedly buried. If that doesn’t stir your blood, the channel has free horror movies in every genre, from haunted houses to ghostly Asian horror to the campy vampire-hunter series Blood Trails—the online prequel to current release 30 Days of Night, based on the classic graphic novel.