adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

Media

How the Media Lost the Traffic War to Facebook and Google

Published

 on

If the first half of 2023 was a low point in the news business’s free fall, the second half is shaping up to be the era of the autopsy. Like earthquake victims searching for a lost handbag, the question on every media person’s tongue (apart from “Are you hiring?”), is “What happened?” Less than five years ago, companies like BuzzFeed and Vice enjoyed multibillion-dollar valuations. Now The Huffington Post is little more than an afterthought, BuzzFeed News has folded after its parent company’s brief foray into life as a public company, Gawker was reborn only to die again, and Vice has filed for bankruptcy, along with a growing list of other beloved magazines. What happened?

Ben Smith—BuzzFeed’s former news chief, who recently ventured from his perch at The New York Times to help launch Semafor, a new new media site best known for courting (and then returning) a large investment from disgraced crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried—offers one answer. In May, Smith published a reported memoir called Traffic: Genius, Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, in which he traces the history of the media landscape from the bygone days of the early social web.

In Smith’s telling, the story of this period is framed in the shadow of an intellectual argument—a clash of internet philosophy, playing out in the lives of two eccentric geniuses. One was Nick Denton, the hardened British founder of Gawker, whose vast agglomeration of toxic blogs became the go-to spot for dick pics, scene reports, and celebrity gossip. The other was Jonah Peretti, Smith’s onetime boss at BuzzFeed, who built his empire of quizzes, cat memes, and hard news by blurring the lines between advertising and editorial content, mashing together an endless stream of advertorial clickbait into a slurry of libido and identity-inflected kitsch. Whether viral traffic is an art (Denton’s view) or a science (Peretti’s theory) is treated as the central tension of the book.

Both men steered their organizations with a nearly religious fixation on traffic and data, Smith explains, a mentality that would help reshape media as a whole. And both believed that traffic was a commodity: a sort of “digital gold” that could be exchanged for real money, status, and power. Their ultimate failure resulted from the shortfall of their respective hypotheses: Denton believed that publishing unvarnished stories about celebrities’ genitalia would bust open the curtain of power (think: Anthony Weiner), and this earned him the enmity of an angry tech billionaire obsessed with privacy (at least his own, that is). And Peretti’s insatiable hunger for growth found him drinking from the fire hose of venture capital only to sacrifice his autonomy to impatient investors. The story of new media, as Smith tells it in this “first draft” of history, is also one of hubris—tenacity, cleverness, and megalomania, writ large.

But seeing this period as a study of character (and characters, with Denton and Peretti just two players in a cast ranging from Arianna Huffington to Andrew Breitbart to Smith himself) ignores critical economic facts that help explain why the BuzzFeeds of the world were destined to remain flashes in the media pan. Because while Peretti and Denton had a hand in the media era that brought us the listicle, the sponsored content post, and the now-ubiquitous style of writing known as internet snark, the story of their rise and fall has as much to do with the society-scale transition from television to internet advertising as anything else. The story of digital media throughout the 2000s, in other words, is really the story of a resource that was seemingly plentiful and inexpensive to mine—until it wasn’t.

In this sense, a gold rush is an apt metaphor for those heady days of the early social web. The California gold rush, which started in 1849, proceeded in three phases. In the beginning, early diggers were given cheap, direct access to a resource that was flowing in abundance. But those early adapters quickly set up systems to box out newcomers, such as machinery to extract the gold faster and taxes on newly arriving diggers. The once-astronomical rate of return available to those who just showed up started to dwindle. Eventually, the unit economics no longer made sense for the average digger. There was still gold—but it was a lot more expensive to get it.

The history of internet traffic—and, by extension, internet advertising—in the early 2000s followed a similar pattern. With relatively few people on the web, and even fewer creating quality content, it was possible to show up and quickly amass an audience with the right niche and some technical savvy. The so-called “blog era,” in which Smith got his start, was a product of this environment.

For years, simply learning how to game the mechanics of Google rankings, while getting on the good side of aggregator sites like The Drudge Report was enough to build a meaningful audience—an approach known as search engine optimization, or SEO. By 2005, however, as Google began to launch new ad products, such as Google Analytics, it became easier for advertisers to track the performance of their own campaigns, and with better products Google became more assertive in charging people for its digital real estate. As this process accelerated, Google made it harder for brands to appear in search rankings without a substantial investment in SEO or search engine marketing (SEM). It triggered an internet arms race, and things became more expensive.

Social media marketing on Facebook followed a similar trajectory. When Facebook launched its ad platform in 2006, brands and publications mainly used their Facebook pages to reach their audiences. The platform’s algorithm optimized for such interactions, showing a brand’s “organic” posts to nearly everyone who liked a page, so brands went on a buying spree to acquire page likes using Facebook’s ad platform. These were cheap at first—often costing no more than a couple of cents, and then they became more expensive, coming with the added risk of buying bots and fake followers. Eventually, Facebook realized that instead of charging advertisers for page likes—a transaction that, once completed, would provide lifetime access to their intended audience nearly for free—by reducing the reach of an individual Facebook page it could charge advertisers on a post-by-post basis, forcing them to pay each time they wanted to reach their audience.

As a 2014 Gawker article put it: “Facebook Is Ending the Free Ride.” In 2012, the average organic reach of a branded Facebook page was 16 percent (meaning that for every hundred page likes, 16 people would see your post); by 2014 it was less than 6 percent, and eventually it fell nearly to zero. By 2015, Facebook effectively killed the reach of the average corporate or branded Facebook page, which made it a requirement for brands to advertise each individual post.

But even then, the cost of reaching an audience on Facebook was so inexpensive that it could produce multibillion-dollar companies in a matter of years. This dynamic produced an e-commerce boom, giving rise to internet-darling firms like Harry’s Razors, Warby Parker, and Allbirds. These firms’ standard operating procedure was to spend 60 to 80 percent of the millions they raised from venture capitalists on marketing, with the vast majority of those dollars spent on Facebook ads. From 2013 to 2017 the average cost for a click on Facebook was between 21 cents and 27 cents—a pittance compared to the vast sums required to advertise on television or elsewhere. Facebook ads had been around for nearly eight years, but large advertisers like Proctor and Gamble or Nike were slow to migrate to the platform. Partly, this was because of an industry-wide perception among corporations and their advertising firms that running Facebook ads was highly technical. This allowed savvy upstarts—such as BuzzFeed—to take advantage of the cheap media and serve as middlemen. As a 2013 story in The Atlantic put it: “One Secret to BuzzFeed’s Viral Success: Buying Ads.”

This began to change around 2018. Whereas “once, BuzzFeed’s clever advertisements had gone viral all on their own,” Smith writes in Traffic, “gradually, Facebook had taken a larger and larger cut.” It’s a somewhat clumsy way of explaining that, by the end of that year, BuzzFeed found itself spending “millions” to distribute the branded posts and videos that had long been its main source of revenue: It spent $386 million to make $307 million in revenue—a $79 million loss.

By 2020, as the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic prompted a mad dash online for large brands, the cost of advertising on Facebook continued to rise. Large advertisers drove up the cost of Facebook’s “attention marketplace,” leaving the average bidder behind in a marketplace where the unit economics stopped making sense. In 2022, the average cost for a click on Facebook was $1.86.

While the fact that companies like BuzzFeed were spending millions on Facebook is no secret, Smith ignores this part of the story; presumably because it contradicts BuzzFeed’s core marketing claim. Because from the moment that BuzzFeed began selling advertising—or, as it called it, “native advertising,” where links paid for by brands like Verizon would be folded into posts that appeared editorial—the premise of its business model was its supposedly unique ability to make things go viral. Where a JetBlue post on the company’s Facebook page might only reach a few thousand people, BuzzFeed’s promised virality could supposedly bring that same post more bang for the buck.

How did it make this work? At the peak of BuzzFeed’s reign, Peretti told New York magazine that internet virality was determined by a formula, expressed as R = ßz (where z represents the number of people who come in contact with something, and ß represents the probability of transmission). Peretti claimed that BuzzFeed’s content style (its listicles, quizzes, eye-catchy headlines) juiced ß, while its transmission tactics (which included things like SEO but chiefly meant buying Facebook ads) were the z. But as the aforementioned Atlantic piece concluded: “Peretti’s formula for virality really adds up to a more mundane sales pitch: Buy lots of ad impressions and realize a modest, if unpredictable, viral bonus.”

That approach was well suited to the early days of the social web, when it was relatively inexpensive to get something in front of a large number of people. But as the cost of advertising went up, that window closed. BuzzFeed may have been among the best purveyors of ß, and this strategy may not have accounted for the majority of its traffic overall, but its ability to buy ads inexpensively and then turn around and sell the same traffic, on its website, at a higher rate was also a critical part of the equation. Advertisers call this process “media arbitrage”—buying traffic and engagement on social media platforms, or other inexpensive traffic sources, at one rate, then selling that traffic from their site to large legacy brands (like Virgin or JetBlue) at a much higher one. In its heyday, according to Smith, BuzzFeed and Gawker were charging about $9 for a thousand impressions. The average cost to acquire the same views on Facebook was around $1. They built their business model on the difference.

Indeed, this approach is what the much-decried “advertising-driven business model” of journalism really means. For years, BuzzFeed, Vice, and others essentially acted like advertising agencies on behalf of big brands. A 2019 case study published by BuzzFeed and Nielsen illustrates this clearly. In it, marketers at BuzzFeed explain how they spent $139 million on behalf of consumer packaged goods companies to promote their products. BuzzFeed was paid to create sponsored content posts and other ad formats, while running ad campaigns that directed traffic to its own website, an approach BuzzFeed called “social discovery.” The point of the study was to convince advertisers that buying ads through BuzzFeed was superior to buying them on television. But it was also selling the idea that giving BuzzFeed money to buy ads and direct that traffic to its own website was a superior strategy to just buying the traffic directly. This meant that BuzzFeed was directly competing with the social media companies from which it was generating traffic in the first place. At its peak, over 75 percent of its traffic came from Facebook.

So rather than build their platforms on things like audience integrity or cultural esteem, companies like BuzzFeed were built on predicting, and then responding to, the fleeting “content” whims of increasingly assertive tech platforms. Their focus was mastering the internet’s game of technical dark arts in a glut of venture capital—and then they were slowly priced out of the game as larger firms with deeper pockets came to learn the same tricks.

In this sense, the story of media throughout the 2000s is also a story of digital enclosure—a process in which a shared, open resource (attention, control of the internet’s roadways) was gradually restricted to those who could pay large sums for it. It’s the result of an internet in which two companies came to control 70 percent of web traffic and 90 percent of digital advertising. BuzzFeed is merely the most dramatic example of the risks of hitching yourself to the whims of an ascendant tech platform. For a few years, cultural savvy and media awareness beat out legacy capital by taking advantage of the society-scale transition from television to digital media—a transition that saw traditional advertising decline year after year while digital advertising rose by roughly 3,400 percent in less than 20 years. Then, as large companies caught on to the shift, the cost of media rose, and buying attention on the internet became a lot like buying attention on television: expensive and competitive.

BuzzFeed didn’t collapse because the internet moved on from its love affair with listicles and cat memes (as a cursory glance at Instagram proves), and it didn’t collapse because of its genius founder’s hubris. It collapsed because the unit economics of online attention changed and the arbitrage opportunity went away. Big brands caught up.

Smith is right to think of this period as the end of an era. But rather than remember these companies as cultural protagonists, run by wily geniuses who discovered why we click on salacious headlines or endlessly share heretofore personal details, we should see them as the casualties of a brief gold rush—the forty-niners who showed up early and made it big, only to be booted off the land by the technologists who never really needed them that much in the first place.

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Media

Bayo Onanuga battles yet another media – Punch Newspapers

Published

 on


[unable to retrieve full-text content]

Bayo Onanuga battles yet another media  Punch Newspapers

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Media

Blood In The Snow Film Festival Celebrates 13 Years!

Published

 on

Blood in the Snow FILM FESTIVAL

Celebrates

13 YEARS

Be Afraid.  Be Very Afraid”

Toronto, on – Blood in the Snow Film Festival (BITS), a unique and imaginative showcase of contemporary Canadian genre films are pleased to announce the popular Festival is back for its 13th exciting year.  The highly anticipated Horror Film festival presented by Super Channel runs November 18th– 23rd at Toronto’s Isabel Bader Theatre  The successful, long running festival takes on many different faces this year that include Scary, Action Horror, Horror Comedy, Sci-Fi and Thrillers.  Festival goers will be kept on the edge of their seats with this year’s powerful line-up.

Blood in the Snow Festival begins with the return of alumni (Wolf Cop) Lowell Deans action horror feature Dark Match featuring wrestling veteran Chris Jericho followed by the mysterious Hunting Mathew Nichols. The unexpected thrills continue with Blood in the Snow World Premiere of Pins and Needles and the Fantasia Best First Feature Award winner, Self Driver.  The festival ends this year on a fun note with the Toronto Premiere of Scared Sh*tless (featuring Kids in the Halls Mark McKinney).  Other titles include the horror anthology series Creepy Bits and Zoom call shock of Invited by Blood in the Snow alumni Navin Ramaswaran (Poor Agnes). The festival will also include five feature length short film programs including the festivals comedy horror program Funny Frights and Unusual Sights and the highly anticipated Dark Visions program, part of opening night festivities.  Blood in the Snow Film Festival Director and Founder, Kelly Michael Stewart anticipates this year’s festival to be its strongest.  This was the first time in our 13 year history, all our programmers agreed on the exact same eight feature programs we have selected.”

Below is this year’s horror fest’s exciting lineup of features and shorts scheduled to screen, in-person at the Isabel Bader theatre. 

**All festival features will be preceded by a short film and followed by a Q&A with filmmakers.

Tickets for the Isabel Bader Theatre lineup on sale now and can be purchased  https://www.bloodinthesnow.ca

Super Channel is pleased to once again assume the role of Presenting Sponsor for the Blood in the Snow Film Festival. We extend our sincere appreciation to the entire BITS team for their unwavering commitment to amplifying the voices of diverse filmmakers and providing a platform for the celebration of Canadian genre content. – Don McDonald, the CEO of Super Channel

Blood in the Snow Festival 2024 Full screening schedule:

Monday November 18th
7pm – Dark Visions

Shiva (13:29) dir. Josh Saltzman

Shiva is an unnerving tale about a recently widowed woman who breaks with a long-held Jewish mourning ritual in hopes of connecting with her deceased husband.

How to Stay Awake (5:30) dir. Vanessa Magic

A woman fights to stay awake, to avoid battling the terrifying realm of sleep paralysis, but as she risks everything to break free, will she be released from the grip of her nocturnal tormentor?

Pocket Princess (9:45) dir. Olivia Loccisano

A young girl must take part in a dangerous task in order to complete her doll collection in this miniature fairytale.

For Rent (10:33) dir. Michèle Kaye

In her new home, Donna unravels a sinister truth—her landlord is a demon with a dark appetite. As her family mysteriously vanishes, Donna confronts the demonic landlord, only to plunge into a shadowy game where the house hungers for more than just occupants. An ominous cycle begins, shrouded in mystery.

Lucys Birthday (9:29) dir. Peter Sreckovic

A father struggles to enjoy his young daughter’s birthday despite a series of strange and disturbing disruptions.

Parasitic (10:00) dir. Ryan M Andrews

Last call at a dive bar, a writer struggling to find his voice gets more than he bargains for.

 Naualli (6:00) dir. Adrian Gonzalez de la Pena

A grieving man seeks revenge, unwittingly awakening a mystical creature known as the Nagual.

The Saint and The Bear (6:34) dir. Dallas R Soonias

Two strangers cross paths on an ominous park bench.

The Sorrow (13:00) dir. Thomas Affolter

A retired army general and his live-in nurse find they are not alone in a house filled with dark secrets.

Cadabra (6:00) dir. Tiffany Wice

An amateur magician receives more than he anticipated when he purchases a cursed hat from the estate of his deceased hero.

9:30 – Dark Match dir. Lowell Dean Horror / Action

A small time WRESTLING COMPANY accepts a well-paying but too good to be true gig.

 

Tuesday November 19th
7pm – Mournful Mediums

Night Lab (15:00) dir. Andrew Ellinas

When a mysterious package arrives from one of the lab’s field research stations, a promising young researcher uncovers a conspiracy against her masterminded by her jealous boss. She soon finds herself having to grapple with her conscience before making a life-or-death decision.

Dirty Bad Wrong (14:40) dir. Erica Orofino

Desperate to keep her promise to host the best superhero party for her 6-year-old, young mother Sid, a sex worker, takes extreme measures and books a last-minute client with a dark fetish.

Midnight at the lonely river (17:00) dir. Abraham Cote

When the lights go out at a seedy little motel bar, at the crossroads of a seedy little town, nefarious happenings are taking place, and three predators are enacting their evil deeds. Enter Vicky, a drifter who quickly realizes whats happening right under everyones nose. After midnight, In the shadows of this dim establishment, evil begets evil, and the predator becomes the prey.

Mean Ends (14:58) dir. Émile Lavoie

A buried body, a missing sister and an inquisitive neighbour makes for a hell of an evening. And the sun isnt close to settling on Erics sh*tty day.

Stuffy (18:26) dir. Dan Nicholls

A young couple sets off in the middle of the night to bury their kid’s stuffed bunny, as one of them is convinced that the stuffy might be cursed.

Dungeon of Death (18:33) dir. Brian P. Rowe

Torturer Raullin loves a work challenge, especially if that challenge involves hurting people to extract information from them.

9:30 – Hunting Matthew Nichols (96 mins) dir. Markian Tarasiuk

Twenty-three years after her brother mysteriously disappeared, a documentary filmmaker sets out to solve his missing person’s case. But when a disturbing piece of evidence is revealed, she comes to believe that her brother might still be alive.

w/ short: Josephine (6:15) dir. John Francis Bregar

A man haunted by his past seeks forgiveness from his deceased wife, but a session with two spirit mediums leads to an unsettling encounter.

Wednesday November 20th
7pm – BITS and BYTES

Ezra (10:57) dirs. Luke Hutchie, Mike Mildon, Marianna Phung

After fleeing the dark and demonic chains of his shadowy old home, Ezra, a killer gay vampire, takes a leap of faith and enters the modern world.

Head Shop (18:14 episode 1-3) dir. Namaï Kham Po

In a post-apocalyptic world, Annas life and work are dominated by her father Sylvestre, a short-tempered mechanic with a terrible reputation for tearing the head off anyone who dares cross him. He decides that shes old enough to follow in his footsteps, much to her dismay. To prove herself, she must now decapitate her first victim. Can she find a way to defy fate?

D dot H (18 :15 episodes 1-2) dirs. Meegwun Fairbrother, Mary Galloway

Struggling artist Doug is visited by the beautiful and enigmatic H, who claims he holds the power to visiting inconceivable places.” Still half-asleep, Doug is shocked when H vanishes suddenly and her doppelganger, Hannah, strides past.

Creepy Bits: Last Sonata (21:08) dir.

Adrian Bobb, Ashlea Wessel, David J. Fernandes, Sid Zanforlin and Kelly Paoli.

Set among forests, lakes, and small towns, Creepy Bits is a horror anthology series helmed by five innovative filmmakers exploring themes of human vs. nature, the invasion and destruction of the natural world by outsiders, and isolation within a vast, eerie landscape that is not afraid to fight back.

Tales from the Void: Whistle in the Woods” (24:36) dir. Francesco Loschiavo

Horror anthology TV series based on stories from r/NoSleep. Each tale blends genre thrills & social commentary exploring the dark side of the human psyche.

9:30 – Self Driver dir. Michael Pierro Thriller

Facing mounting expenses and the unrelenting pressure of modern living, a down-on-his-luck cab driver is lured on to a mysterious new app that promises fast, easy money. As his first night on the job unfolds, he is pulled ever deeper into the dark underbelly of society, embarking on a journey that will test his moral code and shake his understanding of what it means to have freewill. The question becomes not how much money he can make, but what he’ll be compelled to do to make it.
 

w/ short: Northern Escape (10:38) dirs. Lucy Sanci, Alexis Korotash

A couple on a cottage getaway tries to work on their relationship but ends up getting more than they bargained for when they discover something sinister lurking beneath the surface.

Thursday November 21st
7pm – Funny Frights

Midnight Snack (1:41) dir. Sandra Foisy

Hunger always strikes in the dead of night.

Hell is a Teenage Girl (15:00) dir. Stephen Sawchuk

Every Halloween, the small town of Springboro is terrorized by its resident SLASHER – a masked serial killer who targets sinful teenagers that break The Rules of Horror’ – dont drink, dont do drugs, and dont have sex!

Gaslit (10:36) dir. Anna MacLean

A woman goes to dangerous lengths to prove she wasn’t responsible for a fart.

Bath Bomb (9:55) dir. Colin G Cooper

A possessive doctor prepares an ostensibly romantic bath for his narcissistic boyfriend, but after an accusation of infidelity, things take a deeply disturbing turn.

Any Last Words (14:22) dir. Isaac Rathé

A crook trying to flee town is paid an untimely visit by some of his former colleagues. What would you say to save your life if you were staring down the barrel of a gun?

Papier mâché (4:30) dir. Simon Madore

A whimsical depiction of the hard and tumultuous life of a piñata.

The Living Room (9:59) dir. Joslyn Rogers

After an unexpected call from Lady Luck, Ms. Valentine must choose between her sanity and her winnings – all before the jungle consumes her.

A Divine Comedy: What the Hell (8:55) dir. Valerie Lee Barnhart
 Dante’s classic Hell is falling into oblivion. Charlotte,

sharp-witted Harpy, navigates the chaos and sets out despite the odds for a new life and destiny.

Mr Fuzz (2:30) dir. Christopher Walsh

A long-limbed, fuzzy-haired creature will do whatever it takes to keep you watching his show.

Out of the Hands of the Wicked (5:00) dirs. Luke Sargent, Benjamin Hackman

After a harrowing journey home from hell, old Pa boasts of his triumph over evil, and how he came to lock the devil in his heart.

The Shitty Ride (9:13) dir. Cole Doran

Hoping to impress the girl of his dreams, Cole buys a used car but gets more than he bargained for with his shitty ride.

9:30 – Invited dir. Navin Ramaswaran Horror

When a reluctant mother attends her daughter’s Zoom elopement, she and the rest of the family in attendance quickly realize the groom is part of a Russian cult with deadly intentions.

w/ shorts: Defile dir. Brian Sepanzyk

A couple’s secluded getaway is suddenly interrupted by a strange family who exposes them to the horrors that lie beyond the tree line.

 A Mother’s Love dir. Lisa Ovies

A young girl deals with the consequences of trusting someone online.

Friday November 22nd
7:00 pm – Creepy Bits (anthology horror series)

Creepy Bits is a short horror anthology series that explores pandemic age themes of isolation, paranoia and distrust of authority, serving them up in bite-sized chunks. Directed by Adrian Bobb, Ashlea Wessel, David J. Fernandes, Sid Zanforlin and Kelly Paoli.

9:30 – Pins and Needles (81 min) dir. James Villeneuve Horror / Thriller

Follows Max, a diabetic, biology grad student who is entrapped in a devilish new-age wellness experiment and must escape a lethal game of cat and mouse to avoid becoming the next test subject to extend the lives of the rich and privileged.

w/ short: Adjoining (11:42) dirs. Harrison Houde, Dakota Daulby

A couple’s motel stay takes a chilling turn when they discover they’re being observed, leading to unexpected consequences.

Saturday November 23rd
4pm – Emerging Screams (94 mins)

Apnea (14:58) dir. David Matheson

A single, working mother finds her career and her offbeat sons safety in jeopardy when she discovers that her late mother is possessing her in her sleep.

Nereid (7:48) dir. Lori Zozzolotto

A mysterious woman escapes from an abusive relationship with earth shattering results.

BedLamer (15:00) dir. Alexa Jane Jerrett

On the shores of a small fishing village lives a lonely settlement of men – capturing and domesticating otherworldly creatures that were never meant to be tamed.

Blocked (6:30) dir. Aisha Alfa

A new mom is literally consumed with the futility of cleaning up after her kid.

Dance of the Faery (10:23) dir. Kaela Brianna Egert

A young woman cleans up her estranged, great aunt’s home after her death. Upon inspection, she soon realizes that her eccentric obsession with fairies was not born out of love, but of fear.

Deep End (7:36) dir. Juan Pablo Saenz

A gay couple’s heated argument during a hike spiral into a nightmare when one of them vanishes, leading the other to a mysterious cave that could reveal the chilling truth.

Ojichaag – Spirit Within (11:21) dir. Rachel Beaulieu

An emotionally devastated woman seeks comfort in her choice to end her life. As she faces death in the form of a spirit, she must decide to let herself go to fight to stay alive.

Lure (9.56) dir. Jacob Phair

A tormented father awaits the return of the man who saved his son’s life.

Let Me In (10:00) dirs. Joel Buxton, Charles Smith

A reluctant man interviews an unusual immigration candidate: himself from a doomed dimension

7:00 pm –The Silent Planet (95 mins) dir. Jeffrey St. Jules Sci-fi

An aging convict serving out a life sentence alone on a distant planet is forced to confront his past when a new prisoner shows up and pushes him to remember his life on earth

w/ short: Ascension (3:57) dir. Kenzie Yango

Deep in a remote forest, two friends, Mia and Riley, embark on a leisurely hike. As tensions run high between the two, a strange humming noise appears that seems to be coming from somewhere in the woods.

9:30 – Scared Shitless (73 mins) dir. Vivieno Caldinelli Horror / Comedy

A plumber and his germophobic son are forced to get their hands dirty to save the residents of an apartment building, when a genetically engineered, blood-thirsty creature escapes into the plumbing system.
 

w/ short: Oh…Canada (6:20) dir. Vincenzo Nappi

Oh, Canada. Such a wonderful place to live – WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT. A musical look into the artifice surrounding Canadian identity.

 

Tickets for the Isabel Bader Theatre lineup on sale now and can be purchased https://www.bloodinthesnow.ca/#festival

 

Follow “Blood In The Snow” Film Festival:

https://www.instagram.com/bitsfilmfest/

 

Media Inquiries:

Sasha Stoltz Publicity:

Sasha Stoltz | Sasha@sashastoltzpublicity.com | 416.579.4804
https://www.sashastoltzpublicity.com

Continue Reading

Media

It’s time for a Halloween movie marathon. 10 iconic horror films

Published

 on

 

Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.

That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.

We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?

“Rear Window” (1954)

“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.

James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.

— Bob Thomas

“Halloween” (1978)

At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”

Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.

The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.

— Bob Thomas

“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)

“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”

Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.

Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.

— Bob Thomas

“Scream” (1996)

In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.

If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.

By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.

— Ned Kilkelly

“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)

Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”

“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.

The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.

But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.

— Christy Lemire

“Saw” (2004)

The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.

This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.

You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.

But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.

— David Germain

Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.

“Paranormal Activity” (2009)

The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.

The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.

The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.

— Glenn Whipp

Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.

“The Conjuring” (2013)

As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.

“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.

But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.

— Jake Coyle

Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.

Read the full review here.

“Get Out” (2017)

Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”

In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”

It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.

— Jake Coyle

Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.

Read the full review here.

“Hereditary” (2018)

In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”

A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.

Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.

The hype is mostly justified.

— Jake Coyle

Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.

Read the full review here. ___

Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending