Birth of a Villain

Birth of a Villain

Birth of a Villain

Birth of a Villain

Birth of a Villain

Birth of a Villain

Birth of a Villain

Birth of a Villain

Series - Twitch Film Feature Series

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Twitch Film’s Todd Brown takes you back to the origins of filmdom’s greatest monsters. See the first films from such classic horror franchises as Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser and Child’s Play on the big screen.

Films in Birth of a Villain

    • A Nightmare on Elm Street
    • Wes Craven

    • Hideously scarred, blade-fingered ghoul Freddy Krueger murders his way through the dreams of Elm Street's teenage children in Wes Craven's brilliant spin on the slasher genre.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Halloween
    • John Carpenter

    • Masked killer Michael Myers wreaks bloody, stabby havoc on unwary teenagers on All Hallows' Eve in John Carpenter's brilliantly directed and much imitated low-budget shocker.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Child's Play
    • Tom Holland

    • After a seemingly fatal shootout with police, a voodoo-schooled serial killer (Brad Dourif) continues his murderous career by transferring his spirit into the tiny plastic body of a doll named Chucky, in this cheerfully ridiculous and plentifully gory horror romp.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
    • Tobe Hooper

    • Tobe Hooper's nerve-shredding classic about young road-trippers who become prey for a clan of demented, inbred cannibals introduced the first true icon of modern horror cinema with the burly, flesh-masked, chainsaw-wielding brute Leatherface.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Hellraiser
    • Clive Barker

    • Horror maestro Clive Barker's gruesome and perverse tale of S&M-inclined otherdimensional demons contributed a memorable figure to the pantheon of screen ghouls with the aptly named Pinhead.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Phantasm
    • Don Coscarelli

    • Two brothers and a friendly ice-cream vendor trace a series of mysterious murders to the local mortician — known only as The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) — and his intergalactic horde of dwarf minions, in Don Coscarelli's terminally bizarre cult classic.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • The Howling
    • Joe Dante

    • Joe Dante (Gremlins) brought his tongue-in-cheek sense of humour to the werewolf genre in this tale of an L.A. newswoman who discovers that the country resort to which she's repaired for a rest houses a colony of bloodthirsty lycanthropes.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Friday the 13th
    • Sean Cunningham

    • Jason Voorhees, everyone's favourite hockey-masked, machete-wielding killing machine, made his screen debut — in a considerably different version of his well-known self — in this shocking first installment of one of the most successful and longest-running horror franchises of all time.

    • No events playing at this time.

The one-two punch of Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and John Carpenter's megahit Halloween in the 1970s put a new face to American horror movies. While previously the genre had its share of tortured, sympathetic anti-heroes (the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolf Man), this new breed of monster was a hero because of his villainy — and the more gleefully he set about his gruesome work, the better. Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, Chucky, Pinhead — the names have become legend. Birth of a Villain takes us back to the nightmarish beginnings of these modern horror icons.

—Todd Brown