Usually January is a wasteland for the box office, dominated by award bait films, studio dump offs and the sputtering remains of the Christmas blockbusters. This week, one new film braved these difficult days and came out with very respectable numbers.

The Devil Inside debuted on over twenty-two hundred screens, bringing in an estimated thirty-four and a half million dollars. The satanic possession horror film raked in the 3rd highest January opening ever behind Cloverfield and  the special edition re-release of Star Wars back in ’97. The movie had a production budget of only one million, which makes this weekend a pretty big win for Paramount.

Coming in second place this weekend was Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol , which continued it’s very impressive run. With another twenty million, it now is on pace to threaten Mission: Impossible 2 as the series’ top grosser. The movie has had several weeks of really solid holds and is proving to be the big winner of the crowded holiday season.

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It is in fashion right now to bash on remakes and reboots. That line of thinking may or may not be warranted, but you should hear none of it when talking about the upcoming Evil Dead reboot.

Of all the horror franchise that have been revived in the last decade, none more than the Evil Dead series is more malleable. The franchise has always reinvented itself with each new installment, so a new, modern reboot shouldn’t cause immediate concern.

The movie is going to begin filming in a few months and Bloody Disgusting has the scoop on the first bit of casting:

Bloody Disgusting has learned exclusively that Lily Collins (The Blind Side, Priest, Mirror Mirror) is in final negotiations to play “Mia” in FilmDistrict’s reboot aiming for release on April 12, 2013.

In this version, the story centers on five friends (David, Natalie, Eric, Olivia, and Mia) holed up at a remote cabin where they discover a Book of the Dead with a demonic force unleashed possessing each until only one is left to fight for survival.

Lily Collins is a great young actress who shined in The Blind Side and even in the otherwise horrid Priest. We don’t know which of the characters is going to be the “Ash” archetype, but rumors have bubbled up that Raimi wanted a girl to fill that role. Could that be Lily Collins’ Mia? Only time will tell.

Stop-Motion animation is a craft, it takes time and true artistry to create convincing motion with tangible puppets. The end result is a rich, textured world that is more immersive than traditional animation. Next year promises to be a good year for the medium with two new stop-motion movies on the way.

The most intriguing of the two is called ParaNorman, which got an incredibly stylish and moody teaser a while back. Now we have are first taste of the story and some of the characters in a new teaser that was just released. In case you were unaware of what ParaNorman is all about here is a synopsis:

“In ParaNorman, a small town comes under siege by zombies. Who can it call? Only misunderstood local boy Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee), who is able to speak with the dead. In addition to the zombies, he’ll have to take on ghosts, witches and, worst of all, moronic grown-ups, to save his town from a centuries-old curse. But this young ghoul whisperer may find his paranormal activities pushed to their otherworldly limits.”

The film looks tremendous and is high on our must see list for 2012. ParaNorman is set for a September 14th, 2012 release date.

You can check out the gorgeous new teaser after the jump.

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Is it a sequel? A prequel? A remake? A premake? Yes.

Director Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr. (yes, that is a real name) takes a lot of inspiration and most of the story from John Carpenter’s 1982 classic, the only ostensible difference being that this film takes place in the Norwegian camp immediately before the events of Carpenter’s.

The Norwegians unearth the titular Thing and call in some American paleontologists, among them the comely Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a young graduate student whose major qualification is that she provides a reason for the movie to be in English.

And from there, it plays out as you’d expect.

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It all started as a little, micro-budget horror flick 3 years ago, that has now become a phenomenon (pun intended) and one highly anticipated trilogy. Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity is just that, and the viral marketing campaign for the upcoming third installment is just beginning.

Over the weekend, several news outlets received a VHS tape and VCR in the mail that had some pretty scary stuff on it. Just enough to get you to pee yourself with both fear and anticipation for what the next film has to bring us.

Here’s what we can look forward to in terms of a story.

The third film takes place in 1988, when Katie and Kristi were kids. While trying to get video proof of Bloody Mary, Katie and Kristi are first confronted by the monstrous demon haunting them in the first and second movies along with their family.

Check out two of the static-filled videos after the jump, and catch Paranormal Activity 3 in theaters on October 21st.

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Last year, the world was rocked when a man named Tom Six directed some of the most gruesome and horrific scenes in the history of film, let alone the horror genre. Now he’s planning to up the ante even higher with his sequel, the alleged Full Sequence.

The film, which is shrouded in a fair amount of mystery, has got some reportedly ridiculous things to show us, and Six even has the balls to make the film meta in explaining how it ties with the original Sequence. Here’s the synopsis.

The film centers on an antagonist called Martin (Laurence Harvey), who becomes sexually obsessed with a DVD recording of the film within the film, The Human Centipede (First Sequence). In the DVD, a surgeon kidnaps three people and surgically connects them mouth-to-anus. Martin masturbates as he watches the film, with sandpaper wrapped around his penis.

He subsequently creates his own twelve-person “human centipede” and gains sexual gratification from the pain, humiliation and suffering of his victims. He is shown to become sexually aroused whenever a member of his centipede is forced to defecate into the mouth of the victim behind them. Martin rapes the woman at the rear of the centipede with barbed wire wrapped around his penis.^[2] A teaser trailer also revealed that a baby will be in some-way involved with the plot. The penises of two of the victims will be attached to the top of the head of the lead segment.

That rundown alone is enough to make you cringe, but don’t take our word for it. Take a look at the reactions of real-life folks after the jump when they watched the uncensored version of the film in Australia. Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence may just hit theaters here in the US sometime in the next decade.

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For those of you who loved Malevolence, Stevan Mena’s 2004 slasher film, you will love its gory prequel, Bereavement. Even if you haven’t seen Malevolence and just love horror films, you should see this film. It stands on its own as a visually stunning film and has some pretty believable characters as well.

In this film we focus on two different stories: part of the story focuses on Allison (Alexandra Daddario), a 17 year-old girl who has come to live with her uncle Jonathan (Michael Biehn) after the untimely death of her parents. On her daily run Allison passes a a seemingly abandoned home that happens to be inhabited by young Martin Bristol, a boy with a disease that renders him unable to feel physical pain, and his demented captor, Graham Sutter, a sadistic maniac who takes his orders from a mounted deer skull.

The two stories don’t cross paths until the third act. Until that time we follow Allison, who is full of teenage angst. While on another one of her runs, (She runs a lot in this movie) she comes upon William (Nolan Gerard Funk), a muscle car driving heart throb that lives in the trailer park with his paraplegic father. Obviously now we need a side story where Jonathan doesn’t approve of his niece, seeing this “lowlife,” so he does everything to try and stop their love from blossoming.

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Now that FX has made a name for itself in the world of dramatic TV with Justified, The Shield, and Rescue Me, as well as comedic TV with Louie, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Archer, it’s time to take on horror with American Horror Story.

Network veteran Ryan Murphy (creator of Nip/Tuck and Glee) is taking to the raunchy cable channel for a bit of the old fashioned bump in the night. Here’s a synopsis for those still in the dark.

American Horror Story revolves around The Harmons, a family of three who move from Boston to Los Angeles as a means to reconcile past anguish. The All Star cast features Dylan McDermott (The Practice) as “Ben Harmon,” a psychiatrist; Connie Britton (Friday Night Lights) as “Vivien Harmon,” Ben’s wife; Taissa Farmiga as “Violet,” the Harmon’s teenage daughter; Jessica Lange (Tootsie, Blue Sky, Grey Gardens) in her first-ever regular series TV role as “Constance,” the Harmon’s neighbor; Evan Peters (One Tree Hill) as “Tate Langdon,” one of Ben’s patients; and Denis O’Hare (The Good Wife) as “Larry Harvey.”

We’ve got a brand new sneak peek of the show, titled “Belly” in which we get a pretty intense cover of “Tainted Love”. Check it out after the jump, like the show on Facebook, and catch it on FX on October 5th.

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If you’ve been the star of one of the most successful film franchises of all time and now that’s over, you might want to consider trying to go in a different direction with your career. If you’re Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, that’s kinda what you’ve done with your upcoming film The Woman In Black.

In the film Radcliffe plays a lawyer who travels to a remote English village and discovers that the ghost of a scorned woman is terrorizing the locals. The horror thriller is a remake of a 1989 TV movie which was adapted from a play which, itself, was adapted from a novel by Susan Hill. You follow all that? Good.

We’v got a new trailer for the film to share with you today. In it, Radcliffe does his best to overcome the notion that he should just pull out his wand and blast the ghost with his magical powers. Does he succeed? You be the judge.

Check out the trailer after the jump. The Woman In Black is set to hit theaters on February 3rd of 2012.

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While we were away at Comic-Con last week, a few interesting things seemed to happen. Not only did we get word that Frank Darabont would be leaving Walking Dead, but in gaming news, it looks like Freddy Krueger will be returning to the consoles for the first time since the mid 1980s as the final DLC character for Mortal Kombat.

The news comes as bit of a surprise at first, because not many people think of the Nightmare on Elm Street killer when they think about fun playable fighting characters, but then it makes some sense when you realize that this is Warner Bros’ way of cross pollinating between brands.

The character will be available in a few weeks, and will be fully loaded with tons of claw-slashing and hellfire-based moves and combos. Note that this is also the most recent version of Freddy, and not the original Robert Englund version of the character we’ve loved for decades.

It is a shame that this is the alleged “final” DLC character for the game, as Warner has some pretty cool other franchises that they could dip into, as long as they stay away from any of the territory that was covered in Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe.

Who wouldn’t want to see Scorpion take on Voldemort or watch Sub Zero get pummeled by Zach Galifiniakis from The Hangover or even watch Sherlock Holmes slap the hell out of Shang Tsung? Let’s hope that the DLC does well enough for WB to look into a few more options down the road.

In the meantime, check out the full DLC trailer after the jump.

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It was a bit hard to believe that a director could match, or in some ways even improve, on Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. But that’s just what director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo did when he stepped in and took on the sequel 28 Weeks Later. The film became a huge hit and we’ve been waiting to see what he does next. Now, we know.

Fresnadillo’s second English language film is the upcoming Intruders, which stars Clive Owen. The first trailer for the film has just been released and we’ve got it for you right here.

In case you’re not familiar with the film, Intruders concerns two families, one in Spain and one in the UK, who are menaced by terrifying apparitions. In Spain, a mother tries to protect her son from a faceless stranger, while in Britain, a young girl has terrifying dreams of a demon who becomes a real danger to her and her family. Owen plays the girl’s father.

Intruders also features Daniel Bruhl, Carice Van Houten and Kerry Fox. It’s set to be released October 7th in the US.

Check the trailer after the break.

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With anticipation for season two of AMC’s The Walking Dead growing each day, it’s nice to know the show is now back in production and filming. To help get fans even more excited for the next season, AMC has just released a first-look photo from the upcoming season.

The show is currently filming in Atlanta and it seems, at least from the following quote, that Frank Darabont could not be happier about it:

“At this moment, I’m standing on a stretch of post-apocalypse interstate in Georgia, littered with abandoned cars and blessing my good luck to be reunited with our amazing cast, and our fantastic directors and crew.”

Thanks Mr. Darabont, we’re pretty happy you guys are back to work too. Now, please try not to mess the show up. Okay?

Click through to check out the pic. The Walking Dead returns to AMC with all-new episodes later this year.

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