FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

There was a period in the early 1980s when college campuses in movies were lawless microcosms; before every square inch of a university was watched over by omnipresent surveillance or bogged down by hyper-connected modern anxiety, you could run around a quad at two in the morning playing elaborate live-action assassination games with dart guns without instantly getting swatted. TAG: The Assassination Game (1982) encapsulates that period, it is not a pretentious cinematic statement and it is certainly not an transformative work, rather it is a slightly goofy, surprisingly tense budget thriller about kids taking a silly game too seriously until one of them snaps and starts using real bullets. The movie was directed by Nick Castle who most horror fans know best as the physical presence behind Michael Myers in John Carpenter's original Halloween, but you can see he learned a lot while working on set and understands how to use shadows, how to frame a hallway to look threatening and how ...

Long before college movies devolved strictly into crude beer-pong comedies and frat house chaos, there was TAG: The Assassination Game. Released in 1982, this low-budget noir-thriller took a surprisingly dark look at campus life, and Synapse Films is finally giving it the revival it deserves. Restored in 2K directly from the original 35mm archival vault materials, this retro suspense piece lands on Blu-ray on September 9, 2026. The premise is brilliant in its simplicity. A group of college kids play a campus-wide game of assassin, using rubber-tipped dart guns to eliminate each other until only one player stands. It is the kind of game that absolutely would not fly on a college campus today. Things get messy when one bitter competitor decides he hates losing so much that he starts swapping out the toy darts for real bullets. The movie was written and directed by Nick Castle, who most horror fans know as the man inside the Michael Myers suit in John Carpenter's 1978 original Hallowe...