Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds has become such an acknowledged classic and even cultural touchstone that it is easy to forget how revolutionary it was upon its 1963 release. For the Master of Suspense himself, it was a departure in many ways from his previous work while still a testament to his craft and devotion to […]
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Every generation gets the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie it deserves. To date, there have been four official adaptations of Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers and each one adapts its premise to the concerns of the time in which it was made. The deep core of the novel asks, “what exactly is […]
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One of the unique aspects of the horror films produced by Val Lewton at RKO in the 1940s is the seriousness with which they discuss matters of mental illness. Even today, mental health issues are often tiptoed around, but in the forties, they were practically taboo. As discussed in previous entries in this column, Cat […]
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By 1983, Stephen King had rocketed to the top of the publishing world within a fairly short period of time. His first novel, Carrie, had been published only nine years before but he was already considered the modern master of the horror novel. The adaptations of his work, Brian DePalma’s Carrie (1976), Tobe Hooper’s TV […]
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In modern world history, few single years have been as tumultuous as 1968. The Vietnam War continued to drag on and had reached an unprecedented level of unpopularity. The assasinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy shocked the world. Protests against the war, for civil rights, and at the Democratic National Convention raged […]
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Richard Franklin has been called “The Australian Hitchcock” and 1981’s Road Games is the movie that earned him that title. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Franklin did not particularly emulate Hitchcock’s visual style. Instead, he learned how to structure a story and effectively build a sense of dread from the Master of Suspense. He […]
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Flying saucers and alien invasion movies were the trend in the 1950s. UFO sightings in Washington State in 1947 and the famous crash near Roswell, New Mexico in 1948 had ignited a fever for all things alien. The movies soon followed the public interest with films like The Thing from Another World (1951), The Day […]
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Considering his future fame playing a certain Baron, it is an amusing coincidence that Peter Cushing’s very first job in the movies was under the direction of James Whale, director of the classic 1931 Frankenstein, as a double for star Louis Hayward in The Man in the Iron Mask (1939). Hayward played twins in the […]
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When Terrifier 2 was released in theaters, much of the conversation surrounding it was devoted to its gruesome practical effects, insane levels of violence and gore, and audience reactions that included vomiting and fainting on a level not reported since the release of The Exorcist nearly fifty years before. It was being sold as a […]
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By the middle of the 1950s, gothic horror was dead. Modern-set films dealing with nuclear war, radioactive fallout, and the Red Scare filled American theaters with giant bugs and body snatchers. England’s Hammer Studios was no different, releasing successful films like The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and X the Unknown (1956), which were firmly rooted in […]
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With the exception of the Count himself, Renfield is the most dynamic character in the Dracula story. Originally conceived as a madman in Dr. Seward’s sanitarium with a mysterious connection to his vampire overlord, Renfield has evolved with the ever-extending mythos that has arisen around Stoker’s original creation. Since the earliest Dracula films, the character […]
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A strong argument could be made for King Kong being the most influential movie ever made. Kong’s progeny includes Mighty Joe Young, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Godzilla, Ray Harryhausen films, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Lord of the Rings, Avatar, many of the character-driven stop motion creations of the past ninety years, and dozens […]
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No film of the Hays Code era revels in its own perversity quite like Mad Love (1935). Mad science, body horror, insanity, obsession, executions, gaslighting, sadomasochism—it’s all here and presented with unparalleled excellence of craft. Though it may seem tame compared to pre-Code fare like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Freaks, and Island of […]
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For many, Videodrome (1983) remains David Cronenberg’s signature film. It is not his most successful or necessarily even his best, but it does most thoroughly define the descriptor “Cronenbergian.” It is a distillation of many of the themes and motifs he would explore throughout his filmography. Along with The Fly (1986), it is perhaps his […]
The post When Fiction Becomes Reality: How ‘Videodrome’ Is More Relevant Than Ever at 40 appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
Fay Wray began her autobiography On the Other Hand with an open letter to her most famous co-star. In it she said, “for more than half a century, you have been the most dominant figure in my public life. To speak of me is to think of you. To speak to me is often a […]
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