In his last great performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s debut film Targets (1968), Boris Karloff plays the aged and exasperated horror legend Byron Orlok. In a single line he sums up his entire career, at least as viewed by the public: “Marx Brothers make you laugh, Garbo makes you weep, Orlok makes you scream.” As with […]
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Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a film that, much like its protagonist, crosses oceans of time. Director Francis Ford Coppola, one of the filmmakers at the leading edge of the “film school” generation of the seventies, tapped into the talents of the young up-and-coming stars, both in front of and behind the camera, to tell a […]
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Two of the greatest horror films of all time are celebrating their 100th anniversary this year. The first, and best known, is F.W. Murnau’s unparalleled vampire epic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Not quite as well known but at least as influential is Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, also known as The Witch, a truly […]
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Many of us have people in our lives who just aren’t as into horror as we are. Come October, it is tempting to simply hide away, shunning them for a month as we indulge in our favorite genre, as we no doubt will do at least some of the time. But then, they may be […]
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This is not another “Halloween III is good actually” article. After forty years, its reappraisal as a genre classic seems to be more or less complete. It is true that for years the absence of Michael Myers, Laurie Strode, and Dr. Loomis led many fans of the Halloween movies to confusion, rejection, or outright rage […]
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Two of the greatest and most successful horror films made in the wave that followed the successes of Dracula, Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1931 were virtually lost for much of the ninety years since their release. It is true that the black and white versions of Doctor X (1932) and Mystery […]
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After the success of Dracula in early 1931, several studios large and small rushed into production on their own macabre features. With the early thirties being the depths of the Great Depression, these studios were eager to make films on low budgets that could turn large profits. As has continued to be the case even […]
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“In a way they’re the films of a young man who I think had much more rage than he ever realized.” – Wes Craven In 1971, Sean S. Cunningham’s film Together, a soft porn, pseudo-documentary about sex in America, was a success. Hallmark, the distributors of that film, requested a scary movie and offered $40,000 […]
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Psycho is given a great deal of credit for redefining the direction American horror would take in the 1960s, and rightly so, but another film also deserves recognition for its innovations and influence. Like Psycho, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? signaled a shift from aliens, giant bugs, and atomic monsters to the more subtle […]
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Over thirty years after leaving his native England to live and work in Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock returned home. The result is arguably the best film of his late career and easily the most brutal in his entire canon, Frenzy. The film was a return to form, exploring many of the enduring themes of his work […]
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Some people seem to fit multiple lifetimes’ worth of experience into one. Christopher Lee was one of these. Christopher Frank Carandini Lee was born 100 years ago on May 27, 1922 to Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Lee and the Contessa Estelle Marie Carandini Lee. The actor who would later become world famous for playing Dracula joked […]
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It seems that every decade or so the horror genre is declared dead only for a groundbreaking film to come along and resurrect it. In the late 1950s, that film was The Curse of Frankenstein. The “death” of horror is always hyperbole, often merely declaring the end of a particular trend within the genre, but […]
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There is only a handful of films a hundred years old or more that are still preserved, watched, and acknowledged as masterpieces. A few from the early days of cinema endure as milestones and curiosities but works of cinematic art that have endured for over a century are rare—Georges Méliès’s “A Trip to the Moon,” […]
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Roger Corman has been called many things over the years—King of the B’s, The Pope of Pop Cinema, outlaw, renegade, mentor. Now, maybe all of it can be distilled into a single word: legend. In a career that has spanned seven decades, Corman has worn a number of hats: director, producer, writer, and actor are […]
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When he was sixteen years old, Tod Browning ran away with the circus. Technically speaking it was a travelling show called the Manhattan Fair & Carnival Company which he joined after becoming enthralled with one of its dancers. He held several jobs in various carnivals, circuses, and sideshows including barker, escape artist, clown, and stable […]
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