It all began with the sound of thundering footsteps and a now-iconic roar before giving way to Akira Ifukube’s equally iconic music. Japanese cinema and monster movies worldwide would never be the same again. In the beginning, Godzilla represented the ultimate in fear and destruction. A creature so colossal, he could lay waste to entire […]
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Like most movies, The Invisible Man travelled a long and winding road to the silver screen, and perhaps longer and more winding than most. As biographer James Curtis put it in his book James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters, “The gestation of The Invisible Man was the lengthiest and most convoluted of […]
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“Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within…and whatever walked there, walked alone.” – Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959). Of all the subgenres of horror, the haunted house story has provided the most opportunities for slow and subtle terror that creeps and crawls its way under the […]
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One of the great unsung traditions of horror is a character’s external environment reflecting their internal state. It has found its way into films as diverse as Repulsion (1965), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), and Relic (2020) to name just a few. Edgar Allan Poe was hardly the first […]
The post A Plague of Evil: Revisiting 1960’s Edgar Allan Poe Movie ‘House of Usher’ Starring Vincent Price appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
The Exorcist rocked the world 50 years ago and horror has never been the same since. It shocked audiences with its unflinching portrayals of disturbing medical examinations, levels of profanity that shot right past those considered “acceptable” for Hollywood studio films, and a scene in which a twelve-year-old girl masturbates with a crucifix. It was […]
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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 […]
The post Dear Fellow: Remembering Peter Cushing on the Late Horror Legend’s 110th Birthday appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
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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