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,” […]
The post Creeping Shadows: Why ‘Nosferatu’ Still Holds Up 100 Years Later appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
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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January is so often seen as a dumping ground for films that studios have little faith in, either for any awards consideration or box office success. If a film isn’t Oscar bait or likely to be a summer blockbuster, January is where they’re dropped. To be fair, there is at least some truth in this. […]
The post A Night at the Museum: Digging Up ‘The Relic’ 25 Years Later appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
I have always been a fan of that most improbable of all subgenres, the horror comedy. It has been around for a very long time, dating back to the silent era with The Cat and the Canary and the early talkies with James Whale’s genre twisting films like The Old Dark House and Bride of […]
The post ‘Evil Dead II’ Turns 35 and It’s Still the Ultimate Horror-Comedy Hybrid appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
“The place stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-buried cabins of an Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of melted seal blubber.” -John W. Campbell (as Don A. Stuart) in “Who Goes There?” Imagery like this is just one reason why the story that ultimately became […]
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1931 is the foundational year for the horror film. It is the year in which all the strands and experiments of the silent era crystalized into the genre we now know. Even the term “horror movie” was not in wide use before 1931. Four films in particular have had a lasting impact on the genre […]
The post The Enduring Power of Oscar-Winning Horror Classic ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ [Gods and Monsters] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
In the ’70s and ’80s, several archetypes emerged in horror, both in its heroes and villains. The most famous of these is the final girl, exemplified by Sally Hardesty, Laurie Strode, and Nancy Thompson among many others. But another hero emerged as well: the monster kid. This was usually a pre-teen boy with an obsession […]
The Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise is one of horror’s strangest and boldest. It is wildly uneven in tone and quality, whiplashing between deadly serious and high camp, dizzying heights and the lowest depths often within the same movie. But from its notorious original to its bonkers direct-to-video finale, the series is without a doubt […]