For over fifty years, Francis Ford Coppola has been a towering, and often controversial, figure in American Cinema. His filmography is one of the most legendary of all time and includes some of the greatest movies ever made like The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), The Conversation (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979), and […]
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The horror films of the 1950s are often relegated to two categories: space invaders and giant bugs. There is some truth in that generalization, but the reality is far more subtle with deep ties to the past along with the political climate of the decade itself. Both these categories can trace their lineage, at least […]
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Fritz Lang’s M is the greatest serial killer movie ever made. Of course, there have been dozens, even hundreds, of films on the subject with various innovations and evolutions along the way from the early days of cinema all the way to the most recent twists on the subgenre in MaXXXine and Longlegs. A few […]
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By the 1950s, the Universal Monsters had become a punchline with most of them ending their onscreen careers meeting Abbott and Costello. Many of them had become victims of their own success, becoming so iconic that they had lost any ability to frighten anybody. Creatures from outer space, radioactive monsters, and giant bugs had taken […]
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When the news of Roger Corman’s passing was announced, the online film community immediately responded with a flood of tributes to a legend. Many began with the multitude of careers he helped launch, the profound influence he had on independent cinema, and even the cameos he made in the films of Corman school “graduates.” Tending […]
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In the 1930s, Universal laid claim to the two biggest horror stars of the era, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and it was only a matter of time before the pair would meet on screen. In 1932, only months after each rocketed to stardom in Dracula and Frankenstein respectively, the two were dressed in tuxedoes […]
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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!.
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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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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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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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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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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