There's something to admire about film makers that attempt something grand. John Carpenter, master craftsman behind The Thing and Halloween, would seem an ideal choice to create a film that treats God and the Anti-Christ with a scientific eye in the midst of a slow boil supernatural and intellectual horror thriller. What evolves out of this effort is something that is partially scientific and partially a horror film, but these parts do not gel together into a satisfying end product.(read more...)

If you're familiar with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, you know that amongst his most prominent themes is that of the past's ability to terrorize you. The three loosely adapted Poe stories in Spirits of the Dead - "Metzengerstein," "William Wilson," and "Never Bet the Devil your Head" - are about exactly that. Though they are each helmed by a different director, the continuity and quality that flow through them are perfectly consistent, creating an experience that is well-told, layered, and haunting. (read more...)

When you look at the history of horror cinema, there are few actors whose name is synonymous with an entire sub-genre. There's perhaps Boris Karloff and the mad scientist film or Christopher Lee in the Dracula/vampire realm. There's one actor who doesn't often get mentioned amongst the elite group of horror icons, and that's Barbara Steele. With her exotic, striking beauty and graceful physicality, she could move from playing icy villainess to strong but vulnerable heroine with incredible ease. Steele's popularity reached its peak in the 1960s with gothic chillers like Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. One of Steele's lesser films is 1965's Nightmare Castle, a visually sumptuous entry that manages to hold interest despite a wildly silly plot.(read more...)

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors was the first in a series of anthology films from the Amicus studio, and the one that launched them for a time to the same dizzying heights, at least at the box office, as their arch rival Hammer. But it is a film that prove Hitchcock's maxim about a film needing three things: a good script, a good script and a good script, as the poor quality of the writing is the factor that stops this from becoming a masterpiece.

Six strangers share a train carriage on a journey out of London. To pass the time, one gets out a deck of tarot cards and starts to tell the fortunes of his fellow passengers; however, all the stories end with the same card - Death...(read more...)