Posts by Eric Miller

When Roger Corman completed filming The Raven in 1963, it turned out that star Boris Karloff still had two days left to go on his contract for the picture. Not wishing to waste those two days, Corman, and four other uncredited directors, improvised a script and filmed a new film; thus was born The Terror.  Corman used sets, crewmembers, and cast members from The Raven. The film itself is an interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying, trip through the familiar ideas of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films, with the tried and true motifs of the lonely traveler and the man with repressed guilt manifesting itself. Although it is well acted and directed, The Terror does not offer enough shocks to justify its name.(read more...)

Since Bram Stoker first brought the tale of Dracula to life in 1897, the story has been told and retold countless times on screen. Directors such as F.W. Murnau, Tod Browning, Terrence Fisher and John Badham have all offered up different versions of this story, while actors as diverse as Max Schreck, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and Frank Langella have all portrayed the blood sucking count. By 1992, it seemed that this tale had been told so many times that there was nothing left to say. However, that is the year that the legendary director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola, presents us with a flamboyant new look at Dracula. Over one hundred years after Stoker first penned the novel, Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the most faithful film adaptation of the book. While not flawless, it is an engaging and visually exhilarating exercise in screen horror.(read more...)

Anyone doubting the disturbing effects of repression should experience Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One of the most sophisticated and frightening films in 1930s cinema, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde explicitly explores sexuality and repression in ways that most films of the era merely hinted at or disguised in allegory. Using the characters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to graphically express these themes, Mamoulian creates a very frightening and complex film for its day.(read more...)