Haunted Newsreel

It's a sight both thrilling and familiar -- the winding staircase, especially when seen from directly above or below. Many directors and cinematographers use such shots for their guaranteed visual punch -- the landings create artificial frames, the spirals imbue the center of the screen with a sense of the infinite. Plus, the practical purpose of the stairway suggests a journey and not an easy one. Different films have used the winding staircase to evoke different things -- vertigo, insanity, a descent into hell, and even female genitalia. This Thanksgiving weekend, we give our gratitude to one of the great visual tropes in the horror-thriller by presenting six films with staircases we love.

As usual, click the thumbnails to open a larger version of the picture in a new window.(read more...)

When we decided on "Foreign Horror" as the overall theme for our Shocktober review marathon this year, we made a conscious decision to leave out Italy for the most part, despite it having the second-highest horror output for a non-English-speaking country (after Japan). The fact is, we have plenty of Italian horror covered on the site, and we devoted two and a half weeks of last year's Shocktober to two of the country's best-known horror directors, Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava.(read more...)

As we head into our fourth celebration of international horror, we head to the Pacific coast of Asia. To be honest, it's probably unfair of us to lump Asian horror together into one big pot. Each country involved has its own unique identity and its own approach to horror. Japan has a long tradition of ghost stories that, in recent years, have melded with their increased dependence on technology to create such horrors as Ring and Pulse. Meanwhile, South Korea -- a deeply Christian country -- draws on religious themes of guilt and redemption for its cinematic tales of terror. Thailand's supernatural cinema is informed by a culturally-held belief that spirits are everywhere -- they even have a "ghost festival" every year.

Still, time in October is limited, so we are only able to present a very limited selection of the wide range of horror movies produced by Southeast Asian countries.(read more...)

For our tribute to Spanish horror, we're focusing on the works of three of the country's best-known directors (Jesus Franco, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, and Paul Naschy) as well as two newer talents, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza.(read more...)