Horror fans like vampires. It's a pretty simple concept, really, and one that you'd be hard pressed to refute. Over the years, they have developed a mythology both complex (how many ways can you kill a vampire?) and ridiculous (garlic anybody?), but still surprisingly consistent. However, in 1977, director George A. Romero changed this pattern with the release of Martin. Romero demonstrates, without a doubt, that the terror of vampirism is not in the myth. According to Romero, there is no magic, and that reality is far more terrifying than any creature of the night.(read more...)

It is difficult to find many horror films made within a few years of Frankenstein (1931) where Boris Karloff is not wearing some kind of monstrous makeup. Even in The Black Cat (1934), his character wears a faux widow's peak to suggest a demonic appearance. However, in 1935's The Black Room, Karloff foregoes the heavy greasepaint and prosthetics, stripping his acting to the bare bones of the profession -- vocal inflection, body language, and that light of thought flickering behind the eyes. As a bonus, he gives a bravado double performance, playing both halves of a set of identical twins.(read more...)

I dreamed last night that I broke a mirror, and among the shards, I found Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 classic Don’t Look Now.

Then, the dissonance hit.

A dead daughter, drowned in an English lake. Red, red, red. Two old sisters, one blind, one not, summoning premonitions, dead, dead, dead. Restoration. A dwarf serial killer. Red, red, red. The streets and canals and buildings of Venice. A dilapidated church. Dead, dead, dead.

Donald Sutherland. Julie Christie. Tucked in an emotional blanket of fear, anger, guilt, love, and psychic curiosity.(read more...)

Häxan: Witchcraft through the Ages, Danish director Benjamin Christensen’s silent documentary on the history of witchcraft, is reputed as the strangest silent film ever made, if not the strangest of all films.  His point (at the start, anyway) is to show us that witchcraft never really existed and that the things people thought were witchcraft, primarily in the fifteenth century, were actually everyday incidents blown out of proportion.(read more...)