Time for another silent movie watchalong! Our film today is a classic one, the 1924 Austrian film The Hands of Orlac, directed by Robert Wiene, starring Conrad Veidt (who also starred in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Man Who Laughs, incidentally), and based on a book by Maurice Renard. Not only is it wonderful and properly eerie, … More Silent Movie Watchalong: The Hands of Orlac (1924)
Time for another double dose of horror, and damn, I got two good ones today, though they’re definitely not for all tastes (but then again, what is?). The first is 2016’s The Wailing, a massive hit in its native South Korea and an exceptionally reviewed flick on American shores as well. I’d been hearing recommendations for … More Double Feature: The Wailing (2016) and A Dark Song (2017)
I had been wanting to read Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home for quite a while, but had somehow never gotten around to it. I adored his 1972 book The Other, and the film adaptation of it is one of my favorite horror films of the decade. A while back, I was reading a post in a horror Facebook group where … More Book vs Movie: Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon
While the giallo genre has a fairly rigid set of tropes that most films falling within its parameters adhere to (masked killer with gloves, a murder mystery element, ultra violent killings committed with bladed weapons, etc.), that isn’t to say that some directors didn’t try to do something a bit different within the loose confines … More Movies: All the Colors of the Dark (1972)
I decided to do something of a Middle Eastern theme for today’s double feature, consisting of two films I had heard a great deal of positive press about and had been wanting to see for ages. The first is a surreal torture-fest from Turkey, the second a more traditional metaphorical ghost story with an Iranian-born … More Middle Eastern Double Feature: Baskin (2015) and Under the Shadow (2016)
No one would ever accuse notorious Italian gore master Lucio Fulci of being a particularly subtle filmmaker, but even in the wide Fulcian seas of splinter eye gougings, coughed-up intestines, and little braided girls getting their heads half blown off by shotguns, his 1982 giallo thriller The New York Ripper gives even his ardent fans … More Movies: The New York Ripper (1982)
I have to admit that I’m not usually a huge fan of the sci-fi genre or of horror/sci-fi crossovers. There are some exceptions, of course—the Alien franchise, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers—but on the whole, aliens are not really compelling baddies for me. So it was with some degree of meh-ness, one Halloween night, that I randomly … More Movies: Xtro (1983)
It’s time for another scintillating installment of Silent Movie Watchalong, kiddos! Today I’m going to be discussing the eleven-minute D.W. Griffith film The Sealed Room from 1909, which as you might imagine bears a slight resemblance to the Poe story “The Cask of Amontillado,” as well as the works of Honoré de Balzac. It also stars Mary … More Silent Movie Watchalong: The Sealed Room (1909)
The Australian psychological horror film The Babadook made an enormous splash with critics and horror fans when it came out back in 2014, and to this day it still ends up on many “best horror movies of the century so far” lists. Because of the hype surrounding it, there was also a pretty predictable backlash, … More Movies: The Babadook (2014)
Dario Argento is of course no stranger to horror fans, being the mastermind behind such seminal giallo films as Deep Red and Tenebrae, as well as more lurid supernatural fantasias like Suspiria and Inferno. 1971’s The Cat O’Nine Tails (aka Il Gatto a Nove Code), only Argento’s second film, shows many trademarks of the director’s … More Movies: The Cat O’Nine Tails (1971)
