Interview: Director Don Coscarelli Keeps It Weird
Don Coscarelli is back. The director of Phantasm makes a bizarre and welcome return to skewed storytelling along the lines of such exploits as Naked Lunch, Buckaroo Banzai, and Brazil, stirring up a potent, psychotropic blend of horror, fantasy, and sci-fi and bakes up a very altered state in John Dies at the End. Michele “Izzy” Galgana talked to the director for Diabolique. Tell us about how you found this novel. John Dies at the End may be the first motion picture project selected by a robot. I had been reading some transgressive fiction from an imprint called Permuted Press. One…
Interview: Barbara Steele
At the end of the 1960s, the world’s reigning horror queen, Barbara Steele, announced her retirement from the screen. Thankfully, the green-eyed, raven-haired beauty returned to the horror genre in the mid-70s, but before she did, she spoke at length to regular HoH contributor, Tony Crawley. Today, she is still a horror star thanks to her occasional genre roles and the welcome appearance on of some of her gothic and Italian Classics. Here, she speaks with an honesty and frankness that makes this interview as refreshing and interesting as her career as the classic 1960s horror actress. I swear I’m never going to…
Episode No. 10: Dracula (1979): A Conversation with John Badham
On this episode, which complements Diabolique magazine’s special Bram Stoker centenary issue, I’m very pleased to have as my guest director John Badham, the man responsible for Universal Pictures’ 1979 adaptation of Dracula, starring Frank Langella and Sir Laurence Olivier. Hard to believe it’s been more than 30 years since the film was made. I know you’ll enjoy this look back. – Steve
Another Black Sunday with You
The first time I ever saw Black Sunday, the American version of the Italian horror classic La Maschera del Demonio, was at a drive-in with (I believe) Konga as a double feature. The year 1960 was a particularly banner year for genre films, when you consider within that 12-month period we would see not only Hitchcock’s Psycho and Corman’s House of Usher, but this really intense black-and-white nightmare from first-time director Mario Bava. Imagine being 11 years old while witnessing a woman being tied to a stake and then impaled by a hooded muscleman using a hammer to attach an iron mask, filled inside…
“Get out My Pendulum Kiddies, I Feel Like Swinging” – Vincent Price in Beach Party (1963)
The night Vincent Price died, television stations across the country ran the Pendulum scene from Pit and the Pendulum as a collective memory his audience would instantly recognize as the screen persona of Vincent Price. This is as it should have been because if any film could act as an homage to Price’s popularity, not only as a “Horror Icon” but a pop culture icon as well. It was more than likely that his producers at AIP felt the same way since he lampooned the role not only the aforementioned Beach Party film where he does a sly cameo as…
Robert Fuest’s And Soon the Darkness (1970)
David L Rattigan dissects a sequence from And Soon the Darkness, the 1970 thriller directed by Robert Fuest, who died on March 21, 2012 Two holidaying English nurses are cycling through the French countryside, via long stretches of road, with vast fields on each side and a blue sky overhead. Having had breakfast in a small but populated town – “It’s not exactly swinging,” quips Cathy, “but it is dangling” – they are back on the road. Cathy has become quite taken with a handsome stranger from the town. She ogles him with impunity over breakfast. He overtakes them on…
Review: The Chernobyl Diaries
Bradley Parker’s Chernobyl Diaries is like an old amusement park ride. You’ve been on that ride before, and you know what to expect, but it’s a thrill while it lasts. And so goes Diaries, with that familiar formula of taking a small group of good-looking young adults, putting them in an isolated area with little chance to escape, and letting the mayhem ensue. A fun ride, but it’s not Disneyland’sTower ofTerror. We’re introduced to three of the characters, American tourists travelling across Europewest to east, through home video clips in the found-footage style found-footage style of writer and producer Oren Peli’s wildly successful Paranormal…
Episode No. 9: Detention (2011)
In movies, the laws of physics appear to apply most of the time. As viewers we’ve learned to accept that. However, in the on-screen world of director Joseph Kahn, the laws are meant to be challenged, agressively. How else can one explain the way motorcycles race and flip and (yes) climb about objects within the frame of his 2004 film Torque. You either accept the surrealism and allow the director have his fun, or you don’t. You’ll need to make that decision regarding Mr. Kahn’s new movie, Detention – a conceptual whirlwind that uses the framework of a slasher film…
Christopher Lee: The Man behind the Monster
Today, Christopher Lee is recognized as an actor of exceptional range and talent, and despite his rare appearances recently in horror and fantasy films, it is indicative of the man’s immense popularity that his fans have remained loyal to him. But having said that, it would still be impossible to ignore the impact the film fantasy world has had on his career. An impact that has had people calling him the ‘man of a thousand faces’, and the ‘crown prince of terror’. It was 1956 when Lee, who had for some years been struggling along as a bit-part actor, made…
Episode No. 8: Kaneto Shindô’s Kuroneko (1968)
On the eighth episode of Diabolique Radio Show, Steve and Japanese film expert, Brett Michel, discuss Kaneto Shindô’s classic ghost story, KURONEKO (1968), the precursor to modern Japanese horror films like Ringu (1998) and Ju-on (2002).
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Jacob Burman No way, this is coming out on blu-ray? Might have to get my mother this.
May 9, 2013 at 9:58 am