At a faraway glance, Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974) seems like the unlikeliest film to be praised for its artistic merits. The story of a former Nazi rekindling a sadomasochistic relationship with a former prisoner seems scandalous, ...

Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) is proof that positive controversy sells. When the infamous slasher film was released to theatres it was immediately met with outrage. The American public wasn’t quite ready for a beloved holiday icon to join the ...

The mysterious land of Transylvania, now a part of modern day Romania, has long been a staple for gothic horror. From the pages of Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the expressionist masterpiece of Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony ...

Journalist Geoff Barton might not have foreseen the impact he would make when he coined the term NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) in Sounds magazine. The words would become synonymous with a tidal wave of bands that emerged ...

Sexuality was a key element in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s body of work. While certainly not the first to explore the subject, the director chose to utilize it in a variety of ways. In his first feature, Accattone (1961), prostitution plays ...

Jörg Buttgereit is a man of many talents. He’s widely known for his cult films Nekromantik (1987) and Der Todesking (1989), both of which explored the topics of sex and death. However, his work has hardly stopped there. In recent ...

Since their formation in 1992, Carpathian Forest have established themselves as one of the more unique black metal bands to emerge from Norway. Lead by hedonistic frontman Roger “Nattefrost” Rasmussen, the group has been unapologetic with the themes they’ve incorporated ...

1963 was quite the year for horror cinema. In Italy, Mario Bava crafted two masterpieces with The Whip and The Body (La frusta e il corpo) and Black Sabbath (I tre volti della paura). Alfred Hitchcock transformed animals into lethal ...

The Phoenix rising from the ashes—it’s one of the most celebrated stories in mythology, and one of the best ways to illustrate rebirth. (Albeit it’s an analogy that sometimes gets overused.) In the case of Mayhem, there’s no better way ...

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” ...