Eight. Nine. Three. In the Japanese card game hana-fuda, it’s the worst hand you can get. Eight, nine, and three—ya, ku, and sa. Japanese organized crime families adopted the name “yakuza” because of this hand. Because you need to be ...

Somehow, in the late 1970s, a kinky Jess Franco sci-fi/spy film made it onto broadcast television.

In 1987, maverick filmmakers Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-tung joined forces to make A Chinese Ghost Story, one of the most beautiful and enduring films of the Hong Kong New Wave.

In the latter half of the 1970s, a revolution took place in the Hong Kong film industry. At its anarchic forefront was a shaggy-haired visionary named Tsui Hark.

A long time ago, Pu Songling wrote a compendium of weird stories about ghosts and monsters. Who knew that one of these short nightmares would lead to such big things?

Allegory, symbolism, fantasy, and surrealism are often the refuge of artists working under the oppressive thumb of authoritarian regimes. Usually, it works, thanks to the average censor being unable to process art on any but the most literal of levels. ...

Despite finding itself under the thumb of Stalin’s Soviet Union after World War II, grey and miserable Communism never quite took in what was then Czechoslovakia, no matter what the Party or the secret police demanded. There was (and still ...

The Invisible Man (1933, James Whale), based on a story by HG Wells, was one of the early horror films that helped establish Universal as the go-to studio for chilling fare. They were, at the time, locked in a battle ...

Japan’s occasional flirtations with vampires are, like most things having to do with Japan and Western pop culture, a mix of revulsion and fascination with the foreign, a dichotomy born of the interests of the young simply not lining up ...

Frolicking through the Winter Wonderland of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka Nikolai Gogol’s stories seem to be the basis for just about every Ukrainian fantasy-horror film. Born in the town of Sorochyntsi in 1809, Gogol was the son of ...