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 ...

Born in the Dutch town of Utrecht in September of 1952, Sylvia Kristel grew up the daughter of hoteliers. Living in a hotel provided her with, if not exactly a conventional childhood, certainly an interesting one, as the rotating cast ...

If you took special effects film pioneer Georges Méliès and combined him with stop motion animation genius Ray Harryhausen and surreal fantasist Terry Gilliam, you’d have a filmmaker very close to Karel Zeman. Harryhausen was a contemporary, and so the ...

Sheridan Le Fanu’s Tragic Vampire Finally Gets the Film She Deserves. Unfortunately, trends have a habit of becoming played out, and by the close of the 1960s, the Hammer horror films that had been so shocking and revolutionary found the ...

Bela Lugosi isn’t Dracula, but Christopher Lee is, as Hammer Horror is born. In late 1934, a British comedian named William Hinds started a film company, Hammer Productions Ltd., named in honor of Will Hammer, the stage name which had ...

So let’s say, just for the sake of argument, you’re a vampire. Not one of those post-Anne Rice vampires with the leather trench coat and the bad poetry and an appreciation of royalty-free industrial music. No, I’m talking about one ...

Try to imagine that, like me, your life has become a steady parade of disappointments and squandered potential, but then one day, the following happens: having previously been enlightened as to the existence of a Bollywood ninja movie—a rip-off of ...

The Bollywood thriller Gumnaam (1965) isn’t shy about the sort of films that have influenced it. Adopting the jet-set internationality of the 1960s, it becomes an amalgamation of old-fashioned “old dark house” murder mysteries and pop-art modernism filtered through the ...