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 ...

Bamboo House of Dolls (Nu ji zhong ying, 1973) is the Shaw Brothers’ oft-mentioned attempt to cash in on the success of The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage, two films shot in the Philippines by director Jack ...

Know what Samuel Fuller was doing right before he sat down to write Brainquake, and you can better understand why Brainquake turned out as bizarre as it did — aside, that is, from simply being a product of the mind ...

A Hyena in the Safe Despite the best efforts of prudes, decency leagues, and opponents of basic human pleasure, film in the 1960s was becoming liberated from the constraints that had been placed upon it. The willingness of the films ...