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 ...
Read More »A World of Wicker, Part 3: Because of Kristel
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 ...
Read More »The Fabulous World of Karel Zeman
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 ...
Read More »Carmilla in the House of Horror, Part 2
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 ...
Read More »Carmilla in the House of Horror, Part 1
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 ...
Read More »Cardigans vs. Devil Capes: Being a Vampire Isn’t Enough for the Devils of Darkness
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 ...
Read More »Bruce in Bollywood: Dharmendra Meets Bruce Le in Katilon Ke Kaatil
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 ...
Read More »The Old Dark Haveli: The Mad Dancing, Murder, and Mystery of Gumnaam
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 ...
Read More »Bamboo House of Dolls: Women in Prison, Shaw Brothers Style
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 ...
Read More »Ain’t That a Kick in the Head: Samuel Fuller’s Pulp Potboiler Brainquake
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 ...
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