The 1970s saw the end of the reign of Hammer horror. That studio had kicked off its long-running success in 1957 with the release of The Curse of Frankenstein, which was followed the next year with Horror of Dracula. The ...

Elisabeth Brooks in Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981) The Howling is one of my all-time favorite horror films. I discovered it as a child, and it was one of the rare horror movies that my dad enthusiastically introduced me to.It’s ...

There are several inherent themes in Bram Stoker’s seminal Dracula that flow in and out of various adaptations. Themes of classism, of xenophobia and cultural ignorance and especially sexual repression. Some films highlight a couple of these ideas while ignoring ...

When we are introduced to Dr. Sam Loomis in the original Halloween (1978), we’re being thrown into the middle of things. We’re meeting a man at the end of his rope, a man who might very well be minutes away ...

Halloween (1978) is a simple story. It’s about, as Ghostface put it in Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) a guy who “has the white mask and stalks the babysitters.” That’s truly the gist of it, and yet this is a film, ...

Stories of mad scientists date back much longer than most would think, and well beyond anything approaching modern science as we know it. Every culture has told tales of people creating life from something previously inanimate. In Hebrew folklore, one ...

Vampire legends have existed, in some form or another, in every culture on this earth. They predate the written word, so tracing their origin is next to impossible. But the origin of the specific vampire who has and always will ...

Stories about shape shifters are among the first traceable stories ever told. It’s something that has caught the imagination from the earliest days of human memory. Being something else, being something different, something stronger. But it’s not a matter of ...

It’s been seven years since Hellraiser fans were subjected to the ninth film in the franchise—and the first without Doug Bradley as Pinhead—Hellraiser: Revelations (2011). Playing like a budgetless fan film attempt at what a studio remake would look like, ...

Bram Stoker’s Dracula contains many underriding themes, but one of the most obvious, certainly one of the most talked about, is the heavy element of xenophobia that the author injected into the text. Dracula is, after all, about a foreign ...