Have you ever settled in to watch a movie and couldn’t decide whether you want a horror film, a crime movie, an old fashioned murder mystery, a Gothic thriller, something genuinely chilling and even downright grotesque, or maybe even something ...

In 1827, the brilliant if underrated Thomas De Quincey—who inspired Argento’s Suspiria—penned a satirical essay titled “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts.” Over a series of pages, De Quincey relates a conversation at a gentleman’s club, during ...

While there are a few subgenres adjacent to the horror film that have become beloved over the years—such as nunsploitation, poliziotteschi, or women in prison films—one of the few holdouts that still seems strangely neglected is the German krimi. The ...

From the release of Peter Strickland’s debut film, Katalin Varga, in 2009—a film I have been trying to get everyone to watch for years now with little avail—he has established himself as one of the forerunners of contemporary genre filmmaking. ...

Recently in Heather Drain’s excellent piece on Count Yorga, Vampire, she referred to Robert Quarry’s character as a “leisure suit Lugosi,” which is a phrase I’ve been unable to get out of my head. It’s so apt because we all ...

As part of Universal Studios’ ongoing explorations of monsters and the horror genre in the ‘30s, they soon embraced the idea of the sequel with the unexpectedly successful Bride of Frankenstein (1935), introducing a gruesome yet sympathetic female monster (Elsa ...

“Transylvania, land of dark forests, dread mountains and black unfathomable lakes. Still the home of magic and devilry as the nineteenth century draws to its close. Count Dracula, monarch of all vampires is dead. But his disciples live on to ...

“The impulse had become irresistible. There was only one answer to the fury that tortured him. And so he committed his first act of murder. He had broken the most deep-rooted taboo, and found not guilt, not anxiety or fear, ...

To me, Opera (1987) is the last true masterpiece in Dario Argento’s long career filled with cinematic masterpieces. Though he occasionally stumbled, he produced consistently mesmerizing films from his debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), to this film ...

Though I spent the better part of my teen years obsessively tracking down, watching, and re-watching Dario Argento’s giallo films, the third title in his so-called “Animal Trilogy”—including The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and The Cat o’ Nine ...