Feature Articles

During the 1950s, and culminating with the glorious boondoggle Cleopatra in 1963, Italian film studios and craftspeople enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with Hollywood that resulted in, among many other things, a whole lot of ornate stuff piling up in prop ...

For most of his tenure in the “historical hellraiser” genre, Umberto Lenzi was able to mask the paucity of his budgets by leaning on existing costumes, sets, and stock footage. On occasion, however, no amount of lavish ornamentation or camera ...

Originally published by Darryl Mayeski in Screem Magazine – www.screemag.com. “It’s a lost film now. You’ll never see it the way I wanted you to. Never.”Ken Russell, Total Sci-Fi interview, 2010 Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) was a film brought to ...

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 ...

This is the first in a series of features exploring British cinema and culture as reflected by the releases in the BFI Flipside series. A mass of hopped-up teenagers stampede onto a dancefloor, jerking and gyrating to a driving, twangy ...

Expression is a rhythm, with every creator becoming their own conductor and conduit. This is one of many reasons why adapting the written word to the language of cinema is a tricky one and depending on the work and author ...

Many western viewers got their first introduction to the world of Japanese horror in the late nineties/early noughties when films like Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) and Ju-on: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002) made their debut in the wider world. These ...

At a faraway glance, Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974) seems like the unlikeliest film to be praised for its artistic merits. The story of a former Nazi rekindling a sadomasochistic relationship with a former prisoner seems scandalous, ...

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 ...

There is a rich cinematic history of psychos in love, but few have made it on to a list of most controversial movies of all time. In 1994, Oliver Stone, working from a heavily rewritten Quentin Tarantino screenplay, unleashed a ...