Feature Articles

On today, this most revered day, the great Dutch director Paul Verhoeven celebrates his 80th birthday and I, in turn, am celebrating his incredible, often misunderstood career. For a brief, golden period, Verhoeven left the Netherlands and came to work ...

If you follow my writing or social media channels, then you’ve probably gathered that I love lots of movies that aren’t very popular among my fellow film fans. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that Spawn — the much-maligned ...

“I have six fingers see? And two heads! I’m a freak!” Martha Dobie (Shirley MacLaine)   Based on Lillian Hellman’s controversial play about a child’s lie destroying the lives of “decent people”, William Wyler’s The Children’s Hour (1961)  is quite ...

One of Italian cult cinema’s most prolific directors, the wonderful Umberto Lenzi dabbled in many horror and exploitation genres, and is generally remembered for gory cannibal films like Eaten Alive! (1980) and Cannibal Ferox (1981), or poliziotteschi classics like Almost ...

“I told you not to go out tonight, didn’t I?” Poor Frank. He’s a broken and stammering psychological mess of a man, deeply troubled by his childhood abuse. As a child, his mother was a mean hooker who used to ...

For my money, director Jess Franco is the best and most prolific adapter of what I would call Sadeian cinema; he did borrow directly from the Marquis de Sade’s texts from time to time, but even when his loose plots ...

Bigfoot. Ancient astronauts! Noah’s Ark? You might think I’m referring to the programming schedule for the History Channel, and you wouldn’t be wrong depending on who you ask, but for anyone wondering why modern television is populated by what are ...

On Friday the 13th, in October of 1307, King Philip IV ordered the simultaneous mass arrest of dozens of Knights Templar. The order had been formed in the 1100s to defend pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. Later, ...

This is the first entry in Diabolique’s “In Conversation” column, where two or more writers informally—and often personally—discuss cinema, art, and current contentious issues.  Samm Deighan: Recently I was having a conversation with a friend and the subject of Cronenberg’s ...

Secretly Scary is a celebration of movies that were not marketed as horror films, but read as horror films and are as harrowing, terrifying and unsettling as the most confronting horror movies ever made.   “The love every parent fears” In ...