From Island of Lost Souls to Zombie Flesh Eaters – an examination of exiled Mad Doctors, Voodoo and Castaways of Terror Much of Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls (1932), a chilling adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The Island of ...
Read More »Eyes Like Burning Coals: Lugosi Beyond Dracula
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 ...
Read More »Like a Woman Rising from a Tomb: Dracula’s Daughter (1936) and the Fin de Siècle
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 ...
Read More »John Brahm’s Eerie Masterpiece: Hangover Square (1944)
Director John Brahm—one of Hollywood’s many German emigres driven to the United States by the onslaught of WWII and Nazi oppression—is one of the unsung talents of the early years of horror cinema. Perhaps because he directed for Fox, not ...
Read More »A Tribute to Basil Gogos: King of the Monster Kids
Something that has to be said and championed about the magic of late great artist Basil Gogos was his uncanny ability to both pay tribute to the makeup artists who designed and brought to life the cinematic monsters he painted ...
Read More »“For what use are all these melodramatic gestures?”: Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934)
Peter: Aren’t you hungry? Joan: No darling, are you? Peter: Of course not. Joan: Are you sure? Above is the first exchange of dialog in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934). A newlywed couple, Peter (David Manners) and Joan ...
Read More »Howling at Home: Monster Mash-Ups in House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945)
By the time House of Frankenstein opened in 1944, horror stars Lon Chaney Jr. and Boris Karloff were massive draw cards at the box office and actors to look out for – therefore it makes sense that by the time ...
Read More »Laughing, Screaming, Howling: Revisiting a Monster Kid’s Delight, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
Comedy and horror have forever gone hand in hand; the whole adage of laughing/screaming and the physical response paralleled and shared between being terribly frightened and in absolute hysterics is something that filmmakers throughout the years have been attracted ...
Read More »Gothic Madmen: John Brahm’s Forgotten Horror Trilogy
Like so many other European talents from the first part of the twentieth century, German director John Brahm was forced to flee his home country thanks to the rise of Nazism, and eventually found his way to the United States, ...
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