Tag Archives: film

On November 18, 1990 – one day after my tenth birthday – the miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s It aired on ABC. It concluded two nights later, and left a newly-minted 10-year-old terrified even further of both spiders and clowns ...

It is a not-so-little-known fact that exploitation cinema is enamored with Nazis. Why? Perhaps because they represent one of the greatest evils ever known to man. Maybe it is because they represent a real form of darkness, darkness that even the ...

Don Coscarelli is back. The director of Phantasm makes a bizarre and welcome return to skewed storytelling along the lines of such exploits as Naked Lunch, Buckaroo Banzai, and Brazil, stirring up a potent, psychotropic blend of horror, fantasy, and ...

At the end of the 1960s, the world’s reigning horror queen, Barbara Steele, announced her retirement from the screen. Thankfully, the green-eyed, raven-haired beauty returned to the horror genre in the mid-70s, but before she did, she spoke at length to ...

On this episode, which complements Diabolique magazine’s special Bram Stoker centenary issue, I’m very pleased to have as my guest director John Badham, the man responsible for Universal Pictures’ 1979 adaptation of Dracula, starring Frank Langella and Sir Laurence Olivier. Hard to believe ...

The first time I ever saw Black Sunday, the American version of the Italian horror classic La Maschera del Demonio, was at a drive-in with (I believe) Konga as a double feature. The year 1960 was a particularly banner year for genre films, when ...

The night Vincent Price died, television stations across the country ran the Pendulum scene from Pit and the Pendulum as a collective memory his audience would instantly recognize as the screen persona of Vincent Price. This is as it should ...

David L Rattigan dissects a sequence from And Soon the Darkness, the 1970 thriller directed by Robert Fuest, who died on March 21, 2012 Two holidaying English nurses are cycling through the French countryside, via long stretches of road, with ...

Bradley Parker’s Chernobyl Diaries is like an old amusement park ride. You’ve been on that ride before, and you know what to expect, but it’s a thrill while it lasts. And so goes Diaries, with that familiar formula of taking a small group ...

In movies, the laws of physics appear to apply most of the time. As viewers we’ve learned to accept that. However, in the on-screen world of director Joseph Kahn, the laws are meant to be challenged, agressively. How else can ...