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Mathilda (1820) – The Abyss of Guilt and the Horror of the Self If Frankenstein was Mary Shelley’s grand, thunderous statement on the dangers of scientific ambition, then Mathilda is her whispered, devastating confession about the failures of the human heart. Written just two years after the publication of her magnum opus, this 1820 novella…
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The screen transitions from darkness to a nighttime suburban street. A little girl named Jessie sings ‘Incy Wincy Spider’, one foot in the flooded gutter, the other on the pavement before she is called in by her mother. Moments later, a Hitchcockian violin stab screeches in time to an adult pair of boots splashing violently…
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Over the next thirteen weeks, the Friday the 13th franchise will be ripped apart, dissected and, maybe, put back together again by nanites (depending on what century we are in). This is a series of films that has taken the audience on a hell of a ride from the low-fi beginnings at Crystal Lake before…
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I love ranking franchises! Even bad franchises. And I think that’s what shocked me the most after my recent watch of the entire Alien franchise: it’s not particularly good. Whereas many of the classic horror franchises I’ve ranked to this point (Halloween, Friday the 13th, Child’s Play) tend to have a roller coaster like experience…
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I’m not crazy, okay? Just… don’t forget that as we go on here. I mean, I’m nuts for Jason Movies, but that’s allowable, right? They are good-to-great movies! Well… okay-to-great. All right, they are sucky-to-great. I know, I know. Jason Goes To Hell still exists. More on that one later, though, because it’s about to…
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Frankenstein: The Spark of Being and the Birth of Modern Dread For too long, the story of Frankenstein has been trapped in the realm of bad costumes, green-painted foreheads, and B-movie screams, but that is an injustice that entirely misses the dark, vital truth: Mary Shelley didn’t just write a Gothic ghost story in 1818;…
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By 1963, Hammer’s cathedral of Gothic horror stood tall. Dracula had already bared its fangs to the world; Frankenstein had resurrected the flesh of gods; The Phantom of the Opera had mourned beauty’s decay beneath the stage. But now, with The Kiss of the Vampire, Hammer stepped into a new chamber — one where the…
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By 1962, Hammer’s Gothic world had already been soaked in blood and revelation. Dracula and Frankenstein had rewritten the language of British horror; The Curse of the Werewolf had turned that language into lamentation. And then came The Phantom of the Opera — not a storm of violence, but a sigh. Terence Fisher’s Phantom is the…
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By 1961, Hammer had built a cathedral of color and shadow. Their Gothic universe was now a mythology unto itself — stitched together from the corpses of old legends, electrified by desire, faith, and decay. Into that world of crucifixes and candlelight came The Curse of the Werewolf, Terence Fisher’s lone venture into lycanthropy. It…
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Having recently ranked the Mission: Impossible franchise after it [allegedly] wrapped up with The Final Reckoning, I got to thinking about what other franchises I could do a ranking of. In addition to Tom Cruise’s nearly 30 year action journey, I had previously done the Halloween, Friday The 13th, and Nightmare On Elm Street series…