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By 1959, Hammer had become an empire of beautiful decay. The blood of Frankenstein had dried to a glossy crimson, The Hound of the Baskervilles had wrapped dread in civility, and the studio was now looking inward — away from monsters, toward man’s most intimate horror: the fear of dying. The Man Who Could Cheat…
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There seems to be an overall critical appreciation for Black Phone 2, the sequel to the horror/thriller film The Black Phone. The first movie featured excellent performances all around, especially from actors Ethan Hawke and Mason Thames. It also starred Madeleine McGraw as Gwen Blake, the sister to Thames’ character, Finney. Hawke starred as “The…
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After The Revenge of Frankenstein, Hammer had nothing left to prove. The blood had already been spilled, the moral lines blurred beyond recognition. What came next wasn’t escalation — it was refinement. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) wasn’t about gore or monstrosity. It was about atmosphere. About dread that slithers rather than strikes. This…
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By the time The Revenge of Frankenstein hit screens in 1958, Hammer was no longer testing the waters — it was baptizing itself in blood. The Curse of Frankenstein had shattered the old order, turning the genteel Universal monsters into something vivid, violent, and human. The Abominable Snowman had cooled the chaos, testing the moral…
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Sometimes, instead of delivering you from reality, a film forces you deeper into your nightmare, pushing you, along with the characters, beyond the edge. Such was my experience with POSSESSION. I was in the throes of a divorce when I saw the film, and it left its mark on me. With its visceral anguish, hysteria,…
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After the blood and blasphemy of The Curse of Frankenstein, you might expect Hammer’s next foray into horror to keep that arterial flow going — another plunge into the lurid, the violent, the gothic. But instead, they went cold. The Abominable Snowman (1957), directed by Terence Fisher and written by Nigel Kneale, is the quiet,…
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When I watched the UK premiere of Yuriyan Retriever’s Mag Mag on Saturday, the director’s name was relatively new to me, although well known in Japan and more recently in the USA. I had read it was going to be a “weird and wild satire of J-Horror”, which I’ve been fond of since discovering Urotsukidōji, Ring and…
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If you were thinking that Saint Patrick’s Day is a unique backdrop for an alien invasion horror movie, you’d be right. Historically, the few horror movies that do center around the holiday usually have a “killer leprechaun” plot, which makes the body-swapping alien concept of Hulu’s “Crawlers” so unique. Set in the town of Emerald…
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We’ve already ventured into the coffin of Hammer’s Dracula — that blood-soaked fever dream that redefined Gothic horror and drenched British cinema in technicolour blasphemy. But before the Count ever bared his fangs, before Cushing and Lee carved their names into horror’s stone altar, there was another experiment — quieter perhaps, but no less revolutionary.…
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When we think of old Hollywood the silent film era of Charlie Chaplin and the birth of American cinema, we picture a glamorous world preserved in black and white celluloid. But beneath the surface of that glittering industry lay a seedy underbelly of greed, addiction, and violence. The 1922 murder of William Desmond Taylor stands…