For more (that’s more positive) about Scare Me, check out Rob & Carrie’s interview with writer-director-star Josh Ruben! It is inordinately easy to root for Scare Me (one of two films by that title with extremely similar loglines released in 2020; this is the one picked up by the streaming service Shudder as an exclusive). […]
The Silence is a film of negation. The first words spoken – the first of not very many, at that – are a declaration of ignorance and meaninglessness. A boy of ten or eleven, Johan (Jörgen Lindström) points to a sign written in an unfamiliar language, asking, “Vad betyder det?” (What does that mean?). Off-camera […]
It of course doesn’t describe every one of the studio’s 28 features, not even most of them, but I think there’s a fairly clear platonic ideal of an Amicus Productions film: a horror anthology, directed by Freddie Francis, with a script adapted from the work of author Robert Bloch, starring Peter Cushing. 1965’s The Skull, […]
In 1963, Ingmar Bergman was hip deep in an attempt to translate the theatrical devices of August Strindberg’s chamber plays into a cinematic idiom, with Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light already behind him, and The Silence right around the corner. In this middle of this unusually intense period of producing some of the […]
Amicus Productions was only around a short time, from 1962 to 1977, and it produced a fairly small number of features, 28 in total (one of which it sold off rather than distribute under its own name). Despite this, it has one of the strongest reputations in the history of British genre film production. Of […]
On paper, The Personal History of David Copperfield does everything right. The first feature film adaptation of Charles Dickens’s 1849-’50 novel in a half century is both clearly in love with the source material (just check out that title, which at least reminds us that most Dickens novels technically have much longer names than we […]
This October, I’ll be working my way through several of the films made by Amicus Productions, the second-most-beloved British horror film specialists of the 1960s and ’70s. First up, though, is the film that was an Amicus film before Amicus existed. The film industries of the United Kingdom and the United States have always been […]
When I think upon Ingmar Bergman’s cinema, and what most perfectly embodies it, why he is one of my very favorite filmmakers of all time and what are the irreducible components of his style, what I always think of first is Winter Light from 1963. Specifically, I think of the shot of Ingrid Thulin’s face. […]
