It cannot be pointed out too many times that many of the things we think of as the peculiar sins of contemporary cinema are in some ways as old as the medium itself. This is never clearer – and never more important to reiterate, since this is perhaps the most peculiar sin of them all […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: Marvel’s Ant-Man shows us the fun side of being so small that you have to look up to an […]

The first two-and-a-half decades of feature-length American horror cinema can be crudely divided into two flavors: the movies made by Universal Pictures, and everything else. It was Universal who, in the 1920s, cracked the code of making literary adaptations that were longer on spooky atmosphere than prestige; it was Universal who finally pulled the trigger […]

Watching 1935’s Werewolf of London 80 years later is taking a peek into a history that never was. The first feature-length werewolf movie in English (and probably the first in all of sound cinema, though it does well to be a bit cagey with absolute pronouncements on the history of genre films) was one of […]

There’s a particular subgenre of movies that’s really popular, and relied on so heavily that just a few years after it broke out, the Hollywood studios have almost driven it into the ground. Hoping to freshen things up, one of the savviest producers around decides to offer a job to one of the most impressive […]

The 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera is two things. One of these is the best of the small population of pure horror films made in the United States during the silent era. The other is a thorny mess to talk about, so we need to have some history. The short version of […]

There was not ever going to be a good reason to tell the secret tragic backstory of how Count Dracula, one of English culture’s all-time best unrelentingly wicked bad guys, was actually motivated by love of his family and country. Let’s be totally clear about that part. Secret tragic backstories for the Wicked Witch of […]

Edgar Allan Poe’s seminal 1841 detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is a locked room mystery in which hobbyist detective C. August Dupin realises that an enraged orangutan jumped into an open window and, in a frenzy, slaughtered the women it found there. The first sound feature to adapt a Poe work, 1932’s […]

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy has the personally unfortunate distinction of being the first movie starring that celebrated comedy duo that I ever saw, and the direct reason that it was many, many years until I saw a second: when I finally caught one half by accident, well into my 20s, the discovery that […]

A mere four years after the adventures of Kharis the mummy (played here, for the last time, by the resentful and alcoholic Lon Chaney, Jr.) began with The Mummy’s Hand in 1940, they slammed to an end with The Mummy’s Curse, the last Universal mummy picture that was actually aiming to be horror: they’d trot […]

Without exception, every single Universal monster franchise hit a point where it was uncomfortably obvious that the people making them had entirely stopped caring. For the films starring Kharis the mummy, that point was The Mummy’s Ghost, the first of two mummy films from 1944, and that fact alone tells us of the estimable “crank […]

If your stereotypical notion of a mummy movie is an undead corpse in moldy bandages scraping its feet along as it stalks terrified victims who really only need to walk at a brisk pace to keep well ahead of a monster that they could destroy with a matchbook, you should know that not all mummy […]