Scary Stories is much more than a movie about naive but adventurous teenagers exploring a haunted house In their hometown. It re-creates an intense atmosphere of place and time; the…
After Night of the Living Dead began to make big money, many low-budget filmmakers tried a similar approach. Small cast, few special effects or none, and a tight story. …
A made–for-TV movie on a top-100 horror list. Hard to believe, for sure. The Night Stalker is peculiar in some other ways too. At times it is more of a…
The Revenge of Frankenstein was the second of seven movies that Hammer Studios produced featuring Baron Frankenstein and his many creations. Six of them starred the remarkable Peter…
CAUTION–SPOILERS NEAR END Like so many movies I wrote about, Wendigo sets its sights high. It refuses to follow commercial formulas. Not that it succeeds at everything it tries…
Witchfinder General comes close to being the ultimate revenge fantasy. It is unique in other ways too. Vincent Price gives possibly his all-time best performance, working with a director…
In 1984, a brilliant theater director and playwright made the jump from the stage into movies. Stuart Gordon was virtually an unknown outside Chicago. Out of all his choices,…
Note—From Beyond was released in 1986 with an R rating. Years later, the deleted material was rediscovered and edited back, into the unrated DVD. This is the version the…
Even before the credits finish, you can tell Night of the Hunter won’t be your average western…or thriller…or anything else. You hear music—straight out of the most savage…
The years spanning the mid 60’s and the early 70’s saw some major changes in American movies, and in movies worldwide. Barriers on nudity (The Pawnbroker, Women in Love)…
For most of us, The Blair Witch Project (1999) was the first horror story we experienced that tried to disguise itself as real-life events. (A few novels had actually done…
Some of us are fortunate enough to experience a novel, poem, painting…or movie, that strikes us as perfectly planned, all the way from the outline in the artist’s soul. Maybe…
The Seventh Victim is a unique movie experience– in many, many ways. Some may find it highly scary…others may find it more creepy than scary. Others…find it neither. Like…
Audition begins as a quiet, thoughtful character study. You may be reminded of Ordinary People, the under-rated late-60’s drama Rachel, Rachel, even a serious variation on Sleepless in Seattle. …
I don’t write about many big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. But writing about Aliens feels like a privilege—like describing someone you feel honored to know. It has all of this: solid…