"Black Sunday" is not the best of Mario Bava's movies, but I include it here as a favorite and placeholder for all his films. I like this film in particular, because it serves as a nice "missing link" between the Universal horror films of the 30's and 40's and the Hammer and AIP horror films that would follow well into the seventies, but where those later films would be a little bit creaky in their execution, "Black Sunday" grips your attention from beginning to end and when it's all done, you feel you've watched a good piece of filmmaking ...
What may go down in history as the first film to be originally based on a shopping mall, this first sequel to "Night of the Living Dead" was inspired, nearly ten years after the original was released, by a tour of one of the first modern, fully-self-sustained shopping malls (Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania) ...
Is there a human being on the face of the planet who hasn't seen or at least heard of "The Shining"? It's curious, because it's not your standard "notorious" horror film, like "Night of the Living Dead" or "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre". It's the result of a master filmmaker finding something wholly unrelated to the horror in the source material (in Kubrick's case, writer's block and the pressure of needing to come up with a new project as the span between films grows) that strikes his very core. Kubrick delivers a horror film alright, but one without monsters and without gore ...
A third remake on this list, but, really, the granddaddy of all re-imaginings. The original 1958 film, a classic in it's own right, based on the George Langelaan short story about a scientist who creates a disintegrator-reintegrator device and is accidentally crossed with a housefly in the process, takes the result quite literally: a man with the head and arm of a fly (and a fly with the head and arm of a man). David Cronenberg's version, from a script by Charles Edward Pogue, looks at ...
Widely-known as "the film that ruined Tod Browning's career", 1932's "Freaks" was a bold experiment that had it's heart in the right place. The story revolves around a troop of deformed circus performers - or "freaks" - who are manipulated by two "normal" members of the troupe. Browning's intention was to portray the so-called monsters as human, while the two humans (the "normals") are the real monsters. For the circus performer roles, Browning chose to cast real people with these deformities and birth defects ...
It's true that at its heart, "Alien" is nothing more than a B-monster picture. At the time that the script eventually made its way to Ridley Scott, it had already been turned down by some pretty big name directors (Walter Hill, Peter Yates, Robert Aldrich) and the studio rather sheepishly handed it to him, expecting the same. Scott, however, saw what the other directors didn't see and from something that shamelessly copied from so many sources ...
Universal Monsters Thursdays continue with my second favorite classic creature. Released the same year as Todd Browning's "Dracula" starring Bela Lugosi, this James Whale film continued to prove to Hollywood that the supernatural could sell. To this day, there is still discussion and controversy over whether or not Lugosi was originally to play the role of the monster in the film ...
Like "Night of the Living Dead", the fact that it was made on a shoestring budget (with an Eclair NPR 16mm news camera) adds to what makes this film one of the best horror flicks ever made. When I first heard that Michael Bay was producing a remake of "Texas Chain Saw Massacre", I knew that this was one element that would definitely be lacking. When I was a kid, and first saw this film as one of the first home video titles released, I knew that it was a low budget film and knew that it had the reputation of being one of the scariest films ever made.
Not to be confused with the rumored David Fincher project about Elliot Ness hunting a serial killer. "Torso", also, more creatively known as "I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale" ("Bodies bear traces of carnal violence"), is a little known Italian gore movie that is notable, maybe not as a perfectly executed film as a whole (it's definitely not), but for a couple of really genius sequences which have gone on to inspire other films and filmmakers.
"Night of the Living Dead" is a perfect example of how much can be done with very little. Made pretty much on a whim by Romero and his business partners (John Russo, Russell Streiner, Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman) at Latent Image in between corporate videos and commercials. The crew doubled-up on tasks and pitched in where they could. Hardman has said, since they couldn't afford to do a film where the characters went out and came across horror, "The best that we could do was ...
