The Most Dangerous Game
A formative horror-watching experience from the horror medium’s own formative years, 1932’s The Most Dangerous Game is the kind of film that resonates in a viewer’s mind like some acquired primal memory.
A Christmas Dream
Christmas: a dream for some, a nightmare for others, and conceivably either for each of us, depending upon the time in life.
The Wizard of Oz
On Christmas 1950, Judy Garland reprised her role as Dorothy for a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast of The Wizard of Oz. One wonders what this must have been like for her.
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
Have you ever noticed how frightening the absurd can be? The less something holds with what we regard as the operating standards of reality, the more it troubles us, especially when the situation is personally, rather than communally, affecting.
Christmas Evil
The aim of slashers—at least in their early days—was to shock. They weaponized their newness and how they broke with films of the past, in which the gory details of riven bodies happened offstage after a fashion, even when those injuries were sustained in front of our very eyes.
Beware, My Lovely
Christmas in the company of people we call friends and/or those with whom we share a last name can often feel like Christmas in isolation or alongside strangers.
You Can Pay Me Back Later
Thanksgiving horror films/turkeys to rise or fall face first to the occasion of your holiday.
Them!
You’d be challenged to find a more gripping, immersive first 15 minutes from a horror movie than what we get with Them! (1954).
The Tell-Tale Heart
Quality, mid-century animated horror can be a bit like a top-grade Sun Ra album or an Abstract Expressionist sculpture. That is, you don’t know when it might be from, and find it both surprising and sensical when you’re apprised of the date. Edgar Allan Poe was an artist who believed in the short form.
The Return of the Vampire
Had you watched Bela Lugosi in Universal’s 1931 Dracula and then been apprised by a clued-in demon-cum-publicist of the underworld that the actor lived for the chance to reprise his most famous role, you wouldn’t exactly be surprised.