The Masque of the Red Death
Smart, sinister, colorful (back to this in a minute), nuanced, expansive, repellent, beckoning, dastardly, placating, and inspiring, Roger Corman’s 1964 The Masque of the Red Death isn’t only the apotheosis of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, but of mid-1960s horror as well.
The Pit and the Pendulum
Edgar Allan Poe wasn’t exactly a lover of plausibility. He may not have been a lover of anything, despite popular culture’s love of him, preferring to wander dark streets at ungodly hours and converse with ravens while dreaming up unique ways to die. Fanfare for the common dyspeptic man.
April Fool’s Day
Horror initiates are sometimes thrown into the deep end of the fright pool scarcely before they can keep themselves afloat, as with the child whose father says, “Sure, you can watch with me,” resulting in everyone being up past their bedtime as dad consoles a girl who saw A Nightmare on Elm Street before she ought to have.
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.