Author: Colin Fleming

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man

If you want to have some fun with your fellow horror film aficionados, ask them what they’d rate as the single most effective scene for mood and atmosphere in any of the Universal monster movies.

The Black Cat

Despite what’s tantamount to a subgenre of macabre offerings suggesting otherwise, Edgar Allan Poe isn’t an author whose work readily lends itself to the cinematic medium.

Lonesome Ghosts

Meet the right ghosts in your formative years—or help someone else to do the same in theirs—and a lifelong love of the stories and films in which they feature may be the result. Many children first came to know what fun a ghost can have after watching Disney’s 1937 short, Lonesome Ghosts.

The Invisible Man

The early monstrous mass of Universal bogeys put down roots in the pop-culture zeitgeist as deep as any to be found in the most ancient burial grounds.

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories have never lacked for adaptations, with The Hound of the Baskervilles—novel number three out of four featuring the famed detective and his Boswell—being among the most tempting to tackle.

White Zombie

Many horror fans most associate Bela Lugosi with his distinctive voice. We need only to think of myriad memorable lines from Dracula alone, delivered with an intonation that no one else could supply, and the relevant scene plays before our mind’s eye.

Dark August

What of the ephemeral horror film experience? That is, the movie we watch knowing we’ll likely only see it once, likely having encountered it by chance, but which is nonetheless memorable?

This One Summer

Certain horror films have a knack for making viewers ask themselves, “Okay, what are we doing here?” and in this regard, 1983’s Sleepaway Camp is a prime example of the sometimes-edifying effectiveness of the tonal shift, which may say more about our preconceptions than what a work is really doing—and building toward—all along.

The Lodger

Marie Belloc Lowndes’s 1913 novel The Lodger—an expansion of her short story of the same name—has been an enticing proposition for filmmakers, and well it should, given its delectable “what-if” premise: Jack the Ripper had to have lived somewhere, allowing that he was not unhoused, so what if he lived in the spare room you were renting out?