Il demonio
Her name, brilliantly chosen, is Purificazione: Purification. Scapegoated, slut-shamed, and viciously abused, Purif is arrestingly beautiful and sexually appetizing, uneducated and intelligent. Tormented, in a perpetual fever, she prowls her unadorned village and its windswept surroundings, armed with a cursed item, searching for the object of her desire, a lover soon to wed a more dominatable, well-behaved woman.
Blue Beard
Blue Beard is a glutton. He likes food and female orifices, in that order, which doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a major thing for the latter in this early 1901 French-film dazzler by Georges Méliès.
The Mummy
Love—or what we call love—produces a lot of lip service, which isn’t a reference to kissing. We proclaim our dedication to another, though in reality—if our typical future behavior is any indication—we might as well be saying, “Fat chance.” Horror films often feature obsession that is billed by the obsessing individual as love in its purest form. This would-be brand of love resembles hate and is in reality about control and ego.
The Devil-Doll
Well, here we have quite the farrago: Tod Browning’s penultimate film, Lionel Barrymore in drag, enslavement, telekinesis, paralysis, skin-slicing, an explosion, Christmas, romance, and what’s tantamount to heartwarming horror.
Murders in the Rue Morgue
One of the most unheralded of Universal’s 1930s horror films, though perhaps the purest example of the form during that era, Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) comes off as early-Hollywood torture porn by way of German Expressionism.
Island of Lost Souls
It begins with an immense, creaking ship emerging from a silver fog and closes with an island on fire, the myriad beast-men who inhabit it exacting orgiastic revenge on their self-proclaimed creator.
Dr. Renault’s Secret
An American doctor arrives in a French village. He’s come to wed the niece of renowned local scientist Dr. Renault, but a storm forces him to delay the final leg of his journey and spend the night at an inn.
I Walked with a Zombie
A nurse leads a catatonic through an expanse of moonlit cane. They pass displays of sacrificed animals before encountering the towering, shirtless, dead-eyed Black man who grants them entry to a private outdoor religious ceremony…
The Uninvited
One of the most beloved horror movies of the 1940s that didn’t have the name Val Lewton attached to it, Paramount’s The Uninvited is a classy, atmospheric chiller that remains transgressive to this day.