Though it followed in the footsteps of the trailblazing The Curse of Frankenstein, this second film in Hammer Studios long-lived love affair with horror virtually invented traditional gothic atmosphere with its quiet, windswept countryside, cozy village inn and brooding, spooky castle.
One of the heralds of the science fiction-peppered horror films that peppered the 1950s. The inherent fear these films were exploiting was the paranoia of an outside influence on America by a sinister foreign entity—the same paranoid that would fuel the notorious Red Scare.
Beyond Universal’s big three in their monster legacy collection (Dracula, Frankenstein and The Wolf Man), Creature from the Black Lagoon was more of a summer adventure than an outright horror film.
That’s right, today’s entry is all about The Invisible Man. With the success of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, Universal Studios was looking for the next big screen horror villain to fill the theater seats with thrill seekers.
Director David Twohy manages to make an entire planet seem claustrophobic as a band of survivors from a crashed spacecraft discover they have arrived just in time for a full-blown blackout eclipse on a planet orbiting three suns. Though largely remembered as the launch of Vin Diesel’s leading-man career, Pitch Black is a smart science fiction horror film that has its protagonists forever on the run from the planet’s carnivorous, nocturnal monsters.
Hammer Studios didn’t always produce the best scripts for their classic horror series, but when it came to timeless icons Dracula and Frankenstein, they perfectly captured the spooky, haunting atmosphere. In this follow-up to their adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, the thunder claps, the wind howls, the townsfolk fret and the beautiful young sex-kitten is… well, young and sexy.
As clever as its predecessor, with an opening sequence every bit as horrifying. The self-aware references to sequels carry the film throughout and the scares are genuinely frightening and, in the case of the prologue, downright disturbing.
After gaining some notoriety with his controversial The Crying Game, director Neil Jordan was picked to film the first of Anne Rice’s popular novels featuring the vampire Lestat. After some casting controversy regarding Tom Cruise, Rice completely reversed her opposition to him after viewing the finished film.
By no means a spectacular horror movie but it is a nice little ghost story. Director James Wan, rather than relying on cheap gore and torture, as in the Saw movies that he launched, opts here for old fashioned mystery and suspense.
There are very few decent childrens’ programs for Halloween outside of the classic, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Having already broken ground with Chicken Run, director Nick Park and Aardman Entertainment cast their signature duo, Wallace and Gromit, in a wonderfully playful horror spoof in their first feature-length motion picture.