As iconic as Bela Lugosi’s performance is, Tod Browning’s Dracula is a rather drab affair, unimproved by Philip Glass’s post hoc score. Hammer Studios bloodier Draculas were an atmospheric improvement but they veered much too far from the source material. John Badham’s late-70s update falls somewhere in between.
After the successes of Halloween and Escape from New York, Director John Carpenter took a risk in remaking one of the most popular science-fiction films of the 50s. Though he used elements from Howard Hawks’ classic version, he drew most of his inspiration from John W. Campbell, Jr.’s novella Who Goes There? In the process, he created something that is as classic as the film that inspired it.
The granddaddy of all haunted house movies. Doctor John Markway, desirous of connecting the worlds of science and the supernatural, gathers his own little group of ghost hunters to spend the summer at Hill House in hopes of doing just that. During their stay they encounter the usual strange occurrences and things that go bump (or bang… or boom) in the night. It
Tom Holland was quite keen to do a vampire film that was contemporary, rather than a period piece. Up to that time, there hadn’t been a successful one and the genre had lapsed into parody. With Fright Night, he gave vampires just the right jolt of bloodlust needed to bring the undead back from the dead.
Honestly, all of Fantasia is an enormous delight. Consisting of eight animated segments set to an arrangement of classical music, it’s a beautiful experiment in the evolution of animation. The penultimate segment, Night on Bald Mountain, is the real delicacy here. Ovelooking a small village, an ominous mountain comes to life in the form of the demonic Chernabog, a winged personification of Satan.
William Castle, though not a great filmmaker by any means, was a consummate showman. Many of his films relied on some sort of gimmick to augment the movie experience. In the case of House on Haunted Hill, a trick called “Emergo” was used, nothing more than a skeleton floating above the audience during the climax. It was hardly needed. As cheesy and laughable as the climax is, this remains one of Castle’s better cinema scares.