Alissa Burger James Whale’s 1931 Frankensteinis an iconic classic horror film, with Boris Karloff’s embodiment of the Creature a widely recognized popular culture figure. Whale’s Frankenstein is particularly significant for its position at the intersection of a wide range of textual engagements, both in its adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel (and that novel’s 1831 […]
Zack Kruse and Justin Wigard By the mid 1950s, director-producer Sam Katzman was settling in at Columbia Pictures; the one-time Poverty Row filmmaker had nearly thirty years in Hollywood and had established a reputation for himself by producing serials and genre pictures with meager budgets that had disproportionately high rates of return. Katzman’s approach to […]
Jessica Parant, Spinsters of Horror Westerners have a long history of going into conquered nations and extracting artifacts all in the name of science. Egypt has perhaps suffered the most at the hand of European imperialism in the name of colonization. The Mummy (1932) is a pre-code American horror film directed by Karl Freund about […]
Bloodwash is the latest video game to be published by Torture Star Video, a publishing label launched by Puppet Combo, the developer behind notable instances of playable nightmare fuel such as Babysitter Bloodbath (2013), Nun Massacre (2018), and Murder House (2020). Like these games, Bloodwash has a distinctive low-poly style reminiscent of video games from […]
Let me start this by saying that representations in film matter. The prelude to this statement was me watching the documentary series on Netflix about Woodstock ’99, Trainwreck (2022). One astute journalist pointed out that if you want to understand the collective ethos of the time, one need only look to the biggest box office […]
Growing up, horror was a carefully curated genre in my house. No fiction books and certainly no video games. Movies were only allowed if it was clearly a man in a monster suit. As I grew older I also grew more unsatisfied with this arrangement. Starting in middle school, I took greater and greater risks […]
The culture wars in US politics have become fixated on the rural-urban divide ever since rural voters in just the right mix of states elected Donald Trump to the Presidency in 2016, launching a thousand ethnographic think-pieces in big city news outlets about the worldview of small-town white folks who had long been overlooked by […]
Director Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film The Shape of Water was born from a desire to retell the story of The Creature from the Black Lagoon films from the 1950s. Del Toro had always wanted the Gill-man and the human woman he falls for to be romantically together in the end[1]. Getting to such a […]
Horror movie makers sometimes consider religion as a cheap add-on to a plot. Little do they realize that a carefully constructed religion can convey very real fear. The Wicker Tree (2011), spiritual successor to The Wicker Man (1973), demonstrates this distinction clearly. The Wicker Man, released the same year as The Exorcist, had something in common with that vastly […]