Joseph Chang In 1951, when Bela Lugosi reprised his iconic role on stage as Count Dracula, which had frightened worldwide audiences just two decades earlier, he was sadly met with giggles from theater-goers everywhere the play toured. To the then-aging Lugosi’s disappointment, the audience was more amused than afraid (Gatiss 54:38-56:35). It was the atomic […]
Josh Grant-Young 1761 – London. A woman is dragged into the infamous Bedlam asylum, a dark and dreary place where the (purportedly) insane of London are committed. Her madness, confirmed by a court prior to her being committed, is but a pretense to silence her forever. Within the cramped space of the asylum, where many […]
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 […]