If Alfred Hitchcock were to have made an occult horror film, it’s not beyond the realms of fantasy to believe that it would look something like Sidney Hayers’ 1962 film Night of the Eagle. Mixing up all sorts of clean cut imagery and marvellously juicy language, the film is one of the more Freudian in the horror canon and a far more subtle affair than … Continue reading Night Of The Eagle – Sidney Hayers (1962)
This review contains spoilers. The second release of the BBC Christmas ghost stories finds the real birth of it as a staple of the wintery Christmas nights of the 1970s and showcases the first two of five serials by Lawrence Gordon Clark. Though both of the stories are again M.R James adaptations the connecting factor here, apart from being chronologically accurate, is the inclusion in … Continue reading BBC Ghost Stories – The Stalls of Barchester/A Warning To The Curious (1971/1972)
This article contains spoilers. As a companion piece to John Gilling’s other big Hammer success The Plague of Zombies, 1966’s other Cornish based horror is an entirely different film even though shot relatively back to back. The Reptile focuses far more on the individual effects of a creature on the loose rather than a general view on the chaos, though obviously the villages where both … Continue reading The Reptile – John Gilling (1966)
The first of the two BFI releases due out on the 20th of August, this double bill of the classic BBC ghost story adaptations sets the tone for the future releases while also justifying the detail and time put into them. This release contains both adaptations of perhaps M.R. James’ most famous short tale and the release plays wonderfully on the natural juxtaposition of the two … Continue reading BBC Ghost Stories – Whistle And I’ll Come To You (1968 & 2010).
Still reeling from the massive success of Cold War infused science fiction, Hammer films clearly saw a gap in the market for a British flavoured take on the paranoid happenings around space travel and nuclear weapons. Adapting Nigel Kneale’s original BBC Quatermass series is an absolute masterstroke by Hammer producer Anthony Hinds and it can be argued that the success of this one film lead … Continue reading The Quatermass Xperiment – Val Guest (1955)
The sub-genre of Folk Horror is possibly the oddest mixture of ideals and ideas ever to join in the world of cinema. Trying to envision a genre taking best aspects from Folk tradition and mix it with the scary and disturbing edges of Horror can be difficult to imagine. However, amongst this small group of films, all of which are brilliant, sits one that transcends the … Continue reading The Wicker Man – Robin Hardy (1973)
Celluloid Wicker Man 