Tag: classic horror

Film

The Masque of the Red Death, Roger Corman (Part 3) – The Freudian Dream.

Part 1. Part 2. The Freudian Dream Corman’s Poe films have become famous for their dream sequences.  The source literature revels in the possibilities of nightmares taking over the psyche so they seem an apt distraction for a medium that already adores the possibilities of dreams.  The Masque of the Red Death perhaps contains Corman’s most effective and disturbing sequence; one of the few to … Continue reading The Masque of the Red Death, Roger Corman (Part 3) – The Freudian Dream.

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Film

The Old Dark House (1932) – Symbolism, Class and Taboo (James Whale).

Contains spoilers. Hindsight can be a terrible burden to approach an older film with; lagging hard on the back of the viewer whose inability to contextualise what they’re seeing disengages their perception.  When watching James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932), it could be tempting to accuse the film of being full to the brim with stock horror clichés.  Yet Whale’s film is special and … Continue reading The Old Dark House (1932) – Symbolism, Class and Taboo (James Whale).

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Film, Film Music and Sound

The Horror Score Rebellion – Part 3 (Rosemary’s Baby And Popular Music In Horror)

Though 1968 may best be remembered for Romero’s zombies, another film released that same year had a similar impact to the way horror films in the subsequent decade were scored. Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Polish émigré Roman Polanski, has a legacy of imitators that developed from its scoring techniques. Polanski’s tale of the occult in a Manhattan apartment block primarily employs a classical score but large … Continue reading The Horror Score Rebellion – Part 3 (Rosemary’s Baby And Popular Music In Horror)

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Film, Folk Horror, Landscape, Television

A Brief History of Occult and Folk Horror

Article originally published in New Empress Magazine. Being old and feeling almost excavated from some grainy piece of earth, silent horror has the unnerving sense of being a genuine piece of documentation. No doubt unaware of it at the time, Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages (1922) is a film that so embodies this accidental aspect that viewing it recalls the feeling of Ash’s … Continue reading A Brief History of Occult and Folk Horror

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Film, Folk Horror

Night Of The Eagle – Sidney Hayers (1962)

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)

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Film

X The Unknown – Leslie Norman (1956)

Following on from Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment, the company continued their desire for rating incorporated titles with 1956’s X The Unknown. It may perhaps hold the most unimaginative of Hammer’s titles but the film itself has some surprisingly good moments. The story follows an extremely similar route to its predecessor but certain tweaks allow more paranoia to build specifically around the radiation that clearly obsessed … Continue reading X The Unknown – Leslie Norman (1956)

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Film, Folk Horror

The Quatermass Xperiment – Val Guest (1955)

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)

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Film, Film Music and Sound

The Horror Film Score Rebellion Part 1 – Classic Horror

INTRODUCTION 1968 was the year that horror cinema sought to change the way in which it scored its films and began to develop alternatives to the increasingly cliched sounds that had become a staple of the genre since the silent era. David Raskin, who had scored the first two Basil Rathbone-starring Sherlock Holmes films in the early thirties, as well as a number of film … Continue reading The Horror Film Score Rebellion Part 1 – Classic Horror

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