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)
Horror films were slow on the upkeep when it came to electronic music. Though elements of it were being used in other genres before 1968, electronic music didn’t really reach horror until the late sixties. The exact date of the first use of electronic score has been attributed to various films; largely Cold War fare such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Invasion of the … Continue reading The Horror Score Rebellion Part 2 – Night Of The Living Dead And The Electronic Score.
Tarkovsky after The Soviet Union “The Artist exists because the world is not perfect” – Tarkovsky in interview. When considering what makes a cinema officially national, what elements are really being held to account? No matter what is said, there will always be anomalous results that mean certain visuals, techniques and scores don’t actually define a national cinema but are simply used by it. Perhaps … Continue reading How Historical And Cultural Dynamics Shaped The Work of Andrei Tarkovsky (Part 2-Nostalghia).
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
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)
When looking into the history of film titles, there surely cannot be one more controversial and loaded than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? It’s a vicious, daring piece of marketing that implies what’s in store is something altogether grim and deeply disturbing as well as graphically violent. Thankfully the film in question is far more intelligent than that and is most definitely not to be confused with the recent … Continue reading The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – Tobe Hooper (1974)
Celluloid Wicker Man 