The first depictions of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts created by the film pioneer Georges Méliès in the late 1890s, the best known being Le Manoir du diable, which is sometimes credited as being the first horror film. Since the beginning of horror flicks, there has probably never been a more […]
Body Double
A young actor’s obsession with spying on a beautiful woman who lives nearby leads to a baffling series of events with drastic consequences. Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) is a struggling actor who has lost his role in a low budget Vampire B movie after his claustrophobia thwarts shooting. He discovers his girlfriend cheating on him, […]
The Howling
A graduate of Roger Corman’s school of low-budget ingenuity, director Joe Dante rose to the challenge of The Howling, an instant werewolf classic. Makeup wizard Rob Bottin created what was then the wildest onscreen transformation ever seen. With Gary Brandner’s novel The Howling as a starting point, Dante conceived a werewolf colony on the California […]
Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture
Movie audiences seem drawn, almost compelled, toward tales of the horrific and the repulsive. Partly because horror continues to evolve radically—every time the genre is deemed dead, it seems to come up with another twist—it has been one of the most often-dissected genres. Here, author Kendall Phillips selects ten of the most popular and influential […]