Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 10/11.

"What does it feel like to drown? If you're decapitated, how long do you remain conscious?" asks David Pescovitz at Boing Boing. "New Scientist has a fascinating feature on how it feels to die from a variety of causes."

But back to movies. "The horror genre is, by its very nature, cannibalistic," writes David Carter at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Umberto Lenzi has repeatedly denied the connection between his Cannibal Ferox and Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, but the two films essentially pose the same conclusions, albeit using vastly different methods. Cannibal Holocaust blurred the lines between an art film and a horror film; Cannibal Ferox never positions itself as anything but a pure horror film, and a considerably effective one at that."

Phil Morehart's latest clip at Facets Features comes from The Old Dark House: "The film is [James] Whale at his best: the perfect combination of spooky details, fluid camerawork and a wry, dark gallows humor. And what a cast - Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart, Raymond Massey and the great Ernest Thesiger."

In the 1931 version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Rouben Mamoulian "successfully takes advantage of the (waning) laxity of the Hays Code to perform a kind of social psychoanalysis, bringing [Robert Louis] Stevenson's implicit conflation of convention with repression - and marriage with sexual satisfaction - to the surface," writes Billy Stevenson.

"Resident Evil purports to reinvent its classic horror roots as a modern rock-out action scenario, made by and for fans of the popular PS2 videogame line in which the dead are brought back to life by the deadly T-virus agent," writes Rob Humanick. "Consider this long-time fan dissatisfied, then."

Posted by dwhudson at October 11, 2007 3:14 PM