Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 10/27.

"Fifty years ago, in a cramped studio on the banks of the Thames in Berkshire, the director Terence Fisher called the shots on the Hammer version of Dracula," writes Matthew Sweet in his history of the vampire on screen for the Guardian. "The original print has just been restored by the British Film Institute and is now ready to manifest itself again. Its color palette, which always looked crude and garish on television, is now a rich mix of autumnal browns and priestly purples. Only the fake blood - which gathers inside Christopher Lee's vampire contact lenses, spurts from staked hearts and spatters inexplicably from the air - reads as improperly, unnaturally bright, like Kathleen Byron's tarty lipstick in Black Narcissus."

"Why watch Terence Fisher's Dracula when you can watch Browning's, Murnau's, Herzog's, Maddin's, or even Coppola's instead?" asks Nathan Kosub at Reverse Shot. "For Lee, of course." Which is also why he's just watched The Devil Rides Out.

Back in the Guardian, Kate Mosse on Algernon Blackwood and his "readership hungry for his peculiar blend of nature and the supernatural."

"Although the social relevance of Let Sleeping Corpses Lie is likely to have had greater impact (and well-earned shock value) during its initial release, its intelligence in approximating the cultural conflicts of the day has since earned it the quality of timeless relevance, even if the film itself is relatively unknown compared to many of its 70s horror brethren," writes Rob Humanick.

Louis Bayard reviews Susan Tyler Hitchcock's "delightful" Frankenstein: A Cultural History: "No one, it seems, can quite agree on what this monster means, and for more than a century, no one could be sure what he looked like - until director James Whale tapped a minor, 40-something actor named Boris Karloff for the 1931 film adaptation."

Also in the Washington Post:

• Alan Lightman's Ghost "is by no means the scariest supernatural tale you could read on Halloween - King is still king - but it may be the smartest, and for that reason it ends up being a hell of a lot more unsettling than a horde of flesh-eating zombies," writes Ron Charles.

• In his collection 20th Century Ghosts, Joe Hill's "subject matter is steeped in the pop culture and tabloid detritus of the last 50 years: serial killers, abducted children, families living on the fault lines between divorce and poverty, horror movies and supernatural fiction," writes Elizabeth Hand. "Yet his real focus is an almost obsessively nuanced exploration of the nature of American manhood." More from Chris Bolton at Powell's.

• "By finding the horrors that exist in everyday life - always the most fertile source for fear - [Joyce Carol] Oates has crafted a suspenseful and satisfying collection," writes David J Montgomery. "Some of the stories in The Museum of Dr Moses hew more closely to mystery than to the macabre, but they are all a ghoulish delight."

• And April Austin reviews Susan Warren's Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking, and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever.

"Night of the Lepus is one of those movies in which a fabulous premise is realized in exactly the wrong way," writes Megan Weireter at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "A few major problems prevent us from having too much fun with this. For one, there's not one single instance of anyone saying, 'Giant killer rabbits? That's crazy talk!'"

I Married a Monster from Outer Space "is much better than you’d ever expect," writes Jeff at Movie Morlocks. "Imagine a feminist sci-fi version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers where all of the men in town are slowly replaced by these hideous imposters (they drop their 'human' disguises occasionally, especially during electrical storms)."

The Telegraph lists the "31 Scariest Moments in Film."

Posted by dwhudson at October 27, 2007 2:02 PM