Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/25.

"One of the downsides of being a horror movie fan for over 40 years is that, by this point, I've pretty much seen it all," writes Richard Harland Smith. "I cut my teeth on the Universal monster movies, grew up with the Hammer horrors, schooled myself with the Corman Poes and paid my dues with the Italian gialli and the American slashers before branching out to the terrors of Asia, Indonesia and India.... And then life throws you a curveball. Such is the case with Dr Renault's Secret (1942)."

Also at Movie Morlocks, morlockjeff: "While it obviously borrows elements from Tod Browning's The Devil Doll (1936) and Dead of Night (1945) and even throws in a ratty-looking zombie for good measure, Curse of the Doll People also looks ahead to such scary-for-their-time chillers like the made-for-TV Trilogy of Terror (1975) with Karen Black being stalked by a Zuni warrior fetish doll. But the thing that places this South of the border horror in nightmare territory are the dolls themselves."

"Hammer has arisen from its cinematic crypt and after a 30-year absence once again stalks the land, intent on thrilling and terrifying a new generation." David McKittrick reports in the Independent.

Robert Horton opens a week-long Halloween series by telling the story behind the making of Tod Browning's Freaks - and it's reception over the years. "The blend of melodrama, MGM gloss, medical grotesquerie, and early-sound ambiance is uncanny. Even its technical flaws add to the effect: the tinny soundtrack, the sometimes creaky line readings..., the dream-like lapses in continuity: just before one tense sequence fades to black, there's a frightening, shivery shot of Randian lurking under a wagon, which logically must be from the climax but is inserted at this earlier moment. It's absolutely eerie, and it absolutely works. Take from Freaks what you will, but no movie has ever crept like this one.

"Usually at this time of the year, we launch our annual 'Great Pumpkins' Halloween-week series with something like a state-of-the-art assessment of the horror film," blogs Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling. "For 2008 we're hard-pressed to find anything worthwhile to say.... This year, for my first pumpkin, I rewatched an old chestnut, and I'll be damned if it didn't reveal nearly everything that's missing in horror today. John Landis's An American Werewolf in London has a reputation as a horror-comedy, a dubious category that would soon be replaced by the broader Ghostbusters template (chuckles more important than scares) and which now has been taken over by the cheap sub-Hot Shots drek in the Scary Movie franchise. Yet while Landis's film is certainly noticeably tongue-in-cheek, its occasional laughs are not intended to deflate or detract from the horror. Miraculously, the chuckles and the shocks stand side by side proudly."

"Italian horror did not begin and end with giallo, but it certainly put the genre on the map and influenced the direction of Italian horror (as well as, among others, Spanish and French horror) for decades." At the Parallax View, Sean Axmaker presents an annotated list: "Thirteen Landmarks of Italian Horror; or, There's Always Room for Giallo."

John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick "is best known today through the garish distortions of the Hollywood adaptation - a pity since it's one of Updike's most ambitious works, a brilliant counterstatement to his masterpiece, the Rabbit Angstrom cycle, our age's one great serial epic, with its intertwined themes of adultery, death, family strife and social discord." Sam Tanenhaus finds the sequel, The Widows of Eastwick, "predictably ingenious... At 76, he still wrings more from a sentence than almost anyone else. His sorcery is startlingly fresh, page upon page." More from Elaine Showalter, who notes in the Washington Post that throughout the history of American letters "literary witches have represented our culture's attraction to, and fear of, female sexuality, empowerment and creativity," and from Christopher Taylor in the Guardian.

Back in the New York Times:

• "It would be nice to be able to say that Saw V is a revolting, nerve-racking trip into the cesspool of the human imagination, since that seems to be the point of this undying horror franchise," writes Nathan Lee. "Sadly, the latest and least of the Saw films is just plain boring and even a little tame - albeit by the standards of a genre that helped bring the phrase 'torture porn' into the lexicon." More from Sam Adams (Los Angeles Times), Nathan Rabin (AV Club) and Nick Schager (Slant).

• "Heaven knows why reputable actors like Anne Hathaway, Patrick Wilson and Dianne Wiest attached themselves to Passengers, a supernatural thriller so mechanically inept and lacking in suspense that it doesn't even pass muster as lowbrow Halloween-ready entertainment," sighs Stephen Holden. More from Nick Schager (Slant).

• Throughout the nearly two centuries since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus appeared in 1818, men have pretty much dominated literary horror - until now. Terrence Rafferty surveys a new generation.

• Frank Decaro on The Munsters: Complete Series: "The discs reveal how hilarious - and how fragile an endeavor - the original series was."

• Again, Nathan Lee: "There's one thing the heroes of The Gay Bed & Breakfast of Terror share with their straight counterparts in similar tossed-off horror cheapies: They're so catty, obnoxious and generally unpleasant, you can't wait for them to start getting hacked to bits."

"Peter Straub's revelatory anthology Poe's Children is subtitled 'The New Horror,' a designation that raises a couple of questions: What exactly is the 'new horror'? What makes it different from, or better than, the old stuff?" Bill Sheehan in the Washington Post.

Patrick Ness reviews The Graveyard Book: "We are deep in Neil Gaiman territory here, and it's hard to think of a more delightful and scary place to spend 300 pages." Also in the Guardian, PD Smith, briefly, on Lars Svendsen's A Philosophy of Fear.

Steve Garden in the Lumière Reader on the Masters of Cinema release of Vampyr: "There are two commentaries on the MOC disc: one by film scholar/critic Tony Rayns, and the other by director Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth). Both are interesting: Rayns mostly discusses the formal aspects of the film, while Del Toro offers a personal reading of the metaphysical meaning of the work, attempting to get to the heart of Vampyr's compelling fascination."

"Corpse Mania isn't a remake of Bava's Blood and Black Lace, but Kwei Chih-Hung must have written some copious notes before executing his own screenplay," notes Peter Nellhaus.

"Matthew Crick's documentary Creature Feature: 50 Years of the Gill-Man chronicles the makings of the [Creature from the Black Lagoon] trilogy and its lasting effects on fanboys, among them Benicio Del Toro (who here supplies a celebrity testimonial," writes Martin Tsai in the Voice. "For the uninitiated, Creature Feature would better serve as a special feature on a DVD set."

"Great ghost or haunting movies come out at a far lower rate than slasher, vampire or zombie movies and half the time they're not even real." Jonathan Lapper explains.

Posted by dwhudson at October 25, 2008 9:30 AM