There’s nothing like a monster movie from your childhood to keep hold of your imagination LONG after you’ve grown up — waaay up!  Though it isn’t a horror movie per se – not a mummy or a ghost in sight — Universal’s 1956 feature The Mole People has some creepy scaly reptilian underground monsters that give the Morlocks of The Time Machine a run for their money.  

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For the early settlers of this country, the New World offered freedom as well as the unknown…..     READ MORE

When you’re talking obscure horror movies you’ve got to know your audience.  Mention a movie that the general public might consider obscure – say John Hancock’s eerie LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971) or Dario Argento’s immortal SUSPIRIA (1977) – and you’re likely to elicit a groan from a true horror aficionado.  This isn’t snobbery per se but something closer kin to the 1,000 yard stare of combat-hardened veterans of war.  A horror lifer doesn’t just yank one of the ubiquitous Horror Films To Die For from the New Releases rack come Friday and think him or herself a horror maven because he’s watched some poor sap have his scrotum staplegunned to the seat of a chair; the true horrorite has put in the leg work and laid out the cash to buy the films they’re interested in – in every possible media known to man.  A lot of us have history with these so-called obscure horror movies… we’ve either seen them theatrically, in their original release (as I did the above two titles) or followed their trail from 16mm to gray market VHS to studio released tape to DVD upgrade (been there, bought that) to Blu-ray and beyond.  So we tend to be an exacting lot, especially when the O Word is being passed around, because for all our faults – and they are legion – we know from obscure.  READ MORE

EYE OF THE DEVIL (1966) opens with a minute long montage that reduces the entire film down to a series of disorientating images. It’s an impressive and beautifully edited beginning that you might expect to see at the start of an Ingmar Bergman film or in the middle of an Eisenstein picture and it sets the tone for the entire movie. This leisurely paced occult thriller wants to unsettle you as well as enchant you and it manages to do just that in its first few minutes. Most horror films will take their time building suspense or they’ll bludgeon you over the head with a few shocks to get your heart racing but EYE OF THE DEVIL takes an entirely different approach to terror that I deeply appreciate. It taps into your imagination immediately and before the title sequence even begins you know that EYE OF THE DEVIL is going to be a very different kind of horror film. And while it does make use of predictable elements found in classic gothic literature including a cursed family, a tormented heroine, an old dark house and flamboyant villains, these gothic trappings work to the film’s advantage. They give the viewer something familiar to cling to while the movie works its magic.

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“I detest the expression ‘horror film.’ I make films on the supernatural and I make them because I believe it.”  - Jacques Tourneur, Positif

The lead character in Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, psychiatrist Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), declares that he is “not a superstitious sucker.” He is a sardonic skeptic of mystical powers and things that go bump in the night. Unfortunately for him, Tourneur is a master of visualizing dread, at uncanny images that disturb the orderly corridors of consciousness. So Night of the Demon, my selection for this week of supernatural selections at Movie Morlocks (it airs on TCM on October 29th at 6PM), finds Holden’s self-righteousness crumble in the face of Tourneur’s terrifying control of the medium. As Raymond Bellour wrote, Holden’s “problem is trying not to believe in the devil, while ours is trying to accept belief in the cinema.”

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Boo!  Happy Halloween.

This week, cinephiles, horror buffs, and movie-lovers of all ages are descending on video stores, cranking up those Netflix queues, and scouring the Internet for suggestions for thrillers and chillers to watch in celebration of a holiday that is all about scares and dares—but in a fun way. The Movie Morlocks are here to help by blogging about offbeat, unusual, and obscure horror movies that have become personal favorites over the years. Perhaps more than with most genres, choosing a favorite horror film can be a very personal choice. One fan’s fright night is another’s sleep fest, because viewers tend to choose their favorites based on past memories, childhood fears, or other personal criteria. But, chances are you will find a movie or two that sparks your interest in our week-long blog-a-thon, which begins today and concludes on Halloween.

My choice for this week’s blog-a-thon is based on a childhood memory of a horror movie that truly scared me. Its haunting imagery lingered in my mind well into adulthood, affecting my behavior to this day, if only in a small way.  When I was little girl, I watched the horror movies on local Cleveland television stations presented by colorful TV hosts such as Ghoulardi, Houlihan & Big Chuck, and the Ghoul.  Or, I attended the Saturday afternoon creature features at the old Shea Theatre with my posse of friends, half watching the movie and half looking to see if the boys in our class were there, too.  Most of the movies were along the lines of the cheap-looking and hokey William Castle horror-fests. Sometimes, the TV hosts would trot out the old Universal classics, which were seriously creepy but did not scare me. One afternoon in the comfort of my living room, I turned the dial to Carnival of Souls—a movie totally unlike the other horror films I was accustomed to seeing.

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A nice 35mm print of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) is making the theatrical rounds thanks to Rialto Pictures. (Its next three screening engagements are in Boulder, Chicago, and Charlottesville.) Peeping Tom has interesting similarities to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Both were released the same year and feature seemingly shy and timid protagonists with murderous issues. More importantly, both films show venerated directors working at the peak of their powers and delivering an artistic tour-de-force on that core subject that weds an audience to any film: voyeurism. There are also some very important differences. Psycho was shot in black-and-white with a budget of under one million dollars and reaped profits that skyrocketed to a worldwide gross beyond the $50 million mark. Peeping Tom had a similar production budget, but was shot in Powell’s preferred color-saturated medium of Technicolor and was a financial disaster. Even worse, it dealt Powell’s career a crippling blow. Both have now long been studied and revered as masterpieces, so what went wrong for Peeping Tom? READ MORE

What if Jesus Christ was a donkey?         READ MORE

Once again I find myself in the lonely position of defending a personal pleasure which causes me no guilt at all, for all the contumely and horse laughs it may inspire in the rest of the world.  I speak, you should have deduced by now, of the Mummy.   Arguably the least loved member of the Universal Classic Monsters stable, the Mummy is dear to me and I’ve been thinking about him a lot this Halloween. READ MORE