I love a mystery.  I didn’t always.  My Mom was the mystery fan in our house, while I preferred the more visceral thrills of horror and science fiction; at the age of 10 or 11, I couldn’t fathom the point of a story in which people in suits and gowns gave one another the hag [...]

One of the things Hollywood really knew how to do, apart from making stars and making movies, was sell stuff.  The behind-the-scenes deal-making is worthy of a book of its own but for the purposes of this piddling blog post I’m talking about celebrities who loaned themselves out or whose images were used without their [...]

For this last installment of “First in Fear: Native Americans in Horror Films,” we turn to the subject of Helpful Indians – those shamans, scouts, sure-shots and spirit guides who help Anglos out of sticky wickets, both supernatural and otherwise.  I think we all know where to turn for the prototype of the Helpful Indian.  [...]

At some point in the early 1970s, post the founding of the American Indian Movement (AIM), post-BILLY JACK (1971), post-Wounded Knee ’73, post-Sacheen Littlefeather, Native Americans began to percolate into pop culture as totems of white guilt and to serve as conduits between a modernized, secularized present and what was perceived to be a more [...]

Last week I kicked off my multi-part series of essays on Native Americans in Horror Films with a discussion of the key First Nation Fright Flick gimmick of sacred burial grounds and the violation of, leading to dire consequences and untimely, Indian-themed deaths.  Today we segue from karmic comeuppance to Vengeful Indians of the Mostly [...]

If you grew up anywhere in the continental United States, you were raised in Indian territory.  Or land that was once Indian territory.  That fact wasn’t lost on me as I came of age in New England, where every third town was named for some long forgotten Native American brave or tribe, from Moosup to [...]

Watching Edward L. Cahn’s DESTINATION MURDER (RKO, 1950) recently, I was delighted – delighted in the way only a movie lover can be delighted – to see that the scrappy little B-noir’s opening scene was filmed at the long-defunct Marcal Theater, on Hollywood Boulevard.  The movie itself isn’t half bad, chock-a-block with creeps (Albert Dekker, [...]

Looking through my old film books from the 70s, it never fails to amaze me how many of those gnarly, mysterioso Spanish horror films I’ve seen in the intervening years.  I can’t believe I actually have in my possession flawless DVD transfers of such you’ve-never-seen titles as Eloy de la Iglesia’s LA SEMANA DEL ASESINO [...]

As I have noted recently, it seems these days that no week goes by without the appearance of some film that I thought I’d never see turning up on DVD.  Home video insiders have worried over the past few years that the medium of digital versatile discs has gone about as fer as it kin [...]