Richard Harland Smith
My grandmother Julia played piano in the Beckley, West Virginia silent movie house where my father Dick grew up watching the exploits of cowboy heroes Tom Mix, Buck Jones and The Three Mesquiteers. Raised in New England, I was a frequent attendee of the Danielson Cinema, built in 1900 as a playhouse and formerly called the Orpheum Theater. Due to my Dad's status as principal of our mill town's only high school, I was given a literal free pass to the movies and saw each new hit multiple times during its week-long run. Emancipated in my thinking and catholic in my tastes even by the age of 8, I would march the half mile to the Danielson Cinema to see such varied fare as DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE, AIRPORT, THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES' SMARTER BROTHER, RYAN'S DAUGHTER and THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE, initiating a cinematic education whose first term ended when the Danielson Cinema was destroyed by fire in 1978.

After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre in New Haven, I moved to New York City to be an actor but switched gears to become an Off-Off Broadway playwright. My one act plays and full lengths have been performed at such varied Manhattan venues as The Grove Street Theatre, 29th Street Rep, Synchronicity Space, The Theatre-Studio, the Pulse Theatre, the Sanford Meisner Theatre, Raw Space and H.E.R.E. Performing Arts Center. In 2004, my wife and I relocated to Hollywood, where I currently write box copy, liner notes, talent bios and promotional material for several DVD companies and review DVDs for the Turner Classic Movies website. I am the author of several horror screenplays, am the former Euro-Cult film discussion moderator of the Mobius Home Video Forum and I have been a staff writer for Video Watchdog magazine since 1999. I'm a contributor to The Wallflower Press critical guides Contemporary North American Directors and Contemporary British and Irish Directors and to the upcoming Vampiros and Monstruos: The Mexican Horror Film of the 20th Century and The Book of Lists: Horror.
Posts by Richard Harland Smith

Give me a horror movie in which a woman climbs behind the wheel of a big American car and hits the road to meet her doom and I’m a happy hitcher.

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RHS: Let’s pretend the HorrorDads have the run of a disused movie theater and permission to run a Halloween dusk to dawn horrorthon. We will all contribute a movie to the line-up but before we begin, let’s talk about the kinds of horror movies each of us think is right for this time of year. [...]

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Paul Gaita returns for the second and final part of his pre-Halloween Must-See Round-Up with the Kings of Cult! – RHS

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Horror Dad Paul Gaita has control of my page today with some Top 10 and Top 5 lists of Must-See horror films he has culled from the ranks of the kings of cult especially for the Hallowtide. Here is part one; part two follows later today – RHS

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I am, of course, paraphrasing Gloria Swanson from Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BLVD. (1950), which is not a horror movie and, at the same time, is. It is on the one hand a deliriously catty attack on Hollywood’s cult of personality and, on the other hand (which is just a bloody hook!) a rewriting of Bram [...]

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Every October 1st I turn into a big weirdo. Well… more so. 

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For years, I was unsure as to whether SH! THE OCTOPUS (1937) was a real movie. Long before the IMDb, when all I had to go by was the odd reference book and the occasional muttered remark, I convinced myself that this Warner Brothers-First National release was bogus, the celluloid equivalent of urban myth. Maybe [...]

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Often shortlisted as one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time, Larry Buchanan’s THE EYE CREATURES (1965)… nah, I’m just messing with you. Nobody says it’s one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time. Some would argue that it isn’t really science fiction; others might suggest it doesn’t deserve to be [...]

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The nifty indie outfit Synapse Films has released the grindhouse classic THE EXTERMINATOR (1980) in an extended (gorier) director’s cut as a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack. Though the care and professionalism that the Michigan-based outfit has brought to bear since it was founded in 1996 have always been conspicuous in their obscure and cult film acquisitions, [...]

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In honor of James Coburn’s birthday yesterday, and my own birthday tomorrow, I’m going to talk a bit about one of his more obscure projects – the Allied Artists thriller THE INTERNECINE PROJECT. I first heard about the film when it was included in John Willis’ Screen World 1975, as a foreign feature picked up [...]

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