October 2012
23 posts
Arbogast on Film: 31 Screams →
Enjoy the 2012 installment of this great blog’s “31 Screams” series!
Free Horror Movies on Hulu (Courtesy Criterion... →
Happy Hallowe’en everyone! Enjoy these great picks on Hulu (for free) from the Criterion Collection.
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Polish horror posters
If you’ve never taken a look through some Polish movie posters, then get your Google Image Search going and type in that phrase. Wildly creative and often downright baffling, these are almost addictive to look at, especially being used to the bad-Photoshop, overused-template movie posters we get in this country.
Here are some great Polish posters for horror films:
Rosemary’s Baby
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Weird-O-Matic Wax Episode 5 →
The season’s last podcast is up. Give it a listen.
Horror at the fair
For a while now, I’ve been collecting pictures of old “ghost shows” and horror-themed fair attractions. This particular spiritualism-inspired exhibit developed into things like spookshows and the usually-disappointing clattering old fair rides (which I always still loved), but seem to not be around so much these days.
Here are some of my favorites from the heyday:
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Horrorgami: Haunted Houses from a Single Sheet of... →
Check out these incredible works of kirigami— in this case, recreations of famous haunted houses cut from a single sheet of paper.
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Supernatural (and Supercreepy) Spirit Photos of... →
NPR article on William Hope, a man who claimed he could photograph spirits.
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Paris, 1947
LIFE Magazine visits the Grand Guignol Theatre:
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Images:
Selections from Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, Phantom der nacht (1979)
It should be no surprise that kindly, loony Werner Herzog would decide to give remaking one of the landmark films of early cinema a whirl. It should also be no surprise that he nailed it, imbuing it with some dark (dark dark) humor and a Hoover-sucking sense of doom while maintaining the original’s style...
Spookshow fun
Spookshows were theatrical performances popular from the 1920s-early 1960s. In the heyday of spiritualism and the waning days of vaudeville, this form of entertainment found a unique popularity. It began as a kind of augmented seance routine, using lights and smoke and typical medium histrionics, and by the 60s, they were generally nothing more than people running around in monster costumes....
September 2012
1 post
October 2011
50 posts
Happy Hallowe’en, everybody!
Go to a haunted house! Pass out trick-or-treat candy!
Provide a soundtrack to your Hallowe’en with my podcast: M.T. Coffin’s Weird-O-Matic Wax
And tune into NeverEndingWonder Radio!
Aaand watch as many horror movies as you can!
Hulu has a bunch running for today only:
...
Images:
Selections from Jack Hill’s Spider Baby, or The Maddest Story Ever Told (1964)
Virginia plays “Spider”.
A young Sid Haig ogling/grabbing at an off-screen Carol Ohmart.
The incredible Jill Banner and Beverly Washburn.
Creighton Chaney winds down.
Hey, look. My banner.
The clever spider’s method.
Carol Ohmart impassioned.
The AV Club has a few nice Hallowe’en-time articles up.
24 Hours of Horror With Edgar Wright
-continuing their annual tradition of having a horror-literate artist design a 24-hour horror movie marathon. Edgar Wright’s is, in my opinion, by far the best (above Brendan Small and Eli Roth).
and The AV Club staff pick their favorite scary movie moments.
Chicago-based Sound Opinions have their annual Hallowe’en show. Listen to them cover the scariest tunes in rock history:
Stream it, or
download it.
Images:
Selections from Dario Argento’s Opera (1987)
The Three Stooges:
Behind the scenes with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff:
Oh-kay, Now it’s time for Disney Hallowe’en cartoons, yes. I’ll just get right to it:
Now, with this next one, I’m cheating. It’s not a Disney cartoon, but it was drawn by Ub Iwerks, who did ^The Skeleton Dance.
This sing-along video used to be on our VHS copy of Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Man, my brother and I wore out that...
Also!
The great under-appreciated under-appreciated film review site, Not Coming to a Theater Near You, has been killing it with awesome horror film reviews this month.
Also!
Check out their great stills series (<—-click a-here), featuring great grabs from great horror films, like this one from Nobuhiko Obayash’s 1977 bat-sh*t masterpiece, Hausu:
Seriously, if you’ve...
Here are two very neat things brought to my attention by two very neat people
1. Ian J. found this sweet animated short
Gawper from A Large Evil Corporation on Vimeo.
2. Jennifer H. (check out her amazing art here—-> Woman in a Shed) found this fun post about an important lesson that horror films can teach us: Don’t Be a Babysitter
Enjoy !
Here’s a great article in the New York Times that highlights the incredible(ly bizarre) career of filmmaker-provocateur José Mojica Marins, aka Coffin Joe. Mojica managed to nearly single-handedly create a horror film scene in Brazil. Combining shock value and an amazing DIY, hyper-macabre aesthetic, his films are engrossing, gruesome events; they are fascinating for their sheer audacity...
Images:
Selections from Paul Naschy’s Panic Beats (1983)
WatchHey now! Watch Stuart Gordon’s great, gruesome, and goofy Lovecraft-inspired 1986 film, From Beyond.
Posters from various Amicus Productions films, gathered from the incredible “horror, sci-fi, exploitation, cult, trash, [and] B-movie” poster archive, Wrong Side of the Art:
MSN’s 50 Scariest Movies of All Time
Click the image to check out the photo-article.
This is a pretty cool list; lots of great horror films on it. However, it’s typical of most “__ Scariest Movies of All Time” lists in that the choices, as far as scariness, seem pretty arbitrary. Some of the movies on this list are scary, some are kind of creepy-ish, and some are...
Don’t forget:
Get some Hallowe’en ambience going with M.T. Coffin’s Weird-O-Matic Wax!
Listen early!
Listen often!
Har-har, yet another Hallowe’en-time movie suggestion:
This one is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 kind-of-talkie/kind-of-silent Vampyr.
Made shortly after his brilliant but commercially-disappointing Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr follows a young man, Allan Grey,
who, while staying a country inn, is given an envelope by a mysterious stranger, marked “open upon my...
The Monster Channel
Click the image to visit:
“What is The Monster Channel?
The Monster Channel is the first 24/7 interactive horror movie channel, featuring classic horror movies and TV series, retro trailers and commercials, features hosted by the nation’s new generation of horror hosts and you!”
Internet Archive (archive.org) is an incredible online resource; it’s a free digital library of seriously mammoth proportions. And so they have a seriously mammoth collection of public domain horror movies that you can either download or stream.
So if you like horror movies and have a decent internet connection, here’s a new way to make your October even shorter:
Internet Archive:...
Boy Meets World Hallowe’en Special
Bruce Campbell hosts AMC’s 20 Scariest Movies.
