After The Seventh Victim‘s disappointing returns, Val Lewton and RKO clashed over their next project. Lewton wanted a comedy, provisionally titled The Amorous Ghost, as a change of pace; studio boss Sid Rogell, Lewton’s bete noir, insisted on a sequel to Cat People, which Lewton resisted. Then RKO suggested a Universal-style monster rally, They Creep By Night, reuniting …
Val Lewton’s third horror film, The Leopard Man (1943) initially seemed promising. Based on Cornell Woolrich’s novel Black Alibi, it had more pedigree than Lewton’s previous movies. He reunited his previous team: director Jacques Tourneur, writer Ardel Wray, even Dynamite, the black leopard from Cat People. Forced again to film on the RKO lot, he …
Val Lewton, Russian émigré turned horror master, was a reporter, pulp novelist and MGM publicity writer before moving into film. He spent the 1930s as David O. Selznick’s story editor, directing second unit work on A Tale of Two Cities (1935) and script doctoring Gone With the Wind (1939), warning Selznick it would be “the mistake of his …
The first in Roman Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” (preceding Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant), Repulsion is a landmark psychological horror film, whose influence can be seen from Fat Girl to Black Swan.
There are multiple reasons why Out of the Past is such an exemplary work in the world of noir, and part has to do with just how faithfully and inventively it adheres to the form.
The etymologic history of the giallo sub-genre is well-documented by now. Giallo, Italian for yellow, refers to the cheap mystery books that at least partially inspired a cross-section of gruesome murder films from the likes of Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci. Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much from 1963 is commonly referenced …
The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh Directed & Written by Rodrigo Gudiño Canada, 2012 There are, broadly speaking, two types of haunted house stories: those in which some more or less innocent stranger gets caught in the middle of some festering saga of ancient wrong, and those in which the ectoplasmic chickens of past …