Noticias

Horror films have existed since the dawn of the medium. Shortly after the invention of film, French director George Mellies created Le Manoir du Diable (The Haunted Castle), likely the world’s first horror flick. Though silent, The Haunted Casztle included comparably quaint scares of the 1890s. Since then, the genre has evolved considerably, and a movie won’t get many screams from a man in a bedsheet anymore. It needs something more, something substantial and shocking. By the dawn of the new millennia, one certainly couldn’t produce something akin to Mellies’ The Haunted Castle and expect a terrified audience. Moreover, these films faced a veritable haul of predecessors. By this point, filmmakers had thoroughly terrified audiences with all the traditional scares. Ghosts, ghouls, and demons were no longer novel concepts.

This was the conundrum facing Takashi Miike, and he answered with a film as controversial as it was groundbreaking.

In the modern movie world of “franchise” cinema, there’s one thing more difficult than making a sequel: making a sequel to a sequel. Most sequels tend to either try to double down on what made the original so great or, alternatively, attempt to take things in a more expansive new direction. The third film or “threequel” poses something of a unique quandary though. The concept of the “threequel” isn’t a new one, in fact it is almost as old as cinema itself. The very first “threequel” arguably arrived all the way back in 1907 with George Méliès‘ The Haunted Castle, the third in a trilogy of silent films that began with The Kingdom of the Fairies (1903).

However, modern filmmakers face an increasingly tricky task with threequels. Essentially, they either need to find a satisfactory way to wrap up the story or alternatively inject fresh blood into proceedings with a...

[This October is "Gialloween" on Daily Dead, as we celebrate the Halloween season by diving into the macabre mysteries, creepy kills, and eccentric characters found in some of our favorite giallo films! Keep checking back on Daily Dead this month for more retrospectives on classic, cult, and altogether unforgettable gialli, and visit our online hub to catch up on all of our Gialloween special features!]

One of my favorite professors in college would start and end every class session with the same sage words of wisdom, “You don’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.” This quote, resonating loudly in the absence of video stores, in the disposal of physical media by major retailers, with the undeniable influence of social media on creative output and in the shadow of a global pandemic, paints an entirely new perspective on the future of film and the paths that will be taken based on the past already paved.

The narrative theme we will describe as “looking back” is not a new concept for storytelling. Whether searching history for stories about famous figures, critical moments, or rare circumstances, returning to the past is grounds for interesting stories.

Looking back at the footprints set by genre film; from Méliès to Wiene, from Murnau to Browning,...

On 22 August, Eureka! Entertainment is releasing Early Murnau: Five Films, 1921-1925 on its Masters of Cinema label in the UK. As its name might suggest, the deluxe three-disc Blu-ray set includes five masterpieces from German director F.W. Murnau - Schloß Vogelöd, Phantom, Die Finanzen des Großherzogs (The Grand Duke’s Finances), Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) and Tartuffe - all arriving on Blu-ray in new high definition transfers for the very first time. As if that wasn’t reason enough to pick up this set, the supplements have now been revealed to further whet your appetite: New high-definition presentations of all five films, created by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung Uncompressed Pcm audio on all five scores Original German-language intertitles with newly translated optional English-language subtitles on...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

On 22 August, Eureka! Entertainment is releasing Early Murnau: Five Films, 1921-1925 on its Masters of Cinema label in the UK. As its name might suggest, the deluxe three-disc Blu-ray set includes five masterpieces from German director F.W. Murnau - Schloß Vogelöd, Phantom, Die Finanzen des Großherzogs (The Grand Duke’s Finances), Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) and Tartuffe - all arriving on Blu-ray in new high definition transfers for the very first time. As if that wasn’t reason enough to pick up this set, the supplements have now been revealed to further whet your appetite: New high-definition presentations of all five films, created by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung Uncompressed Pcm audio on all five scores Original German-language intertitles with newly translated optional English-language subtitles on...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Sunrise

Scenario by Carl Mayer, from an original theme by Hermann Sudermann

Directed by F.W. Murnau

USA, 1927

William Fox had seen Faust, Nosferatu, and The Last Laugh, and on the basis of these German masterworks, he brought their creator, F.W. Murnau, to Hollywood. What he got was a truly distinct cinematic vision, which was what he had in mind: something to set a few Fox features apart from the other studios’ output. What he probably didn’t expect was just how much of that “artsy” European touch he was going to get with Murnau on contract. Were American audiences going to go for this type of movie, with its symbolism, melodious structure, and overtly self-conscious style? At any rate, Murnau’s first picture at Fox was one to remember. Sunrise, from 1927, is one of the greatest of all films. It is a touching, beautiful, and artistically accomplished movie, one of the best ever made,...

Olga Tschechowa points the finger.

It's a listless country house gathering, broiling with intrigue under the surface: Bertie Wooster might appear, except we're in Germany. The hunt is rained off: nobody has anything to do except read the paper or gossip. And then Graf Oetsch arrives, suspected of murder, and they really have something to gossip about...

I first saw F.W. Murnau's Schloß Vogeloed (1921), under the misleading title The Haunted Castle, on a grey-market VHS bought on eBay. Grey was the word: the washed-out images were devoid of clarity, life and atmosphere, and the only thing that struck me asides from the pervasive theatricality was a double dream sequence which crashed into the plot for no real reason.

The first dream is scary, although the dreamer is the film's comedy relief character, "the anxious gentleman" played by Julius Falkenstein. As he slumbers, the window blows open and the diaphanous curtains blow in the gale.

Title a film The Haunted Castle and you are probably going to build up a certain number of expectations in an audience’s mind, namely there’s going to be a castle and it’s going to be haunted, but this early film by German master Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau is not the Gothic ghost story that you may expect. The original German title for the film is perhaps more appropriate, and it’s the one Masters of Cinema have opted to place more prominently on the DVD cover, translating to the less suggestive ‘Vogelöd Castle’.

Just a year after Schloß Vogelöd Murnau made what is almost certainly his most famous, if not best, film Nosferatu, a wonderful achievement and an iconic film from the silent era. Schloß Vogelöd is much more of a restrained and understated film than something like Nosferatu but it is nonetheless a very interesting film both...

What’s it about? One of the earliest surviving F.W. Murnau films (made in 1921), this is another sterling release from Eureka’s Masters of Cinema label. Schloss Vogelöd a.k.a The Haunted Castle isn’t really a haunted house movie. It’s memories and bad deeds which roam the corridors spooking the gathered characters. What we have here is [...]...