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Damien Thomas, the British actor perhaps best known for his turn as the vampire Count Karnstein opposite Peter Cushing in the Hammer Films horror classic Twins of Evil, has died. He was 83.

Thomas died April 18 at Salisbury Hospice in Wilshire England, and had been battling progressive supranuclear palsy, daughter Phoebe Court-Thomas told The Hollywood Reporter.

In high-profile miniseries, Thomas played the Portuguese priest Father Alvito alongside Richard Chamberlain in 1980’s Shogun at NBC, and he was the unsettling Richard Mason in a 1983 BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre, starring Zelah Clarke and Timothy Dalton.

Thomas also portrayed a ruthless first mate in Roman Polanski’s Pirates (1986), starring Walter Matthau. When the film bombed at the box office, he blamed himself and said the experience shattered his confidence, he recalled in 2013.

However, when he saw the movie again years later, he “realized it wasn’t me at all. Actually, I’m not so awful in it.

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After the success of her paired portrait-of-the-artist features The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II, British writer-director Joanna Hogg takes a stylistic swerve with The Eternal Daughter, a melancholy winter’s tale with horror elements.

It’s effectively a third chapter in the Souvenir story, one that jumps into the present day after the 1980s setting of Part II. This time, Tilda Swinton takes over the role of Hogg’s fictional avatar Julie (originally played by Swinton’s daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne) and also reprises the role of Julie’s contained, genteel mother Rosalind, affording the actor a chance to indulge her enthusiasm for complex hair and make-up disguises. The two women travel to a remote hotel in Wales for a sentimental journey, one that stirs up both happy and unhappy memories. In the end, it plays a little too often like an...

In the latest installment of his ongoing interview series, host Stuart Wright talks with 606 Distribution co-founder Pat Kelman about his 5 Great British Horror Films, which include:

Eve Vault of Horror (1973) Frankenstein & the Monster From Hell (1974) The Omen (1976) The House that Bled to Death

606 Distribution acquired two new films at Cannes 2019. Silver Bear-winner System Crasher (Systemsprenger), and French music drama Le CHoc Du Futur (UK Title Tbc)

System Crasher joins 606’s roster of striking female-centred films, with a Triple-f rating of writer and director (Nora Fingscheidt), and an electrifying performance by 11 year old Helena Zengel. Le Choc Du Futur is directed by French music veteran Marc Collin of the band Nouvelle Vague, and describes itself as “an ode to the women in France in the 1980s who helped develop electronic music.” It stars Alma Jodorovsky and Clara Luciani.

The UK’s longest-running genre event, the Festival of Fantastic Films, has added director Peter Sasdy to the guest lineup of its 2009 edition, running Friday-Sunday, October 16-18 in Manchester, England. Best known for his work with Hammer Films, Sasdy’s association with the iconic company stretches all the way from the 1969 TV anthology Journey To The Unknown to the company’s 1986 swansong, Hammer House Of Mystery And Suspense, also encompassing the features Taste The Blood Of Dracula, Countess Dracula and Hands Of The Ripper.

Other Hammer veterans speaking and socializing at the weekend-long event include Twins Of Evil director John Hough and actors John Carson (from Plague Of The Zombies) and Scars Of Dracula’s Jenny Hanley. But there’s more to the British genre scene than Hammer; among the other actors attending are Burke And Hare’s Derren Nesbitt, The Ghoul (and Zombie) star Ian McCulloch and Evil Aliens’ Emily Booth.