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This weekend sees the release of Danny Boyle’s much-anticipated return to the 28 Days Later franchise, 28 Years Later. Reviews and audience reactions to this one are all over the place, but the movie is doing well at the box office. Zombies tend to be good at the box office, although of course no one ever uses “the z-word” in these movies, with Boyle and his writer, Alex Garland, preferring the term “infected”.

Of course, zombie movies are nothing new. Next to vampires, they’re probably the most popular antagonist in horror, with it a strong genre ever since 1932’s White Zombie, which is generally regarded as the first real zombie film. At a certain point, the genre used to revolve around voodoo curses, such as in Val Lawton’s classic I Walked With a Zombie, and even the underrated Wes Craven movie, The Serpent and the Rainbow. Yet,...

Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie wasn't an immediate success upon its release in 1943, despite both the director's and producer Val Lewton's solid reputations as horror masters thanks to Cat People. The major reason behind the mixed reviews might be that the film did, and still does, feel different from the body of classic Hollywood horror at the time. Using Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre as inspiration, Tourneur's film departs from classic monster figures and even from the psychological complexity that was explored in Cat People.

Horror cinema has a strange habit of resurrecting itself from time to time. The Universal monsters of the 1930s enjoyed a technicolor reincarnation in the Hammer films of the late 1950s; slasher films bled out by the mid-'80s, but Scream brought them back with a vengeance; and the walking dead just keep coming back for more. Today's zombie fans can easily see why this trope never dies with this list of terrifying 20th-century cult classics and hidden gems.

Everyone knows that George Romero is the reigning champion of zombie cinema, but the tradition he established has begotten a horde of powerful and innovative followers whose films still stand up today. This horror history lesson will show fans of modern hits like The Walking Dead and the 28 Days Later franchise that their faves come from a grand tradition that refuses to stay dead.

This Early Zombie Film Is Still...

When Julianne Moore accepted her 2015 Oscar for Still Alice, she made a point of thanking me and my husband: “And finally, to the filmmakers, Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer, who had hoped to be here tonight but can’t, because of Richard’s health. When Richard was diagnosed with Als, Wash asked him what he wanted to do. Did he want to travel? Did he want to see the world? And he said that he wanted to make movies.”

The declaration she referred to took place three years before. Richard had just been told it was highly likely he had Als. The weight of terms like total paralysis, locked-in, and no cure was beginning to settle, dramatically reshaping our sense of the future. The more common form of the disease starts in the legs or arms and is called “limb onset.” Richard’s variant of Als was known as “bulbar...

Film noirs have always leaned into the darkest impulses of human existence, and the desire for revenge has long been a cornerstone of the genre. From widowed cops tirelessly pursuing those who harmed their loved ones to old enemies emerging from the protagonist's past in search of vengeance, sinister tales of revenge included some of the greatest film noirs ever made. As corrupt crooks, fatalistic femme fatales, and vilified victims become embroiled in conspiracies of murder and deceit, its inevitable that those who have been wronged wish to seek revenge.

Plenty of must-watch film noirs explore themes of revenge, as classic noir actors like Robert Mitchum excelled at playing morally corrupted characters who would stop at nothing for a chance at vengeance. These stories echo the fears and anxieties of their era, as the aftermath of the Second World War and fears around impending nuclear conflict led to many depictions of darkly sinister characters.

Terrifying tales of undead creatures rising from their graves or zombie infections spreading through an unsuspecting society have enthralled horror movie lovers for decades. As supernatural stories get to the heart of human anxieties, the best zombie movies tap into the fear of death and address social and political issues, as zombies serve as powerful metaphors for social woes. From deeply layered examinations of racial issues to pointed satires deconstructing consumerism, below the surface, zombie movies have a lot to say about social structures.

The greatest zombie films include some of the best horror movies of all time, as undead ghouls and infected once-human creatures served as the basis for incredible horror movie franchises. Some amazing found-footage horrors dealt with contained outbreaks as small groups of survivors struggled to survive, while others looked at the grand picture as entire populations were ravaged by an apocalyptic outbreak taking place over years and decades.

Sure, there are plenty of new and classic horror movies on streaming this year. But there’s nothing that beats the sensation of sliding a disc into a Blu-ray player. It harkens back to the thrill of going to your local video store, picking out a scary movie and taking it home.

We thought we’d celebrate that sensation by picking out our very favorite new home video releases for this Halloween, a mixture of obscure favorites, outright classics, near-hits from some of our favorite modern filmmakers and a new movies that gets a terrific home video treatment. Grab some candy, your comfiest pajamas and settle in for the night with these gems.

Janus “Demon Pond”

One of the season’s must-have titles is “Demon Pond,” a bizarro, late-‘70s nightmare from Masahiro Shinoda, whose “Pale Flower” and “Double Suicide” are already a part of the Criterion Collection. Shinoda updates...

Things are getting spooky over at the Criterion collection, and it's not just because Beetlejuice's Winona Ryder recently stopped by the closet. For the next 24 hours, the famed purveyors of physical media will be offering a 50% off flash sale, including new releases like Gummo, Gregg Araki's Teen Apocalypse Trilogy,...

The horror films produced by Val Lewton for Rko Studios throughout the 1940s all share DNA, though the third and fourth films in the cycle, Jacques Tournier’s I Walked with a Zombie and Mark Robson’s The Seventh Victim, seem to be especially connected. Both were released in 1943 and concern protagonists who enter hidden worlds beyond their understanding, worlds that allude to rot existing in conventional society should one care to acknowledge it. The protagonists’ growing awareness parallels our own, though in each case the viewer is left with little hope for reform or closure. They have glimpsed nightmare realms and are humbled by what they discover about their societies as well as themselves.

Notions of reform are particularly relevant to I Walked with a Zombie, which offers an unusually nuanced portrait of the legacy of colonialism. Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), a nurse from snowy Ottawa, is hired to...

Supernatural has had an impressive Rogues Gallery over the seasons, but the series' early years had some of its best. One that sticks out the most is the Season 3 addition of the demon Lilith. Penned during the writer's strike of '07-'08, Lilith arrives as a new adversary to challenge monster-hunting brothers Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles). Supernatural takes after other genre shows of its kind, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X-Files, by implementing a monster of the week style while building up to a villain of the season.

The previous two seasons revolve around finding the brothers' missing father, John Winchester (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and the Yellow-Eyed Demon who killed their mother, also known as Azazel (Frederic Lehne). Dean kills Azazel at the end of Season 2, leaving a power vacuum open for many demon factions to curry favor. Once Lilith becomes the obvious leader of these factions,...

Directed by horror master George A. Romero, the box office smash, Night of the Living Dead, arrives on 4K Uhd on 7th October. Shot on a shoestring budget the movie is a great story of independent cinema and became one of the most influential films of all time.

Following on 14th October comes I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim on 4K Uhd and Blu-ray™ . Terror lives in the shadows in a pair of mesmerizingly moody horror milestones conjured from the imagination of Val Lewton, the visionary producer-auteur who turned our fears of the unseen and the unknown into haunting excursions into existential dread.

To celebrate this release we have a chance for 2 lucky winers to win a copy of all 3 movies.

Criterion Collection Halloween Giveaway

Night of the Living Dead

New 4K Restoration

Shot outside Pittsburgh on a shoestring budget, by a band of filmmakers determined to make their mark,...

When you’re putting together a list of the biggest taboos in Western culture, death itself might not make the cut. But it should: North Americans and Europeans are chronically averse to facing death. Too many of us quietly believe if we follow the right workout regimen, eat enough kale, and take the right expensive supplements we may just live forever. It’s a predictable belief for our youth-obsessed culture. So the intrigue of zombie movies is that this genre forces us to confront death face-to-face. Or rather, death confronts us, looking to scoop out our brains and have us join its ranks.

Sometimes, zombies can bear larger metaphors on their disintegrating shoulders — for our increasingly wired yet increasingly isolated post-internet world, say, as in “Shaun of the Dead.” But sometimes zombies are just zombies: walking corpses who shuffle around and remind us that, even if we’re never somehow reanimated,...

Zombie movie fans are well aware of the fast versus slow debate. While zombies are depicted as fast chasers in great movies like 28 Days Later or Zombieland, the genre purists firmly believe that slow zombies are an innate part of the horror the creatures bring ever since early examples in cinema like White Zombie or I Walked With a Zombie. Even quintessential filmmaker George Romero has spoken against the use of fast zombies, as his vision was the sole blueprint for the modern zombie genre for a long time until the fast undead became popular.

Fast or slow, a good movie can make zombies terrifying or hilarious -- or both at the same time. Classics directed by Romero like 1968's Night of the Living Dead and 1979's Dawn of the Dead are canonical entries that feature slow zombies and heavily influenced what people have expected from the genre since then.

This October, Spirit Entertainment, in collaboration with The Criterion Collection, is set to delight horror fans with the release of two seminal films, Night of the Living Dead and a double feature of I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim. These releases promise to offer a fresh perspective on classic horror with pristine 4K restorations and an array of special features that delve into the making and legacy of these groundbreaking films.

Night of the Living Dead: A Landmark in Independent Cinema

Directed by the legendary George A. Romero, Night of the Living Dead will be available in a new 4K Uhd restoration on 7th October. Shot on a modest budget just outside Pittsburgh, this 1968 masterpiece became a midnight hit and a box-office sensation, fundamentally altering the horror genre. The film’s simple yet gripping plot follows a group of strangers trapped in a farmhouse as they fend...

A pair of moody horror milestones from producer Val Lewton, I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim are being paired up for a new release from The Criterion Collection.

The double feature is getting a 4K Uhd + Blu-ray combo edition as well as a Blu-ray edition and a DVD edition, with the release date for all three versions set for October 8, 2024.

Terror lives in the shadows in a pair of mesmerizingly moody horror milestones conjured from the imagination of Val Lewton, the visionary producer-auteur who turned our fears of the unseen and the unknown into haunting excursions into existential dread.

As head of Rko’s B-horror-movie unit during the 1940s, Lewton, working with directors such as Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson, brought a new sophistication to the genre by wringing chills not from conventional movie monsters but from brooding atmosphere, suggestion, and psychosexual unease.

Suffused with ritual, mysticism,...

Likely that Gummo‘s most often been seen on a DVD passed among friends like cinematic contraband. Though I doubt that legacy will ever quite die (maybe now it’s Mkv files), that history makes all the more notable a 4K upgrade put into circulation by Criterion. They’ll be releasing Harmony Korine’s totemic feature debut in October alongside a Val Lewton double of I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim and Masahiro Shinoda’s Demon Pond. Per the traditional October viewing, one could say that all four are, in their own ways, horror.

Meanwhile, G. W. Pabst’s immortal Pandora’s Box, featuring the never-bested Louise Brooks, gets a Blu-ray upgrade.

See cover art below and more at Criterion:

The post The Criterion Collection’s October Lineup Includes Val Lewton and Harmony Korine on 4K first appeared on The Film Stage.

It’s been almost 70 years since the first of four film adaptations of Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers was released and in that time we’ve yet to meet a single one of these so-called “snatchers.” I suppose that’s the point, since if they have to snatch a body, they don’t have bodies. This plays directly into the way the story, in its various adaptations, serves as a metaphorical horse to be hitched to any topical cart, the non-corporeal snatchers (presumably extra-terrestrial) view us as all-purpose vehicles for their…what? Bodies, minds, or souls? Don Siegel’s 1956 film, still considered to be the quintessential version of the story (though Philip Kaufman and Abel Ferrara’s remakes aren’t exactly chopped liver), actually conceals the answer behind budget compromises and plot holes: They are us, or we could be, if we don’t watch out.

Through the...

Admit it – there’s at least one horror movie out there with a “gotcha” moment that made your heart slam against the inside of your ribcage. A sudden out-of-nowhere reveal, often accompanied by a loud noise on the soundtrack. Scenes like this have been making audiences soil their seats since the era of classic monster movies, and it’s not hard to see why. The response is hardwired into our brains; an instinctive fight-or-flight reflex when our natural defense mechanisms are rudely interrupted. The term “jump scare” wasn’t commonly used to label this effect until the 21st century, and it only really became part of popular culture after the birth of YouTube – which practically weaponized the technique with viral “screamer” videos and clip compilations.

Legendary director Alfred Hitchcock once famously criticized this kind of scare tactic, claiming suspense far is more effective than a sudden shock… but he’s...

Zombies weren't always brain-craving; the idea was introduced in 1985, a turning point in zombie history. George A. Romero defined modern zombies, using them as a metaphor for social-political issues. The Return of the Living Dead introduced brain-craving zombies, cementing the concept in horror film history.

While zombies have become a staple of the horror genre, their time has been relatively short in the media. Unlike other monsters like vampires, werewolves, and ghosts, zombies are a modern construct created on the screen as opposed to literature, at least as the fresh-hungry monsters we know them as today. While it is almost universal knowledge that the living dead crave brains, this concept was only introduced as recently as 1985 and is only one of a few stepping stones that have led to zombies as we view them today in movies, TV, and video games.

We will look at the history of zombies, from voodoo to re-animated corpses,...

From the Italian godfather of gore, Lucio Fulci, comes City of the Living Dead, a notoriously nauseating, compellingly corporeal masterpiece of apocalyptic zombie horror.

Arrow Video has restored the Italian horror classic for a brand new 4K Ultra HD / Blu-ray Limited Edition, and Bloody Disgusting is debuting the restoration’s trailer today.

Ahead of the release on March 25, watch the brand new 4K trailer below!

Arrow previews, “Stridently going beyond the classical stylings of his horror hit Zombie Flesh Eaters, City of the Living Dead sees Fulci eschew conventional narrative logic in favour of a delirious, oneiric mode of storytelling which stresses visuals, surrealism and atmosphere. Presented here in a 4K restoration with a wealth of extras, Fulci’s gore-drenched classic can now be devoured as never before!”

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Limited Edition Contents:

• Restoration from a 4K scan of the original camera negative by Cauldron Films

• 4K (2160p...

Cinema is a storytelling medium that’s constantly evolving and it’s truly remarkable how much movies have changed since the 1940s, especially when it comes to particular genres like horror. Horror remains one of cinema’s most versatile genres that examines the universal feeling of fear and suspense. Modern horror movies can be dense in gore or psychologically troubling. However, the ability to get away with more and push boundaries doesn’t always result in a stronger horror movie.

Horror movies from the 1940s are close to a century old and can come across as quite tame by contemporary standards. That being said, 1940s horror can still be incredibly creepy and some of the decade’s contributions can confidently hold their own with most modern movies.

Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein Release Date: June 15, 1948

10 Best Movies From The 1950s

For a horror film that celebrates one of cinema's most famous comedic duos,...

Killers of the Flower Moon was partially inspired by Ari Aster, says Martin Scorsese.

In an interview with The Irish Times, director Martin Scorsese says the work of Ari Aster helped him pace his upcoming film, Killers of the Flower Moon. The total run time for the movie is 3 and 1/2 hours -- a choice that Scorsese vehemently defends. That being said, he understands the crucial aspect of pacing in a movie that long, stating, “I very much like the style and pacing of good horror films like Ari Aster’s Midsommar or Beau Is Afraid. The pacing of those films goes back to the B films of Val Lewton, Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People or I Walked With a Zombie. Just going a little slower. A little quieter." Midsommar in particular has been praised for its eerie and suspenseful slow burn, making audiences wait for the terrifying payoff.

Related: Midsommar Movie Ending,...

We’re now just a few days away from the widest release of Martin Scorsese’s career as Killers of the Flower Moon is set to open in around 3,500 theaters in the United States from Paramount and Apple. With the SAG strike underway, the legendary director himself has led the promotional campaign, which means the publishing of several stellar interviews digging deeper into the process.

One of the most interesting bits to arrive about the production of his David Grann adaptation is that Scorsese drew inspiration from Ari Aster when it comes to the project. “I very much like the style and pacing of good horror films like Ari Aster’s Midsommar or Beau Is Afraid,” he told The Irish Times. “The pacing of those films goes back to the B films of Val Lewton, Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People or I Walked With a Zombie.” While Scorsese’s admiration for Aster is well-documented,...

Based on David Grann’s best-selling crime thriller, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon tells the real-life mystery of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma in the 1920s, who became wealthy after oil was discovered beneath their land. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off, and the ensuing spiral of conspiracy, greed and murder got so bad that the FBI had to step in. It’s a sprawling story with a nearly three-and-a-half-hour runtime, and Martin Scorsese looked to the films of Ari Aster for influence on its pacing.

“I very much like the style and pacing of good horror films like Ari Aster’s Midsommar or Beau Is Afraid,” Martin Scorsese told The Irish Times. “The pacing of those films goes back to the B films of Val Lewton, Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People or I Walked With a Zombie. Just going a little slower.

Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have been quite open in interviews when discussing the massive “Killers of the Flower Moon” script overhaul that took place during the film’s development. In a new interview with The Irish Times, the director revealed that he and co-writer Eric Roth had been working on the “Flower Moon” script for two whole years when DiCaprio took issue with the approach.

“Myself and [my co-screenwriter] Eric Roth talked about telling the story from the point of view of the bureau agents coming in to investigate,” Scorsese said. “After two years of working on the script, Leo came to me and asked, ‘Where is the heart of this story?’ I had had meetings and dinners with the Osage, and I thought, ‘Well, there’s the story.’ The real story, we felt, was not necessarily coming from the outside, with the bureau, but rather from the inside, from Oklahoma.

Martin Scorsese is crediting Ari Aster’s “Midsommar” for inspiring the pacing and running time of “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

Scorsese told The Irish Times that the 206-minute length of “Killers of the Flower Moon” is in line with horror films ranging from auteurs like Aster or Val Lewton. “Killers of the Flower Moon” borrows from a blend of genres like Westerns and horror.

“I very much like the style and pacing of good horror films like Ari Aster’s ‘Midsommar’ or ‘Beau Is Afraid,'” Scorsese said. “The pacing of those films goes back to the B films of Val Lewton, Jacques Tourneur’s ‘Cat People’ or ‘I Walked With a Zombie.’ Just going a little slower, a little quieter.”

Scorsese continued, “I was very concerned about allowing scenes that were not narrative into the story, scenes to do with the Osage culture — leaving in those scenes of custom,...

This article contains mild spoilers for "The Exorcist: Believer."

In William Friedkin's 1973 adaptation of William Peter Blatty's "The Exorcist," the film opens not on the possession of 12-year-old Regan MacNeil, but on Catholic priest and archaeologist Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), who is on a dig in Northern Iraq. He comes across a medallion of Saint Joseph, as well as an idol representing the demon Pazuzu. Fans of the film "The Exorcist II: The Heretic" will know that this is representative of the demon that will later possess Regan. According to Babylonian and Assyrian myth, Pazuzu is a wind demon, and his presence in the opening indicates that Merrin has dealt with Pazuzu before.

But with this desert setting, this scene also implies that there's something foreign — other, about this statue and medallion. Almost as if the intrusion of artifacts from the Middle East is truly responsible for...

Just in time for the spookiest month of the year, Guillermo del Toro shares some of his favorite films from Turner Classic Movies.

The Oscar-winning director discussed his watchlist on the TCM YouTube page, starting with 1941's Suspicion. "One of the main resources of suspense is not knowing," he explained. "And the other one, by the way, is hope. They go hand in hand. And not knowing is the moral of this tale." He lauded Cary Grant's casting as a suspected killer, the way the film explores Joan Fontaine's paranoid psyche and the film's ambiguous ending, which was reshot by director Alfred Hitchcock himself. Fontaine's work would earn her the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1941, marking the only Oscar-winning performance in a Hitchcock film.

Related: Guillermo Del Toro Celebrates Over the Garden Wall’s Fall Dominance

Del Toro's next pick was 1931's Freaks, which he called...

Guillermo del Toro doesn’t hold back about his love for his favorite movies. If you’ve spent any time on his Twitter feed over the years, you’ve likely seen him praise Stanley Donen’s use of the color red throughout the late director’s body of work, and hail everything from William Wellman’s 1931 film “Other Men’s Women” to David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” from 2022. The man has wide-ranging taste, and a deep awareness of cinematic history that’s informed his own films.

Now he follows Turner Classic Movies advisors Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson in giving his own picks from TCM’s lineup, all titles that will be airing in October. Watch the video, exclusive to IndieWire, above.

First up, he picks one of the most sorely underrated titles from Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography, 1941’s “Suspicion,” airing on TCM at 2:00am...

Graveyards: those eerie expanses where the departed find their eternal rest, and where filmmakers unearth some of the most spine-tingling tales ever told. At Nightmare on Film Street, we’ve got a bone to pick with anyone who doesn’t appreciate the macabre magic of a good cemetery-set scare.

So, dust off your tombstone trivia and join us on a moonlit stroll through 13 graveyard horror movies that promise to leave you delightfully disturbed.

ABC 13. The Midnight Hour (1985)

Halloween night, a cursed scroll, and the dead rising from their graves. This TV movie is a nostalgic trip back to the ’80s, where a group of teens must confront the supernatural to save their town. With its graveyard setting playing a pivotal role, it’s a hauntingly fun start to our list.

Rko Radio Pictures 12. I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

A nurse is brought to the Caribbean to care for a woman in a mysterious catatonic state.

One of the unique aspects of the horror films produced by Val Lewton at Rko in the 1940s is the seriousness with which they discuss matters of mental illness. Even today, mental health issues are often tiptoed around, but in the forties, they were practically taboo. As discussed in previous entries in this column, Cat People (1942) is largely about repression and The Body Snatcher (1945) deals with guilt, paranoia, and psychopathy. The Seventh Victim (1943), one of the lesser-seen entries in the Lewton cycle, is about loneliness, the depression that stems from it, and suicidal ideation. It externalizes the inner struggles between the light and darkness that use the mind as a battlefield and demand a choice between life and death. Because of the unflinching way The Seventh Victim approaches the subject of suicide, this should be a considered a content warning for the discussion to come later. But first, some background on the film itself.

Ever since the inception of horror filmmaking, zombies have wandered the Earth. We all know George A. Romero as the Godfather of the Dead, but historians track the first zombies on screen back to 1932’s “White Zombie” starring Bela Lugosi. Before “The Walking Dead” made flesh-munching a source of mainstream cable entertainment, voodoo curses turned the living into dead-eyed shufflers like in Jacques Tourneur’s “I Walked With a Zombie.” Then came the brain feasts, the often debated runners, the contemporary remakes, and Negan’s trusty Lucille.

Film historians can connect the dots between zombie benchmarks that travel at different speeds over decades of releases. Lucky for you, we’re here to rank the 25 best zombie movies to set the record straight. Our list, our rules for inclusion. Let’s slash through the endless horde of zombie titles and see which are left standing as the undefeatables.

This episode of Wtf Really Happened to This Horror Movie was Written and Narrated by Andrew Hatfield, Edited by Mike Conway, Produced by Lance Vlcek and John Fallon, and Executive Produced by Berge Garabedian.

“Don’t let them bury me, I’m not dead!”

When we think of zombies, it’s only natural to first go right into everyone’s favorite flesh-eating ghouls that were popularized by George Romero in his genre classic Night of the Living Dead. But the idea of zombies has been around much longer and is actually steeped in fact. Haitian voodoo has claimed to create zombies for hundreds of years and in film, these were represented in some of our earliest horror movies. White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie are two of the more famous ones, but the entire sub-genre has some fascinating watches. Horror legend Wes Craven brought a return to Voodoo...

Cat People Cat People, 9.05pm,BBC4 Thursday, June 2, and then iPlayer

This 1942 film about a woman (Simone Simon) who fears that so much as kissing her husband (Kent Smith) will awaken an ancient curse that will turn her into a man-eating cat, is worth watching for its beautifully constructed visuals alone. More noir than horror in nature - especially for a modern audience - cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca's use of shadows to evoke fear and ambiguity is masterfully done. A scene in a swimming pool, which relies on sound design and the eerie reflections of the water upon the world to generate atmosphere, is particularly worthy of note. Beyond the look, Jacques Torneur's exploration of the immigrant experience in America, though embedded within the film's genre trappings, is also subtly moving. Don't miss I Walked With A Zombie, which screens immediately after it.

The Darjeeling Limited, 9pm, Great Movies, Friday,...

It starts with a ‘bang’. An enigmatic, metallic sound wakes up the protagonist of “Memoria”, Jessica Holland (Tilda Swinton), a Jacques Tourneur-inspired character, about whom we don’t know much. Aside from visiting her sister, growing orchids, and seemingly being in mourning after her deceased husband, she seems like a mystery we’ve just witnessed through a sudden awakening. The sensation sets her in motion. She starts to look for its roots, questioning one’s sanity, like a detective who’s about to lose their senses. Slowly drifting between the worlds of liminal boundaries – between material and imagined, visual and sonic, past and present – Jessica becomes involved in a mystery that will push her closer to the memory of the Colombian past. As it happens with Apichatpong’s narratives, the audience is plunged into a journey, too; we’re invited to participate and to cherish all of that – memories,...

By Hank Reineke

A March 1945 notice in the Los Angeles Times reported that following his return to Hollywood from a Uso camp tour, Boris Karloff was to begin work on a Rko Radio production titled Chamber of Horrors. The film was to be produced by Val Lewton, the producer who had already brought to the screen such psychological-horrors as Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Curse of the Cat People (1944). Karloff had already appeared in a pair of Lewton’s horror-melodramas for Rko, The Body Snatcher (1945) and Isle of the Dead (1945). The actor had been enjoying his freelance status of late. Recent castings in a series of mad scientist films (1940-1942) for Columbia solidified Karloff’s reputation as cinema’s preeminent boogeyman - even in roles sans grotesque makeup appliances. So the engagement of the actor for Chamber of Horrors was properly trumpeted in a 1945 Variety notice as...

Something almost beyond comprehension is happening on October 31st… and two men want to do a couple of podcast episodes about it. This is the Halloween Parade… volume 1.

Please help support the Hollywood Food Coalition.

Click here, and be sure to indicate The Movies That Made Me in the note section so Josh can finally achieve his dream of showing Mandy to his wife!

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

The Exorcist (1973) – Oren Peli’s trailer commentary

Wait Until Dark (1967) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

The House On Skull Mountain (1974)

King In The Wilderness (2018)

Sugar Hill (1974)

World War Z (2013)

I Walked With A Zombie (1943)

White Zombie (1932) – Mick Garris’s trailer commentary

Night of the Living Dead (1968) – George Hickenlooper’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Pumpkinhead (1988)

Blacula (1972)

Blackenstein (1973)

The Flesh And The Fiends (1960) – Charlie Largent’s two reviews

Road Rebels (1964)

Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

Perks Of Being A...

Hello, everyone! Now that September is nearly upon us (which means we’re getting closer and closer to our favorite season), we have one last round of home entertainment releases ahead of us before we can finally bid August a fond farewell - and there are a lot of different titles making their way home tomorrow. Arrow Video is keeping busy this week with their 4K release of Dune as well as the special edition release of The Brotherhood of Satan, and Kino Lorber is resurrecting several classics on Blu-ray this Tuesday, including The Raven, The Last Man on Earth, and The Comedy of Terrors.

If you have younger genre fans at home, you’ll definitely want to pick up the new editions of Coraline and The Boxtrolls from Scream Factory, and for you cult film fans, Vinegar Syndrome has you covered with their new Blu-rays for Killer’s Delight, The Lamp...

Swamp Dogs: House of Crows is a 5-issue comic book miniseries from a team that lives and breathes horror and we're very excited to have an exclusive preview just for Daily Dead readers! Below, we have an exclusive look at a variant cover from Chuma Hill, along with an exclusive preview of the first issue.

We were also fortunate to have an exclusive quote from J.M. Brandt, who talked about his horror movie influences:

"Swamp Dogs: House of Crows will be a 5-issue miniseries that kicks off the Swamp Dogs world of stories. It plays out just like a classic horror movie in terms of its beats and some of its tropes. Of course, we play with expectations a fair bit... but Theo and I find beauty, comfort, and a surprising amount of creative freedom in the horror movie formula. Theo has an actual university degree in cult films,...

When Roky Erickson’s 1981 cult classic album The Evil One was rereleased in 1987, it opened with the skronky “Two-Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer),” a song loosely inspired by the believe-it-or-not head-transplant experiments conducted by a Soviet surgeon in the Fifties. Over a snaking electric guitar lead, Erickson howled about “working in the Kremlin with a two-headed dog.”

Margo Price and her band put their own spin on the song for an upcoming tribute album to Erickson. While she flip-flops the title to “Red Temple Prayer (Two-Headed Dog),” the Nashville singer-songwriter...

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Although it might seem difficult to believe, there was a time – not very long ago, in fact – when zombies weren’t the mainstream icons they are today. Horror fans have always loved the undead, of course, but it wasn’t until the back-to-back release of “28 Days Later” and “Resident Evil” in 2002, followed by Zack Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead” remake in 2004 and “The Walking Dead” TV series in 2010, that zombies truly crossed over to become ubiquitous pop culture favorites. And with Snyder’s “Army of the Dead” arriving in Netflix on May 21, their popularity is only likely to increase

Today, zombies are much more than just a beloved category of movie...

Isle of the Dead

Blu ray

Warner Archive

1945 / 1.33:1 / 72 min.

Starring Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Katherine Emery

Cinematography by Jack MacKenzie

Directed by Mark Robson

The Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin produced several versions of Isle of the Dead in the late 1800’s—none of them suggested a typical tourist attraction but more than a few artists used that gloomy seascape as a port of inspiration; Rachmaninov composed a symphony, Dalí produced a surrealist tribute, and Strindberg sketched the fragments of a play, Toten-Insel. There’s even a hint of the painting’s portentous cliffs in Welles’ Xanadu. In 1945, Val Lewton, Mr. Dark Shadows himself, conceived an entire film built around Böcklin’s haunted island.

Directed by Mark Robson, Isle of the Dead is thematically rich, even for a Lewton project; set in Greece at the end of the Balkan wars, a plague joins forces with the supernatural to wreak havoc...

With April lurking right around the corner once again, that means we're close to the halfway point to another All Hallows' Eve, and Shudder is celebrating in style with their largest slate of programming to date, including the return of Samuel Zimmerman's “Halfway to Halloween” Hotline, the season 2 premiere of Creepshow, the 2021 Fangoria Chainsaw Awards, Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula, In Search of Darkness: Part II, and a bunch of other new additions!

Below, you can check out the full list of titles coming to Shudder this April, and be sure to visit Shudder's website to learn more about the streaming service and their scary good lineup!

Press Release: New York – March 4, 2021 – April showers bring a packed lineup of new horror films and series to Shudder, AMC Networks’ premium streaming service for horror, thriller and the supernatural, for its annual ‘Halfway to Halloween Month.’ With April marking the halfway point to Halloween,...

Horror cinema, by nature, is most often concerned with the uncanny. The fantastic. The grotesque. Despite the genre’s largely fictional preoccupations, however, the macabre has always been a viable outlet for political and social commentary. In fact, the American horror film provides an often reliable indicator as to which forms of societal unrest plague the nation at any given time. Perhaps more than any other filmic genre, horror has provided an outlet for filmmakers to document government fallacy and real- life atrocity through the filter of fantastic, often supernatural, narratives. By hyperbolizing societal conflicts like war, civil unrest, poverty, and corruption, a good political horror film seeks not only to draw attention to such issues, but also to make them seem manageable by comparison. Take, for example, the premise of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). While Americans needn’t worry themselves over hordes of zombies rising from...

The Ape

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1940 / 62 min. / 1:33:1

Starring Boris Karloff, Maris Wrixon

Cinematography by Harry Neumann

Directed by William Nigh

William Nigh directed over 40 silent films before he signed on for The Ape, which might account for this 1940 film looking far older than its release date—the staging is rudimentary and the dialog so simple that intertitles would convey the action with all its meaning intact. Curt Siodmak’s storyline could have been plucked from a different era too—in particular 1931’s City Lights in which a flower girl regains her sight thanks to Chaplin’s perennial outcast, the little tramp. In The Ape the misfit is Boris Karloff as a scientist who helps a lame girl to walk—and though this low budget melodrama can’t compete with Chaplin’s sentimental masterpiece, like many silent era films, it has its own unvarnished appeal.

Karloff plays Dr. Adrian,...

I’m a sucker for a good scary song. Just throw in some eerie wind effects, a creature howling, a zombie or two gibbering, and you’ve got my attention. Halloween is to me what Christmas is to Mariah Carey fans: an excuse to listen to thematic songs all month long. (Oh, and to hoard pumpkins like a squirrel preparing for winter.)

Not all of these songs are outright spooky — we’ve all heard “Thriller” one too many times. Instead, they’re a collection of creepy character studies, atmospheric tunes,...

French filmmaker Jacques Tourneur is, certainly, an important part of the history of horror cinema, because he was one of the directors in Val Lewton’s low-budget horror unit at Rko Pictures. In the forties, Tourneur directed the Lewton-produced classics Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man, notable for being able to build suspense and scare the audiences without being explicit. Several years later, in 1957, Tourneur also directed Night of the Demon, a masterpiece about the supernatural and those who vainly deny its existence. But Tourneur was much more than those horror efforts, he made a wide variety of movies once he left his country for Hollywood. The recent Tourneur retrospective that the Ficunam put together as part of its 10th...

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

From retrospective screening series celebrating everything from Hammer films to the movies of Jean Rollin and Mario Bava, New York's Quad Cinema has always featured an eclectic lineup of classic horror films, and this month is certainly no exception. To celebrate the January 24th opening night screening of Bertrand Bonello's Zombi Child, Quad Cinema is featuring a bunch of 35mm screenings of movies that inspired Bonello's latest film, including Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow, Brian De Palma's Carrie, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and more.

You can view the full lineup of Quad Cinema's "Bertrand Bonello’s Footnotes to Zombi Child" screenings below, and to learn more, visit their official website.

"Origin Stories:

Bertrand Bonello’s Footnotes to Zombi Child

Starts Fri January 17

French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello selects films that inspired and informed his upcoming Zombi Child, opening January 24

Titles include 35mm prints of Carrie, I Walked with a Zombie,...

It’s the formidable Bette Davis once again, in yet another superior William Wyler picture. The Somerset Maugham play is a classy vehicle for a star performance — the nagging legal ‘difficulty’ of plantation wife Leslie Crosbie is intertwined with colonial politics but remains entirely personal. Leslie isn’t exactly a poster girl for the feminist movement. Is she the victim of social pressures or just a petty, selfish monster? Screenwriter Howard Koch had to invent a twisted new ‘yellow peril’ finish to appease the Production Code … you know, the Code that some people say made Hollywood movies better.

The Letter

Blu-ray

The Warner Archive Collection

1940 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 95 min. / Street Date September 24, 2019 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, Frieda Inescort, Gale Sondergaard.

Cinematography: Tony Gaudio

Art Direction: Carl Jules Weyl

Film Editor: George Amy, Warren Low

Original Music: Max Steiner

Written by Howard...

You can tell that the Halloween season is getting closer, between various retailers already donning their shelves with tons of decorations, the days are getting shorter, and Turner Classic Movies has debuted their October schedule online, which features an abundance of genre awesomeness that will be hitting airwaves this fall. Without a doubt, TCM is one of the best resources for classic film, so for those of you looking to broaden your horizons this Halloween, definitely check out their calendar and set those DVRs.

Also, TCM has designated Godzilla as their “Monster of the Month” for October, so look for a bunch of classic films featuring the “King of the Monsters” and other beloved Kaiju throughout October as well.

**All Listings are in Est.**

Friday, September 27th

3:15pm – The Mummy’s Shroud

6:30pm – The Mummy (1959)

Saturday, September 28th

2:00am – Belladonna of Sadness

3:30am – House (1977)

Sunday, September...