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Taylor Dearden, Patrick Marron Ball, and Noah Wyle in ‘The Pitt’ (Photograph by Max/Warrick Page)

Max is kicking off the new year with the series premiere of The Pitt, a medical drama that puts ER star Noah Wyle back in scrubs and playing the chief attendant in Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital’s emergency room. Max’s January 2025 lineup also includes the season five premiere of the critically acclaimed, comic book-inspired animated series Harley Quinn, and the series debut of Isadora Moon, based on the bestselling book series.

Season 23 of Real Time with Bill Maher and the premieres of A24’s The Front Room, Look Into My Eyes, and A Different Man stream on Max in January.

Max January 2025 Lineup

January 1

5 Things with Kate Bolduan (CNN)

A Star is Born (1937)

Act of Valor (2012)

All Elite Wrestling: 2019 PPV Events (5 Episodes) (2024)

All Elite Wrestling: Collision 2024 (5 Episodes), Season 2

All Elite Wrestling: Dynamite 2019 (12 Episodes...

[Editor’s note: this list was originally published in October 2022. It has since been updated with new entries.]

Slasher movies are generally considered to be among the more disreputable horror film subgenres. They can be misogynistic, punishing women for their sexuality while also appealing to viewers’ most prurient, voyeuristic impulses: celebrating the male gaze while damning the objects of that gaze except for a virginal “Final Girl.” But slasher movies can veer the closest to true-crime of any of the horror subgenres, meaning that its issues of representation often say as much about an audience that wants to consume beastly criminality as packaged narrative, as it does the filmmakers who deliver them to us.

The best slasher movies are as idea-oriented as any horror films. And almost all force you to look within and ask yourself: what’s the line between you watching a horrific act… and finally looking away?

The genre as we know it was birthed in the mid-’70s from American filmmakers like Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter,...

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.

François Truffaut’s ode to Hitchcock and Cornell Woolrich is an ice-cold femme revenge tale. Jeanne Moreau exacts retribution from five men who made her a widow on her wedding day. Truffaut winds it as tightly as a mousetrap, leaving Ms. Moreau’s psychology a mystery — feminists can debate whether the film is misogynistic. Raoul Coutard’s color cinematography is deceptively warm and inviting; the film’s biggest boost comes from Bernard Herrmann’s powerful music score.

The Bride Wore Black

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1968 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 107 min. / Street Date February 14, 2023 / La mariée était en noir / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Michel Bouquet, Jean-Claude Brialy, Charles Denner, Claude Rich, Michael Lonsdale, Daniel Boulanger, Alexandra Stewart, Sylvine Delannoy, Luce Fabiole, Michèle Montfort.

Cinematography: Raoul Coutard

Production Designer: Pierre Guffroy

Film Editor: Claudine Bouché

Original Music: Bernard Herrmann

Written by François Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard from the novel by William Irish...

New remastered restorations of Val Lewton pictures? We’re there. This terrific double bill gives us two Lewton shockers that are in no way ‘lesser’. The progressive psycho killer picture The Ghost Ship suffered a legal setback and disappeared for almost fifty years; it’s a masterpiece of taste and tone. Bedlam is a costume picture with an ideal role for Boris Karloff, and multiple eerie moments worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. Both movies exhibit interesting storytelling techniques, too. Rko should have promoted Lewton to A pictures, as they did his collaborators Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise and Mark Robson.

The Ghost Ship + Bedlam

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1943 + 1946 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / Available at Amazon.com / Street Date October 12, 2021 / 24.99

Starring: Richard Dix, Edith Barrett; Boris Karloff, Anna Lee.

Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca

Art Directors: Albert S. D’Agostino, Walter E. Keller

Original Music: Roy Webb

Written by Donald Henderson Clarke; Carlos Keith & Mark Robson...

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,...

Dementia Seed: James Concocts Brooding Debut of Intergenerational Horror

A growing influx of low-fi genre films, many directed by women, have steadily redefined broad categorizations of horror by returning to base fears and motifs for what should more aptly be labeled ‘cinema of dread.’ A stellar example of this type of slow-burn foreboding, which prizes characterization and metaphorical narrative subtexts, is the directorial debut from Australia’s Natalie Erika James, Relic.

In league with recent items by Jennifer Kent and Ari Aster, James, like Rose Glass and Romola Garai, has concocted an art-house mood piece which recalls the 1940s era of Val-Lewton films, particularly those B-pictures directed by Jacques Tourneur, like Cat People (1942) or The Leopard Man (1943), which were predicated on horrific flights of fancy but depended upon imbalance and unease through the power of suggestion and the playful teasing of troubling imagery.…...

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...]...

James O'Keefe, the veteran sitcom producer and frequent Garry Marshall and Miller-Boyett collaborator who worked on Mork & Mindy, Perfect Strangers, Full House and Family Matters, has died. He was 76.

O'Keefe died Oct. 31 of heart disease at his home in Bel Air, his wife, former Sony Pictures Studios executive Jan Kelly, announced.

His father was Dennis O'Keefe, an actor in such movies as The Leopard Man (1943), Brewster's Millions (1945), Walk a Crooked Mile (1948) and Follow the Sun (1951), and his mother was Steffi Duna, an actress and dancer who appeared in ...

July’s home entertainment releases are ending on a high note this week, as we have tons of great horror and sci-fi titles coming our way this Tuesday. Scream Factory is keeping busy with a handful of Blu-rays on their docket this week, including Quatermass and the Pit, Quatermass 2, The Leopard Man, Lust for a Vampire, and a Steelbook edition of Humanoids from the Deep.

Roxanne Benjamin’s feature film debut, Body at Brighton Rock, is also being released this Tuesday on various formats, and Vinegar Syndrome is resurrecting both Hellmaster and Play Dead as well. And, if you happened to miss it in theaters, Deon Taylor’s The Intruder is set to invade your home media shelves this week as well.

Other Blu-ray and DVD releases for July 30th include What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hotel Inferno and The Reptile.

Body at Brighton Rock

Wendy, a part-time...

Scream Factory Presents The Leopard Man On Blu-ray™ July 30, 2019 A savage killer is on the loose! Los Angeles, CA – Scream Factory proudly presents the 40s horror cult classic The Leopard Man in its Blu-ray debut July 30, 2019. The release comes complete with special features including new audio commentary and a brand …

The post ‘The Leopard Man’ on Blu-Ray from Scream Factory July 30, 2019 appeared first on Hnn | Horrornews.net.

After directing Cat People (1942), Jacques Tourneur introduced moviegoers to The Leopard Man, and more than 75 years after its initial release, Scream Factory is bringing the serial killer horror film to Blu-ray for the first time on July 16th, and we've been provided with the cover art and full list of special features:

Press Release: Los Angeles, CA – Scream Factory proudly presents the 40s horror cult classic The Leopard Man in its Blu-ray debut July 30, 2019. The release comes complete with special features including new audio commentary and a brand new 4k scan of the original nitrate camera negative.

From legendary horror film producer Val Lewton and from Jacques Tourneur, the director of the original Cat People, The Leopard Man is one of the first American films to attempt a remotely realistic portrayal of a serial killer.

Is it man, beast or both behind a string of savage maulings and murders? An...

In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” (1843) a large feline named Pluto follows the narrator “with a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader comprehend.” Poe’s narrator struggles to put into words how, exactly, this pursuit fills him with terror. Cinema has provided a solution to capturing the elusive, uncanny cat: its quiet steps, eerily graceful jumps, gleaming eyes, and mythologized ability to dodge death nine-fold. Unlike dogs, cats are more independent and can’t be relied on to come when they’re called. Cats are expert at hiding, fitting into unbelievably tiny spaces, and their claws are extremely sharp. Hovering in the liminal field between wilderness and domestication, the house cat is often used in horror to parallel the genre’s interest in showing the disintegration of the home or domestic life into chaos. Poe’s story has been loosely adapted as a horror film several times,...

He is the Master of Mood. Once you’ve seen a few films by Jacques Tourneur, you see how meticulously this extraordinary filmmaker could create a sense of atmosphere, no matter the setting. The Film Society of Lincoln Center is now set to host the largest New York retrospective of the French-born genre director’s work in decades. The exhaustive program, titled “Jacques Tourneur, Fearmaker,” runs from December 14 to January 3 and includes nearly every film he ever made.

The lineup includes his extraordinary horror films for Rko produced by Val Lewton, to the creepy Gothic mystery “Experiment Perilous” and the all-time noir classic “Out of the Past” to later work such as the twisty British frightfest “Curse of the Demon” (sometimes titled “Night of the Demon”) and the unique crime thriller “Nightfall” which answers the question every cinephile didn’t even know they need to ask: What happens when you...

No, it’s not a the-day-after sequel to The Lost Weekend, but a class-act mystery-horror from 20th-Fox, at a time when the studio wasn’t keen on scare shows. John Brahm directs the ill-fated Laird Cregar as a mad musician . . . or, at least a musician driven mad by a perfidious femme fatale, Darryl Zanuck’s top glamour girl Linda Darnell.

Hangover Square

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1945 /B&W / 1:37 Academy / 77 min. / Street Date November 21, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Laird Cregar, Linda Darnell, George Sanders, Faye Marlowe, Glenn Langan, Alan Napier.

Cinematography: Joseph Lashelle

Film Editor: Harry Reynolds

Original Music: Bernard Herrmann

Written by Barré Lyndon

Produced by Robert Bassler

Directed by John Brahm

Here’s a serious quality upgrade for horror fans. Although technically a period murder thriller, as a horror film John Brahm’s tense Hangover Square betters its precursor The Lodger in almost every department. We don...

(Aotn) Turner Classic Movies is bringing the horror next month. Starting on October 1st the channel will be bringing back movies such as the original Cat People and Dracula. Fan’s of classic movies will surely not want to miss this.

If you have ever wanted to know where the band White Zombie got there name be sure to tune in on Halloween morning at 8:30 Am. The Universal Monster’s are sprinkled throughout this marathon and will hopefully delight old school horror fans.

Complete Schedule Below:

Sunday October 1, 2017

8:00 Pm Dracula (1931) 9:30 Pm Dracula’s Daughter (1936) 11:00 Pm Son Of Dracula (1943)

Monday October 2, 2017

12:30 Am Nosferatu (1922)

Tuesday October 3, 2017

8:00 Pm Frankenstein (1931) 9:30 Pm Bride Of Frankenstein (1935) 11:00 Pm The Mummy (1932)

Wednesday October 4, 2017

12:30 Am The Wolf Man (1941) 2:00 Am Island Of Lost Souls (1933) 3:30 Am The Black Cat (1934) 4:45 Am The Invisible Man (1933)

Sunday October 8, 2017

2:00 Am Night...

The Brazilian filmmakers Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra have been working together for over a decade now. After an award-winning career in short films, their feature debut Hard Labor (2011) world premiered at Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section. Following this, the two writer-directors pursued their solo careers, continuing to explore the genre of horror and musical. I interviewed the duo about their long-awaited reunion for their new film Good Manners (2017), which will have its world premiere as part of the International Competition at the 70th Locarno Film Festival.Notebook: The two of you have been working together for over a decade now. How do you understand the development of this long time partnership?We met in film school when we were at the end of our teens. What first brought us together was our common interest in musicals, fantasy and horror films. These are the kinds of...

This year Locarno International Film Festival celebrates its 70th anniversary. It is one of the most admired and respected film festivals in the world and historically a festival that has been combining tradition and innovation. We had the privilege to discuss some ideas on cinema, curatorship and festivals worldwide with its artistic director Carlo Chatrian, who has been running Locarno for 5 years now.Notebook: Can you share a few thoughts of what we can expect from the 70th edition of the Locarno Film Festival?Carlo Chatrian: Locarno reaches its 70th edition, but we do not want to make a simple celebration. Instead, we want to look ahead rather than look back to the great history of the festival. That's why we decided to have a special section called the Locarno70 which will show debut films that have premiered in Locarno all through its long history. For me, it’s a...

No, not a blind Sherlock Holmes, but a blind Van Johnson, who directs his butler, his girlfriend Vera Miles and the London police to thwart a crime based on something he overheard in a bar. Henry Hathaway directs a complicated murder mystery that plays like a combo of Rear Window and Wait Until Dark, with a cranky Van Johnson as the central character.

23 Paces to Baker Street

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1956 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 103 min. / Street Date February 21, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Van Johnson, Vera Miles, Cecil Parker, Patricia Laffan, Maurice Denham, Estelle Winwood, Liam Redmond, Isobel Elsom, Martin Benson, Queenie Leonard.

Cinematography: Milton Krasner

Film Editor: James B. Clark

Original Music: Leigh Harline

Written by Nigel Balchin from the novel Warrant for X by Philip MacDonald

Produced by Henry Ephron

Directed by Henry Hathaway

In the 1950s the murder mystery thriller came of age, as creakier older formulas...

The latest installment in the filmmaker's series of journal-films combining iPhone footage and sounds and images from movies. A diary penned with cinema.Journal (6.6.16 - 1.10.17)feat. additional footage from Masha Tupitsyn and Isiah MedinaMy journal-film series (of which this is the third installment) came to be as a means of resolving the points of convergence and departure amongst the environments I occupy and those which I encounter in cinema. I like to view these films as a method of managing the images that take up my thoughts and memories into a new continuity, one in which the distinction between images seen on-screen and those personally experienced is no longer absolute. In dissolving this partition, these films provide a vector for the animation conceptual concerns through cinema - montage fulfilling that which language can only formally describe and vice versa. The following essay outlines some of the concerns this film attempts...

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Courtesy of Janus Film.On the occasion of a comprehensive retrospective the Tiff Bell Lightbox (October 28 - December 23), the need to summarize the thirty plus films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder seems not just daunting, but reductive. How to simplify someone who both evolved and contradicted himself? While typically turning out three films per year between 1966 and his death in 1982, the year 1974 seems like one of the German director’s most unified, at least in terms of one preoccupation: marriage. This particular year seems as possibly a mid-way between Fassbinder’s working out-the-kinks genre exercises (The American Soldier, Love Is Colder Than Death) and the later, lavish international co-productions based on esteemed literary works (Despair, Querelle). The diversity upon which the holy union is depicted can be detected if just judging by each of the three’s own source material; Ali: Fear Eats the Soul a...

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 sent Wray to photograph Santa Fe, New Mexico and crafted meticulous sets around her snapshots. Despite this attention to detail, The Leopard Man is one of Lewton’s weakest efforts.

The plot is simple enough. Nightclub entertainers James (Dennis O’Keefe) and Kiki (Jean Brooks) arrive in Santa Fe with a leopard in tow; Kiki’s rival Clo-Clo (Margo) scares the cat, which escapes into the city. The leopard kills a Mexican girl, sending the city into a panic. Several other women die, but James grows convinced that the leopard isn’t behind them.

1952's Si muero antes de despertar is adapted from a novella by William Irish, better known as Cornell Woolrich. Adapting the story to an Argentinian setting makes little difference, and in fact the added element of Catholic guilt perhaps darkens and intensifies the noir atmosphere. The poetic handling of this tale of murder and suspense, and the way a train blasts through the frame, strobe-lighting a frightened child, recall Val Lewton's production The Leopard Man, also set south of the border and also based on a Woolrich tale.Carlos Hugo Christensen had a particular liking for the film noir aesthetic and stories of shadowy deeds (the same year also saw him release a striking compendium film, No abras nunca esa puerta / Never Open That Door, based on two short stories by Woolrich). He brings expressionistic brio to the story of a truculent schoolboy who is sworn to secrecy by...

Viewers expecting to see a lighthearted  'Cisco Kid' swashbuckler got a surprise with William Wellman's movie: it's a tragedy about a genuine historical California bandit who may have been an outlaw terrorist, avenging murderous discrimination against Mexican-Americans in the Gold Rush days. Hangings, rape and massacres -- not your average popcorn matinee fare for 1936. The Robin Hood of El Dorado DVD-r The Warner Archive Collection 1936 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 85 min. / Street Date May 26, 2015 / available through the WBshop / 18.49  Starring Warner Baxter, Ann Loring, Bruce Cabot, Margo, J. Carrol Naish, Soledad Jimenez, Carlos De Valdez, Eric Linden, Edgar Kennedy, Charles Trowbridge, Harvey Stephens, Marc Lawrence. Cinematography Chester Lyons Film Editor Robert J. Kern Original Music Herbert Stothart Written by William A. Wellman, Joseph Calleia, Melvin Levy, from a book by Walter Noble Burns Produced by John W. Considine Jr. Directed by William A. Wellman

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

I'm always...

Few comics sit at the intersection of “fan beloved,” “industry defining,” and “absolutely impossible to acquire” the way the EC Comics library does. For a while they almost felt like Comics’ very own Holy Grail. On one hand, you’ve got the Tales From The Crypt brand itself, which has left an indelible mark on pop culture with films, cable TV series, Saturday morning cartoons, and a line of revival graphic novels from Papercutz — a proud legacy, to be sure. But on the other hand, you enter into the more nebulous region of pop cultural osmosis, and it’s there that the legend of Bill Gaines’ little comic line that could grows to gargantuan levels. The baby boomers that ate his ghoulish “mags” up in the early ‘50s eventually grew into the genre fiction movers and shakers of the ‘70s and ‘80s — from cult directors like George Romero and Joe Dante,...

Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...

Out of the Past

Directed by Jacques Tourneur

Written by Daniel Mainwaring

USA, 1947

Director Jacques Tourneur knew how to make the most out of a little, particularly when he was working in collaboration with producer Val Lewton (see Cat People, 1942, I Walked with a Zombie, 1943, and The Leopard Man, 1943). So when Rko gave this master of the low-budget picture a comparatively larger budget and a top-notch screenplay (by Daniel Mainwaring—as Geoffrey Homes—based on his own novel, “Build My Gallows High”) the result was one of the finest of all film noir.

Starring Robert Mitchum as Jeff and Jane Greer as Kathie, Out of the Past is built on a premise that is one of the defining characteristics of noir: the inevitability of an inescapable past. Such a device was often integral, with the repercussions of one’s recent deeds coming back to haunt them, but relatively rare was...

The hardest part about choosing my favourite horror films of all time, is deciding what stays and what goes. I started with a list that featured over 200 titles, and I think it took me more time to pick and choose between them, than it did to actually sit down and write each capsule review. In order to hold on to my sanity, I decided to not include short films, documentaries, television mini-series and animated films. I also had to draw the line at some point in deciding if certain movies should be considered horror or not. In such cases where I was split down the middle in deciding, I let IMDb be the judge for me. And in some cases, I’ve included these titles as special mentions. Long story short, I can’t include every movie I like, and I have to draw the line somewhere. With that said,...

John Dies at the End will be released to theaters on January 25th and I recently had the opportunity to interview a number of people involved with the movie. I’ve already published my article with Don Coscarelli and next up is my interview with Paul Giamatti. Not only did we talk about his involvement in John Dies at the End as an actor and executive producer, but I also learned about his love of classic horror movies.

I recently watched John Dies at the End and loved how much it felt like a movie out of the 80′s. So many horror movies from that decade had a great mix of horror and comedy.

Paul Giamatti: I’m a fan of that kind of stuff too. This has a nice old school thing to it which is really good.

Many of our readers may not be aware that, on...

There are roughly a gazillion scary movie marathons happening on TV for Halloween 2011. Zap2it's got you covered for all your spooky programming. Be sure to check your local listings for times and channel.

All times Eastern.

Friday, Oct. 28

ABC Family: 13 Nights of Halloween, 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., "The Addams Family," "Addams Family Values."

AMC: Halloween movie marathon, 9 a.m. to midnight ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "House of Wax," "Scream 3," "From Dusk Till Dawn," "Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane," "Survival of the Dead," "The Walking Dead"

Bio: Scary movie documentaries, 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. the next day ("The Inside Story: The Silence of the Lambs," "The Inside Story: Halloween")

CBS: "CSI: NY" Halloween episode, 9 p.m.

Chiller: Halloween programming, 6 a.m. to midnight ("Twilight Zone" episodes, "The Daisy Chain," "Fingerprints," "Stevie," "Devil's Mercy," "Children of the Corn"), "Chiller 13" (The Decade's Scariest Movie Moments,...

Joe Dante runs down the TCM Halloween rundown!

Of all the available outlets for classic movies, TCM leads the (admittedly small) pack in variety, invention and print quality.

Still not nearly as widely available as it should be (try finding it on hotel televisions), the brand has nevertheless firmly carved an essential niche in the cable/satellite movie landscape, allowing owner Time Warner to maximize its vast library of vintage movies culled from numerous studio sources. In fact, Time Warner owns more titles than any other entity, and lately has been forthcoming with clever marketing ideas like the Warner Archive on-demand dvd service, which has been thankfully adopted by MGM, Sony, Fox and Universal. There are more titles available to the general public than ever before, often in pristine condition.

But to love a film you have to see it, and to see it you have to know it exists.

Monsters in horror movies more often represent an internal than an external threat. Henry Frankenstein’s Creature is, depending on how you read it, symbolic of the repressed; when he sees the monster in Bride of Frankenstein his shock isn’t a response to its features, but to what the Creature means to him. He’s a respectable, well-to-do, loving husband who lights up with a manic obsession when confronted with the possibility of playing God, and the Creature is irrefutable proof of that obsessive streak.

In the 1940s Universal’s hold on the genre started to wane, and less effort and artistry was put into the resulting films. After The Wolf Man in 1941 it switched from A to B pictures, and focussed on increasingly silly sequels to the big franchises: Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula and The Mummy. With films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Frankenstein...

Above: L.A. noir—Rudy Bond, a .45, Aldo Ray, and an oil derrick.

Jacques Tourneur, one of old Hollywood's last poets, seems forever known, when know at all, for pairing his nebulous, poetic clashes between rationality and irrationality with the inspired clouds of unease of producer Val Lewton's wartime productions in such films as Cat People (1942), The Leopard Man (1943), and I Walked With a Zombie (also 43), and for one of the most unsusal and foggy noirs—and canonical films—ever produced, Out of the Past (1947). In the 1950s Tourneur's products grew more erratic, though masterpieces were frequent—ranging frmo the beginning of the decade with the genuine warmth of his good-hearted Western, Stars in My Crown (1950), to the end, with a return to scientific-materialist horror in the British production Night of the Demon (1957)—and frequently uncanny and haunting in that way so specific to Tourneur, where memories of his...

For this edition Shadows of Film Noir, we take a look at William Castle's The Mark of the Whistler (1944), produced by the "B" unit at Columbia Pictures in 1944. It's a terrific, compact, intense little knuckle-biter about greed and its terrible consequences. It has never been available on video or DVD, though it recently screened at San Francisco's Roxie Cinema as part of an extraordinary new film noir series, "I Still Wake Up Dreaming." Here's hoping that someday Sony will be able to release a "Whistler" box set.

Behind the Scenes

"The Whistler" series comprised eight films, released between 1944 and 1948. They were more or less like "The Twilight Zone," with different stories and different characters each time, although actor Richard Dix played the lead character in seven of them. (Each movie ran about 60 minutes.) The "Whistler" character (played, without credit, by Otto Forrest) is more or less a narrator, a...

Reading about movies, you hear stories of some films shot in five days and other films shot over three years. Some of the poverty-row directors and B-movie makers cranked out as many movies as they could during a calendar year, while filmmakers like Charlie Chaplin and Stanley Kubrick waited years between projects (making each release a new "event"). Most filmmakers, I think, given the chance would probably release one film per year, keeping their toes in without burning out. But sometimes, whether it's a trick of the calendar, or some peculiar rhythms of timing, some of the greatest directors manage to release two films per year. And even less often, both of these films turn out great. The following is my not-exactly-extensive, but enthusiastic celebration of the one-two punch or the director's double-whammy.

1. Jacques Tourneur: I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man (1943)

The world has frankly been...

In 1942, at the age of 38, Val Lewton was named the head of Rko Studios’ horror unit.  As part of his job, he was to follow three rules.  His films had to cost the studio less than $150,000, his films had to run under 75 minutes in length, and his supervisor’s would be supplying the names of each film.  For the next four years, Lewton would write and produce nine horror films, each of them earning a status in history as black and white horror classics.Nine for nine.  That’s not a bad batting average for a young producer in Hollywood, particularly when dealing with horror films.  Of these nine films, Lewton had a hand in writing the screenplays for three of them.  Of these three, perhaps the most famous is 1945’s ‘The Body Snatcher.’

Based on the short story from the 1880s by Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Body Snatcher’ tells...