Monster of the Day

I'm sure this is an Alamo Drafthouse poster, but man, that's sweet. Vampyr is great if you appreciate mood and atmosphere, a real classic in that regard.

Another film that's only marginally horror but still a good Halloween pick is 1926's Faust. Obviously it's more of a morality tale than a horror film, but the imagery of the Devil is fantastic and very influential. There's a shot of a gigantic Satan looming over a town that clearly influenced the Night on…

Huh. Apparently in Germany sex and horror sold as far back as the 1920s. Who knew? This film is great, by the way. You should definitely check it out.

As I've said previously, I think the stately pace of Caligari and Nosferatu add a genuine nightmare quality to them. If I were to pick one horror silent that comes closet to chugging along at a decent pace, though, it would be the horror comedy Cat and the Canary, remade not too long after…

And with Phantom of the Opera the world gets its first bonafide horror star in Lon Chaney. Although that reputation basically rests on two films, this and Hunchback of Notre Dame (back when Quasimodo was considered a 'monster'), his array of somewhat more prosaic but twisted and sinister villains,and his skill (and amazing willingness…

Still one of the best vampire films. Vampyr is pretty great too.

It's nearly October, and time to start planning your Halloween viewing. I like to start old school. And you don't get much better than this. If you haven't seen it, or seen it in a while, check it out again, it's pretty great.

Or when making movies, apparently. Well, the first watch party went pretty well. I had stumbled across a movie, last minute, a Korean kaiju film I'd never heard of. So I switched the movie to that. It was a good decision. By nature, you don't want a super plot-heavy movie while doing a watch…

Marvel, even pre-Internet, wisely headed off getting a ton of letters from pedants like me yelling, "He's not Frankenstein!!" We recently learned, though, that all the 'Monster's' [named by a patriarchal cisnorm scientist, of course] parts were from the corpses of women of color and that thus [insert preferred pronoun] is better than all…

  I know we've talked about these before, but....  So Dell, during that period when the Adam West Batman show was super-hot, decided (I can see the guy pitching this: "You know who the original Batman was? Dracula!") to try to turn the classic monsters into superhero characters. And if the comic were really…