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American films Horror
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The best of the eight collaborations of director Tod Browning and legendary star of the silent era Lon Chaney, The Unknown is also Browning’s darkest and most disturbing film, several orders of magnitude more chilling than his subsequent horror classic Dracula (1931). What makes this macabre tale of unrequited love...
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The film that launched one of Hollywood’s biggest band wagons and has the distinction of being one of the best known films ever made is one that continues to divide critical opinion. Universal’s 1931 production of Dracula is the seminal monster movie, one of the most influential films of all time, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would describe it as a masterpiece...
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It was the enormous success of Tod Browning’s Dracula in 1931 which prompted Universal Pictures to make a second film in the fantasy/horror genre, and that film, Frankenstein, was to become the most influential film of its kind in the history of cinema. With its distinctive expressionist design and compelling narrative...
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Misunderstood and reviled in its day, Freaks has come to be regarded as one of the most important films of the Twentieth Century, since it confronts some fundamental truths about the human condition which, for some reason, film directors seem unable or unwilling to tackle. There has never been a film quite like this one...
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The third of Universal’s great monster icons, the Mummy, made his first appearance in this atmospheric chiller, magnificently portrayed by Boris Karloff in what many regard as one of his finest performances. Karloff had only recently made a name for himself as another iconic Gothic horror monster, Frankenstein’s monster in James Whale’s legendary 1931 film...
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Possibly the greatest monster movie of all time, certainly one of the most celebrated, the original King Kong still manages to impress with its groundbreaking special events and unexpected degree of humanity. The gigantic gorilla standing on top of the Empire State Building, fighting off an attack of biplanes, is one of cinema’s most enduring images...
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RKO wasted no time capitalising on the success of their 1933 hit King Kong and immediately rushed out this cut price sequel which, whilst inferior to the first Kong movie in virtually every respect, is still an entertaining romp. This time, the production team went for laughs rather than thrills and chills, so the film had a potentially wider market than its...
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It is easy to be dismissive of genre films, particularly those made in the Hollywood film factory. The Bride of Frankenstein is classified as a horror film, one of a series of such films made by Universal Pictures in the 1930s and ’40s, but it is considerably more than that. The crowning achievement of director James Whale’s remarkable career...
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Universal Pictures’ success in the Gothic horror field in the early 1930s encouraged the other major Hollywood studios to get in on the act, and MGM was among the first to profit from a growing appetite for graveyard ghouls, mad scientists and dark houses with something decidely nasty in the cellar. One of MGM’s better offerings in the genre is Mark of the Vampire...
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Dracula (1931) was the first in Universal Pictures’ series of gothic horror films but it took a full five years before the company made a sequel to this film (remarkable when you consider how popular it had been). That sequel, Dracula’s Daughter, is widely considered the best of Universal’s vampire offerings...
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No one who worked on the 1939 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles - least of all its producer and instigator Darryl F. Zanuck – could have imagined how successful it would be. The film was such a hit that the company which made it, Twentieth Century Fox, immediately commissioned a sequel, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)...
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RKO Picture’s ambitious The Hunchback of Notre Dame is regarded by many as the best film adaptation of Victor Hugo’s celebrated novel. With a budget of two million dollars, it was one of the most expensive films of its time, and with its slick production values, immense crowd scenes and lavish design, it shows...
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After Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy, the Wolf Man entered Universal Pictures’ family of popular horror creations when this spine-chilling monster film hit cinema screens across America in 1941. Universal had previously played around with the idea of lycanthropy in their 1935 film Werewolf of London (1935), but this was essentially just a reworking of the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde...
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The film which magnificently resuscitated and re-defined the horror genre in Hollywood in the 1940s, Cat People remains a chilling work, its impact heightened by its understated performances and modest resources. It was the first in a series of successful collaborations between producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur...
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After the success of Cat People, French director Jacques Tourneur and Russian-born producer Val Lewton came up with this similar, and equally effective, dark psychological drama of horror, romance and conflicting love set in the Caribbean with aspects of Charlotte Brontë’s "Jane Eyre" thrown in. Instead of all-out horror...
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It took Universal Pictures more than fifteen years to get round to remaking their earlier adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s celebrated horror novel The Phantom of the Opera. The original 1925 version, which starred "man of a thousand faces" Lon Chaney in one of his most memorable roles, was an early success for Universal and encouraged the studio to embark on the production of a series...
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One of the most highly regarded and popular of Universal’s Sherlock Holmes adventures, The Pearl of Death is also the one that is closest to the original Arthur Conan Doyle story on which it is based, here The Adventure of the Six Napoleons. As a consequence, this is one of the few films in the series that feels like it might have been penned by Conan Doyle...
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The best in the Universal series of Sherlock Holmes films, The Scarlet Claw achieves a perfect fusion of the classic British murder mystery with the eerie trappings of the Gothic horror film that Universal had pioneered since the 1930s. The plot is an obvious rehash of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and is riddled with enough contrivances to make your head spin (who in...
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For fans of the world famous fictional detective, one of the joys of the Sherlock Holmes films made by Universal Pictures in the 1940s is watching out for the references to the original Conan Doyle stories. The Spider Woman is a particular delight since it has a cornucopia of references, ranging from The Sign of Four to The Speckled Band...
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The penultimate entry in Universal’s compendium of gothic horror flicks repeats the winning formula of the previous film in the series, House of Frankenstein (1944), reuniting its three most popular monsters – Dracula, the Frankenstein monster and the Wolfman – for another fun-filled horror fest. The three monsters would endure one more reunion for Universal...
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