Jack Pierce is hardly an unsung hero of thirties horror, but he’s certainly not as well known as someone like Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff. He is, however, perhaps as responsible as anyone else for the genre’s success in the thirties. The imagery of movies like Frankenstein and Dracula is so enduring as to be […]

  The Symbolist movement refers not to the literal practice of using one thing to represent another, but to an aesthetic, literary and artistic movement of the nineteenth century. The movement has close ties to the Romantic movement, which spawned Frankenstein (the novel) as well as Polidori’s The Vampyr, which can be seen as a sort of […]

The great tragedy of Peter Lorre’s career is the premature end that ghettoization, typecasting, and alcoholism brought it. His early career is possessed of such HIGH highs and he ended it with a premature death and a series of weak performances in worse movies.

Imposing and innovative German director Fritz Lang was born in 1890 and went on over the next 80 years to help define film as we know it today. Although regarded as a true auteur and an artist, most of the films he made were genre films.

One of the most interesting actresses of the Universal 1930’s horror pictures, Zita Johann appeared in exactly one classic horror film: she played Helen Grosvenor, the reincarnation of Princess Anck-es-en-Amon in the Boris Karloff classic, The Mummy. Although The Mummy can rightly be criticized for being a Egyptian re-skinning of Dracula, it has many virtues […]

Dracula has been many things since it’s been released – it was epochal upon its original release, the commercialization of sheer terror, the sexualized menace of Bela Lugosi, the Gothic writ large in Silver Nitrate. Later, compared to efforts that followed, the sheen began to wear off of Lugosi’s Dracula, its star reduced to less […]