Darkman (1990)

There’s a scene in Darkman (1990) that had me pumping my fist in giddy delight. Liam Neeson plays Peyton Westlake, a dashing scientist who is trying to crack the code of developing synthetic skin for grafts, and whose experiments have been failing, the cells breaking apart. When the power goes out in Westlake’s home laboratory […]

Dracula (1931)

Sometimes you’ve gotta go back to the original spooky source. Seeing Bela Lugosi in The Black Cat made me realise I’d never seen his portrayal of Dracula (1931), the very role that made him a star and a horror icon. The performance, and Lugosi’s Hungarian accent, looms so large over pop culture, everything from Sesame […]

The Black Cat (1934)

“It is better to be frightened… than to be crushed.” So says Bela Lugosi in The Black Cat (1934) after saving a woman from falling luggage – he plays the role of Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a Hungarian psychatrist returning to his homeland after spending more than a decade in a Siberian prison camp during WWI. […]

The Curse Of Frankenstein (1957)

When I was a kid, I loved watching The World Of Hammer on SBS, the doco series that was basically a greatest hits package of Hammer Horror narrated by Oliver Reed. Seeing that Hammer Studios made their own version of Frankenstein, my kid brain had a weird brand loyalty to the Boris Karloff Frankenstein, like, […]

Evil Of Dracula (1974)

Evil Of Dracula (1974; Chi o Sū Bara) is a Japanese cinematic riff on the Hammer Horror formula. It’s your basic Dracula story, this time imagined as taking place in an all-girls residential college out in the countryside. A new hunky psychology teacher, Professor Shiraki (Toshio Kurosawa) arrives by train and becomes acquainted with the […]