Monday, October 31, 2005

Anyway You Slice Them!











------------------------------------------------------------------Carlos Clarens


My first brush with horror was via "American Gothic" literature. Whether it was: Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The House of Seven Gables " & "Rappaccini's Daughter"; Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger ; Edith Wharton: "Ethan Frome"; Herman Melville: "Moby-Dick" ; or inevitably E.A. Poe's, "The Fall of The House of Usher", my "yearning for the fantastic, for the darkly mysterious" was piqued and of course made the leap from the written word to the visual. My interest in "film noire" of course could not exclude certain horror classics. Listed below are several of the latter:


Early Classic Horror Films:


F. W. Murnau's feature-length Nosferatu, A Symphony of Terror (1922),









The Phantom of the Opera (1925)









Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)








The Wolf Man (1941)








Frankenstein (1931)









Dracula (1931)









The Mummy (1932)









King Kong (1933)









Cat People (1942)









Freaks (1932)









Other More Modern Classics:



Psycho (1960)








Alien (1979)










The Shining (1980)










Rosemary's Baby (1968)










The Birds (1963)









A Clockwork Orange (1971)










The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)









The Silence of the Lambs (1991)










Night of the Living Dead (1968)










The Exorcist (1973)











Happy Halloween!

4 comments:

marybid said...

Ooh. Hoffmann. I am such a sucker for Das Sandman. Gotta love the uncanny.

Nick said...

I have heard of but never read: "The Devil's Elixir".

Unknown said...

I have seen many the movies that yopu mention here.

Nick said...

Some I'll admit are pretty hard to exclude from one's lifetime.