Category: movies

This Is Not the Black Cat Movie You’re Looking For

On By Ryan HarveyIn movies
Black-Cat-1941-Crematorium

One of my favorite discoveries in my college library was the volume Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946 by Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas. The 1990 book was one of the first to look at the entire canon of Universal’s horror and mystery pictures from their Golden Age and treat them as something more than the “kiddie TV entertainment” they were once relegated to. I grew up watching these movies on weekend afternoons, but until Weaver et. al I knew little about the behind-the-scenes tales of their making.

I must’ve kept the book checked out of the college library for a straight year, constantly renewing it. It gave me a huge uptick in appreciation for classic horror and instilled in me a hunger to dig up the more obscure movies the authors covered. And they covered everything: The Sherlock Holmes movies; the Inner Sanctum mysteries; the supernatural comedy Ghost Catchers; films such as The Secret Key that only count as horror because a star like Boris Karloff appeared in them; historical epics with gruesome content, like Tower of London; plus obscurities The Mad Ghoul, House of Horrors, and the film I’m writing about today.

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Pass Those Runes, Please: Night of the Demon

On By Ryan HarveyIn movies

Night-of-the-Demon-UK-Poster

Happy October! I’m resurrecting horror movie articles from my old blog and revamping them. This article is reworked from a 2008 post.

British Horror doesn’t begin with Hammer Film Productions, as much as it might seem to. The same year Hammer released their Gothic breakthrough, The Curse of Frankenstein, another influential UK horror film reached screens and helped ignite the British terror flood: Night of the Demon (released in the US in an edited version as Curse of the Demon).

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October Is Hammer Horror Country

On By Ryan HarveyIn movies
hammer-film-productions-brides-of-dracularjpg


I belong to the class of people known as the “October Folk.” Our favorite month of the year is the tenth. It’s more than just a casual favorite—to us, the month feels more alive than others, the creative batteries are the most charged. It’s a social time but not a crowded time; an energetic period but not an exhausting one. It’s crisp, beautiful, and draped with the wonderful touch of the eerie we all need more of in our lives. Or at least the October Folk do.

Horror films are a major part of the celebration of October for us. But not any horror film will do. We each have special favorites that speak more of the season to us. For me, the special October seasoning comes from Hammer Film Productions, the British studio that from 1957 to 1976 crafted a special type of Gothic film. Hammer epitomizes the romanticized and fairy-tale terror that’s so pleasant to my palate this season.

Last year, I celebrated Hammer in October with weekly posts at Black Gate on different movies. Last year’s menu:

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The Good Intentions and Failures of Exorcist II: The Hereticu

On By Ryan HarveyIn movies

exorcist-II-heretic-linda-blair

Happy October! I’m resurrecting horror movie articles from my old blog and revamping them. This article is reworked from a 2013 post.

John Boorman has directed a number of classics, including three personal favorites: Point Blank (1967), Deliverance (1972), and Excalibur (1981). But lying like an oily stain in the middle of his career is the 1977 box-office disaster and audience-loathed sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic.

It’s not universally loathed. Martin Scorsese has expressed admiration for the film: “I like the first Exorcist, because of the Catholic guilt I have, and because it scared the hell out of me; but The Heretic surpasses it. Maybe Boorman failed to execute the material, but the movie still deserved better than it got.” Genre critic and historian Kim Newman acknowledges the film isn’t a success but that it does manage to be interesting.

I lead toward Newman’s perspective. Exorcist II: The Heretic contains fascinating ideas, wonderful visual moments, and an excellent score. It’s also weirdly off-kilter, unevenly acted and scripted, and edited on a bad glue-sniffing trip. It’s no surprise audiences in 1977 laughed it off the screen.

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Navajo Joe: Not Burt Reynolds’s Favorite Flick, But I Like It

On By Ryan HarveyIn movies

Navajo-Joe-blu-ray-review
When Burt Reynolds died earlier this month at age eighty-two, I went directly home to watch Navajo Joe. Not Deliverance. Not White Lightning. Not even Smokey and the Bandit, which Amazon Prime loaded up only the week before. Nope, none of the classics. Instead, I went to a 1966 Italian Western that Burt Reynolds rarely had anything positive to say about.

When he hit the talk show circuit in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Reynolds liked to joke about Navajo Joe as a movie only shown in prisons and on airplanes because the audience couldn’t walk out. He often told a story about how he thought he was signing up for a film directed by Sergio Leone when he accepted producer Dino de Laurentiis’s offer, only to discover it was Sergio Corbucci. “Wrong Sergio,” he’d crack.

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