Vampires are a B-movie staple. Whether produced by Hammer Films or Roger Corman, off-Hollywood audiences never seem to tire of them. They’re a monster that’s just human enough to be alluring but still dangerous and thrilling. While the film vampire has had strong erotic undertones since at least Bela Lugosi’s 1931 portrayal of Count Dracula,… Read more »
“So, Von Sternberg’s movies had to have plots even though they already had them inherent in the images. What he did was make movies naturally — he lived in a visual world. The explanation plots he made up out of some logic having nothing to do with the visuals of his films. His expression was… Read more »
A heart beats on the soundtrack. We see a head covered in a stocking, but the face is not visible. The stocking tears, revealing layers upon layers of tearing material, newspaper, collaged mouths cut from magazines ripping away to reveal only more mouths. After the credits, we return to a shot of a woman with… Read more »
Though the singular French filmmaker Robert Bresson was once thought of as a kind of transcendentalist, and was even discussed as such alongside Carl Dreyer and Yasujirō Ozu in Paul Schrader’s famous book Transcendental Style in Film (1972), more recent criticism on Bresson has pushed back against this as the dominant hermeneutic approach. If transcendentalist… Read more »
“Strange things happening, mother,” writes Lillian Gish in Night Hunter (2011). She has found a giant egg in her bassinet, an egg that will multiply and lead to her own transformation (into a bird? a snake?). Perhaps her transformation process has already begun and she gave birth to the egg without knowing it. Strange things… Read more »
It’s hard to over-emphasize how solidly Paul Reubens’ star persona is fused with his famous character, Pee-wee Herman. Reubens created Pee-wee in the late ’70s during his tenure with the famous L.A. improv group The Groundlings. Initially, Pee-wee was childlike but not created for specifically for children. As a stage show in the early ’80s,… Read more »