Later, Universal Pictures had smash hits with iconic versions of Dracula, The Wolf Man and Frankenstein. Roger Cormans movies would demonstrate the sheer trashy power of horror, and Hitchcock tapped into this B picture aesthetic with his own low budget masterpiece, Psycho, which popularised the psychological horror film, taking the genre away from its supernatural roots although William Friedkins masterpiece, The Exorcist, took it right back there again. Horror has potently mixed with other genres and Halloween and Nightmare On Elm Street showed how horror can be a cash cow franchise, a lesson demonstrated once again by the stomach turning Saw series. Horror demonstrates the Guignol potential of cinema and the brutal way it can toy with the viewer. Movies released and planned for release in 2017. Free horror movies papers, essays, and research papers. Will you find romance in 2015 If its at the movies, then yes. Were looking at the biggest and best romantic movies of 2015, whether its about pure love or. Peeping Tom film still. Fifty years ago, Michael Powell was the darling of British cinema, thanks to the movies he directed with Emeric Pressburger, including A Matter of Life and Death, and The Red Shoes. And then he made Peeping Tom. The film has since been reappraised, but in 1. Hitchcock released Psycho it was greeted with distaste strong enough to derail Powells career. The Observers CA Lejeune wrote Its a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom. It tells the story of Mark Carl Boehm, an unassuming focus puller at a film studio who spends his free time working on what he calls his documentary. Chillingly, it entails filming women with a camera that has a spike concealed in the leg of the tripod, and a mirror in which the victims are forced to watch their own contorted faces as they are stabbed to death. Afterwards, Mark obsessively reviews the film. His voyeurism hinges on the need to see the fear on the womens faces as they realise theyre about to die. The film still shocks today, so its easy to see why people were so deeply upset at the time. One of Marks victims is played by Moira Shearer, the much loved star of The Red Shoes. The upset was compounded by Powells own presence in the film. It turns out that Marks pathology is related to his dominating father, a psychologist who subjected his son to experiments in fear from an early age. In the home movies documenting these terrifying experiments, Powell himself plays the father, while the young Mark is played by Powells nine year old son Columba. The truly upsetting element in Peeping Tom is, of course, what it says about the cinema, in which we are all voyeurs. Not just the audience transfixed by images of other peoples lives, but also the director who orchestrates the action from behind the camera. All this filming isnt healthy, Mark is warned at one point, and Powell, contrary to the critics at the time, understood this very well. There is some irony in the fact that his critique of cinematic voyeurism is now regarded as a horror classic. Killian Fox Vampyr Photograph Ronald Grant Archive. I wanted to create a waking dream on screen and show that horror is not to be found in the things around us but in our own subconscious, said Danish film maker Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose loose adaptation of two stories from Sheridan Le Fanu Carmilla and The Room in the Dragon Volant was initially conceived as a silent movie. Sound was added during production, but the films trance like images could stand on their own as a visual poem in which the action seems to take place on the cusp of dreams and reality. Apart from German actress Sybille Schmitz, who plays the vampires chief victim, and French actor Maurice Schutz, who plays her father, the cast was non professional. Baron Nicolas de Gunzberg, who provided finance for the film, also took the leading role under the pseudonym Julian West. He plays a roving occult investigator called Allan Grey David in some versions who arrives at an old inn by the side of a river and explores a nearby castle where an evil doctor appears to be helping a vampire prey on the lords two daughters one of whom is bedridden, suffering from a strange sickness, while the other is being held captive. Grey reads a book on vampirism and acts as our surrogate in this curious realm of crooked staircases, off kilter corridors and Freudian keys and doors, a world where mens shadows take on a life of their own and skeletal hands grasp bottles of poison. Dreyer shrugs off conventional linear narrative and takes an experimental approach, plunging us into a waking nightmare that isnt so much black and white as it is misty grey. When cinematographer Rudolph Mat who would later direct films such as the noir thriller DOA showed Dreyer some frames made hazy by accidental exposure to light, the director had him place a layer of gauze in front of the lens to replicate the effect for the rest of the film. Many of the images from this movie have passed into horror iconography an old man standing by the river tolling a bell with a scythe over his shoulder Greys dream of being buried alive the evil doctor suffocating in flour dropped from the mill above. Its hard to spot where nightmares end and reality begins. Kubo And The Two Strings Downloading. This really is a film that exemplifies the idea of dreaming with our eyes open. Anne Billson Lina Leandersson in Let the Right One In. Photograph c. MagnoliaEverettRex Featurec. MagnoliaEverett Rex Feature. The snow whirls, the nights draw in and a gloomy Swedish housing estate becomes a pocket murderesss hunting ground. Let the Right One In is based on a book by John Ajvide Lindqvist and directed by Tomas Alfredson. Here is a vampire story born out of the shadows a film of whispered secrets. But dont lean too close it may well pull out your throat. Oskar Kre Hedebrant is a bullied 1. Eli Lina Leandersson, who is pale of skin and dark of eye and wise beyond her years Ive been 1. Eli has recently moved into the estate with a man who may possibly be her father, or a paedophile as he was in the novel, or a lover who has grown old while she remains young. She needs constant feeding and her blundering, alcoholic neighbours provide easy pickings. Yet it would be too easy to file Let the Right One In as a tale of a hunter and her prey, or of light and dark, good and evil. Most of its inhabitants are victims of one stripe or another. They are the marginalised and the dispossessed, living their lives below the parapet and sustaining themselves with blood and alcohol. And while these people may, at times, be able to help each other, and even love each other, the transaction comes with a terrible price. Eli helps Oskar confront the bullies and so Oskar helps Eli when she is left abandoned in her decaying apartment. But the films finale does not quite offer the happy resolution weve been wishing for. We are left wondering just where these characters go from here. On its release in 2. Let the Right One In which has since been subjected to an American remake found itself billed as the antidote to the Twilight pictures, a movie that brought a little mystery and magic back to the hoary old bloodsucker yarn. Perhaps it gave it some red meat as well. The Twilight kids would presumably never be caught scaling the walls of a hospital to feast on a patient, or snuffling spilt blood from a dirty stone floor, as Eli does. Alfredsons heroine is sensitive and sympathetic. But we are never allowed to forget that she is also a stone cold killer the embodiment of the old adage about the snake that winds up biting the cowboy who gives it shelter Because Im a snake, stupid. Its what I do. Earlier this year, the horror author Stephen King bemoaned the way in which the vampire genre has recently been hijacked by lovelorn southern gentlemen and boy toys with big, dewy eyes.