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When Fritz Lang began in film he was a better writer than director. This lavish two-part thriller sees him concocting a multi-genre mashup, shoehorning cowboy action thrills and an exotic lost Incan civilization into dagger-and-poison serial skullduggery. The Spiders Blu-ray Kino Classics 1919 / B&W / 1:33 flat / 173 min. / Street Date August 23, 2016 / Die Spinnen / available through Kino Classics / 29.95 Starring Carl de Vogt, Ressel Orla, Lil Dagover, Georg John. Cinematography Karl Freund Designers Otto Hunte, Carl Ludwig Kirmse, Heinrich Umlauff, Hermann Warm Music (2012) Ben Model Produced by Erich Pommer Written and Directed by Fritz Lang   There appears to be nothing new under the sun, even if lovers of Indiana Jones don't realize that most everything he did, had been done long before in silent serials. I have a lazy habit here of claiming that Fritz Lang invented most of the basic ideas we see in every adventure genre except the western. But these...

Cinema Art from Lawrence, Kansas?   Industrial filmmaker Herk Harvey comes through with a classic horror gem for the ages. A haunted church organist begins to suspect that her hallucinations are more than just nerves. And who is that ghoulish man who keeps appearing in reflections, or popping up out of nowhere? Carnival of Souls Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 63 1962 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 78 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date July 12, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger, Art Ellison, Stan Levitt, Herk Harvey. Cinematography Maurice Prather Film Editor Dan Palmquist, Bill de Jarnette Original Music Gene Moore Assistant Director Raza (Reza) Badiyi Written by John Clifford Produced and Directed by Herk Harvey

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Herk Harvey's marvelous Carnival of Souls is an anomaly in screen horror, a regional effort that transcends its production limitations to deliver a tingling encounter with the uncanny. Harvey was a prolific producer of industrial films,...

Shock takes a deeper look at 1962’s deranged semi-remake, The Cabinet Of Caligari. There’s a song by Trent Reznor’s electro-outfit Nine Inch Nails, the B-side to the single “Sin”; it’s a grinding cover version of the classic Queen song “Get Down Make Love”, that opens with one of the most memorable film samples in industrial…

The post In Praise of the Truly Deranged 1962 Remake of The Cabinet Of Caligari appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.

Douglas Sirk's first American movie came out so well that Prc sold it to MGM, earning Sirk a promotion out of the Poverty Row studios. John Carradine is excellent - and underplays! -- as the Hangman of Prague who moonlights as a depraved sex criminal. But the context in this wartime propaganda movie is serious -- it commemorates the Nazi murder of an entire Czech town. Hitler's Madman DVD-r The Warner Archive Collection 1943 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 84 min. / Street Date December 1, 2015 / available through the WBshop / 18.95 Starring Patricia Morrison, John Carradine, Alan Curtis, Howard Freeman, Ralph Morgan, Ludwig Stössel, Edgar Kennedy, Al Shean, Elizabeth Russell, Jimmy Conlin, Ava Gardner, Natalie Draper, Victor Kilian, Otto Reichow, Peter van Eyck, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Blanch Yurka. Cinematography (Eugen Schüfftan, credited as Technical Advisor), Jack Greenhalgh Film Editor Dan Milner Second unit and uncredited production designer Edgar G. Ulmer Original Music...

This Halloween, if you want a good, old-fashioned, low-tech scare in between your costume parties and your horror movie viewing, we have this recommendation for you: Turn out the lights, grab your flashlight, place it beneath your chin, and gather round your scare-hungry friends for a spooky reading of “Enoch.” This creepy tale is a short story by Robert Bloch, who also wrote the novel that was the basis of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” one of the films in the Top 10 of HitFix’s Ultimate Horror Poll. Bloch first published “Enoch” in horror fiction pulp magazine “Weird Tales” in 1946. Among other works by Bloch — whose mentor was H.P. Lovecraft — was the screenplay for “The Cabinet of Caligari” (which also made the Top 100 of our horror poll), multiple stories about Jack the Ripper and 10 episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” “Enoch” is about a man named Seth plagued (or protected?) by a...