Tag: Film Studies
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A Sci-Fi Screenplay Written by Artificial Intelligence
Here’s an intriguing article about a screenplay written by a computer. I found this at ARS Technica. Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival…
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Remembering the Midnight Monster Shows
At Paleofuture, Matt Novak has a good essay on the “spook shows” of the 1940s, 50s, & 60s. We had a couple of these in my home town when I was a kid. Of course, I was always there in the thick of it. Midnight ghost shows (sometimes called “spook,” “voodoo,” or “monster” shows) promised…
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7 Films About Neuroses & Psychoses That Don’t Get Enough Attention
Jonathan Eng writes on CURNBLOG, “Film history is jam-packed with neuroses, psychoses, and character disorders writ large and small. As Vivian Leigh and Dustin Hoffman and Javier Bardem and Natalie Portman can attest, having a DSM-5 condition can lead to an Oscar. Russell Crowe, in A Beautiful Mind, had to settle for a BAFTA. “When…
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Experimental Filmmaker Stan Brakhage
When I was about 11 or 12 years old, I read in Famous Monsters magazine about a kid who made an amateur science fiction movie on 8 mm film. To achieve his ray-gun effect, the kid scratched each individual frame of film and colored the scratch with an ink marker. When, as a teenager, my…
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Extraordinary Paranormal Noir
A blog called Film Noir of the Week reviews Séance On A Wet Afternoon, saying: This is the story of a mentally unstable woman who believes that she communicates with the dead. Her hubris demands that she control and improve her fate, and so she turns to crime in order to satisfy her goals. Séance on…
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Creature Feature
Ben Chapman wore the gill-man suit in Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) for all of the scenes filmed on land, while Ricou Browning portrayed the Creature in all the underwater scenes. In fact, Ricou Browning did the underwater scenes for all three Creature movies. In Revenge of the Creature (1955), Tom Hennesy played the…
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The First Horror Anthology?
On his web site 1,000 Misspent Hours and Counting, Scott Ashlin begins his review of the 1919 silent film Weird Tales (also known as Eerie Tales) with, “Rarely does one have to wait long after finding what seems to be the first of something before an even earlier example comes to light, but that…
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Murder on the Thames
In his Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations, Tony Reeves discusses the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy: “There are wonderful London locations in Alfred Hitchcock’s British film since The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956, but first the collision between the blackly humorous script and director Alfred Hitchcock’s virulent misogyny, previously kept in check by production codes, makes for queasy viewing…
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Back In the USSR
From the Austin Film Society, a fascinating article about the 1936 Russian film, Cosmic Voyage: Despite its impressive accuracy in several aspects of space travel, the Soviet sci-fi film COSMIC VOYAGE (1936) was scarcely known to exist until recently. Fritz Lang’s German sci-fi film WOMAN IN THE MOON (1929) received much wider distribution and exhibition…