Saturday, February 14, 2009

A History of Horror

We've got one more week of Firefly, and then we'll close that out the following week with the feature film Serenity. On March 4, we'll embark on a history of horror in the Slaughtered Lamb Cinema.

We're bypassing the classic horror silents at this point (quite likely to revisit them in the future). Before we begin our weekly series, we'll be tying things in with our February movie party, focusing on some of the early talkies of Tod Browning. Browning, while most famous for his version of Dracula with Bela Lugosi, had quite a career working with Lon Chaney, who very likely would have gone on to star in Dracula had he not passed away due to cancer after making one successful talkie - The Unholy Three - a sound remake of a silent Chaney/Browning collaboration.


We'll be starting off with that film on Saturday the 21st, and following it with two more of Browning's non-Dracula follow ups, the 1932 cult classic Freaks and the film that reunited him with Bela Lugosi, Mark of the Vampire - itself another remake of the lost Browning/Chaney film - London After Midnight. We'll close out the night with the documentary Universal Horrors, which not only covers that studios horror output from the 1930s-40s, but also the films of the other studios who were quick to jump on Universal's horror bandwagon. This will be a great introduction to the films we'll be featuring on Wednesdays on the weeks and months ahead.

In addition to classics you'll be familiar with (Dracula, Frankenstein, King Kong), we'll introduce or reintroduce you to the great films of the period which you may have never seen before. We hope you'll join us for some classic horror films next Saturday, and if you're able, for our weekly tour through the halls of horror starting in March. Click on the link to the Slaughtered Lamb Calendar in the sidebar to the right to see the weekly schedule.

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