VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE
Thanks to everyone who voted!
The roots of horror run deep. As the 2014 Summer of Blood begins to wind down, I felt it only right to pay homage to those roots, going back to some of the very first movies to use the now-common tropes of body-count pictures (though not always in common ways) in a style that was deliberately conceived as "horror", as opposed to more incidentally horror-like mysteries or crime dramas. This the period after Dracula and before the strong enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, when imaginative filmmakers of the early sound era could go crazy with all kinds of weird and warped ideas to freak the hell out of Depression-era audiences. And while they've largely lost that power today, there's still a lot of charm and low-key terror to be mined from them.
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)
From IMDb: "A mad scientist seeks to mingle human blood with that of an ape, and resorts to kidnapping women for his experiments."
Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)
From IMDb: "The disappearance of people and corpses leads a reporter to a wax museum and a sinister sculptor."
The Vampire Bat (1933)
From IMDb: "When the villagers of Klineschloss start dying of blood loss, the town fathers suspect a resurgence of vampirism."
14 August 2014
3 comments:
Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.
Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.
Might I propose The Bat Whispers (1930).
ReplyDeletehttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020668/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
From IMDb: "A master criminal terrorizes the occupants of an isolated country mansion."
Itself a remake of 1926's The Bat, noteworthy both as a pre-Dracula proto-slasher murder-mystery flick, and ALSO as a primary influence on the creation of Batman!
Oh, how long did I dither between The Bat Whispers and The Vampire Bat. But if I recall correctly, there's not a single death in The Bat Whispers (I haven't seen it in years)? And that seemed like I should probably disqualify it on those grounds. But by all means, anyone who wants to write it in is welcome to.
ReplyDeleteDamn. I really wanted to see what 1933 had instead of Paris Hilton.
ReplyDelete