Author: Margeaux Hendricks
The Reboot Fallacy: Why Every Film is a Remake
We forget, within a modern societal structure, that the propagation of culture is often achieved through re-enactment or retelling. When oral tradition was the dominant social form, prior to the written word, the most famous, most important and the most socially relevant stories or mythologies were the ones being retold at festivals, around campfires and…
B-horror and the Rise of the Scream Queen
The b-movie or b-picture was a product of the Golden Age of Hollywood (arguably the 1930s-1950s, more or less) and really took off with the introduction of the “double feature” at cinemas. The b-picture was the more cheaply produced, not always feature length, curtain-raiser at double feature events. Several genres were represented in the…
The Evolution of the Slasher Film
In my 120 Years of Horror post, a clear path was mapped from the advent of film making to the current milieu dominating the horror genre; the slasher was a late bloomer within this genre. By the 1950s film making was fast moving away from the familiar tropes and formulae of literary horror adaptations. Audiences…
120 Years of Horror
What was the first horror film ever made? Many people might guess Lugosi’s Dracula or Nosferatu, maybe even Frankenstein; and those are good guesses for the average Joe. If you were one of those thinking of Nosferatu, you’d still be about 27 years off. Many film buffs, film scholars and fans agree that the first horror motion picture is…