Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Spooky Things #2: Victor Sjostrom's PHANTOM CARRIAGE


Within a few years of its release in 1921, Victor Sjostrom’s The Phantom Carriage was considered a masterpiece of the cinema, alongside such canonical stalwarts as The Gold Rush, Battleship Potemkin, and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Charlie Chaplin thought The Phantom Carriage was the greatest film ever made. However, as the silent era ended and Carriage’s eye-popping-for-the-time special effects became outmoded, Sjostrom’s film fell out of favor and was soon regarded as more of a relic than a milestone. Fortunately, back in 2011, the Criterion Collection deigned to release a Bluray of The Phantom Carriage.

Sunday, October 1, 2017

Spooky Things #1: M.R. James "The Mezzotint"


Well it's Halloween season. And - why not?! - let me go ahead and use that time to inch my way back into the blogosphere.

I'm officially done as the movie reviewer over at GreenCine. Everything I've written for them now routes to one of those "404 Not Found!" singularities. 'Twas a nice gig whilst I had it. As time allows, I will slowly port over everything I've written for them (published and otherwise) to this site.

But never mind that. For this month - October 2017 - I will go ahead and force myself to do daily check-ins. All of those check-ins will be somehow horror/spook/ghost/ghoul/ghast/goblin/hobgoblin/witch/etc.-related. What a devil of a time we will all have, my faithful readers!