“An American Werewolf In London” is the film that I remember most distinctly as a child. It’s partly because I knew I wasn’t allowed to watch it, partly because it scared me so much. It’s only later in life that I fully appreciate the frightening influence it had on me – the reason I slept with the light on for weeks afterwards – was because it was so good. It is the cinema of attractions, the spectacle. An immediate and direct injection of emotion, be it humour, fear, anger, happiness. John Landis was a master at toying with his audience’s primal emotions. But, with classic Hollywood narrative as his blueprint, he could also tell a great story.

Rightly or wrongly I look back at the last decade of horror films as one that gave us nothing new. We retread old ground, often with poor remakes or as they became known during the period – the re-imagining. Instead of western audiences enjoying new and interesting tales from the East – a craze that started in the late 1990s with the likes of Hideo Nakata’s 1998 chiller “Ring” or Takashi Miike’s 1999 film “Audition” – we had American producers nicking the stories and replaying them for English-speaking audiences with pretty Californian teenagers.

The following essay is an accompanying piece to the following Top 10 Films Lists that feature Ridley Scott’s Alien: Science-Fiction Horror, Scariest Movie Scenes, Gory Film scenes, and Films beginning with ‘A’. Please also read my review of the film HERE
A critical study closely examining Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as a re-evaluation of feminist culture in cinema

Looking at feminist writer Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the classical Hollywood film it is interesting how Alien (Scott, 1979) defies her claims about scopophilia, in that the film both subverts her ideas about voyeuristic …

d. Stanley Kubrick; w. Stanley Kubrick; st. Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Michael Bates, Warren Clarke, John Clive
Stanley Kubrick’s mesmerising 1971 classic is an interesting beast. The film’s hallucinatory visuals depicting a strange, narcissistic society of the future, steeped in seventies art deco and harsh, contrasting lighting, paint a bleak, uncompromising picture. Kubrick’s use of implied violence, death and cultural destruction throw the viewer into a hellish, emotional quagmire of pessimism and hate.

Yet we’re complicit in the violence as Malcolm McDowell’s Alex narrates the story to us as if we are …

“Are you telling me you built a time machine out of a DeLorean”: The Magic of Robert Zemeckis

Robert Zemeckis was once asked if television was a bad influence on children. He answered, emphatically, “television isn’t an education, but I see no reason to turn it off.” What would so many television-starved children give for Zemeckis as a babysitter, or indeed a father: ‘Can I pur-lease watch more TV?’/’Of course you can!’ He was a product of the television generation – this new visual medium that found its way into most …

The allure of the single location film
Films set in a single location (or predominantly in a single location) have always fascinated me. Perhaps it’s their theatre roots, as many single-location films derive from the work of playwrights. The consequence of that is strong characterisation, an emphasis on good acting, and tight control of plot that usually takes place over a few hours.
Another reason I am a fan of single location (and indeed single day films or those set over a short prescribed period of time) derives from my distaste …

“Do you like baseball…do you, Anderson?”
“Yeah, I do. You know, it’s the only time when a black man can wave a stick at a white man and not start a riot.” – Mississippi Burning, 1988 (Directed by Alan Parker)
The Birth of Film: The Birth of a Nation
Hollywood has addressed the difficult and often destructive theme of race and prejudice since its early beginnings. The most iconic film of early silent cinema is D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”. It is one of the most lauded films of the period, …

Have you ever had a Lloyd Grossman cooking sauce? The makers of said cooking sauce commissioned a survey that yielded the following information: Britons consume only four staple meals – we cannot be bothered to cook anymore. According to the Guardian newspaper that would suggest we eat one of our favourite meals – that being spaghetti Bolognese – nearly three-thousand times in an average lifetime. Perhaps this says we just don’t like to cook, at least, extravagantly, or that our appetite is less adventurous than we might think. Or maybe …