Nerds for 1930s horror (myselfincluded) have cause to both cry and rejoice today. Bad news first: Universal has announced plans to remakeBride of Frankenstein, James Whale’s 1936 masterpiece, with The Illusionist’s Neil Berger in talks to write/direct. Berger’s probably not the worst choice in the world, but I think I speak for all concerned fans when I say that Oingo Boingo’s “Weird Science” video was remake enough.
In much better news: Lou Lumenick alerts us to the October release of the Karloff and Lugosi Horror Classics DVD box set, which includes the first DVD release of my favorite horror film of the 1930s, Michael Curtiz’s The Walking Dead, starring Karloff as a pianist who is wrongly executed and then brought back to life. Yay!
It’s been a huge week in history, but not so huge at the box office. We decide to take a look back at some classic movies with conscience, each made at a pivotal moment in America history. Movies where the hero doesn’t stand up to a diabolical villain, but instead has to face a latent evil embedded in society. We discuss Fury, The Ox-Bow Incident, 12 Angry Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird, among others.
Karina reports on here disappointing experience of being shut in on Halloween. It wasn’t the lack of social engagement that spoiled the evening, it was sub-par horror programing on Turner Classic Movies. She offers some sound advice for putting together a killer classic horror marathon.
Focus Features has set a 1000 screen-wide, September 12 release date for the George Clooney starring Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading. David Poland wonders is this is a thinly-veiled dump: “[H]ave The Coens asked to be pulled out of the Oscar race next year? Has the studio seen a first cut of the picture and decided that it wasn’t a racer? Or is Focus just going to pull out the stops for Harvey Milk and pushing this high profile distraction out of the way?”
“It’s astonishing, not only to think about the challenges Paul [Sturtz] and David [Wilson] faced in creating a regional non-fiction festival that would take place in a small mid-western town during the winter, but also to consider how quickly the festival has earned the respect and goodwill of the international documentary film community—as well as the people of Columbia, Missouri.” Joel Heller introduces a podcast interview with the co-directors of the True/False Film Festival.
Mental Floss quizes your knowledge of Universal’s classic 1930s monster movies.
Lindsay Lohan has been replaced as the celebrity face of Jill Stuart by Hillary Swank. Yes, it’s exactly that kind of news day.
Cory Doctrow at BoingBoing points to this scanned article from a 1933 issue of Modern Mechanix, which goes inside the Hollywood makeup studio of the era. Much of the story concentrates on how Boris Karloff (as you know, my classic horror movie hearthrob) was made up to look like Frankenstein and The Mummy, but my favorite part is the headline screencapped above.
RKO has announced that they’re setting up a production company to remake eight classic, Val Lewton-produced thriller/horror films over the course of the next two years. The movies to be remade include I Walked With a Zombie (a mystical-racist spin on Jane Eyre, one of Lewton’s many collaborations with director Jacques Tourneur), While the City Sleeps (star-studded late Fritz Lang), Lady Scarface (the one starring Judith Anderson and Eric Blore, not the porno of the same title), The Body Snatcher (most notable for a single scene showdown between Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff), Bedlam, The Leopard Man, The Monkey’s Paw, and The Seventh Victim.
I’m a huge fan of the Lewton films, but they’re not the kind of thing you can really be precious about––remaking Lewton’s library isn’t exactly like remaking Citizen Kane (which RKO coincidentally also holds the remake rights for). For the most part, Lewton was tasked with making micro-budget schlock that could be cranked out quickly and turn an even quicker profit, and it’s almost an accident that the films hold up as well as they do today.
But it is a bit troubling that Twisted Pictures––the people who brought us the Saw franchise––are co-financing four of the remakes, including I Walked With a Zombie. Even leaving aside the fact that Zombie is the one Lewton film I’ve seen that could never be made in its original form today––check out the “weird Black magic” double entendre in the original trailer above––the thing that makes the Lewton films great is that most of the scares are psychological, rooted in the implication of things that we can’t actually know and don’t actually see. Can you a imagine a more unnatural bedfellow than the see-everything style of Saw? No one’s expecting a batch of B-horror to be reformulated into grade-A masterpieces, but I don’t want to see RKO bastardize these titles as mere cover for the churning of more generic torture porn, either.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Focus Features has set a 1000 screen-wide, September 12 release date for the George Clooney starring Coen Brothers film 
