If you want to stay home and watch movies on Halloween but actually getting your hands on the full slate of films on our Six Degrees of Frankenstein marathon seems like too much trouble, consider Turner Classic Movies your back-up. The channel began its 48 Hours of Horror this morning at 6:15 with a showing of Mad Love, the Peter Lorre-starring tale of fatal attraction for which I am a total nerd. Highlights coming up over the next two days include:

…Read more

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.

[Via Bloody-Disgusting]

• Oh man … I totally forgot about the Val Lewton blogathon, and now I’m way too busy with Sundance prep to write something up. In any case, it starts today, to coincide with the TCM premiere of Val Lewton: The Man In the Shadows. I saw Kent Jones’ doc (narrated by Martin Scorsese) at Telluride, and it’s definitely a must-see for fans of films like Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie who want a taste of Lewton’s lesser-known works.
• Anyone could have guessed that last night’s Un-Golden Globes would be “weird”, but who could have guessed that it would have moved so many journalists to lapse into poetics? First Variety likened the experience to a dream; then, the NY Times topped their coverage with this photo of an unusually long-faced E! anchor, with a caption pointing up his supposed existential dilemma. Now, David Poland’s getting into the act, with this revelation: “I don’t really like ghosts as much as I enjoy the living.”
• A week or so ago, Jurgen Fauth mentioned that he’d bought an URL that he didn’t know what to do with. He’s since figured it out: IDrinkYourMilkshake.com has now become a web portal dedicated to aggregating discussions––and inevitable video mashups, as above––concerning There Will Be Blood. Act now, and you can even get an @idrinkyourmilkshake.com email address!
• Bob Westal ponders Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. “Could this film be the next Duck Soup combining the silliest comedy and the sharpest satire?”

• Above: John C. Reilly, in character as Dewey Cox, performs Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.” I still think Walk Hard looks terrible, but I have to admit, he’s got the hip swivel down… [Via The Playlist]
• OMG, it IS real! The A.V. Club taste tests Brawndo: “I can’t see slamming one of these, or even drinking more than one a year, but it beats the flavor of most energy drinks. And you’re doing your part to help the world of forgotten film with every can.”
• Whitney at Pop Candy points out that Strange Culture, my favorite doc from Sundance 2007, is premiering on the Sundance Channel tonight at 9:35 ET. I’ve written about the film here and here.
• Michael Guillen announces a Val Lewton Blogathon. Karina marks her calendar. [Via GreenCine Daily]

Yay! It’s here. First thing’s first: two of the three tributes will, indeed, be presented to Daniel Day-Lewis and Shyam Benega; the other will focus on composer Michel Legrand (awesome). Other highlights: special screenings of King Vidor’s The Big Parade, a documentary about Val Lewton directed by Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones, a program dedicated to George Kuchar, and the premiere of Gerald Peary’s doc FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES: The Story of American Film Criticism – which, theoretically, I’m in. See the full schedule, cribbed from the press release, after the jump.

…Read more