Peter Bogdanovich's TARGETS is fifty years old this week.

Fifty years ago this week Peter Bogdanovich released his outstanding debut feature, TARGETS. In The Quietus I take a look back at TARGETS and its commentary on U.S. firearms culture.

Follow the link here.

Folk Horror in The Basement!

SCREAM is 50!

This month the marvelous SCREAM magazine celebrates its 50th issue! I take a close look at Polanski's adaptation of ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968).

Out August 29th!

THE DARK SIDE #194 - IN SHOPS AUGUST 2ND!

In January 1934 screenwriter John L. Balderston adapted Bram Stoker’s 1914 short story ‘Dracula’s Guest’ into an outline for producer David O. Selznick as an intended sequel to Universal’s DRACULA (1931). Balderston’s original storyline was designed, as he himself said, to capitalise on the ‘great box office value of torture and cruelty’: Dracula's Daughter was written by Balderston as a S/M dominatrix(complete with whips and chains)who draws the blood of virile young men.

Balderston’s vision of the female vampire was not to be realised in the film that eventually emerged two and a half years later. In its development from script to screen, DRACULA’S DAUGHTER would fall to tighter restrictions placed on screen content by the industry’s regulating body, the Production Code Administration (the ‘Hays Code’) under Joseph Breen, and to increasing opposition to the horror film by state and overseas censors. Although the version of DRACULA’S DAUGHTER that Universal produced in 1936 is now often praised by keen-eyed critics for its risqué undercurrent of lesbianism, its graphic content in terms of sex and violence is very much tamer than Universal had originally planned. 

My article in the latest THE DARK SIDE (out August 2nd)reveals the extent to which the PCA and BBFC managed to defang DRACULA’S DAUGHTER!