THE UNKNOWN at Hyde Park Picture House, May 20th.

I am introducing Tod Browning's silent classic THE UNKNOWN at Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds, on May 20th, as part of the Yorkshire Silent Film Festival.

Info and tickets HERE.

I'm introducing FRANKENSTEIN & THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN at the DERBY QUAD

As part of their Universal Monsters season, and tying in with my one-day course on Universal Horror, on Friday 1st and Saturday 2nd June, I'm introducing a double-bill of the James Whale classics FRANKENSTEIN (1931) and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN at the Derby Quad.

For more information and to book tickets go HERE.

To see the full line-up of the Universal Monsters season go HERE.

For more details of my Universal Horrors course go HERE.

My retrospective of FREAKS in SCREAM magazine!

Issue #48 of SCREAM includes my retrospective of Tod Browning's classic FREAKS. Out now at W.H. Smiths and other retailers. Or you can buy a copy HERE.

CANDYMAN now on Kindle!

My book on Candyman is now out on Kindle!

You can preview it HERE

UNIVERSAL HORROR one-day course!

Come along to the Derby Quad cinema on Saturday 2nd June and join my one-day course in Universal Horror!
Full details here.

My book on CANDYMAN is now in stock!

Now in stock at AMAZON.COM

10 Great Spaghetti Westerns

Italian exploitation cinema has traditionally drawn on American genres, and never more popularly than in the spaghetti western...

Read my BFI list of 10 great spaghetti westerns. 

50 Years of Planet of the Apes

The astonishing ending of Planet of the Apes (1968) with Charlton Heston screaming in despair as the camera lingers on the shattered remains of the Statue of Liberty is unremitting in its bleakness. And even watching it 50 years later, we can hardly rest easy.

Go here to read my tribute to Planet of the Apes on the BFI website.

Candyman - now available to pre-order!

When Candyman was released in 1992, Roger Ebert gave it his thumbs up remarking that the film was “scaring him with ideas and gore, rather than just gore.” Indeed, Candyman is almost unique in 1990s horror cinema in that it tackles its socio-political themes head on. As critic Kirsten Moana Thompson has remarked, Candyman is ‘the return of the repressed as national allegory’: the film’s hook-handed killer of urban legend embodies a history of racism, miscegenation, lynching and slavery – ‘the taboo secrets of America’s past and present.’

In this book in the Devil’s Advocates series, Jon Towlson considers how Candyman can be read both as a ‘return of the repressed’ during the George H. W. Bush Sr. era, and as an example of nineties neoconservative horror. He traces the project’s development from its origins as a Clive Barker short story (‘The Forbidden’) through to finished picture; discusses the importance of its gritty real-life Cabrini-Green setting; and analyses the film’s appropriation (and interrogation) of urban myths. Included in the study are the two official sequels (Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh [1995] and Candyman: Day of the Dead [1999]) plus a number of other urban myth-inspired horror movies such as Bloody Mary (2006) and the Urban Legend franchise. The book features an in-depth interview with Candyman’s writer-director Bernard Rose. 

ORDER HERE

"Dirty, Slimy Freaks!"

Read my in-depth article on Tod Browning, Lon Chaney, Freaks and the Eugenics Movement, over at DIABOLIQUE