This is honestly one of the most bizarre moments in all cinema ...
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Elspeth Dudgeon undergoes an astonishing transformation (with the aid of special makeup and camera filters) in SH! THE OCTOPUS (1937).
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Kim Newman
@AnnoDracula
Novelist and critic.
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No actor should ever be cast as Batman unless they ace this scene in a screen test which then gets leaked online. Indeed, all former Batmen ought to record their own versions. twitter.com/YUXLOA/status/
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RIP - the great cartoonist of the macabre, Gahan Wilson (1930-2019).
A thing I love about Margot Kidder's Lois Lane is that gives the impression being Superman's girlfriend is in the Top Ten Things in Her Life but not the Top Five.
Here's my TV serial pitch - a depressed, middle-aged policeman is murdered and a cheerful schoolgirl spends six episodes investigating before deciding there are too many depressed, middle-aged policemen on TV anyway and the killer should be allowed to get away with it.
If you start watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at 22.17 this evening, Brexit happens just as Leatherface hits the guy in the head with a sledgehammer.
Remember the B Ark in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? If Douglas Adams were around now, he'd fill the thing with influencers.
Before the far right claim Vera Lynn, remember that a) she sued the British National Party for using her recording of 'The White Cliffs of Dover' as an anti-immigration anthem, and b) she was the patron of this charity dedicated to Burmese war veterans. h4fa.org.uk/veterans
The lesson of Deadpool is that Something Different works. So make a daffy G-rated Squirrel Girl movie aimed at tweens. Not Deadpool again.
I'm sitting down to watch The Death of Stalin - because a head of state dying ignominiously strikes me as a hilarious feelgood Christmas film pitch at the moment.
The Sun God is angry. We must sacrifice the leader of the tribe. Get David Cameron into the wicker man now.
If it's time to 'move on' from lockdown issues, let's get to the massive fucking corruption shall we?
Random film images of the day - Das Singende Klingende Baumchen/The Singing Ringing Tree (1957). Trigger warning for kids still traumatised by its 1960s TV airing in the UK on Tales From Europe.
Several horror reboots will soon have prologues in which President Trump scrawls his signature on a pardon ... then cut to a long-incarcerated franchise fiend being released into the community.
Obviously, it was a disappointing night for Sharknado 5 Global Swarming.
Wes Craven reinvented horror at least four times - most directors don't even manage it once.
Every time you have the urge to remake a Stephen King property that's already been done brilliantly, buy the rights to an as-yet-unfilmed Peter Straub novel instead. Then you won't get hammered with those 'not as good as the one from 1984' reviews.
I just posted this as part of a jokey thread, but thought it was worth looking at on its own - Nancy Loomis, Jamie Lee Curtis and PJ Soles smiling ... Halloween (1978).
Without Romero, no Nightmare Movies ... without Nightmare Movies, no me. Thanks, George.
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I couldn't put into one tweet how I feel about George A Romero, his passing & his influence on me. So I wrote this. edgarwrighthere.com/2017/07/17/rem
Before Hitler shot himself in the bunker, did he take a moment to gloat that newspapers and newsreels would suffer falling circulations when there was no war/Nazi news to print?
Given the choice between a Boris Johnson book about Shakespeare or your Nan not dying, how many times do you want to punch the Prime Minister in the face?
Don't worry, if slides out you'll still get quality Neil Gaiman tweets from @realneilhonest, @neilgaimanandIdliketosellyoustuff, @gailneamanmadabouthelicopters, @thisissomuchneilithurts, @neilbringbackmarathonbarsgaiman, @notabotneil, @probablyamabotneil, etc.
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Twitter's felt for a while like a party that was fun a while ago but now it's probably time to go home. I suspect this will be the equivalent of turning all the lights on or the moment when the party host starts cleaning their teeth:
theverge.com/2022/10/30/234
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A new film series from Mark Kermode will begin on BBC Four in July. Details this way... buff.ly/2lIDayn
This woman - Saffy from Birmingham, apparently - is my casting choice for Captain Britain.
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Happy 90th to ... Tod Browning's Dracula, released on this day in 1931.
It is impossible to overestimate the impact George A. Romero had on the horror film.
Dear makers of important, sincere, downbeat dramas and documentaries about the way we live today - sorry but I'm watching Blood From the Mummy's Tomb this evening instead.
I'm always cheered by the ending (spoiler) of The Castle of Fu Manchu, last film in its series, where Christopher Lee's Fu Manchu says 'the world shall hear from me again' and then we didn't.
The rule is that if a coronation has to be televised, the BBC has to give us a Quatermass serial a couple of months later.
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I've no interest in or knowledge of plenty of things - could pay me to write about them? I've never watched and don't see the point of those cooking contest shows, for instance. 750 words on Great British Bake-Off by Monday at the usual rates?
It's been too long since anyone remembered how great screen adaptations of Walter Tevis novels tend to be ...
Imagine thinking that banning Maus on Holocaust Memorial Day was the right choice.
It's Ray Harryhausen's centenary. #Harryhausen100. The first film I saw in a cinema was his First Men in the Moon. He pips even Melies to the title of great effects-man-as-auteur and is responsible for more kids falling in love with wonder at the movies than even Speilberg.
Didn't Myra Hindley die during Children in Need too? Is Pudsey Bear a vigilante angel of death for incarcerated serial killers?
Just sitting down to do a rough outline for the Secrets of Cinema Xmas Special. First big decision: should wear a) Colin Firth's jumper, b) Bruce Willis' vest, c) Gene Hackman's Santa suit, d) Christopher Plummer's Santa suit, or e) Carol Kane's fairy wings?
Universal monsters mean exponentially more to me than Star Wars, yet it never once occurred to me that it would be a good idea to belittle, hector, badger, harass and belabour Tom Cruise for trashing the franchise with The Mummy.
It's a very personal Daily Dracula anniversary for me - fifty years ago today, aged 11, I stayed up late on a Friday night to watch Dracula (1931) on UK TV ... that broadcast literally set the course of my life.
Very sorry to hear of the death of Derek Malcolm - always kind, generous and wicked. I'm still chuckling at something he said of the record after the press screening of Three Men and a Little Lady which could never be printed in The Guardian.
From now on, let's call the Prime Minister Captain Fuck the Lot of You Pleb Rotters You're So Unfair Why Don't You All Just Die and Leave Me All the Fucking Buns and I Am So Funny You Know Not a Whining Snivelling Useless Tossbag So There.
Farage and Morgan step down in the same week. It's like Nick Fury's recruiting for the Arsehole Initiative.
Contains a 14,500 word new novella 'Anno Dracula 1902 The Chances of Anything Coming From Mars ...' And a ribbon! Out in October.
I went and saw Psycho because the trailer indicated it was about this fat British guy gloating over crime scenes. Turned out he was in it for, like, two seconds standing with his back to the camera wearing a cowboy hat. What a con!
It occurs to me that I'd be eager to see the Downton Abbey movie if it had murders in it ... and an eccentric detective solves the mystery. Oh, and there should be sliding panels, secret passageways, a killer in a gorilla suit, and a curate filling the cellars with dynamite.
'If we found our Earth was doomed – say, by climatic changes – what would we do about it?’ ‘Nothing – just go on squabbling as usual.’ Quatermass and the Pit. #nigelknealewasrightagain
Some writing days involve taking words out or replacing them with better ones. Focusing on a daily count subtly deprioritises essential days where the end-of-play word count would be something like minus 250.
Just recorded commentary tracks for US BluRay releases of the Peter Cushing Dalek films with and ...
PS Don't give the money to Secret Fucking Cinema like last time.
It took six credited screenwriters to ruin The Mummy. The franchise was better served by Abbott and fucking Costello.
Surely, a twenty-years on sequel to Trainspotting should mostly involve visits to a series of untended graves.
Bastard just trashed Bonfire Night ... I suppose it's time to retire poor old Guy Fawkes and burn a Boris Johnson every November 5th for the next 400 years.
Sorry to hear that Dominic Cummings has resigned. He should have been sacked months ago.
The psychic talent I want to see sort out the ERG isn't Uri Geller. It's Carrie White.
I've signed every copy of the 30th anniversary edition of Anno Dracula - out now from - and have included a spooky doodle of some sort in about 5% of the print run. If you get one of these, feel free to post a picture of the doodle.
Deep down, we all knew it. Prime Minister Johnson despises us. All of us.
Very sorry to hear of the death of longtime film critic and horror scholar (and my neighbour) Alan Frank.
One of the most affecting/frightening moments in any comes at the end of The Reptile, when the monster (Jacqueline Pearce) contraintuitively shrieks 'I'm cold' as she catches fire. Sorry to hear of Pearce's death today.
If Winston Churchill had a close friend/special advisor who pointed night-time spotlights at Coventry Cathedral during the Blitz, Churchill would have personally shot him.
The most unrelatable aspect of The Umbrella Academy is the idea that someone zapped back to 1963 lands next to a first run cinema showing Hammer's Kiss of the Vampire and doesn't go see the movie.
Out now from ... includes a commentary track with me and Sean Hogan and an hour-long interview with Roger Corman I hosted at the BFI Southbank. The transfer looks gorgeous.
Villains who'd be great in a Justice League film -
1 The Legion of Doom
2 Brainiac
3 The Crime Syndicate of Earth-3
4 Starro
5 the Ultra-Humanite
...
678 Killer Moth
679 Dick Grayson's Aunt Harriet
680 Matter-Eater Lad
681 a penguin (not the Penguin)
682 fucking Steppenwolf.
Update - thanks to @BBCFOUR, special arrangements have been made and 's Secrets of Cinema will be on the BBC i-Player for an extended period
There is no more annoying 2019ism than 'name a better [whatever] than [something hilariously middling] ... I'll wait'. Remember when people could express enthusiasm for something without coming across as smug, bullying, closed-minded assholes?
Want to know how to dishonour a flag? Wave it above your head while doing or saying evil shit. Or hide behind it while being an arsehole.
I just keep remembering films things Christopher Plummer was brilliant in - here he is as the head of People Against Goodness and Niceness (PAGAN) in Dragnet.
I still find it hard to imagine the circumstances whereby William Friedkin wound up directing Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party for Amicus.
John Hurt and David Warner argue about fashion and art in Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs
George Romero was assistant assistant assistant on North By Northwest, which featured a terrific, cat-eyed Martin Landau as a sly villain.
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Huge congrats to Putin's Poodle, Nepotism Barbie, Cokey Flop-Sweat Ken and The Spare for destroying the GOP in an orgy of crime-family-backed losing. The Trump brand is now so toxic it should be listed as a chemical weapon. Now f#ck off back to your golden toilets you assholes.
I got confused by the pro-voting statements of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and accidentally teleported a dead squid into Boris Johnson's cornflakes.
Hello all - just a note to say thanks to the many people who sent me birthday good wishes. Obviously, it's not been one of my best birthdays ever - the first since 1994 I haven't been able to host a big summer gathering - but I've been cheered by all the folk who reached. xx
I can now announce that my novel Professor Moriarty The Hound of the d'Urbervilles is in development as a long-form TV project at Playground Entertainment playgroundentertainment.com Early days yet and no other details available.
A huge - and hugely welcome - Christmas present has arrived from ... the Vintage Classics collection.
Your Tory leadership candidate name is 'that loathsome, utterly incompetent, self-serving shit' followed by your name.
Happy 100th Birthday to Bat-villain Glynis Johns (Lady Penelope Peasoup).
Sorry to hear of the death of artist Ron Cobb, who did concept work for Alien, Star Wars and other films ... here are some of his Famous Monsters of Filmland covers.
I'm looking forward to Ridley Scott's final final cut which confirms the theory that Roy Batty is really human and just nods off at the end.
Obviously, it was a mistake ... the honours were intended for Iain Glen, Duncan Jones and Michael Marshall Smith and a short-sighted clerk scrambled them together. Otherwise, this is the worst elevation to the knighthood since Sir Guy of Gisbourne.
At this point, the BBC should stop having comedians do Johnson and Trump jokes. The subjects remain ridiculous but have stopped being funny. It's time to commission horror writers.
This is an astonishing minute and forty-six seconds ...
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Though the late Bob Rafelson had huge hits with later Jack Nicholson films, Easy Rider & Five Easy Pieces to name two, I’ll always love him first for co-creating The Monkees & directing their insane, wonderful film ‘Head’. I and many others have lovingly ripped it off. RIP Bob x
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Just for balance, I'm compiling a list of male directors whose horror movie projects have sailed through to a greenlight but should have been tossed in a bin. It's a long list.
The hell with this, I'm going to watch a film about a monkey terrorising Elisabeth Shue.
There isn't a frame in Black Narcissus that doesn't look gorgeous ... here's Kathleen Byron without wimple and with red lipstick.
