In late 1948, producer David O. Selznick released Portrait of Jennie, a romantic fantasy that defied the conventions and, not surprisingly, died at the box-office. Audiences were asked to accept a “serious” romance between a man and a female ghost in a time-curving story in which the past and the present come together. It’s easy [...]

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It’s rare for an animated film to have such a strong social context in recent history. The Iron Giant is a children’s film about the Cold War, and it deals explicitly with the fear of other, yet it does so without becoming a didactic finger-wagger. With humor and the emotional bonding between boy and giant, [...]

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Not many would dispute that Hollywood horror movies had their heyday at Universal in the 1930s, the location and period that produced, among others, Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Invisible Man (1933). But Universal’s prowess in the genre had already been well established before the sound era immortalized Bela Lugosi’s accent [...]

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In Time after Time, traveling through time is accomplished by the nuts and bolts of science, specifically a helicopter-like machine that converts sun rays into electricity. This is time travel as H. G. Wells envisioned it in his novel The Time Machine (1895), and that’s no coincidence: Time after Time is an ingenious, grown-up fantasy [...]

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Set in Greece during the 1912 Balkan War, Isle of the Dead receives its grotesqueness partly from its setting and partly from its director, Mark Robson, whose resumé boasted other horror flicks of the time. The story that unwinds on the island of quarantined plague victims is more disturbing than even its superficial impression would [...]

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