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One of the most celebrated names associated with the genre, the late, great Bla Lugosi is regarded as horror royalty to this day. Starring in some of the most revered cinematic offerings that the golden age of horror had to offer and renowned for his frequent collaboration with fellow horror icon Boris Karloff, the Hungarian-American actor announced his arrival on the scene in Hollywood during the 1930s with Tod Browning's Dracula - a legendary role that he is now virtually synonymous with - and never looked back.

While he often lamented the fact that he was forever typecast as a villain courtesy of his thick accent and imposing physical appearance, Lugosi embraced this status quo by breathing life into an array of the genre's most enduring dastardly characters. While many of his films were decidedly not perfect, the actor provided the foundations for many of horror's most archetypal character molds,...

With the recent announcement that James Gunn and Peter Safran are planning to reboot the DC Universe, fans are eager to know how their favorite superheroes will look on the silver screen. Since the producer has confirmed that Batman will debut in a new The Brave and the Bold film, the fandom has already fan-casted different actors who could definitely play the part. Additionally, fans can't help but look back and reflect on all the actors who played Batman before.

As of 2024, 10 different actors have portrayed the Caped Crusader in both live-action films and on television, with many more voicing Batman in animated and video game works. Some of them have starred in their own story, while others only served as guest stars on a show. Regardless of this, each performance brought something different to the hero. Their performances are a central part of what has made Batman as popular as he is today.

In 2023, it was announced that the filmmaking team Radio Silence was stepping away from the "Scream" franchise to helm a new Universal monster movie. But this wasn't going to be yet another "Mummy" remake and had nothing to do with the ill-fated Dark Universe. No, this was a brand-new horror creation titled "Abigail"... sort of.

Radio Silence's Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directing duo responsible for the fifth and sixth "Scream" films, are overseeing this latest effort, which focuses on a team of crooks who kidnap a wealthy man's 12-year-old daughter (Alisha Weir) and hole up in a mansion while they await the ransom payment. The only problem is that the sweet little ballerina they kidnapped is actually a bloodthirsty vampire who, if the trailer is anything to go by, is not only ruthless when it comes to taking out her captors but has a truly sadistic side, as...

When it comes to the world of Westerns, there's a few directors people think of right away — Clint Eastwood, Sergio Leone, and John Ford are three that are bound to leap into one's mind. Among modern folks, Kevin Costner and James Mangold may pop on your radar. In reality, though, the most prolific director of Westerns isn’t any of these men or even a filmmaker that’s on the mind of the nerdiest film geek. Lambert Hillyer, a prolific American director from the first half of the 20th century, holds the record for most Westerns directed, with the Guinness World Records claiming that Hillyer directed 148 Westerns in his lifetime (out of 156 motion pictures total).

The death of the Dark Universe was painful for those who saw its potential but a boon for Universal's larger monster horror franchise. Three years after the studio's 2017 "Mummy" crashed and burned at the box office, "Saw" and "Insidious" creator Leigh Whannell delivers a bold new take on "The Invisible Man" that reinvented the classic property while also establishing an exciting director-driven approach for future Universal monster re-imaginings. Whannell will try and repeat that success later this year with his "Wolf Man" reboot, which (naturally) made /FIlm's most anticipated movies of 2024. Before that, though, it turns out we're getting a seemingly brand-new and perhaps even more intriguing Universal monster flick titled "Abigail."

Universal's previously untitled film hails from Radio Silence, the filmmaking trio -- comprised of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and producer Chad Villella -- behind the low-budget horror-comedy hit "Ready or Not," as well as the...

Boris Karloff: The Man Behind The Monster director Thomas Hamilton on his upcoming series Horror Icons on interviewing Roger Corman: “He not only worked with Vincent Price, he worked with Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney.” Photo: Thomas Hamilton

Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, Conrad Veidt, Maria Ouspenskaya, George Zukor, Paul Wegener, Emil Jannings, Brigitte Helm, Gale Sondergaard, Gloria Holden, Claude Rains, Fay Wray, Duane Jones, Max Schreck, Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Lon Chaney Sr., Lon Chaney Jr, Fw Murnau’s Faust and Nosferatu, Arthur Lubin’s Phantom of the Opera, Rowland V. Lee’s Son of Frankenstein, George Waggner’s The Wolf Man, James Whale’s The Invisible Man, Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen’s The Golem, Hanns Heinz Ewers and Stellan Rye’s The Student Of Prague, and George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead...

Heading into his first edition at the helm of the Neuchatel Intl. Fantastic Film Festival (Nifff), artistic director Pierre-Yves Walder looked to land his white whale, setting his sights on a retrospective idea he’d dreamed up many years before.

“In concrete terms, I’ve wanted to do this ever since I first applied to the festival,” Walder says of Scream Queer, a pet project that reflects on Lgbtiq+ representation through the lens of the fantastic. “I wanted to explore social elements through genre, which has always been a mirror for society, a place to express certain unmentionable ideas in abstract, using metaphor to explore subjects off limits in more direct approaches.”

Showcasing 15 films curated by Walder and his team and another four selected by The xx singer Oliver Sim, this year’s centerpiece retrospective brings together camp items like “Nightmare on Elm Street II,” cult classics like the Wachowski...

Blood Rave, Baby. After heading back to the ’30s to check in with Countess Zaleska in Lambert Hillyer’s queer horror classic Dracula’s Daughter and hitting the road with Steve Zahn and Paul Walker in Joy Ride, we went back to Haddonfield to discuss David Gordon Green’s 2018 sequel Halloween. Now we’re heading back to the ’90s to discuss […]...

We Need to Talk About Cameron…. After touring the streets of Los Angeles in David Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive, we went all the way back to the ’30s to check in with Countess Zaleska in Lambert Hillyer’s queer horror classic Dracula’s Daughter, before hitting the road with Steve Zahn and Paul Walker in Joy Ride. Now, in celebration of […]...

“Cockeyed philosophies of life, ugly sex situations, cheap jokes, and dirty dialogue are not wanted. Decent people don’t like this sort of stuff, and it is our job to see to it that they get none of it.” The words of American film censor Joseph Breen reverberated through Hollywood, changing the cinematic landscape for decades. Established in 1934, the Motion Picture Production Code (or Hays Code) enforced by Breen was given the power to approve films prior to release. They created strict guidelines as to what they considered moral and immoral behavior. Chief among the code’s list of “Don’ts” and “Be Carefuls,” and henceforth banned in films, was “any inference of sex perversion.” In Horror Film: An Introduction, author Rick Worland remarks that “Hollywood has a long history of equating homosexuality with criminality, perversion, and morose self-destruction.” However, Hollywood’s new standards did not achieve what they set out to do.

Universal Horror Collection: Vol. 1

Blu ray

Shout! Factory

1934, ’35, ’36, ’40 / 1.33 : 1 / 66 / 61 / 79 / 70 min.

Starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi

Cinematography by John J. Mescall, Charles Stumar, George Robinson, Elwood Bredell

Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, Lew Landers, Lambert Hillyer, Arthur Lubin

Like the cat who swallowed the canary, Boris Karloff made for a serenely sinister antagonist. Even when portraying bloodthirsty devils like the vampire Gorca in The Three Faces of Fear or a debauched satanist looking for trouble in The Black Cat, “Dear Boris” was the very model of a well-mannered monster.

Bela Lugosi, Karloff’s unofficial rival on the Universal lot, showed similar restraint in his star-making turn as Dracula – but the same halting, imperious manner that gave otherworldly dignity to the Count would typecast Lugosi as a kind of oddball antihero – the cultivated eccentric driven to madness or worse. He approached each of those roles with a manic intensity that might net...

From their "Hammer's House of Horror" screenings to their 21-movie Mario Bava spotlight, New York's Quad Cinema has been an essential source for celebrating the horror genre's past, and they will continue to do just that this October with a massive retrospective series celebrating filmmaker Jean Rollin, as well as a complementary set of screenings highlighting some of horror's most memorable female vampires.

Read on for full details on Quad Cinema's Jean Rollin Retrospective (kicking off on October 18th) and "A Woman's Bite: Cinema’s Sapphic Vampires" (beginning October 26th) and be sure to visit their official website for more information!

"Jean Rollin Retrospective + Sapphic Vampires

October 18-November 1

This October the Quad salutes the lurid eroticism of Jean Rollin with a retrospective including Fascination, Requiem for a Vampire, and Lips of Blood

Plus a survey of sapphic vampire films indebted to his aesthetic with titles including The Hunger, Lust for a Vampire,...

Films by Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, and Buster Keaton are among the “hundreds of thousands” of books, musical scores, and motion pictures that will enter the public domain on January 1, according to The Atlantic. All of the works were first made available to audiences in 1923, four years before the introduction of talkies. Due to changed copyright laws, this will be the largest collection of material to lose its copyright protections since 1998.

Artists looking to incorporate black-and-white era throwbacks into their modern creations will have lots of new options. The Atlantic consulted unpublished research from Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, which shared with IndieWire a list of 35 films that will soon become available to all.

“Our list is therefore only a partial one; many more works are entering the public domain as well, but the relevant information to confirm this may...

"Batman" is a 1943 black-and-white 15-chapter theatrical serial from Columbia Pictures, directed by Lambert Hillyer, starring Lewis Wilson as 'Batman' and 'Douglas Croft' as 'Robin', based on the DC Comics character, with J. Carrol Naish as 'Dr. Daka', Shirley Patterson as 'Linda Page' and William Austin as 'Alfred':

Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek "Batman"...

The 2016 blu ray release of the Frankenstein and Wolf Man Legacy Collections was a moment of celebration for movie and monster lovers everywhere, bringing together all the golden age appearances of Frankenstein’s misbegotten creation and Larry Talbot’s hairy alter-ego. Universal Studios treated those dusty creature features to luminous restorations; from Bride of Frankenstein to She Wolf of London, these essential artifacts never looked less than impeccable and, at times, even ravishing. Colin Clive’s frenzied declaration, “It’s Alive!”, never felt more appropriate.

Now Universal has turned their attention to their other legendary franchise players, Dracula, the sharp-dressed but undead ladies’ man and Im-ho-tep, the cursed Egyptian priest who loved not wisely but too well.

Dracula: Complete Legacy Collection

Blu-ray

Universal Studios Home Entertainment

1931, ’36, ’43, ’44, ’45, ’48 / 449 min. / B&W / 1:33 / Street Date May 16, 2017

Starring: Actors: Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr. , Boris Karloff, Bud Abbott, Lou Costello

Cinematography: Karl Freund,...

Wagon Tracks

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1919 / B&W / 1:33 Silent Ap / 64 min. / Street Date January 24, 2017 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring William S. Hart, Jane Novak, Robert McKim, Lloyd Bacon, Leo Pierson, Bert Sprotte, Charles Arling.

Cinematography: Joseph H. August

Art direction: Thomas A. Brierley

Titles: Irvin J. Martin

Written by: C. Gardner Sullivan

Produced by: William S. Hart, Thomas H. Ince

Directed by: Lambert Hillyer

Last year we were gifted with an excellent Blu-ray of a silent John Ford western, 3 Bad Men, which turned out to be a satisfying sentimental action tale. This month we get a much older silent western that’s almost as interesting. Its star is William S. Hart, the silent icon most of know through a still of a man in a ten-gallon hat brandishing two pistols in a barroom. Hart frequently played gunslingers, but not always. Olive’s presentation of Wagon Tracks sees him...

From SneakPeekTV.Com, take a look @ the first film appearance of 'Batman', from "Batman" (1943) directed by Lambert Hillyer, starring Lewis Wilson as 'Batman', Douglas Croft as 'Robin',  J. Carrol Naish as 'Dr. Daka', Shirley Patterson as 'Linda Page' and William Austin as 'Alfred":

"...'Batman', a secret U S government agent, attempts to defeat the sabotage schemes of enemy agent 'Dr. Daka'...

"...operating in 'Gotham City' at the height of World War II..."

Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek "Batman"...

When Universal’s Dracula was released in 1931 vampires were a relatively underexplored creature of genre films. Sure you had Nosferatu, which was released a full nine years before, but Dracula was the first film to feature a blood sucking fiend that made a killing at the box office. Universal was quick to capitalize on the surprise success of Dracula and several sequels (some in name only) were made. There was Son of Dracula (‘Alucard’ is all I need to say about that one), Dracula’s Daughter, House of Dracula, House of Frankenstein (which featured all the Universal monsters) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. While most of those films are disposable fodder, Dracula’s Daughter stands out from the pack as not only being entertaining, but also being the one sequel that had as much influence as its predecessor.

Released in 1936 and written by Garrett Ford and directed by Lambert Hillyer,...

Horror maestro Tim Sullivan shares with doorQ.com his thoughts on his new Chillerama movie, the I Was A Teenage Werebear short, the Rising Star award for Sean Paul Lockhart (Brent Corrigan) and the best in Queer Fear. -Dqm

With 4th of July fireworks still bursting in the air, how fitting that this week also marks the arrival of Q Fest, Philadelphia’s premiere Lgbt film festival. Having just played San Francisco and Denver to great success, I Was a Teenage Werebear will screen this Friday, July 8th in the City of Freedom.

The response to Teenage Werebear and its playfully subversive message of tolerance and “Room For All” has been quite heartening and encouraging not only for me, but for my Chillerama partners in crime, Adam Green, Joe Lynch and Adam Rifkin. The goal was to make something that particularly spoke to gay audiences, but at the same time...

"Dracula's Daughter" is the 1936 Universal vampire sequel to Bela Lugosi's classic 1931 feature "Dracula".

Directed by Lambert Hillyer from a screenplay by Garrett Fort, "Daughter" stars Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden, Marguerite Churchill and Edward Van Sloan.

Based on author Bram Stoker's story "Dracula's Guest", the film begins where "Dracula" ends, with the 'Count' destroyed by 'Professor Von Helsing' (Van Sloan).

Von Helsing is immediately arrested by the police and escorted to Scotland Yard, where he confesses to destroying Count Dracula, but because the vampire had already been dead for over 500 years, it could not be considered murder.

Van Helsing enlists the aid of psychiatrist 'Dr. Jeffrey Garth' (Otto Kruger), once one of his star students, while Dracula's daughter, 'Countess Marya Zaleska' (Gloria Holden), with the aid of her manservant,' Sandor' (Irving Pichel), steals Dracula’s body from Scotland Yard and ritualistically burns the fiend's body, hoping to break...

By Matt Singer

Since 1940's "Batman" #4, and his first movie serial three years later, the Caped Crusader has called Gotham City his home. On screen and on the printed page, its visual representation has changed quite a bit over almost 70 years. At times, the look of the metropolis has been an afterthought; at others, directors have paid more attention to Gotham's appearance than to the characters living in it, and its latest appearance, in Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight," may be its most unusual yet. (None the least for sparking a heated New York/Chicago debate.) Here's a look at eight movies full of gargoyles, dark alleys, and, yes, big naked statues.

Batman (1943)

Directed by Lambert Hillyer

Production Designer: Uncredited

This bargain basement production didn't even bother giving the Dynamic Duo a Batmobile, letting them make do with a generic black sedan, so it's no surprise Gotham is equally indistinct.