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“Why was I not made of stone, like thee?”

Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1923) starring Lon Chaney screens Thursday January 19th at 7:00pm at Schlafly Bottleworks (7260 Southwest Avenue Maplewood, Mo 63143).

In fifteenth century Paris, the brother of the archdeacon plots with the gypsy king to foment a peasant revolt. Meanwhile, a freakish hunchback falls in love with the gypsy queen.

Victor Hugo’s classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame received a grand send-up from Universal Pictures, and superstar Lon Chaney (as Quasimodo) in 1923. The studio spent a lot of money on this production, and it shows. Universal claimed this film made Mr. Chaney a superstar. Their pride is understandable, but Chaney had already achieved that position. He was a hot property throughout the 1920s. Chaney was responsible for pulling viewers into the cinema for several high-level productions.

Universal added some of the best supporting actors in Hollywood, beautiful St. Louis...

Jim Knipfel Sep 5, 2019

With the release of It Chapter Two, we take a look at one of the first creepy clown films.

As a culture, we seriously hate our clowns. A deep-seated and supposedly irrational fear of clowns is so commonplace it’s even been given a scientific name: coulrophobia. It’s hardly a surprise then that angry, axe-wielding or merely creepy clowns would become such a pop cultural mainstay, from The Simpsons and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and more recently from Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight to Stephen King’s It and It Chapter Two. Back in the day, the video store where I used to work carried (I counted) nineteen clown-themed horror movies, from Killer Klowns From Outer Space to Divine’s last film, Out of the Dark.

Evil Clown comics used to be a regular feature in National Lampoon. The 1928 silent film The Man Who Laughs...

‘Hollywood Hero’ John Dewar remembered (photo: Anthony Slide wearing Tom Mix’s hat in 1976) Perhaps I have been around too long, but as I grow older I grow despondent that those who contributed so much to film history in the past are forgotten, with others often coming along and taking claim for their achievements. One such Hollywood hero is John Dewar, whom I met when I first came to Los Angeles in 1971. He was a curator in the history department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and introduced me to the museum’s treasures relating to film history, acquired before the creation of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — at a time when both institutions were housed together simply as the Los Angeles County Museum. Back in the mid-1930s, it was Ransom Matthews, head of industrial technology at the Museum, who had started collecting such materials.

Lon Chaney fans can revel in Kino’s Blu-ray transfer of The Penalty, featuring one of the thousand faces that first catapulted the extremely talented performer into one of the most celebrated careers in film history. As a double amputee, Chaney is in top form, the motif of the disenfranchised, the butchered, the mutated, the unloved outstretched in full glory here, once again, to the detriment of his own health.

The film opens with a title card announcing that there’s been “A victim of the city traffic,” and we see a young boy has been seriously wounded. A young Dr. Ferris (Charles Clary), however, has mistakenly amputated the boy’s legs, a fact indiscreetly announced by the physician’s older colleague, Dr. Allen (Kenneth Harlan). The young boy overhears their discussion and Dr. Allen’s plan to lie to the boy’s parents by saying that the amputation saved the boy’s life.

Blu-ray Release Date: Oct. 23, 2012

Price: Blu-ray $34.95

Studio: Kino Lorber

Lon Chaney stumps for revenge in 1920's The Penalty.

In a role that established him as one of the most dynamically terrifying performers of the silent screen, Lon Chaney stars in the fiendish 1920 silent film The Penalty, a grotesque thriller from director Wallace Worsley (The Hunchback of Notre Dame).

When an incompetent doctor amputates the legs of a young boy, he has no idea that the youth will grow up to be the immoral and embittered Blizzard, a criminal mastermind who orchestrates a bizarre and heinous plot to avenge himself upon his malefactor. His plan involves befriending the surgeon’s daughter (Ethel Grey Terry) and serves as an artist’s model for her sculptural rendition of Satan, waiting for just the right moment to unleash his demonic desires.

In playing the devious Blizzard, Chaney tightly harnessed his legs within a pair of leather stumps,...

We just received word that The Man of a Thousand Faces: The Art of Bill Nelson has hit print and is only available at Creature Features. Here's the lowdown for you lovers of classic horror out there:

In 1970, internationally renowned artist Nelson created "The Lon Chaney Portfolio," an exquisitely rendered series of black and white illustrations devoted to Hollywood’s beloved “Man of a Thousand Faces.” The collection showcased portraits from many of Chaney’s most memorable films, including The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, London After Midnight, The Penalty and Laugh, Clown, Laugh.

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As part of our on-going attempt to re-publish some great feature articles from yesteryear for the enjoyment of new readers who may not have visited Owf the first time around, here’s a 2009 article by Tom Fallows originally written for the release of Drag Me To Hell.

This Article Contains Images That Some Readers May Find Disturbing

“The sun began to set – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an endless scream passing through nature. ”

- Edvard Munch

Sam Raimi’s new horror movie Drag Me to Hell is perhaps one of the first movies to fully reflect our current economic crisis/catastrophe. With its story of a bank worker (Alison Lohman) who refuses an old Hungarian woman further...

Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin is currently leading a series at Toronto's Innis Town Hall about his work. To kick things off on Tuesday night -- as only Maddin could -- "May I Blow My Bugle Now? My Life in Clips." From a fledgling Edison film to surrealists and George Kuchar, Maddin elaborated on the cinema that has inspired him.

Many of us describe him as the Canadian David Lynch, or as I like to describe his work -- comedically Lynchian. But listening to his cinematic passions, it quickly becomes clear that his approach is more classic than strange. Maddin seems drawn to two very distinct aspects of old cinema -- what's left out of a film (whether it be art installations that remove dialogue from a film, or a distinct lack of sound effects), and more importantly, moments that are exacerbated to melodramatic extremes, what he calls "uninhibited truth." Surrealist cinema,...