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With the impending Irish release of the criticalyy acclaimed Gods and Monsters, a biopic about director James Whale, Mark Venner takes the uninitiated through the early years of Hollywood horror movies.
In the weekend of Oct 31st 1998 a 25 year old film grossed 2.1 million in Britain's cinemas. Long unavailable on video cassette, The Exorcist's remarkable re-release took even its distributors by surprise. Across the Atlantic during the same weekend John Carpenter's latest movies Vampires grossed over $9 million, the biggest ever opening for a film on a Halloween weekend. This, together with such recent successes as the two Scream movies, and Halloween H20, would seem to indicate that the much maligned genre of the horror move is back in (big) business. As it happens, The Exorcist is a mediocre film that really doesn't deserve its reputation and most of the other movies are either over-hyped teen slasher pics, or in the case of H2O, a desperate attempt to cash in on what appears to be a 'chiller' new wave.
Of far more interest is the news that Bill Condon's Cods and Monsters played to a full house at the London Film Festival in November, as well as opening the Birmingham International Festival of Film and Television. Condon's film recreates the last days in the life of legendary director James Whale who made four horror films for Carl Laemmle's Universal Studios in the 1930's. Each of these films can justifiably be called a classic: Frankenstein and it's brilliant sequel The Bride of Frankentein were launched upon an unsuspecting pubic a few short years after the advent of sound. Whale, a gentle and reserved Englishman singlehandedly forged a genre, thereby becoming the father of the modern horror movie. Perhaps the recent news that a second film of Whale's life is now in development, based on )ames Curtis's book, James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters, indicates that at long last a reappraisal of both Whale and the many extraordinary horror films of the 30s and 40s is imminent.
Of course, horror subjects were tackled by filmmakers in the silent era. Thomas Edison, the famed American inventor who patented the 'Kinetograph' in 1889, produced the first ever film adaptation of Mary Shelly's...