Volume 40, Number 8 · April 22, 1993
Horror for Pleasure
By Geoffrey O'Brien
MOVIES DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Bram Stoker's Dracula
directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Columbia Pictures
Nosferatu
directed by F.W. Murnau
Kino, $29.95
Dracula
directed by George Melford
MCA, $14.95
Vampyr
directed by Carl Dreyer
Kino, $29.95
Freaks
directed by Tod Browning
MGM, $19.95
The Black Cat
directed by Edgar Ulmer
MCA, $14.95
I Walked with a Zombie
directed by Jacques Tourneur
Turner Home Entertainment, $19.95
Curse of the Demon
directed by Jacques Tourneur
Columbia Pictures, $69.95
Horror of Dracula
by Terence Fisher
Warner Brothers, $19.95
Black Sunday
directed by Mario Bava
various distributors
The Haunted Palace
directed by Roger Corman
HBO, $19.99
The Fearless Vampire Killers
directed by Roman Polanski
MGM, $19.98
The Conqueror Worm
directed by Michael Reeves
HBO, $59.99
Daughters of Darkness
directed by Harry Kümel
various distributors
Ganja and Hess
directed by Bill Gunn
various distributors; often retitled Blood Couple
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
directed by Tobe Hooper
various distributors
Suspiria
directed by Dario Argento
various distributors
The Brood
directed by David Cronenberg
Orion, $19.98
Fear No Evil
directed by Frank Laloggia
Columbia/Tristar, $9.95
Dead Ringers
directed by David Cronenberg
various distributors Media, $19.95
Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula may be the first coffee-table horror movie, reenacting on an opulent budget the cheap thrills once associated with drive-in triple features. The film starts at full throttle, whirling through a fifteenth-century Romanian battlefield, Dr. Seward's nineteenth-century London madhouse, and the shadowy mazes of Dracula's castle. To live up to the breathless effects of its first fifteen minutes it must sustain a barrage of optical effects and erotically charged tableaux, leaping wolves and geysers of blood, storms and severed heads, and flurries of cinematic in-jokes.
Review, 6546 words
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