Hello!

Thanks for sticking with CineSavant …. just making it through a new week feels like an accomplishment, frankly.

We have another worthwhile link purloined from the estimable David J. Schow — I took one look at Dinosaur Archive’s post documenting the fabrication of those giant display Lizards to be fascinating.

The automatons we see constructed here achive some really smooth motions. We skipped through to ponder the construction and materials strategy involved … it’s pretty elaborate. When it comes time to manufacture my own dinosaur hide, this video will have given me some good ideas. We really enjoyed the  Indiana Dinosaur Museum back in South Bend, but I don’t recall it having any animatronic dinosaurs like these.

The video has more on its mind than just the construction … which is the part that held my attention.

It’s time for another Book Review at CineSavant. This one is a nice surprise from a frequent review contributor to CineSavant, our UK correspondent Lee Broughton. He’s the editor of a new compendium of academic writing titled Reappraising Cult Horror Films,  from Carnival of Souls to Last Night in Soho.

Some of Lee Broughton’s earlier film writing skewed toward the western genre, but in the last ten years I’ve noticed an increased interest in horror and cult-oriented films, such as the excellent commentary he contributed to  Steppenwolf, a definite cult item positioned somewhere between a western and a horror film.

Omnibus film digests have the advantage of presenting a range of analytical voices, that offer more than one approach to the given subject. Lee has tapped a good group of writers that help us see where the horror genre has been going in the last quarter-century or so. A number of cult classics are perused, but we were equally engaged by discussions of pictures we’d never heard of.

Editor Broughton tempts fate with his lineup of 13 authors. Looking at roster I see more than half are from the UK, most of the rest are from the States, and one is based in Poland. As the book’s title announces, it begins with a well-known classic cult item, but soon veers off in multiple directions. The book does not endeavor to cover the full subject, as have numerous previously published round-ups of Cult Cinema; Reappraising aim appears to be to introduce some new thinking. Divided into sections on individual films, directors, and ‘cycles and clusters’ the approach is academic in nature. Most chapters are indexed with footnote bibliographies, a resource unto themselves. The notes point to film periodicals, trade papers, and for one politically-focused chapter, deleted Twitter tweets by Donald Trump.

The book begins with Bill Shaffer’s production history for Carnival of Souls. It’s the only entry that’s more historical than analytical, but it helps to reminds us of the eccentric origin of many cult pictures. The Polish scholar Kamil Koscielski looks at The Shining from a different direction than the recent pop autopsies performed on Kubrick’s film. Cynthia J. Miller and Tom Shaker plumb the psychological basis for Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and Phevos Kallitsis examines the legacy of race discrimination as reflected in the folk horror of Candyman, including a graphic chart that plots the film’s main concerns, called ‘spaces.’ Craig Ian Mann examines the newer horror item The Hunt (2020), which replays ‘The Most Dangerous Game,’ except with ‘jaded liberals stalking deplorables‘ as defined by Hilary Clinton.

In the directors’ section, Mark Goodall offers a welcome overview of Harry Kümel, the Belgian auteur of Daughters of Darkness and Malpertuis. Matthew Melia invites us to reevaluate the maverick Ken Russell, especially in his later microbudgeted, homemade ‘Garagiste’ pictures.

The third section offers even more new thinking, with articles that examine sub-genre groupings of films by theme and region. Xavier Mendik runs through a vein of ‘White Trash Horror’ theorized to have sprung from the success of John Boorman’s 1972 Deliverance. Pete Falconer looks at the extremes of Australian ‘Ozploitation’ cinema, a movement that resisted Hollywood influence and remained peculiarly local. Alice Haylett Bryan opens our eyes to post- 2000 French cult horror films, which she tells us have content that’s exceptionally extreme, even by horror standards.

Kevin Bickerdike defines a new subcategory, horror localized in public housing projects and ‘terrible towers.’ A seminal film for this horror offshoot is David Cronenberg’s Shivers / They Came From Within. And James Shelton’s article analyzes cult horror in terms of narrative construction, focusing on ‘investigative outsiders’ such as Sgt. Howie in The Wicker Man. He singles out narratives expressing the idea of ‘nemein,’ a concept not all that easy to define … an attempt to give balance to the universe?

Lee Broughton’s own contribution is a full breakdown and analysis of Roy Ward Baker’s The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. Following up on his own study of gender typing  in westerns, Lee illuminates the curiously negative role given Julie Ege’s ‘adventuress’ in that hybrid-Chinese Hammer horror film.

As should be obvious, this cult horror digest is not a place to read about horror personalities. There are very few illustrations. But it provides some progressive thinking to the horror discussion, in directions some of us traditional horror fans haven’t examined. The book is available both soft and hard-bound; here’s the link for Bloomsbury Academic:

— Plus the Amazon US sales link.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

I’m taking a pass on column entries today. The distraction of ‘larger world issues’ makes it hard to concentrate on our favorite pastime. This page’s readership comes here for escape, not to hear too many personal opinions. So we’ll proceed when this particular funk goes away. Don’t be concerned, I’m not the depressive type. Let us hope for the best.

We’re working on a book review and voting in the OFCS this week. I will do my best to concentrate on civilized values and common courtesy. Thanks very much for the notes and corrections; I’m grateful for my modest group of correspondent-friends. The comments on the reviews are becoming more constructive as well. I’ll try to contribute more responses to them.

Hasta el sábado… ¡ten coraje, sudamericanos!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Welcome to 2026 and a Brave New World …. this is the year in which Fritz Lang set  Metropolis, after all. We almost have flying cars and we definitely have big companies that grind up people. The dystopian developments we most fear are becoming more difficult to describe, let alone depict in a movie.

As we always take the easy way out, we therefore look back to the year 1955, to admire a pretty nifty YouTube promo for the big-format camera process Todd AO, posted by ‘marlbrouk’.

Presented in a ‘Smilebox’ format (here called ‘Ultra-Curve’), the 12-minute promo is a sampler of the 65mm film process, showing that it replicates the ‘enveloping’ effect of Cinerama without the cumbersome 3 screens and 3 projectors. It’s from an  Oklahoma! Blu-ray release; it may have been shown before some 1955 screenings of Oklahoma!  Could the neon-decked theater we see be the Egyptian on Hollywood Blvd?

Those Todd AO lenses were pretty incredible. Although the 30 fps version of Oklahoma! was a one-shot experiment, it sure looks good … and was incredible on a big screen.

(I have to say, I’m getting pretty fed up with forced ads on YouTube …)

Another link of note comes from Gary Teetzel — an informative video featurette about vintage Fin de siècle Flip Books, odd little publications from 125 years ago.

These are photographic movies printed on paper to flip with one’s thumbs … I remember spending afternoons as a teenager doing animated mini-cartoons in the margins of books, at least until my teacher caught me.

The theme of this discussion / show ‘n’ tell is finding bits of Georges Méliès movies in these flip books. Some fragments may be from films that are considered lost. ‘Re-animating’ the flip books without destroying them involved some clever cinematographic techniques. The speakers are International Scholars Robert Byrne and Thierry Lecointe; the host is Pamela Hutchinson, who so impressed us that we featured her smile instead of an image of a flip book. We’re bent that way.

The presentation was part of the 2021 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and begins with a Nosferatu– themed video promo. The speakers talk about the ‘Flip Book’ book that was generated from their research …  which I found here.

Scrolling down a bit further, we find about 30 fully recovered, restored and annotated flip book fragments, complete with mini-soundtracks. And since we like Pamela Hutchinson’s approach to film art, here is her  book on G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

It’s our last column before the New Year … are we ready for 2026, a year that to me seems far, far in the Future?  Well, who is ready for anything any more?  The best of luck for everyone, is what we’re hoping for.

We start with a happy report about a 70mm revival. We have friends who work for companies that take care of studio film libraries, and oversee remasters and sometimes restorations. It’s not something that I write about because I don’t want to ask too many questions — everything they’re doing is proprietary information, which we all know is sacred.

Well in this instance I’m free to call out a friend who has worked hard and long on restorations of some pretty important pictures.

An article at Variety covers the restoration — in 70mm — of the Biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told. It’ll be screened at the Academy Museum a few weeks from now in January, introduced by both George Stevens Jr. and Guillermo Del Toro.

The special news is that Variety reporters Jazz Tangcay, Payton Turkeltaub and Giana Levy call out Amazon MGM as the initiator of the restoration, which included an 8K scan of the original 65mm Ultra Panavision negative. They name the people behind the project — work that too often remains anonymous: Schawn Belston, Scott Grossman and Darren Gross.

I met Darren 28 years ago and have watched his career with interest. The only previous opportunity to call out one of his achievements was when he found and remastered an important group of outtakes for  Blue Velvet.  David Lynch was all but ecstatic — he’d been looking for them for decades. The article carries more information about the 70mm screening.

The generous web researcher Michael McQuarrie has found yet another page that pegs our juvenile interests — a site by a UK graphic designer who has an incredible volume of 007 paraphernalia on display. I couldn’t find his name on the page.

Michael wanted me to see the Record Album vault — it was practically my whole album collection in 1967. The page has giant photo files of toys, games, cars, model kits, figurines and guns; other galleries give us trading cards, badges and stickers, plus publicity promos, banners, standees and displays.

Yet more pages give us an impressive set of photos of the graphic designer visiting Bond 007 locations. The basic front page:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Happy two days after Christmas. You think your day was special — I got new bath towels … to replace a set so frayed, you’d think an animal had torn them. The nice thing is that it felt like a real treat. Correspondent “B” in New York sent me a fancy Big Apple coffee cup, and a compendium book of Nancy comics. My granddaughter is just old and patient enough to maybe enjoy them with me, the next time we get together. So no complaints here.

What’s with the images of Lon Chaney?  The one on the left might be an AI generated ‘almost’ image of the great silent actor. We’re being flooded with interesting AI experiments; this week Gary Teetzel forwarded links to two parallel features touting ‘restorations’ of the lost horror thriller London After Midnight.

The first is from Sci-Fi N Horror A Go Go, with the title

It clocks in at 43 minutes. The second, from Bakémon: Japanese Monster Legends is called

and is 46 minutes in duration. They are curious exercises that grossly misuse the word restored. We immediately think of the disc companies that identify the cosmetic fixes they put on bad copies of movies, as ‘restorations.’  What the AI programs do is indeed impressive. Given a stack of high quality production stills plus the text of old intertitles, each AI experimenter has cobbled together what I would call a clever ‘enhanced photo novel’ narrative.

It’s truly amazing how dimensional motion is created from still images. We see attractive but mostly static images that rely far too much on inter-titles to tell a story. As the original production stills mostly pose characters in sets, standing next to each other, that’s mainly what the individual shots show.

Most of the action on view is conveyed via push-in and pull-out trucking motions, that have little connection with the way most silent films look. One of the AI presentations uses a few dissolves between shots, something even less associated with the silent era. Fake digital ‘film damage’ scratches and dirt here and there, a real ‘fan made’ giveaway.

The experiments are interesting to see, and too easy to criticize. Every so often we see something clever, but in most shots characters just ‘hover’ in motion. Sometimes they appear to move in reverse. It’s like a slightly vivified slide show.

Why are we not ecstatic about the possibilities of AI in visual media?  The idea that a lost film could be recovered this way is simply dangerous to cultural history. With more clever ‘borrowing’ of from other movies, one could probably concoct a bogus London After Midnight that would fool many viewers. We are already seeing completely bogus videos that can fool experts.  AI could be the end of movies, and the political possibilities are much worse.

Michael McQuarrie found this 1970 publicity piece produced by Hammer Films, promoting actress Victoria Vetri and Val Guest’s  When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. It begins with clips of Hammer’s offices just off Piccadilly Circus.

Sir James Carreras is fronted as the big name; the questionable voiceover identifies him as the ‘discoverer’ of Ursula Andress and Raquel Welch. We see a quick blip of (I think) Aida Young, the real producer of When Dinosaurs. We get a bit of behind the scenes footage, and some abbreviated shots of Jim Danforth dinosaurs that include a random shot from the 1960  The Lost World. Is the Ms. Vetri-versus-Snake scene in the completed film?  I don’t remember. [Note, 12.28.25: Bill Shaffer remembers … and says that both the snake scene and the Lost World stock shot are in the finished film…]

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson