Sep 29 2026
By the late 1950s, America had monster fever. Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the Mummy, and other creatures from Hollywood’s past were finding new audiences on television just as movie theaters filled with radioactive mutants, aliens, giant insects, and teenage monsters. Somewhere in the middle of this wonderfully strange cultural moment lurked another enduring figure: the werewolf. …
Sep 29 2026
By the middle of the twentieth century, Frankenstein’s monster was no longer confined to a stormy laboratory in a black-and-white horror movie. He was appearing on television sets, magazine covers, model-kit boxes, Halloween masks, novelty merchandise, and eventually even in a suburban sitcom. Few fictional characters made the transition from horror icon to pop-culture personality …
Sep 22 2026
Imagine Halloween sometime around 1962. A plastic vampire mask waits on the kitchen table, a cardboard skeleton hangs crookedly on the wall, and somewhere in the house a television set glows in the dark as Frankenstein or Dracula begins after the late news. At the drugstore, monster magazines compete for attention with comic books, while …
Sep 19 2026
In 1954, something strange emerged from the water. Universal Pictures had already given movie audiences Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, and the Wolf Man. Most of those characters belonged to an earlier generation of horror, however. By the 1950s, movie screens were increasingly populated by extraterrestrials, radioactive mutations, scientific experiments, and creatures …
Sep 18 2026
By the 1950s and 1960s, Count Dracula had escaped his Transylvanian castle. He was on television, in monster magazines, on model-kit boxes, in toy aisles, at Halloween parties, and even represented by a lovable vampire grandfather on a prime-time sitcom. The terrifying aristocrat of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel had become one of the most recognizable …
Sep 16 2026
Few films look quite like The Color of Pomegranates. Sergei Parajanov’s extraordinary work feels less like a conventional motion picture than an illuminated manuscript brought to life. Figures stand inside carefully arranged compositions. Books flutter in the wind. Pomegranates bleed their juice onto pale fabric. Carpets, fruit, lace, stone, water, animals, religious objects, and human …
Jul 05 2026
Born on this day, July 5, 1889, in Maisons-Laffitte, France, Jean Cocteau spent his life moving between artistic worlds. He was a poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, draftsman, designer, critic, and collaborator whose work crossed many of the boundaries that normally separate literature, theater, visual art, music, and cinema. Trying to describe Cocteau with a single …
Jul 04 2026
The Fourth of July has inspired everything from parades and fireworks to songs, musicals, and movies. For classic-film fans, it is also a perfect excuse to revisit movies that explore different sides of American life—from Broadway showmanship and small-town celebrations to the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the complicated experience of coming home …
Jun 12 2026
The great Hollywood beach-party craze would not truly arrive until the 1960s, when surfing, bikinis, pop music, and teenage romance became a genre of their own. But the 1950s had already discovered that a stretch of sand could be one of the most versatile settings in the movies. Throughout the decade, Hollywood sent its stars …
Jun 06 2026
Born on this day, June 6, 1950, in Brussels, Belgium, Chantal Akerman became one of the most influential filmmakers to emerge from European cinema after the 1960s. She made films about apartments, hotel rooms, train stations, city streets, kitchens, borders, mothers and daughters, people waiting, people traveling, and people carrying histories that could never be …
