Fifty Years of Appointments With "The Wicker Man"

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of The Wicker Man, the classic British horror film directed by Robin Hardy and starring Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland, and Christopher Lee.

Something About The Ladykillers

You get the picture.

Something About Adaptations of Little Faithfulness

Action?

Something About Pyewacket

Nine lives, or some such.

Something About Middle Grade Adaptions

...and the books that inspired them.

Something About The Devil Rides Out

Oriel seraphim and so on....

Memoriam: Herbert Lom

Actor Herbert Lom – the last of the lady killers – has died. He was 95.

A native of Prague, his first picture was a very early Czech film, Zena Pod Krizem (1937), that he participated in before migrating to England to continue his career. His roles flourished throughout the next four decades including The Seventh Veil (1945), War and Peace (1956), El Cid (1961), and The Phantom of the Opera (1962).

'Mansion' Inspired by The Black Cat?

A fan named Matthew shared his thoughts with us on what he thought we some of Bellairs's purported inspiration for The Mansion in the Mist:

Myriad references to THE BLACK CAT (a 1934 horror film from Universal Studios, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi) exist in THE MANSION IN THE MIST.  Wasn't John Bellairs a Karloff fan?  (Karloff is (subtly) alluded to too.)

That tidbit popped into mind when this was posted to CraveOnline recently:

Fans on the Fence About "The Adventures of Tintin"

The GeekOut blog has an essay on why Tintinologists and fans are on the fence about the recent "The Adventures of Tintin" movie:

Something About 'Lost Hearts'

We've noted some of the similarities between the introduction to The House with a Clock in its Walls and M.R. James’s Lost Hearts. Now you can see some screen shots from a 1970s-era adaptation of Lost Hearts (which looks creepier than the 1970s-era adaptation of The House with a Clock in its Walls, for that matter). A warning to the curious (!) but this is not for faint-hearted.

Come Under One Body's Hand

Just got through watching a strange little film entitled The Wicker Man. It’s set on an island off the west coast of Scotland where people continue to practice ancient pagan rituals. The film was released in 1973 and it’s fairly dated and all, but there was one curious little scene that made me do a double take.

Someone's In My Fruit Cellar!

After watching the horror film The Evil Dead (1981) on someone's movie channel we went online to the trivia section at IMDb and found this tidbit:

The cabin did not actually have a cellar. Most of the cellar scenes were filmed in the stone cellar of a farmhouse owned by producer Robert G. Tapert’s family in Marshall, Michigan. The last room of the cellar was actually Raimi’s garage. The hanging gourds and bones are a tribute to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). For the scene where the students descend into the cellar, a hole was cut into the floor, a shallow hole was dug, and a ladder was placed into the pit.

Nice. Anyone want to add anything to the story?