vampires
theartsdesk in Stockholm - HK Gruber and sacred monstersWednesday, 29 November 2017
It was excellent, flesh-creepy fun back in 1978, when a young Simon Rattle conducted the Liverpool world premiere with the composer declaiming, but how well has Austrian maverick H(einz) K(arl) "Nali" Gruber's "pandemonium" for chansonnier and... Read more... |
Preacher, Amazon Prime VideoFriday, 12 August 2016
If you’re going to go toe-to-toe with Daredevil and Jessica Jones, the first two series in Netflix’s supremely realised and blood-spattered depiction of Marvel Comic’s Hell’s Kitchen, it’s as well to do it with conviction. By hosting Preacher, based... Read more... |
If Katie Hopkins Ruled the World, TLCFriday, 07 August 2015
The premise is a simple one. Get some fairly well-known celebs – preferably at least one comedian – stick them in a room, get them to say some contentious things in front of a studio audience for some un-PC LOLs and then edit it down to a hilarious... Read more... |
Christopher Lee: A Career in ClipsSaturday, 13 June 2015
Christopher Lee died this week, aged 93. It’s strange that an actor best known for horror films, for characters that were fiendish and diabolical, should be so cherished a part of the British cultural landscape. That fact speaks volumes for the... Read more... |
What We Do in the ShadowsThursday, 20 November 2014
Clearly the makers of this delightful film from New Zealand have watched a lot of movies, as so many are neatly and obliquely referenced – Nosferatu, The Blair Witch Project, The Lost Boys, Grease, to name just a few - in a comic tale about a group... Read more... |
The Art of Gothic: Britain's Midnight Hour, BBC FourMonday, 27 October 2014
Andrew Graham-Dixon’s villainous alter ego got a second airing tonight in his exploration of 19th-century Britain’s love of all things Gothic. Last week we saw him hanging about in decaying graveyards, or appearing, wraithlike in a dank corner of a... Read more... |
DVD: Blacula - The Complete CollectionTuesday, 21 October 2014
Blaxploitation, like Krautrock, is an early Seventies term that sounds faintly uneasy now. Begun by Hollywood studio hits such as Shaft, the craze for films with mostly black casts and often black creators made expressly for black audiences was... Read more... |
Legends, Sky 1 / The Strain, WatchThursday, 18 September 2014
Let's face it, there are so many big-budget, densely plotted US TV imports around now that it seems a little hackneyed to compare them to buses - but even by those standards, scheduling the two newest ones concurrently seems a little careless. Your... Read more... |
Let The Right One In, Apollo TheatreWednesday, 09 April 2014
Flying masonry put the Apollo in the headlines late last year when part of the theatre’s ceiling collapsed; now an airborne vampire and an impressive refurbishment give it new life. A cyclorama of dark tree branches and cloud-scudded skies covers... Read more... |
Only Lovers Left AliveWednesday, 19 February 2014
Unique, dreamy, super cool and splendidly silly, just like its maker Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive is a vampire flick packed full of romanticism, wit and enchanting, fuzzy music. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are perfectly cast as a... Read more... |
Let the Right One In, Royal Court TheatreFriday, 06 December 2013
Vampire romance is a genre which has a mysterious tendency. Every time it migrates from one art form (say novel) to another (say film) it loses some of its darkness and acquires a strange sweetness. So it was with Let the Right One In, a 2004 novel... Read more... |
Dracula, Sky Living / Bates Motel, UniversalFriday, 08 November 2013
The Dracula story has seen almost infinite permutations, though none of them ever manages to improve on Bram Stoker's still-haunting original. This new Anglo-American production keeps Stoker's late 19th-century setting, but has transformed the... Read more... |
