My friend Lucy published today a nice lengthy piece about the 1939 adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.
You can find the post here, and read it through the usual Google Translate thingy. It’s excellent, and it raises an interesting question, by noting that The Hound of the Baskervilles is treated as a proper Gothic story, an old dark house film.
This got me thinking about the connection between the Canon and the Horror genre, and so while clouds gathered and the storm approached, heralded by thunder and lightning, I brew myself a cup of hot tea, and I took a look at the other Hound, the one that was unleashed on the moors, in the full shocking splendor of Technicolor, by Terence Fisher, with the assistance of the fine gentlemen of Hammer Films.
The first Holmes movie in color.
Another Gothic adaptation, featuring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
It was, if you recall, the year 1959. Continue reading
Category Archives: Media
The Second Lauren Bacall Blogathon: Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
This is The Second Lauren Bacall Blogathon, run by the In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood blog, and if I have to explain to you who Bacall was, you are reading the wrong blog.
But please follow the link and check out the wealth of great posts from the blogs that are participating in the blogathon, and then come back here, because we have a train to catch, and we are running late. Continue reading
French Naughtiness, General Pershing, and inspiration
There is an image, here on my desktop, I’ve been hoping to use as an inspiration for a short story for quite a while.
It’s called Les Surprises de la Vie de Chateau: La Revue Nocturne, that is Surprises of the Life in the Castle: The Night Review.
It’s a host of ghostly dames, in gorgeous Medieval dresses, examining with curiosity and bafflement the lingerie of a flapper girl as she spends the night in a castle’s bedroom.
It was drawn by Chery Herouard for a magazine called La Vie Parisienne, somewhere in the 1920s. Continue reading
H.P. Lovecraft & Ronald Colman
A bit of Old Time Radio for our Radio Karavansara feature, courtesy of the Internet Archive: Ronald Colman starring in a 1945 radio adapation of H.P. Lovecraft’s classic The Dunwich Horror.
Enjoy!
Meet Miss Sherlock
I am on a Sherlock Holmes roll – and it really looks like these next few months will be Sherlockian apocrypha and folk horror, considering the books that are piling up (virtually) on my ereader.
Now, there was a time, before Facebook, when I was one of the Hounds of the Internet, and I was a lot more into Sherlock Holmes and related matters than I am now. I started out as a Sherlock Holmes fan in middle school, and read the stories and watched the movies etcetera.
But like Steely Dan used to sing
Those days are gone forever
Over a long time ago.
Or so I thought. Continue reading
Hope & Glory – meet the Thuggee
This is sort of a triple package of a post – we’ll get a bit of history, some literature, and then a movie.
Nice way to spend a Sunday, right?
This week we have been talking a lot about Hope & Glory, but I hope I kept it varied enough you were not bored out of your socks.
Now, when we put together Hope & Glory I knew we’d have to put the Thuggee in. The Deceivers are such a big trope in Indian adventure that leaving them out would be unthinkable – and in general, whatever is fine in an Indiana Jones movie is also fine at my gaming table.
This leads us to a gentleman by the name of Sir William Henry Sleeman, KCB. Continue reading
Karavansara 