Horror Actressing: Elizabeth Allan in "Mark of the Vampire"

by Jason Adams

1935's Mark of the Vampire reunited director Tod Browning with Bela Lugosi four years after they had you know some success with a little film called Dracula. In those four in-between years Browning made the infamously disturbing Freaks (still disturbing to this day!), which was censored and banned everywhere, totally derailing his career. Nobody wanted to work with him after Freaks. But he did eventually manage to round up financing for a remake of one of his most successful silent films...

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Horror Actressing: Jamie Lee Curtis in "Halloween"

by Jason Adams

It is October 28th as I write this and so naturally one is thinking of Halloween -- not the holiday but John Carpenter's movie, I mean. I think in movies exclusively now, ya see. But with this franchise it's hard not to -- the original film was released 41 years ago yesterday and its star Jamie Lee Curtis is out there right now still playing Laurie Strode for the first of two brand new sequels, Halloween Kills for next year and then for 2021 (the no doubt deceptively titled) Halloween Ends. What a good time to celebrate Laurie Strode then...

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Horror Actressing: Luiza Kosovski in "Sick Sick Sick"

by Jason Adams

Anyone who's ever seen a Horror Movie surely already realizes that this genre is a good place to see Actresses really give it their all. Whatever the reasons are that connect the female experience with cinematic trauma -- and it's not that I don't know the reasons, it's just that there are too many to list -- no other genre has spent more time rooting around in what it means to be a woman than the Horror Genre has. From Carrie White to Rosemary Woodhouse to Mother Abagail and Annie Wilkes -- you name her, she's had her Horror Movie...

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Horror Actressing: Mia Goth in "Suspiria"

by Jason Adams

To tell the truth it's been taking me a coven's worth of willpower not to use this "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series week after week as an excuse to go through the cast-list of Luca Guadagnino's  Suspiria one by one by one and highlight every single woman in the film -- there's nary a weak link in sight, everybody is serving something special, and that's a lot of every-bodies given how deep that cast-list runs. 

Thankfully I'm not alone in my obsession, and one of my favorite horror writers on the entire internet, Stacie Ponder at Final Girl, has devoted the entire month of October to doing just that. She's not just talking the stellar cast though -- every day she's dissecting themes and images and if you ask me proving to the naysayers (of which those of us who adore the film know there are many, more many, than there are lovers) that Guadagnino gifted us with a profoundly rich and moving horror masterpiece, aching up to its eaves with feeling.

Anyway Stacie's impelling piece last week on the love relationship between Susie (Dakota Johnson) and Sara (Mia Goth) finally managed to break my back with respect to holding out on talking this movie -- specifically I've had nothing but Goth's work on my mind for seven straight days. And what a blessing that's been...

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Horror Actressing: Maribel Verdú in "Pan's Labyrinth"

by Jason Adams

As long as there have been haunted houses there have been housekeepers keeping them, and the role of the housekeeper in a horror film is a tried and true one that film-makers can and have spun off a dozen different ways. There's the strange and sapphic Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) in Rebecca; there's the seemingly good-natured but with a hell of a secret Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan) in The Others; and there's the bluntly unfriendly type typified by Mrs. Dudley (Rosalie Crutchley) in The Haunting who gets to speak the immortal line, "In the night. In the dark."

Guillermo Del Toro, would of course be familiar with all these tropes, which is why I think his spin on the role with the great Maribel Verdú in Pan's Labyrinth is so fascinating...

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