George A Romero
A New Yorker by birth (4th February 1940 if you were thinking of sending him a card) George Romero has made Pittsburgh his spiritual and artistic home. It was there that he attended the renowned Carnegie Mellon Institute, and he found work in the city after graduation turning out industrial films, commercials and short films with his first production company-The Latent Image. This was never enough to satisfy someone who’d been making films on an old 8mm since the age of 14 though, and in the late 1960s he got together with a group of friends and formed Image Ten Productions, one of many small-scale independent film companies that was springing up across America at the time. Read more
The Ninth Gate (1999)
In light of his excellent Rosemary’s Baby, a film which brings together Roman Polanski, Johnny Depp and Lucifer naturally invites high expectations. You’ll be consistently under-whelmed though, as The Ninth Gate offer up the promise of an edgy, compelling and suspenseful little movie and instead delivers a flaccid and unemotional tale that limps woefully on to its disappointing conclusion. Read more
The Ring (2003)
The story goes that two Dreamworks execs sat down to watch Hideo Nakata’s Ring quite early in the morning, and they were so impressed by what they saw that by lunchtime they had managed to secure the rights to remake it. Amazingly, for a big-budget Hollywood remake of an independent, low-budget Japanese film, a lot of that passion and excitement for the original actually shows through in the finished product. The Ring, as we are meant to call it now, occasionally misfires, and is inevitably victim to a certain level of major-studio cackhandedness, but on the whole it does an admirable job of bringing the story to a wider audience. Read more
High Plains Drifter (1973)
Clint Eastwood has long been a real hero of mine, so I’m delighted to be able to add to the Lagoon a film that he not only starred in but also directed. I concede that High Plains Drifter is probably more of a mystical Western than a Western-based horror film but the proficiency of its supernatural foundations are such that it more than merits a mention here. Read more
Ring (aka Ringu) (1999)
Hideo Nakata’s astonishing adaption of Koji Suzuki’s best-selling novel was for many people their first (and possibly only) brush with the murky world of Asian horror. The film’s global success, and the various franchises it has spawned, was something of a watershed for international cinema; it almost single-handedly spearheaded the Japanese invasion that has dominated Western horror, both for the American studios looking for the latest hot property to remake and for cinema-goers tantalised by the promise of what has been dubbed ‘Asia Extreme’. Read more
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