For the first decade of his career as a director, Lucio Fulci excelled at making popular comedies and musicarelli. Over ten years, he churned out 24 features and only deviated from his chosen genre path with a single western, 1966’s Massacre Time (Italian: Le colt cantarono la morte e fu... tempo di massacro; aka: The Brute and the Beast). Massacre Time revealed glimpses of the sadistic, gore-hungry horror flicks to come, but the bloodier moments were justified in matching th

As was often the case, the most distasteful and transgressive Nazisploitation movies were helmed by Italian filmmakers. The repulsive sadiconazista (a portmanteau that basically translates to ‘Nazi sadism’) cavalcade began with Luigi Batzella’s goofball gross-out SS Hell Camp (Italian: La bestia in calore, 1977) and continued with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s arthouse shocker Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Italian: Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodom, 1970), Sergio Garrone’s SS Experim

Science fiction films would never be as abundant as sword-and-sandal movies or spaghetti westerns were in their heydays, but there was still a notable contingent of Italian-made spacefaring adventures during the 1960s, including Antonio Margheriti’s Assignment: Outer Space (aka: Space Men, 1960) and Battle of the Worlds (Italian: Il Pianeta degli uomini spenti, 1961), Primo Zeglio’s Mission Stardust (Italian: ...4...3...2...1...Morte, 1967), and Pietro Francisci’s Star Pilot

Sold by Troma Studios as an irreverent action film, Surf Nazis Must Die (1987) is actually a late-to-the-party Delinquent Dystopia movie. This minor blip of a subgenre is an extension of the American and European juvenile delinquent movies of the ‘50s/‘60s and a similar Japanese movement that peaked in the ‘70s. The Rosetta Stone that connected teen scare type movies with near-future dystopia fiction was, of course, Stanley Kurbrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), itself based o

Having made a living as a working-class filmmaker in Japan since 1991, Takashi Miike initially directed whatever scripts he was handed. In interviews, he’s incredibly modest about his creative talents during retrospective interviews, stating that he didn’t even originally want to be a director – it was simply the most viable career choice. It was this uncharacteristic lack of artistic pretension that left Miike free to make uniquely intuitive and subversive motion pictures.

Sergio Donati was among the unsung founders of the spaghetti western movement, responsible for script-doctoring duties on Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More (Italian: Per qualche dollaro in più, 1965) and, based on unverified rumors, possibly A Fistful of Dollars (Italian: Per un pugno di dollari, 1964), as well as Leone’s co-scripter on Once Upon a Time in the West (Italian: C'era una volta il West, 1968), where he was brought on to make sense of Bernardo Bertolucci & Dar

In the 1980s, the Hong Kong box office was beset by a glut of martial arts/horror hybrids and police thrillers, fueled by genre spoofs, like Kuei Chih-Hung’s Hex vs. Witchcraft (1980) and Sammo Hung’s Winners & Sinners (1983), Hung’s groundbreaking jiangshi comedy Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980), and various hardnosed Jackie Chan cop movies. Eventually, someone at Golden Harvest said “Hey, why don’t we try combining all of these hits into a single production?” and Haunte

New Zealand-based filmmaker Peter Jackson introduced himself to cult audiences around the world with a trilogy of uniquely transgressive, independently produced, gross-out, black comedies entitled Bad Taste (1987), Meet the Feebles (1989), and Braindead (1992). Braindead (released unrated, but still cut as Dead Alive in the US) in particular was an unparalleled zombie epic that pushed the idea of splatter humor to its very limits. There are grosser and more shocking movies ou

The popular concept of the motion picture vampire has, over a hundred years and thousands of movies, become a largely homogenized mythology, based on Eastern European folklore, a couple of bestselling books (Bram Stoker’s Dracula [1897] and Frances Burney’s Camilla [1796]), and Christian religious doctrine. Creative types will always find an interesting angle to the classic vampire, but unique versions of blood-sucking monsters already exist throughout the world. In Asia alon

There’s a well-known phenomenon where studios make competing motion pictures with suspiciously similar premises. Whether the similarities were a coincidence or a case of direct rivalry, audiences were encouraged to debate which film ‘won’ that year’s unlikely competition. An American Werewolf in London vs. The Howling (1981). K-9 vs. Turner & Hooch (1989). Mission to Mars vs. Red Planet (2000). Antz vs. Bugs (1998). Then there are years like 1990, when horror fans saw dueling