As a writer of horror/ghost stories who lives in British Columbia, I usually get a number of e-mails every time one of these cases is reported. I guess people think I am a) always looking for material (well, sort of) and/or b) able to offer an explanation (er - no).

Yes, that's certainly one word to describe the film. Again, it's very much a curate's egg to me; I never quite bought Robert Stephens as Holmes, and much as I love Colin Blakely he really needs to calm down; he plays Watson as if he's on the verge of a nervous breakdown much of the time (which is perhaps somewhat…

The Seven Per Cent Solution came out just after I had started hoovering up the canon and any pastiche I could find, and was the first 'new' Holmes film I ever saw (I'd already seen the Rathbone/Bruce ones). I think I've seen it once in the decades since (holy crap, that was a long time ago), and while I liked it a lot…

I'll just be a bit (okay, a lot) pedantic here, and note that Paget only came on board as illustrator when the Holmes short stories began appearing in The Strand Magazine in July 1891; he didn't illustrate the first two novels. Which is okay, because it wasn't until the short stories began appearing that Holmes really…

The thing about saying something like 'RDJ plays Holmes in a way that is nothing like the character in the books' seems to indicate that there is a right way and a wrong way to play Holmes, when in fact there are several different ways to play him, depending on whether you want to play up the 'contemplative man of…

I agree that in the canon, Holmes acknowledges (on several different occasions) that Watson is a tough customer; his queries as to whether or not Watson has his revolver with him, before they set out on a potentially dangerous mission, indicates not only practicality (you can be the best boxer or baritsu [sic] master…

I don't think it's ever been adapted for TV (and certainly not for
movies). Clive Merrison and Michael Williams did it on BBC radio back in the 1990s; they're the only two actors to have done all 60 stories in the canon.

Yes, I noticed the mistake after I made the post, and went back in and changed it. It really took until the fourth Universal film - Sherlock Holmes Faces Death - for the series to get on track. It's one of my favourites in the series - along with Scarlet Claw - partly because it's based on an identifiable canonical…

I was at Brett's memorial service in 1995, which was held at the Church of St Martin's in the Fields in Trafalgar Square (my husband had met and interviewed Brett a few times, and had worked with Michael Cox, the producer of the Brett series, to create a Sherlock Holmes display at Granada Studios in Manchester, where…

I think it's already started (not referring to your comment, more a nod to the fact that a lot of people greeted the initial news of a season 4 by bitching about how much they thought the show had gone downhill, and figuring season 4 will not reverse this trend).

Wow, look at that: a trailer that contains actual snippets of scenes and lines of dialogue, and shots that last longer than three seconds!

Lionel Atwill was no slouch as a horror actor either. And later on in 1939 he and Rathbone would be reunited in The Hound of the Baskervilles for Twentieth Century-Fox, still my favourite film version of the book. Atwill played Dr Mortimer; in 1942, when the rights to the characters of Holmes and Watson had gone to…

As I said elsewhere on the AV Club recently, the opening scene of Romero's Night of the Living Dead particularly resonates with me, because my name is Barbara and my brother's name is John, and he would absolutely have tried to creep me out like Johnny does with Barbara, had the situation ever occurred.

It's not really scary so much as eerie, but I love the opening scene of Carpenter's The Fog, with John Houseman on a beach scaring the crap out of a bunch of kids with his story about the origins of Antonio Bay. The ticking of the pocketwatch, the low-key, eerie music (by Carpenter), the sudden snap as Houseman shuts…

"Want to see something really scary?" is still a favourite in-joke between my father and me. He doesn't really care for horror movies much, but he loves this scene.

I hear this post is doing really well in some areas of Philadelphia.

The other one I remember was my son asking me if I could remember - as in, had personally lived through - World War I. No; and I don't remember World War II or the Korean War or even, really, the Vietnam War, although I was alive during the last one; I just wasn't paying much attention to the headlines when I was in…

I guess what "monsters" (and by extension horror) a child will tolerate depends on the child. My mother was reading me Poe stories when I was six; letting me watch the original King Kong when I was seven; and letting me watch the 1963 The Haunting when I was 10. I guess she figured that since I was reading ghost…

Ah, Scooby-Doo. I got my son a DVD of the first season when he was five or so, and as we watched it I said "I remember watching these when they were first aired!" He looked at me gravely and said "You must be really old, mom." Thanks, son. The cats are now ahead of you in the will.

"Get me my Axe!"