I'm not disputing the basic "Heart of Darkness" parallels in this or the other examples mentioned, but I did want to try to make one clarification. I don't think "Heart of Darkness" is about a European colonialist going out and being "driven mad" by his encounter with another culture. Kurtz gives free reign to his…

I'm not sure that's true. Bad actors can ruin a great script. And great actors can elevate a weak script. The script itself actually has a fairly limited impact on the overall quality.

In Our Time is great, but it can get amusing/frustrating to listen to Melvyn Bragg trying to pin an academic down to a simple answer to a complex question.

The organ theme in Ghost and Mr. Chicken is fantastic. I haven't thought to look to find a copy of it in this iTunes age, but I need to go buy it right now.

As a preteen, the scene from "Pet Semetary" with Zelda, the sick sister dying in the back bedroom, really got under my skin more than anything else in that movie. And then I read the more fleshed-out version of the scene in the book, which just solidified my nightmares for years. There's something about the idea of a…

As a small child I saw the movie "House" (not the freaky Japanese film, but the American cheesy horror movie), in which a monster-woman's hand is flushed down the toilet only to crawl back out and attack someone later. It's basically a comedy scene, but for an embarrassingly long time as a kid, I couldn't sit on a…

No, to be the most British name of all time, it must have a hyphen. And maybe a peerage title. Sir Benedict Cumberbatch-Smythe.

Your point highlights a distinction worth drawing that others have touched on, too. Perhaps we should distinguish "shocks" and "scares" from horror that derives from ideas and concepts. I think the escalation effect really applies to shocks and scares, to the "carnival spook house" type of horror movie (even when that…

See, I think Alien is a really interesting case study here. The commonplace theory is that Alien is effective partly because it hides its creature so effectively. And yet, I would argue that Alien is still effective even on a viewer for whom all the mystique of the alien creature design has been evaporated by all the…

So, how would you rank Island of Lost Souls, Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), and Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)?

Oh, and a follow-up point: this escalation also seems to be particularly a cinematic problem. It does not seem to affect literary to nearly the same degree. Poe can be just as effective on a modern reader as a Victorian one, and we continue to be utterly freaked out by campfire stories we've heard dozens of times…

I wonder how much of this might be related to a general trend of escalation that particularly afflicts horror. I can't think of a genre whose techniques and style have a tendency to become dated nearly as profoundly (comedy would be a candidate, but I still think lots of old comedies remain funnier than old horror…

I'm not sure this "but that's the way they were portrayed in the literature of the time" argument holds up to much scrutiny. Would it be acceptable for a medieval Doctor Who story to feature a group of hook-nosed, usurious Jews who are stealing children to sacrifice them? After all, that's how they were portrayed in…

Yeah, I've been a bit irritated by the number of student-film-level movies proliferating in NetFlix Watch Instantly's "Horror" category. Heck, it's gotten to where I'm almost happy to see a direct-to-DVD movie pop up, since I know that will at least have some level of professionalism that these…

Yeah, I think it's really worrisome that so much of our culture revolves around stoking people's feelings of dissatisfaction. That drives consumerism, as you point out, and it's driving our politics. It's just incredible that a system premised on basically making sure you *always* feel at least a little unfulfilled…

I don't know that it's even about needing Congress on your side. I think the problem is that country is at the mercy of the "undecideds" and the Swing States. Why didn't the Democrats do anything while they had power? Because they were terrified of having that delicate percentage shift the tipping point. But of…

Or you can argue why it might be worthwhile to go beyond that initial gut instinct when evaluating the films' qualities and legacy retrospectively.

I actually think that's been a great loss to the genre — the idea that it's cosmic radiation or what have you that's reanimating the dead. It seems like the vast majority of modern zombie material has adopted the "it's an infection!" motif, which makes the threat much more containable.

If you want to dive in to Classic Who for a longer series of stories (rather than a sampler of different Doctors), I'd recommend the "Key to Time" storyline (which was all of season 16). It's right in the sweet spot of Tom Baker's run, with a nice mixture of story types.

I haven't yet seen the second Matt Smith season, and I've been avoiding spoilers about River Song (though I can tell just from the episode titles and random comments popping up here and there that major stuff has happened in that plot line). But if it's been revealed that she's a Time Lord or something similar, then…