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The horror films of the 1950s are often relegated to two categories: space invaders and giant bugs. There is some truth in that generalization, but the reality is far more subtle with deep ties to the past along with the political climate of the decade itself. Both these categories can trace their lineage, at least in American film, back to two quintessential classics of the genre—Dracula and Frankenstein, but removed from spooky castles and unspecified European locales and placed squarely in the suburbs and cities of Cold War era America. Like Dracula, the alien invasion film examines the fear of “the other.” The so-called giant bug movies are really “science gone awry” movies and Frankenstein has been the template and ultimate expression of that idea since its publication in 1818. By the 1950s, the great scientific fear was nuclear power, specifically in the form of the atomic bomb and the...

Joan Weldon, stage actress and a Warner Bros. contract player in the 1950s who achieved lasting sci-fi fame in the creature feature giant ant classic Them!, died Feb. 11 at her home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She was 90.

Her death was only recently announced by her family. A cause was not specified, but the family notes that she “passed away peacefully” at home.

“A talented and successful opera singer and actress of theatre, film, musicals and television, she was simply known to many as Joanie,” the family writes, “whose love for light-hearted pranks and practical jokes spread joy wherever she went.”

Born in San Francisco, Weldon began her professional career at age 16 when she became the San Francisco Opera’s youngest contract singer. She would return to the live stage often, appearing on Broadway opposite Alfred Drake in the 1961 musical Kean.

In 1958 she played Marian the Librarian in the national touring...

Psycho killers long ago lost their novelty, but in 1956 Budd Boetticher and Wendell Corey gave us Leon ‘Foggy’ Poole, a screen original with limitless appeal. Imagine a time when ‘normalcy’ was so taken for granted that any weird behavior was enough to give us the chills? Foggy carries this crime potboiler with a refreshing new idea: his dangerous maniac looks more normal than normal people.

The Killer Is Loose

Blu-ray

ClassicFlix

1956 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 76 min. / Street Date June 13, 2017 / 29.98

Starring: Joseph Cotten, Rhonda Fleming, Wendell Corey, Alan Hale Jr., Michael Pate, John Larch, Dee J. Thompson, Virginia Christine.

Cinematography: Lucien Ballard

Original Music: Lionel Newman

Written by Harold Medford, story by John & Ward Hawkins

Produced by Robert L. Jacks

Directed by Budd Boetticher

A smartly directed mid-fifties noir with a sensational central performance from the overlooked Wendell Corey, The Killer is Loose shows director Budd Boetticher at ease with a modest budget,...

The gray rolling seas thundered through the forest of pilings under the piers, sometimes cresting enough to send a geyser of wind-whipped froth up onto the decking. Other places, it poured through the gaps the wind and tide had eaten through the dunes and poured into the beach town streets. It pulled boats large and small from their moorings in the lagoon marinas and piled them like a child’s toys up on the land. Some in apartment buildings would tell of the cars in the ground level garage floating against each other bathtub playthings. But there was nothing childlike in the way it took entire houses, made seaside villages look like an extension of the ocean and not the land.

For the day and a half I watched Hurricane Sandy pound my home state of New Jersey – which was all the time I had before I lost my cable...

To investigate the origins of the horror film, it is necessary to discuss the German expressionism movement of the 1920s in films such as Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Der Golem. This time around a genre whose peak was the 1950s and 60s is up for discussion in the creature feature. There is one name that is instantly synonymous with the creature feature and that is Roger Corman. There will be no debate on his prolific output as he is a genre unto itself, much in the same way that Ed Wood was with “the bad movie”. Instead the three films this article will be focusing on are: Godzilla, Them (!) and Night of the Living Dead.

For those that debate that the zombie film doesn’t feature under the canon of the creature I say this. It may definitely not be an easy argument to make now, but...

Budd Boetticher was known primarily for his Westerns—particularly the ones he made with Randolph Scott—but over the course of his 30 years as a feature-film director, Boetticher tried his hand at war pictures, gangster pictures, comedy, and noir. In 1956, the same year he began his run of classic oaters with Scott, Boetticher made The Killer Is Loose, a drum-tight crime picture as twisty and efficient as his cowboy films. In a lightning-fast opening 15 minutes, Boetticher and screenwriter Harold Medford (working from a story by John and Ward Hawkins) set up the premise. After a bank robbery ...