So I was delighted to discover this weekend that my favorite Mycroft, Mark Gatiss, wrote and produced a horror doc for BBC a few years ago (which I found while looking up stuff about John Carpenter, you know, as you do) called A History of Horror. I poked around and found it where most online videos are to be found, and let me tell you, friends, it is absolutely great.
Gatiss also does some poking around himself into movie archives, and shows off stuff like Lon Chaney's makeup kit, and documents from a censor board's opinion of all that dirty sexy Christopher Lee vampirin' going on in Horror of Dracula. I spent most of the episode exclaiming things like, "Oh, that movie? Yeah, it's my favorite, too, Mark! Let's be best friends!" Ah, but that's a horror of a different color.
The second installment is fantastic, if you're a Hammer and/or Peter Cushing fan like I am. There's an especially great moment at or near the 50 minute mark, where a brief interview bit is shown with Cushing and Vincent Price on the set of Madhouse. As an aside, if you haven't seen it, Madhouse is wonderful, a great combination of horror, mystery and send-up of Hollywood/movie biz.
I'm saving the third installment for tomorrow. So far I can't find it anywhere to purchase online, but who knows? Maybe it'll pop up somewhere soon. It's a nice companion piece to books like Danse Macabre and Projected Fears, and I'd recommend it to any horror fan.
Also: needless to say! But if something's needless, you can count on me to spell it out. Between this and Tank Riot's Zombies! episode, my to-watch horror movie list has ballooned to freakish, atomic-influenced proportions.
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