Afterword
Having given reviews from over two hundred films, in four genres, perhaps I’ve shown how film-noir, mystery, horror, and science-fiction often overlap and complement each other.
Film noir, after all, is the development or fusion of the mystery, crime, and gangster genres. Mystery and Horror often travel hand in hand; and there’s more than a touch of horror in many sci-fi films.
As B-movies with drive-in status and cult interest set up or followed many of these films too. In short, all of these genres posited edgy, dangerous, ambiguous worlds that appeal to the viewer seeking that level of entertainment and escapism.
Any Dark Corner will show criminals, monsters, murderers, aliens--dead, alive, or neither dead nor alive. If they’re not coming to get us with thoughts, dreams, fugue states, trances, curses, double-crosses, ambushes, schemes, and nightmares; and the pleasant relief that we can turn away from the screen of their dark habits.
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Given the line-up of movie titles in this book, I suppose many will wonder why each genre was grouped in this particular way. That, of course, was a subjective decision on my part; there’s plenty of ways to subdivide them into manageable chunks.
Noir is the easiest: since the genre evolved rather quickly, and has some fairly definite borders, grouping by release date is logical. Mystery had its trends too; but the haunted house setting--usually in England--had a nature all its own. Actually, an English setting would do as a sub-genre in mystery. Also, the more depraved and psychological titles--of the Chiller/Thriller mold-- seems to hum according to its own lurid fancy.
It’s almost impossible to shake mystery and horror from each other, so there’s plenty of overlap with these two genres. I thought of having a horror niche for those titles based on literary works, but that applies to so many of them, it seemed redundant. I settled on the Barons of Horror concept to highlight those staple, stalwart horror stars--with obvious overlapping into the Coffin City crew.
The Horror/Sci-fi segue is hard to sort out too. but, there is quite a distinction between the earth-based and other-worldly settings. Also between giant monsters, and humanoid ones. I dithered about having a separate category for sci-fi in purely desert settings. but that overlaps with other isolated paces--Alaska, Siberia, etc.
Some might ask why include clunkers (Death Curse of Tartu? From Hell It Came?), While maybe skipping a classic. I thought it might be good to show that, much as I like these movie genres, some of the titles just aren’t all that good; Plan 9 from Outer Space and some others might be termed bad/good (another sub-genre?).
The length of the individual reviews varies quite a bit; that doesn’t mean that the longer the review, the better the movie. It probably just means that the shorter ones were written well before the longer ones, as I’ve been chipping away at this for three years. For obviously significant titles not seen here, my only excuse is that I had to stop somewhere, and/or, I haven’t seen the movie recently.