There’s no one right way to be a vampire, even if it comes with the same sleep schedule. Cinema has helped us grasp this concept over the decades, with variations on the folk horror archetype colored by some most frightening of human feelings: addiction, lust, control, and isolation. For as much as vampires cannot see themselves in the mirror, they’re reflections of ourselves, shapeshifting throughout different cultural periods.

The tradition of vampirism also brings out authorship from directors, with many using the setup for their own expression: the likes of Park Chan-wook, George Romero, Jim Jarmusch, Abel Ferrara, Catherine Hardwicke, Guillermo del Toro, Amy Heckerling, for just a taste.

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Forty years ago, Andrzej Zulawski’s “Possession” was released into an unprepared world. The lurid, gruesome horror story of a marriage gone terribly wrong, Zulawski’s movie was butchered by some distributors, banned in some countries, and received with a general mix of shock and scorn. In the decades since, the film’s reputation has grown exponentially – it’s now considered a veritable cult classic, and a stunning new 4K restoration from Metrograph Pictures will see it re-released in cinemas this October.

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It’s the witching hour, and we’re just in time to serve you our final frightening dish in our Halloween-themed horror banquet. We’ve discussed the best of the genre from the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and this century, the best foreign-language horrors, and some of the most visually stunning on-screen nightmares we’ve ever seen. Now it’s time to shine a spooky light on 25 riveting performances in horror films. Ranging from as early as the 1930s all the way to the present, the men and women who populate this article have kept us awake on many nights, sent currents of chill down our spine, and, in a few cases, made us laugh just as readily as they made us scamper to the nearest blanket.

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It’s the beginning of the spookiest month of the year, so it’s no accident that this week will see the release of one of the best horror films of the year, Babak Anvari‘s “Under the Shadow” (our review). It was well received at Sundance and throughout the year at its various festival berths, but if you haven’t heard as much about it as you did about, say, “The Babadook” or “The Witch,” there’s a simple reason: although it’s a U.K.

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The Films Of Werner Herzog: A Retrospective

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