Book Review: Icons of Fright

Icons of Fright: 100 Interviews with Legendary Horror Filmmakers
Published by Harker Press, 2025. 469 pages
By Mike Cucinotta, Rob Galluzzo, Adam Barnick, and Jason Alvino

When you first look through this massive volume of interviews, it’s astonishing the number of people covered within the pages. The subjects range from directors, actors, screenwriters, makeup artists, stuntmen, and just about everyone in between! And the names in those categories ranges from the very well-known to the more up-and-coming ones that have just started in the industry or are just getting some notoriety from their work. But then I quickly noticed that the interviews are old… like decades or older. And I quickly thought, “Who wants to read interviews from 15 years ago?”

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Hitchcock and Herrmann Book

June 3, 2025 by Jon Kitley in Book News and tagged Alfred Hitchcock, Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock & Herrmann, North by Northwest, Oxford University Press, Psycho, Steven C. Smith, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo | Leave a comment

Composer Bernard Herrmann worked with Alfred Hitchcock on some of his most well-known scores, such as Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and of course, Psycho (1960). They would work on 8 films together, creating some of the finest in cinematic history. Now, author Steven C. Smith gives us a book that delves into that relationship in his new book Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema, due out this fall. Smith spent over four decades doing research, from unpublished documents, new interviews, giving us readers a look inside the collaboration between Hitchcock and Herrmann.

When you have to strong-willed characters like these two, you know there are going to clashes. But they still were able to work together for some time and helped create some amazing films and film scores. This 312-page hardcover book is being published by Oxford University Press and can be pre-ordered now, with a cost of $39.99.

Soundtrack Review: Psycho II

August 6, 2024 by Jon Kitley in Reviews: Soundtrack and tagged Alfred Hitchcock, Bernard Herrmann, Intrada, Jerry Goldsmith, Psycho, Psycho II | Leave a comment

Psycho II
Released by Intrada, 2021
31 Tracks with a Total Running Time of 1:14:30 Min.
Composed and Conducted by Jerry Goldsmith

I can’t imagine being asked to take on the task of creating a sequel to the Alfred Hitchcock classic, which director Richard Franklin and screenwriter Tom Holland did, and, I feel, really knocked it out of the park. Same goes with Jerry Goldsmith, having to come up with a score to follow up Bernard Herrmann. Couldn’t have been easy to even think of doing. But Goldsmith made this score his own, and it really works.

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2023 Year End Review – Part 2: Best Viewings!

December 31, 2023 by Jon Kitley in Year End Reviews and tagged Against the Grain, Alfred Hitchcock, Blood Flower, Cobweb, Demien Rugna, Don't Listen, Eloy de la Iglesia, Eskil Vogt, I See You, Joseph Stefano, La Abuela, Martin Landau, Mike Vraney, No One Heard the Scream, Paco Plaza, Psycho, Something Weird Video, Terrified, The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre, The Grandmother, The Innocents, Vinegar Syndrome, Voces, When Evil Lurks | 3 Comments

As always, it was a struggle getting my list down to ten films. It was even stranger because when I first started going through my list of movies I watched this year, at first, I thought I was going to have trouble even coming up with five titles. But the more I looked into them, the more I realized that not only did I have more than ten, but almost like last year, most of the films I have listed here came out in the last few years. I’ve only got two “old” ones and the rest from 2020 to 2023. I would like to say that it gives me hope for modern films, but really mainly if you look outside the country! Six of my films are from foreign countries, which does give me a LOT of hope of the horror genre as a whole.

Let’s get started, shall we? These are listed in alphabetical order to make it a little easier for me, since narrowing it down to ten was hard enough!

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Friday Favorites: Hitchcock!

July 10, 2020 by Jon Kitley in Friday Favorites and tagged Alfred Hitchcock, I Confess, Lifeboat, Man Who Knew Too Much, Psycho, Rear Window, Rope, Strangers on a Train, The Birds, Vertigo | 7 Comments

rear window friday favorite

This Friday we’re going to talk about the one of the greatest directors that ever said “Action!” The one and only Alfred Hitchcock. Unlike most fans, my first introduction to him wasn’t any of his films, but his television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. But once it came to movies, Psycho was definitely the one I remember as being one of the first, if not the first. But way before we were introduced to Norman and his domineering mother, Hitchcock gave us so many great titles, from The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and then remade in 1956), Lifeboat (1944), Rope (1948), I Confess (1953), Rear Window (1954), and so many more.

So for this Friday Favorites, let us hear what yours is from our friend Sir Alfred.

Movie Review: Deranged (1974)

June 7, 2020 by Jon Kitley in Reviews: Movies and tagged Alan Ormsby, Deranged, Ed Gein, Jeff Gillen, Psycho, Robert Bloch, Roberts Blossom, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tom Savini | Leave a comment

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Deranged (1974)
Directed by Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby.
Starring Roberts Blossom, Cosette Lee, Micki Moore, Robert Warner, Pat Orr

Of all the films based on the real life story of Ed Gein, I would say this one is the most accurate. Since I grew up in a small town in Michigan, I’ve always found this film to be very creepy, since there were a few people in my town that could easily have been another Ed Gein. In case you’re not aware of the facts, Gein was from Plainfield, Wisconsin that murdered at least 2 people, but also had dug up several people from the local graveyard, using their body parts for nefarious things, before he was caught in 1954. How something like that could have be going on, and nobody would have ever know, boggles the mind. According to author Robert Bloch, that is the one thing that he took from the whole Ed Gein affair for his book Psycho, that a small town America could be housing a terror that nobody was aware of. Tobe Hooper also took a lot of ideas from Gein for his film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), including the fact that Gein had face masks made from human skin. Continue reading →

Book Review: The Haunted House on Film

February 5, 2020 by Jon Kitley in Reviews: Horror Reference Book and tagged Haunted Castle, Haunted House on Film, Legend of Hell House, McFarland, Old Dark House, Paul Meehan, Psycho, Rosemary's Baby, The Haunting, The Innocents, The Shining | 5 Comments

The Haunted House on Film: An Historical Analysis
Published by McFarland, 2019. 222 pages
By Paul Meehan

The haunted house film is one of my favorite sub-genres so I was very excited to dig into this title when it finally came out. I was hoping to add a multitude to titles to my “Crap! I haven’t seen that yet” list, which is exactly what I did. Even before we get into the thick of this review, anytime a book has you seeking out different titles, that is always a good thing!

The introduction gives a great overview of the not only haunted house in cinema, but in fiction as well, giving the reader a nice background as to where all of this really started. When you consider that the very first haunted house film, Georges Méliès 1986 film Le Chateau Hante (aka The Haunted Castle), was also the very first horror film, makes this sub-genre really the oldest in the horror film category. But we also have early titles discussed such as D.W. Griffith’s One Exciting Night (1922) and Roland West’s The Bat (1926). Meehan covers the early “old dark house” films that really were a combination of mystery/thriller/comedies, giving a good explanation as to why these are really different than what one would normally define as a haunted house film. On many of the movies discussed, where there is a mystery killer, the author leaves it up to the reader to find the movie and watch it to find out who that might be. Since many authors will give away any surprises, which really is a letdown going into the film if you know the ending, it’s nice to know those secrets were left hidden. Continue reading →

Horror at the Egyptian!

August 1, 2019 by Jon Kitley in Movie Events and tagged Carrie, Halloween, Poltergeist, Psycho, The Egyptian Theatre, The Exorcist | Leave a comment

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Never too early to start making your plans for the Halloween season right? I mean, stores are already starting to put out the decorations, so makes perfect sense to me. Granted, for a lot of us, the Halloween season is all year round!

The Egyptian Theatre in Dekalb, IL has announced a Horror Film Series in October, showing a classic horror film every Tuesday throughout the month. Tickets are $8 each and the movies will start at 7pm. Here is what they will be screening: Continue reading →