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Exclusive: Indonesian director Joko Anwar (Impetigore) is preparing to make his English-language debut with Fritzchen, an adaptation of the classic short story by Charles Beaumont that is in development at Village Roadshow.

While the story published in Orbit magazine in 1953 (and later in Beaumont’s anthology Yonder) examines a boy’s encounter with a strange creature on the beach, blending elements of sci-fi and horror, details with regard to the film’s plot are being kept under wraps. Michael Voyer (The Broodmare) is adapting the script, with David Kopple on board to produce for Entertainment 360. Village Roadshow recently optioned the short story and will serve as the project’s financier.

Beaumont was an acclaimed science fiction writer best known for penning such Twilight Zone episodes as “The Howling Man,” “Static,” “Miniature,” “Printer’s Devil” and “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You.” He also wrote the screenplays for films including Brain Dead,...

Gold Derby odds-makers are betting on Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” to clean up in the below-the-line categories – as of this writing it’s projected for six wins! – but one category where it might have some stiff competition is Best Makeup and Hairstyling. As I noted in my previous piece about the category, transforming actors for biopics has often led to Oscar gold, and yet there’s also plenty of historical precedent for the academy to pick a fantasy or science-fiction epic like “Dune,” which features exemplary work by Donald Mowat and his team of artists and stylists.

This year the Makeup category turns 40 years old, with hairstylists added as award recipients in 1993, and then hairstyling was added to the name of the category in 2012. But the very first competitive winner in the category, after a couple honorary awards (for 1964’s “7 Faces of Dr. Lao” and 1968’s “Planet of the Apes...

Isle of the Dead

Blu ray

Warner Archive

1945 / 1.33:1 / 72 min.

Starring Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Katherine Emery

Cinematography by Jack MacKenzie

Directed by Mark Robson

The Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin produced several versions of Isle of the Dead in the late 1800’s—none of them suggested a typical tourist attraction but more than a few artists used that gloomy seascape as a port of inspiration; Rachmaninov composed a symphony, Dalí produced a surrealist tribute, and Strindberg sketched the fragments of a play, Toten-Insel. There’s even a hint of the painting’s portentous cliffs in Welles’ Xanadu. In 1945, Val Lewton, Mr. Dark Shadows himself, conceived an entire film built around Böcklin’s haunted island.

Directed by Mark Robson, Isle of the Dead is thematically rich, even for a Lewton project; set in Greece at the end of the Balkan wars, a plague joins forces with the supernatural to wreak havoc...

This article marks Part 3 of the Gold Derby series reflecting on Horror Films at the Oscars. Join us as we look back at the spine-tingling movies that earned Academy Awards nominations, including the following films from the 1980s and 1990s.

On the heels of the lukewarm reception for “Alien” (1979), horror cinema still struggled to break through at the Oscars with the start of the 1980s.

Stanley Kubrick‘s “The Shining” (1980) was not voters’ cup of tea, though it did earn Razzie Award nominations in Worst Director and Worst Actress (Shelley Duvall). Likewise, Brian De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill” and Peter Medak’s “The Changeling,” both now considered horror classics, were not embraced at the Oscars.

The one 1980 horror film that did strike a chord was “Altered States,” the trippy collaboration of director Ken Russell and screenwriter Paddy Cheyefsky. It landed nominations in Best Original Score and Best Sound.

The...

A great actor once said “never work with children or animals.” This episode features both, and once again, the axiom proves true. The students of Coal Hill School have a sleepover in the museum of natural history, and wake up…

In The Forest Of The Night

By Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Directed by Sheree Folkson

London, and indeed the whole world, ha been engulfed by dense, fireproof forests overnight. The Doctor assumes it’s an act of aggression, but with the help of the kids of Coal Hill School, including one very sensitive girl, the real threat to Earth is identified. But are they too late to realize they’ve been attacking the wrong side?

This is another episode where the main plot and the threat of the week is almost overwhelmed by the staggering character work. Wonderful camera work from the director (the steadi-cam run around the top deck of the...

H.G. Wells' 1898 classic alien invasion novel, The War of the Worlds, has been adapted several times for the big screen, most recently by Steven Spielberg five years ago (my first "Scenes We Love" entry for Cinematical), two low-budget entries, one set in Victorian times and the other in the present released to coincide with Spielberg's adaptation, and most memorably, fifty-seven years ago by producer George Pal (The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, The Time Machine, Conquest of Space, When Worlds Collide, Destination Moon) for Paramount Pictures. Pal's adaptation, directed by Byron Haskin (The Power, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, From the Earth to the Moon, Conquest of Space) from a screenplay by Barré Lyndon, created the template for every alien invasion film that followed. The War of the Worlds won an Academy Award for its groundbreaking visual effects. It was nominated, but surprisingly didn't win, the Academy Award for the equally innovative sound design.

By Scott Essman

In the history of the modern American cinema, there are but few legacies of makeup artists. While the legendary Burman and Dawn names each include three generations of makeup artists, there is but one lasting family that features four working generations: the Westmores of Hollywood. With ties to virtually every studio in the annals cinema, the Westmores have created classic makeups in top contemporary film and TV shows back to the earliest years of silent film.

George Westmore, the patriarch of the Westmore clan at the turn of the century, worked as a wigmaker in his native England — where he was born in 1879 — and gave birth to sons Mont (born in 1902), twins Perc and Ern (born in 1904), Wally (born in 1906), and a daughter, Dorothy (born in 1907). The young family traveled to the U.S. to seek better opportunities and maintained a wig-making and beauty salon business which floated amongst various cities,...

Charles Schram, whose iconic Cowardly Lion make-up for The Wizard of Oz charmed generations of film fans, died Nov. 14 in Los Angeles. He was 97. Born in Los Angeles in 1911, Schram enrolled in art classes at the University of Southern California with William Tuttle. According to Al Taylor and Sue Roy.s book Making a Monster, MGM Make-up Department Head Jack Dawn recruited Schram and Tuttle in 1935 as apprentices after he asked a college dean to recommend a couple of sculpture and painting students who could learn the art of make-up for the 1937 film The Good Earth. The pair went on to collaborate on several films, including The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, Ben Hur and The Time Machine.

Actor Tony Randall, the stage, screen and television actor best known as fussy Felix Unger on the 70s sitcom The Odd Couple, died in New York in his sleep Monday night after complications from a long illness; he was 84. An actor who specialized in playing comedic sidekicks and best friends, Randall first gained prominence onscreen by reprising his Broadway starring role in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? in 1957. That film was followed two years later by his scene-stealing turn in Pillow Talk opposite Rock Hudson and Doris Day, the first of many supporting romantic comedy roles for which he would become best known (others included Let's Make Love, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers), although he was also an effective and versatile lead in 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. Randall seamlessly transitioned to television in 1970 with The Odd Couple, based on the hit Neil Simon play, in which he was paired with Jack Klugman, who played the messy Oscar Madison; the show ran for five years and won both actors Emmy Awards for their roles. Innumerable television appearances followed, most notably The Tony Randall Show (1976-78) and Love, Sidney (1981-83), a pioneering sitcom in which his character's homosexuality was implied but never stated. Randall turned most of his energy to the stage in his later career, founding the non-profit National Actors Theatre in 1991, starring in and directing a number of the company's productions. The actor made a brief return to the screen last year in Down with Love, an homage to the Rock Hudson-Doris Day films in which he co-starred. Randall is survived by his wife Heather Harlan Randall . who was fifty years younger and made him a father for the first time at 77 . and their two children, a 7 year-old daughter and a 5 year-old son. --Prepared by IMDb staff...

Actor Tony Randall, the stage, screen and television actor best known as fussy Felix Unger on the 70s sitcom The Odd Couple, died in New York in his sleep Monday night after complications from a long illness; he was 84. An actor who specialized in playing comedic sidekicks and best friends, Randall first gained prominence onscreen by reprising his Broadway starring role in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? in 1957. That film was followed two years later by his scene-stealing turn in Pillow Talk opposite Rock Hudson and Doris Day, the first of many supporting romantic comedy roles for which he would become best known (others included Let's Make Love, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers), although he was also an effective and versatile lead in 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. Randall seamlessly transitioned to television in 1970 with The Odd Couple, based on the hit Neil Simon play, in which he was paired with Jack Klugman, who played the messy Oscar Madison; the show ran for five years and won both actors Emmy Awards for their roles. Innumerable television appearances followed, most notably The Tony Randall Show (1976-78) and Love, Sidney (1981-83), a pioneering sitcom in which his character's homosexuality was implied but never stated. Randall turned most of his energy to the stage in his later career, founding the non-profit National Actors Theatre in 1991, starring in and directing a number of the company's productions. The actor made a brief return to the screen last year in Down with Love, an homage to the Rock Hudson-Doris Day films in which he co-starred. Randall is survived by his wife Heather Harlan Randall . who was fifty years younger and made him a father for the first time at 77 . and their two children, a 7 year-old daughter and a 5 year-old son. --Prepared by IMDb staff...