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By Ryan Fleming. It's that man again. We'll see a lot of him. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. In which Ryan Fleming imagines a 1970s...

By Ryan Fleming. No. Not this alien. Not quite. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Too often in the West, success or impact in film is couched purely in terms of the American film industry based in Hollywood. Despite most nations having their own native film industry, many of them since the earliest days of film and some of them actually predating Hollywood. Such was the success of Satyajit Ray, whose films produced in his native India had earned major awards in Europe throu

Marooned guest: Ryan Fleming Tradition. Plus it saves searching out a new picture each time. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Once...

By Ryan Fleming. Zombie Hunters in New Orleans. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The feeling of fear in horror fiction is usually felt...

By Ryan Fleming Everyone loves a Styracosaurus. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. In any industry, advances in technology can alter the trajectory of companies, people’s careers, and projects in a very rapid fashion. The film industry is no exception, and the fleeting nature of fame and fortune perhaps is even more susceptible to these changes than other more staid industries. Advances in technology can include the move from silent to talkie pictures, from back-and-white to

By Ryan Fleming This is not a good sofa to hide behind. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Since age restrictions were introduced to...

By Ryan Fleming HP Lovecraft. Unfilmable? Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Unfilmable is mostly spoken about as a certitude, that certain works cannot be adapted into a filmed medium. It is in fact an inconclusive state. We know this because many works that were previously deemed unfilmable have already been filmed. William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch was adapted in 1991, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho in 2000, and JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings from 2011 to 2003. T

By Ryan Fleming. The grandmother of slasher films. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. An oversaturated marketplace caused by innumerable...

By Ryan Fleming Inevitably, it was also made into a Musical. Bodyguards don't normally burst into song. Trust me on that. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. There are many measures by which the success of a film can be graded. Probably the most important to those that control the production of films is getting a return on the budget they put up. It is why they are more willing to bet money on something that is likely to be a success than take a risk on something completely n

By Ryan Fleming. Frankenstein at work in his laboratory. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Modern horror fiction was born in novels....

By Ryan Fleming Sales of chainsaws rose after the film. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. As the 1960s became the 1970s, US horror...

By Ryan Fleming Four out of five; a series long in the production. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 2023 will see the release of a film sequel. Not an unsurprising development, since almost all major releases for most of the 21st Century have been sequels. Or prequels. Or remakes. Or reboots. Or seqoots. Or spin-offs. Or midquels. Or any number of ways Hollywood has connived to trade on past nostalgia to make up for a dearth of ideas. This one stands out for two reasons: f

By Ryan Fleming Who else? Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The success or failure of a film often comes down to its script. There are myriad other factors that can make or break a film, but the script is the component that a production is sold on. Most cases of development hell involve the script being constantly rewritten. Even in a successful film, however, the script is largely provisional right up to filming. So, whilst a script can often take the blame, or praise, for

By Ryan Fleming Sammy is preparing for a big event, due on June 6th. Set your calendars. On the Sea Lion Press Forums, we run a monthly...

By Ryan Fleming. The horror. The Omen (1976). Picture Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. By the time Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde ushered in...

By Ryan Fleming. Katsuhiro Otomo riding Kaneda's motorcycle. That must be fun. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Remakes are everywhere in film. In every form, so much so that we even have a whole new vocabulary to describe essentially the same idea of a new version of an older film. There are remakes, reimaginings, and reboots. It’s reached a stage where there is actual disagreement over which term to use in the case of the emergence of seboots or requels. A lot of these a

By Ryan Fleming. They are, in fact, early televisions. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. After experiments throughout the 1920s and...

By Ryan Fleming. A potential saviour. Picture Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Can the existence of an entire film studio depend on the existence of a single film? There are numerous examples of studios whose success can be traced to a single film. New Line Cinema acquired their nickname “The House That Freddy Built” after their long-term survival was confirmed by the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, and innumerable sequels featuring its villain Freddy Kruger. If the

By Ryan Fleming. (for Part 1 of this article, see here). It lives!!!! Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Between 1957 and 1974, Hammer...

By Ryan Fleming Three of the greats: Lugosi, Lee, Pallance. The Vampire Strikes Back. Image from Wikimedia. In writing about the history,...