For many Open Cul­ture read­ers, the Hal­loween sea­son offers an oppor­tu­ni­ty — not to say an excuse — to re-expe­ri­ence clas­sic hor­ror films: F.W. Mur­nau’s Nos­fer­atu from 1922, for instance, or even George Méliès The Haunt­ed Cas­tle, which launched the whole form in 1896. This year, may we sug­gest a home screen­ing of the for­mi­da­ble work of vin­tage cin­e­ma that is 1968’s The Astro Zom­bies? Writ­ten, pro­duced, and direct­ed by Ted Mikels — auteur of The Corpse Grinders and Blood Orgy of the She-Dev­ils — it fea­tures not just “a mad astro-sci­en­tist” played by John Car­ra­dine and “two gore-crazed, solar-pow­ered killer robot zom­bies,” but “a bloody trail of girl-next-door vic­tims; Chi­nese com­mu­nist spies; dead­ly Mex­i­can secret agents led by the insane­ly volup­tuous Tura Satana” and an “intre­pid CIA agent” on the case of it all.

You can watch The Astro Zom­bies for free, and new­ly remas­tered in HD to boot, at Kino Cult, the new stream­ing site from film and video dis­trib­u­tor Kino Lor­ber. Pull up the front page and you’ll be treat­ed to a wealth of tit­il­lat­ing view­ing options of a vari­ety of eras and sub­gen­res: “Dri­ve-in favorites” like Ape and Beware! The Blob; “gold­en age exploita­tion” like Reefer Mad­ness and She Shoul­da Said ‘No’!; and even clas­sics like Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis and Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Fear and Desire.

True cult-film enthu­si­asts, of course, may well go straight to the avail­able selec­tions, thought­ful­ly grouped togeth­er, from “Mas­ter of Ital­ian Hor­ror” Mario Bava and pro­lif­ic Span­ish “B‑movie” king­pin Jesús Fran­co. Those look­ing to throw a fright night might con­sid­er Kino Cult’s offer­ings filed under “hard­boiled hor­ror”: Kill­bil­lies, The House with 100 Eyes, Bun­ny: The Killer Thing.

Few of these pic­tures skimp on the grotesque; few­er still skimp on the humor, a nec­es­sary ingre­di­ent in even the most har­row­ing hor­ror movies. Far from a pile of cyn­i­cal hack­work, Kino Cult’s library has clear­ly been curat­ed with an eye toward films that, although for the most part pro­duced inex­pen­sive­ly and with unre­lent­ing intent to pro­voke vis­cer­al reac­tions in their audi­ences, are hard­ly with­out inter­est to seri­ous cinephiles. The site even includes an “art­sploita­tion” sec­tion con­tain­ing such taboo-breach­ing works as Cur­tis Burz’s Sum­mer House. Among its gen­er­al recent addi­tions you’ll also find Dog­tooth by Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos, per­haps the most dar­ing high-pro­file provo­ca­teur cur­rent­ly at work in the medi­um. Since Kino Cult has made all these films and more avail­able to stream at no charge, none of us, no mat­ter our par­tic­u­lar cin­e­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties, has an excuse to pass this Hal­loween un-enter­tained — and more to the point, undis­turbed. Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Hor­ror Film, George Méliès’ The Haunt­ed Cas­tle (1896)

Watch Nos­fer­atu, the Sem­i­nal Vam­pire Film, Free Online (1922)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films

Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies: Full of Hor­ror & Sus­pense

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

What Scares Us, and How Does this Man­i­fest in Film? A Hal­loween Pret­ty Much Pop Cul­ture Pod­cast (#66)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

It did­n’t take long after the inven­tion of cin­e­ma for its sheer pow­er of spec­ta­cle to become clear. Arguably, it was appar­ent even in the pio­neer­ing work of the Lumière broth­ers, though they attempt­ed only to cap­ture images famil­iar from every­day life at the time. But in a decade or two emerged auteurs like Fritz Lang, who, hav­ing grown up with cin­e­ma itself, pos­sessed high­ly devel­oped instincts for how to use it to cap­ti­vate large and var­i­ous audi­ences. Released in 1927, Lang’s Metrop­o­lis showed movie­go­ers an elab­o­rate vision, both fear­some and allur­ing, of the indus­tri­al dystopia that could lay ahead. But it also had danc­ing girls!

Or rather, it had a danc­ing girl who’s actu­al­ly a robot — a Maschi­nen­men­sch, accord­ing to the script — built by the film’s vil­lain in an attempt to besmirch the hero­ine who would lib­er­ate the tit­u­lar city’s down­trod­den work­ers. (Both the real woman and her mechan­i­cal imper­son­ator are skill­ful­ly played by Brigitte Helm.)

In the video above, you can see the scan­dalous and cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly inno­v­a­tive spec­ta­cle-with­in-a-spec­ta­cle that is Metrop­o­lis’ dance scene col­orized, upscaled to 4K res­o­lu­tion at 60 frames per sec­ond, and new­ly sound­tracked with a track called “Lemme See About It” by Max McFer­ren. This is rec­og­niz­ably Metrop­o­lis, but it’s also a Metrop­o­lis none of us has ever seen before.

The pro­duc­tion also com­bines visu­al mate­r­i­al from dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the film, quite a few of which have been edit­ed and re-edit­ed, lost and recov­ered over near­ly the past cen­tu­ry. (The run­ning times of the offi­cial­ly released cuts alone range from 83 to 153 min­utes.) Cer­tain dif­fer­ences in qual­i­ty between one shot and the next make this obvi­ous, though the con­sis­ten­cy of the over­all col­oriza­tion eas­es the sud­den tran­si­tions between them. A Metrop­o­lis fan could­n’t help but feel some curios­i­ty about how the whole pic­ture would play with all of these enhance­ments, not that it would resem­ble any­thing Lang could orig­i­nal­ly have envi­sioned. But then, no sin­gle cut exists that defin­i­tive­ly reflects his inten­tions — and besides, he’d sure­ly approve of how the film’s dance sequence has been made to cap­ti­vate us once again.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Metrop­o­lis: Watch Fritz Lang’s 1927 Mas­ter­piece

Watch Metrop­o­lis’ Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Inno­v­a­tive Dance Scene, Restored as Fritz Lang Intend­ed It to Be Seen (1927)

If Fritz Lang’s Icon­ic Film Metrop­o­lis Had a Kraftwerk Sound­track

One of the Great­est Dances Sequences Ever Cap­tured on Film Gets Restored in Col­or by AI: Watch the Clas­sic Scene from Stormy Weath­er

The Icon­ic Dance Scene from Hel­lza­pop­pin’ Pre­sent­ed in Liv­ing Col­or with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (1941)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Time and again in inter­views, Quentin Taran­ti­no has straight-faced­ly declared that he will retire from film­mak­ing after his tenth fea­ture. He may already have reached that num­ber with 2019’s Once Upon a Time… in Hol­ly­wood, depend­ing on whether each part of Kill Bill counts as a sep­a­rate film. If not, we have one more Taran­ti­no pic­ture to look for­ward to. His dec­la­ra­tion of immi­nent retire­ment is unusu­al and even dispir­it­ing giv­en that he’s still in his late fifties, an age that has found many auteurs at the peak of their pow­ers. What lies behind it is the sub­ject of the short video above from Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer.

“I like the idea that there is an umbil­i­cal cord con­nect­ed to my first film, all the way to my last, and that is my body of work,” says Taran­ti­no in one of the inter­view clips includ­ed. “A bad film on the fil­mog­ra­phy affects good films.” Being known not just as a promi­nent direc­tor but an obses­sive cinephile, Taran­ti­no can sure­ly name off the top of his head dozens of mas­ter film­mak­ers who allowed their own bod­ies of work to be blem­ished.

“Artists don’t always notice when their skills are flag­ging,” as Puschak puts it. “Taran­ti­no is leav­ing ear­ly to pre­vent cross­ing that line unwit­ting­ly.” Though spec­u­la­tive, this notion has hard­ly been con­tra­dict­ed by the direc­tor’s own words.

Puschak writes about the pow­er of the oeu­vre — an artist’s body of work tak­en as a whole, even as an art­work in itself — in his new book Escape into Mean­ing. The con­tent of this video reflects only the first sec­tion of that essay, a med­i­ta­tion on what it means to con­sid­er every­thing a cre­ator has made as a piece of an inter­con­nect­ed whole. The tech­niques, ref­er­ences, themes, and obses­sions that recur promi­nent­ly in Taran­ti­no’s movies make his fil­mog­ra­phy prac­ti­cal­ly invite such an analy­sis, as well the ques­tion asked by Puschak: “Can a well-designed fil­mog­ra­phy bestow greater mean­ing onto the films that make it up?” No mat­ter how many more works Taran­ti­no will make, and what­ev­er form they take, the whole of his exist­ing oeu­vre assures us that all of them will be thor­ough­ly Taran­tin­ian.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Analy­sis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Nar­rat­ed (Most­ly) by Quentin Taran­ti­no

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Shoots a Film at 3 Dif­fer­ent Bud­get Lev­els: Reser­voir Dogs ($1 Mil­lion), Pulp Fic­tion ($8 Mil­lion), and Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood ($95 Mil­lion)

Quentin Tarantino’s Copy­cat Cin­e­ma: How the Post­mod­ern Film­mak­er Per­fect­ed the Art of the Steal

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Remix­es His­to­ry: A Brief Study of Once Upon a Time… in Hol­ly­wood

Quentin Taran­ti­no Releas­es His First Nov­el: A Pulpy Nov­el­iza­tion of Once Upon a Time… in Hol­ly­wood

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

As of this writ­ing, Mank is David Fincher’s newest movie — but also, in a sense, his old­est. With Net­flix mon­ey behind him, he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors spared seem­ing­ly no expense in re-cre­at­ing the look and feel of a nine­teen-for­ties film using the advanced dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies of the twen­ty-twen­ties. The idea was not just to tell the sto­ry of Cit­i­zen Kane scriptwriter Her­man J. Mankiewicz, but to make the two pic­tures seem like con­tem­po­raries. As Fincher’s pro­duc­tion design­er Don­ald Gra­ham Burt once put it, the direc­tor “want­ed the movie to be like you were in a vault and came across Cit­i­zen Kane and next to it was Mank.”

Cin­e­maS­tix cre­ator Dan­ny Boyd quotes Burt’s remarks in the video essay above, “When a Mod­ern Direc­tor Makes a Fake Old Movie.” After estab­lish­ing Fincher’s sig­na­ture use of com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed imagery to cre­ate not large-scale spec­ta­cles but rel­a­tive­ly sub­tle and often peri­od-accu­rate details, Boyd explains the exten­sive dig­i­tal manip­u­la­tion involved in “aging” Mank.

Fincher’s artists added clouds, dust, “the gleam of vin­tage lamps,” grain and scratch­es, “lat­er­al wob­bling,” and much else besides. The cin­e­matog­ra­phy itself pays con­stant homage to Cit­i­zen Kane’s then-ground­break­ing angles and cam­era moves, even employ­ing “old-school tech­niques that dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy and a decent film bud­get have made increas­ing­ly obso­lete” such as shoot­ing day-for-night.

And yet, as most of the com­ments below Boy­d’s video point out, the result of these con­sid­er­able efforts falls short of con­vinc­ing. Maybe it’s all the shades of gray between its blacks and whites; maybe it’s the smooth­ness of every­thing, includ­ing the cam­era moves; maybe it’s all the mod­ern act­ing. (As the New York­er’s Richard Brody puts it, “Our actors are of their time, and can hard­ly rep­re­sent the past with­out invest­ing it with the atti­tudes of our own day, which is why most new peri­od pieces seem either thin or unin­ten­tion­al­ly iron­ic.”) If any film­mak­er could over­come all these chal­lenges, it would sure­ly be one with Fincher’s back­ground in visu­al effects, fas­ci­na­tion with Old Hol­ly­wood, and noto­ri­ous per­fec­tion­ism. For all its suc­cess in oth­er respects, Mank proves that one can no more make old movies than old friends.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Makes Cit­i­zen Kane a Great Film: 4 Video Essays Revis­it Orson Welles’ Mas­ter­piece on the 80th Anniver­sary of Its Pre­miere

How Did David Finch­er Become the Kubrick of Our Time? A New, 3.5 Hour Series of Video Essays Explains

Fight Club Came Out 20 Years Ago Today: Watch Five Video Essays on the Film’s Phi­los­o­phy and Last­ing Influ­ence

David Fincher’s Five Finest Music Videos: From Madon­na to Aero­smith

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“There is no Gar­bo, there is no Diet­rich, there is only Louise Brooks.” — Hen­ri Lan­glois

On this side of the 20th cen­tu­ry, it’s hard to imag­ine a time in cin­e­ma his­to­ry when Louise Brooks was­n’t an inter­na­tion­al silent icon, as revered as Diet­rich or Gar­bo. But the actress with the unmis­tak­able black hel­met of hair near­ly end­ed her career for­got­ten. She gave up the indus­try in 1938, after refus­ing the sex­u­al advances of Colum­bia Pic­tures boss, Har­ry Cohn. “Brooks left Hol­ly­wood for good in 1940,” Geof­frey Mac­nab writes at The Inde­pen­dent, “drift­ed back to Kansas where, as a fall­en Hol­ly­wood star, she was both envied for her suc­cess and despised for her fail­ure.”

She would move to New York, work briefly as a press agent, then on the sales floor at Saks Fifth Avenue, after which, as she wrote in her auto­bi­og­ra­phy Lulu in Hol­ly­wood, her New York friends “cut her off for­ev­er.”

Her two most leg­endary films, made in Berlin with Ger­man direc­tor G.W. Pab­st, were crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial fail­ures only screened in heav­i­ly-edit­ed ver­sions upon release. Most of her silent Hol­ly­wood “flap­per” come­dies were deemed (even by Brooks her­self) hard­ly wor­thy of preser­va­tion. It would take lat­er crit­ics and cinephiles like Ken­neth Tynan and Hen­ri Lan­glois, famed direc­tor of the Ciné­math­èque Française in 1950’s Paris, to res­ur­rect her.

By 1991, Brooks was famous enough (again) to war­rant a hit New Wave anthem by Orches­tral Maneu­vers in the Dark, who intro­duced a new, young audi­ence to Pan­do­ra’s Box in their video (top) cut togeth­er from scenes of Pab­st’s film. Pan­do­ra’s Box (see the trail­er above) com­bines two plays by Frank Wedekind in a con­tem­po­rary sto­ry about Berlin’s sex­u­al­ly free atmos­phere dur­ing the Weimar era. Brooks plays Lulu, a seduc­tress who lures men, and even­tu­al­ly her­self, to ruin. “In her Hol­ly­wood films,” writes Mac­nab, “Brooks had been used (in her own words) as a ‘pret­ty flib­ber­ti­gib­bet.’ With Pab­st as her direc­tor, she became an actress.”

As Brooks was redis­cov­ered (learn more about her in the doc­u­men­tary below) and achieved a sec­ond round of fame as an essay­ist and mem­oirist — so too were the films of Pab­st, who also direct­ed Brooks in Diary of a Lost Girl. Both films had been shown in trun­cat­ed ver­sions. Pan­do­ra’s Box, espe­cial­ly, caused a stir on its release, upset­ting even Weimar cen­sors. Ger­man crit­ics were unim­pressed and audi­ences object­ed to the cast­ing of the Amer­i­can Brooks. (Its Amer­i­can release sub­sti­tut­ed a hap­py end­ing for the film’s down­beat con­clu­sion, Mac­nab notes, “one of the strangest death sequences in cin­e­ma: creepy, erot­ic and with a per­verse ten­der­ness.”)

Accord­ing to Charles Sil­ver, film cura­tor at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, “audi­ences of 1928 were not ready for the film’s bold­ness and frank­ness, even in few-holds-barred Weimar Berlin,” a city Brooks described with her usu­al can­dor:

… the café bar was lined with the high­er-priced trol­lops. The econ­o­my girls walked the street out­side. On the cor­ner stood the girls in boots, adver­tis­ing fla­gel­la­tion. Actor’s agents pimped for the ladies in lux­u­ry apart­ments in the Bavar­i­an Quar­ter. Race-track touts at the Hoppe­garten arranged orgies for groups of sports­men. The night­club Eldo­ra­do dis­played an entic­ing line of homo­sex­u­als dressed as women. At the Maly, there was a choice of fem­i­nine or col­lar-and-tie les­bians. Col­lec­tive lust roared unashamed at the the­atre. In the revue Choco­late Kid­dies, when Josephine Bak­er appeared naked except for a gir­dle of bananas, it was pre­cise­ly as Lulu’s stage entrance was described by Wedekind: ‘They rage there as in a menagerie when the meat appears at the cage.’

Despite the film’s ini­tial fail­ure, in Berlin and in the char­ac­ter of Lulu, Brooks had found her­self. “It was clever of Pab­st to know,” she wrote, “that I pos­sessed the tramp essence of Lulu.” A fierce­ly inde­pen­dent artist to the end, she reject­ed the opin­ions of crit­ics and audi­ences, and heaped praise upon Pab­st and “his truth­ful pic­ture of this world of plea­sure… when Berlin reject­ed its real­i­ty… and sex was the busi­ness of the town.”

You can pur­chase a copy of Pan­do­ra’s Box on DVD, cour­tesy of Cri­te­ri­on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Extreme­ly Rare Tech­ni­col­or Film Footage from the 1920s Dis­cov­ered: Fea­tures Louise Brooks Danc­ing in Her First Fea­ture Film

10 Clas­sic Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Nos­fer­atu to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

Enjoy the Great­est Silent Films Ever Made in Our Col­lec­tion of 101 Free Silent Films Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness