It includes an interesting and moderately well-researched view of medieval Halloween customs in England. I’ve said before that I’m not really interested in horror movies as horror movies, but I do like gothic period pieces, with and without science fiction or fantasy elements. A few of my favorites are below:

-Horror of Dracula/Brides of Dracula: if you’re a Stoker purist, you should run far away from these movies, but I personally think they’re great fun as monster hunting fantasies, with Horror being tighter, colder, and more exciting, and Brides (aka The Further Adventures of Dr. Van Helsing) being messier, mellower, and more romanticized.

-Night Creatures/Evil of Frankenstein: These feel like quasi-swashbucklers, not the last of the studio’s attempts to accommodate actor Peter Cushing’s yearning for a bit of Douglas Fairbanks in his gothics, but perhaps the movies that go the furthest down that road. They don’t make the connoisseurs’ best-of lists, but they’re entertaining to watch, kind of ridiculous (okay, kind of a lot ridiculous if we’re talking about Evil) and full of cool sets and surprisingly(1) likable characters.

Those four I can watch almost any time, the ones below I have to be in a certain mood for:

-Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)/The Mummy (1959): I’m pairing these up partly because they were made awfully close together by basically the same people (I think the musical composers and supporting casts are different and that’s about it.) Their other unifying factor is a rare romantic leading man role for Sir Christopher Lee in Hound of the Baskervilles (as Sir Henry Baskerville) and pretty much his only romantic monster(2), Kharis, in The Mummy. Both have their plot weaknesses. Mummy doesn’t spend enough time on the love triangle (needs more of John and Isobel being lovey-dovey together), while spending too much time on recaps, and on the mummy wrangler maundering away at his allegedly pagan prayers that sound like someone filed the serial numbers off of something either Christian or Muslim.(3) Hound suffers from the usual sagging second quarter when Holmes disappears (as seen in the novel), and a new for the movie scene where Holmes is unnecessarily nasty to his client. All of these films’ shortcomings are easily fixed with the fast-forward button.

-Curse of Frankenstein/Revenge Of Frankenstein: I have to be in a very specific mood to want to see a snarky, well-dressed sociopath commit Mad Science, but when I do, one of these two usually gets pulled off the blu-ray shelf. The first one is visually more attractive and arguably better-made, but I’m more often in the mood for the second one, which doesn’t so much soften the mad scientist as give him better instincts of self-preservation. He also doesn’t personally murder anyone in Revenge, although he’s an accessory after the fact to someone else’s murder at the start of the film.

(1) For instance, in Evil of Frankenstein, Baron Frankenstein is much more comically self-centered and much less sociopathic than he is in pretty much any of Cushing’s other portrayals of him. And in Night Creatures, pretty much everyone is involved a government thug, a smuggler, an ex-pirate, or checks two out of three of those boxes, yet most of them are either sympathetic or at least pitiable.

(2) His Dracula is primarily a predator. He’ll seduce his prey if he can, hypnotize them if he can’t, and physically overpower them if all else fails. Drool over this Dracula’s looks all you want – he was a very good-looking man, if not a type I tend to get excited about – but please don’t pigeonhole him with the intentionally romantic Draculas like Langella or Oldman.

(3) Ancient pagan religions generally did not view one’s relationship with supernatural beings through the same lens the Abrahamic religions use, and in this instance it feels like the filmmakers didn’t do their homework.