#13 ghosts house on haunted hill even id argue house of wax

[borom1r]

also seeing google lump Van Helsing (2004) in with the Dark Universe movies is hilarious to me because technically it is Not and it’s so tonally different from like, The Wolfman and Dracula Untold

and like I did really love the 2010 wolfman remake, I haven’t seen Dracula Untold since I caught like half of it on TV ages ago— it seems like Universal never had a coherent thesis for this cinematic universe (and still didn’t when they tried to reboot it with The Mummy/The Invisible Man). The Wolfman feels more in-line with something like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and I think leaning into again the gothic horror character-drama side of things while maintaining the almost monochromatic color-grading with the really dramatic, pseudo black-and-white styling would’ve been really cool imo

(and dgmw i think Dracula Untold is fundamentally a bad Dracula film— I think Van Helsing as a theoretical Dark Universe installment got Dracula’s character wayyyyy closer when they made him A Weird Dramatic Fucking Guy)

Also I have a whole set of gripes about the turning Dracula into a tragic romantic figure thing (stares pointedly at Bram Stoker’s Dracula) which is its own can of worms with whatever the hell was going on with this theoretical twice-failed cinematic universe alongside the separate can of “why are we modernizing this” worms that’s relevant to the more recent failed reboot

idek where I’m particularly going with this outside of rambling about classic monsters but I do think there was a really interesting chunk of like, mid-90s stretched loosely through the 2010s horror cinema that leaned heavily on the gothic genre and played creatively with its source material, again a la Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, that was so inspired aesthetically and really pushed practical effects in creative ways that I just wish we’d seen more of. And like all my love to Leigh Whannell obviously but I am genuinely so upset we didn’t get an Invisible Man movie in that neo-gothic film style.

look there’s a lot to be said about sequel baiting in a movie like The Wolfman (2010) especially when the character they’re bating with is based off a Real Person(tm), but all that aside I would’ve genuinely loved to see a Hugo Weaving-led werewolf horror/period drama film in that heavy, pseudo black-and-white style