RECOMMENDED HALLOWEEN VIEWING: Anyone interested in the history of the fantastique must contend with the spirit of Tod Browning. Not only was Browning the first American director brave enough to confront the supernatural in cinema—in the form of his 1931 adaptation of Dracula, his most famous work—but he also left behind a legacy of unique and original films, many of which are black jewels filled with scintillating and shocking surprises. If you only know Browning through Dracula, you can’t really understand the true depth of his talent. It’s difficult to think of a contemporary director who might be in any way comparable to Browning and his weird obsessions. The only American director I can think of that might fit the bill is David Lynch, who has created one dark masterpiece after another since his 1977 debut with Eraserhead, time after time digging into the troubled inner lives of his tortured characters through means both mundane and phantasmagoric. It’s that juxtaposition, of the real and the hyperreal, that overlaps with the pioneering work of Tod Browning, master illusionist.
I contend that there are at least a dozen (or perhaps thirteen, if one counts the ghostly remains of London After Midnight, a lost film that exists only in the form of a forty-six-minute reconstructed version based on existing stills) Browning films with which any fan of the fantastique should be intimately familiar because, whether you know it or not, Browning’s films are part of the very DNA of the fantastique in world literature....
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