The Wider Screen Blog

THE BIRTH OF THE HORROR GENRE German expressionism is an art movement that bridged the time between Wilhelm II’s reign and the beginning of World War II. Before being applied to film,  its activities reached "into more areas of human intellectual endeavour, its adherents participating in agitation for and implementation of change in politics, economics, social structures, publishing, music, film, t heatre, architecture, painting and literature ( Boorman, 1986 . P.3 )”.  With German expressionism influence,   The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , (Wiene,1920), a horror masterpiece in the style and tone, left the German public both horrified and enthralled by creating  a terrifying world and an external physicalisation of a nightmare. There are three factors that form the distinctive identity of   The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari : Set Design, Actors and Camera Movements, and Exaggerated Performance. Firstl...

Hong Kong Horror, The U nique Fusion of East and West Alongside the cinema o China, and the cinema of Taiwan, The cinema of Hong Kong is one of the major Chinese language cinema. In 1898, China signed over the  New Territories   on  a ninety-nine-year lease made Hong Kong became a former British colony. Under British rule, Hong Kong had a greater degree of political and economic freedom than mainland China and Taiwan. This allowed the ghost movie boom which would not have occurred under Chinese Communism as all horror films were banned for many years ( O’Brien, 2003  p.6 ). In 1984, Britain agreed to relinquish all claims on Hong Kong with the condition that the territory retained its capitalist system, and the associated social and economic freedoms for at least fifty years after  the new territories expired in 1997 .  In 1989, Category 3 a new rating system was introduced to classify films with ...

Landscape, The Darker Side of New Zealand Cinema New Zealand cinema is one of the latest starting cinemas to get off the ground in term of proper industry in the world. The country’s film industry really start going only from the 1980’  and is both rely on but at the same time reject the Hollywood mainstream .   The reason why New Zealand cinema started so late can be explained by the massively small population  compared to the size of the country which makes the industry had not got enough audience to sustain. In 1991, there were only 140 screens in NZ compared with a massive number of 24,639 screens in the U.S. However, after 10 years the number of screens in NZ has been increased by 3 times. Although, this number is very small compare with the US but with rapid growth, New Zealand cinema will soon catch up with the world’s cinema industry. Number of New Zealand screens compare with U.S screens, 1991-2010 Year New Zealand s...

The Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer When speaking of Britsih horror most of us would picture the classic Hammer Horror movies, with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing staring. But before the starting of the Hammer film production, it was Tod Slaughter who pioneered and dominated the horror genre. Tod Slaughter started as theatre actor before he stared in some of the most violent horror films in the 1930s when he was in his 50s including The Face At The Window(1939), The Crimes Of Steven Hawke and Murder In The Red Barn which both released in 1936. IN 1933, the British Board of Film Sensors added the first 'H'( for "horror") certificate to cover the American horror films that started to flush in in the 1930s. One of the most famous American horror films "Frankenstein", contains a scen e which implied the death of a little girl at the hands of Frankenstein's monster.  And because of this, in 1951, the government introduced the "X...