Cinema is a screen onto which we can project our fears, torments and the monstrosities of the world. The screen protects us from what we see, but cinema has also permanently anchored our nightmares around a few powerful images (empty houses, hostile attics and basements, demonic masks, bloodcurdling grimaces, disturbing postures). Throughout the summer, the Cinémathèque québécoise will be presenting a series of films encompassing more than one hundred and twenty years of horror, reminding us that what scares us most is to make the deepest of our fears tangible and credible.
Universal Studio's first talking horror film
Renfield, an English real estate agent, visits Transylvania to sell a London property to the count Dracula. After hypnotizing Renfield into his mindless slave, the dashing, mysterious Count Dracula travels to London and takes up residence in an old castle. Soon Dracula begins to wreak havoc, sucking the blood of young women and turning them into vampires. When he sets his sights on Mina, the daughter of a prominent doctor, vampire-hunter Van Helsing is enlisted to put a stop to the count's never-ending bloodlust.
Based on the novel by Bram Stocker and on the stage play written by Hamilton Deane and John Balderston.
Tod Browning
Tod Browning is a american film director, film actor, screenwriter, vaudeville performer, and carnival sideshow and circus entertainer. He directed a number of films of various genres between 1915 and 1939, but was primarily known for horror films, and was often cited in the trade press as the Edgar Allan Poe of cinema. Browning's career spanned the silent film and sound film eras. He is known as the director of Dracula (1931), Freaks (1932), and his silent film collaborations with Lon Chaney and Priscilla Dean.
