Current | The Criterion Collection

In the 1960s, American television networks opened a new front in their cold war with Hollywood: instead of licensing existing films, they would make their own, offering viewers the chance to see new feature-length movies without having to leave home. By the early 1970s, made-for-TV films were regularly broadcast by all three networks, cranked out on low budgets by new talents...

Some of horror’s most memorable monsters travel by road. As seen in the Highway Horror collection I have programmed for the Criterion Channel, automobiles can function as death traps, murder weapons, and, in some cases, even sentient killers. In many ...

Deep Dives

The Criterion Channel includes a treasure trove of horror movies ranging from the widely celebrated to the rare and unknown. To get you in the mood for Hall...

On New Year’s Day 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was first published, in an anonymous three-volume edition of five hundred copies, costing a steep sixteen shillings and sixpence. The twenty-year-old Shelley made the princely sum of forty-one pounds on the deal. The novel had started life as a short story—the birth of Frankenstein’s creatur...

The figure of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is the single most culturally influential and dominant trans film image to date. The character, whose given name is Jame Gumb, is the primary example in a specific category of Hollywood horror invention with which late-twentieth-century trans viewers would become intimately familiar: grotesque transfeminine ...