Historical Dictionary of Horror Cinema by Peter Hutchings

Author:Peter Hutchings [Hutchings, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: # Publisher: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. # Number Of Pages: 432 # Publication Date: 2008-02-28, ISBN-13: 9780810855854
Published: 2011-05-29T22:14:43+00:00

07_671_08KtoL.qxd 2/5/08 9:49 AM Page 184

184 • KEIR, ANDREW

KEIR, ANDREW (1926–1997). The Scottish actor Andrew Keir played in a variety of genres but he is best known for his performances in two Hammer horror films. In Terence Fisher’s Dracula—

Prince of Darkness (1966), he made the monk Father Sandor a more approachable and worldly hero than the ascetic vampire-hunter played by Peter Cushing in Fisher’s previous Dracula films. Similarly, in Roy Ward Baker’s Quatermass and the Pit (1967), he offered a kinder and more avuncular rendition of the scientist-hero than that offered by Brian Donlevy in Hammer’s other Quatermass films (and in 1996 he would play the part of Quatermass again, on radio this time in The Quatermass Memoirs). In 1971, he appeared in his third Hammer horror, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, replacing at very short notice Cushing who had withdrawn from the production because of his wife’s death.

KEITH, SHEILA (1920–2004). By all accounts, Sheila Keith was a sweet Scottish lady, and most of her roles in film and on television reflected this. However, she also played some of the most vile and evil women in British cinema history. This was almost entirely due to the efforts of British director Pete Walker, for whom Keith worked regularly during the 1970s. She began in Walker’s House of Whipcord (1974), where her supporting role as a sadistic prison warder stole the film. Frightmare (1974), her next for Walker, was tailored with her in mind. In a ferocious and terrifying performance, she played an apparently innocuous character who was actually addicted to cannibalism and was also not averse to attacking her victims with a red-hot poker or a pitchfork. The ecstatic expression on her blood-bespattered face as she drives a power drill into someone’s head remains one of British cinema’s more unsettling moments. By contrast, her performances in Walker’s House of Mortal Sin ( The Confessional) (1975), The Comeback (1978), and House of the Long Shadows (1983) were quieter, more decorous affairs, although she maintained a sinister aura throughout. Her cameo appearance in the pastiche horror television series Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible (2001) underlined her status as a minor icon of British horror.

KELLJAN, BOB (1930–1982). The American horror films of writer-director Bob Kelljan contributed to the updating of the vampire myth 07_671_08KtoL.qxd 2/5/08 9:49 AM Page 185

KIER, UDO • 185

that took place in the 1970s. In Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) and its sequel The Return of Count Yorga (1971), the aristocratic vampire—

played by Robert Quarry—moved comfortably among the citizens of modern America, and both films had the open endings that at the time were becoming something of a generic convention. Kelljan also directed Scream, Blacula, Scream (1973), a similarly themed vampire story that was the sequel to the blaxploitation hit, Blacula (1972).

KENTON, ERLE, C. (1896–1980). Like most of the directors working in American horror of the 1930s and 1940s, Erle C. Kenton was not a horror specialist but instead moved between genres. In Kenton’s case, he had started out working for comedy producer Mack Sennett.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.