Kris Hambrick's Corner

The first commercial film to use sound, 1927’s The Jazz Singer, was in a sense a musical. Why did movies sing almost before they could talk, and what have movie musicals meant to pop culture over the past hundred years? Are they merely escapist fluff, or can they offer commentary along the way?  

Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera just turned 100. This Halloween, we’ll look back at how Universal turned a couple of Victorian novels into a genre juggernaut and revisit the origins of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, and all their descendants. Why was this type of story so successful in the […]