Tiago's brain dump

The history of the  Weimar Republic  is as short as it is fascinating. Established in 1918-19 by reformist civilian politicians who aimed at introducing modern democracy to a Germany used to nothing but the authoritarian  Hohenzollern monarchy , its formative years were far from the democratic-republicanist utopia its creators had aspired. With its economy crippled by the maintenance of the blockades imposed during World War I, famine was generalized; the humiliating terms of the  Treaty of Versailles  infuriated right-wing extremists, who brewed hate and antisemitism; political instability caused by power struggles among several party coalitions made it nearly impossible to run the young republic efficiently; lastly, the German people, once suppressed by absolute state power, commanded to follow and obey, felt severely at a loss about their newly given rights, retreating  instead into themselves, yearning for a strong leader to show them ...

With most of its factories destroyed and a great deal of its able-bodied population wiped out, the years following the end of World War I  were marked by great economical instability in Europe. With exception of the  Weimar Republic , where  UFA -sponsored cinema  was seen  as a tool to restore its people's morale after having lost the war, little to no money was being invested in the European entertainment industry as a whole. Correspondingly, most domestic film companies opted to avoid altogether the risks inherent to movie production, by concentrating their activities in the more stable motion picture distribution business instead. As a consequence, film production came to an all time low in Europe in the early 1920s, whose home market was then flooded by Hollywood. Seeing themselves unable to compete with the powerful US film industry given their meager budgets, a group of French directors decided to take an orthogonal approach, striving to dif...

In this day and age, in a society so numb to violence, it is hard to imagine a time when people used to be scared by  Vincent Price  movies. Back then, it was commonplace for horror films to revolve around either the classic monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula and so on), or the fears of the  Atomic Era  (such as aliens, giant mutations resulting from radioactivity, and failed scientific experiments with catastrophic results). Although the  Hammer  films, with their graphic violence, were pushing the boundaries of what could be shown onscreen, the horror element itself was still quite detached from reality, be it in some Gothic castle in the past or in the laboratory of a crazy scientist in the near future. It was not until 1960, with  Michael Powell 's  Peeping Tom  and  Alfred Hitchcock 's  Psycho , that horror was brought to the real world, to the present-day society: far away from the literal monsters from before, embodying pure ...