Noel O'Shea
Is there a more maligned genre than the horror film? asks Noel O'Shea in Seminal Horror Films, 1919 - 1999 (part 1 and part 2).
Related: films - horror films
Intro
Noel O'Shea writes about movies.Profile
Noel O'Shea was born on Christmas Day, 1965, in Limerick, Ireland. From the age of 5, when his father took him to see Disney's "The Aristocats", he's had a fascination with the flickering image. During his formative years he saw 1000s of films, usually sprawled out on the carpet in front of the television set. His favourites from this period were "King Kong", "Frankenstein", "Things to Come", and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance". In 1978 his life was changed by two things: first, the local cinema showed "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", and 8 13 year-olds ventured forth into the unknown ... changed his life. The second moment of epiphany came when a rerelease of Kubrick's "2001" came to town; this was cinema he had never seen before and he wanted more of the same. So, he began to watch the films of Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky et al. Now his faves are "The Magnificent Ambersons", "2001" and "The Searchers". He now has 3000 films in his collection - between videos and dvds - and wouldn't trade any of them for ANYTHING.Just a note on his dedication to cinema: When Robert De Niro turned 60 on August 17, he and his buddies had a De Niro festival - 12 films on the trot (nearly 20 hours of viewing - Noel O'Shea was LAST MAN STANDING at the end...)
His musical tastes run from Bob Dylan to The Waterboys, by way of Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, The Beatles, The Who, Nick Drake & Ennio Morricone.
He has a BA in English & Philosophy and spends hist time freelance writing, watching films, and drinking pints of Guinness with his buddies in the local pub. --Noel Gerard O'Shea, actorforhire_2@hotmail.com
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