Howery's Review

CAHIERS DU HOWERY

OCT. 30-NOV. 2

I need to correct some of the times that were on the schedule I emailed weeks ago. I was guessing at a few of those, mostly for Nov. 1, because I didn’t have the full TCM sked at hand yet. Also, the channel subbed in one film that wasn’t listed back then: Horror of Dracula, Oct. 31, 12 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Central. The further corrections are:

Oct. 31

11:30 p.m. E, 10:30 C

Frankenstein (1931)

Nov. 1

12:45 a.m. E; 11:45 p.m. C ^{Oct. 31}

The Invisible Man (1933)

2:15 a.m. E; 1:15 a.m. C

The Wolf Man (1941)

4:45 a.m.. E, 3:45 C

The Black Cat (1934)

Nov. 2

8:30 a.m. E, 7:30 C

He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

OCT. 30

MATINEE (1993)

“[Director/producer William] Castle got so carried away with the promotion that he arrived in a hearse at some of the premieres and made his entrance popping from a coffin. Was this not the ultimate in auteurism? Would Jean-Luc Godard have gone this far? Would he have arrived in a wrecked car to promote Weekend? Would Sergei Eisenstein have arrived in a battleship?” – John Waters

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“It takes a lot more to scare people these days.” – John Goodman as Lawrence Woolsey

Since director Joe Dante’s Matinee is a roman à clef, modeled on and satirizing the working life of schlock-meister William Castle – “the Master of the Gimmick” – I have recycled the John Waters quote (which I first cited in an October 2021 review of Macabre [1958], Castle’s maiden voyage into the horror genre).

In Matinee, John Goodman is a delight to behold as Larry Woolsey, the character based on Castle (b. 1914, d. 1977).

The time is October 1962. The place is Key West. As the nation panics over the potential apocalypse that came to be called the Cuban Missile Crisis, Woolsey visits the Florida city to promote his newest sci-fi/horror opus, Mant – and to leverage the widespread paranoia into greater box-office receipts.

Meanwhile, Navy-brats Gene and li’l bro Dennis fret over their father’s deployment to Cuba and at the same time are thrilled at the thought of Woolsey’s personal appearance. The director’s and the boys’ stories are eventually intertwined.

But Gene and his new school pal Stan, who are in their early teens, must face a genuine terror: dating.

Gene has a crush on a pint-size radical: Sandra, who addresses her bohemian parents by their first names.

Stan has a crush on Sherry, whose ex-boyfriend, a ducktailed petty criminal and budding beat poet surnamed Starkweather, is vehemently opposed to this pairing.

Clips or sound bites of J.F.K., Adlai Stevenson, Art Linkletter, and Lenny Bruce add a dash of authenticity.

Matinee was made by a horror fan (Dante) for horror fans, with scads of in-jokes and Easter egging to enthrall viewers. (To name one: an article headlined “Magazine Collecting – It Pays,” on a mock-up of The Miami Herald. As a youth, Dante wrote for the periodicals Famous Monsters of Filmland and Castle of Frankenstein.)

William Castle’s audience-bait gimmicks included Emergo, Percepto, Illusion-O, the Punishment Poll (none of which I will elaborate upon here), and – as his opener – a bona fide Lloyd’s of London insurance policy that would award $1,000 to the survivors of any Macabre theatergoer who died of fright.

Castle stand-in Woolsey’s ploys to physically enhance Mant are Atomovision and Rumble Rama – entailing futuristic gadgetry that might seem more at home in an early-’60s space opera than among the machinery of a movie theater.

The film within a film, Mant (“Half man | Half ant | All terror!”), offers the letter but not the spirit of Castle’s work. Even viewed through the lens of parody, it is not at all like any of Castle’s productions, but more a tribute to other infamous B-movie auteurs of the era: e.g., Jack Arnold, Bert I. Gordon, Nathan Juran, Kurt Neumann, Japan’s Ishirô Honda, and, of course, Dante’s former mentor, Roger Corman.

Mant is a hybrid of The Fly, Them!, and every other giant-critter flick ever made; there are also angry, torch-carrying villagers in the manner of the ancient Universal pictures.

In fact, the film outside the film, Matinee, is closer to one Castle work: The Tingler. Matinee’s plot contains a tinge of the juvenile-delinquent subgenre, along with a dab of the Karloff-Bogdanovich thriller Targets (1968), and a soupçon of disaster movie. Some characters in both dimensions are surnamed after former second-feature stars (like Mara Corday and Morris Ankrum).

The cast of the black-and-white Mant includes three old pros: Robert Cornthwaite (The Thing From Another World; War of the Worlds), Kevin McCarthy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its inferior 1978 remake; Twilight Zone: The Movie; Innerspace; Eve of Destruction; Joe Dante’s Piranha and The Howling), and William Schallert (Mighty Joe Young; The Man From Planet X; Gog; Them!; the serial Commando Cody; The Incredible Shrinking Man – and, of course, he was dad on The Patty Duke Show).

In the “framing story,” Cathy Moriarty is Woolsey’s girlfriend and, thus, Mant’s leading lady. Robert Picardo (The Howling; Star Trek: Voyager) is the antsy manager of the local theater. John Sayles and Dick Miller are Woolsey’s shills. Jesse “Maytag Repairman” White is the avatar for American International Pictures mogul Samuel Z. Arkoff. Naomi Watts briefly appears in a spoof of Disney fantasies. Belinda Balaski (of Dante’s Gremlins, The Howling, and Piranha) is Stan’s mom. CBS-TV newsman Ike Papas – who was around in 1962 – emblazons the small screen, giving us the top stories of the day. A face in the crowd is Flipper’s Luke Halpin (who, IMDb informs us, also served in the Matinee crew, as a grip).

Some aficionados reject horror comedy outright as a tainted format. But I say: “The funnier, the better.”

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In one sequence, Woolsey – with the help of an animated mastodon – touches upon the primal, psychological reasons why people like to be scared.

But I’d love to see a horror that deals with why many don’t care for fright films.

What the world needs is a satire in which the monster’s victims fall into one or more of the following categories: (A) people such as my much younger distant cousin on Long Island, who, when he was a little fellow, told me: “I don’t like ’cary movies”; (B) those who look upon horror as a laughing matter, such as some fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a program I find scarcely amusing at all; (C) the truly irritating folks who will enjoy a horror film or series but delude themselves by saying, “That’s not horror,” because they consider “horror” a dirty word!

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The real William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill will be aired on Halloween. (That review will explain Emergo.)

“The sort of film I would’ve called ‘neat-o’ 15 years back. It makes me wish there were more neat-o movies around these days, y’know?” – The Austin Chronicle (1993)

PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE

“All you of Earth are idiots!” – Eros, an alien planner

What more can be said about director/writer/producer Edward D. Wood Jr.’s favorite among his own works?

A largely amateur cast. (Southern accents abound.) Toy flying saucers, dangling from visible string, that look as if they could really use more ballast. Cardboard tombstones nestled in a soundstage cemetery. An airplane cockpit backed by a clipboard, a circular slide rule, and a shower curtain. Plentiful stock footage, mostly depicting the U.S. military.

The continuity is nonexistent: Night becomes day and vice versa repeatedly, in the wink of an eye.

And there’s silent footage of Bela Lugosi. (More on this a little later.)

The incongruous plot, set in the San Fernando Valley, involves a horde of three distinctly humanoid alien invaders – Eros, Tanna, and the Ruler – who try to make good on Klaatu’s threat at the conclusion of The Day the Earth Stood Still: They intend to destroy humanity before our warlike atomic ways can destroy the universe. To accomplish this, they will use an army of zombified earthlings – so far, also numbering only three. As author David J. Hogan quips, “It seems that even extraterrestrials must watch their budgets.”

Another of the many egregious flaws in this movie: Some of the dialogue is out of sync with the picture.

And Wood’s script was so ridiculous that the performers in at least one sequence found it unreadable and rewrote it themselves. Actress “Vampira” (Maila Nurmi), who appears in other segments as Lugosi’s deceased, zombified wife, refused to speak her lines, and so her undead character is silent throughout.

But the dialogue does have a certain poetry – doggerel poetry, but poetry, nevertheless.

Here are a few samples:

“Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. … My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about Grave Robbers from Outer Space?” – from the Amazing Criswell’s prologue; Plan 9 was originally to be titled Grave Robbers etc.

“The sky to which he had once looked was now only a covering for her dead body. The ever-beautiful flowers she had planted with her own hands became nothing more than the lost roses of her cheeks.”

“One thing’s sure. Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody’s responsible.”

“Visit! That would indicate visitors!”

“It’s tough to find something when you don’t know what you’re looking for.”

“Their own dead will be used to make them accept our existence, and believe in that fact.” –the alien Ruler

“We found a lot of suspicious things out in that cemetery. Then again, [we] didn’t find anything to base a fact or suspicion on.”

The story behind the making of Plan 9 – much of it depicted in Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood (1994) – is far more intriguing than the 1957 film itself. Bela Lugosi, a bosom buddy of Wood, died four days after shooting had begun. But the always resourceful director still worked the few minutes of Bela’s completed footage into Plan 9. In other scenes, Lugosi was replaced by Wood’s wife’s chiropractor, a younger man who looked nothing like the Dracula star and fittingly concealed his face with a vampire cape.

The wily Wood persuaded a group of Baptists to fund the making of the picture, with a false promise that profits would be used to produce Christian films in future. A church official was convinced that several of the cast members had found Jesus, and they were duly baptized in a private swimming pool.

Among those dunked was 400-pound, Stockholm-born pro wrestler Tor Johnson (“the Swedish Angel”), one of the Ed Wood regulars. He portrays the ultimately zombified police Inspector Clay.

Wasp-waisted Maila Nurmi, in her Chas. Addams-based guise of Vampira, had hosted a horror-film show on Los Angeles’s ABC-TV affiliate.

Aside from Lugosi’s, the most recognizable face in the cast may be Lyle Talbot’s. As his 1996 New York Times obituary said, he’d acted with “Bette Davis, Mae West, Carole Lombard, Mary Astor, Ginger Rogers and Shirley Temple.”

Fans of antique Westerns will spot Gregory Walcott (as the plane pilot/male lead) and perhaps Tom Keene (as an Army colonel). Walcott also appeared in four Clint Eastwood pictures.

John “Bunny” Breckinridge, a wealthy drag performer, is the alien Ruler. (Gore Vidal’s “Myra Breckinridge” was named after him.)

One of the above-mentioned Baptists, the Rev. Lynn Lemon, who presides at Inspector Clay’s funeral, was chaplain of the Optimist Club of West Los Angeles.

The Amazing Criswell, a “psychic” whose florid tones are heard in the prologue and epilogue, had a local L.A. television show and a widely syndicated column, “Criswell Predicts.”

Plan 9 is the first of a handful of IMDb credits for Dudley Manlove (Eros), and his last was 1962’s Creation of the Humanoids (said to be a favorite of Andy Warhol’s). Manlove was a tap dancer and radio announcer.

Joanna Lee (Tanna), who also appeared in The Brain Eaters (1958), featuring the young Leonard Nimoy, became an Emmy-winning TV writer and producer.

I’m going to channel the Amazing Criswell and venture a prediction: Someday, Quentin Tarantino will remake Plan 9. Considering QT’s well-known foot fetish, I foresee that the actress playing Tanna – probably Uma Thurman – will appear in a shoeless, sockless state in one or two scenes. The potential title for the chapter on the DVD: “Eros and Tanna Toes.”

The film “is more critical of America’s government and military strategy (that calls for an arms build-up and further nuclear experiments) than any other director dared to be. (Better directors who made pictures that made sense couldn’t get away with such pointed criticism of American institutions.)” – Danny Peary

“Wood was talentless, but relentless. It’s almost as if he didn’t know or care that he had no talent; the movies themselves may not have mattered to him. As with some great directors, perhaps the only thing that mattered to Ed Wood was making movies, not having made movies. – Bill Warren

“It literally ‘says’ nothing, it has no characters, no story, no direction, no whatever; it’s a completely unstructured dream produced with no interference from the conscious mind at all.” – Phil Hardy

“There is nothing funny about this one, no matter how many times it has been laughed at in those mostly witless compendiums which celebrate the worst of everything.” – Stephen King

CAT PEOPLE (1942)

“I like the dark. It’s friendly.”

Journalist/novelist Kim Newman believes that Universal’s Werewolf of London and The Wolf Man provided inspiration for estimable producer Val Lewton’s Cat People, but this is a different breed of horror entirely.

Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur, stars Kent Smith as Oliver Reed (no, not the chap from Hammer Film’s Curse of the Werewolf). In New York City, the hapless Reed weds Irena Dubrovna (Franco-Italian actress Simone Simon), a Serbian-born beauty who refuses to consummate (or even kiss-ummate) the marriage, believing that she’ll turn into a homicidal monster if she does so.

In this picture and in 1943’s The Seventh Victim – to be aired later on Oct. 30 – Tom Conway (George Sanders’s older brother) portrays the same character, psychiatrist Louis Judd. (But observe what occurs about 68 minutes into the 73-minute Cat People.) Judd, Roger Ebert wrote, “is a graduate of the Vincent Price school of therapy.”

In Cat People, a small role is played by Alan Napier, who was butler Alfred on the Adam West Batman series, and who obviously had an affinity for cat women.

Two chilling nighttime scenes – one set in Central Park, and the other at an indoor basement pool – have been imitated many, many times over the years.

Trivia time:

• For all you fans of the TV series Orphan Black (2013-17): Wanna know what Ukrainian psycho-killer Helena is alluding to when she calls a fellow clone “moja sestra”? Look no further than Cat People.

You’ll find the answer in a brief walk-on by actress Elizabeth Russell (who is also in Lewton’s The Curse of the Cat People, The Seventh Victim, and Bedlam). Regarding the Russell scene and other parts of the plot, screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen said that Lewton received several letters “congratulating him for his boldness in introducing lesbians to films in Hollywood.”

• Lewton was an ailurophobe.

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“Almost certainly the best horror film of the forties.” – King

“The Val Lewton films of the 40s … strikingly anticipate, by at least two decades, some of the features of the modern horror film.” – Robin Wood (1986)

“With Cat People, producer Lewton inaugurated a series of modestly budgeted, extremely literate, intelligently understated horror movies … which should have left more of a mark on Hollywood than they did.” – Hardy

“Lewton believed in suggesting horror rather than showing it.” – Mark Robson, Cat People editor (and the director of The Seventh Victim as well as Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls)

“Cat People is constructed almost entirely out of fear. There wasn’t a budget for much of anything else.” – Roger Ebert

“Cat People remains, with all its flaws, a perfect film – which means that even its flaws have become classic.” – Chris Fujiwara

“In 1942, Cat People was a radically new type of horror film, abounding in subtle allusiveness and wearing its intellectual credentials on its sleeve.” – Jonathan Rigby

“It instantly set [Lewton] apart from other horror filmmakers of the time. … The entire film was approached from an angle then entirely fresh and original.” – Favius Friedman

“A sex melodrama in horror movie clothing.” – Gregory Mank in his Cat People DVD commentary

“In such a story physical and sexual violence are implicit right from the start and yet director Tourneur keeps them delicately … offstage.” – Leonard Wolf

“It deals more with the fear of sex than with a cliché monster.” – Michael Weldon

“A metaphor for both female sexuality and xenophobia.” – The Rough Guide to Cult Movies by Paul Simpson et al.

“A variation on the werewolf theme, the case history of an obsession, a study in frigidity (or possibly repressed lesbianism).” – Carlos Clarens

“Perhaps the greatest shock of all in Lewton’s work … is the overwhelming grief, anxiety and pessimism of his female protagonists – emotions that must have been mirrored to a certain extent by the audience, given the success of the films.” – Jon Towlson

“Rarely has the plight of the solitary monster seemed so heartrending as [Simone Simon] makes it.” – Donald C. Willis

“A labored and obvious attempt to induce shock. And Miss Simone’s [sic] cuddly little tabby would barely frighten a mouse under a chair.” – Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (1942)

“To modern audiences the film may appear closer to melodrama than horror, its innovative techniques over-familiar through imitation, and only a handful of scenes pack a genuine chill.” – Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made, by Kim Newman and James Marriott

“Seriously weakened by passages of lumpy, strained dialogue, uncertain performances and uneven pacing.” – Joel E. Siegel [This writer was a Georgetown professor of English and film studies, and not to be confused with the late Good Morning America movie critic.]

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)

This tale of Caribbean voodoo and a dysfunctional white family is very loosely based on Jane Eyre. A nurse (Frances Dee) travels from Ottawa to the West Indies to care for a catatonic woman.

Tom Conway is the sick woman’s brother-in-law.

The screenwriter was Curt Siodmak, who worked on The Wolf Man (coming to TCM on Nov. 1) and other fine (and some not-so-fine) scripts for Universal.

Author Peter Dendle describes the black zombie character, Carrefour, as “an embodiment of the will of the natives and of the land itself, a will expressing disapproval of the moral trespasses of the decadent colonialists.”

Of one scene featuring actor/calypso performer Sir Lancelot (1902-2001), British-born critic Robin Wood wrote in 1972: “There can’t be many Hollywood movies of the early Forties in which a colored character is permitted to make sly, malicious fun of whites who are neither comic nor villainous – with the film’s at least partial endorsement – and get away with it.”

Trivia time: Lancelot put a reworking of the song he sings here on record under the title “Scandal in the Family.” It was also known as “Shame and Scandal (in the Family)” and “Ah Woe Is Me” and has been covered by Odetta, the Kingston Trio, Peter Tosh and the Wailers, the Stylistics, Helen Humes, and many other artists.

“A dull, disgusting exaggeration of an unhealthy, abnormal concept of life.” — Thomas M. Pryor in The New York Times (1943)

“This movie helped rescue the genre from a clichéd world where monsters roared, heroines screamed and heroes rescued.” — The Rough Guide to Cult Movies

“… a hauntingly, nightmarishly beautiful tone poem of voodoo drums, dark moonlight and somnambulistic ladies in floating white, brought to perfection by [Jacques] Tourneur’s direction … wonderfully evocative transposition of Jane Eyre (loosely speaking) to the West Indies … [hovers] visually in precarious balance between darkness and light … a small masterpiece.” — Hardy

“One of the most poetic and mournful horror films ever made. … The film has rightfully been proclaimed a minor masterpiece.” — Dennis Fischer

“A deeply moving, beautifully filmed and thematically satisfying love story with the implications of a Greek tragedy. … The love story is the frame for a richly moving film that includes understated comments on the relationship between blacks and whites.” — Wolf

“One of the finest of all American horror films … It is built on an elaborate set of apparently clear-cut structural oppositions: Canada-West Indies, white-black, light-darkness, life-death, science-black magic, Christianity-Voodoo, conscious-unconscious, etc. — and it proceeds systematically to blur all of them.” — Wood

IWWaZ is “derived from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. … [The] nocturnal walk through the cane fields, while the approaching drums drown out the rustling of the wind, constitutes the core of the film as well as one of the high-water marks of screen terror.” — Clarens

“Avoiding motivation and rational explanation, ambiguity and sexual tension reign in Zombie, not in the least through the suggestion of a link between Western anxieties and folk superstition.” — Ernest Mathijs

“Concerned predominantly with horror and insanity caused by repressed female sexuality in the family.” — Towlson

“An atmospheric and intelligent vision unparalleled in zombie film. … The natives are presented with an appreciation and sensitivity refreshingly at odds with Hollywood standards of the day.” — Peter Dendle (2001)

“[Lewton’s motion pictures] were subtle in their style and presentation, depending upon psychological aspects of horror, suggested by atmospheric photography and clever editing rather than the more blatant shocks of convention horror films.” — John Brosnan

“Like all of Lewton’s films, this one gets more frightening the less it shows.” —The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made

“Our formula is simple. A love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual violence. Fadeout.” — Lewton

THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943)

“I’ve been quiet, oh, ever so quiet. I hardly move, yet it keeps coming all the time, closer and closer. I rest and rest, and yet I am dying.” – Elizabeth Russell as Mimi

Satanists in Greenwich Village!

This picture was cowritten by Lewton; his write-hand man, DeWitt Bodeen; and Charles O’Neal (Ryan’s father).

It marked the directorial debut of film editor Mark Robson (who later supervised Lewton’s Bedlam, Isle of the Dead, and The Ghost Ship) and the screen-acting debut of Kim Hunter (Zira in the original Planet of the Apes franchise) as Mary Gibson. Hugh Beaumont plays the romantic interest, lawyer Gregory Ward; Beaumont later portrayed another Ward – Ward Cleaver, the Beaver’s dad.

One scene apparently inspired the most famous sequence in Hitchcock’s Psycho; another scene was copied by Carol Reed in The Third Man. Italy’s premier horror director, Dario Argento, has declared himself a fan of Lewton, and it is easy to see the connection between The Seventh Victim and Argento’s Suspiria.

Author Greg Mank says that at least five of the female characters in The Seventh Victim are inferred to be lesbians. Mank and other writers wonder if the influence of Lewton’s aunt, the silent-era star Alla Nazimova, might be somehow linked to this element in the scripts of both The Seventh Victim and Cat People. Val Lewton Jr. believed that his father based the Seventh Victim’s title character (played by Jean Brooks) on Nazimova.

“Rarely has a film succeeded so well in capturing the nocturnal menace of a large city, the terror underneath the everyday, the suggestion of hidden evil.” – Clarens

“Innocent Mary’s quest for her own sinister mirror image, embodied by her missing sister, is a chthonic journey through a bleak New York plangent with despair, a Gotham populated by the damned.” – Nikolas Schreck

“Unusually eloquent in its vision of life as a meaningless, pitiful process of consumption.” – Siegel

“The Seventh Victim isn’t quite well directed enough to be called a masterpiece. But almost.” – Hardy

“Maybe it isn’t essential that a plain horror picture make sense but at least the patron is entitled to know what the heck is going on. … We have no more notion what The Seventh Victim is about than if we had watched the same picture run backward and upside down.” – Crowther

CURSE OF THE DEMON (1957; U.K. title = Night of the Demon)

“Like one that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And, having once turned round, walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Dr. Julian Karswell is a perfect British gentleman. Loves his mother. Good with children. Occasionally conjures up a fierce cyclone to intimidate his enemies. Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), we discover, is a master of the black arts and leader of a Satanist cult.

His main nemesis is a visiting American psychologist (Dana Andrews) who is at first skeptical of the occult but eventually compelled to become a true believer.

This motion picture is loosely based on a 1911 short story, Casting the Runes, by Britain’s M.R. James.

According to author John McCarty, director Jacques Tourneur “for research purposes … interviewed several of England’s most famous witches about the spirit world.” (The McCarty book from which this quote comes is named after Tourneur’s 1958 The Fearmakers, a Red-scare thriller that also stars Dana Andrews.)

Curse of the Demon is the subject of a myth among horror aficionados: Tourneur claimed he wanted to leave the monster unseen, but that he was forced by the producer to show the demon on-screen. However, author/documentarian Tony Earnshaw has discovered that the demon was in the script early on. The design of the creature is based on old woodcuts. Fans have been debating its efficacy for decades.

Some deem this tangible devil one of the film’s few flaws. Another weak point (not to give away too much) is undoubtedly the scene of the tussle between Andrews’s Dr. Holden and “Grimalkin,” where the actor seems to be playing with a large plush toy.

Welsh-born costar Peggy Cummins was a pistol-packin’, Bonnie Parker-esque villain in the acclaimed noir Gun Crazy (1950).

Charles Lloyd-Pack (no relation) has a bit part as a chemist.

Screenwriter Charles Bennett had a hand in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (both versions), The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent, Sabotage, Blackmail, and Secret Agent, as well as several DeMille scripts.

Brooklyn-born Hal E. Chester was executive producer and a cowriter. As a youth, this former actor had appeared in the interconnected Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, and East Side Kids franchises.

“Repays repeated viewings with a number of subtle and richly textured scenes that are, in their quiet way, as perfect as any in the movies.” — Bruce Lanier Wright

“Except for a shot where the demon looks like King Kong in drag, riding an invisible bicycle, I think the demon is terrific. … It’s the scariest monster in film history.” — Peary (1983)

“A highly effective black magic thriller packed with atmosphere.” — David Pirie

“Tourneur’s horror classic is both redemptive and evangelical … a compelling critique of modernity and the demons it has awakened.” – A Christian Response to Horror Cinema (2015) by Peter Fraser (who quotes 2 Thessalonians 2:3-8 with reference to the allegory of the film’s villain)

“In the hands of Jacques Tourneur, the use of understatement as the most effective method of sending chills up an audience’s collective spine reached a sort of apotheosis.” — John McCarty (whose straight-to-video 2007 docuseries The Fearmakers Collection, based on his book, includes a segment on Tourneur)

“Jacques Tourneur … knew that real horror is a fragile, glass-boned thing. … Night of the Demon abounds in prosaic situations turning implacably into nightmares.” — Clarens

“Screenwriter Charles Bennett was one of Alfred Hitchcock’s ablest collaborators, and this may in fact be the finest Hitchcock film that Hitchcock never made.” — The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made

PEEPING TOM (1960)

“Mark, are you crazy?”

“Yes, do you think [the police will] notice?”

I have seen a dozen of Michael Powell’s films. (And you know how I hate to brag about these things.)

This is my least favorite.

That is not to say it’s a weak motion picture or a weak thriller – and it even offers moments of nonintrusive dark humor, right from the antagonist’s first line.

But it just has so much extraordinary competition among the director’s other works. (Many, from 1939 to 1957, were codirected, cowritten, and/or coproduced by Emeric Pressburger.)

At the time of its release, Peeping Tom was widely censured, censored, and suppressed, and it pretty much ended Powell’s career. (An uncut version was at last released in 1979.)

The action begins with a Jack the Ripper-style murder in Soho. The audience is told right away who the killer is: Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm), a movie studio employee who moonlights filming adult movies on the second floor of a newspaper shop.

Mark is a nervous, shy man of soft, halting speech. (His speaking becomes more forceful when it has obviously been rehearsed.)

And he has a unique way of killing.

He is obsessed with his camera, which he always keeps with him. In one brief shot, he seems to make love to the lens.

He meets his downstairs neighbor Helen (Anna Massey, daughter of Raymond) as she’s celebrating her 21^st birthday. There is an immediate attraction, and Mark wastes no time before explaining to Helen, with the aid of old home movies, how his father, a renowned biologist, used him as a guinea pig when he was a young child.

But Helen’s mother, who is blind, has her suspicions about Mark.

One quibble: How is it that Mark has a thick German accent, whereas his late father, heard on old tape recordings, has a British accent? (In the home movies, Powell portrays the father, and his own son is little Mark.)

Cast members include Moira Shearer (who stands out as a movie stand-in), Nigel Davenport (as a police sergeant), and Shirley Anne Field (as a comedy star). Field’s other genre work includes Horrors of the Black Museum and These Are the Damned.

In an early scene at the secret stag-movie studio, one of the scantily clad models has a surprising face that clearly arouses Mark. The actress is Susan Travers, who held the title role in a very good bad 1961 film, The Snake Woman. And remember the final sequence of Hitchcock’s Frenzy (also costarring Anna Massey), when Jon Finch thinks the figure he sees under the covers is serial killer Barry Foster, and he bops the person’s head with a tire iron, only to discover that the supine individual is a naked (and already dead) woman? That’s Travers, too. And she’s the nurse in The Abominable Dr. Phibes who’s eaten alive by locusts.

“Powell dared … to show us how close moviemaking can come to madness, how it can eat you up.” – Martin Scorsese

“One of the supreme achievements of the British cinema – and of cinema in general.” – Hardy

“We can relate to Mark’s voyeuristic tendencies because like him we moviegoers become entranced by horrible images on the screen.” – Peary

Peeping Tom suggests “that we, the audience … are complicit in seedy invasions of privacy for entertainment and that filmmakers are predatory, even life-sucking creatures.” – Time Out magazine

“Other movies let us enjoy voyeurism; this one exacts a price. … We cannot laugh and keep our distance: We are forced to acknowledge that we watch, horrified but fascinated.” – Roger Ebert

“A brilliant satirical insight into the neurotic, pornographic element in the act of filming, more relevant than ever in the age of reality television and CCTV.” – The Guardian

“British critics hated Peeping Tom because it brought those bastions of good taste face to face with their own hypocrisy. Peeping Tom also dared show sides of England seldom revealed on movie screens at the time ….” – Sixties Shockers: A Critical Filmography of Horror Cinema, 1960-1969 by Mark Clark and Bryan Senn

“An offbeat black-comedy-drama, tart on the surface but a bit soft at the center.” – Willis

THE TENANT (1976)

“At what precise moment does an individual stop being who he thinks he is?”

When you want to look at a prospective new apartment, and you discover the concierge in the building is Shelley Winters, you should know that you’re in for deep trouble!

After a bit of haggling with the Paris building’s owner, Monsieur Zy (Melvyn Douglas), Trelkovsky (director-cowriter Roman Polanski), a filing clerk by profession, takes the run-down, two-room apartment, whose former occupant, Mlle. Choule (French for “cabbage”), has been hospitalized after throwing herself out of its window.

To his dismay, Trelkovsky soon finds out that his floor’s shared bathroom has far greater problems than the fact that it is around two corners and on the other side of the courtyard. And there is also the issue of noise, key to the plot, in this unquiet environment.

Earlier, with an unexplained motive, he chooses to visit the bedside of the doomed, silent former tenant, where he meets her anguished friend Stella (Isabelle Adjani). He lies to Stella – one of a number of lies on his part – and says he was acquainted with Choule. Immediately, sparks fly for him and Stella, and they see a most unusual film together.

The plot turns into the flip side of Polanski’s Repulsion; the concluding sequence could have been made by Fellini, and it has a hint of an even better-known Polanski horror.

Writer Fawn Krisenthia has an interesting theory: The entire story is lesbian Stella’s deathbed fantasy.

Co-scripter Gérard Brach collaborated with the director on Repulsion and other films. He worked on the George Harrison-scored Wonderwall as well as Quest for Fire and The Name of the Rose.

The Tenant is based on a 1964 novel by Roland Topor, a surreal cartoonist who worked for the magazine that was the predecessor of Charlie Hebdo. Topor cowrote the 1973 animation Fantastic Planet. As a thespian, he’s Renfield in Herzog’s 1979 remake of Nosferatu.

Adjani is Lucy Harker in Nosferatu. She’s appeared in two genre films that I haven’t viewed: Possession (1981) and the 1996 reboot of Diabolique.

Author David J. Hogan writes, “Actors were seemingly chosen for their grossness of feature.”

But I insist Melvyn Douglas must have been hired on the strength of his performances in The Vampire Bat (1933) and James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932).

Claude Dauphin, who plays the husband of a hit-and-doesn’t-run driver, was a Parisian police inspector in Karl Malden’s Phantom of the Rue Morgue, a psychotherapist in Hammer Film’s Stop Me Before I Kill, and the President of Earth in Jane Fonda’s Barbarella.

Jo Van Fleet, who portrays a scheming neighbor of Trelkovsky’s, is best known as Newman’s ailing mother in Cool Hand Luke. She was the headmistress of Satan’s School for Girls, a noted 1973 TV-movie.

Lila Kedrova (Blood Tide, Sword of the Valiant, Testament) is a distressed tenant who doesn’t take any crap.

Michel Blanc, who has a walk-on here, held the title role in the 1989 crime thriller Monsieur Hire.

“Trelkovsky … is a character who might have been invented by an Edgar Allan Poe who’d had the opportunity to read about Raskolnikov and Josef K. He’s a particularly Eastern European kind of late-19th-century outsider set down in contemporary Paris.” – Vincent Canby, The New York Times

“A comedy tipped with poison. … It is hard to determine, as it often is with Polanski, what in the movie is genuinely frightening and what is just cynical.” – Time magazine

“At times preposterous, the movie is also perversely clever.” – New York magazine

OCT. 31

HÄXAN: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES (1922)

Made by a Swedish company and shot in Denmark, this pseudo-documentary purports to view medieval and Renaissance witchcraft through the lens of modern psychology. The first 13 minutes of the 107-minute silent are a history lesson, illustrated with old engravings, ancient statuary, and models.

This is interesting, but things really get rolling with the middle portion of the movie, when the screen bursts forth with bizarre re-creations of Black Masses, church-sanctioned torture, self-flagellation, and Macbeth-style cooking classes.

There’s also a bit of nudity. (After all, this is a Scandinavian film.)

The final 17 minutes deal with contemporary superstitions and posit that supposed witches of old were suffering from what in the more civilized early ’20s were known to be “nervous disorders” or “hysteria.”

The outré costumes and settings will still impress contemporary viewers. Danish director Benjamin Christensen appears as Satan himself, flicking his tongue in a manner that puts Jimi Hendrix to shame.

“There has always been and there continues to be a popular fascination with the sexual habits of those committed to celibacy. In many accounts, these repressed desires ultimately surface in deviant forms. The moments of unconscious sexual release found in Benjamin Christensen’s Witchcraft Through the Ages are acts of sadomasochism that would make the Marquis de Sade dance with pleasure.” – the horror documentary Kingdom of Shadows, narrated by Rod Steiger

“A work of pure cinema that seems as lively and inventive today as it did in the 1920s.” – Schreck (2001)

“Perhaps unclassifiable, but genuinely horrifying and even still shocking today.” – Peter Kobel (2007)

“Many sequences are genuinely grotesque, with echoes of Bosch and Goya, but there is also a humorous dimension.” – Hardy

“An uneven mixture of illustrated lecture and imaginative moviemaking.” – Clarens

Häxan “is not just scientific and artistic, it is an ethical event.” – Film-Kurier, a former German magazine (1924)

“Wonderful though this picture is, it is absolutely unfit for public exhibition.” – Variety (1923)

“Not recommended for conservative or younger viewers.” – Robert K. Klepper

“Gave the censors ulcers in the 1920s.” – DVD & Video Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter

“Subject matter too grim for most picture houses [of the day].” – McCarty (1994)

🕱

Trivia time: Clips from Häxan are used in director Dwain Esper’s 1934 cult classic, Maniac.

EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1959)

Oft imitated but never surpassed, director Georges Franju’s classic Les yeux sans visage is the story of mad doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), who kidnaps women in failed attempts to replace the disfigured face of his daughter with their faces. Guilt-ridden Génessier caused the car accident that scarred the girl.

Alida Valli (Reed’s The Third Man, Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case, Bava’s Lisa and the Devil, Argento’s Suspiria) is Génessier’s assistant. Edith Scob is the eerily masked daughter.

The movie is adapted from a novel by Jean Redon. The scriptwriters included the crime-author team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who penned the novels on which Diabolique and Vertigo are based.

The score was done by Maurice Jarre. Among his many awards were Oscars for the music of Doctor Zhivago and A Passage to India.

While viewing, try not to think too much about the Billy Idol song of the same name. (I wonder if anyone has ever done a song with the lurid American title for this motion picture: The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus? Are you listening, Rob Zombie?)

“Replete with echoes of both Nazi experiments and the institutionalized torture enacted by the French government in Algeria; it is a paradigmatic example of the art film-horror hybrid.” – Murray Leeder

“Few horror movies are this brutal, or this gentle. … Along with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Eyes Without a Face profoundly influenced the subsequent generation of European horror movies.” – Sixties Shockers

“Eyes Without a Face, with its blending of poignant realistic details and Cocteau-influenced dream imagery, is a uniquely persuasive nightmare film, a hideous dream too vivid and emotionally authentic for disbelief. … It must be one of the three or four creepiest (and best) horror movies ever made.” – The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986)

“Despite the fact that it contains three of the most horrid scenes yet filmed … the main impression left by the film is strangely one of austere beauty. … Franju has constructed a work which transcends its horrific content and leaves the spectator haunted, thoughtful and disturbed, even if not quite knowing why he should be.” – Ivan Butler (1967)

“Franju … managed to evolve a style that was both elegant and expressionistic, pure and magical.” – Steven H. Scheuer

“With a fluid rhythm and nocturnal scenes, director Georges Franju gives the schlock material an ethereal quality unique to horror films.” – The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made

“The first thoroughly modern, adult horror film, dispensing with the gothic trappings that had kept other modern genre films … mired in the past.” – Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made

“Eyes Without a Face … proves one thing. The French are thorough. Someone had the idea of making a horror film even nastier than anything Hammer Films could do; and they succeeded.” – John Braine, author of Room at the Top and Life at the Top, writing in the Daily Express

“Far too leisurely in its pace to create much horrific atmosphere and much of its genre reputation rests upon the clinical nastiness of the surgery scenes. The film has become a cult movie as much for Franju’s reputation as a cinema historian and theoretician as for its inherent qualities.” – Alan Frank

“The elaborate visual style gives the impression of having been calculated largely to conceal the deficiencies of the script.” – Roy Armes

“A piece of revolting, pandering, evil rubbish. … [The British censor] should have ordered it to be publicly burned in the Charing Cross-road. And, on top of the fire, he should have thrown the makers of the film, and the people who saw fit to release it in Britain.” – the Daily Herald (1960), a former London newspaper

“Need only be visited by psychotics who enjoy being bored between bouts of being sick.” – the News Chronicle, a former London paper

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“William Castle and Alfred Hitchcock were the first director-personalities. Before then, nobody in America knew what a director was.” – John Waters



HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1958)

In director Castle’s thriller, millionaire Vincent Price offers $10,000 (which was real money back in 1958) to any one of a group of five guests, from various walks of life, who dares to spend the night at a so-called party in, as Elisha Cook Jr. puts it, “the only really haunted house in the world” – where seven people over the years have been murdered in ghastly fashions.

Price has rented the house from Cook. The latter and the other four guests are strangers to Price’s Frederick Loren (no relation to Frederick Metzengerstein) and to one another. Also attending is Frederick’s fourth wife, Annabelle Loren (no relation to Annabel Lee). “The first [wife] simply disappeared; the other two died,” she informs a guest.

The party favors are handguns encased in little coffins.

The exterior of the house is really a Frank Lloyd Wright home in L.A.

As described above, William Castle was infamous for his promotional gimmicks. In theaters running THoHH, at a crucial moment, a glowing skeleton on a wire floated above the heads of audience members. Castle dubbed this effect “Emergo.” The Saturday Evening Post said the skeletons presented “irresistibly attractive targets to small boys with slingshots.”

“No indignity is too great [for the houseguests] – in boom-time fifties America, anything is endurable in the pursuit of financial reward.” – David J. Skal

“Despite William Castle’s cool and essentially passionless direction, House on Haunted Hill is a remarkably satisfying and frequently very scary film in which one will look in vain for any meaning beyond its bag of Hallowe’en tricks. … [It’s] something of a bargain basement prize package of a horror film.” – Wolf

“William Castle, doing what he did best: scaring the s*** out of the kids in the

audience. … [Regarding Emergo:] Excited patrons, knowing what was going to happen, were well armed with candy boxes to throw at the battered and defenseless bones.” – Weldon

“There’s more energy than sense in this camp exploitation piece ... but it’s enjoyable enough.” – The A-Z of Horror Films by Howard Maxford

“The picture works despite its gaping plot holes thanks to Castle’s sense of atmosphere, [scriptwriter Robb] White’s catty dialogue and Price’s sinister performance.” – Jonathan Malcolm Lampley

“The hero and heroine (Richard Long and Carolyn Craig) are as virtuous and as exciting as potato pancakes.” – David J. Hogan

“More boo-boo than boo. … Couldn’t cure a child’s hiccups.” – Newsweek



“One, two, three, HEY, look at Mr. Lee.” – the Bobbettes

By a strange coincidence, during the same month that this American “girl group” hit was released, June 1957, Christopher Lee’s Curse of Frankenstein came out in the United States. That’s part of a six-film Lee marathon. All but the first are Hammer Film productions, and one non-Lee Hammer movie, Plague of the Zombies, will follow those.

HORROR HOTEL (1960; U.K. title = The City of the Dead)

In this British-made thriller, set in the United States, American college professor Lee sends a woman student, Nan (Venetia Stevenson), to a Massachusetts town where witches were burned in the 17^th century. (In the real world, witches were hanged, not burned, in America.)

Nan finds a work-study program that she hadn’t bargained for.

And this is only half the story.

Stevenson, who died at age 84 on Sept. 26, was the daughter of Anna Lee (seen this month in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) and Robert Stevenson, director of Mary Poppins. (Venetia Stevenson’s first husband was Russ Tamblyn; her second was Don Everly.)

Also in the cast are theatrical diva Patricia Jessel, American former child star Betta St. John, and Valentine Dyall (whom a few readers may recognize as the Black Guardian on Doctor Who in the 1980s).

The slippery American accents affected by the British, Irish, and South African players, including Lee, will remind us of how silly Americans who imitate English accents must sound to those who are the genuine article.

The murky mise-en-scène leads me to paraphrase something I once heard Joe Dante say: Fog is the low-budget moviemaker’s best friend.

Horror Hotel was released by Vulcan Films, the predecessor of one of Hammer Film’s British competitors, Amicus Productions (founded by two industrious New Yorkers).

Director John Llewelyn Moxey, a television stalwart on both sides of the pond, later guided Lee in the English-language version of the West German coproduction Psycho-Circus (a.k.a. Circus of Fear). Moxey went on to helm the 1972 TV movie The Night Stalker, starring Darren McGavin and Carol Lynley, the pilot for McGavin’s Kolchak series.

The cinematographer was Desmond Dickinson, earlier behind the camera for Olivier’s Hamlet and Anthony Asquith’s The Importance of Being Earnest and The Browning Version. But for the remainder of Dickinson’s career, the horror output was mostly bottom of the barrel, e.g., Konga (starring Michael Gough), Berserk (Joan Crawford), Incense of the Damned (Patrick Macnee and Peter Cushing), The Beast in the Cellar (Beryl Reid and Flora Robson), Trog (Crawford again), Horror on Snape Island (Dennis Price).

Scripter George Baxt also worked on Circus of Horrors (not to be confused with Circus of Fear); Burn, Witch, Burn (U.K. title = Night of the Eagle); and Hammer’s Vampire Circus.

“This little-known, compact thriller … plays beautifully on TV, where its stagy dramatics get pushed to the background in favor of its spare atmospherics.” – The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made

“To say that the movie is atmospheric is a gross understatement. There’s so much fog swirling around the cursed town, it looks like the surface of Venus. Many scenes are accentuated by the chiaroscuro of flickering flames, and the eerie chanting of the Satanists, like a church choir gone awry, completes the aura of menace.” – Alan Tromp

“Although cheaply made, studio-bound and short on complexity, the film has a beautifully eerie Lovecraftian atmosphere.” – Hardy

“Captures [H.P. Lovecraft’s] tone with more accuracy than any of the films actually based on his work.” – Schreck (2001)

“It had very much the witch-haunted flavor of Lovecraft’s stories. I think my greatest achievement was my American accent.” – Christopher Lee

“A miniclassic of the British horror renaissance.” – DVD & Video Guide

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The following four Christopher Lee films were directed by Terence Fisher, whom Cinefantastique magazine has called “the old master.”

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)

This is the milestone – penned by Jimmy Sangster and shot in Eastmancolour – that started the horror ball rolling for Hammer Film, which had been around since the ’30s.

But I can’t heartily recommend the first of the Hammer reboots of classic Universal monster movies, which also marked the first of many Hammer teamings^† of Peter Cushing (Victor Frankenstein) and Christopher Lee (the mute Monster). It’s not very good, by Hammer standards or by any other measure.

Take heed of the words of Cushing, co-narrator with Lee of the at times very funny documentary Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror (1994), as he refers to the making of TCoF:

“The first day I met Christopher, he was disappointed that he hadn’t any dialogue. I told him, ‘Consider yourself lucky. I’ve read the script.’”

_____

^† I say “Hammer teamings” (though the pair would later appear together in other studios’ productions as well) to qualify this statement, since Cushing and Lee were both in the casts of two earlier motion pictures: Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet, and Huston’s 1952 Moulin Rouge. But Lee was still a struggling unknown in the mid-1950s.

_____

“This is the ugh-est film I’ve ever seen.” – the (London) Daily Herald

“By comparison, an abattoir is a rather friendly place.” – the Sunday Express

“Depressing, degrading – for all lovers of the cinema only two words describe this film.” – the (London) Tribune

“Most of the critics talked about the vile mind of Jimmy Sangster … . It was all quite extraordinary.” – Sangster

“The leitmotif of the film is blood; more accurately, the color of blood. … The Curse of Frankenstein … is suffused with scarlet.” – Denis Meikle

“We wanted a thing which looked like some wandering, forlorn minstrel of monstrosity, a thing of shreds and patches, but in flesh and blood and organs.” – Terence Fisher, speaking of the monster’s new look (created by makeup artist Philip Leakey)

“The film’s humour is sophisticated rather than camp.” – Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made

HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)

“I know somewhere nice and quiet where we can play.”

With another script by Hammer stalwart Sangster, this thriller marked Christopher Lee’s first appearance as the king of vampires. Peter Cushing takes on his oft-repeated role as vampire hunter Van Helsing, and the cast includes Michael Gough (Alfred in the Batman pictures from 1989 to ’97) and Hammer perennial Charles Lloyd-Pack. (No relation; his surname was Lloyd-Pack, sometimes unhyphenated. See Curse of the Demon, below.)

But you will find little in common with Lugosi’s version – or with the Stoker novel.

“Holy-moly!” – John Carpenter (quoted in the docuseries The Fearmakers Collection [2007])

“This film disgusts the mind and repels the senses. Dracula . . . is a handsome, sinister human being in a long black cloak with a sexual lust for the blood of the beautiful women who are his victims.” – Nina Hibbins, The Daily Worker (1958)

“[I] feel inclined to apologise to all decent Americans for sending them a work in such sickening bad taste.” – C.A. (Caroline Alice) Lejeune, The Observer (1958)

“There are boring horror films, and tasteless horror films. This new version of Dracula is a boring, tasteless horror film.” – Peter John Dyer of the British Film Institute (1958)

“In general, those sort of criticisms are highly exploitable.” – Michael Carreras, executive producer, Horror of Dracula

Fisher’s Dracula “is the 19th-century equivalent of James Bond – a man with all the qualities, powers and pleasures the petty bourgeoisie guiltily pines for, a lurid representation of the aristocracy.” – Hardy

“Christopher Lee’s Count was fashioned as something of a cross between a brooding Lord Byron and a sulky James Dean – the perfect embodiment of 1950s sexuality.” – Ken Hanke

“‘It is a common fallacy that vampires can change into bats and wolves,’ announced a conceited Van Helsing … and to bury all the covert symbolism of the vampire, the new Dracula substituted a blatant, almost athletic display of sadism and necrophilia.” – Clarens

“The villain again becomes what he was always meant to be, the charming, intelligent and irresistible host who is on the point of turning the cosy Victorian world upside down by transforming women into ravening sexual animals.” – Pirie

“Horror of Dracula liberated the horror movie, allowing it to become more sensual as well as more graphic.” – Fischer

“Horror of Dracula implies that the women of this world need Count Dracula to occupy the beds left vacant by easily fooled husbands and wandering fiancés.” – Gregory A. Waller

“Dracula was sexy, and he was seducing people, and he was basically going to bed with women ... and afterward, they just thought he was great.” — Joe Dante

“This is one of a handful of motion pictures which changed the face of horror films forever.” – Gary A. Smith

“Hammer had thrown down a gauntlet, ushering in a new age of visceral bluntness on-screen.” – Skal

“Probably Hammer Films’ best shocker.” – Leonard Maltin

“Arguably the best of the Hammer horrors.” – Maxford [Editor’s note: Hammer, in its original incarnation, made more than 60 horrors between 1957 and 1976.]

“The Hammer Studio style at its best.” – Scheuer

“The best vampire film ever made.” – Weldon (1983)

“One of the five best horror movies of all time.” – John Carpenter (again – quoted in 1991)



Trivia time:

According to author Denis Meikle, composer James Bernard “was reported to have said that he was specifically asked to write ‘sex music’ for the film.”

In the marvelous documentary Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror (1994), Lee comments on Bernard’s soundtrack for Horror of Dracula: “This three-note, dropping-octave theme underscored the power of the title character.” Later in the doc, it is pointed out that Bernard, who composed for many Hammer motion pictures between the mid-’50s and mid-’70s, always based his melodies on the number of syllables in each movie’s title and their accents. In the U.K., this film was known simply as DRAC-u-la.

To put it another way, you can sing the words of the title to the tune of each of Bernard’s themes. Listen via YouTube to this piece, and to how he handled one of his final Hammer works, for Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell (1974).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c41qUVJ8fqk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9UtkZRNZF0

THE MUMMY (1959)

A fair revamping of elements from Universal’s The Mummy (1932), The Mummy’s Hand (1940), and The Mummy’s Tomb (1942). This three-pronged remake stars Lee (in the title role), and Cushing is the menaced archaeologist. Sangster again served as scenarist. Mummy leading lady Yvonne Furneaux later costarred in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Polanski’s Repulsion.

“This disgusting English remake was done without my knowledge or consent, and it has been a terrible shock.” – Nina Wilcox Putnam (1888-1962), who wrote the story on which the 1932 Mummy was based, in a letter published in Time magazine

“Fisher’s reworking … adds little thematically, save for a greater awareness of cultural relativity, but by making the titular creature the focus of the film, it is visually far richer.” – Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made

“Fisher’s surrealist use of colour … together with his unnerving sense of camera position and cutting, give the movie a genuinely macabre poetry never achieved in mummy films before or since.” – Hardy (1986)

THE DEVIL’S BRIDE (1968; U.K. title = THE DEVIL RIDES OUT)

This overrated movie is based on a 1934 story by a friend of Lee’s, Dennis Wheatley (1897-1977). The villain of the piece, Mocata (Charles Gray), like so many other baddies, was inspired by occultist Aleister Crowley.

Lee battles to wrest two young friends from the grip of Satanists.

The role of the hero was a rarity for Lee. We remember Charles Gray from Rocky Horror and two 007s: You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever. Also featured is Brit-com mainstay Paul Eddington.

The screenwriter was The Twilight Zone’s Richard Matheson.

As several authors note, the special effects are the weak spot.

“One of the few contemporary horror films that could match the style and craftsmanship of the old classics.” – William K. Everson

“Made on what by modern standards is still a comparatively tiny budget, it remains an excellent example of the kind of thing that can happen when melodrama is achieved so completely and so imaginatively that it ceases to be melodrama at all and becomes close to an allegorical vision.” – Pirie (2008)

“May well be the finest Hammer movie of all, showcasing the studio’s classic strengths while avoiding the formula-bound tiredness that mars so much of its product. ... Wheatley himself considered it to be the best filmic adaptation of his work.” – Wright

“The cinematic equivalent of a fire-and-brimstone sermon.” – Sixties Shockers

“While the special effects do not impress, the acting and sincere writing do.” – Fischer

“Dated demonic effects range from silly to surprisingly sinister, or both.” – The Rough Guide to Cult Movies

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Trivia time: American distributors changed the title from The Devil Rides Out, fearing that filmgoers would mistake it for a cowboy flick.

DRACULA A.D. 1972 

This sucky Hammer project was a failed attempt to ride on the cape-tails of the American International Pictures success, Count Yorga, Vampire (1970).

The best sequence is the prologue, set in Hyde Park in 1872, with Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing chasing down his prey – though Cushing hadn’t battled Lee’s Lord of the Undead since 1958. (However, the A.D. opening is also distressingly similar to the finale of one of the cinematic antecedents, Dracula Has Risen From the Grave.)

We then fast-forward to the title year and a ritzy home where the obscure San Francisco rock-tet, Stoneground, has been hired to entertain at a private party.

Unwelcome neo-hippies have crashed the party. One is the granddaughter of Lorrimer Van Helsing (Cushing again), a descendant of our favorite vampire hunter. Jessica Van Helsing is played by Stephanie Beacham. Another uninvited guest is Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame).

Later, this bunch meets at a coffee bar (cleverly named the Cavern), and Johnny suggests doing something “way, way out” – a Black Mass, to be held in an abandoned church. This is another rehashed idea, from Taste the Blood of Dracula.

Listen in this Satanic A.D. sequence for a musical nod to the Beatles “A Day in the Life.”

Our undead antagonist is resurrected by the ceremony and gets to work on the conventional objective of killing his enemy’s descendants.

Brace yourself for some miserable puns in the dialogue. (None so bad as the anagram “Alucard,” an alias used in Lon Chaney Jr.’s Son of Dracula [1943].)

Beacham’s credits include Brando’s The Nightcomers, And Now the Screaming Starts, and the prime-time soap Dynasty.

Among Jessica and Johnny’s buds is African American singer-author Marsha Hunt, affecting an English accent – and not to be confused with blacklisted Caucasian actress Marsha Hunt, who died in September, a few weeks shy of her 105^th birthday! The younger Hunt earned the distinction of having been in relationships with John Mayall, Marc Bolan of T. Rex, and Mick Jagger (the mother of his daughter Karis J. may have been the inspiration for “Brown Sugar”). Here she plays – dare I say it? – a bit part.

Another of the mates is Caroline Munro (Hammer’s Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter; The Golden Voyage of Sinbad; Joan Collins’s The Devil Within Her; At the Earth’s Core; the 007 adventure The Spy Who Loved Me; and 1980’s Maniac).

Director Alan Gibson handled both this and its sequel, Lee’s final Count-down in the Hammer role, the equally execrable Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973).

Don Houghton scripted both those Draculas and the follow-up, the deplorable Hammer-Hong Kong hodgepodge, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974). (Houghton did far better, in long form, with two earlier Doctor Who serials.)

Laboring in a male-dominated field, Josephine Douglas, a former actress, was the producer.

Michael Vickers, a multi-instrumentalist with the original Manfred Mann, scored A.D. 1972. Author Jonathan Rigby bemoans Vickers’s “inappropriate wah-wah guitars and over-emphatic horns.” Bruce Lanier Wright says the score “would sound far more appropriate in an Italian spy movie.” He adds that Stoneground’s “music produces a sensation akin to biting down on aluminum foil.” (This band included Sal Valentino, in between stints as lead vocalist of the Beau Brummels [“Laugh, Laugh”; “Just a Little”].)

Trivia time: A short subject titled HorroRitual, made by U.S. distributor Warner Bros., preceded some theatrical screenings of A.D. ’72. In this featurette, actor Barry Atwater – who, that same year, appeared as a vampire in The Night Stalker, the pilot TV movie for Darren McGavin’s Kolchak – is tricked out as Dracula and affects a Hungarian accent.

A cobweb-covered Atwater rises from a coffin and leads audience members in the oath of enlistment in the Count Dracula Society (which really exists): “… and in sign whereof, I will receive all privileges thereto, so help me Christopher Lee. …”

Moviegoers were given HorroRitual pins, society membership cards, and other items.

(Atwater was a Vulcan philosopher on one of the last episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series.)

HorroRitual can be viewed here, beginning at about 7:28:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6HlklPEKQA

“All I get to do is stand around on unhallowed ground, sweep down corridors and make the odd pounce or two. Nobody can write dialogue for Dracula. … I have one original Bram Stoker line, but that’s yelled out at a distance of a hundred years.” – Christopher Lee

“The character of Dracula had never been feebler than here.” – Pirie

“Gibson had little understanding of what Hammer films were all about.” – Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography by Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio

“A dismal example of the decline of the Hammer vampire output, with a confused and feeble script that fails effectively to locate the Count in the Swinging Chelsea of the seventies, wasting Lee and Cushing.” – Frank

“Reduces Hammer’s top two titans to the level of kitsch, comic-book nonsense. … However, Dracula A.D. 1972 is certainly an entertaining picture – but for all the wrong reasons.” – Rigby

“The shameless rehashing of scenes that had been executed with more verve the first time around attests to the general paucity of imagination.” – Schreck

“… Dracula and his activities get pushed into the background. Only Peter
Cushing, moving serenely and sincerely through the thicket of trite dialogue and overanxious performances, achieves moments of chilling convention.” – Cinema TV Today, a former U.K. trade journal

“Abysmal fang and cross flick without even the saving grace of humour. The worst of the Hammer Draculas, its would-be hip dialogue has to be heard to be believed.” – The A-Z of Horror Films

“If you can’t laugh at the stilted talk, you’ll be bored stiff instead of scared stiff.” – The New York Daily News

“No films in history have aged more quickly and less gracefully than those of the late 1960s and early 1970s – the ones that desperately attempted to be ‘relevant for today’s kids,’ while displaying a baffled ignorance of the era’s actual youth culture. Dracula A.D. 1972 is, like, a particularly dismal example.” – Wright

PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES (1966)

In a 19^th-century Cornish village racked by mysterious deaths, a medical professor is called in to help and discovers that the local squire has ingeniously picked up a Caribbean method of supplying free labor for his profitable tin mine, which everyone believes to be idle.

Critics cite the nightmare sequence as the most striking in this movie. The scene has been “often quoted” in later films, Phil Hardy notes.

The undead makeup is not among the best creations of Hammer’s Roy Ashton, but the zombie-master character sports a hooded mask that leaves an indelible impression on viewers. (And, by the way, the letters B.Ƨ. emblazoned on his hood and robe stand for Baron Samedi, the voodoo god, according to author Wayne Kinsey.) The faux-African accoutrements in the movie sets are ridiculously out of place.

The director was John Gilling, whose filmography includes The Reptile (made back-to-back with Plague); Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (late Lugosi; alternate title = My Son, the Vampire); The Gamma People (weird, British-style Red scare sci-fi); The Flesh and the Fiends (a Burke and Hare tale, with Peter Cushing, Donald Pleasence, and Billie “The Omen” Whitelaw); Blood Beast From Outer Space (a primer on skillful, low-budget SF); and Hammer’s The Mummy’s Shroud.

“[The plot draws] a subtextual parallel between the walking dead enslaved in a Cornish tin mine and the exploited working classes.” – The Hammer Vault: Treasures From the Archive of Hammer Films, by Marcus Hearn

“The story has often been viewed as an analogy to the plight of the Welsh coal miners. In BoxOffice magazine, producer Anthony Nelson-Keys simply called it ‘a morality play.’” – Smith

“Surprisingly effective entry in a generally moribund subgenre.” – Joe Dante, writing in Castle of Frankenstein magazine

“Jacqueline Pearce puts the lie to the saying that by the time a pretty, young girl knows how to act she is no longer a pretty, young girl.” – Monster Mania magazine

“So predictable that its standard scare tactics are merely tedious.” – the New York Post

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A marathon of three Universal Frankensteins and four other Universal classics. A chance to compare the Karloff Frankenstein to the Christopher Lee remake, which runs earlier on Halloween. (No contest!)

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BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

“We belong dead.”

Director James Whale’s follow-up to his Frankenstein (1931) is an example of the sequel outstripping the original. And Boris Karloff talks in this one!

At the movie’s outset, a little retcon shows us that the monster didn’t really die in the 1931 picture, as everyone thought. He’s up and at ’em again, and looking for love, with the aid of a reluctant Baron Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive, reprising his role) and the eager, Uber-weird Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger).

The bona fide bride of Frankenstein, Baroness Elizabeth F., is portrayed by 17-year-old Valerie Hobson of Northern Ireland. She also appeared in Universal’s Werewolf of London in 1935.

Franz Waxman’s stirring score was recycled in Universal serials and elsewhere.

“This is a pompous, badly acted film, full of absurd anachronisms and inconsistencies. It owes its one moment of excitement … to the strange electric beauty of Miss Elsa Lanchester.” — Graham Greene (1935)

“Some movies age; others ripen. Seen today, Whale’s masterpiece is more surprising than when it was made, because today’s audiences are more alert to its buried hints of homosexuality, necrophilia and sacrilege.” — Ebert

“The grim parallel with the life of Christ is not accidental; much of the film’s cleverness lies in Whale’s impudent religious symbolism.” — Hogan

“Probably … the best of the entire manmade monster genre from any period.” — Everson (1974)

“The brilliant screenplay is as vibrant with language as it is with action.” — Wolf

“One of the silver screen’s most fondly regarded horror movies, this splendid sequel to Frankenstein offers an excellent blend of black humour and thrills, and shows all concerned in top form.” — Maxford

“Whale apparently decided to make Bride of Frankenstein Universal’s most ghoulish horror film, also its funniest and psychologically most endearing.” – Ethan Mordden

“Whale manages to elicit both terror and pathos by means of a camp rendition of the ceremonies of birth and marriage.” — Alberto Manguel

“A baroque exercise in the fantastic that periodically succeeds in parodying itself.” — Clarens

“Whale manages to walk a tightrope between poetic intensity and parody that finally succeeds magnificently.” – Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made

“While this is a major genre film, it is by no means the classic it is claimed to be. By infusing the movie with his own quirky sense of humour, Whale undermines the horror to its detriment.” — Frank

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Trivia time: Elsa Lanchester’s Bride coiffure was inspired by the Nefertiti Bust.

SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939)

“This is place of dead. We’re all dead here.” – Lugosi as Ygor

Karloff portrays the Monster for the last time. (Not counting an amusing October 1962 episode of Route 66 that also guest-starred Lon Chaney Jr. and Peter Lorre.)

Boris had objected strongly to having the Creature speak in The Bride of Frankenstein, and here he again utters only growls, grunts, and well-placed screams (actually one scream, heard twice – dubbed the second time).

The actor’s pantomime dexterity is superlative: Observe, for example, the doctor’s first encounter with the reanimated Monster, and how the Creature wipes that smile onto Dr. F’s face.

Basil Rathbone, as the title character, spouts medical technobabble with the best of them.

Lionel Atwill is police Inspector Krogh, he of the artificial arm that’s spoofed in Young Frankenstein.

The monster’s BFF, Ygor (Bela Lugosi), is an old man with a horn. His backstory is that he survived a hanging with only a minor injury: a broken neck. Ygor plays baleful tunes as the Monster goes out to do his pal’s dirty work.

Four-year-old Donnie Dunagan’s saccharine performance as the grandson of Frankenstein is as risible as it is irritating.

The movie’s sets are a throwback to the glory days of German Expressionism.

The director/producer was Rowland V. Lee, who also guided Karloff and Rathbone in the same year’s Tower of London, featuring Vincent Price.

Scenarist Wyllis Cooper created the horror radio series Lights Out and Quiet, Please.

“God, he was cute.” – Lugosi, speaking of his alter-Ygor to a New York Post reporter in 1939

“The last in Universal’s Frankenstein series to make much sense.” – Weldon

“At 10 reels [it’s] much too long to sustain feelings of terror or genuine excitement. … Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating film, and, if only on the level of its art direction, sets, lighting, and overall visual elegance, must certainly rank as the second best film in the series [after Bride of Frankenstein].” — Everson

“Slow the film may be, but it has a kind of architectural solidity that matches the dreamlike labyrinthine massiveness of the sets … and builds to a stunning climax.” — Hardy

If Son of Frankenstein “isn’t the silliest picture ever made, it’s a sequel to the silliest picture ever made, which is even sillier. … But its silliness is deliberate — a very shrewd silliness, perpetrated by a good director in the best traditions of cinematic horror.” — The New York Times (1939)

FRANKENSTEIN (1931) 

This was Karloff’s 81^st movie, according to his daughter, Sara. (He made his first in 1919.) Also starring Colin Clive, Mae Clarke (she of the famous grapefruit in the face), and Edward Van Sloan. It was one of the biggest moneymakers up until that time.

Jack Pierce (born Janus Piccoulas), an immigrant from Greece, was head of Universal’s makeup department – and manager of the studio’s basketball team. He created the iconic looks of Frankenstein, the Mummy, and all the rest of the classic Universal monsters of the ’30s and ’40s, and he called Karloff “the greatest of them all as far as playing these parts.”

“Frankenstein is a thriller, make no mistake. Women come out trembling, men exhausted.” — Motion Picture Herald, a former trade paper

“A classic, the most famous and possibly the most influential genre film ever made … [Whale] creates an effectively oppressive Gothic atmosphere but his handling of non-horror scenes and his apparent lack of interest in the romantic leads, as well as his tendency to allow Colin Clive to over-act at key moments, tends to dissipate the overall effect.” — Frank

“Historically, Frankenstein may be the most important of all horror films. The ersatz Victorian flavor of Dracula is nowhere to be found in this work, the first truly modern horror film. Along with its thematic qualities and bravura theatrics, Whale’s film pioneered much of the horror form in its unadorned use of shock cutting and shock for shock’s sake.” – Hanke

“Boris Karloff’s fiercely sensitive portrayal — a master class in bewilderment and paranoia — remains unmatched in the history of horror.” — Slate magazine (2012)

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Trivia time: Karloff got this role after Bela Lugosi turned it down. Leslie Howard and Bette Davis were considered for the parts of Henry Frankenstein and his fiancée, Elizabeth.

NOV. 1

THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933)

“We’ll begin with a reign of terror. A few murders here and there. Murders of great men, murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction.”

🕱

“Power, I said! Power to walk into the gold vaults of the nations, into the secrets of kings, into the Holy of Holies; power to make multitudes run squealing in terror at the touch of my little invisible finger. Even the moon’s frightened of me, frightened to death! The whole world’s frightened to death.”

Based, needless to say, on H.G. Wells, but also partly based on Philip Wylie’s The Murderer Invisible. Claude Rains and Gloria “Titanic” Stuart star. (London-born Rains got the part after Karloff turned it down; it was his first Hollywood role.)

Look fast for Walter Brennan, John Carradine, and Dwight Frye.

Screenplay writer R.C. Sherriff also worked on director James Whale’s The Old Dark House and The Bride of Frankenstein; Dracula’s Daughter (coming up during the wee hours of Nov. 1); and The Dam Busters (1955), a U.K. World War II drama whose climactic aerial scenes inspired Star Wars.

(Preston Sturges, later a directorial king of comedy, had written a wild script for the film that involved the Russian Revolution. This draft was rejected, and Universal fired Sturges.)

“[A] very English film full of Whale’s idiosyncratic humour.” — John Brosnan

“Strong in plot and atmosphere, masterly in trick photography … powerful fantasy … [with] offbeat humour.” — Dyer

“This eerie tale evidently afforded a Roman holiday for the camera aces.” —Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times (1933)

“Not only is the show a technical tour de force, The Invisible Man also contains some of the best dialogue ever written for a fantastic film. … There are flashes of the offbeat humor so dear to Whale.” — Clarens

“Arguably the best H.G. Wells adaptation on film.” — John Brunas

THE WOLF MAN (1941)

… or, The Wolf of Wales Street.

Seventy of the most exciting minutes in cinematic history.

Set in a fictional Welsh town and starring Lon Chaney Jr. (as Larry Talbot), Claude Rains, ’40s scream queen Evelyn Ankers, Ralph Bellamy, Warren William, and Patric Knowles.

As for the ill-starred Talbot, Gypsy Maria Ouspenskaya abets him after her son, “Bela” (Lugosi), a-bites him.

Much of the werewolf lore now deemed commonplace was invented for this picture by screenwriter Curt Siodmak.

“One of the best of the new brand of Universal thrillers, star-laden, glossy, streamlined.” – Everson

“Its trump card is the superbly suspenseful atmosphere in which [cinematographer Joseph] Valentine’s camera makes virtuoso use of fog and mist to create an eerie fairy tale world.” – Hardy

“The last of the great Universal horror films.” – Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films, 1931-1946, by Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas

“Larry is not a tragic hero in the classical sense; he is not a great man brought low by a single flaw in his nature, just a luckless lunk who has the misfortune to be bitten by a werewolf. But the schematic inevitability of his fate – and the frenzied violence of its staging – make The Wolf Man’s final reel one of the most powerful in Universal’s repertoire.” – Rigby

“Universal’s moneyspinner, the jewel in the crown of their second wave of horror films … . But Chaney Jr., an unlikely horror star who seems to have walked in from some buffoonish comedy, is unable to carry … the pathos required … . Rather than any lupine qualities, he most resembles an overfriendly dog; Jack Pierce’s make-up is similarly unconvincing, although mercifully the actor is unrecognizable underneath.” – Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made

“Chaney’s makeup results in quite a good monster, and might pass among apes, but it bears not the slightest resemblance to any wolf that ever was, would have been disclaimed with horror by the most devoted wolf-mother, and would not have deceived the hunters for an instant.” – Butler

Bellamy, William, and Knowles “have all the presence of paper napkins. … Done better as Cat People.” – Willis

DRACULA’S DAUGHTER (1936)

You’re all familiar with pre-Code. Well, this film caused an intra-Code controversy — at least in Britain. The sceptred isle’s bluenosed version of the Hays commission, the British Board of Film Censors, said DD “would require the resources of half a dozen more languages to adequately express its beastliness.”

Perhaps one point of contention was the lesbian overtones, undertones, and in-between-tones of the plot.

Gloria Holden is the title character, Countess Marya Zaleska, who is seeking release from her father’s curse.

Irving Pichel is her manservant, Sandor. Pichel was also a director; he codirected The Most Dangerous Game (1932), one of the most imitated films in history; the 1935 remake of She; the William Powell fantasy Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid; and the landmark space opera Destination Moon (1950).

Dracula’s Daughter starts out exactly where Dracula left off, and Edward Van Sloan reprises his role as vampire hunter Von [sic] Helsing. Blink and you’ll miss Hedda Hopper, as a London society hostess.

The director of Dracula’s Daughter was Lambert Hillyer, whose Invisible Ray, with Karloff and Lugosi, was released the same year. Hillyer also helmed the first screen adaptation of Batman, a 1943 serial.

Screenwriter Garrett Fort worked on 1931’s Dracula and Frankenstein.

Here’s a choice sampling of dialogue (and the talented performers somehow make this work):

MARYA [playing Chopin’s Nocturne No. 5]: The cradle song. The song my mother once sang to me long, long ago, rocking me to sleep as she sang in the twilight.

SANDOR: Twilight!

MARYA: Quiet! Quiet! You disturb me. Twilight. Long shadows on the hillsides.

SANDOR: Evil shadows.

MARYA: No, no. Peaceful shadows. The flutter of wings in the treetops.

SANDOR: The wings of bats.

MARYA: No, no, the wings of birds. From far off, the barking of a dog.

SANDOR: Barking because there are wolves about.

MARYA: Silence! I forbid you. … I’ve found release.

SANDOR: That music doesn’t speak of release … That music tells of the dark. Evil things, shadowy places. …

MARYA: Sandor, look at me. What do you see in my eyes?

SANDOR: Death.

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“We were more than a little astonished to learn that … Dracula had left a family, it having been our notion that he was wedded to his art. … Gloria Holden is a remarkably convincing bat-woman, but we found ourselves wondering all through the picture how she managed to preserve so attractive an appearance — after sleeping in coffins and all — without the aid of a mirror. Vampires, you know, can’t see their reflections. Still, we suppose it’s a minor objection to a cute little horror picture.” — Frank S. Nugent, The New York Times

“Sympathetic characterization adds a fascinating ‘monster-as-victim’ subtext ... Dracula’s Daughter is not as good as Dracula. Still, while lacking the overpowering presence and almost palpable atmosphere of its father, this Daughter can well take pride in its own thematic and thespic accomplishments.” — Senn

“Hollywood has never learned that magnificent acting and remarkable photography are not sufficient to make a great deal out of a very little. Dracula’s Daughter falls far short of its predecessor because of its disregard for the fundamentals of cinematic law.” — Hollywood Spectator, a former film magazine

THE BLACK CAT (1934)

“Superstition, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.” — Lugosi as Dr. Vitus Werdegast

SPOILER ALERT! As I wrote in 2010, in a web-only sidebar on director Edgar G. Ulmer for dallasnews.com, this movie “marked the first teaming of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. The Black Cat has nothing to do with Poe — despite the title — but a great deal to do with necrophilia, devil worship, human sacrifice, quasi incest and (worst yet) ailurophobia. Oh, and Lugosi’s character flays Karloff’s alive. A censor’s nightmare!”

As author Gregory Mank says, it’s “the most perverse of all the Universal horror classics.” A word of caution: Don’t expect too much in the way of logic from the plot. Just enjoy the ride.

Trivia time:

• Karloff’s Hjalmar Poelzig got his surname from German architect Hans Poelzig, who had worked with Ulmer on the set design for 1920’s Der Golem. But the character’s persona was inspired by occultist Aleister Crowley.
• Lugosi’s widow, Hope, said, “He hated cats.”

“One of the masterpieces of the genre.” — Hardy

“Stands out as a landmark in the genre — many buffs have even dubbed it the best of Universal’s ‘golden horror films’ of the thirties — with Lugosi in one of his several finest roles.” — Calvin T. Beck

“The Black Cat is a totally unique film. There has never been another quite like it, either in mood or in execution. … While there does appear to be an occasional lapse in continuity, and the motivations of the characters at times seem hazy …, these incongruities actually add to the perverse appeal of the picture and enhance its dark, otherworldly texture.” — Senn

“Perhaps the most outré horror film of its period. Ulmer’s fondness for quasi-expressionism and heightened melodrama turn the film into a perversely clever comic strip.” — Hogan

“Boldly thumbing its nose at convention, the film is a veritable catalogue of human corruption.” — Universal Horrors

“There is not much Poe in this, and in spite of a splendidly sinister performance by Karloff and a surprisingly moving one from Lugosi the final result is a rather scrappy and ineffectual film.” — Butler

“The scenes of torture may thrill morbidly inclined picture-goers but the rational picture-goers will, no doubt, be filled with disgust.” — Harrison’s Reports, a former movie trade journal

A “clash of two eyebrow-squinting nuts.” – Variety

NOV. 2

HE WHO GETS SLAPPED (1924)

No, this isn’t a Chris Rock biopic.

The preface to a jokebook published many years ago read, “With few exceptions, all humor is sick.”

One point that the compiler of the jests was making went something like this: We laugh at a person slipping on a banana, or at some other pratfall. But, in real life, such an accident could cause a serious back or neck injury or a concussion.

He Who Gets Slapped stresses this paradox.

Lon Chaney is hardworking scientist Paul Beaumont, whose patron, Baron Regnard, steals both his groundbreaking theories and his wife.

And what is his reaction?

“Be a clown, be a clown

All the world loves a clown.”

Years later, Beaumont has traded his goatee for greasepaint and run away to join the circus, a small one near Paris. There he is known as “He Who Gets Slapped” (or “He” for short). His shtick: Other clowns slap him continually, no matter what he is saying or doing. His claim to fame is the record number of blows he can endure in the act.

Freud might call this repetition compulsion, since both the Baron and Beaumont’s wife had smacked him during his earlier downfall. In He’s mind, the laughing faces of his clown “audience” dissolve into the laughing faces of academicians who had humiliated him years earlier.

Periodically during the film, the action breaks away to show a sole clown, spinning a globe, laughing at the orb, and at one point thumbing his nose at it. (Censors in future would ban such a gesture.)

Chaney shares the screen with two other matinee idols of the day, Norma Shearer and John Gilbert.

Shearer is bareback rider Consuelo, the daughter of a faded aristocrat and the object of He’s unrequited love. The scene in which Consuelo sews a cloth heart on to He’s costume has to be among the most sensual of the silent era.

The director was Victor Sjöström (who, upon moving from Sweden to Hollywood in 1924, had changed his name to Seastrom).

He Who Gets Slapped is based on a 1914 play by Russia’s Leonid Andreyev.

This was the first movie released by MGM, and the climactic scene will certainly bring to mind the studio’s famous logo.

Parts of the story will chill even today’s viewers, who are inured to more graphic images.

After all, there’s nothing scarier than a clown.

“There is not an instant of ennui, not a second one wants to lose.” – The New York Times

“Brilliant use of lighting and Expressionist devices.” – VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever