Cult Horror Movies: Discover the 33 Best Scary, Suspenseful, Gory, and Monstrous Cinema Classics
Author: Danny Peary
Date: 2014-10-07 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Arts & Photography; Film; Photography & Video
Description: The Bride of Frankenstein to House of Wax to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to The Brood —horror is a beloved and multifaceted genre, with no two classics truly alike. And almost all of them—great and not-so-great—inspire the kind of passion that only cult films truly reach. In this collection of 33 essays drawn from his revered Cult Movies series, cult film specialist Danny Peary examines, dissects, defends, and exalts horror films from his unique and engaging perspective. His writing is a cornerstone of the cult film culture that continues to flourish today. New to this ebook series are Danny
Publisher: Workman Publishing
Rights: All rights reserved

More Cult Movies ebooks coming this fall!

Cult Midnight Movies
November 2014

Cult Crime Movies
December 2014

“Danny Peary pretty much coined the term ‘cult movies.’”
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“Virtually impossible to put down, crammed with all sorts of obscure information, offbeat interpretations and criticism. Peary not only makes us want to catch and enjoy obscure, underrated gems . . . but also offers new insight into old favorites . . . a book for both the fan and the serious student.”
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Cult Horror Movies

Discover the 33 Best Scary, Suspenseful, Gory, and Monstrous Cinema Classics

Danny Peary

Workman Publishing • New York

Contents

Introduction

Altered States

An American Werewolf in London

Basket Case

The Black Cat

Black Sunday

Blood Feast

The Bride of Frankenstein

The Brood

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

The Conqueror Worm

Daughters of Darkness

Freaks

Godzilla, King of the Monsters

Halloween

House of Wax

I Married a Monster from Outer Space

I Walked with a Zombie

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

King Kong

The Little Shop of Horrors

Martin

Massacre at Central High

Night of the Demon

The Night of the Hunter

Night of the Living Dead

Peeping Tom

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Psycho

Seconds

Targets

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

The Thing

The Wicker Man

Appendix

Introduction

Cult movies were once considered to be only those obscure pictures that were admired by a small, sad coterie of film “experts” and other social outcasts. But I choose to define “cult movies” quite broadly. I consider them those special films that elicit a fiery passion in moviegoers long after their initial releases; that have been taken to heart as if they were abandoned orphans in a hostile world, cherished, protected, and enthusiastically championed by segments of the movie audience; that are integral parts of people’s lives. Cultists don’t merely enjoy their favorite films; they worship them, seek them out wherever they are playing, see them repeatedly, and are intent on persuading anyone who will listen that they should be appreciated regardless of what reviewers thought. They will brave blizzards, skip their weddings, ignore their most solemn religious holidays, and even date their least-appealing cousins to see a film for what may be their tenth, twentieth, or one hundredth time.

When you speak of cult movies, you speak in extremes. Hardcore cultists, ranging from polite to lunatic, insist that their favorite films are the most intriguing, unusual, outrageous, mysterious, absurd, daring, entertaining, erotic, exotic, and/or best films of all time. Also they point out that cult films differ radically from standard Hollywood films in that they characteristically feature atypical heroes and heroines; offbeat dialogue; surprising plot resolutions; highly original storylines; brave themes, often of a sexual or political nature; “definitive” performances by stars who have cult status; the novel handling of popular but stale genres. Outstanding special effects, spectacular camerawork, and a willingness by the filmmakers to experiment distinguish many cult films, but adoration for some, like Blood Feast, has absolutely nothing to do with admiration for the filmmakers’ skills—it’s often to the contrary.

The typical Hollywood product has little potential for becoming a cult favorite because it is perceived by everyone in basically the same way. Almost everyone agrees on the quality of these films, on what the directors are trying to say, and on the correct way to interpret the films’ messages. On the other hand, the great majority of cult films are born and live in controversy, in arguments over quality, themes, talent, and other matters. Cultists believe they are among the blessed few who have discovered something in particular films that the average moviegoer and critic have missed—the something that makes the pictures extraordinary. They grasp the elusive points of their favorite films, the filmmakers’ most personal visions, the cult stars’ real selves coming through; and they find glory in the belief that they are among the few on the same wavelength as the people involved in making these films. While word of mouth certainly plays a large part in the growth of cults for individual films, what is fascinating is that in the beginning pockets of people will embrace a film they have heard nothing about while clear across the country others independently will react identically to the same picture. There is nothing more exciting than discovering you are not the only person obsessed with a picture critics hate, the public stays away from en masse, and film texts ignore.

In this book on horror, I have included prime examples of various types of cult films. You will find pictures that reviewers attacked and, almost as a reflex action, film enthusiasts rallied around; pictures hated by the average moviegoer as much as by the press that have been saved from oblivion by a cult of out-of-the-mainstream critics and film scholars; pictures underrated or neglected by everyone at the time of their releases that recently have been rediscovered and reevaluated; pictures that have gained popularity because they star performers who have become cult stars or were made by filmmakers who likewise have become cult figures; pictures for which we have nostalgic feelings because they had great impact on us when we were kids; pictures that are so out of the ordinary that attending them has become a communal event. You see that what really differentiates cult movies is that they can be discussed not only in terms of their genres but also in terms of their fans.

Altered States

1980 Warner Bros.

Director: Ken Russell

Producer: Howard Gottfried

Screenplay: Sidney Aaron (Paddy Chayefsky)

From a novel by Paddy Chayefsky

Cinematography: Jordan Cronenweth

Special Visual Effects: Bran Ferren

Special Makeup: Dick Smith

Music: John Corigliano

Editor: Eric Jenkins

Running time: 102 minutes

Color

Cast: William Hurt (Eddie Jessup), Blair Brown (Emily Jessup), Bob Balaban (Arthur Rosenberg), Charles Haid (Mason Parrish), Thaao Penghlis (Eccheverria), Miguel Godreau (Primal Man), Dori Brenner (Sylvia Rosenberg), Peter Brandon (Hobart), Charles White Eagle (The Brujo), Drew Barrymore (Margaret Jessup), Megan Jeffers (Grace Jessup).

Synopsis: In 1967, in New York, psychophysiologist Edward Jessup spends time floating in an isolation tank, researching sensory deprivation. He hallucinates religious allegories and cries while re-experiencing his father’s painful death. His friend Arthur Rosenberg, a pharmacologist, records his EEG tracings. Jessup admits he doesn’t know what he’s searching for.

At a party Jessup meets Emily, a doctoral candidate in physical anthropology. After they make passionate love, he reveals that as a child he believed in God and had visions—until his father died. Emily realizes that he is someone willing to sell his soul for Truth. She tries to convince him that “Life doesn’t have truths.” And that in his fanatical search for Truth, all he has done is replace God with the Original Self.

When both get teaching positions at Harvard, Emily suggests that they get married. He agrees, although he cannot reciprocate her great love for him.

In 1974, Arthur and his wife Sylvia move to Boston. They learn that Jessup and Emily, who have two daughters, are separating. Jessup has no time for a family and sentimental feelings when he must find his Original Self. Emily goes to Nairobi to study baboons. Jessup goes to South America to participate in a mushroom ceremony held by a backward tribe of Mayan descendants. All who partake are supposed to have a common experience. When Jessup drinks the ceremonial liquid, he hallucinates he is propelled into a crack in the Nothing, from which, the chief explains, comes one’s unborn soul.

Back in Boston, Jessup resumes isolation tank experimentation while Arthur and his friend Mason Parrish record his words. He injects himself with the mushroom solution and has amazing hallucinations and blackouts while in the tank. At one point he tells his assistants that he has become an apeman and is killing a sheep. He emerges from the tank with blood on his mouth; X-rays reveal that his skull has temporarily taken on the shape of a gorilla skull. At night he briefly experiences genetic change, and hair grows on his body. Emily returns to Boston, still in love with Jessup and worried that he is cracking up. He goes into the tank alone and emerges as an apeman. He brutally beats a guard before escaping to the zoo. He kills and eats a sheep. Jessup is discovered by the police—in his human form. Jessup insists that he go back into the tank with Emily, Arthur, and Mason present to witness that he really can turn into an apeman. There is an explosion that knocks out Arthur and Mason. A whirlpool forms in the lab, and Jessup, in an embryonic state, is sucked toward the moment of creation. Emily pulls him out.

Jessup tells Emily he now knows that all that is important is human life, not the terrible moment of creation. Only her love is keeping him from being pulled back to that time. Suddenly he changes into his embryonic form. Emily tells him to fight it if he loves her. They touch and she becomes an energy form. Jessup slams his arm into the wall, over and over. Suddenly, human again, he hugs Emily, who also reverts to her human form.

In 1980 any science fiction or horror film that boasted expensive special effects was a good bet to do blockbuster business. Warner Bros. was optimistic about Altered States when it opened strongly in urban areas, even breaking box office records at some theaters. But it lost its momentum once it hit Middle America, dropped off dramatically in attendance in cities once critics had their say, and proved to be a major commercial disappointment. That it became a regular on revival theater schedules (playing in four New York theaters in one month years after release) and often turned up as a Midnight Movie was not unexpected, considering the cult for director Ken Russell, the increased popularity of star William Hurt, and the fanaticism some moviegoers have for pyrotechnics; but why it initially fizzled is unclear. Perhaps SF fans didn’t think the trip through Eddie Jessup’s unconscious world was as visually thrilling or mentally challenging as most movie trips through outer space. Perhaps horror fans, who were weaned on films in which Lon Chaney, Jr., turned into a werewolf under a full moon, didn’t think the transformation of the tall, blond Jessup into a short, brown-haired apeman should have been done offscreen. Or perhaps they did not feel there were enough gruesome special effects to warrant an ad campaign that promised plentiful horror elements. Probably some moviegoers decided to boycott Ken Russell movies after wasting good money on such inexcusable exercises in self-indulgence as Lisztomania (1975) and Valentino (1977). (When I saw Lisztomania, the projector broke down in the middle of the film, but no one complained.) It’s likely that the staunch admirers of the late screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky—Marty (1955), The Goddess (1958), The Hospital (1971), Network (1976)—considered themselves too sophisticated to rush to a film in the fantastic vein. Or perhaps audiences couldn’t buy the premise that someone who cared as little about mankind as Jessup would be so obsessed with finding man’s origins.

Classic horror films had the same actor play the scientist and the creature he becomes after weird experiments. But in Altered States Hurt’s Primal Man is played by tiny Mexican dancer Miguel Godreau.

Still, there’s an easier guess as to why Altered States didn’t generate enough positive word of mouth to make it successful. For about ninety-five uneven but “acceptable” minutes, the film takes viewers on an ambitious exploration of man’s origins and simultaneously advances the intriguing theory that there can be genetic change if one’s consciousness is manipulated. Then, suddenly, the picture drops several intellectual planes, disregards Arthur’s and the viewer’s desire to make further discoveries with Jessup, and settles safely on Jessup expounding a simplistic philosophy about the importance of love and life that could be sold to manufacturers of religious Mother’s Day cards. Sure, it’s grand that the long-suffering Emily finally gets the affection she deserves. Emily is a great character: brilliant, funny, loyal, concerned, brave. Unfortunately, once Jessup tells her that the Ultimate Truth is that there is no Ultimate Truth (some revelation!), that what’s really meaningful is what’s happening in our present everyday world (i.e., their love for each other), and that his journey to the point of creation to find his Original Self was painful and unsatisfying, then, for us, his seven-year search automatically becomes irrelevant. Much sound and fury signifying nothing. We can’t enjoy putting puzzle pieces together and figuring out all those religious symbols Jessup hallucinated if Jessup himself believes it’s of no consequence. He should know. It’s as if Jessup returned from Mars to report it’s sandy and cold there, and he, Chayefsky, and Russell concluded that there should be no further exploration or discussion of the planet. We know from countless horror films that man shouldn’t tamper in some areas he doesn’t comprehend; but we still agree with Stanley Kubrick in his belief, expressed in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), that man’s noblest characteristic is an insatiable desire to make discoveries even if they will lead to culture shock.

Jessup lies in a sensory deprivation tank. Prior to filming, as Blair Brown told me, she, William Hurt, and Ken Russell spent time in tanks from the sixties. “I was very relaxed, Bill hallucinated like crazy, and Ken was convinced bad spirits had been left over in his tank. Therein lie our three personalities.”

All that we’re left to discuss at the end of Altered States are its blasting soundtrack; Bran Ferren’s special effects, which utilized computer animation, rotoscoping, and scores of opticals; and the special effects makeup work (“the mole” and “the bladder” effects where it looks like there’s movement beneath the skin, the use of specially designed body suits, the sculpturing of figures used in Jessup’s metamorphosis back to an embryonic state) by the legendary Dick Smith (1973’s The Exorcist, 198l’s Scanners). That’s apparently been enough for the film’s cultists, but not for anyone else. As awful as is Disney’s The Black Hole (1979), at least there was an ambitious attempt to visualize the inconceivable at the picture’s end—a trip into a black hole. I want to see what Jessup experiences when he’s in his ghastly embryonic form and is screaming. And it shouldn’t look as if paint is splattering under a microscope, as does Ferren’s inadequate ninety-second light show.

If only Jessup had died like most movie scientists who venture into no man’s land (rather than having Emily’s love redeem him); or if he had pulled Emily into the whirlpool with him; or if he and his beloved had not reappeared after momentarily vanishing (becoming an energy force?) in the hall sequence. Then at the fadeout, Arthur, with a cup of coffee in his hand, and Mason, shouting as usual, could look at each other with confusion, and ask such questions as “What did Jessup experience?”; “What did he see that made him scream?”; “Where did they go?”; “What will they find?”; “What have they become?” And viewers could answer these questions and formulate opinions about the meanings of various images and occurrences. Granted, these endings would have been as trite as the present one, and would not have improved the film at all, but they just might have sparked the controversy necessary to have made the film a hit. Except for a few southern fundamentalists who protested the theory of evolution espoused, no one bothered to debate the film’s content. Everything’s too spelled out. How popular would 2001 have been if everyone understood the meanings of the black monolith and the star child?

Probably inspired by John Lilly’s mind expansion experiments of the midsixties, Chayefsky wrote his only novel—in which he sprinkled scientific data like other people drop names—with the intention of its becoming a film. Columbia was originally set to produce the adaptation for an estimated $12.2 million. To direct, Chayefsky hand-picked Arthur Penn, whom he had known since they’d been driving forces in live television in the fifties. After six months of pre-production, during which the two men supposedly planned different pictures, Penn quit. Six weeks and $1.5 million later, Chayefsky and producer Howard Gottfried happily announced they had signed Ken Russell to direct his first American film. The flamboyant British director’s outrageously excessive style certainly seemed suitable for this, if any, picture, because it depends on mind-blowing visuals. Yet he was an odd choice. Foremost, he was not the partner or puppet Chayefsky desired, but someone who would insist that his personal vision make it to the screen. His refusal to control his outlandish artistic notions already had resulted in cinematic chaos. Only Women in Love (1969), The Devils (1971), where Russell’s delirious style truly worked, and cult hit Tommy (1975) had done well financially. The Boy Friend (1971), an original tribute to Hollywood musicals starring Twiggy, the one Russell film I enjoy, at least had scattered critical recognition. But his other works—which, like Altered States, are about eccentrics striving for some form of immortality—had flopped with critics and ticket buyers: The Music Lovers (1970), Savage Messiah (1972), Mahler (1974), Lisztomania, and Valentino. His aim was to shock viewers; instead they were repelled. When Columbia lost interest in financing Altered States soon after Russell took the helm, it seemed like good business sense.

Jessup regresses to an embryonic state. Dick Smith created this single-piece head-to-toe foam latex suit.

Warner took over the film, which wound up costing $14.9 million. It would have cost another $4 million if Russell had gotten along with the Penn-hired John Dykstra, the special effects wiz of Star Wars (1977), and not replaced him with the much less expensive Ferren, then only twenty-seven. Not surprisingly, Russell and Chayefsky didn’t get along either. A week after filming began, Chayefsky walked out. He still collected all monies, but insisted titles credit go to his alias Sidney (his real name) Aaron. Chayefsky claimed that Russell was ruining his novel, but I can think of no other movie adaptation that is so close to its source. It’s more than likely that he came out publicly against Russell because he realized early on that no faithful adaptation of his book could result in a good film. He needed a scapegoat in order to keep his own reputation intact. But if you don’t like Altered States, blame Chayefsky.

I find no director as infuriating as Ken Russell, but I admit some admiration for his work on Altered States. Consider that if he had changed one word of Chayefsky’s unwieldy dialogue he would have been sued. The proposal scene, in which Emily tells Jessup exactly how peculiar he is (he’s a weird lover, a Faust freak, etc.), is an example of what Russell had to contend with: Emily’s monologue goes on and on without fluidity. Russell solved much of this overwritten-dialogue problem by having his actors talk so quickly that lines that would make no sense to the average viewer anyway are lost; when Jessup must spout a lot of intellectual mumbo jumbo upon meeting Emily, Russell has him talk with a mouth full of food. Russell realized that words were less important than impressing viewers that the characters are loquacious about erudite subjects. William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban, and Charles Haid—the fine cast assembled by Arthur Penn—also must be credited for figuring out ways to circumvent the much too literate dialogue. They all are believable, and smooth, as they deliver intellectual diatribes.

Emily rescues Jessup from the whirlpool. “I loved Emily for her grand passion for Eddie,” actress Blair Brown told me. “She was extremely intelligent and lived a rational existence except for him. If she hadn’t met him, she’d have had everything organized and lifeless. Her passion turned everything upside down. I’m envious of those women with a calm center who are fixed on a man in such a real, powerful way.”

The film actually improves on the novel in several ways. By eliminating the book’s sequence in which Emily unsuccessfully tries to live without Jessup (before giving up and marrying him although he doesn’t love her), she retains her strength throughout the film—and is not the least bit pathetic in her devotion. Such a sequence also would have implied that Emily would never be able to go without Jessup to Nairobi. Her excited rap to Jessup about her baboon studies upon her return is handled especially well by Russell. It not only establishes her expertise in a scholarly field in which Jessup, a genius, isn’t expert, and reveals the importance of her work in her life, but also illustrates the difference between a passion [hers] and a mania [his] for scientific discovery. Furthermore, it reaffirms the thrill of exploration to viewers turned off by Jessup’s mad Jekyll-Hyde experiments. Two changes serve to make Jessup a more palatable character. In the book Jessup vomits at the beginning of every experiment, indicating his masochistic, self-destructive nature. We are thankful such scenes were done away with, particularly because Russell is known for gross-out sequences (like having his characters swimming in “filth” in Tommy and Valentino). The most important deletion was the dialogue in which Jessup cruelly confesses to Arthur that he has no love, not even warm feelings, for his children. Onscreen we see Jessup, in the same sequence minus the dialogue, kiss his sleeping kids on their brows. From this tenderness we suspect that he does have subliminal feelings of love toward them—and we get to like him better than he likes himself. That this alienating character who thinks of God, Christ, and crucifixes when he makes love—in Play It Again, Sam (1972) Woody Allen thinks of Willie Mays during lovemaking—is played by the talented, charismatic William Hurt also makes some of his more insensitive actions easier to take. And because it is Hurt in the role, we can feel sympathy for Jessup and also understand why Emily loves him so much.

At times Russell’s symbolism is heavy-handed—for instance, he repeatedly places Jessup in doorways, on the threshold of discovery and displaced in time and space—but surprisingly he keeps things under control. Especially impressive are his realistic apartment and lab sets, with their seedy designs; the successful presentation of highly competitive academic types without making them obnoxious; a fairly tense atmosphere and a particularly spooky scene in which the apeman runs loose in the lab basement; and some lengthy, one-shot scenes that reveal the theatrical background of the performers. What I like best of all are his closeups of Blair Brown when Emily reacts, as if dazed and amazed, to her husband’s strange thought processes.

Two years in production—six months of work for the actors—Altered States is famous in film circles because those involved were under so much stress. Blair Brown told me about filming the climactic scene in the hall:

We didn’t start working in the hallucination suits until the end, which was wise because Ken wouldn’t have had any actors left. It was hard on Dick Smith, who is a genuinely nice man. You’d come in with tears rolling down your cheeks and he’d have to put you back in the suit. It would take three hours for makeup. It was horrible and it went on for weeks and weeks. You couldn’t sit, you couldn’t eat, you couldn’t go to the bathroom. They glued things to our palms and the soles of our feet. And they covered our ears too. I wanted to scream. It’s as if you were in a death trance, or a coma. When we weren’t filming they’d put us on slant boards, at an angle. And people would come by and tell me jokes and their intimate secrets as if I were a priest or mummy. The worst: Ken didn’t like the action, so he put a harness under my suit so he could drag me down the hall. I already had lenses that covered my eyes and someone got the idea to put seed lightbulbs on my eyelids and then cover them with rubber eyes. And they covered my nose all black and gave me a mouthpiece that made it look as if my teeth were gone. I’d get dragged down the hall backward until my head would crash into the wall. We did that all day, every day. One day, Bill had just done the hand slamming bit and his arm was black and blue from the wall. I was brought on as the next course. And I was crawling down the wall with my arms spread, saying, “Aaaghhh.” And Ken was screaming “More despair! More despair!” And my body said, “I’m leaving,” and I fell over and got a big bump on my head. I have pictures from an Altered States party. Everyone is so white and swollen. We should have been put away for several months. Instead we got T-shirts that said “I survived Altered States.”

In the final hall sequence Eddie and then Emily move into a quantum state where there is no matter. It is their great love for each other that saves them from oblivion.

An American Werewolf in London

1981 (U.K.-U.S.) Universal release of a PolyGram picture

Director: John Landis

Producer: George Folsey, Jr.

Executive Producers: Peter Guber and Jon Peters

Screenplay: John Landis

Cinematography: Robert Paynter

Special Effects Makeup: Rick Baker

Original Music: Elmer Bernstein

Editor: Malcolm Campbell

Running Time: 97 minutes

Color

Cast: David Naughton (David Kessler), Jenny Agutter (Alex Price), Griffin Dunne (Jack Goodman), John Woodvine (Doctor Hirsch), Brian Glover (chess player), David Schofield (dart player), Lila Kaye (Gladys, the barmaid), Frank Oz (Mr. Collins), Don McKillop (Inspector Villiers), Paul Kember (Sergeant McManus), Anne-Marie Davies (Nurse Gallagher), Michael Carter (Gerald Bringsley), Landis (car-crash-victim cameo).

Synopsis: American students David Kessler and Jack Goodman are backpacking in Northern England. Seeking refuge from the cold, rain, and darkness, they enter The Slaughtered Lamb, a pub in tiny East Proctor. When Jack becomes too inquisitive about burning candles and a pentagram on the wall, the hostile and secretive dart and chess players force them to leave, despite the barmaid’s concern for their safety.

Although the moon is full, David and Jack wander off the road and get lost in the moors. They hear loud growls. They joke around but are terrified by what lurks in the dark. A huge wolflike beast lunges on Jack and rips him to pieces. It then attacks David. Shots ring out. Before he loses consciousness, David sees a naked stranger lying dead beside him and the armed men from the pub standing above him.

Three weeks later, David awakens in a London hospital. Nurse Alex Price and her supervisor Doctor Hirsch inform him of Jack’s death. Heartbroken, David refutes police inspectors who claim they were attacked by an escaped lunatic. He insists that an animal caused the bites and bruises on his body.

David has terrible nightmares. So when dead Jack, whose blood-drenched face and body are decaying, appears in the hospital room, David assumes he’s just dreaming. Between wisecracks, Jack says they were attacked by a werewolf and that David will become a werewolf when the moon is full. Jack tells David to kill himself before he murders innocent people and they too become miserable, walking corpses. Jack can be freed from his limbo state only when David, the last of a line of werewolves, is dead.

Alex asks David to move in with her. They make love, they fall in love. But Jack, who has further decayed, pays another visit. David worries he is going crazy. That’s also the concern of Hirsch, who thinks David may start to act like a werewolf.

David is alone in Alex’s apartment when the next full moon rises. He undergoes an agonizing metamorphosis and becomes a wolf. That night, a couple on the way to a party, three bums, and a gentleman in an underground station are savagely killed by a wolf. David wakes up naked in the wolf cage at the zoo. He doesn’t remember what happened, but is full of energy. He wants to have sex with Alex but she takes him by cab to see Hirsch. However, when David learns of the deaths, he jumps out. He tries to get arrested. When this proves unsuccessful, he tells Alex that he loves her and runs off, not wanting to put her in danger.

In the back of a porno house in Piccadilly Circus, David meets Jack, whose face has rotted away completely, and the bloody and scarred victims of his murder spree, now of the undead. They insist that David commit suicide.

The full moon rises while David is in the theater. He becomes a werewolf. He kills a patron and an usher, then charges outside into the crowd that has gathered. He bites off an inspector’s head and breaks loose. There is panic. Cars crash and people are killed and injured. The werewolf runs into an alley. Sharpshooters take aim. Alex arrives and runs into their path. She moves toward the wolf, saying she loves David and wants to help. The wolf growls viciously. Rifles are fired. Alex cries as she sees the human David lying dead.

David (second from right) and Jack seek refuge in The Slaughtered Lamb. Only Gladys the barmaid makes the strangers feel welcome.

John Landis wrote the first draft for his strange “pet” project in 1969, before he had turned nineteen and two years before he’d direct and write (and star in) his first picture, the mini-budgeted Schlock (1973), another cult favorite. It took Landis twelve years, half a dozen lapsed options, numerous dialogue (but not plot) rewrites, and three “monster” hits—comedies Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), and The Blues Brothers (1980)—before he had enough muscle to secure $10 million financing for a picture most moneymen believed was too frightening to be a comedy and too funny to be a horror film.

Schlock, which spoofs the silly Joan Crawford missing-link horror film Trog! (1970), was meant to be a comedy. This time Landis took his subject seriously—he made a horror film. His work may contain outrageous humor, but the horror isn’t undermined by the wisecracks exchanged by David Naughton’s David and his pal, Griffin Dunne’s Jack (even after Jack has become a walking corpse); the quirky major and minor characters (several were hired from Rent-a-Punk); the offbeat use of rock music (Bobby Vinton, Sam Cooke, and the Marcels sing their versions of “Blue Moon,” Van Morrison sings “Moondance,” and Creedence Clearwater Revival sings “Bad Moon Rising”); and the consistently weird situations. To the contrary. I think the off-the-wall humor keeps viewers so off-balance that it heightens their nervousness; similarly, it’s the very absurdity of backpackers David and Jack’s plight in the opening sequence—they must enter a pub called The Slaughtered Lamb; the men inside treat them like lepers; they soon find themselves lost in the moors at night while a wild, growling beast circles them—that causes their terror to increase. The jittery pair continues to make wisecracks (Dunne is extremely funny) in an attempt to cover their fear, but for them, as well as the audience, the humor doesn’t dissipate the horror. The high doses of humor are never at the expense of the genre; Landis adheres to horror movie conventions rather than mocking them and, as a result, has made a respectful, traditional—thematically, if not in approach—werewolf movie. So it’s fitting this PolyGram production was released by Universal, the studio that produced the seminal werewolf films Werewolf of London (1935) and the underappreciated horror masterpiece The Wolf Man (1941), in which Lon Chaney, Jr., introduced the “definitive” movie werewolf, Lawrence Talbot.

Alex brings David home to recuperate. They quickly become lovers.

Surely Universal didn’t participate in the project in order to revive its werewolf-film tradition, but to show its gratitude to Landis for making the studio so much money with his past comedies and to compete with Avco-Embassy and Warner, which were busy preparing horror movies with wolf themes. Indeed, for horror movie fans, 1981 became the long-anticipated Year of the Wolf. In addition to Landis’s film, Joe Dante directed Terence H. Winkless and John Sayles’s tongue-in-cheek adaptation of Gary Brandner’s novel The Howling, in which newscaster Dee Wallace happens upon a colony of California werewolves. Also, Michael Wadleigh—who made Woodstock (1970) but not the TV movie The Werewolf of Woodstock (1975)—directed and scripted (with David Eyre) an adaptation of Whitley Streiber’s allegorical Wolfen, in which New York detective Albert Finney hunts a murderous pack of supernatural wolves. Not surprisingly, the three films were often compared to each other, with The Howling (also destined for cult status) matching American Werewolf, my preference, as the favorite among moviegoers and critics. I was struck by this quote from a Village Voice review by Carrie Rickey (a critic I admire): “Unlike The Howling’s insinuation that werewolfery is an expression of sexual liberation or Wolfen’s suggestion that the animal state is superior to human civilization, AW doesn’t deal with the metamorphosis angle at all, which is the heart of the matter. Why do werewolves do what they do? . . . [Landis] assumes good and evil, doesn’t illustrate them.” I don’t agree.

Certainly Landis does rightly touch on—subtly at times, I admit—the sexual aspects of lycanthropy. It’s no coincidence that both Jenny Agutter’s nurse Alex Price and Nurse Gallagher, who admits peeking at David’s genitals, find their patient sexually attractive. Alex, who is confused by her own strong feelings for this stranger she invites into her bedroom, tells him, “I find you very attractive” and, later, “terribly attractive.” Landis might have had David confess women were never much attracted to him in the past, but his point is clear: Once the blood of a wild beast flows in David’s veins, he gives off an irresistible sexual scent. Just as David’s new state “liberates” the sexual feelings of Alex, who has had few past lovers, his own sexual feelings increase considerably. For instance, on the morning after his first night on the prowl as a wolf, during which he murders and half-eats six people, what the newly energized David desires most is a “quickie” with Alex.

When David and Alex do have sex, it is a far cry from the antiseptic lovemaking in the hilarious porno film David and Jack will watch, See You Next Wednesday. It is tender, but it’s also deeply passionate and definitely animalistic—in the shower, Alex (after 1971’s Walkabout, an Agutter role typically required her to be nude in water) licks and kisses away the drops on David’s shoulder; in bed, David moves his tongue down Alex’s body. Throughout the film, Landis draws a strong correlation between one’s hunger for food, one’s sexual appetite, and one’s bloodlust (composed of the hunt, attack and kill, and the devouring of the prey). Landis cleverly includes several scenes in which characters are unable to satisfy their hunger for food; because eating food = sex = bloodlust in this film, there is an increase in our anticipation/anxiety for sexual and violent release. Subconsciously we become nervous as David and Jack are denied food at The Slaughtered Lamb; David refuses to eat hospital food until Alex, using food for seduction, feeds him (even so, because we see David eat only a trifle we don’t sense his nourishment); David’s breakfast is interrupted by Jack’s corpse; Alex and David shop for groceries but we never see them eat what they buy; John Woodvine’s Doctor Hirsch is also denied food at The Slaughtered Lamb; prior to turning into a werewolf, David twice opens the refrigerator but takes nothing out (his hunger for food is replaced by this thirst for, as he recites, “the blood of an Englishman”); a couple is attacked on the way to a dinner party; an underground passenger barely gets a candy into his mouth—he has no time to chew it—before he must run for his life.

Wolfen’s “suggestion that the animal state is superior to human civilization” is neither original nor stimulating, so I don’t think Landis would want to make a horror film with that as its major theme. But he has his human characters share their world with animals—lambs, deer, wolves, lions, dogs, a cat, and gorillas, which are revered by Landis and FX expert Rick Baker (who both played them in past films). And, in this film in which man and beast share one body, Landis twice equates man with beast: David and Jack first appear sitting on a truck amidst lambs, coming across as “human lambs” on their way to The Slaughtered Lamb and then to their own slaughter by a werewolf; in the funniest scene, caged simians watch David, running nude through the zoo, make a “monkey of himself.”

In a scene quite similar to one in 1980’s Altered States, although they were conceived independently, David awakens from his first night as a werewolf and finds himself naked at the zoo. His trip through London back to Alex’s apartment is the picture’s comedic highlight.

Rickey contends that Landis assumes good and evil are at war in his tale but doesn’t bother to draw the battlelines. I think the good-versus-evil confrontation is implicit in traditional werewolf movies, in which the lead character, be he Naughton’s David Kessler or Chaney’s Lawrence Talbot, is a good person who through no fault of his own becomes a werewolf. (The Howling would be traditional if Dee Wallace became a werewolf earlier in the picture.) The battle is for the soul, and because the man himself is never corrupted (he remains pure in heart) he may return to his human form (a state of grace) after being killed while in his werewolf state. Of course, the monstrous appearance the man assumes when the moon is full and his subsequent monstrous acts represent the evil that flows through his bloodstream since being bitten (defiled and cursed) by another werewolf. All horror fans know that the “beast” within this pure man, which emerges when the moon is full, is as much the embodiment of evil as the vampire. Nevertheless, Landis makes it clear to the novice that the werewolf represents evil, even in a religious sense. David and Jack may be Jewish but their first action is fitting for a Christian parable: They are “lambs” foolishly leaving the flock. The last name of Jack, the first werewolf victim, is Goodman as in good man. Equally significant is that when people confront a werewolf, they speak to the heavens: “Mary, Mother of God”; “Good Lord!”; and “Jesus Christ!”—even when undergoing his own metamorphosis from man to wolf, David cries “Jesus Christ!” and “God!” Furthermore, I believe that David, in the tradition of past movie werewolves, can’t bring himself to commit suicide because this act would betray God.

It is not of central importance in traditional—the type I prefer—werewolf movies why werewolves do what they do. Because we fans of the subgenre already know the reason. American Werewolf and its predecessors, all bona-fide tragedies, instead deal with the hopeless, lonely struggle of the good, decent protagonist once he realizes he has become a werewolf, must murder innocent people, and is a threat to the ones he loves. Not only does a battle rage within David between good and evil (the modern age of reason and the dark ages, science/sense and superstition, angels and demons), but also the body itself is in revolt (a man’s worst fear according to the horror director David Cronenberg), growing hair, fangs, and long nails, and twisting, contracting, and elongating until the human form has given way to the form of a large, four-legged wolf. In the amazing, convincing three-minute metamorphosis sequence (as Sam Cooke’s calm “Blue Moon” plays), which helped win Baker the first Oscar ever given in the special effects makeup category, David suffers both tremendous terror and pain as changes take place to his body and face (a wolf snout bursts out of David’s nose and mouth!). It’s different in The Howling, where evil men and women will their own, painless transformations from humans to two-legged wolves. The celebrated transformations in Dante’s picture, orchestrated by Baker-protégé Rob Bottin after Baker left the project to work with Landis (they’d first discussed AW while collaborating on Schlock), are visually stunning. However, they happen so frequently within a brief time span that they slow down the climax and, more annoying, are there mostly for effect on viewers. On the other hand, Baker emphasizes how the transformation affects the character, David. This is the first werewolf movie in which our sympathy for the character increases all the way through the transformation. (Baker told me: “Being a makeup artist is like being a dentist or doctor. The guy in the chair associates you with discomfort. As a rule, I don’t like actors and they don’t like me. But David was the most cooperative actor I ever worked with. For one week, I spent ten hours a day putting on his makeup. He didn’t like the discomfort, but he enjoyed being in the makeup.”*)

In a truly remarkable special effects sequence, David becomes a werewolf before our eyes. Unlike werewolves in past horror movies, such as Lon Chaney, Jr.’s Lawrence Talbot, David takes on the shape and exact appearance of a wolf. Whereas men in past horror films seemed to be in a semi-trance while their face, hands, and feet changed, David’s lengthy transformation process is extremely painful.

Other than meeting Alex, nothing pleasant happens to David Kessler. And we feel extra sympathy for him because he’s played by the instantly likable Naughton, previously Dr. Pepper’s vested pied piper in a series of popular television commercials. David can’t even die the “romantic” death he envisioned, being killed with silver bullets by someone who loves him, which is how Lawrence Talbot dies in House of Frankenstein (1944). He truly fits in with the tragic figures of werewolf-movie lore: Henry Hull in Werewolf of London; Chaney in The Wolf Man, which critics should add to the list of fatalistic noir films of the forties, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), perhaps the best horror-comedy ever made; Michael Landon in the underrated I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957); Oliver Reed in the overrated Curse of the Werewolf (1961); as well as Simone Simon in Val Lewton’s Cat People (1942), a werewolf-theme variation with blatant sexual overtones.

Rick Baker applies grisly makeup to the face of an uncomfortable Griffin Dunne. As the movie progresses and Jack’s walking corpse further decays, the makeup becomes heavier and more gruesome.

Because this picture contains ferocious, bloody violence it has never been compared to the works of Lewton. Yet there is much that reminds me of the forties producer who made an art of “suggestive,” offscreen horror—including the argument that there is as much reason to believe in the supernatural as in Christian teachings or science. The opening sequence certainly has Lewton elements: familiar characters in unfamiliar, hostile surroundings (the Black Mountains in Wales); a setting, East Proctor, that has remained unchanged through the centuries (filming took place in Crickadarn, a Welsh village with six cottages, one farm, and two churches with graveyards); strange, secretive, superstitious characters (played by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s cast for Nicholas Nickleby); a mysterious, forbidding statue (Landis contributed the Angel of Death statue); endangered characters walking at night. The scene on the moors (until we actually see the werewolf attack Jack) and the scene (although brightly lit) in which the commuter is chased through the deserted Tottenham Court Road underground station recall classic sequences in Cat People and The Leopard Man (1943) in which Lewton characters are threatened by wild beasts. They are genuinely terrifying. Oddly, the scene in which the three homeless men are approached by the werewolf would have worked better if it hadn’t been as reserved as Lewton—the scene is too short to not have included either a more suspenseful buildup to the attack, or the attack itself. Landis filmed the men being mauled but later cut the footage, despite preview-audience approval. As he later told Fangoria: “I made a change that, I think, hurt my picture commercially.”

I’d have liked more screen time for Jenny Agutter, a personal favorite, including moments when her character is in danger; I wish more would have come out of Dr. Hirsch’s investigation of the attack on the moors; and I’d have liked David to have looked into the mirror a second time just before his transformation and scared himself and us by really growling this time (he pretended to growl earlier). But other than the attack on the homeless men, the only scenes that don’t work come at the end. I dislike the long scene in the porno theater (although I love the appropriate identity-confusion humor in See You Next Wednesday), in which David is confronted by the skeletal Jack (here Baker created a “puppet” to replace Dunne, who still provided the voice) and his six victims, who urge him to kill himself. It is silly, takes away our feeling that their deaths were tragic (because we see them talking and, in some cases, in good humor), and leads nowhere because David doesn’t even try to commit suicide afterward. It would have worked if Landis included a subsequent scene in which a bystander prevents David from committing suicide and is killed for his trouble when, as they struggle for David’s knife or gun, David turns into a werewolf.

I’m also bothered by the elaborate car-crash sequence in Piccadilly Circus (for the film, Landis also ambitiously and sneakily filmed in Trafalgar Square and Windsor Castle, the Queen’s country residence). Landis’s inspiration was a real-life incident in which a dog ran onto the San Diego Freeway and caused many deaths. However, I don’t think such a scene works during the climax of a monster movie. Perhaps, we could have just heard the crashes and screams while the camera stayed on the werewolf as he headed toward the alley. The ending in the alley is too abbreviated—I’d like to have seen the wolf leap into the air toward Alex—but from a story point it’s satisfying. At the very least, Landis deserves credit for not having the open ending that mars almost every horror film nowadays. It’s somewhat ironic that one of the best horror films of recent years is one of the few that didn’t leave room for a sequel.

*Griffin Dunne was less enthusiastic about the many hours he had to spend in his decaying-cadaver makeup. He told me: “The makeup was incredibly uncomfortable—it was boiling under the makeup, there were clumps on the back of my neck, and I got rashes. It made me depressed. I had nightmares about being dead and watching my own funeral. Once I was made up, no one wanted to look at me. They’d say, ‘Hello, Pizza Face.’ I ate alone.”

Basket Case

1982 Analysis Releasing (Midnight bookings were initially handled by Libra Films)

Director: Frank Henenlotter

Producer: Edgar Ievins

Screenplay: Frank Henenlotter

Cinematography: Bruce Torbet

Special effects: Kevin Haney and John Caglione

Music: Gus Russo

Editor: Frank Henenlotter

Running time: 91 minutes

Color

Cast: Kevin VanHententryck (Duane Bradley), Terri Susan Smith (Sharon), Beverly Bonner (Casey), Lloyd Pace (Dr. Harold Needleman), Diana Browne (Dr. Judith Kutter), Robert Vogel (hotel manager), Bill Freeman (Dr. Julius Lifflander), Joe Clarke (Brian “Mickey” O’Donovan), Dorothy Strongin (Josephine), Ruth Neuman (aunt), Richard Pierce (Mr. Bradley), Kerry Ruff (detective).

Synopsis: It’s night in Glens Falls, New York. Dr. Julius Lifflander knows someone is following him. He runs into his home and tries to call the police. The line is cut. The lights go out. There are strange sounds. He fires his gun at the shadows on his wall. A grotesque hand grabs him. He is ripped apart.

Duane Bradley checks into a fleabag hotel in Manhattan. Brian “Mickey” O’Donovan, drunk as usual, notices that Duane carries a wad of money. Everyone notices he carries a wicker basket. Duane secretly talks to the basket’s occupant. Duane walks up to room number 7, meeting Casey, a prostitute, and Josephine, a wacky storyteller, on the way. He buys fast food and tosses it in the basket. Whatever is in there gobbles it up. It communicates with him telepathically.

Duane and his basket pay a visit to Dr. Needleman. Duane takes off his shirt to reveal an enormous scar that covers his right side. Needleman realizes that he operated on him when he was a teenager. He becomes frightened. Duane is very taken with the nurse Sharon. They make a date for the next day.

Duane falls asleep in a movie. A guy steals his basket and opens it. His face is mangled. That night, Sharon leaves work. Needleman is alone. Duane opens his basket. The door to Needleman’s office is ripped off the hinges. Soon his body is ripped apart. By Belial, a misshapen little semihuman creature with fangs and claws.

Duane has a date with Sharon. They kiss at the Statue of Liberty. Back in the hotel room, Belial knows what’s happening. He’s jealous. He tears apart the room. All the weird people from the hotel investigate. They find nothing. O’Donovan steals Duane’s money and returns to his room. Belial, who can crawl on the outside of the building, rips O’Donovan apart and retrieves the money. Duane returns. He realizes Belial’s jealousy provoked his outburst. He tells Belial not to worry—they’ll always be together.

They were born in Glens Falls. Siamese twins. Belial was attached to Duane’s side. Their father considered Belial a monster because his wife had died giving birth. He hired Needleman and Dr. Judith Kutter to help family doctor Lifflander detach Belial. They tossed Belial in a garbage bag. They thought he was dead, but he survived and grew stronger. He killed the father. An aunt raised Duane and Belial. Belial wanted revenge on the doctors.

There are more incidents in the hotel. Casey screams when she sees Belial in her bed, reaching for her breast. But she is not hurt.

Belial and Duane visit Dr. Kutter. Belial rips her apart. She screams when about ten scalpels wind up in her face.

That night while Duane dreams, Belial rapes the sleeping Sharon. He tries to quiet her when she screams, maybe killing her. The outraged Duane takes him back to the hotel. As the residents look on, Belial grabs Duane’s crotch. Duane screams. They fly out the window. Belial hangs from the hotel sign. He holds Duane, but by the neck. He can’t help but strangle him. They fall to the pavement, both dead.

I know. A lot of you turkeys didn’t expect me to show. I’m not what you call a public kind of guy. But this is different. This is premiere night. This is one of the top 10 movies of the decade. This is sick and grotesque and hilarious. This will totally gross out Cherry Dilday if I can con her into going. We’re talking classic cinema here. We’re talking No. 1 on the Joe Bob Briggs Best of ’82 Drive-In Movie list.

We’re talking Basket Case.

—Joe Bob Briggs
Dallas Times Herald (7/9/82)

Belial peeks out of his mobile home.

In the year of E.T., Joe Bob Briggs, the refreshingly irreverent guru of the drive-in crowd down in Texas, was one of many critics talking up Basket Case, a stunningly creative little horror gem that provided a needed spark to the Midnight Movie scene. Featuring the sensitive psychotic Belial, the most endearing movie “monster” since Mighty Joe Young (1949) when he’s not ripping people apart, this surprisingly smooth mix of terror, strong violence (which, except in one scene, will offend few), and quirky humor (“What’s in the basket—Easter eggs?”) was “the midnight classic of the year!” according to Heavy Metal; “the sleeper of the year!” according to Heretic; “the terror-cult sensation of the year!” according to Fangoria; “a rare picnic for horror fans” according to the San Francisco Chronicle; “the best of the year so far” according to the East Village Eye. It got a particularly glowing review in the Detroit Free Press: “It’s like E.T., as written and directed by a psychopath,” wrote Diane Haithman. “Admittedly, Basket Case is not for everyone—but the fact that one horror film can be so different and so much superior to another [Halloween III] goes to show that even schlock horror fans are looking for more than blood. They need a character they can love—even if he has to be kept locked and chained in a wicker basket.” Even Rex Reed, who along with Joe Bob Briggs “discovered” Basket Case at the Cannes Festival of 1982, was impressed enough to declare it “the sickest movie I’ve ever seen.”

Basket Case was a joint venture by director-writer-editor Frank Henenlotter and producer Edgar Ievins, two Greenwich Village horror movie fanatics who, according to Ievins, simply “wanted to make a movie so we’d get money to make another movie.” Previously Henenlotter had done a few 8mm films for his own pleasure (Son of Psycho, Lurid Women); the closest he’d come to making something commercial was Slash of the Knife, a 16mm short that had the distinction of being considered too offensive to play as a companion piece to John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972). Ievins’s film experience had been limited to experimentation with stop-motion photography (one of Basket Case’s delights) and work on Stalking the Wild Asparagus, a project that was never completed. Together, Henenlotter and Ievins rounded up enough investors to finance a film called Ooze. But when that film was abandoned in the planning stages due to investors’ fears it couldn’t compete with similar Hollywood products, Henenlotter wrote Basket Case, a picture designed specifically for a shoestring budget.

I spoke to Ievins, who didn’t want to reveal exactly how low the budget was until he had sold the film to cable. “I don’t want them to say here’s twenty-five bucks, now you’ve made a profit.” Ievins did admit that filming had to be shut down six times when funds ran out, requiring frantic searches for additional investors. “Sometimes we’d arrive on the set with less than thirty minutes of film in the camera. So we’d do a lot of rehearsing because we couldn’t have retakes. And we had to forget about cover shots.” Of course, they couldn’t pay for studio space, so they went out on location, to Ievins’s friends’ houses in Glens Falls, New York, friends’ lofts in New York City, and a welfare hotel in mid-Manhattan. (The hallway-stairs scenes are particularly fascinating.) “We can’t mention the name of the hotel, because they threatened to sue if we did,” said Ievins. “They were worried about the health board seeing footage.” Henenlotter and Ievins would have liked to use 35mm film, but that was impossible. Ievins said, “We used 16mm strictly because of economic factors. It was cheaper. Our theory was that if the picture was good enough, we’d get money to blow it up to 35mm. Bruce Torbet, our cameraman, did a great job because he lit everything in such a way that it would look correct once blown up to 35mm—which was different than lighting a 16mm film that you don’t expect to blow up. The film is grainy, but I’m happy to say it doesn’t detract. Torbet, who hates horror movies and low-budget films, was our technical director-wonder. He made things work on bubble gum and Scotch tape, about the only resources we had.”

Henenlotter and Ievins were also fortunate to hire Kevin Haney and John Caglione, protégés of Dick Smith, to do the special effects. They are quite remarkable: Even when they look silly or cheap, they have charm. The very lifelike, misshapen Belial was made out of foam and latex. He looks a bit like Dick Smith’s embryo in Altered States (1980). There were two full-bodied models, as well as the teenage Belial, and there were a couple of pairs of his hands. Haney built the cable-operated version of Belial, Caglione the teenage version, and both worked on the stop-motion model. Henenlotter did the stop-motion scenes himself. At no time can you see how Belial is operated (no visible wires, etc.), a fact which pleases the filmmakers considerably.

The picture took six months to shoot. It was sold to Analysis Releasing, which worked out a deal with Libra Films to handle Midnight bookings, a task it had done so well with Eraserhead (1977). But Analysis and Libra made a big mistake. They decided to trim the picture’s violence, causing a furor among horror cultists who were waiting for the director’s version they’d read such fine things about (in publications like Fangoria and The Gore Gazette). “Their decision to cut the film,” reflects Ievins, “was admirable and in a way flattering. They wanted to reach the art house audience first. But whereas Eraserhead is an art film, Basket Case is a monster movie. It should have been geared for the horror-cult audience first. It must prove its worth with its target audience. You must deliver. You can’t have a musical without songs. We needed violence. The thing that worried me was that audiences who saw the edited version were taking it so seriously. The cuts actually made the film more violent. The excessiveness of the violence is what made it cartoonish. People’d scream and then they’d laugh. It was a cathartic experience. It would loosen up the crowd to laugh at our silly jokes. The film we made was punctuated for horror. After the trimming, it was like having jokes without punchlines.” Basket Case limped along in its edited version for several months before the deleted footage was restored in most cities. Almost immediately, attendance zoomed; and soon there were lines down the block (as all top Midnight Movies should have), and some repeat viewers could be seen carrying wicker baskets.

Their lovemaking interrupted, Duane has a hard time keeping Sharon calm once Belial makes his presence known.

I saw the complete Basket Case at a Midnight showing at New York’s Waverly Theater, the original Midnight home for both The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Eraserhead. The capacity audience was very young, less festive than found at Rocky Horror, less apprehensive than found at Eraserhead, but equally curious. There were only a few repeat viewers. Some, including myself, were braced for the gore (after all, the picture is dedicated to Herschell Gordon Lewis), and most, including myself, didn’t expect anything special, despite the rave reviews. In fifteen seconds of screen time—during which time Dr. Julius Lifflander finds himself trapped in his home by an unknown terror—the entire audience is laughing at Lifflander’s situation and at the ridiculousness of his hysterical actions, while feeling some of his fear. A few more seconds pass. Lifflander backs against the wall, doomed. A hideous, deformed hand with clawlike fingers reaches up, grips his head, and pulls it down off the screen; blood shoots everywhere; the head reappears and Lifflander’s face is a deeply gashed, bloody mess; the hand grabs it again. The entire audience cheers. No one was repulsed—and everyone was impressed with the nifty direction. Everyone, including myself, had been won over. And Ievins is correct: There is tremendous gore—what Belial does to Dr. Needleman, Dr. Kutter, and Brian “Mickey” O’Donovan is truly gruesome—but unlike other gore filmmakers (Herschell Lewis in particular), Henenlotter has made the gore effective enough to please “splatter” fans but at the same time made it so excessive that it’s funny. It’s great gore, but it’s also peculiarly amusing. Importantly, it’s not meant to gross viewers out.

Dr. Judith Kutter reacts to Belial’s brutal act of vengeance. This is the pose of all Belial’s victims once his teeth and claws go to work.

What I find most impressive about Basket Case is that it never loses momentum. Scene after scene of this oddball story is interesting, well written for tension and humor, cleverly directed, and well acted. Adding to our enjoyment, Henenlotter has assembled one of the strangest groups of actors/characters to ever grace a horror film. Duane and Belial seem almost normal in a world of mad doctors and lowlifes of the type who occupy the Hotel Broslin (Josephine, O’Donovan, the clerk). The three positive influences on the twins are their kindly aunt (young Belial sits in her lap while she reads out loud), prostitute Casey (played by cult favorite Beverly Bonner), and Sharon—and even they are peculiar. “Terri had a tough assignment playing Sharon,” says Ievins. “In a film filled with bozos, she had to play it so audiences could identify with her. Females like the scene where she accuses Duane of not visiting New York’s tourist sites. In most films, it’s the man putting the woman on the spot.” Sharon’s wig, which the audience I was with was quick to point out, makes her “look like a 1960s All-American girl. Miss Iowa. The typical horror movie victim.”

Kevin VanHententryck does a great job as Duane Bradley, sympathetic hick from upstate New York. I particularly like the scene where, drunk, he tells Casey the story of his youth (she, of course, doesn’t believe his twin is in the wicker basket)—half laughing, half crying. He’s not as funny as Terri Susan Smith or any of the hotel residents, but he makes an appealing lead. Of course, no one can match little Belial. There’ve been a lot of strange hotel/inn/boarding house boarders in horror movie history—Claude Rains in The Invisible Man (1933), Henry Hull in Werewolf of London (1935), Laird Cregar’s Jack the Ripper in The Lodger (1944), and Michael Rennie’s alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) immediately come to mind—but none are as weird as “the very small, very twisted, and very mad tenant” (as the publicity sheets say) in room 7 of the Hotel Broslin. When he paces back and forth plotting his next crime, he reminds me of gangster Edward G. Robinson, cigar in mouth, pacing while plotting his next heist. “Belial has a personality,” writes Diane Haithman. “Besides his annoying tendency to murder, he’s jealous, sulky, possessive, witty—and he even can be grotesquely cute.”

The filmmakers handle Belial quite interestingly. For one thing, as Ievins points out, “We make fun of everyone in the film, including Sharon in the reception room scene, but never do we make fun of our monster—he’s treated more caringly than the humans.” For almost the entire film, we sympathize with Belial because a great wrong was done to him in his youth. We don’t mind his doing away with such despicable characters as Lifflander (almost called Pillsbury), Kutter, and Needleman, or even thief O’Donovan. After all, he has the good taste not to harm Casey, a decent person. Suddenly, in the film’s most controversial scene—to which the audience I was with acted negatively (“How obligatory!”)—he rapes (and possibly kills) Sharon. “This scene was not meant to be enjoyable,” says Ievins. “It’s meant to be disturbing and haunting. We knew that it had elements that would help make the film a success or limit the audience. Because it adds a new twist—the monster has gone too far. Everyone, even Duane, is outraged.” Personally, I hate the eighties trend which had nude women being raped by monsters—Humanoids from the Deep (1980) and Forbidden World (1982) were two offenders—and I think it’s a big mistake to have had Belial rape Sharon. It’s a mean thing to do to a nice character. The filmmakers’ intentions may have been honorable, but there’s no excuse for having a woman raped by a monster on the screen. I’m disturbed by the sight of him perched on her bloody crotch, moving up and down. This is one scene that could have been more subtle, that would have been helped by editing. When he was looking up toward his hotel window, I thought Belial had been contemplating suicide (“He’s too much in control to kill himself,” says Ievins). Better that than what he’s really contemplating. At least, it’s not clear that Sharon is killed: “We deliberately had her continue to breathe throughout,” says Ievins. “We’re guilty of not making her breathing more obvious.”

So when Belial is hanging from the Hotel Broslin sign, both strangling and trying to save Duane (“Hey, are you okay up there?” asks a dimwitted hooker), our feelings toward the monster are ambivalent. The beast hurt the beauty, we rationalize, so he deserves to die. Still, he’s such a pathetic creature. . . . As for the film, despite the rape, it deserves to play on the Midnight circuit for, as Ievins hopes, “ten years.”

The Black Cat

Also known as The House of Doom and The Vanishing Body

1934 Universal

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

Producer: Carl Laemmle, Jr.

Screenplay: Peter Ruric

Screen story: Edgar G. Ulmer and Peter Ruric

Suggested by the story by Edgar Allan Poe

Cinematography: John Mescall

Music: Heinz Roemfield

Editor: Ray Curtis

Running Time: 65 minutes

B&W

Cast: Boris Karloff (Hjalmar Poelzig), Bela Lugosi (Dr. Vitus Werdegast), David Manners (Peter Alison), Jacqueline Wells [later Julie Bishop] (Joan Alison), Lucille Lund (Karen Werdegast Poelzig), Egon Brecher (the majordomo), Harry Cording (Thamal), Anna Duncan (maid), Henry Armetta (sergeant), Albert Conti (lieutenant), John Peter Richmond [later John Carradine], Herman Bing.

Synopsis: American novelist Peter Alison and his wife, Joan, are honeymooning in Hungary, and are on their way to Gömbös. They must share their train compartment with a strange man, Dr. Vitus Werdegast. Once a prominent psychiatrist, Werdegast is coming home after eighteen years—three years at war, and fifteen years in the Kulgaar prison. He believes his wife, Karen, and baby died. Werdegast is going to see his “old friend,” architect Hjalmar Poelzig, who betrayed him and thousands of other Hungarians to the Russians. The Alisons, Werdegast, and Werdegast’s large, mute servant, Thamal, travel by bus through a driving rainstorm. The driver informs them that Poelzig has built a mansion on the site of Fort Marmaros, above a bloody battlefield, “the greatest graveyard in the world.”

The bus crashes and the driver is killed. The four passengers walk through the storm to Poelzig’s modernist mansion. They are greeted by a mute servant and maid. Werdegast tends to Joan’s injured shoulder and gives her a knockout drug. Poelzig is awakened by his young, blonde wife. He comes to see his guests. There is tremendous tension between Poelzig and Werdegast. Werdegast wants to kill his longtime acquaintance. These two men know each other well. Poelzig is not surprised when Werdegast kills his black cat with a knife—he tells the Alisons that Werdegast has “an all-consuming fear of cats.”

Poelzig takes Werdegast down long winding stairs that lead into what was the old fort. Werdegast is horrified to see his dead wife suspended in the air. Poelzig embalmed her after her death, two years after the war. He had married her. He says Werdegast’s daughter died. Werdegast attempts to shoot Poelzig, but he almost collapses when a black cat appears. Later, Werdegast tells Thamal to pretend to be Poelzig’s servant. They must be patient about killing Poelzig because the house is rigged with dynamite.

Poelzig invites Werdegast to a Black Mass he’ll be performing the next night. Werdegast realizes Poelzig plans to sacrifice Joan as part of the ritual. The two men play chess to determine Joan’s fate. Poelzig wins. Joan is locked in her room. Peter is locked in a chamber below. The young blonde woman visits Joan. She says she is Karen, Poelzig’s wife and Werdegast’s daughter. Joan reveals her father is alive! Poelzig overhears the conversation. Soon Joan hears Karen’s screams.

The satanic cult arrives. Poelzig presides. One cultist screams when Poelzig is about to sacrifice Joan. Poelzig is distracted. Werdegast and Thamal sneak Joan downstairs. Meanwhile Peter has escaped. He fights the majordomo but is knocked out. Thamal kills the majordomo, but only after being shot. Joan tells Werdegast his daughter is in the mansion, but Werdegast’s joy is short-lived—he finds her corpse on an operating table. Poelzig suddenly appears. He and Werdegast fight. Thamal helps Werdegast secure Poelzig to the embalming rack. Thamal drops dead.

Poelzig is skinned alive by the delirious Werdegast. Meanwhile Joan and Peter come to. Joan tries to get a key out of Thamal’s fist. Werdegast tries to help. Peter thinks he is harming her, so he shoots him. Werdegast tells the young couple to flee. When they are safely outside, he blows up the mansion.

Released from a Russian prison, Dr. Vitus Werdegast asks newlyweds Peter and Joan if he can share their train compartment.

Early in the picture, Werdegast visits Joan in her room in Poelzig’s bizarre castle. Her door slides open and he enters. About twenty seconds of screen time later, Poelzig enters the same door. Apparently his entrance was filmed later, after everyone forgot about the sliding door . . . because Poelzig pushes the door open. Also there is now what looks to be a light switch next to the door, although there wasn’t one when Werdegast entered. For the rest of the film, this door is next to the switch and must be pushed open. In another film, this might seem like a blatant gaffe, but in The Black Cat it almost seems logical, as if it were all part of a weird vision. After all, director Edgar G. Ulmer, who worked in Germany’s film industry for ten years, admitted his influence was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). If Robert Wiene’s silent classic can be interpreted (incorrectly) as the deranged vision of an insane character, then it can be argued that The Black Cat is the irrational vision of two insane characters, architect Poelzig, who—I’m speaking theoretically—conceived the film’s outlandish set design, and psychiatrist Werdegast, who is responsible for the film’s psychological perversity.

If the story we are watching unfold is indeed meant to be the weird manifestation of the postwar delirium shared by Poelzig and Werdegast, then Ulmer can get away with any inconsistency, any break in continuity. Joan’s door can, logically, slide open one moment yet need to be pushed open the next. (It’s most believable in a house that has a revolving room.) Peter can be wearing a perfectly fine jacket, yet walk through a door (and into another camera setup) and be wearing a jacket with a ripped shoulder. Joan can be wearing a long white gown as she races up the circular steps of the fort, yet when she enters the mansion proper be improperly dressed in a thin white nightgown, which is hiked above her knees, and a black cape. It’s also acceptable that the revolving room in which Peter is imprisoned—it turns until the door space faces a brick wall—actually contains the controls that spin the room . . . therefore it takes him all of ten seconds to escape. Somehow it makes sense that the previously calm Werdegast so overreacts to seeing Poelzig’s first black cat that he automatically throws a knife through it, and that Poelzig has no emotional reaction to either the execution of his pet or his guest’s unruly behavior. And it’s okay that nothing comes of Werdegast’s cat phobia. It even makes sense that Werdegast would threaten to shoot Poelzig—until he falls through a wall upon seeing a second black cat—yet in his next scene order Thamal to put away his knife and be discreet about their plan to kill their host. When Werdegast explains to his servant that they have to be careful because the house is rigged with dynamite, it doesn’t bother us that there’s no way Werdegast knows about the house being rigged with explosives and no reason Poelzig would rig his own house to be blown up in the first place. Likewise it’s acceptable that Poelzig be nonplussed the entire film, yet panic at the conclusion and race alone into the cellar and engage Werdegast in hand-to-throat combat. And we do not lose our “suspension of disbelief” just because Poelzig truthfully tells his young bride that she is “the very core and meaning of my life” and then kills her for no reason soon after. We don’t question his hasty act, even though he might have held off a few minutes and sacrificed her at the Black Mass, rather than Joan. Since this was a low-budget picture, we wouldn’t expect Ulmer and his writer, Peter Ruric, to have included a transition scene that informs us of the practicality of Poelzig murdering Karen—although perhaps this was one of the scenes Universal excised despite Ulmer’s protests. And we wouldn’t expect Ulmer to bring Karloff back to dub one of Poelzig’s offscreen lines when someone else could do it quicker, or to reshoot scenes in which Lugosi, whose English was far from perfect, blew lines: Forgetting the verb, his Werdegast queries Poelzig about his embalmed wife, “Why she, why she like this?”; unable to decide between “flay” and “tear,” his crazed Werdegast tells Poelzig he’s going to “fayr [sic] the skin from your body.”

Everyone in the film but Karloff seems to have pronunciation problems. Other than Budapest and Vienna, no town is pronounced the same way twice. “Marmaros” comes across as “Mamorish,” “Kulgaar” as “Kurogarde.” Until Peter and Joan joke that Poelzig’s name sounds like “Pigslaw,” you might think his name is Persik or Perlzig. It’s hard to figure out the spelling of “Werdegast” from hearing Lugosi say it—and, though it’s spelled Werdegast in the titles, if you look at the studio’s publicity material, you’ll find it spelled Verdegast. In the titles, Lucille Lund’s young bride is Karen; in the film, Werdegast refers to his wife (after whom his daughter was named) as Karin, Lund introduces herself to Joan as Karine (or Kareen), and Joan—Jacqueline Wells certainly has no ear—immediately refers to her as Karen. You know there’s going to be trouble with names in the first scene, when Lugosi introduces himself as Dr. Vitus Werdegast and neither Peter nor Joan even raise their eyebrows. We don’t find out Joan’s name until several scenes later because Peter’s introduction is “I’m Peter Alison and this is my wife.” It reminds me of when that symbol of the original, hapless New York Mets, tight-lipped “Choo Choo” Coleman, who didn’t know the derivation of his own nickname, was asked his wife’s name and responded, “Mrs. Coleman.” (To “What’s she like?” he answered, “She likes me, bub.”)

The Black Cat is only a couple of whiskers away from the movie loony bin, inhabited by those cuckoo films that we admiringly call “the worst films ever made.” If Dwain Esper had directed Peter Ruric’s script and hired the identical crew and cast of nontalents he used in the same year’s Poverty Row atrocity, Maniac, then I’d bet that film would rival Maniac as the worst film of the era (and beyond). After all, they both contain characters who are off their rockers, Edgar Allan Poe elements (in Maniac, one crazed character gouges out and swallows a cat’s eye, another imagines himself the orangutan in Murders in the Rue Morgue), knock-down fights in basements, characters making perverse use of corpses, characters in trances, and outlandish storylines. As it is, even with horror icons Karloff and Lugosi, and a decent supporting cast, and obvious talent behind the camera, The Black Cat could be regarded as a travesty on Maniac’s low level, if it were dissected. But while Maniac has so many obvious moments of awfulness that it is considered entertaining, The Black Cat is so entertaining that everyone overlooks its many awful moments. (Strangely, it isn’t even regarded as campy.) In truth, as William K. Everson points out in his book Classics of the Horror Film (1974), “the weakness of the script, decidedly vague and contradictory actions and motivations, while probably accidental, adds to the perversity of the film.”

Hjalmar Poelzig conducts a Black Mass in his house. Joan is to be sacrificed.

Few films that have taken Poe titles for their own have even remotely followed the plots of their sources, and The Black Cat—like Karloff and Lugosi’s intriguing follow-up, The Raven (1935)—is no exception. Yet it is not alien to Poe. Everson writes: “It is slow and stately, an aura underlined by its deliberate use of classical music in place of original scoring, the macabre story of devil worship imbued with a sense of decay, furthered by some extremely literate . . . dialogue. It may be considered one of the most successful attempts to transfer Poe to the screen, even though it transfers only a mood and not a plot.” Bill Krohn, in an article on Ulmer for Film Comment (August 1983), concurred:

Ulmer was faithful to the letter to Poe, to his symbols, which he manipulates with such sensitivity that Marie Bonaparte’s analysis of [Poe’s] Tales could serve as a commentary of the film as well: Lugosi’s cat phobia, the subterranean crypt, the upright posture of the embalmed woman, even the uncanny whiteness of the castle walls à la Roderick Usher’s painting of a vault the walls of which emit “an inappropriate and ghastly splendor,” and the especially morbid connotations of which are unravelled at the end of Bonaparte’s reading of “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym.”

The Black Cat’s genesis was a screen treatment by Universal writers Stanley Bergerman and Jack Cunningham. Although the studio hadn’t done well with Lugosi’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), Bergerman and Cunningham still believed that Poe could provide good source material as well as attract viewers. So they came up with a story titled “The Brain Never Dies” that combined two Poe tales, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat.” It dealt with two New England recluses, Roderick and Madeline Usher, and their mad physician who plans a series of brain transplants. At the end, the transplants are prevented and the physician’s black cat, whose brain is half human, pushes its master to his death in the collapsing house. This story was junked, but Universal was intrigued by the black cat angle and came up with a second story. In his book The Count: The Life and Films of Bela “Dracula” Lugosi (1974), Arthur Lenning writes:

This time Universal followed Poe’s story more closely and planned to star Boris Karloff as Edgar Doe, a man who, through too much drinking, becomes a sadistic brute who tortures both wife and cat. One night he gouges out the cat’s eyes, strangles the animal, and ultimately picks up another cat. Finally he kills his wife and buries her in a wall. When the police come to investigate, Doe shows off the new wall in the cellar. The cry of a cat is heard, the wall torn down, and the body of the wife discovered with the cat perched on it.

This story was fairly faithful to Poe’s tale, yet when Ulmer wrote his own treatment, he jettisoned everything in it except the title and the presence of two black cats. In fact, he used more elements from the Bergerman-Cunningham story, including the doomed Usher-like recluses, the mad doctor, and the crumbling house. Ulmer named his evil architect Poelzig after Hans Poelzig, the scenic designer on the German horror classic The Golem (1920), the first film on which Ulmer worked (as a silhouette cutter). And he based him on British satanist Aleister Crowley, who would later also serve as Charles Gray’s model in The Devil’s Bride (1968) and, perhaps, Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man (1973). As Lenning writes, Crowley called himself “The Beast of the Apocalypse” and tried to build a reputation as a symbol of evil. In the early twenties, he and his followers established the Abbey of Thelema in a Sicilian farmhouse, and from time to time newspapers carried sensational reports of their devil-worship practices. In 1933, when Ulmer was writing his screen treatment, Crowley made headlines by initiating a suit against artist Nina Hammett, who described his activities in her autobiography. Crowley took the stand during the trial and his shocking testimony caused the press to refer to him as “the wickedest man in the world”—Karloff’s Poelzig would match this description.

What made The Black Cat more significant than most horror films of the era is that it had thematic relevance. Ulmer infused his story with a postwar anguish that was peculiar to Europeans, because they continued to live on soil where their loved ones were buried in mass graves. Poelzig has built his mansion overlooking, as the bus driver boasts, “one of the greatest battlefields of the war—tens of thousands of men died here.” His modernist mansion stands, in fact, directly on top of Fort Marmaros, “the greatest graveyard in the world.” Death presides. In such a morbid setting, neither Poelzig nor Werdegast can forget their common past; for them there is no future, just overdue death. Poelzig is actually touching when he discusses this truth with Werdegast:

You say your soul was killed and that you have been dead all these years. And what of me? Did we not both die here in Marmaros fifteen years ago? Are we any less victims of war than those whose bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both the living dead?

In a 1970 interview printed in Film Culture and reprinted in the book Kings of the B’s (1975), Ulmer spoke of this theme. When Peter Bogdanovich asked him where he got the idea of a castle being built on a graveyard, Ulmer responded:

“That came out many years before. I met at that time Gustav Meyrinck, the man who wrote Golem as a novel. Meyrinck was one of these strange Prague Jews, like Kafka, who was very much tied up in the mystic Talmudic background. We had a lot of discussions, and Meyrinck at that time was contemplating a play based upon Doumont, which was a French fortress the Germans shelled to pieces during the First World War. There were some survivors who didn’t come out for years. And the commander was a strange Euripides figure who went crazy three years later when he was brought back to Paris, because he had walked on that mountain of bodies. And I thought it was a subject that was quite important. And that feeling was in the air in the twenties. . . . I wanted to write a novel really, because I did not believe the literature after the war and during the war, on both sides. In Germany and in England, [war] was very much the heroic thing. . . . I couldn’t believe that. Therefore I took two men who knew each other and who fought their private war during the time that capitalism flourished. I thought it was quite a story stylistically. I had a wonderful cameraman [John Mescall], and [producer Carl Laemmle] Junior let me do the sets and everything at the same time. . . . It was very much out of my Bauhaus period.”

In Germany, Ulmer had designed and helped build mammoth expressionistic sets for theater director Max Reinhardt, and had worked at UFA as production designer (“which meant the designing of every angle [because] our sets were built in perspective with rising and sloping floors”) for such camera-conscious film directors as Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. He came to the United States in the mid-twenties and was employed as art designer and set and model builder for Carl Laemmle, Sr., at Universal. Ulmer again worked with Murnau, when Murnau came to America, and William Wyler, Erich von Stroheim, and Cecil B. De Mille, among others. He was also given a chance to direct, beginning with silent Westerns and graduating to sound features, Mr. Broadway (1933), starring Ed Sullivan, and an anti-syphilis film, Damaged Lives (1933).

His next film, The Black Cat, was the first of his works as director that allowed him to make proper use of his set design experience. He collaborated with Universal’s resident art director, Charles D. Hall, and came up with Poelzig’s Bauhaus mansion, with shining white floors, walls, and ceilings, white furniture and curtains—a far cry from Hall’s gloomy, Gothic interiors in Universal’s other horror films like Frankenstein (1931) and The Old Dark House (1932). One could imagine Astaire and Rogers dancing through Poelzig’s Art Deco living room area and up those fancy stairs. It’s a house that is out of tune with the dark fort below and the figure of evil who resides in it, who wears black robes, black pajamas (he dresses as rarely as Hugh Hefner), black slippers, and black lipstick—Poelzig has black cats, performs a Black Mass, for which he provides his guests with black robes, reads a book with a black cover; and when he goes out on his balcony, the trees and sky are nightmarishly black. (We know what his favorite color is.) I like Ulmer and Hall’s long, winding staircase that leads to the fort area—although I’m sure actors hated doing more than one take of climbing scenes—and the revolving room concept. But the fort area doesn’t compare to the modernistic house. It’s quite bare. Poelzig explains to Werdegast that the guns are gone, but military charts still hang on the wall. Wouldn’t it have been more interesting if the charts were gone (how useless they are) and the guns remained?

The Black Cat is one of the most visually interesting horror films of the period. Credit goes both to Ulmer, who used tricks from his silent days, and to John Mescall, who would do the exceptional cinematography for The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). There are some eerie close-ups of Karloff (what a hairstyle!) and Lugosi, alone and together; and erotic close-ups of misty-eyed Poelzig as he lies over the entranced Karen and looks down into her face, and of Peter lying on top of Joan, kissing her injured shoulder. There is an effective use of shadows—the flaying is conveyed by shadows on the wall. And there are three extremely haunting silent passages: Poelzig’s rising in his veiled bed, as if he were a vampire sitting up in his coffin, upon the arrival of the guests; the satanists’ arrival, the Poelzig-led procession, and their donning of robes (an image that recalls German horror classics); Ulmer and Mescall use a subjective camera and dissolves to convey Poelzig and Werdegast’s “deathwalk” through the fort.

The subjective camera scene is the most artistic moment in the film, the specific moment that reveals how vast is the talent (director, cameraman, set designer) behind the camera, the moment that injects class into the preposterous proceedings. Other scenes specifically designed to give the film class are truly silly: Poelzig playing classical music on the organ, Poelzig and Werdegast engaging in the most famous cinema chess game prior to The Seventh Seal (1957)—more interesting is how Poelzig (is Karloff improvising?) twice cuts off Peter’s protests by insisting the game must continue—Poelzig delivering his Black Mass in Latin. But such scenes don’t detract from the film—they contribute to the charm. They also greatly enhance the intended overly dramatic nature of the film. Remember this is a film where the pretty heroine screams and faints, and faints and screams, and the bland hero (Manners is well cast) spends most of his time knocked unconscious and manages only one aggressive act—he fatally shoots Werdegast, the one person trying to help (no wonder Werdegast calls him “fool”). It’s a film with two mute servants. And it’s a film where a man marries, murders, and embalms his friend’s wife, then marries his stepdaughter and kills her, too, and then is skinned alive by his father-in-law.

The escalating battle between Werdegast and Poelzig, played by the horror cinema’s two greatest stars, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. In the most famous cinema chess game prior to The Seventh Seal, they play for Joan’s life.

Of course, the greatest delight for viewers is watching Karloff (Boris is not used in the titles) and Lugosi in their first film together. It was Ulmer’s idea to bring the stars of Frankenstein and Dracula (1931) together; the presence of Lugosi caused him to pad the Werdegast role and to switch the locale from Italy to Hungary. Ulmer told Bogdanovich:

“[Karloff] was very charming . . . my biggest job was to keep him in the part, because he laughed at himself. Not the Hungarian, of course. You had to cut away from Lugosi continuously, to cut him down. . . . One of the nicest scenes, I had with [Karloff], he lies in bed next to the daughter of Lugosi, and the young couple rings down at the door, and he gets up and you see him the first time in costume, in that modernistic set. I explained the scene to him and he said, ‘Aren’t you ashamed to do a thing like that—that has nothing to do with acting?’ So I told him to be nice and do it, and he never took himself seriously—he got into bed, we got ready to shoot, and he got up, he turned to the camera, after he put his shoes on, and said ‘Boo!’ Every time I had him come in by a door, he would open the door and say, ‘Here comes the heavy . . . ’ He was a very, very lovely man.”

They fight next to the body of Karen, whom Poelzig has murdered.

Karloff’s deadpan, tongue-in-cheek performance is perfectly balanced by Lugosi, whose early dignified manner soon gives way to his singular brand of histrionics. It’s a joy listening to conversations between two actors with such different accents and speech patterns. As Everson writes: “Dialogue in the film is relatively sparse, but the lines conceived for Karloff and Lugosi, quite apart from theatrical bravura, seem almost to have been story-boarded to take advantage of their accents, and to extract the maximum from those lines via skillful cutting.” Karloff is the superior actor and he mesmerizes us with his stare and his philosophical discourse. But here, as in The Raven, when he assumes the villain role, Lugosi holds his own. For who but Lugosi could get away with “It’s after all better to be frightened than to be crushed” or the picture’s most famous line, “Superstitious, perhaps—baloney, perhaps not!”

Werdegast informs the skinny Poelzig that he is about to be skinned alive.

Black Sunday

Also known as The Hour When Dracula Comes, House of Fright, and The Mask of the Demon

1960 (Italy) A Galatea-S.P.A. production released in the U.S. in 1961 by American International Pictures

Director: Mario Bava

Producer: Massimo de Rita

Screenplay: Ennio De Concini and Mario Bava

From the story “The Vij” by Nikolai Gogol

Cinematography: Ubaldo Terzano

Music: Roberto Nicolosi (Italian version); Les Baxter (English version)

Editor: Mario Serandrei

Running Time: 87 minutes

B&W

Cast: Barbara Steele (Asa and Katia), John Richardson (Dr. Andre Gorobec), Ivo Garrani (Prince Vaida), Andrea Checchi (Dr. Choma), Arturo Dominici (Javuto*), Enrico Olivieri (Constantin), Antonio Pierfederici (the Pope), Clara Bindi (the innkeeper).

Synopsis: In Moldavia in 1630, the beautiful witch princess Asa and her lover Javuto are put to death by Asa’s brother. Asa, who is a vampire, puts a curse on her brother’s descendants and vows to get her revenge. A spiked demon’s mask is hammered into her face.

In 1830, Dr. Choma and his young assistant, Dr. Andre Gorobec, travel through Moldavia. As they are traveling by coach through the frightful woods, a coach wheel breaks. The two doctors continue on foot in the direction of a howling noise. They enter a crypt on the Vaida estate and discover the tomb of Asa. Her mask breaks and a decomposed head can be seen. When a bat attacks Choma, he cuts his hand. His blood drips onto Asa’s face.

Leaving the crypt, the doctors meet Katia, who looks exactly like Asa. She tells them that she, her father (Prince Vaida), and her brother (Constantin) live a sad life on land the people of Moldavia think is haunted. The two men travel on to an inn.

Asa is revived by Choma’s blood. She calls for Javuto to rise from his grave, and he does so by turning his grave site upside down. He goes to the castle and enters the Prince’s room. The Prince drives him away by holding up his crucifix but is so terrified by the ordeal that he becomes deathly ill. Katia and Constantin send their servant Boris to bring back the doctors. But Boris doesn’t arrive at the inn. It is Javuto who brings Choma to the castle. He takes Choma through a secret passage in the fireplace to the crypt. Asa sucks blood from his neck. Choma goes to the Prince and kills him. Asa tells Javuto that she wants the blood of Katia—only that can make her immortal.

Andre arrives at the castle. He is suspicious of Choma, who acts very mysteriously. He comforts Katia. They fall in love.

Boris is discovered along the road, drained of his blood. A little girl tells Andre that she saw a man with a mustache pick up Choma at the inn. She points to a picture on the castle wall. A priest recognizes Javuto’s painting. He and Andre go to Javuto’s grave. They find Choma inside. Realizing Choma is a vampire, the priest drives a stake through his eye.

Katia searches the castle for Andre and Constantin. She sits by her father’s body. Her father sits up and tells her he is a vampire and wants to drink her blood. Javuto intervenes and destroys the Prince by throwing him into the fireplace. He takes Katia to Asa. Just as he is about to bite into Katia’s neck, he hears Andre in the castle. He goes to fight him. Asa grabs Katia, but when she goes to drink the blood from Katia’s neck, she finds a crucifix there.

After a brutal fight, Andre tosses Javuto down into a pit where Constantin is. Constantin crawls out. Before he dies, he urges Andre to save Katia.

Andre enters the crypt. Asa pretends to be Katia and tells him to drive a stake through the real Katia who is lying on a rock slab unconscious. He is about to do so when he notices that Katia is wearing a crucifix. He opens the robe that Asa wears and sees only bones. The priest arrives with the townspeople. They burn the screaming Asa at the stake. Andre and the priest pray for Katia to return to life. Their prayers are answered.

In 1630, witch Asa is about to be executed; already her lover Javuto (on the other stake) has been killed by a spike-studded mask that was driven into his face.

The prints I have seen of Mario Bava’s Italian horror classic begin with a producer’s warning that “the picture will shock you like no picture ever has,” that it may be “harmful to the young and impressionable,” and that it shouldn’t be viewed by anyone younger than fourteen. Years after its release, Black Sunday is far more interesting for its stunning evocation of a malefic environment than for its shock content—scores of excessively violent horror films, some even directed by Bava, have understandably lessened its impact. Yet I recall seeing it as late as 1969 and finding the imagery so strong that I could see why England would ban it for eight years. The spiked demon’s mask being driven into Asa’s face, the maggots crawling around the eye sockets of Asa’s skeleton, the older doctor being drawn toward the reborn Asa’s face, which is covered by holes from the spikes, Andre pulling back Asa’s robe and discovering her body is all bones—if there were even more gruesome images like these, then perhaps it would still be banned in England. (But other than these shocks, there is little in Black Sunday that couldn’t be found in Universal horror movies of the thirties.)

Black Sunday was the first film directed by Bava, considered before his death Italy’s greatest fantasy filmmaker. Previously he had been cameraman on Ricardo Freda’s I Vampiri (1956), the first picture of Italy’s vampire cycle, and Freda’s Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959), one of my favorite schlock horror films. Black Sunday is as impressive as it is because it reveals Bava’s background—almost everything is conveyed visually. Bava’s world consists of dark mountains set against a gray sky; mist-shrouded forests where limbs from trees seem to reach out to grab those who dare pass through; 200-year-old graveyards where the soil is too cursed for anything to grow; ancient crypts where bats fly about in the darkness, spiders spin their webs, and decaying walls crumble; and shadowy, ice-cold castles full of secret passageways and enormous hidden chambers. It is a world where light (i.e., the fires used to burn witches) fights a losing battle against oppressive darkness, and even the pure (priests, virgins) wear black. It is with his camera that Bava, working closely with his gifted art director Giorgio Giovannini, creates an atmosphere where the living and dead coexist (but not harmoniously). In The Vampire Film (Barnes, 1975), Alain Silver and James Ursini write:

The world which Bava conveys . . . is a mutable one, composed of shifting contrasts and colors, of complements and atonalities, a world which moves like Spenser’s “ever-whirling wheel” from real to unreal and back again, from life to death and death to life in an unstable landscape of phantasmagorical sights and sounds.

Bava’s characters are often thrust into the mutable middle ground between these two existential extremities, where figures glide through misty, opulently decorated yet insubstantial and illusionary settings, a universe of semidarkness where shadows and hallucinations are as graphically actualized as the personages, a special passageway linking the natural and supernatural.

In 1830, Andre and Dr. Choma stand near Asa’s crypt. This is one of several glorious sets in Bava’s film that represents a decaying universe.

Black Sunday was shot in black and white, and this helps considerably in establishing the haunting mood of the film, as well as working allegorically in a tale about good versus evil. Probably even more effective is Bava’s use of a mobile camera to explore his nightmarish world. The film’s most interesting moments all contain camera movement. The two doctors enter Asa’s crypt, and the camera turns 360 degrees around the spooky, crumbling, cobweb-covered chamber. The doctors ride off in their coach, but the camera returns to the crypt, where after a long tracking shot it settles on Asa’s face. Maggots crawl in her eye sockets; her mouth is slightly open and she calls to Javuto to rise—lightning flashes outside, a tomb breaks open, dust flies, and rocks crumble as Javuto returns from his grave. Soon the mobile camera follows the path taken by the now invisible Javuto through the castle toward the Prince’s chamber; as it moves along we see things topple over as if a gust of wind was blowing through the castle. Dr. Choma rides in the carriage driven by Javuto. The journey is in slow motion, but paradoxically the coach looks as if it was going as fast as the wind, as the foreground and background seem to whiz by the panning camera. (Where other horror scenes are accompanied by sounds—suspenseful music, bells, wind howling through a broken organ’s pipes—this carriage ride takes place in absolute silence and captures the exactness of a nightmare like no other sequence in the picture.) Once in the castle, the doctor follows Javuto, and Bava’s camera follows the doctor. Doors automatically close. It is dark. Javuto disappears, but his lantern hangs by itself in the air. A door creaks open, then slams shut. From out of the dark passageway, Choma has entered the crypt. The top of Asa’s tomb quivers and bursts off, revealing Asa on her back, panting. It’s a great sequence, and, like the other fine moments in the film, it has no dialogue. (In a dubbed film, which Black Sunday is, moments without dialogue can be appreciated.)

Javuto emerges from his grave.

Black Sunday convinced many of us that Mario Bava would be a force to be reckoned with in the horror field for many years to come. Unfortunately, he never made another picture half as good. Planet of the Vampires (1965), though silly, and Blood and Black Lace (1964), though replete with gratuitous violence, can be recommended with some hesitation, but most of his films, like the terrible Baron Blood (1972), make me wonder if there were really two Mario Bavas. It may be, as some critics contend, that Bava’s mistake was to switch from black and white to color; after Black Sunday he preferred showing blood (in bright red) to creating an atmosphere for terror—his forte.

Black Sunday is blessed with the presence of Barbara Steele, the most fascinating actress ever to appear in horror films with regularity. This was the English actress’s first starring role—she was under contract to AIP in America but was loaned to Bava—and she proved to be the ideal choice to play the dual role of Asa and Katia. Her beauty is mysterious and unique: her large eyes, high cheekbones, jet-black hair, thick bottom lip, and somewhat knobby chin don’t seem synchronized, and as a result her face can be looked on as being either evil (Asa) or sweet (Katia), depending on the beholder. Steele played heroines and villainesses with equal believability in numerous horror films after Black Sunday all over Europe, and earned the distinction of being the unofficial queen of the genre. One critic called her “the only girl in films whose eyebrows can snarl”; Variety said that she resembled Jackie Kennedy; Eugene Archer of the New York Times described her as “a blank-eyed manikin with an earthbound figure, and a voice from outer space.” Critics weren’t the only ones to take note. Fellini used her in 8½ (1963); her one-time husband, screenwriter James Poe, wrote a part for her in his script of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) which went to Susannah York once the property was taken out of Poe’s hands; Jonathan Demme wrote a part for her which she did play in Caged Heat (1974). Like a few other actresses of the time who weren’t box office sensations—Caroline Munro, Linda Hayden, Beverly Garland, Jenny Agutter, Erica Gavin, Stella Stevens, Angie Dickinson, Glynnis O’Conner, Tuesday Weld, Blythe Danner, Diana Rigg, Barbara Hershey—Steele has a strong cult following: Her fans revere her for her talent, her wit, her emotional range, her intelligence, and her mysterious quality as much as for her beauty, and wished she wouldn’t keep accepting minor roles in minor films when she should be doing significant work. After fifty years, her star has not faded, and it is because of Steele, probably even more than Bava, that Black Sunday, in which her screen persona was established, remains a cult favorite.

Javuto tries to strangle Andre. Is it Asa or Katia who lies by them?

*Listed in some sources as Javutich.

Blood Feast

Also known as Egyptian Blood Feast and Feast of Flesh

1963 Box Office Spectaculars

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Producer: David Friedman

Screenplay: A. Louise Downe

Cinematography: Herschell G. Lewis

Music: Herschell G. Lewis

Editors: Robert Sinise and Frank Romolo

Running time: 67 minutes

Color

Cast: Thomas Wood (Pete), Mal Arnold (Fuad Ramses), Connie Mason (Suzette), Lyn Boulton, Scott H. Hall, Toni Calvert, Astrid Olsen.

Synopsis: A homicidal maniac has done away with several young women in brutal fashion. He has always taken away parts of their bodies. Homicide detective Pete Thornton has no clues.

Dorothy Freemont arranges for Fuad Ramses to cater a party for her daughter Suzette. Since Suzette is studying Egyptology, she is happy Fuad will prepare an Egyptian feast that hasn’t been done for five thousand years. It will be in two weeks, which will give Fuad time enough to get the last of his ingredients. In his back room, Fuad has a statue of the “mother of veiled darkness,” the goddess Ishtar. He is preparing the ancient blood rite for her. He mixes the solution in a huge vat, which contains the parts of the dead women. Fuad is the murderer!

Tony and Marcy make love on a beach. Fuad attacks them. He slices off the top of Marcy’s head and takes her brain for his solution. The only thing her parents can tell Pete about their daughter is that she belonged to a book club. This makes Pete stop and think. Some of the other victims belonged to a book club. Including the one whose tongue Fuad rips out that night.

Pete attends his weekly Egyptian studies lecture with his girlfriend Suzette. The lecturer tells them about the cult for Ishtar, and how virgins were sacrificed on an altar.

Pete rushes to the hospital. The maniac has struck again, hacking away most of the skin on Janet Blake’s face. She is dying, but manages to tell Pete the killer was old and had wild eyes. She also says he said something that sounded like “Etar.” Pete can’t understand why that sounds familiar.

Suzette’s best friend Trudy also belongs to the book club. She orders the book Ancient Weird Religious Rites by Fuad Ramses. Fuad kidnaps Trudy and brings her to his store. He whips her and collects her blood, the last ingredient in his solution for his goddess.

Despite the kidnapping, the party is still on. Pete calls Suzette to tell her he’ll be late. Meanwhile Fuad arrives with his food. Before he will serve the feast to the guests, he insists Suzette come into the kitchen with him. He has her lie on a counter, his altar, and say a prayer to Ishtar. He is ready to stab her with his knife. She is to be sacrificed. This takes forever because she can’t take him seriously.

Pete calls up the lecturer and gets information about the cult of Ishtar. He figures out Fuad is the murderer. He discovers Trudy’s chopped-up body at the catering store. He rushes to Suzette’s party. Dorothy Freemont interrupts Fuad just as he’s about to stab her daughter. Fuad escapes just as the police arrive. Pete chases him. Fuad climbs into the back of a garbage truck. He is crushed, just like the garbage he was.

This weather-beaten, grisly poster inspired one amateur songsmith to invent a theme jingle (with music from “Camptown Races”) for Blood Feast: “Writhing victims of a madman’s lust, doo da, doo da . . .”

A maniac has viciously murdered ten young women in two weeks’ time. He has invariably carried off parts of their bodies. The last three victims have had a leg hacked off, brain removed, and tongue yanked out (the cause of death), respectively. Pete, the officer in charge of the homicide investigation, offers to drive pretty Suzette Freemont (some name!) home one night so she won’t risk danger. Along the way, he pulls his convertible into a secluded area for some nookie-nookie. When Suzette gets the shivers, Pete assures her that the murderer isn’t lurking about, that she’s safe with him. Then he jokes: “On second thought, you may be safer with the killer than you are with me!” Talk about tasteless . . .

When you talk about tasteless cinema you must begin with the self-professed “Wizard of Gore,” Herschell Gordon Lewis. This notorious exploitation filmmaker from Chicago was the perpetrator of a whole slew of money-making grotesqueries, most of them made prior to Night of the Living Dead (1968), the picture generally and mistakenly regarded as the first horror film with gore. Lewis’s pictures, which cost around $30,000, made use of buckets of his patented blood solution (made up in a cosmetics laboratory) and featured uncommonly repulsive violence: slashings, stabbings, whippings, impalings, eye gougings, dismemberments, and scalpings ad nauseam. Characters died with their eyes open; blood gushed. If you detest horror films that show how many shocking ways a creative sadist can do away with young women, then Lewis is the man to blame. His women are dunked head first into boiling oil, have boulders dropped on them, their eyes pulled out and squashed, their nipples sliced off (with milk shooting out—chocolate milk to show it’s all done in fun, ha ha). He’s paved the ugly way with such “gore” classics as Blood Feast; his best film, Two Thousand Maniacs (1964)—an obvious influence on Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974); Color Me Blood Red (1965)—last of his “blood” trilogy; The Gruesome Twosome (1967); A Taste of Blood (1967); The Wizard of Gore (1970); and The Gore Gore Girls (1972), with Henny Youngman. “His films are impossible to defend; thus he automatically becomes one of the great directors in film history,” writes John Waters in Shock Value (Delta, 1981). Waters, who titled his Multiple Maniacs (1970) as a tribute to Two Thousand Maniacs, willingly takes position number two (naturally) behind his idol on the Tasteless Filmmaker chart. The equally generous Lewis, whom Waters interviewed in his book, maintains that they should be rated even: “The difference is simply that in your films, people eat defecation [Pink Flamingos (1972)]; in mine the audience is simply exposed to it.”

Lewis’s career began with commercials and business films. From there he graduated to softcore “nudies,” which he filmed in Chicago (he made the first Chicago films in forty years) or down at the local nudist camp. This man, who had an M.A. in journalism and a Ph.D. in psychology, and who had taught on the university level, churned out such films as Living Venus (1961), Nature’s Playmates (1962), Daughters of the Sun (1962), B-O-I-N-N-N-G! (1962), Goldilocks and the Three Bares (1963), and Bell, Bare, and Beautiful (1963). All done in 35mm, they were stiff competition for Russ Meyer’s 16mm “nudies” output. One, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961), which Lewis claimed has “the seven ugliest girls that ever appeared,” is considered a pioneer film of the foolish genre. All were profitable and were booked for several years.

When Lewis figured the “nudies” were on their way out and more graphic sex films were on the horizon, he looked for another type of film that wasn’t being made in Hollywood. He settled on pictures that contained ultraviolence. Producer and partner David Friedman, inspired by a performance of the Grand Guignol in Paris, went along with the decision. Their first film was Blood Feast, made in Miami in four, six, or nine days (Lewis gives a different number each interview). Containing some of the most violent images in screen history, it somehow slipped by the censors. It opened in Peoria, and by the second day there were overflowing crowds despite a torrential downpour. It then went on to do astronomical business in drive-ins and grindhouses throughout the country, with business particularly strong in the South: this set the trend for future Lewis films. In an interview with Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn for Kings of the Bs (Dutton, 1975), Lewis said: “Everyone was surprised at the business this picture did, including myself. There were many people who wouldn’t see it. There were a great many who wanted their money back. There were others who saw it five or six times, which also bewilders me, because I’d never call Blood Feast a good production.”

In The Golden Turkey Awards (Perigee, 1980), Harry and Michael Medved nominate Lewis as candidate for “Worst Director of All Time.” From their description of his work, I’d deduce that the Medveds bluffed having seen any of his films (e.g., they call the elderly maniac in Blood Feast “youthful”). But if you would want to make a case that Lewis is among the worst directors in history, go no further than Blood Feast. This is certainly one of the most inept pictures of all time. The acting is ghastly, casting abominable, scoring (by Lewis) miserable, camerawork clumsy. Even Playboy playmate Connie Mason wears too much clothing, but for a needless insert where Suzette lounges by the pool in a bikini. “She never knew a line,” Lewis told Waters. “Not ever. Nor could she ever be on the set on time. . . . I’ve often felt if one took the key out of Connie’s back, she’d simply stand in place. Acting was simply not one of her talents.” I particularly like the way she holds her arms while in front of the camera, as if she were freezing.

I stop laughing at Blood Feast’s badness about ten minutes into the film, around the time I start to get a migraine from the characters’ infernal voices (Fuad, Dorothy Freemont, and Dr. Flanders are the worst culprits) and the irritating score, which utilizes a booming timpani and “soap opera” organ. But Blood Feast could be a delight for camp enthusiasts. Because the film was done tongue in cheek, it’s hard to say how much of the humor was intentional. But it’s safe to conclude that with this bunch of actors and technicians at work, there was no way a good film could result. It’s just remarkable how awful every scene is. (This observation comes from someone who admits that Two Thousand Maniacs, despite its offensive aspects, has some style and is genuinely nerve-wracking.) Particularly memorable: the way Lewis’s camera lingers on a Zenith radio in the opening sequence; the wacky, horribly acted scene in which Dorothy makes catering arrangements with Fuad, who besides talking like a cross between Bela Lugosi and a chorine in a Gold Diggers movie, is obviously reading from cue cards; the way Tony tells the ill-fated Marcy “PROVE that you love me!”; the scene where an hysterical Tony, distressed over Marcy’s death, shouts out indecipherable inanities, while Pete stands inches away calmly taking notes with his pencil and pad; the way Marcy’s mother Molly cries loudly at the police station, but mysteriously interrupts her weeping each time another character must talk into the microphone; the living room conversation between Suzette and Dorothy, in which Mason can be seen reading her awful dialogue; the scene where a hospital doctor looks at a patient who has had “half her face hacked away clear to the bone” and admits “it’s one of the most brutal cases I’ve ever seen”—I wonder what his most most brutal case was; the scene after Fuad is dead, when Pete tells the whole story to his partner—as if viewers couldn’t understand how he was able to solve such a mystery. A word on Mal Arnold. Blah! Mal Arnold, a Miami actor, in Blood Feast gives the worst acting performance in a horror film since the old man (Felix Lucher) in Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958). Lewis didn’t know what happened to him after making this film. Could they have forgotten he was in the back of that garbage truck? (I could have sworn that the print of Blood Feast I saw years ago ended with a dedication to the Miami garbage department—but the print I saw of late has no such acknowledgment. Was I mistaken?)

Fuad mutilates Marcy on the beach. Questioned by police, Marcy’s parents will recall what they consider to have been her most interesting characteristic: She belonged to a book club.

I can understand those people who enjoy Blood Feast for its camp value. I only question those who thrill to the no-holds-barred violence; laugh and cheer while Lewis lovingly pans up and down hacked-up, bloody bodies—just as John Waters lingers on fire in Pink Flamingos; smile during Fuad’s protracted whipping of Trudy’s bare back and when he collects her dripping blood in an urn; and applaud shots of a face with a gouged-out eye, and a head with its top lopped off. These are the people who wrote letters to Lewis, wanting to know how he did his special “splatter” effects. They care most about the film’s “highlight”: when Fuad pulls the tongue out of the woman’s mouth. (He hired a woman named Astrid Olsen, who worked at Miami’s Playboy Club. One reason he picked her was because she had a mouth big enough to hold a sheep’s tongue—purchased in Tampa, and so spoiled on shooting day that Pine-Sol was doused on it—cranberries, gelatin, and Lewis’s blood solution.) It is very convincingly done, which is why it’s so popular. For me it’s easier to take than the frighteningly realistic thumb amputation in Two Thousand Maniacs. There is a cult for “gore” films and Lewis is its god. When it comes to adoration of Lewis, I can only think of Suzette’s remark regarding Ishtar’s death cult: “How could . . . people follow such a vile cult?”

The Egyptian head on the wall seems to be taking part in this jolly conversation between Pete and Suzette—or laughing at the horrendous emoting of Thomas Wood and ex-Playboy playmate Connie Mason. Throughout the film Mason holds herself as if she were freezing.

The Bride of Frankenstein

1935 Universal

Director: James Whale

Producer: Carl Laemmle, Jr.

Screenplay: William Hurlbutt and John L. Balderston

From the novel by Mary W. Shelley

Cinematography: John D. Mescall

Music: Franz Waxman

Editor: Ted Kent

Running time: 75 minutes

B&W

Cast: Boris Karloff (The Monster), Colin Clive (Baron Henry Frankenstein), Valerie Hobson (Elizabeth Frankenstein), Ernest Thesiger (Dr. Septimus Pretorious), Una O’Connor (Minnie), E. E. Clive (the burgomeister), Elsa Lanchester (The Monster’s Bride/Mary Shelley), Douglas Watson (Percy Bysshe Shelley), Gavin Gordon (Lord Byron), Dwight Frye (Karl), O.P. Heggie (blind hermit), John Carradine (hunter), Walter Brennan (neighbor), Joan Woodbury (little queen).

Synopsis: Mary Shelley tells her husband, Percy, and friend Lord Byron, that she has only told part of her story about scientist Henry Frankenstein and the Monster he created. The Monster had become a murderer because of the criminal brain Frankenstein had accidentally given him.

The peasants think the Monster lies dead in the blazing windmill, following his confrontation with Frankenstein. But he fell through the floor and landed safely in water below. Hans, the father of a little girl the Monster accidentally drowned, searches for the Monster’s remains and is killed. The Monster also kills Hans’s wife. Minnie, Frankenstein’s nervous housekeeper, tells the townsfolk that the Monster lives, but no one believes her until corpses are discovered.

Frankenstein recovers from his battle with his Monster. His new bride, Elizabeth, tells him he did the devil’s work in creating an artificial being from dead matter. Dr. Pretorious visits Frankenstein. He was a doctor of philosophy at Frankenstein’s university but was booted out. Although Frankenstein insists he has learned his lesson, his curiosity forces him to go with Pretorious to his lodgings, where Pretorious shows Frankenstein several miniature figures he has created by growing them from seeds. But he has been unable to create a being of normal size. He wants Frankenstein to be his partner. Frankenstein refuses, saying “This isn’t science. It’s more like black magic.” Pretorious reveals he wants to create a woman. Then he can create a race of monsters. Frankenstein realizes that Pretorious is power hungry and mad.

The Monster flees through the forest. As always he looks for friendship. He frightens a sheepherder. Her screams result in townspeople chasing him. The Monster is arrested and chained in the police dungeon, but he breaks free and kills one of his guards. He runs into the forest and takes refuge in a blind hermit’s house. The hermit doesn’t realize he is a Monster. He teaches him how to talk and say words like bread, drink, friend. Both forget their loneliness. But hunters discover the Monster in the house. They force the hermit to leave. Again the Monster is alone and miserable.

Fleeing the townspeople, he comes upon Pretorious, who has hired murderers Karl and Ludwig to rob graves. Pretorious pretends to be his friend by giving him liquor. The Monster kidnaps Elizabeth. This forces Frankenstein to help Pretorious build a Bride for the Monster. Karl kills a young woman for her heart, but doesn’t tell Frankenstein that he got it through murder. Pretorious keeps the impatient Monster quiet by keeping him drunk.

The Bride is created. The Monster is excited. He hopes she will be his friend. But she pulls away from him, horrified by his looks, although her own aren’t much better. The Monster is hurt and angry.

The Monster, who has already killed Karl, orders Frankenstein from the laboratory, locking him safely outside with Elizabeth. He tells Pretorious that he must stay with him and the Bride. Pretorious has underestimated the Monster. The Monster pulls a lever. There is an explosion. The castle crumbles. The Monster, the Bride, and Pretorious are killed. Frankenstein and Elizabeth hold each other.

A poignant, tragic moment. The Monster hopes he has found a friend and companion—he will be sadly disappointed. Jack Pierce’s makeup on Lanchester and Karloff was remarkable; unfortunately it left permanent scars.

The gatherings that took place summer nights at Lord Byron’s estate in Switzerland in 1816 were the artistic equivalents of the summit conferences of World War II. In addition to Byron himself, they were attended by intellectual physician John Polidori and neighbors Percy Shelley and his nineteen-year-old bride, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. These meetings were significant because of long philosophical discussions among the three men (while Mary listened intently), and because Byron was at work on Canto III of his Childe Harold and Shelley on his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Mont Blanc. Yet they are better known for a particular June night when the four challenged each other to write the best horror story. The surprising winner of the contest was Mary Shelley. She concocted a frightful story about a scientist named Victor Frankenstein who created a horrible monster out of dead matter and (while his creation went on a murder spree) became so guilt-ridden because of what he considered his own blasphemy that he withdrew into a life of constant self-torment. That Shelley called her book Frankenstein (or, the Modern Prometheus) instead of simply Frankenstein is significant. (Not coincidentally, Byron wrote Prometheus at this time, and Shelley soon after wrote his epic poem Prometheus Unbound.) Her work is no simple story of a mad scientist and his monster gone amok. It is about the philosophical implications of man defying God’s laws (both Frankenstein and his articulate creature offer their views on the subject), the great burdens he places on himself for daring this, and his moral responsibility when the monster turns killer.

James Whale’s classic Frankenstein (1931), the first sound and third film version of Shelley’s novel, is indeed about the scientist (here called Henry, not Victor) feeling guilty for tampering in the unknown, for creating a “baby” who has no chance in this world, for unleashing a killer. He is the one who suffers. He is the modern-day Prometheus. It is his film. In Whale’s splendid sequel The Bride of Frankenstein, however, the Monster relieves Frankenstein of his overwhelming burden by becoming responsible for his own heinous actions. Bride is the Monster’s film.

Bride (which had shooting titles The Return of Frankenstein and Frankenstein Lives Again!) ingeniously begins with a recreation of the conversation in which Mary Shelley (played by Elsa Lanchester) discussed her horror story with Percy Shelley and Byron. (The lesser-known Polidori has been discarded.) Before continuing her story, which will be what takes place in Bride, she refers back to what happened in the first part of her tale, the content of the original film. She tells the men that she had written “a moral lesson”: “There is punishment for those who emulate God.” Although this statement does express the theme of the first film, it is extremely misleading, because it can mistakenly be understood as implying that Henry’s sin was to create an artificial life form instead of leaving all creation up to God. (After all, such an endeavor is indeed portrayed as sinful in countless horror stories, including many derivatives of Frankenstein.) I don’t believe the real Mary regarded Frankenstein’s life-giving act as criminal and deserving of punishment, although she did realize that Frankenstein would feel both terror and shame as a result. For here was the daughter of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (who died in childbirth) and radical religious philosopher William Godwin; she was the wife of a man who welcomed Prometheus’s defiance of God’s supreme authority and considered it unjust that God sentenced the Titan to endless torture for going against His law and helping man. It’s probable that Mary Shelley admired Frankenstein’s attempt to create life, to discover the secret of life, particularly because his initial purpose was to benefit mankind. Frankenstein’s sin in the original film is not that he went against God’s laws but that once he became a creator he competed with God for sovereignty. There is a revealing moment in Frankenstein when the Monster looks up and spots sunlight flickering into the dark chamber in which his creator keeps him. How beautifully Boris Karloff conveys the new being’s newfound feelings of warmth and wonderment as, with a half-smile, he shuffles directly under the light. Suddenly, and seemingly without reason, Frankenstein blocks out the light. He jealously refuses his creature any knowledge (symbolized by the sunlight) that he didn’t offer himself, as well as any contact with the God who sent this sun ray. It is for emulating our jealous God in the sense he won’t allow others to use divine powers in his domain—rather than for defying God—that Frankenstein deserves condemnation.

Frankenstein (left) stands back warily while the diabolical Pretorious introduces the Monster to his unreceptive bride.

Frankenstein’s real crimes are against society. Moreover, they begin even before he has brought life to his Monster. His self-imposed isolation from fiancé Elizabeth, his friends, and the townspeople is itself a perversion, because he becomes an outsider, an outcast, an elitist. (Ironically, it is the Monster who seeks love, companionship, and camaraderie with the masses.) Even more important, as Lester D. Friedman points out in The English Novel and the Movies (Ungar 1981), “it is his refusal to provide the parental responsibility due his offspring that seals his fate. . . . Frankenstein is an irresponsible researcher, for he fails to take human consequences into account.” Frankenstein should oversee his “child’s” introduction to the townsfolk, its “coming out” into society. But caught up in his own grief, he neglects his fatherly responsibilities and abandons his creature, leaving it to make its own way in a world repulsed by grotesquery. Consequently, the Monster-child ends up murdering almost everyone who rejects him.

Following the prologue, Bride flashes back to the end of Frankenstein, when the scientist and the Monster confront each other near the windmill. It is a significant scene because here, finally, Frankenstein faces up to his responsibility. He is like George in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (published in 1937), who kills the feeble-minded Lennie (a child in a powerful man’s body whose unintentioned murder is very similar to the Monster’s murders) rather than let the mob devour his friend. (Although the Monster isn’t Frankenstein’s friend, to him it represents man’s highest achievement, regardless of its criminal activities.) They struggle to the death—the Monster’s—and the windmill (symbol of Frankenstein’s great dream, as it was Don Quixote’s) comes crashing down in flames. Although Universal’s desire to make a sequel to the mammoth hit Frankenstein resulted in the Monster’s resurrection (giving further credence to the theory that the Monster is a Christ figure), Henry had done his duty. Therefore, in Bride, there is no need for him to continue with his suffering. Now we can fully concentrate on the Monster’s misery.

There are many reasons why Bride is better than its predecessor, not the least being that it deals with the Monster’s need for female companionship, which is central to the second half of the novel. In Shelley’s book, the Monster tells his creator: “I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects. This being you must create.” When Frankenstein destroys his female creature before bringing her fully to life, the Monster is furious and dedicates himself to making his creator’s life miserable. On his wedding night Frankenstein discovers his bride Elizabeth has been killed. He pursues her slayer endlessly, and dies from the ordeal. Before voluntarily going off to the coldest region on earth to die also, the Monster explains the reason for his suicidal wish: he will never be able to love a woman. “I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched.” Bride, like the film Frankenstein, fails to properly indicate the Monster’s guilt from having committed murders, a guilt often expressed in Shelley’s book (“Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death”), but at least it deals with the Monster’s desire for a mate. In other ways it differs radically from the second half of Shelley’s book. Never mind. It’s a superlative, wonderfully imaginative horror masterpiece. Only Mad Love (1935), directed by Karl Freund, Whale’s cameraman on The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933), is as stylized. Those who don’t consider King Kong (1933) the greatest of the monster films almost invariably choose The Bride of Frankenstein.

As good as Frankenstein is, it is bleak, cold, and depressing. There is little music, little wit. It is much like a silent film. Bride had a higher budget and its production values breathe life into the story. Most impressive is Franz Waxman’s full score, complete with church bells upon the Bride’s birth. The claustrophobic castle and laboratory set of the original film are balanced here by great spacious, candlelit chambers with shiny floor and columns, all covered by mysterious shadows. And how wonderful is the expressionistic forest the Monster runs through, as the camera pans. We see a dark gray, cloudy backdrop in the distance, peasants with torches (on its way to becoming a horror movie cliché) massed on the horizon, and the Monster maneuvering around the trunks of trees (we never see branches or leaves) that are scattered about the hilly foreground. (Some shots of peasants against the sky remind one of Sergei Eisenstein.) Neither James Whale nor his skilled cameraman John Mescall strived for realism; they wanted viewers to know at all times that this was the visualization of the story Mary Shelley is telling in the prologue.

Director Whale, whose other classics include Journey’s End (1930), starring Colin Clive, Waterloo Bridge (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), with Karloff and Ernest Thesiger, The Invisible Man (1933), and the best of the Dumas films, The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), was an outstanding, underrated director who treated horror films with respect and gave them elegance. In Bride he displayed a bold, macabre sense of humor. How devilish he is when he has a silly farm wife reach into the windmill for her husband’s hands and accidentally pull the Monster from the debris; or when he has a beautiful sheepherder (obviously one of Universal’s starlets) become so terrified at seeing the Monster in the woods that she plummets into a nearby stream. There are other humorous touches: having one of Pretorious’s miniatures be a replica of Henry VIII, who was played by Elsa Lanchester’s husband Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933); having Karl complain about grave-robbing: “This is no life for murderers.” It was also a nice twist to have the same actress play the Bride and Mary Shelley (a bride in 1816), further emphasizing that we are watching Shelley’s story. Interestingly, Whale originally intended to have Karl kill Elizabeth and have it be her heart placed in the Bride, so the bride of Frankenstein would also be the Bride of the title. That idea was scrapped when it was decided that Henry would survive. (Why does the Monster spare Henry and Elizabeth? Perhaps to make his last gesture a noble one.)

It is the hermit who teaches the Monster to talk. His vocabulary consisted of forty-four simple words that director Whale found in test papers of Universal’s child actors. The Monster was given the mental age of a ten-year-old, and the emotional age of a fifteen-year-old.

Of course, the film benefits tremendously from imaginative casting. The weaselly Dwight Frye. The overly hysterical Una O’Connor. Elsa Lanchester, who had a comedy background. Ernest Thesiger, Whale’s friend, who looks like a caricature of mad scientists, is unforgettable as Pretorious, one of the oddest scoundrels of the horror genre. Here’s a weirdo who fancies he looks like the devil (“A slight resemblance or do I flatter myself?”), toasts “a new world of gods and monsters,” and civilly tells Henry his one weakness is gin and the Monster his one weakness is cigars. He is indeed Satan in his relationship to the Monster (Adam, in the novel), tempting the first male of an artificial race with a female (Eve). For Henry, he serves as an example of what he could have become if he hadn’t rid himself of his God complex.

Whale was fascinated by actors with angular faces: Clive, Thesiger, O’Connor, Lanchester, and Karloff all are given tremendous closeups, from straight on and in profile. Particularly effective is the creation scene, which appropriately takes place during a terrifying electrical storm. It’s all shot with strange camera angles, with Clive (an excellent actor) and Thesiger standing at angles themselves; Whale cuts wildly from closeup to closeup of the two scientists, who both become increasingly loony as the experiment progresses. Then the Bride appears. Elsa Lanchester, who beat out Brigitte Helm and Phyllis Brooks for the part, is marvelous in this brief appearance. In a white shroud, on two-and-a-half-foot stilts that make her movement birdlike, she half-wobbles, half-glides across the room. In profile, her stitches are barely noticeable because of her wild hairstyle, inspired by Nefertiti. She almost steals the film from Karloff and Thesiger.

But it is Karloff s touching performance that makes the film great. What an actor he was. Wearing a forty-eight-pound uniform, standing on stilts, covered with bluish-green greasepaint, and almost hidden beneath genius Jack Pierce’s patented makeup, Karloff still comes through. His sensitive eyes always manage to express the Monster’s feelings. Here is a creature who comes across as a stray dog, beaten and burned in the past and paranoid, but desperate for kindness. He loves beauty, music, people. Karloff can be mean when the script calls for it, and he can be tender, as Karloff himself was, as when he pats the Bride’s hand and asks hopefully, “Friend?” Or when in the famous vignette with the blind hermit, he comforts the overjoyed man who has finally been sent a friend by God. His Monster can even be amusing, as when he smokes, drinks, and learns a vocabulary. At all times, viewers empathize with him—we understand his misery and his longings. The Monster speaks in Bride for the only time in the Universal series, but it was unnecessary; with Karloff in the part, the Monster is eloquent even when silent.

The Brood

1979 (Canada) New World

Director: David Cronenberg

Producer: Claude Heroux

Screenplay: David Cronenberg

Cinematography: Mark Irwin

Music: Howard Shore

Editor: Alan Collins

Running Time: 92 minutes

Color

Cast: Oliver Reed (Dr. Hal Raglan), Samantha Eggar (Nola Carveth), Art Hindle (Frank Carveth), Cindy Hinds (Candice Carveth), Nuala Fitzgerald (Julianna), Henry Beckerman (Barton Kelly), Susan Hogan (Ruth), Michael McGhee (Inspector Mrazek), Gary McKeehan (Mike Trellan), Bob Silverman (Jan Hartog), Nicholas Campbell (Chris).

Synopsis: Dr. Hal Raglan’s Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics is a controversial retreat outside of Toronto where patients are taught to physically manifest their inner hostilities toward various individuals (whose parts Raglan plays in psychodramas) as welts and sores on their skins. Raglan loves one of his patients, Nola Carveth, a very insane woman who was beaten as a child by her mother Julianna. He keeps Nola in strict isolation, not permitting her husband Frank to see her, but he insists that she be granted weekend visits from her five-year-old daughter Candy. Frank is very upset that after one of her weekend visits Candy has bumps and bruises on her back—just like Nola did as a child. He decides that the only way the law will grant him the right to keep Candy away from the institute—and her mother—is by finding evidence to discredit Raglan. He visits a former patient of Raglan’s, Jan Hartog, who tells him that many former patients are suffering physical deformities.

Nola has a session with Raglan during which she recalls her harsh treatment from her mother when a child. Julianna investigates loud noises and is brutally attacked and killed by a dwarf-sized figure in a red coat. Candy sees who killed her grandmother but is too upset and terrified to talk about it, even to her father, whom she loves dearly. Nola has a session with Raglan during which she complains that her father, Barton Kelly, never protested when her mother beat her. Barton arrives in Toronto to attend the funeral of his ex-wife Julianna. He stays in Julianna’s house. The dwarflike creature emerges from under a bed and brutally kills Barton. Frank finds Barton’s body and is almost killed by the creature. It jumps on Frank’s back but suddenly falls to the ground and dies. The doctor at the autopsy says that the malformed creature died because it simply “ran out of gas.” He points out that since the creature has no navel it couldn’t have been born like human beings are born.

Meanwhile Ruth, Candy’s teacher, babysits Candy. She gets a rude telephone call from Nola, who is jealous that she is in Frank’s house and assumes that they are having an affair. The next morning, two dwarflike creatures come into Candy’s classroom. They brutally kill Ruth and take Candy away with them. Nola tells Raglan that she no longer has any hostility toward Ruth and she doesn’t know why. From Michael, a tormented former patient at the institute, Frank learns that Raglan has sent all the patients home except for Nola. Michael tells him that she takes care of a large group of children at the institute. That night Frank arrives at the institute. Raglan, who carries a gun, stops him and tells him that it would be safer if he went upstairs to the children’s ward to get Candy. He tells Frank that the strange creatures are Nola’s children and that they will attack anyone if she is angry. For his safety and Candy’s, he tells Frank to lie to her to keep her calm so the Brood, the children of Nola’s rage, will be neutralized.

While Raglan goes into the Brood’s sleeping quarters to try to rescue Candy, Frank tells his wife how much he still loves her and how he wants them to get back together. She is happy to see him at first, but then decides he hates her and is lying to her. She becomes angry.

The Brood attacks Raglan and kills him. Nola reveals that she has an umbilical cord and an amniotic sac that grows outside her body. She gives birth to a new creature. Frank is disgusted. She tells him that she would rather see Candy dead than go away with him. Upstairs the Brood goes after Candy. Frank strangles Nola. The Brood dies. Frank takes the crying Candy to his car. He doesn’t see the welts that grow on her arm—signs of her inner rage.

In one of the more interesting scenes in The Brood, Frank Carveth visits Jan Hartog, a former patient at Dr. Raglan’s Psychoplasmics Institute, where he was taught to manifest his mental disorders physically as welts on the skin. Revealing a hideous lymphosarcoma that dangles from his neck and resembles a cancerous growth on a horny toad, the deathly ill Hartog angrily contends that Raglan’s treatment has “encouraged my body to revolt against me.” This is a key phrase, because all of David Cronenberg’s early Canadian-made horror films—They Came from Within (1975), Rabid (1977), Scanners (1981), and The Brood—are about our bodies in revolt; our bodies becoming our enemies by creating and, sometimes, transmitting “monsters” that literally destroy our flesh and our sanity. It is probably a morbid fascination for disease, as well as an awareness that nothing scares us more than sudden changes in our physical composition, that makes Cronenberg fill his pictures with so many unpleasant images of bodies in open rebellion: open sores, lesions, bumps and bruises, malformations, abnormal growths, and quickly spreading infections that are embodied by living parasites working their way into our systems and moving about under the skin. This suspicion seems confirmed by the fact that Cronenberg sets his pictures in hospitals, private clinics, and other sterile, orderly environments such as the self-sufficient apartment complex in They Came from Within. (All houses, schools, apartments, and even outdoor locales in his films are hospital clean.) For what makes less sense and is at the same time more realistic than to have your body or mind suddenly run amuck in places geared to promote health, where people—scientists, doctors, and psychiatrists—are supposedly employed to do everything in their power to see to your physical and mental well-being? The unfortunate characters in Cronenberg’s work remind me of (and usually are) the victims of not only the wrong operations (or therapy) but botched operations as well.

While I like The Brood and am intrigued by the premises of all the young Cronenberg’s early films, I question his judgments and directorial maturity—I get the feeling that what he considers to be his films’ high spots are those elements I find the least admirable. I think Cronenberg was at his best when building suspense and creating a malevolent atmosphere, and wish that he didn’t get so much juvenile pleasure from trying to jolt viewers by repelling them with blatant, often ridiculous, images. For instance, in The Brood, he not only has Nola reveal her physical abnormality but has her give birth on the spot just so that when Frank strangles Nola a moment later it will be all the more gruesome because a monster baby gets crushed between them. That’s overdoing it. Often Cronenberg is offensive—too often he is downright vulgar; he seems to be getting kicks trying to disgust us. (He’s like a kid who puts a green pea in his nose at dinner.) Furthermore it is objectionable that he repeatedly shows that sexual contact leads to “monsters” and infectious diseases. In They Came from Within, the violence-inducing parasite enters Barbara Steele’s vagina while she bathes; later she passes it to her lesbian lover via an open-mouthed kiss (we see a swelling move from her throat to her lover’s). In Rabid, quasi-vampire Marilyn Chambers, who has a bloodsucking needlelike spine in her armpit, gives a virulent strain of rabies to whomever she kisses. And in The Brood, the sexual union of the sadistic Julianna and the weak Barton resulted in producing Nola, who because of her parents’ upbringing became progressively insane, and the “symbolic” sexual union of Nola and Raglan has produced the malformed, murderous Brood.

Nola’s children: Candy (left) and the deadly Brood.

They Came from Within is the picture that gave birth to the David Cronenberg cult. (The cult included director John Carpenter, who considered Cronenberg the best director of horror films working in the late seventies/early eighties.) I think this film has a great setting (an enormous, isolated apartment complex), an interesting premise (a parasite that turns people into raving maniacs moves from tenant to tenant), but is an absolutely terrible picture, one of the worst. It begins promisingly enough with humor and slowly building suspense, but Cronenberg suddenly seems to say “to hell with subtlety” and lets everything get out of hand. About halfway through the picture, the “story” ends—also gone are the rules by which we can judge what is logical in Cronenberg’s world—and the remainder of the picture is devoted to one repetitive scene after another in which bands of crazy tenants tear through the building and brutally kill those unaffected by the parasite. Rabid is a very similar picture.

Frank discovers that the Brood has killed Ruth and kidnapped Candy.

The Brood is Cronenberg’s best early film, his one good film. He still tries to shock us with grotesque imagery (included are several close-ups of bloody, crushed heads), and makes up rules as he goes along so viewers can never get their bearings, but there is much in the picture that is noteworthy. For one thing, we care about the characters. We root for Frank as he tries to save his child; we feel sorry for Nola because of her terrible upbringing and because her incurable insanity prevents her from being the wife and mother she would like to be; we even feel sympathy for the pathetic Julianna and Barton, who try to drink away their guilt. And we love Candy, a sweet, gentle, adorable little girl who is being pulled in too many directions; she is scared and is suffering. It is obvious that Cronenberg also cares for her because all through the film he has Frank hugging her, kissing her, comforting her, talking to her in a gentle voice, offering to tell her bedtime stories, tucking her in, leaving the hall light on so she won’t be scared, zipping up her coat, taking her to and from school, trying to protect her. And it’s incredibly poignant when she hugs him and says in her sweet soft voice, “Oh, Daddy, Daddy,” or expresses how relieved she is when he tells her that the creature who killed Julianna is dead and won’t bother her again. She’s such a delicate, vulnerable child, it makes me angry that Cronenberg ends the film by showing welts on her arm (signifying that her rage is building up as it did in her insane mother when she was a child)—why can’t contemporary filmmakers ever let us leave the theater thinking it’s all over and all is well?

To keep Nola’s horrible secret until the end, Cronenberg films her throughout from the shoulders up.

There are several terrifying sequences in The Brood, particularly the murders of Julianna and Barton. When Julianna enters her mysteriously ramshackle kitchen, looks up toward the ceiling, and spots a little crouched figure in red atop the cupboards about to leap on her, or when Candy sees the hooded figure (who may remind you of the dwarf assassin in Don’t Look Now, 1973) hiding on the stairwell, you are likely to jump. Many of the other scenes with members of the Brood will also give you the creeps. The most chilling of these scenes are when two of them brazenly enter Candy’s classroom pretending to be her classmates; and when they walk with Candy hand in hand along the highway in the snow.

Perhaps what is most remarkable about The Brood is the sinister quality that Cronenberg establishes. He does this by staging intense psychodramas between Raglan and Nola; by creating a restrictive atmosphere around the Psychoplasmics Institute; by making his characters humorless and setting the picture in cold, snowy weather (where everyone wears coats and scarves, and walks under gray skies) to suit their icy dispositions and give us chills*; by giving Hartog a progressively worsening cancer; by giving the autocratic Raglan a henchman; by making us aware of the history of child abuse in Nola’s life; and by giving his characters unusual otherworldly surnames—looking in the large Manhattan directory, I was unable to find most character names from the film: Carveth, Raglan, Mrazek, Trellan, Desborough, or Birkin.

Frank tells Dr. Raglan that he doesn’t like Candy being forced to spend time with her insane mother at the institute.

I have no real complaint about The Brood until the final sequence. I think that the “revelation” that Nola gives actual birth to the Brood is a bit anticlimactic. We know that she created the Brood children and that they are murderers—it makes no difference to us whether they were produced typically, parthenogenetically, or by her willing them into existence. But what I would like to know is, to what extent does Nola control the Brood’s actions? If, as Raglan tells Frank, she doesn’t realize that the Brood brought Candy back to live in their “dormitory” at the institute, then that means they acted on their own in kidnapping the girl. But if the Brood can act on its own, then why does it take Nola’s rage to initiate its actions against Raglan? Then again, if it does take Nola’s rage to instigate the Brood’s violent actions, as Raglan says, why doesn’t Raglan allow Frank to go secretly into the dormitory? Since Nola doesn’t feel threatened, there is no reason for her to have an attack of rage at this time. It is in fact Frank’s appearance that sets her off; now feeling persecuted, paranoid, and guilty (like most characters in the picture), she shouts at her husband, “You hate me!” and the Brood swings into action, killing Raglan and attacking Candy. This sequence makes no sense to me, but at least it is spooky, lively, and comes after about an hour and a half of absorbing, solid cinema.

The Brood turns on Candy.

*The only other horror film of the era to exploit the horror elements of a cold environment was Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), also made in Canada.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

1920 (Germany) Decla-Bioscop

Director: Robert Wiene

Producer: Erich Pommer

Screenplay: Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz

Cinematography: Willy Hameister

Art Direction: Hermann Warm, Walter Röhrig, and Walter Reimann

Running Time: 71 minutes

B&W

Cast: Werner Krauss (Dr. Caligari), Conrad Veidt (Cesare), Lil Dagover (Jane), Freidrich Feher (Francis), Hans van Twardowski (Alan), Rudolf Lettinger (Dr. Olsen), Rudolf Klein-Rogge (criminal).

Synopsis: Francis sits on a garden bench with a frightened older man, who insists there are spirits everywhere. A beautiful young woman in white walks by as if in a trance. Francis says she is his fiancé, Jane. He tells about the horrible experience they had.

A traveling fair arrived in Holstenwall, where Francis always lived. Dr. Caligari went to the town clerk to apply for a permit to show his exhibit at the fair: Cesare, a somnambulist, who, while in a twenty-three-year sleep, could predict the future. Caligari was upset at the rude treatment he received. That night, the town clerk was stabbed to death.

Alan, his best friend and fellow student, dragged Francis to the fair. Francis and Alan entered Caligari’s tent. Caligari opened a coffin-like cabinet, revealing the frightening Cesare, a tall, slender man who appeared to be in a trance while doing Caligari’s bidding. Alan asked how long he had to live. Cesare told him he’d die at dawn. Alan failed to contain his fears.

Francis and Alan walked Jane home. They both loved her and agreed to remain friends, no matter whom she married. At dawn, Alan was stabbed to death. Francis and Jane were heartbroken. Francis suspected Cesare of the crime. He and Jane’s father, Dr. Olsen, got a permit to examine Cesare. Caligari was upset when they came to his caravan. But before they examined Cesare, news came that the murderer had been caught.

Francis and Dr. Olsen returned to the police station. The suspect admitted he killed an old woman, hoping that the murderer of Alan and the town clerk would be blamed. He insisted he was innocent of those two murders. Jane went to Caligari’s caravan in search of Francis and her father. When Caligari presented Cesare, she became terrified and fled.

That night, Francis spied on the sleeping Caligari and Cesare, who slept in his cabinet. At this exact time, Cesare crept into Jane’s bedroom. He couldn’t bring himself to stab her. When she awoke and screamed he dragged her off, over rooftops and along a country road. The townspeople gave chase. He dropped Jane. He died of exhaustion.

Francis and the police discovered that it wasn’t Cesare in the cabinet, but a dummy. Caligari fled. Francis tracked him to a mental asylum. He went to the director to learn if Caligari was one of the patients. He was horrified to discover that Caligari was the director! While the director slept, Francis and several doctors looked through his books and diary. The director had read about Caligari, an eleventh-century (seventeenth-century in some prints) mountebank, who used magic to induce a somnambulist named Cesare to murder for him. The director wanted to be Caligari. He got his chance when a somnambulist arrived at the asylum.

Francis and the doctors confronted Caligari. When he was presented with Cesare’s corpse, he became a raving maniac. He had to be restrained. He was put in a cell, forever.

Francis goes to the asylum courtyard. He joins the other patients—including Cesare and Jane! Francis asks Jane when they’ll marry. She says that being of royal blood she can’t follow her heart’s wishes. Francis becomes crazed when he sees the asylum director, whom he insists is the Caligari of his story. The benevolent director says that he can cure Francis now that he is aware of this delusion.

This masterpiece—museum piece?—of the silent cinema was the first horror film of real, lasting quality and the first motion picture to fully incorporate the German expressionism that was pervasive in postwar art and theater. It also qualified as the first “cult movie.” According to Midnight Movies (1983) by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, it played in one Paris theater for seven consecutive years, a record that lasted until Emmanuelle (1974). And throughout the twenties, in Europe and America (Sam Goldwyn imported it in 1921), it was a cause célèbre among the arising avant garde and intelligentsia, who were either excited or angered by its filmmakers’ bold attempt to eradicate the distinction between cinema and art. “More than any other film,” wrote Arthur Knight in Rogue (August 1962),

. . . it convinced artists, critics, and audiences that the movie was a medium for artistic expression. With its weird spatial distortions and pre-Freudian psychology, it set the pattern for art houses—decades before there were any art houses. It triggered a cycle of movies that continues today. . . . New levels of reality had been penetrated by the camera; an illusory world, a world that existed solely in the mind, had been made palpable and real. The motion picture, hitherto concerned primarily with externals, was demonstrably able to plunge beneath the surface and externalize dreams, fantasies, and the workings of the subconscious.

Inevitably the film had an enormous effect. Post-World War I Europe was swarming with artists who wanted to break out of the conventional modes of art, who fought with bare fangs against the bourgeois culture and bourgeois standards they had inherited. . . . They argued for a cinéma pur, a type of movie that did away with plots and happy endings.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was conceived by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, two artistically inclined young pacifists who met in Berlin after the war. They saw film as a revolutionary form of artistic expression—visual storytelling that necessitated collaboration between writers (novelists, poets, playwrights) and painters, cameramen, actors, directors. New itself, film was the ideal medium through which to both call attention to the emerging pacifism in postwar Germany and exhibit the radical anti-bourgeois art. Although neither writer had connections to any Berlin film company, they decided to concoct a scenario. As both were enthusiastic about Paul Wegener’s works, they chose to write a horror film. They drew on past experiences. Janowitz still had disturbing memories of a night in 1913, in Hamburg: After leaving a fair he had walked into a park bordering the Holstenwall (the name of the town in the film) and glimpsed a bourgeois stranger as he disappeared into the shadows after having mysteriously emerged from the bushes . . . where a young woman’s ravaged body was found the next morning. And Mayer still was embittered about his sessions during the war with an autocratic, highly ranked, military psychiatrist. At night, like Francis and Alan in the film, Janowitz and Mayer would often go to a nearby fair. One evening, they saw a sideshow titled “Man and Machine,” in which a man did feats of strength and forecast the future while supposedly in a hypnotic trance. Inspired by this, Janowitz and Mayer devised their story that night and wrote it in the following six weeks. The derivation of the name Caligari? At the time, Mayer happened to be reading Unknown Letters of Stendhal, in which an officer named Caligari was mentioned.

Caligari presents Cesare to the terrified Jane. Later he will send Cesare to her bedroom.

Erich Pommer tried to get rid of the two young men who burst into his office at his small Decla studio. But Janowitz and Mayer insisted on telling him their fantastic film story, and the future head of UFA was so impressed by “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” that he bought it on the spot. He even agreed that it should be made in expressionistic style, partly as a concession to his studio only having a limited quota of power and light. Pommer, in his essay “Carl Mayer’s Debut,” which can be found in Paul Rotha and Richard Griffith’s Film Till Now (1949), recalled:

The artist whose style they wanted followed was Alfred Kubin, the hero of Prague’s radical artists. While Mayer and Janowitz talked about art, I was thinking of rather a different aspect of the script. The mystery and macabre atmosphere of the Grand Guignol was currently in vogue in German films, and this story fitted perfectly. They saw an “experiment” in the script—I saw a comparatively inexpensive production.

While Mayer and Janowitz were off courting Kubin, Pommer put Caligari in the hands of designer Hermann Warm and painters Walter Reimann (Pommer writes of “Herlth” instead of Reimann) and Walter Röhrig, “whom I’d met as a soldier painting sets for a German military theatre in Braila, Rumania.” All were of the Sturm group (taken from the name of a magazine), which promoted expressionism in every field of art. When Pommer began to have second thoughts about how the film should be designed, they had to convince him that it made sense to paint lights and shadows directly on set walls and floors and background canvases, and to place “fantastic, unreal, flat sets behind real, solid people.” Director Robert Wiene, who replaced first choice Fritz Lang after Lang withdrew to finish his serial The Spiders, did a test scene to demonstrate the artists’ theories. It was so impressive that Pommer gave his artists free rein, and his writers decided there was no further need to pursue Kubin. In fact, Janowitz and Mayer would write their next film for Pommer, Genuine (1920), with the new method in mind. It would be a disaster. (In future years, Mayer would become known as the silent screen’s most skilled poet, writing the visually oriented scripts for F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh, in 1924, and Sunrise, in 1927.)

Cesare passes through one of the film’s strange, expressionistic sets.

No film is more bizarrely designed than Caligari—in fact, the design is so startling that you tend to overlook Mayer and Janowitz’s truly intriguing story. The characters walk about in sparsely furnished yet tiny, claustrophobic sets. They move in and out of the inevitable shadowed areas of the frames. The few props (the high chairs, the beds) are oddly constructed, or are conspicuous by their absence (as in the jail cell). The backgrounds are obviously painted—as if done by a six-year-old with his off hand—and there are even markings on the floors. The costumes and makeup are also exaggerated and sloppy, as if put on by someone without taste: Conrad Veidt’s somnambulist Cesare wears black tights, a polo sweater, and white pancake makeup. The high, weirdly shaped hats and walking canes that jut out from the men’s hands (even gloves have lines on them) are at odds with everything on the streets of Holstenwall: Most odd is that everything, including the numerous scribbled straight lines on windows, walls, and floors, zigzags at odd angles so that there is an exaggerated perspective to everything we see and the frame looks out of whack. For instance, Caligari’s caravan is crooked, has a door that is even more slanted than that, and a window that is even more slanted. The only thing that stands straight and tall is Cesare; yet when he dies, his body starts to crumble and he raises his arms so that they form angles similar to the twisted tree branches near him.

Future filmmakers, in and out of the horror-fantasy genre, would come to understand from watching Caligari that one can express the emotional or mental states of characters through the design of sets they walk through. This is ironic because it wasn’t the intention of the men who made Caligari to use the decor to express what the characters were thinking or feeling. It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that the film was bizarrely designed because what we are seeing is a story being told by a madman. Indeed Siegfried Kracauer in his seminal book on the German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), quoted one of the many early “self-assured” critics who thought this was what the film implied: “The idea of rendering the notions of sick brains . . . through expressionist pictures is not only well conceived but also well realized. Here this style has a right to exist, proves an outcome of solid logic.” But for us to equate the expressionism with the cerebral world of the madman, Francis, we must either ignore that the final scene at the asylum, which takes place after Francis has completed his bizarre story, also has the wild designs we saw during his story or figure that director Wiene badly blundered and simply forgot that the set in the finale should be realistic. Even so, common sense tells us that men who wanted to promote expressionism wouldn’t represent it as the visualization of madmen—that would only mock the art form. Obviously the expressionistic design is meant to represent the visualization of the creative, quite sane minds of the men who are telling a sixty-nine-minute story in which Francis tells a briefer story. The expressionism is meant to add dramatic force to the filmmakers’ horror story and to help remove it from reality (but not from sanity), as do the impossible time lapses (i.e., the scene in which Caligari asks the rude town clerk for a permit and the scene in which police discover the town clerk’s body would logically take place the day and night before Francis and Alan attend the fair, but these scenes are placed between the time Francis and Alan leave for the fair and arrive a few minutes later).

Having seen the opening, in which Francis informs his companion that he will tell a story of the horrible events that befell him and Jane, and the twist ending, we naturally assume that what comes in between is Francis’s story. Yet we don’t have to believe a story in which his romantic rival, Alan, is conveniently killed off, and he heroically traps the criminal mastermind, Caligari. We only wonder why in his tall tale Francis doesn’t also rescue Jane from Cesare and win her heart forever. I think that if you remove the opening and finale from Caligari you would still recognize what remains as Francis’s wishful tale, in which he wins the lady he loves and simultaneously prevents his homeland from being taken over by a dictator and his human killing machine. It would still fall into the category of “psychological” horror film.

It’s certainly appropriate to conjecture how the removal of the framing scenes would alter the picture because they weren’t included in the original scenario. They were added, depending on your source, by Lang, Pommer, or Wiene. Mayer and Janowitz bitterly objected to the framing scenes because they—or at least the ending—completely alter the meaning of the film. The twist ending is a lot of fun, and certainly has a great deal to do with the success of the film, but Mayer and Janowitz had reason to complain. It not only led critics astray by providing them with, they wrongly believed, the explanation for the expressionism, but also it reversed the political messages the writers were trying to get across. The writers, who detested authority figures, sensed that Prussian authorities were turning the German population into zombie-like creatures like Cesare, who’d blindly follow all orders. They worried that the time was ripe for a mad Caligari figure, a mountebank and demagogue, to rise from obscurity (small-time power) and, while the ineffectual police and government officials sit on high chairs and do as little as they do in the film, hoodwink the sleeping, defeated masses of postwar Germany into following his evil ways. “According to the pacifist-minded Janowitz,” Kracauer wrote, “they had created Cesare with the dim design of portraying the common man who, under the pressure of compulsion of military service, is drilled to kill and be killed.” In their scenario, Mayer and Janowitz had clearly anticipated the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. However, by including the final sequence and making the director at the asylum a benevolent man who wants to help the insane Francis, those in power at Decla (who didn’t listen to hirelings Mayer and Janowitz) actually showed a high regard for authority figures, who, judging by the director, have understanding and consideration for those under their supervision. This wasn’t what the writers had in mind. They may have had some solace in knowing that after seeing Werner Krauss as the villainous Caligari the entire picture, it’s difficult for us to trust Krauss’s asylum director at the end. We still suspect he is Caligari and wonder how he’s certain he can cure Francis just because he realizes Francis thinks he’s Caligari. What will the cure be? (You wouldn’t want to be in Francis’s straitjacket.)

No one has ever tried to duplicate Caligari—except for Mayer and Janowitz, who flopped with Genuine—but its impact and influence have been immeasurable. For instance, it showed future horror filmmakers how to blend shocks, suggested horror (we see Alan’s murder in shadows), and psychological horror. It was the first of the genre to prove that what happens offscreen or in the mind can be as terrifying as physical shocks. It’s easy to understand why this film frightened audiences in 1920 and for years after. There are specific scenes that would be repeated in future films. Cesare’s coming to life while in his crypt anticipated numerous vampire movies; the nocturnal strolls of the “woman in white” in Dracula (1931) wouldn’t be much different from Jane’s ghostly walk through the asylum garden; the spooky scene in which Cesare sneaks into Jane’s bedroom was copied in later horror classics like Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931); and Cesare’s walk through the expressionistic forest prefigured a similar scene with the Monster in Frankenstein. The marvelous scene in which Cesare carries Jane over the weirdly designed rooftops and along the country road has certainly been repeated in many horror films, especially those in which townspeople chase after the monster, but as he walks into the fantasy-world horizon, I wonder if this scene also inspired the winding Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz (1939).

As Francis and the white-uniformed doctors look on, the head of the asylum is upset at the sight of the dead Cesare. It’s now clear that he is the mad Caligari, as Francis asserted.

If you have seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari only on video or in an Introduction to Film course—I fell asleep watching a musicless, shaky 16mm print in college—or in cut form (there are several versions, with different subtitles and running times), give it another try. Under the right circumstances, with loud music and a pristine print, it suddenly doesn’t seem so slow, the camerawork doesn’t seem so static, and the acting comes across as powerful rather than silly—I particularly enjoy Lil Dagover, whose anguished reactions upon learning of Alan’s death and meeting Cesare are worthy of Nazimova. After all these years, it is still an astonishing film.

The Conqueror Worm

Also known as The Witchfinder General

1968 (U.K.) American International release of a Tigon British Film

Director: Michael Reeves

Producer: Louis M. Heyward

Screenplay: Michael Reeves and Tom Baker

Based on a novel by Ronald Bassett

Cinematography: Johnny Coquillon

Music: Paul Ferris

Editor: Howard Lanning

Running Time: 88 minutes (the British version is without prologue and epilogue narrations but this has no effect on screen time)

Color

Cast: Vincent Price (Matthew Hopkins), Ian Ogilvy (Richard Marshall), Hilary Dwyer (Sara), Robert Russell (John Stearne), Rupert Davies (John Lowes), Patrick Wymark (Oliver Cromwell), Wilfred Brambell (horse dealer), Nicky Henson (Trooper Swallow).

Synopsis: It is 1645, and England is torn by war between the Royalists and Oliver Cromwell’s Roundheads. While the country is in a state of confusion, professional witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins and his brutal assistant John Stearne ride from town to town, torturing confessions out of suspected witches and collecting money from local magistrates for every “witch” they execute.

They arrive in Brandiston, where aged clergyman John Lowes had been called a witch by some villagers. They torture him by sticking needles into his back (searching for the devil’s mark) and hitting him, stopping only when Lowes’s beautiful niece, Sara, whose fiancé, Richard Marshall, is off fighting with Cromwell, offers herself to Hopkins. With Lowes in prison, Hopkins visits Sara for sexual favors every night. But while he is away, Stearne rapes Sara; when Hopkins finds out, he wants nothing more to do with her and orders Stearne to continue his torture of Lowes. Before leaving the village, Hopkins and Stearne execute Lowes and two others. Marshall returns to Brandiston and realizes that he hasn’t kept his oath to Sara to let “no one harm you.” He vows to kill Hopkins and Stearne. After marrying Sara—at least in his eyes (no one performs the ceremony)—he sets off across the English countryside, telling Sara to go to Lavenham. Marshall eventually catches up with Stearne, but after a brutal fight he escapes. Now both Hopkins and Stearne know that Marshall is on their trail.

Marshall finds out that Hopkins and Stearne are in the town where Sara has fled. With a few of his soldier friends he gallops there. However, Hopkins, having found out that Sara is in the town, has set a trap for him: Soon both Marshall and Sara are taken off to a dungeon.

While Sara is pricked with long needles, Hopkins tries to get Marshall to confess that he is a witch so he can be publicly executed. But all Marshall says is that he will kill Hopkins, so the torture continues. Hopkins orders Stearne to bring Marshall closer while he brands Sara. At this moment, Marshall kicks his boot heel into Stearne’s eye, blinding him. He then grabs an ax and strikes Hopkins with it innumerable times. Arriving at the scene, one of Marshall’s friends mercifully shoots Hopkins, killing him. “You’ve taken him from me!” yells the outraged Marshall. Sara screams uncontrollably.

One of many shocking images in Reeves’s film: Suspected witches including John Lowes (left) are hanged while their condemner Matthew Hopkins looks on from his steed.

During the summer of 1968, exciting reports began to filter out of Europe (beginning with West Germany) about a British “horror” film called The Witchfinder General, directed by the relatively unknown Michael Reeves. Oddly, the picture had played in America that spring under the title The Conqueror Worm and had gone virtually unnoticed. The few snoozing trade paper reviewers who saw it had treated it as just another entry in AIP’s Edgar Allan Poe series starring Vincent Price, and gave it such dismal notices that future bookings were scarce. By the time anyone was alerted that The Conqueror Worm was not adapted from the unadaptable Poe poem, that AIP had not made the film but was only distributing it, and that it deserved our unqualified attention, it was long gone from the circuit. By the time most American critics were able to track down a print, Michael Reeves was dead.

On February 11, 1969, England’s most promising director, and already its most fascinating from both a visual and thematic standpoint, committed suicide—his death being attributed to an overdose of sleeping pills.* Michael Reeves was twenty-five. While one can’t necessarily understand what makes a director tick or how he perceives the world around him by studying his films, when one looks at Reeves’s small oeuvre—The Castle of the Living Dead (1964), on which he began as the assistant director but took over in midproduction, The She-Beast (1966), and especially The Sorcerers (1967) and The Conqueror Worm—his manner of death doesn’t seem all that surprising.

One of the film’s erotic images: Marshall and Sara get reacquainted when he returns from the front.

It is safe to say that no director in cinema history exhibited such a consistently depressing and angry view of the world and humanity as Reeves. For that reason, politically “progressive” film critics have had difficulty dealing with his works—particularly The Conqueror Worm, which Reeves cultists correctly regard as his best, most ambitious film. While Reeves’s talent is indisputable and his repeated condemnation of those who abuse power admirable, it is hard to fully endorse him because his attitude, as reflected in his joyless endings, was so negative, even defeatist; his heroes and heroines, who start out as likable people, full of love and tenderness, ultimately surrender to the evil Reeves felt to be the dominant part of every person’s nature. Film purists may protest AIP’s addition of the prologue and epilogue narration for the American print of the film, but the words of Poe that conclude this version aptly sum up Reeves’s gloomy philosophy as set forth in his art: “That the play is the tragedy ‘Man.’ And its hero the Conqueror Worm.”

All those enjoyable Poe films starring Vincent Price, like House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964), deal in some way or another with evil. Directed by Roger Corman, those films are intentionally claustrophobic, with almost everything taking place within secluded castles. The evil that exists, personified by the mad, hermitlike Vincent Price characters, is confined to the castles themselves, so that if the castles are destroyed the evil within their walls will be destroyed as well. These pictures end optimistically, quite the opposite of what happens in the Reeves films.

In The Conqueror Worm we are presented with an evil that is overwhelming, invulnerable, and that will emerge victorious. This evil is not confined to a single castle but runs rampant across all of England, contaminating the people, wiping out whatever goodness exists and replacing it with a contagious sickness characterized by each “victim’s” desperate need to be cruel to his fellow human beings. Throughout the England of 1645 (and the film accurately depicts how it really was in that time) the devil’s work is being done: in the countryside, Cromwell’s Holy War leaves scores of bodies unburied in the forests and high grass; in the towns, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne carry on their reign of torture and murder, also in the name of religion and with the townspeople’s compliance. But it doesn’t stop there. The evil is all-encompassing, as is evident when Hopkins kills suspected heretics by/in fire, by/in water (drowning), and in the air (hangings); and is himself brutally killed deep within the earth.

The real-life Matthew Hopkins was the son of a Puritan minister, a lawyer by trade. In 1645 and 1646 he and his partner John Stearne executed two hundred so-called witches. (Among his victims was John Lewis, whom the film’s John Lowes is based on, and Elisabeth Clarke, actually Hopkins’s first victim, though in the movie one of his last.) But in 1646 Hopkins fell into disfavor with powerful religious and political figures, and when magistrates outlawed the methods he used to get confessions of witchcraft, he retired. He wrote a defense of his two-year career called The Discovery of Witchcraft, completing it just before his death the next year.** I believe The Conqueror Worm is an exercise in revenge: Michael Reeves in the person of Trooper Richard Marshall (played by Reeves’s friend Ian Ogilvy) achieved revenge on a historical perpetrator of evil, whom Reeves doubtlessly thought died too easily. Instead of allowing Hopkins the peaceful death he enjoyed in real life, Reeves has Marshall do him in, Lizzie Borden style.

As Matthew Hopkins, Vincent Price has never been better. Critic Robin Wood, who wrote a long, excellent tribute to Reeves for Movie (circa 1969), thought Price miscast, but I think it is quite the contrary. Even physically, Price is perfect: We see an intelligent face covered by a scruffy beard—symbolic of Hopkins’s contempt for a world gone to the uncivilized; we are unsettled when this aging, flabby man matter-of-factly orders young women to be sent to him for sexual favors; we see him in his Puritan garb perched on his black horse and we recognize the angel of death. Hopkins comes across as a menacing figure, shrewd, arrogant, brutal, and Price properly plays him with a great deal of restraint. Reeves, who previously directed excellent performances by horror movie icons Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele, and Boris Karloff, managed to keep Price from going into the ham actor routine that mars many of his performances—that in itself is an achievement. Importantly, Price conveys the scorn that someone of Hopkins’s breeding and intelligence would have for a world which allows him—and even financially enables him—to commit what he knows to be monstrous, sadistic acts. Hopkins is god in an England full of greedy, hypocritical, superstitious people who he feels are inferior to him. He spits on them and debases them by raping their women, taking their money, and executing the few among them brave enough to protest the diabolical acts taking place in their country.

When Hopkins and his assistant Stearne want an answer, they make sure they get it.

Over the years there have been numerous films which have dealt with a man or woman seeking revenge on those who have harmed his or her loved ones. Death Wish (1974), The Bride Wore Black (1968), Rancho Notorious (1952), Nevada Smith (1966), a few dozen mad scientist movies. The list is endless. Yet, as Village Voice critic William Paul perceived in 1970, “[I]f anywhere, [The Conqueror Worm’s] antecedents lie [not in film but in] the Elizabethan [and Jacobean] revenge play, sharing both the revenge motif and large quantities of blood spilled.” In fact, one may think of Hamlet while watching Richard Marshall risk court-martial, the loss of his mind, and perhaps Sara’s love as well in his relentless pursuit of Hopkins and Stearne. What is quite evident is that Marshall quickly forgets the reasons he is seeking revenge. While it starts as an act of “justified” vengeance on the men who killed John Lowes and raped Sara, it soon becomes clear that his hatred for the men is less because of these crimes than because they have caused him to break his honorable promise to Sara that he would allow no harm to come to her. And what eventually motivates Marshall, onward and onward, is solely his second vow that he will kill Hopkins. It is not unexpected that in the horrifying dungeon sequence Marshall refuses to utter the confession that will halt Sara’s torture taking place in front of him, choosing instead to reaffirm his vow to kill Hopkins. When Marshall’s soldier friend kills Hopkins before the berserk Marshall can strike him with an ax for the umpteenth time, Marshall predictably explodes, shouting, “You’ve taken him from me!” Now even Marshall’s second oath has been broken. This is too much for him to cope with and his look of madness is genuine.

Audiences usually cheer at the end of revenge films when the villain gets his just deserts. But they inevitably groan when they see the helpless Hopkins lying on the ground, all bloody and senseless, waiting for another blow to fall. They are relieved when the soldier’s gunshot prevents Marshall from continuing his sadistic revenge. They sense, as Sara does when she screams and screams, that Marshall is performing an act that would have made Hopkins proud. It is appropriate that this corruption of Marshall’s soul takes place in the bowels of the earth, in Satan’s playground.

Reeves’s The Sorcerers is about a kindly elderly couple (Boris Karloff and Catherine Lacey) who, by using a mind control machine, force a depressed young man (Ian Ogilvy as Michael Roscoe) to perform crimes to which they can vicariously thrill without risking arrest. The crimes they have him commit increase in degree, from petty theft to brutal murder, just as the scientist’s once-sweet wife’s love of power and violence increases. For that film to work, and it does, everything depends on the tension level gradually building toward the fiery (everyone-is-killed) conclusion. The Conqueror Worm presents a challenge to a director in that it begins with a pre-credits sequence so powerful—a screaming woman being led to a scaffold where she is hanged—that the film must be kept at a high level of intensity in order to avoid a dramatic letdown. The Conqueror Worm is a stunning film in many ways, but probably Reeves’s greatest achievement is that he was able to maintain an extraordinary momentum throughout, until the film ends as it began with a woman (Sara this time) screaming.

Along the way there is much violence—executions, tortures, a nerve-wracking soldier-ambush sequence—and even some erotic lovemaking between Sara and Marshall. And whenever there is a chance that the hectic pace might be slowing a bit, Reeves automatically has Marshall jump on his mighty steed and race it across the countryside (an effective visual device), the sweeping music driving him on. The audience never gets a chance to relax. By the end of the film it is as if you have just run the gauntlet.

The horrifying finale begins with Stearne joyfully inserting needles into Sara’s back while the chained Marshall can do nothing to stop his wife’s torture except confess that he is a witch, which he will not do no matter how much she suffers.

*Depending on the source, Reeves’s death was either suicidal or accidental. His manner of death has also been debated; various reports had Reeves dying from a pill overdose, a car accident, and a fall from a high window.

**John Stearne retired in 1648. He then wrote A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft.

Daughters of Darkness

Also known as Blood on Red Lips, Children of the Night, Erzebeth, and The Promise of Red Lips

1971 (Belgium-France-West Germany) Maya, Roxy Films, and Mediterranea Films production released by Gemini Releasing in association with Maron Films

Director: Harry Kumel

Producers: Paul Collet and Alain C. Guilleaume

Screenplay: Pierre Drouot, Harry Kumel, and J. J. Amiel

Cinematography: Edward van der Enden

Music: François de Roubaix

Editors: Gust Verschueren and Denis Bonan

Running time: 87 minutes (100 minutes in uncut form)

Color

Cast: Delphine Seyrig (Countess Elisabeth Bathory), Danièle Ouimet (Valerie Tardieu), John Karlen (Stefan Chiltern), Andrea Rau (Ilona Harczy), Paul Esser (Porter), George Jamin (The Man), Joris Collet (butler), Fons Rademakers (Mother).

Synopsis: Valerie and Stefan make passionate love on a train. Two hours earlier, they were married in Switzerland. They are heading for England, where Stefan’s mother lives. When they miss their boat, they check into a seaside hotel in Ostend, Belgium. Off season, it is completely deserted.

A red car pulls up driven by a young girl named Ilona. Her middle-aged mistress checks into the hotel. The concierge is surprised that she looks exactly like a woman who checked in thirty years before. Her name was the same as well: Elisabeth Bathory. Elisabeth spots Stefan and Valerie dining. She thinks them perfect and tells them so. Ilona is jealous of how Elisabeth looks at Valerie. She wants to die, to be set free. She’s also thirsty.

In nearby Bruges, a fourth girl has been murdered and had her blood drained from her body. When Stefan sees the corpse, he can’t hide his enjoyment. This worries Valerie. A retired detective follows them back to Ostend. He tells Elisabeth that similar murders took place thirty years before.

Elisabeth becomes acquainted with the young couple. She and Stefan recall the murders of Elisabeth Bathory three centuries before. Valerie is upset to see her husband speak so delightfully of torture. She goes to her room. She undresses. When she looks on the balcony she sees the nude Ilona. She screams. Elisabeth tells her she imagined seeing Ilona. That night, while Stefan and Valerie make love, Elisabeth and Ilona watch from the balcony.

Stefan finally calls his mother, who happens to be a man. He is upset that Stefan has married but tells him they’ll figure out what to do with her once they arrive in England. At night Stefan brutally beats Valerie with a belt. She tries to leave him, but Elisabeth stops her at the train station. Valerie is disgusted when Elisabeth tells of her love for her. But she listens when Elisabeth says Stefan thinks of Valerie only as a slave.

At Elisabeth’s instruction, Ilona seduces Stefan. He pulls her into the shower. She panics and falls on an open razor and is killed.

Elisabeth takes control. They bury Ilona. Racing back to the hotel to beat the sunlight, Elisabeth runs over the snooping ex-detective. She and Valerie sleep together. Valerie tells Stefan she is like a different person when with Elisabeth. She can’t control herself. The three dine together. Elisabeth tells Valerie to kiss Stefan. She obeys but is repulsed. Stefan slaps Valerie. The two women fight him and kill him by hitting him over the head with a heavy glass bowl. They drink the blood that flows from his wrists.

With the body of Stefan in the trunk, Elisabeth and Valerie drive away. They can’t wait to sample life’s pleasures. But the morning sun gets into Valerie’s eyes. The car crashes and Elisabeth is impaled on a sharp limb.

A young couple at a resort listens to a strange woman tell them how perfect they are, and how they will be great friends. But though she sounds like Elisabeth, she looks like Valerie.

This Belgian-made English-language vampire film, which director-writer Harry Kumel termed “a gothic fairy tale for full-grown adults,” is among the most stylish of horror films and might very well be the most perverse. Twentieth Century Fox originally was set to both finance and release the picture: its executives had been impressed by Kumel’s prize-winning Monsieur Hawarden (1968), about a mysterious baroness who lives as a man outside Amsterdam, and probably figured he’d tell an equally intriguing tale of the historical “bloody countess,” Elisabeth Bathory. But a disagreement over distribution resulted in 20th’s changing its mind and Kumel desperately searching for a new backer. Gemini Pictures agreed to let Daughters (then titled Blood on Red Lips) be its first picture as long as Kumel was willing to make changes in his screenplay to make it more commercial. (The result? Gemini’s J. J. Amiel got cowriter credit.) We who detest studio interference that forces a writer or director to alter his movie, may protest Gemini’s insistence that the picture contain more nudity and violence than Kumel intended, as well as including the telephone scene between Stefan and his male “mother” that suggests a macabre homosexual relationship between the two. (Critics dispute whose idea this scene was.) But it is precisely because Daughters is an utterly bizarre, kinky film that it has such allure.

In its publicity releases, Gemini used a four-word slogan: “Vampirism, lesbianism, homosexuality, sadism!” Simple enough, and more accurate than the ad Gemini ran in Variety. According to this ad, Judith Crist considered Daughters “Exquisite!” What Crist actually stated in her New York magazine review was that “the exquisite [Delphine] Seyrig has . . . landed in a horror of a movie.” (Gemini would have done better quoting Variety itself or, strangely enough, The Christian Science Monitor, which gave Daughters mild endorsements.) Most New York-based critics agreed with Crist. Luckily, the only review I read at the time was in The New York Times, where Howard Thompson, whom I remember going out on the limb only once before, to praise The Nutty Professor in 1963, asked temptingly, “Want to see a fascinating vampire picture?”

I didn’t think Daughters a horror masterpiece then—and I still don’t—but I greatly appreciated its oddness, its daring stylistic impositions, its spellbinding character interaction. And that Kumel had clearly made an art film, not the exploitation film Gemini wanted. As it drifted off into temporary obscurity over the decade, it remained distinct in my memory while countless horror films, some better, blended into one another. As it turned out, others couldn’t forget this film either, and in the early eighties it reemerged, at revival houses, even at the Museum of Modern Art. It is a flawed film to be sure, but of all the horror films that have strived for high camp, only Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) have so masterfully combined traditional horror elements with outrageous, often ludicrous wit; only Paul Bartel’s cult item Private Parts (1972) and Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982) can approach its sexual perversity, but neither matches the eroticism that pervades every scene of Daughters. Moreover, it is that rare horror film with social relevance: It more than expressed feminist themes at a time when mainstream movies weren’t so brave; it actually had a decidedly antimale attitude, despite being made by men.

Male vampires in movies usually need to drink a victim’s blood before gaining control, but female vampires such as Elisabeth use subtler methods—as Valerie discovers.

Until Personal Best (1982) and Lianna (1983) came along to tastefully, in my opinion, and fairly graphically depict loving, sexual relationships between women, lesbians as central characters could only be found in porno flicks and vampire films (maybe because audiences accepted the notion that lesbians were as perverted as bloodsuckers). There is a famous, extremely sensual scene with vampire Gloria Holden and streetwalker Nan Grey in Dracula’s Daughter, which was filmed way back in 1936, that has strong lesbian implications. In 1961, when Roger Vadim made his haunting vampire film Blood and Roses, in which Elsa Martinelli comes to possess the angelic Annette Vadim, there was no longer the need to be merely suggestive. And as films became more explicit and sensational, female vampires and their female victims could be seen cavorting in the nude (often with blood dripping from fangs onto bare bosoms) in films all over Europe: in England, in Hammer Studios films like The Vampire Lovers (1970), with Ingrid Pitt, and its semisequel Lust for a Vampire (1971); in France, in Jean Rollins softcore sex-bloody horror films; in Spain, in Jesus Franco films like Vampyros Lesbos (1971), a title that needs no translation.

In America, Stephanie Rothman directed the tongue-in-cheek The Velvet Vampire (1971). Despite having a bright, sunny look unique to vampire films (her vampire loves the sun, the plants that fill up her desert home, her dune buggy, and sex), Rothman’s film has striking thematic and plot similarities to Daughters. It too is about a female vampire with a sense of humor who breaks up the male-dominated marriage of a young couple by first showing the wife how faithless and worthless he is, then seducing her, and finally killing him. What’s most remarkable is that in both films the lesbian couplings are preferable to those involving men. In Daughters the mistress-slave relationship of Elisabeth and Ilona (“I want to be free”) has become unfulfilling for both women, yet it comes across as being more caring, tender, and even respectable than the one we imagine between sadistic mama’s boy Stefan and his obviously diabolical “mother” (a cameo by Dutch director Fons Rademakers). And Valerie finds being with Elisabeth much less debasing than being with Stefan, whose attitude is “I’m a man, and she’s mine.”

As the film begins and Stefan and his bride of a couple of hours are in the middle of some heated lovemaking on a train, she inquires if he loves her. He answers negatively. At the time we think he is only joking, but already we dislike his cruelty. Soon after, we see that he is deceiving his wife by telling her he has been unable to get through to his mother. When he finally calls his mother and we see a red-lipped, deep-voiced, orchid-sniffing queen on the other end of the line, saying “I can’t wait to see our new flower,” we can only guess what horrors Stefan is bringing Valerie to. We get some indication perhaps when Stefan beats Valerie with a belt for no reason. When she questions his obvious delight in viewing the mutilated girl in Bruges, his sadism becomes psychological: he turns her question around and makes her feel guilty by accusing her of enjoying pointing out his perversity; when she seeks forgiveness and tries to unbuckle his belt, in an effort to seduce him on the bus, this manipulator rejects her advances. With Elisabeth’s help, Valerie comes to understand that Stefan wants her to be “a slave, a thing, an object of pleasure.” Therefore she’d rather be with Elisabeth, who truly loves her and promises to bring her happiness (“There’s so much of life still to taste”). At the last moment, Rothman stops short of having her velvet vampire and the young wife become lovers, but Kumel allows Elisabeth and Valerie to get into bed together. Still, both films confirm an important point about female vampires in the cinema: Unlike their male counterparts, who must win a woman’s “undying” love by hypnotizing them into submission and drinking their blood, females can win over a woman completely through the unbeatable combination of will power, mind control, and sex appeal. As we see again in Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983).

After being beaten with a belt by Stefan, Valerie lies awake thinking how she can escape her sadistic husband.

Just as there was an historical Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, there was indeed a Lady Dracula. Elisabeth Bathory was a Hungarian countess who got it into her head that she could preserve her youth and beauty by bathing in an elixir: the blood of young virgins. So between 1600 and 1610 she kept a “herd” of female virgins in the dungeons of her Castle Crejthe, murdering between six and eight hundred for her daily baths. When King Mathias II got wind of these atrocities he had her walled up in her castle for life. “How did the story end?” asks Stefan in Daughters. “Who knows?” replies Elisabeth knowingly.

The legend of “the bloody countess” was the subject of several horror films that came out at about the same time as Daughters. (Most did not use the name Bathory, however.) I’ve never come across Jean Grau’s Legend of Bloody Castle (1973), with Lucia Bose; Paul Naschy’s The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman (1971), with Paty Shepard; or Naschy’s sequel Curse of the Devil (1973), with Maria Silva; but Hammer’s handsomely produced Countess Dracula (1972) plays quite often. What’s most interesting about Ingrid Pitt’s obsessive Bathory (called Elisabeth Nadasdy) is that she hates women—they are her competition. She kills women to satisfy her vanity, believing beauty will help her win love and favors from men. On the other hand, Delphine Seyrig’s lesbian Elisabeth, who is confident but not vain, has no use for men. She has no fear of the retired detective: She runs past when he wants to question her (dismissing him with “I have no time for you right now”) and later she casually runs him over with her car. She despises Stefan most of all: She manipulates him into Ilona’s love trap; after he accidentally kills Ilona, she throws his clothes at him disdainfully, ordering him to get dressed; she bosses him around while he digs Ilona’s grave in the sand, submissively working on his hands and knees; and when the hole is big enough she rolls Ilona’s corpse into it without even the common courtesy of allowing him to climb out first.

While being unfaithful to Valerie, Stefan inadvertently causes Ilona’s gruesome death. He looks up from her corpse to see Valerie and Elisabeth looking at him.

Seyrig, a Lebanon-born French actress who won critical raves in the early sixties in two landmark films by Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963), must have delighted in playing this strange role. Seyrig is an ardent feminist: artistically, she sought out films in the seventies that were to be directed by women; politically, she was extremely active in a move to change antiquated rape laws in France. How she must have loved giving Stefan, the epitome of the male chauvinist pig, his just rewards. Also I’m sure she enjoyed playing Elisabeth in the manner of her friend Marlene Dietrich. Thus the ironic, wry humor, and the smile even when insulted or feeling melancholy; and the wild, magnificent wardrobe. In fact, Seyrig’s initial appearance recalls Dietrich in Sternberg films (Sternberg and Kumel were friends as well). At an angle we see only part of her visage: The sanguine lips stand out because of the white-caked facial makeup; the face is delicately framed by a black veil and the wings of a high fur collar. And she is as mysterious as Dietrich. Oddly, we never become positive that Elisabeth has become a vampire in the classic sense, although her beauty at the age of about four hundred certainly indicates she is. But we never see fangs and she denies she is a vampire when she admits to most everything else. Is this woman only pretending to be Elisabeth Bathory?

Kumel gets effectively offbeat performances from his entire ensemble, including John Karlen, who was only hired because he was Gemini’s Howard Zucker’s friend, former Miss Canada Danièle Ouimet, and the pouty, wistful Andrea Rau. But as mentioned, Kumel’s strength is his audacious style. Most directors fade to black, a few fade to white, Kumel fades to blood red. The film may contain numerous horror conventions—mist, too loud suspense music, and vampires who cast no reflections, don’t drink alcohol, and spend time peering into bedrooms from balconies—but nothing is handled conventionally. How cleverly he uses sound, music, his wonderful sets (including a deserted hotel that predates the one in Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining), colors (especially red, of course), clothes, character placement, and weird camera angles (often he shoots from above, or at a great distance to visually convey the terrible isolation each character feels). He knows how to create moods without relying on dialogue; it is the dialogue that establishes the film’s humorous tone. The film can be intentionally silly, as when Elisabeth says, “It’s a great day to be alive”—upon her return from burying Ilona and running over the detective; then it can be utterly outrageous, in a macabre sort of way, as when Stefan and Elisabeth, with her arms draped over him and massaging his chest, almost reach simultaneous orgasms while detailing for the aghast Valerie the tortures used by Elisabeth Bathory in the seventeenth century; it can be surreal, as in the magnificent shot of Elisabeth surrounding Valerie with her cape as they stand on a cliff, the full moon shining behind them; it can recall the dreamlike quality of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), as when Stefan and Valerie visit Bruges and see the girl’s corpse; and it can be downright horrifying, as when Ilona is killed by falling on Stefan’s razor. Harry Kumel never became a major director, but this one film proves he had great talent. Daughters may be a wicked film, as some critics and viewers have complained, and it is no gem, but it is sexy, imaginative, amusing, and undeniably fun. It is a curiosity piece that viewers who have tired of the latest trend in horror films surely should seek out.

Freaks

Also known as Forbidden Love, The Monster Show, and Nature’s Mistakes

1932 MGM

Director: Tod Browning

Producer: Tod Browning

Screenplay: Willis Goldbeck and Leon Gordon

Based on the short story “Spurs,” by Tod Robbins

Dialogue: Edgar Allan Woolf and Al Boasberg

Cinematography: Merrit B. Gerstad

Music: No credit

Editor: Basil Wrangell

Running Time: 64 minutes

B&W

Cast: Wallace Ford (Phroso), Leila Hyams (Venus), Olga Baclanova (Cleopatra), Rosco Ates (Roscoe), Henry Victor (Hercules), Harry Earles (Hans), Daisy Earles (Frieda), Rose Dione (Madame Tetrallini), Edward Brophy and Matt McHugh (Rollo Brothers), Louise Beavers (maid); as themselves: Daisy and Violet Hilton, the Siamese Twins; Olga Roderick, the bearded lady; Johnny Eck, the boy with half a torso; Randian, the Hindu living torso; Schlitzie, Elvira, and Jennie Lee Snow, the White Pin Heads; Pete Robinson, the Living Skeleton; Josephine-Joseph, the Half-Woman Half-Man; Martha Morris, the Armless Wonder; Frances O’Connor, the Turtle Girl; Angela Rossito, a midget; Zip and Pip; Elizabeth Green.

Synopsis: A carnival barker takes customers to look at a sideshow freak called the Feathered Hen. A woman screams. He tells the story of the freak. Cleopatra was a beautiful trapeze artist with the carnival. She knew that Hans, a midget, had a mad crush on her, and flirted with him so he’d give her money. Frieda, Hans’s fiancé—also a midget—warned Hans that Cleopatra was just taking advantage of him, but he would not listen. He believed that the normal Cleopatra loved him despite his small size and often visited her in her trailer.

Venus, the carnival’s pretty seal trainer, moved out of strongman Hercules’s trailer when she realized he was no good. She and Phroso, the clown, became intimate friends, but they still cared about what was going on with their friends, the carnival freaks. Among the happier events: The human skeleton and the bearded lady had a child—a hairy baby girl; Violet Hilton agreed to get married just like her Siamese twin sister Daisy; Schlitzie, one of the pinheads, got a new dress.

Hercules and Cleopatra had an affair. They laughed at Hans behind his back for thinking she was really interested in him. But when Frieda let it slip out that Hans was heir to a great deal of money, Cleopatra realized she and Hercules could become rich if she married Hans.

After the wedding there was a celebration. Cleopatra and Hercules were extremely drunk and openly cozy with each other. Frieda became very upset and walked away. Hans felt humiliated. When all the freaks started chanting to Cleopatra that they accepted her as one of them, she became hysterical at what she regarded as an insult and mocked them. Her true feelings about freaks were revealed.

After Hans’s inheritance, Cleopatra began giving him poison, which she told him was medicine. But Hans was aware of her evil plot and spit out the poison when she wasn’t looking. Meanwhile the other freaks spied on Cleopatra and Hercules.

One stormy night, as the circus caravan moved slowly toward the next town, Hercules tried to break into Venus’s wagon to rape her, but Phroso interfered. During their fight, the wagon overturned, throwing them out. Just before Hercules got the upper hand, he was struck by a knife. Pinheads, Johnny Eck (the boy with half a torso), Randian (the Hindu Living Torso), and other freaks chased him through the forest. For Hercules, there was no escape.

Meanwhile, other freaks confronted Cleopatra with the fact that she’d been poisoning Hans. They pulled out knives and guns. She ran through the forest, but they were close behind . . .

Cleopatra is the Feathered Hen. She is so mutilated that she is more chicken than woman. She squawks.

Phroso carries on a “normal” conversation with Randian, the Hindu Living Torso.

When a boy in the late 1800s, Tod Browning did what millions of lads just dream about: He quit school and ran off to join the circus. He befriended the sideshow freaks and witnessed firsthand the public’s simultaneous feelings of morbid fascination, fear, and pity toward them. It was these feelings that Browning drew out of audiences when he directed a series of silent horror classics in which Lon Chaney played characters with physical abnormalities. (Sometimes Chaney would have no arms; sometimes he would have no legs; always his body was twisted and ugly.) But while these films dealt with physical grotesqueries, they were not about freaks per se; it was only when, at the suggestion of midget actor Harry Earles, he made Freaks, starring actual freaks, that Browning was able to adequately express his own feelings toward the strange folk he had worked and lived with as a child. Viewers of this picture will feel not only fear, curiosity, and pity toward the freaks but also warmth, respect, and amazement. “Freaks is moving, harsh, poetic, and genuinely tender,” writes critic Penelope Gilliatt. “To enable people to look at grossly deformed human beings without ever feeling sickened or even intrigued is the sort of thing that can be done by art.” Despite what Gilliatt writes, we are jolted and a bit sickened by our first sight of the freaks in the picture, when the twisted, deformed creatures are playing in the farmer’s field. But they are presented to us so matter-of-factly (without dramatic music or close-ups) that within minutes we are, as Gilliatt contends, perfectly comfortable in their presence. In fact, we can’t help but admire how well they function despite their handicaps and that they carry on pridefully, their physical abnormalities notwithstanding. Freaks without hands eat with their feet; those without legs walk on their hands; and even Randian, who was born without arms or legs, gets along—he can even light his own cigar. Browning’s point is that people needn’t pay to see them just because of their “differentness”—with the exception of the pinheads, these freaks are talented show people. For one thing, they can “act” in front of a camera. Some of them even display a quirky sense of humor (especially the Hilton Siamese twins).

The first time we see the freaks they are frolicking in the woods like five-year-olds at play. When the owner of the property comes upon them, he lets them stay on his land because Madame Tetrallini, their supervisor, assures him that they are as harmless as children. But we soon learn that they are much more complex than children and that they only revert to their childlike side as a ploy to get outsiders to leave them alone. The same freaks who clutch Madame Tetrallini for protection in this early sequence will later crawl through the rain-soaked forest with guns in their pockets and long knives in their teeth to castrate Hercules (this castration is implied although the actual scene depicting this was deleted from all prints) and mutilate Cleopatra. Children? It is Cleopatra’s treatment of Hans as if he were a child that makes her so insidious. “To me—you’re a man,” says Frieda to Hans. And he is a man, but Hans mistakenly believes that being a man means being “big”; in order for him to be convinced that he is normal (a man), he must meet the approval of a normal woman. The opening shot of Cleopatra shows her high on the trapeze looking down on Hans admiring her from below. She will later refer to Hans as “my little green-eyed monster,” and as a “dirty, slimy freak,” but we can tell immediately from this visual metaphor how “small” she thinks him to be. Her downfall, of course, is a result of her also mistaking size for a sign of manhood. When she is playing around with Hans, she isn’t dealing with a child.

Told by the freaks that they accept her as one of them, Cleopatra is revolted. Hans (at the head of the table with his back turned) feels shame that his wife has acted so insultingly toward his friends. Only Hercules is amused by the situation.

Browning’s picture pits beautiful physical specimens against freaks of nature. But it is the freaks who become our heroes and Cleopatra and Hercules who come across as repugnant monsters. Cleopatra and Hercules are typical normal people: They are in love with physical beauty (she has a picture of a muscleman on her wall) including their own; and seek wealth and sexual gratification no matter whom it hurts. They are unfaithful every chance they get, disloyal even to each other. On the other hand, the strength of the freaks lies in their solidarity. They accept that they are not normal—this is their common bond—and have learned that there is no shame in looking like they do. (Hans temporarily forgets this.) It is only when someone tries to harm them or damage their self-respect that they find it necessary to defend themselves. Theirs is a community of capable individuals who watch over one another. When one is hurt, they all feel the pain and come out in force, with one objective, as one—and not like little children. Their code of honor calls for retribution; it does not call for leniency.

Venus, played with pizzazz by beautiful Leila Hyams, gives Frieda advice on how she should treat her man Hans.

Freaks doesn’t become a horror movie until the wedding banquet. The freaks sit around the table and walk on it, dance and drink, and do tricks. The fire-eater and the sword-swallower do their routines. It is like something out of Buñuel. Cleopatra is enjoying herself smooching with Hercules and insulting Hans when the freaks begin to chant deliriously, “We accept you, one of us. (Gooble, gobble*)” and offer her a toast. She “freaks out” and chases them away for insulting her by suggesting that she could be one of them. They leave the banquet, but they don’t go away. Browning places them under trailers, under trailer steps, at trailer windows—always staring at Hercules and Cleopatra, giving them the willies. Once insulted, they are all business as Cleopatra learns when they enter her trailer looking like Al Capone’s hit men, pulling guns and knives from their coat pockets. The night scene when the freaks crawl under the trailers through the mud puddles and slither and hop through the woods to get to Cleopatra and Hercules is much creepier than anything in Browning’s Dracula (1931), as horrifying as anything he ever did. It has often been criticized for exploiting the physical abnormalities of the freaks to create its terror. Of course, this is true. But the freaks must be portrayed as they are in this scene: to emphasize the fact that both Cleopatra and Hercules, seeing them approach, think of them as monsters; and to remind us that freaks won’t allow the world to trample on them, that they are a formidable force when united, and that despite being “exhibits” in the carnival, they are not passive beings, but capable of aggression.

It is because of the freaks that the picture has had so much trouble with censorship over the years. (It was banned in England for thirty years.) But I can think of no film from the period that is filled with more sexual innuendo. The relationship between the very sexy Venus and Phroso is most peculiar. “You’re a pretty good kid,” she tells him. “You’re darn right I am,” he replies, adding this unexplained line: “And you should have caught me before my operation.” There is one long scene in which you believe Venus is talking to Phroso while watching him take a bath. Finally, we see that he is wearing pants and the tub we thought he was sitting in (he is standing through the tub) is just a prop for a clown routine. We don’t know what went on when Venus shared a trailer with Hercules, but we know what’s about to happen when he visits Cleopatra. She asks how many eggs he wants her to make for him. “Not many,” he says. “Six.” She opens up her robe to reveal her black slip. “How do you like them?” she asks. He looks at her breasts and says, “Not bad.” Even the Siamese twins, the Hilton sisters, take part in the suggestive humor. They each have a man (a husband and a fiancé), and we wonder what the sleeping arrangements are. An amusing moment occurs when one of the sisters is kissed on the lips and we see that the other sister is enjoying the sensation. Oddly, Browning didn’t fully exploit the sexual possibilities of Josephine-Joseph the half-woman half-man. But just her presence in the sleazy sideshow atmosphere will start you thinking.

Interestingly, there seem to be at least three versions of Freaks in circulation. The one I always saw until a couple of years ago ends with a shot of Cleopatra turned into a chicken (just like Browning turned Chaney into a chicken for a twenties’ publicity pose), squawking like Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel (1930). But I have seen two other versions with a tagged-on scene. In the first, Phroso and Venus, both smartly dressed, leave an office (possibly in a court house) and smile at the hugging Hans and Frieda, who smile back. In the second, a depressed Hans looks as if he is about to cry. Perhaps it’s because he thought he had the beautiful Cleopatra, but now Browning has him being married off to Frieda, a character played by Daisy Earles, his real-life sister.

The classic shot of Cleopatra after the vengeful freaks have had their way with her.

*It sounds like “gooble, gobble” to me.

Godzilla, King of the Monsters

1956* (Japan-U.S.A.) Embassy release of a Toho production

Directors: Ishiro Honda (original footage) and Terry Morse

Producer: Toho International, Inc.

Executive Producer: Tomoyuki Tanaka

Screenplay: Takeo Murata and Ishiro Honda

From an original story by Shigeru Kayama

Cinematography: Masao Tamai and Guy Roe (American footage)

Special effects: Eiji Tsuburaya, Akira Watanabe, Hiroshi Mukoyama, and Kuichiro Kishida

Music: Akira Ifukube

Editor: Terry Morse

Running time: 80 minutes

B&W

Cast: Raymond Burr (Steve Martin), Takashi Shimura (Dr. Yamane), Momoko Kochi (Emiko Yamane), Akira Takarada (Hideto Ogata), Akihiko Hirata (Daisuke Serizawa).

Synopsis:** Steve Martin, American correspondent for United World News, lies injured in a Tokyo hospital, along with countless other victims. The city has been destroyed. He greets Emiko, the daughter of famous paleontologist Dr. Yamane. She tells Steve, “We’re all living on borrowed time.” Steve flashes back on past events.

Steve had come to Tokyo to meet his scientist friend Dr. Serizawa. He was met by Tomo, a government official, who informed him that when he was flying over the ocean a ship had been wiped out. There had been a blinding flash and the ocean had burst into flame. Then eight other ships were obliterated. Only a few men were rescued. Covered with strange burns and suffering from shock, they soon died. At a meeting of scientists, Dr. Yamane and others decided to question the natives of Odo Island, where for centuries there had been a legend about a great monster of the land and sea: Godzilla.

Steve and Tomo went to the island. At night, during a storm, some natives were killed and huts crushed. Screaming natives claimed they had seen Godzilla. Odo natives came to Tokyo to testify, spurring Yamane to lead a scientific expedition to the island. He discovered that the land was radioactive. Suddenly Godzilla, a 400-foot beast, appeared over the mountain. The people ran to safety. Emiko fell but was pulled to her feet by young seaman Ogata. Although she was engaged to Serizawa, she and Ogata were in love.

Back in Tokyo, Yamane announced that Godzilla had been wakened from a two-million-year sleep by the atomic-bomb testing in nearby Bikini Atoll. Godzilla is radioactive.

Godzilla emerged from Tokyo Bay. He destroyed a train and a bridge, killing many people. Guns had no effect on him. When he next came from the water, the military had put an electric barrier around the city. He ripped down the wires and walked through Tokyo, spewing his atomic breath, crushing all buildings in his path. Steve was hospitalized when a ceiling fell on him. He tells Emiko that it looks hopeless for mankind. She confesses that Serizawa has invented an Oxygen Destroyer, which when placed in water could destroy the monster.

After much soul searching and arguing with Ogata and Emiko, Serizawa agrees to use his Oxygen Destroyer. But he says that it must never be used again.

Ogata and Serizawa take the weapon into the ocean where Godzilla waits. Ogata emerges from the water and climbs aboard the navy ship where Steve, Emiko, and Dr. Yamane stand. He expects Serizawa to follow. But Serizawa remains below once he detonates his weapon. With the oxygen gone, Godzilla is killed. Serizawa tells Emiko and Ogata to be happy together. He cuts off his own oxygen, committing suicide rather than suffer the guilt of having created such a terrible weapon and possibly be tempted to use it again. All on board weep for the gallant man. Steve realizes that Serizawa gave his life so the world can begin anew.

I admit nostalgic affection for Ishiro Honda’s flying reptile film Rodan (1956) because it scared me into screaming “Japanese! Japanese!” in my sleep when a kid. But even with the popularity of campy (as in bad) movies, I am at a loss to explain the cult in America for Japanese monster movies—not just for the likes of Godzilla, King of the Monsters; Rodan; and Honda’s Mothra (1961), which are considered the cream of a poor crop, but also for all those silly, terribly dubbed cheapies that play on the Early Show and on weekends opposite cartoons. Members of this odd group can correctly name the winners and losers in The War of the Gargantuas (1966), distinguish among the faces of Ghidra—the Three-Headed Monster—and list the films containing the absurd Gamera, an atomic flying turtle. They resent Kong’s narrow victory in the American-release version of King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) and would prefer seeing the original Japanese version, which, I am told, has Godzilla the victor over the American favorite.*** And, unlike most American science fiction fans, they love Godzilla, King of the Monsters.

Godzilla, the embodiment of the A-Bomb dropped on Japan in 1945, emits its atomic breath.

It may be surprising to some that in Japan Gojira, as the non-Americanized version is called, is regarded with the same awe and pride as Americans feel toward King Kong (1933). (Ironically, King Kong was the major influence on Eiji Tsuburaya, Toho’s special effects master.) Not only did the first Japanese monster film cost thirty times that of the average Japanese film of the day, and break all records during its much ballyhooed November 1954 premiere engagement (a Gojira radio play had heightened anticipation), but it also received much serious critical attention in its native country. As Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie point out in The Japanese Film (Tuttle, 1959), even those who criticized “the picture’s exploitation of the atom-bomb scare, praised it for an ‘intellectual content usually lacking in foreign pictures of the same genre.’” It won many awards, including the Japanese Film Technique Award for Tsuburaya. In The Japanese Fantasy Film Journal (No. 13, 1981), Ed Godziszewski writes:

To this day it remains the undeniable favorite of nearly all the monster films in Japan and is considered in Japan by many to be the second greatest Japanese film ever made, next to Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai [1954]. Because of Gojira’s success, Toho produced a wave of science fiction and fantasy films until the mid-70’s, when soaring costs and dwindling audiences brought the production of these films in Japan to virtual standstill. Despite this, thousands of fans turned out for a screening of Gojira during the 1979 Godzilla 25th Anniversary Festival, a testimony to its enduring popularity. Gojira was, and still is, the King!

The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was one who resented the American distributors’ claim that Godzilla was “King of the Monsters.” In 1956 he wrote angrily, “One might remotely regard him as a symbol of Japanese hate for the destruction that came out of nowhere and descended upon Hiroshima one pleasant August morn. But we assure you that the quality of the picture and the childishness of the whole idea do not indicate such calculation. Godzilla was simply meant to scare people.”

Viewings of Gojira, which finally had its American debut in subtitled form in the summer of 1982, and Godzilla, King of the Monsters reveal conclusively that the nuclear bomb theme was foremost in the minds of both the Japanese filmmakers and the American distributors who altered it for American release. Kong, of course, is king, but Crowther was wrong in thinking Godzilla was simply meant to scare viewers. What makes the picture interesting—even though it isn’t that enjoyable or exciting (the Honda version is so somber it is dull)—is that unlike all those giant creatures found in American SF films of the fifties, Godzilla was not just a bad consequence of foolhardy nuclear testing. This merciless monster who kills and destroys with machinelike precision, impersonally and indiscriminately, is meant to be the embodiment of the five-ton atomic bombs that immediately killed 210,000 people when dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This horror film gave Americans one of their first opportunities to see Japanese fury and disgust over what America did to them in August 1945.

Raymond Burr gave his least interesting movie performance in the American version of the film, yet next to his killer in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), this is probably his most memorable cinema role.

When the war ended, Allied Occupation forces in Japan regulated the film industry, destroying more than half of the pictures made, and heavily censoring others. Naturally, for a time, Japanese directors didn’t bother to make films with war themes. Beginning around 1950, however, with the Occupation forces long gone, many films were made with antiwar messages, in angry reaction to the American-made war films that were being imported for the first time and the outbreak of the Korean conflict, which Japan wanted to stay out of. The tone of films such as Vacuum Zone (1952) and Honda’s Eagle of the Pacific (1953) was not anti-American as one might suspect but anti-imperialistic and antimilitaristic, with World War II Japan the target. But filmmakers wouldn’t continue to ignore what they felt was America’s crime against humanity. First came Children of Hiroshima (1952). This was followed by Hedio Sekigawa’s widely seen Hiroshima (1953)—containing documentary footage of the Bomb’s aftermath—which epitomized the anti-American films of the period. Anderson and Richie write: “The picture was financially successful . . . and opened the way for the spate of other films supposedly expressing the American terrorization of Japan.”

Early in 1954, Toho Studios’ executive producer Tomoyuki Tanaka became excited by the fine American film Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), about a dinosaur that is awakened by nuclear blasts and rampages through New York. Wanting to do something similar, Tanaka conceived a project titled The Big Monster from 20,000 Miles Beneath the Sea. That title was changed to Gojira, which was the nickname of a gigantic man on the Toho staff. Meanwhile, the giant octopus which Tsuburaya had envisioned as the monster became a combination Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus, with a multiplated dorsal fin down its back. Two men alternated wearing the one-hundred-pound, virtually airless Gojira suit (accumulating blisters, getting muscle cramps, losing twenty pounds, and even fainting in the process); also two small Gojira puppets were used, including one that emitted a smoky spray, simulating Gojira’s atomic breath. Because of all the special effects, including the building of many miniatures which Gojira crushes throughout the film, the picture took six months to complete. Two years later it was released in America, in a newly edited version.

This lobby card was meant to draw parallels between Godzilla and King Kong, who also destroyed a train back in 1933. Another lobby card had Godzilla being attacked by planes, reminding viewers how Kong met his death.

The most obvious difference between Honda’s version and that turned out by American Terry Morse is that an American character, correspondent Steve Martin, appears in the U.S. film. In cleverly edited scenes, he appears to talk to Japanese characters from the Honda version—but of course their faces are never shown in the same shot. Martin also serves as narrator. Therefore much of the dialogue can remain in Japanese—giving the production surprising authenticity—because Steve translates the words for us or asks his Japanese sidekick (also an actor hired by Morse) to translate for him. Because of Martin’s presence, a Japanese newspaperman from the original version thus became obsolete and his footage was eliminated. In one scene, Martin also takes the place of a Japanese television announcer of the original who sees the monster approaching through the streets of Tokyo and has no way to escape from its path—Martin, like the Honda character, just keeps talking into his microphone as the monster gets closer and closer. Raymond Burr, as Steve, has to react to people and events filmed two years earlier. And he bungles it. His emoting is so nonexistent that at times it’s hard to believe he knows he’s making a horror film. His expression changes only twice: when he takes out a pipe and when he is expecting to die and wipes the sweat from his forehead. Burr was hired for only one day’s work, but it’s amazing how much he’s subjected to as the character he plays is hustled around from one location to another by Serizawa’s aide. It’s little wonder Burr looks nauseated in his final screen moments.

The American version makes two deletions that arouse suspicions regarding the covering up of references to damage done by the A-Bomb: a young woman says that she doesn’t want to be a victim of Gojira, “not after what I went through in Nagasaki”; a doctor detects that a little girl has radiation poisoning, and though she is sitting up now, he indicates she is doomed. Morse also makes changes that identify Godzilla with the deadly powers of the A-Bomb that fell on Japan. Honda has the few ship survivors disappear after their rescue. In the Morse footage these men, who we’re told have been exposed to radiation burns, die mysteriously from the aftereffects. Martin speaks of the pervasive “odor of human flesh” in Godzilla’s wake and describes the rubble as “a smoldering memorial to the unknown”—the unknown being both the incomprehensible bomb that ended the war and what lies ahead in the terrifying atomic (and nuclear) age. Morse retains the scene where the ship and crew are destroyed by a blinding flash of light that initiates a fire—certainly a sign that Godzilla has A-Bomb powers; he also leaves in Honda’s scenes in which the monster emits its atomic breath (rather than only showing it kill by trampling and using its claws), and in which the monster glows, indicating it is radioactive. Oddly, Morse has Steve tell us that Tokyo is evacuated before Godzilla’s attack, which hints that the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were prepared for some kind of attack. Knowing this wasn’t the case, Honda didn’t have the city become deserted and inadvertently stuck Morse with footage that makes no sense in the American version: After Godzilla leaves, the hospitals are filled with his victims—people who were supposed to be out of town.

Early in the Morse film, Emiko surveys the hospital victims and worries, “We’re all living on borrowed time.” This is the kind of gloomy statement made at the end of the Honda version by Dr. Yamane; like Edmund Gwenn at the conclusion of Them! (1954), in which bomb-testing creates giant ants, Yamane predicts future monsters if scientists keep experimenting with deadly weapons. On the other hand, Morse’s film ends optimistically (after all, his film is being shown to the people who dropped the Bomb and won World War II), with Steve mumbling something about how “the whole world could wake up and live again.”

In Morse’s film, Dr. Serizawa, the inventor of the Oxygen Destroyer, the ultimate weapon that is even stronger than the A-Bomb (Godzilla), doesn’t know if he should use it to destroy the monster. We are told he has a moral “responsibility no man has faced.” Of course, here Morse is overlooking the fact that the inventors of the A-Bomb, who had gone on to create the H-Bomb, had faced the same decision as Serizawa—unfortunately, they hadn’t the foresight to destroy the formula for the Bomb after it was used in Japan. Consequently, nuclear testing has proliferated. Serizawa is a Japanese Robert Oppenheimer, the deeply troubled man who created the bomb and later disavowed further bomb testing. Like Serizawa, he concluded that people are just fooling themselves when they say they are creating bombs to be used for peaceful purposes. In Honda’s film, Serizawa (who lost his eye in the war) says, “Man is weak. As long as I live, I may be tempted to use it.” That he uses his Oxygen Destroyer to put an end to Godzilla is philosophically confusing because it almost backs up America’s much disputed claim that it used the A-Bomb in Japan to quickly end the war and stop the killing. But that he destroys his formula and kills himself we can respect: These are drastic acts which Honda, if not Morse, wishes those scientists around the world involved in bomb experimentation would consider. Obviously, none of these scientists saw Godzilla.

Godzilla, King of the Monsters, like Gojira, can be taken too seriously. It does have its camp elements. For instance, when Serizawa and Ogata fight in Serizawa’s lab over the Oxygen Destroyer, and we are in the midst of the most serious scene in the picture, the men suddenly turn to watch a television set that is on for some reason. (In Morse, the many singers we see on the set are supposedly singing a prayer of mourning. Significantly, in Honda, they sing a song about future peace.****) Equally amusing is when Yamane (played by Kurosawa’s great actor Takashi Shimura) sends Ogata and Serizawa into the ocean, where they will detonate the ultimate weapon in mortal combat with the seemingly indestructible monster; his advice? “Be careful.”

*The Japanese-language film was titled Gojira. It was released in 1954, and first played in a subtitled version in the United States in 1982. It was made by Toho Studios and directed by Ishiro Honda (sometimes called Inoshiro Honda). It runs 98 minutes and has the same stars as Godzilla except for Raymond Burr. The film’s chronology is the same.

**This is the synopsis for Godzilla, King of the Monsters, not Gojira.

***With King Kong vs. Godzilla, Godzilla became a Japanese folk hero. In future films, Godzilla would protect Japan from attacks by Mothra, Ghidra, the Smog Monster, Megalon, et al.

****Even though American science fiction films had antibomb themes (while exploiting the Bomb at the same time), they were not antimilitaristic. Nor did they seriously support a goal of world peace, which in the McCarthy era was considered by the film industry to be a communist goal that was supported in the United States only by those sympathetic to Russia.

Halloween

1978 Compass International Pictures release of a Falcon International production

Director: John Carpenter

Producer: Debra Hill

Screenplay: John Carpenter and Debra Hill

Cinematography: Dean Cundey

Music: John Carpenter

Editors: Tommy Wallace and Charles Bornstein

Running time: 91 minutes

Color

Cast: Donald Pleasance (Loomis), Jamie Lee Curtis (Laurie), Nancy Loomis (Annie), P. J. Soles (Lynda), Charles Cypers (Brackett), Kyle Richards (Lindsey), Brian Andrews (Tommy), John Michael Graham (Bob), Nancy Stephens (Marion), Tony Moran (Michael, age 21).

Synopsis: In Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween night in 1963, while his teenage sister Judith made love to her boyfriend upstairs, six-year-old Michael Meyers took a long knife from the kitchen drawer. After Judith’s boyfriend had left, Michael went upstairs, put on a Halloween mask, and stabbed Judith to death. During the next fifteen years he was kept in isolation at a mental hospital in Smith’s Grove, Illinois, under the supervision of Dr. Loomis. He never spoke a word in all that time, he just stared at the wall . . . waiting. On October 30, 1978, Michael steals a state car and escapes. Loomis, horrified because he thinks Michael the personification of evil, capable of terrible crimes, drives toward Haddonfield, believing that Michael will head there. He is correct: Michael has killed a trucker and stolen his clothes and has come back to his old house, vacant since the night of the murder. On Halloween morning he looks out his front door and sees Laurie on her way to the high school. Later Laurie, from her classroom window, sees Michael standing across the street behind a state car. He wears a mask.

When Laurie and her more outgoing friends Lynda and Annie, Sheriff Brackett’s daughter, walk home from school, Laurie notices the state car drive past. It comes to a sudden halt a few yards ahead but then moves along.

Loomis arrives in Haddonfield. He goes to the graveyard, where he discovers that Judith Meyers’s tombstone is missing. Loomis talks to Sheriff Brackett, who is investigating the theft of a mask, a rope, and some knives from a hardware store. Together they go to the Meyers’ house and wait for Michael to return. On Halloween night, Laurie babysits for Tommy while Annie is across the street babysitting for Shelley Wallace. As the girls talk on the phone, Tommy keeps interrupting the conversation to tell Laurie that he sees the boogeyman outside the Wallace house. Each time Laurie looks, he is gone.

Before Annie goes to pick up her boyfriend, she drops off Shelley with Laurie and Tommy. When Annie climbs into her car, Michael is in the backseat and slits her throat. Lynda and her boyfriend Bob arrive at the Wallace house and, finding no one there, go upstairs and make love. When Bob goes to the kitchen alone, he opens a closet and Michael jumps out and impales him with his knife high on a wall. Michael then goes upstairs and strangles Lynda.

Not understanding why Annie hasn’t returned, Laurie goes to the Wallace house. She finds Annie, Lynda, and Bob all dead, with Annie’s body lying ceremoniously under Judith Meyers’s tombstone. Michael comes at her with a knife from out of the darkness, but misses. Laurie escapes and goes back to the house across the street. Michael follows her. Laurie thinks she kills him: first with a long knitting needle and then by stabbing him with his knife. But he keeps getting back up. Loomis, canvassing the neighborhood, sees Tommy and Shelley running from the house and goes inside. Just as Michael is about to kill Laurie, Loomis shoots him numerous times and Michael falls out the window to the ground below. Loomis tells Laurie that Michael is truly the boogeyman. He looks outside and sees that Michael has gone.

The three teenage girls terrorized by psychotic Michael: (left to right) the wisecracking Annie, the upbeat Lynda, and the worried Laurie.

Having earned more than $50 million on a meager $320,000 investment, John Carpenter’s Halloween quickly became the most profitable independently made feature of all time. I am not as sold on the picture as are many critics and the picture’s enormous cult following, but I don’t dispute the claim that it was not only the scariest horror film since Psycho (1960) but also the most imaginatively directed. There have been far too many recent films about unknown assailants with knives or axes (or spears, hatchets, chain saws, etc.) who do away with teenagers/college students in gruesome fashion. Halloween inspired many of them, but Carpenter’s film is so much better than the others that it almost defies comparison. Halloween isn’t merely an excuse to show people killed off but is foremost a fascinating exercise in style. Carpenter truly understood how to make a good horror film according to the rules of the genre, blending together the dark, spooky atmosphere essential to Val Lewton; the humor and suspense that go hand in hand in Hitchcock; the cheap—but fun—tricks and shocks found in William Castle (particularly in his “haunted house” films); and the graphic violence that is a staple of the post–Night of the Living Dead (1968) American horror film.

The most noticeable characteristic of Carpenter’s technique is that his camera (in this case, the very mobile Panaglide) is constantly on the move, following young Michael from outside his house, through the kitchen and dining room, up the stairs, and into his sister’s bedroom, where he stabs her to death (this is all done in one take); craning back outside the Meyers’s house to reveal that Michael is just a small boy. In the present, it sweeps across a Haddonfield street, moving from a long shot to a close-up of Laurie, Annie, and Lynda walking home from school; or simply (yet cleverly) panning to follow imperiled characters as they walk past. The constant movement of the camera combined with Carpenter’s quick editing gives one a sense of dislocation; because we don’t have time to adjust to a particular setting we never feel secure no matter where we are. This certainly adds to our nervousness, though I doubt that Carpenter moves his camera so often to give us this sense of insecurity. More likely, he does it to keep the film’s pace from lagging. But I do believe it is to make us feel insecure that Carpenter switches back and forth (even within the same sequence) between using the camera subjectively, to make us identify with the killer or the characters in danger, and objectively to have us be observers of events transpiring on the screen. Sometimes this effect works well, as in the opening sequence, during which the camera looks through Michael’s mask’s peepholes; but too often it becomes confusing, as when we think we are seeing a P.O.V. (point of view) of the killer’s only to discover a few seconds later that he is somewhere else entirely. Such use of the camera, particularly when it is placed near a potential victim’s back to make it appear that someone is about to reach out and grab him/her from behind, definitely builds tension and adds to the paranoia that is desired by the filmmaker, but it is also unfairly manipulative and misleading.

Before she can complete her conversation with Laurie, Lynda is strangled by Michael, who has fooled her into thinking it is her boyfriend under the sheet.

Carpenter builds a sense of paranoia more legitimately through the creative use of light and shadow. With the exception of Val Lewton’s films, I can think of no horror film that has fewer brightly lit shots. It is very rare in Halloween when some part of the frame isn’t either in shadows or totally dark. This is by design and works wonderfully. I particularly like the shadowy effect caused by the trees Laurie, Annie, and Lynda walk under, which prevents them from enjoying the safety one usually feels outdoors in broad daylight. Also impressive is how Carpenter uses the color white in his night scenes. In fact, this color picture works so well because it is for the most part in black and white—the respective colors for evil (Michael) and good (everybody else). The Wallace house is white, and so are most of the interiors of both houses. This allows the moon to reflect light off the woodwork and keeps the sets from being totally dark, giving the characters an excuse not to turn on a light to see. Wisely, Carpenter also has Michael wear a white mask so at times the screen is totally dark but for his mask, which is reflecting moonlight—this is creepy. It is also extremely powerful when Laurie runs out into the hall after discovering the bodies of her friends and stands crying in the doorway of a totally dark room, and suddenly the white mask materializes in that darkness. Michael’s appearance at this moment is like a vision and recalls the early scene outside the mental hospital when the inmates walk around the grounds at night, their white robes in the darkness making them look like apparitions.

Carpenter’s imaginative use of the wide frame (the picture was filmed in Panavision) contributes to both building paranoia and building suspense. Time and again, when we search the screen we discover more than what is taking place at the point of action. If a character is in the foreground facing the camera, Carpenter will typically have the masked Michael move into the background within striking distance only to disappear when the character looks around. One of the most frightening visuals in the film is when Annie is in the foreground looking out the stuck laundry room door and, in the background (unknown to her), Michael appears outside the window. If a character in the background is looking away from the camera, as is Laurie when she puts the key under the door of the supposedly empty Meyers house, or is preoccupied, as are make-out artists Lynda and Bob in the Wallace living room, Carpenter will place Michael directly in front of the camera—but only with his back and shoulder in frame so we can see both him and his intended prey. In most cases Carpenter will jolt us by having Michael step into the frame, but in the scene in which Lynda and Bob neck on the Wallace couch he pulls his camera back to reveal Michael in the archway staring at them.

Laurie discovers the body of Annie, her throat slit, lying on a bed in front of the tombstone of Michael’s dead sister.

In most instances Michael’s appearances are accompanied by bursts of loud “shock” music, usually a note or two but sometimes driving, scary, piercing music that helps build the suspense. It has a rhythm like a timepiece or a heartbeat and by its very nature adds a time element to the picture that is otherwise missing. The best use of music, I think, is in the opening sequence; as soon as the upstairs light goes out, signifying that Judith and her boyfriend are having sex, a penetrating note jumps on the soundtrack. It fades slightly as the camera (Michael’s P.O.V.) enters the house, but as it does it seems to vibrate; then a spooky melodic line is played on top of this vibrating note as Michael goes upstairs to perform his evil chore. My major complaint with the music is that it is played far too often, at expected moments, and with little variation. (When Michael’s shadow appears on the wall behind Lynda and Bob making love in the Wallace bed, it would have been much stronger if there were no music.) John Carpenter composed the musical score and he did a fine job, but it becomes repetitive and the ringing is tiresome.

Unlike most women-in-peril pictures, Halloween has an interesting assortment of characters. Donald Pleasance is entertaining as Loomis, a quirky, perversely amusing doctor whose every word spreads terror about the events that might transpire now that “the evil is gone” from the asylum. He seems a bit batty after spending fifteen years with Michael, but we realize that it probably takes an insane type to want to track down the indestructible Michael. So we’re glad he’s on our side. Pleasance gets top billing, but the film belongs to three young female leads. Jamie Lee Curtis (the daughter of Psycho’s Janet Leigh and now a cult favorite of horror fans) as Laurie, Nancy Loomis as Annie, and, to a lesser degree, P. J. Soles as Lynda are first-rate, playing the most believable teenagers seen in the movies in some time. The horror aside, it’s a real treat watching these three Middle America teenagers jabber away about boys, school, dates, sex, etc. They are witty (Annie: “I hate a guy with a car and no sense of humor”), smart (which is why Laurie has a hard time attracting boys), and odd in a conventional sort of way (Lynda uses the word “totally” in every sentence). Compare the teenage girls in Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) with those in Halloween, and you’ll discover that De Palma still bears hostility toward teenage girls from his adolescence while Carpenter likes them despite their idiosyncrasies.

I think Michael is an incredibly interesting character, not the typical vengeful movie psycho. Carpenter defines him as Evil itself (the real boogeyman), but I don’t believe that he goes around killing people because he is evil. Insane, yes; evil, no. There is still a little boy inside the man’s body, and everything he does is part of a game. In fact, his activities are less suited for Halloween than “Mischief Night” (the night after Halloween “celebrated” in many American towns when kids play dirty tricks on their neighbors). He has fun scaring characters before he kills them, or teasing them by making noises, or jumping out of closets. The scariest moment is when Michael drives past Laurie, Annie, and Lynda and stops for a moment. He could kill any of these people any time he wants to, but he prefers to hide behind bushes and in closets, peer into windows, or, as in the case with Annie, play tricks with her car door. Before he kills Lynda, he stands in the bedroom doorway with a sheet over his body and glasses on his face, to scare her before strangling her. In his never-ending struggle with Laurie, he even pretends to be dead: repeatedly he crumbles to the ground and lies lifeless only to get up like the Greek Antaeus, stronger each time. That it is all “play” to Michael is confirmed when he stops strangling Laurie in order to put his mask back on (like an unmasked dirty wrestler). Interestingly, Michael never attacks a child (his peers). A boy even runs into him at the elementary school, and Michael lets him go immediately. That Michael is only a threat to adults is odd since by definition a boogeyman is “a hobgoblin who carries off naughty children.”

Wearing a mask, Michael tries to kill Laurie, the last of the girls.

I don’t mind that Michael terrorizes Laurie and Annie without true motivation. Carpenter’s excellent TV thriller Someone’s Watching Me! (1978) benefits from the fact that Lauren Hutton doesn’t know the man who is spying on her. I also find it somewhat refreshing that in Halloween we are rooting for the female victims and would-be victims rather than siding with the killer—as is truly the phenomenon in many of these films—and wanting to see scantily clad females get their comeuppance. On the other hand, I find it a bit annoying that the preludes to Annie and Lynda’s deaths are dragged on for such a long time that we almost hope they are killed just to get it over with; and regrettable that even this film thrives upon the deaths of pretty, half-dressed women. In fact, Halloween has been criticized for its puritanical “morality,” which calls for Michael to kill the sexually promiscuous Judith, Annie, and Lynda, and for Laurie, the only virgin of the group, to be the only one who survives. In Film Comment (March–April 1980), critic Todd McCarthy confronted Carpenter (who also wrote the script) on this point. Carpenter’s defense:

[The critics] completely missed the boat there, I think. . . . [T]he one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife. She’s the most sexually frustrated. She’s the one that’s killed him. Not because she’s a virgin, but because all that repressed sexual energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy. . . .

[The other girls are so] interested in their boyfriends [that] they’re ignoring the signs. She’s aware of [them] because she’s more like the killer, she has problems. She’s uptight, a little bit rigid. She and the killer have a certain link: sexual repression. She’s lonely, she doesn’t have a boyfriend, so she’s looking around. And she finds someone—him.

If this is truly the rationale that helped Carpenter decide what takes place in the film and why, then we can conclude that the sexually frustrated Laurie subconsciously wished Michael back to Haddonfield and into her life. When she keeps dropping the knife (a phallic symbol) by his body on the floor (while viewers scream their disbelief that she is doing something so stupid), she is actually urging on his continued “sexual” advances. Moreover, this sexual affinity between Laurie and Michael explains why Carpenter has Laurie singing “Just the Two of Us” as she walks down the street and moves Michael into the frame with her. But I don’t believe any of this. Intentional or not, Carpenter made a film in which girls are killed directly after or just before engaging in sexual activity. His defense, made up after the fact, is nonsense.

Loomis finally catches up with Michael at the moment he tries to strangle Laurie.

House of Wax

1953 Warner Bros.

Director: Andre de Toth

Producer: Byran Foy

Screenplay: Crane Wilbur

From a story by Charles Belden

Cinematography: Bert Glennon

Music: David Buttolph

Editor: Rudi Fehr

Running Time: 88 minutes

Color

Cast: Vincent Price (Professor Henry Jarrod), Phyllis Kirk (Sue Allen), Frank Lovejoy (Lieutenant Tom Brennan), Paul Picerni (Scott Andrews), Carolyn Jones (Cathy Gray), Paul Cavanagh (Sidney Wallace), Roy Roberts (Matthew Burke), Dabbs Greer (Sergeant Jim Shane), Charles Buchinsky [later Charles Bronson] (Igor), Angela Clarke (Mrs. Andrews), Ned Young (Leon Averill), Richard Benjamin (detective), Frank Ferguson (medical examiner), Reggie Rymal (barker).

Synopsis: In New York, in 1902, Professor Henry Jarrod, a master sculptor, runs a wax museum. His figures reveal his great love of beauty. His partner Matthew Burke wants him to create waxworks with macabre themes so they can make a profit on their enterprise, but he refuses. Art critic Sidney Wallace agrees to buy Burke out in three months, but Burke doesn’t want to wait that long. To get $25,000 in insurance, he sets fire to the studio, destroying all the wax figures that Jarrod considered “his people,” and leaving Jarrod for dead in the burning building. On the day Burke receives the money he agrees to marry flirtatious Cathy Gray, but at his office he is strangled by the horribly burned Jarrod, wearing a black cape, hat, and gloves.

Not too upset by Burke’s death, Cathy tells her smart best friend, Sue Allen, who lives in the same boarding house, that she has a date with another man already. That night Sue goes into Cathy’s room and finds she has been strangled, and her killer—a disfigured man dressed in black—is still in the room. He tries to kill Sue, but she escapes to the house of her boyfriend, Scott Andrews. That night, Jarrod steals Cathy’s body from the morgue. Police officers Tom Brennan and Jim Shane note that the bodies of Matthew Burke and Patterson, an attorney, have also disappeared.

With money from Sidney Wallace, Jarrod opens up a wax museum that has a laboratory in the basement. As he is confined to a wheelchair and his hands have been burned beyond repair, two employees do his sculpting: Leon, an alcoholic, and Igor, a muscular mute. Jarrod says that he can no longer create beauty, and that explains why his new figures are arranged in violent tableaux.

Sue and Scott come to the House of Wax’s grand opening. Sue is stunned to see how much Jarrod’s Joan of Arc wax figure looks like Cathy. Jarrod convinces her that it is just a good reproduction of a face whose picture he saw in the newspaper. Jarrod offers a job to Scott, a striving sculptor, and gets Sue to agree to pose for his masterpiece, Marie Antoinette.

Spurred on by the still suspicious Sue, Brennan and Shane investigate Jarrod. They notice that the Edwin Booth wax figure looks much like Patterson. They question Leon, who they realize is an ex-con who has broken parole. When they find Patterson’s watch in Leon’s possession, they arrest him. They get him to admit that Jarrod has been murdering people and turning them into wax figures.

Sue comes to the wax museum after closing time to meet Scott, but Scott has been sent on an errand by Jarrod. She looks at the Joan of Arc wax figure and when she removes its wig discovers the real, blond Cathy underneath. Jarrod, no longer pretending to be crippled, appears and prevents her from leaving. She beats him on the chest, and his wax mask breaks. When she sees his disfigured face—the face of the man she saw in Cathy’s room—she faints. Jarrod takes her to his laboratory and straps her beneath a giant cauldron full of hot wax. Just in time, Scott and the police arrive, Jarrod falls into the boiling wax, and as the liquid pours out, Brennan pulls Sue to safety.

A 1953 publicity shot for House of Wax featured stars Vincent Price, Phyllis Kirk, and Frank Lovejoy showcasing 3-D paraphernalia.

In the early 1950s, film studios panicked because television was cutting into their profits. To lure back its lost audience, they came up with 3-D, a process which added depth to the screen image and could not be duplicated on television. For about a year and a half, moviegoers flocked to theaters to see images that appeared to come right into the audience, and many producers believed 3-D (along with CinemaScope and Cinerama) was a permanent answer to their financial problems. But the 3-D craze quickly petered out, and 3-D films were considered box office poison. This is unfortunate, because filmmakers were reluctant to give it another chance for another half century.

Some of those early 3-D films were quite entertaining and justified the stereoscopic process as an alternative cinema form. But you never would have known this by reading fifties critics. They just couldn’t take seriously films that required entire theater audiences to wear plastic green Polaroid glasses in cardboard frames. Those glasses cost ten cents and caused terrible headaches, not only because they were so dark that we wanted every screen character to carry a flashlight, but also because the glasses often couldn’t eliminate the blurry double-vision effect caused by faulty camerawork (each scene was filmed simultaneously from two almost identical angles) or faulty projection (the two versions were projected simultaneously by two interlocking projectors run by studio representatives). But audiences liked those glasses and kept them for souvenirs. And they truly enjoyed the films, no matter if they were bad, blurry, or boring. Years after the 3-D craze ended I still recall those films fondly, especially House of Wax, the most popular and commercially successful fifties film that used the three-dimensional process.

House of Wax is by no means a great film, but even in the flat two-dimensional version shown on television it is great fun. I think one of the reasons the picture never got its due is because critics considered it inferior to Michael Curtiz’s Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), the film on which it was based. Unfortunately, for several decades the earlier picture was thought to be irretrievably lost, and 1950s critics assumed that it was a horror classic solely from what they had read—often material written by other critics who hadn’t seen the picture since its release. The surprising discovery of a print of Mystery of the Wax Museum in the sixties embarrassed many film historians because the much-heralded film proved to be anything but extraordinary (except perhaps in its then experimental use of two-color Technicolor). There is some fine, moody photography in the Curtiz film, a solid performance from the venerable Lionell Atwill as the insane sculptor, and a chilling climax in which Fay Wray unmasks the disfigured Atwill and after a pregnant pause lets out a bloodcurdling scream (in the remake Sue simply faints dead away). But the 1953 version, directed stylishly by Andre de Toth (ironically a one-eyed director who made a 3-D film) does not pale in comparison.

In his ghoul outfit, Jarrod abducts Cathy’s corpse from the morgue.

Vincent Price, starring in his first horror film, is not as good an actor as Atwill was, but he has more stature and better establishes a character—a man who is already a bit loony at the beginning (as is clear when he converses with his wax figures)—who would become a homicidal maniac when his life’s work is destroyed and his hands are so crippled that he can never work again. Of course, Price was a hammy actor and as always his overacting adds to the levity of the proceedings. In this case, it benefits the picture because he helps set up the proper atmosphere for the many comical inserts. (My favorite sight gag is when giddy young female visitors to Jarrod’s Chamber of Horrors try to get a good look at the nude Marat wax figure in his bath.) On the other hand, the great quantity of humor in the Curtiz film seems out of whack with the somber atmosphere created by Atwill’s no-nonsense performance.

House of Wax also has its share of exciting moments that compare favorably to those found in the 1933 film. The scene in which Sue discovers the ghoulish Jarrod in dead Cathy’s room and is then chased by him through the dark, deserted streets is quite scary. So is the nocturnal scene in which Jarrod swings by a rope into the sleeping Sue’s room; when she awakens and sits up, his shadow is cast on the wall behind her—a shot worthy of Curtiz, who used shadows as well as any director. Of course, the highlight of the film must be the early sequence when fire sweeps through Jarrod’s studio and the wax figures melt. There is something both eerie and hypnotic about watching these figures in the fire: Even when their eyes and cheeks start melting and we sadly imagine the figures to be in great pain, their expressions do not change, their smiles do not go away. This scene in the original is also chilling, but if House of Wax has an advantage over its predecessor, it is that 3-D makes such images more powerful by bringing them up close.

The spectacular burning of Jarrod’s wax figures, particularly his beloved Marie Antoinette, gives Vincent Price a chance to ham it up.

In Bwana Devil (1952), the first 3-D film, lions and other wild animals seemed to leap into our laps; in Sign of the Pagan (1954) it was charging horses that seemed to jump over our heads; in It Came from Outer Space (1953), a fiery meteor seemed to burst from the screen and zoom directly toward our seats. These are all powerful images, but the 3-D image that stayed with me longest after 3-D was outmoded is found in House of Wax. And it is not an image of one of the many props (chairs, weapons, bodies) that characters hurl our way to scare us, but of two little rubber balls attached to paddles with elastics that the barker in front of Jarrod’s wax museum hits repeatedly toward the camera. The 3-D effect makes the balls seem to shoot from the screen toward our noses—crossing our eyes—return into the screen to the paddles and, hit again, come shooting back toward our noses once more. An acquaintance also remembers this image because it caused her right eye to turn in—not until after six months of wearing an eye patch did her eye muscles mend. But even if it was harmful to our eyes, it is evidence of the imagination put into the 3-D effects in House of Wax. And it also shows that those behind House of Wax were not embarrassed to admit that 3-D was a gimmick that they wanted to exploit to its fullest. Other filmmakers were reluctant to include effects that had nothing to do with the story, but de Toth was as interested in spectacle as plot. So, for instance, he felt no qualms about having Sue and Scott go to a café for no reason other than to show what 3-D can do with high-kicking can-can dancers.

This scene, where legs shoot out from the screen and we sneak glimpses under their dresses—de Toth’s camera is located below the dancers to encourage us—goes on for some time and it is quite titillating. This is one of many times in the picture that the emphasis is on sex (which also could not be seen on television in 1953) rather than horror. Early on we see the shapely Cathy putting on a tight corset; at the end, the tied-up nude Sue lies under Jarrod’s boiling wax (a classic “bondage” sequence). De Toth was probably the first to realize that the secret to good 3-D is a story having both horror and sex—the elements 3-D certainly does the most justice to. As William Paul wrote in The Village Voice in the early seventies:

This sense of things emerging from the screen has always been the most exploitable aspect of stereoscopy; it is the one element that ads for 3-D have always stressed the most. And it is this element which makes the process so suited to horror and pornography because it creates a kind of physical environment that plays on the passive—defenseless—nature of the audience.

More skillfully than other fifties 3-D films, House of Wax combines these elements. As the barker describes Jarrod’s wax museum, House of Wax is full of “thrills, chills, and laughter.” Plus sex.

In 1981, a 3-D series at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York was cause for excitement because it featured the long-awaited 3-D print of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial “M” for Murder (1954) which until then had been commercially released only in a flat version. (The 3-D print had been shelved with the sudden demise of the 3-D craze.) But the Hitchcock film didn’t live up to expectations. Unfortunately, Hitchcock proved too conservative in his use of the effect, probably because he didn’t want to diminish the power of 3-D in the crucial scene in which Ray Milland’s hired killer falls victim to Grace Kelly’s pair of scissors. In this scene, Kelly, being strangled at the time, takes a long pair of scissors she finds on the desk, points them toward us, then stabs him in the back. The scissors protrude from his back, but with our new perspective we unfortunately realize that the scissors are actually as blunt as a pair of children’s paper cutters. So once again, House of Wax, which was also shown in the series, emerged as the cream of the 3-D crop.

In the climactic scene in the film, Jarrod, in his lab outfit, tries to pour boiling wax on the nude but still-living Sue. In this publicity shot, Vincent Price wears Jarrod’s ghoul costume.

I Married a Monster from Outer Space

1958 Paramount

Director: Gene Fowler, Jr.

Producer: Gene Fowler, Jr.

Screenplay: Louis Vittes

Cinematography: Haskell Boggs

Special Effects: John P. Fulton

Editor: George Tomasini

Running Time: 78 minutes

B&W

Cast: Tom Tryon (Bill Farrell), Gloria Talbott (Marge Farrell), Ken Lynch (Dr. Wayne), John Eldredge (Collins), Valerie Allen (Francine), Alan Dexter (Sam Benson), Jean Carson (Helen), Maxie Rosenbloom (Grady), Peter Baldwin (Swanson).

Synopsis: Driving home from his bachelor party, Bill Farrell stops his car when he sees a body in the road. Getting out, he is startled to see a hideous space creature standing in front of him. Bill is engulfed by a vapor and his body disappears. “Bill,” a creature in Bill’s body, shows up at the wedding ceremony and marries Marge, who immediately notices his strange, cold behavior.

A year passes. During this time other men in town begin acting as strangely as Bill, without emotions of any kind. Many nights the men gather at a bar to have private conversations but don’t taste their drinks—they are allergic to alcohol. They are waiting for their scientists’ reports on chromosome alterations before they can mate with the earth women, their mission on earth. Following several strange occurrences, suspicious Marge follows “Bill” into the woods late at night. She sees an alien creature leave Bill’s body and enter a spaceship. She now realizes that there is an invasion going on and that Bill has indeed been taken over.

Marge tries to contact Washington, but the operator tells her all lines are busy. When she tries to leave town, she is stopped by a police roadblock. Aliens in policemen’s bodies tell her that a bridge has been washed out. She knows that they are lying. She tells her godfather, Police Chief Collins, what she has discovered—but he too has been replaced by an alien.

Marge tells “Bill” all she knows. He calmly explains that his planet, Andromeda, has lost all its women. The men from Andromeda have come to earth to propagate with the earth women. Their children would be creatures like him and eventually would conquer the world. As a last hope, Marge goes to see Dr. Wayne. He believes her story. He tells her that he will enlist the help of all men in town who have recently become fathers—evidence that they are not counterfeits.

Wayne and several men enter the woods where the spaceship is hidden. Several creatures come out of the ship. The men fire on them but their bullets have no effect. When several men are disintegrated by ray gun blasts, they let their trained German shepherds attack the creatures. The dogs rip open the creatures’ exposed arteries and the creatures collapse, a gushy substance pouring from their bodies. Marge and “Bill” enter the forest. The townspeople go aboard the spaceship, where they find all the taken-over human beings attached to wires that feed the aliens their knowledge and memories. They detach the wires, freeing the captives. At the same instant, their alien impostors turn into a gelatinous substance and die. A happy Marge and Bill unite. As “Collins” dies he sends a message to other aliens that the invasion has failed. Numerous spaceships flee earth.

Wisely, the aliens decide that it will be easier to get earth women to agree to have babies by them if they take on the physical characteristics of earth men rather than look like this.

There were about half a dozen outstanding science fiction/horror films made in the fifties. I Married a Monster from Outer Space falls just below these in quality, but judging from how it has been neglected, one would think it was a total fiasco. In fact, even the most “complete” histories of science fiction and horror films don’t bother to discuss it. Apparently its title (in the scandal sheet exposé tradition), which in 1958 attracted huge crowds of juveniles to theaters and drive-ins (where it often played with The Blob), also had the adverse effect of turning away critics for years to come. Only in the last few years have horror and science fiction fans come to realize that the outrageous title is totally unsuited for what is basically an intelligent, atmospheric, subtly made sci-fi thriller.

I Married a Monster is part of an SF/horror film subgenre which includes all pictures about aliens taking over bodies of human beings as the first step in an all-out invasion. The two other significant films of the sub-genre, Invaders from Mars (1953) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) are point-of-view films in which the camera records the stories almost exactly as they unfold in the eyes and minds of a boy (Jimmy Hunt) and a man (Kevin McCarthy) in the respective films. The suspense builds as they discover that more and more of their acquaintances have been replaced by counterfeits and as they futilely try to get someone to believe their incredible stories. I Married a Monster is structured just a bit differently so that the suspense builds from two directions at once. In part it is a point-of-view film. We watch Marge as she picks up signs that things are amiss: “Bill” can see in the darkness, is allergic to alcohol, and has lost every human emotion; “Bill’s” male friends are as cold as he; “Sam” dies when a doctor administers oxygen; the puppy she gives “Bill” tries to bite him—and it is later killed by “her husband,” who has always been an animal lover. When Marge follows “Bill” through the woods and finds out that he is an alien, she tries to alert various individuals in the town, but because she is a woman she has an especially hard time getting men to take her story seriously. And she has the same difficulty Jimmy Hunt and Kevin McCarthy had telling the good guys from the bad. Even Police Chief Collins, her godfather, is one of them. Following in Kevin McCarthy’s footsteps, she tries to make a long-distance call, but the operator tells her all lines are busy; she tries to send a telegram to the FBI but sees the telegraph operator toss her message into the garbage; she tries to leave town but is stopped by a police roadblock. All these signs of an invasion Marge is witness to. But unlike viewers of the other two films, we are not limited to the point of view of a single character. Unlike Marge, we see Bill taken over by “Bill”; an outer space creature walking the deserted streets late at night and killing the prostitute Francine when she mistakenly thinks he’s a possible pickup; the hideous faces underneath the human visages of “Bill” and “Collins” when lightning flashes (a tremendous special effect); “Bill” intentionally strangling the puppy that has recognized his otherness; “Bill” telepathically communicating with two aliens who have replaced policemen; the two “policemen” withstanding bullets fired by a trespasser. And we overhear “Bill,” “Sam,” and the other aliens complaining about having to wear human disguises and discussing mating with earth women once their scientists give them the go-ahead. Because we are allowed to learn even more than Marge discovers through living with “Bill” for a year, we are able to see better than she just how cruel and powerful these aliens are. As a result of our knowledge we become nervous for Marge because she may be learning too much for her own welfare. Our extra fear would have been impossible if this were strictly a point-of-view film.

Bride Marge Farrell is ecstatic, but she doesn’t know that her groom, Bill, has been replaced by an alien duplicate (holding the door).

I Married a Monster was directed by Gene Fowler, Jr., who at one time was an editor for Fritz Lang. The Lang influence is very much in evidence, particularly in that Fowler skillfully creates a sense of paranoia—first in Marge, who fears she’s alone in a town full of aliens, and then in the aliens themselves when they know that their presence has been revealed and that some of the townsfolk (recent fathers) have organized to destroy them. (Fowler’s film has many scenes that are brightly lit or take place in the daylight, but at times when he wishes to heighten the paranoia his shadowy rooms and his bizarre camera angles remind one of Lang.) In Fowler’s films, as in Lang’s, people from a particular community always band together against aliens/intruders. In some of Lang’s pictures, the aliens/intruders/loners are good guys and the townsfolk (especially in films set in Germany during World War II) are unfriendly. Fowler used this theme in his lone western, Showdown at Boot Hill (1958), in which our hero, a bounty hunter played by Charles Bronson, enters a hostile town where the people unite to protect the villain he is after. (At the end Bronson and the townspeople make peace.) But in Fowler’s underrated I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), a conscientious, civic-minded posse tracks down a monster (Michael Landon) who is only sympathetic when in his human form. And in I Married a Monster, a heroic vigilante group tracks down monsters that aren’t in the least bit sympathetic (although I wrongly expected “Bill” would reform under Marge’s influence). Interestingly, a German shepherd owned by a posse member is killed fighting the monster in Teenage Werewolf. In I Married a Monster, the German shepherds get their revenge.

There are two moments in the film which immediately recall Lang. Marge and “Bill” enter their hotel. The camera climbs upward along the front of the hotel and settles on a balcony where (miraculously) Marge and “Bill” already stand in their night clothes. Of course Fowler had to stop his filming so actors Gloria Talbott and Tom Tryon could prepare themselves for the balcony scene, but he disguised his “cut” with some flashing lights as the camera reached the balcony. In Lang’s Fury (1936), a cut is similarly disguised. In a night scene Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney walk down the street and suddenly they are walking down another street and a great deal of time has passed—Lang moved the camera a little ahead of them to lose them, and when they walked back into frame it was much later. It’s a nifty “invisible” editing technique, where we believe the camera runs continuously.

Marge tells “Bill” that their marriage has left a lot to be desired.

For me, the most jarring moment in I Married a Monster is not when the monster wearing a coat kills Francine. It is when this creature looks into a department store window and his monstrous reflection is superimposed over baby dolls in the window display—and we know he is thinking of propagation. I can’t help but think of Lang’s M (1931), when child-murderer Peter Lorre looks into a window and his eyes triple in size when he sees the reflection of a little girl who passes by.

Mention should be made of the fine performance of Gloria Talbott as Marge. Talbott was not pretty in the “movie” heroine sense—she always reminded me of a sexier Roberta Shore—but she was a terrific heroine for science fiction and horror films because she projected a rare combination of strength and vulnerability. She was very believable playing the roles of women who were scared about what was happening to them but stood their ground and was truly an ideal choice to play the heroine who foils the alien invasion in I Married a Monster. Tom Tryon, years before he became a best-selling author, is less convincing although adequate as Bill/“Bill.” Importantly, he is so handsome that we can understand Marge’s unhappiness when someone with his looks acts like a robot. Tryon’s “Bill” is more interesting than his human counterpoint; as Bill, Tryon plays a character with all sorts of emotions and doesn’t quite pull it off.

One of the last aliens lies dead. The invasion is over.

I Walked with a Zombie

1943 RKO Radio

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Producer: Val Lewton

Screenplay: Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray

Based on a story by Inez Wallace

Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt

Music: Roy Webb

Editor: Mark Robson

Running Time: 69 minutes

B&W

Cast: Frances Dee (Betsy), Tom Conway (Paul Holland), James Ellison (Wesley Rand), Edith Barrett (Mrs. Rand), Christine Gordon (Jessica Holland), James Bell (Dr. Maxwell), Richard Abrams (Clement), Teresa Haris (Alma), Sir Lancelot (Calypso singer), Darby Jones (Carre-Four).

Synopsis: Betsy, an American nurse, is sent to Haiti to work for planter Paul Holland, taking care of his sick wife, Jessica. It does not take Betsy long to realize that Jessica’s malady is most unusual.

Paul is convinced that his wife is insane. In fact, he is sure that he made her that way. The natives, however, are convinced that Jessica is a zombie, one of the walking dead, and her lifeless appearance, even during movement, seems to confirm their suspicions.

As time goes by, Betsy gets to know the other members of Paul’s family. His mother is a woman caught between her strong belief in the church and a belief in the powers of voodoo. She, too, is tormented by her certainty that she turned Jessica into a zombie. Wesley, Paul’s half-brother, has always loved Jessica, and hated Paul for having treated her so poorly. He seems intent on drinking himself to death.

All in all, the house is in a troubled state. Then to complicate matters, Paul and Betsy fall in love. They wish to marry, but cannot because Paul’s wife is still alive, medically speaking, and he refuses to desert her in her sad state, for which he feels responsible. Although Betsy realizes she may lose Paul if Jessica returns to health, she sets out to cure her patient. But all fails, including shock treatments from Dr. Maxwell and taking her to a voodoo ceremony. It appears that nothing can rescue the Rand family from being in a permanent state of limbo.

Then Wesley arrives at a solution. He stabs Jessica and walks her into the ocean—before the voodoo priest can lay claim to her. He will be with her forever in death. Betsy and Paul unite in life.

A shot that illustrates the skill with which director Jacques Tourneur uses light, darkness, and shadows: Betsy is awakened by Carre-Four outside her bedroom.

In 1941, financially troubled RKO assigned Val Lewton, a former assistant to David O. Selznick, to produce a series of low-budget, escapist horror films. But Lewton—a historian, art expert, novelist, and nephew of legendary Russian actress Nazimova—was determined to please rather than exploit the wartime audience. He told his unit: “They may think I’m going to do the usual chiller stuff which will make a quick profit, be laughed at, and be forgotten, but I’m going to make the kind of suspense movie I like.”

The nine horror-suspense movies Val Lewton made at RKO between 1942 and 1946 are distinguished by the intelligence and sensitivity that went into every aspect of production, from music to characterization; as one critic of the time correctly noted, “There’s a new kind of horror picture nowadays—snappy little spook shows full of beautiful girls and sharp dialogue, good food, and French lullabies.” Lewton’s films were made in direct opposition to horror classics of the past such as Nosferatu (1922), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), Dracula (1931), and King Kong (1933), which scared people with frightening images; he relied on basic universal fears—darkness, sudden movements and sounds—to send chills through his audience. He was convinced that viewers could be scared to a far greater degree by what they imagined in the darkness, or just off screen, than by anything filmmakers could show them. The surprising financial and critical success that the Lewton series obtained is proof positive that his theories on horror, suspense, and terror were correct.

I Walked with a Zombie was the second Lewton horror film, and the second of three Lewton pictures directed by Jacques Tourneur. While its predecessor, Cat People (1942), has made the transition in recent years from “cult film” to “horror classic,” and has become the prototype for countless films, I Walked with a Zombie has replaced it as the Lewton work that shows up most frequently at revival houses, the cult favorite of the Lewton films, a movie that defies imitation.

The reason no one has attempted to make a horror film along the lines of I Walked with a Zombie is that, in truth, it is not a horror film. True, there is some eerie photography, a few suspenseful, even scary, moments, a bit of voodoo, and some zombielike creatures on the screen, but basically this film is a domestic drama set in an exotic locale. (Lewton made it a point to mix the familiar with the exotic. In this film, an American goes to the West Indies. It is likely that had she been a West Indian native, Lewton would have brought her to America.)

The lurid title, which is also the first line of the film’s (Betsy’s) narration, came from a popular Hearst Sunday supplement article written by Inez Wallace. She wrote that she had been skeptical about the existence of zombies until she ran into one while walking across a Haitian plantation. These beings, she discovered, were not “dead,” but their minds and vocal cords had been utterly destroyed from poison (or drugs). As they could understand simple orders, which they obediently carried out, they were put to work in the fields and lived in slavery. Lewton was stuck with the title RKO had purchased for him, but he ignored Wallace’s text. “They may not recognize it,” he told confidants, “but what I’m going to [make] is ‘Jane Eyre in the West Indies.’” True to his word, the film does contain an essential Jane Eyre plot element: a young female in a house with a man and his insane wife.

Inset: Calypso singer Sir Lancelot, one of many nonactors Val Lewton cast in his films, is used like a Greek chorus, turning up every few scenes to explain in song what is going on in the story.

Betsy starts to fall for her employer, Paul Holland. He loves her too but refuses to abandon his sick wife, Jessica.

Although the Lewton unit cared little about the zombie element of the film—Tourneur’s attitude was “those things don’t exist”—the film remains, along with Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), one of the few attempts to deal with the subject intelligently. Halperin had tried to show what he believed to be the true nature of the zombie, and his work visualized the zombie of William Seabrook’s The Magic Island, the same unfortunate creature about which Inez Wallace would later write. Halperin contended there are zombies. Lewton wanted viewers to make up their own minds. According to his film, a person can only become a zombie after death has occurred (which isn’t the case in Halperin’s film). We believe that Jessica’s catatonic state is a direct result of her having become a zombie, yet we also know that she never actually died, making our basis for judgment invalid. Moreover, when Wesley “kills” Jessica with a sword—a feat that was not possible earlier in the film—we must suspect that Jessica may have only been insane, after all. It is a mystery that is left unsolved.

Nurse Betsy will try anything to cure Jessica of the strange malady—here she takes her through the woods to participate in a voodoo ceremony.

Just as Lewton never insults those people in the world who do believe in the existence of the walking dead, he is careful not to criticize the superstitions of the black Haitians in the film. Even the most Christian of the white people in the film believe to a great extent in the powers of the voodoo priest. If anything, the picture shows that having faith in the magic of voodoo is well motivated.

The black characters in I Walked with a Zombie are treated with great respect. The rich whites have control of the economy of their island but the blacks have maintained control over everything that truly matters to them—their customs and religious practices—and they are the ones who understand what forces reign supreme on the island, while the whites wallow in confusion and terror. It is surprising that film historians who have traced the treatment of blacks in the movies have neglected to mention the entire Lewton series. While most Hollywood films of the time either had no blacks at all or used silly, familiar black stereotypes, the Lewton pictures were populated by black characters who possessed warmth, humor, and intelligence. For instance, one of the key roles in I Walked with a Zombie is that of a singer who wanders in and out of the film explaining the plot in song, serving as a Greek chorus (one of several ideas Lewton borrowed from Greek tragedy evident in his films). This role was hauntingly played by a cherubic, Caribbean song improvisor named Sir Lancelot, a Lewton discovery making his film debut. He would return in Lewton’s Curse of the Cat People (1944).

Likewise, feminist film historians have somehow neglected the entire Lewton horror catalog, despite the fact that nowhere in American films have there been women—working women, at that—more intelligent, responsible, resourceful, and courageous. There is not one instance, in I Walked with a Zombie or any of the other eight horror films, in which there is male heroism at work—it is the woman, time after time, who accomplishes what has to be done, and gets herself out of her own misfortunes. Quite simply, this is extraordinary, considering that these pictures were made during the war years, when every other Hollywood movie was showcasing the gallantry of the American male. Frances Dee is part of the fine Lewton tradition that culminated in Anna Lee’s dynamic social reformer of Bedlam (1946), his last film at RKO. Dee is strong, smart, independent, and brave. It is she who moves the story along, not the passive men around her. The men are brooders, she is a doer.

More than any other Lewton film, I Walked with a Zombie relies on atmosphere to transmit fright. There are few true moments of shock in the film, and those scenes that “promise” to shock—the one in which Betsy finds herself alone for the first time with Jessica, on a dark staircase, and the one in which the giant zombie (Darby Jones) threatens Betsy—are cut short before anything actually happens. Director Tourneur wanted his film to be fluid in nature, moving continuously forward, so he rejected any “shocks” that would abruptly halt his gentle pacing. He was attempting to create a “filmic poem.”

Two sequences are among the best found in the Lewton series. The first has Betsy leading Jessica down an unfamiliar path through the cane fields, on the way to see the voodoo priest. Their walk, under the gray, ominous sky, their white flowing garments blowing gently in the wind, is dreamlike. Sounds fill the air: There is a rustling breeze; an owl hoots as if to signal the presence of intruders; voodoo drums beat louder with each step the women take. And a gargantuan black figure waits in their path, as if he were the angel of death.

The second sequence is the one in which Wesley carries Jessica into the ocean. Again, this is a long silent passage with a dreamlike quality. The walk of Wesley through the jungle, down the slopes, across the sandy beach, and deeper and deeper into the ocean until he and Jessica sink beneath the water, is truly moving, the vision of the giant zombie following them to the edge of the water, chilling. Both this segment and the first one capture the essence of the film. We are watching the ultimate “beautiful nightmare.”

All the Lewton horror films are good—Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, and The Body Snatcher (1945) are masterpieces of the genre—but I Walked with a Zombie is the most impressive of the Lewton series from a visual standpoint. Most directors need dialogue—Jacques Tourneur did not. Tourneur obviously learned his lessons well from his father, Maurice Tourneur, one of the greatest directors of the silent era. The lyrical quality of the long silent passages, the shadows, the lighting, the music, the settings—all so important in his father’s silent films—is what makes I Walked with a Zombie so fascinating, and so different from the typically brutal horror film. It is not surprising that I Walked with a Zombie is the film that made Tourneur proudest.

The Lewton series was received very enthusiastically in the forties by such influential critics as Manny Farber and James Agee, with Farber particularly excited about The Leopard Man (1943)—Tourneur’s third film for Lewton—and Agee about Curse of the Cat People—which he said should have gotten an award for “the whole conception and performance of the family servant (played by Sir Lancelot), who is one of the most unpretentiously sympathetic, intelligent, antitraditional, and individualized Negro characters I have ever seen presented on the screen.” Unfortunately, few moviegoers realized that Lewton’s nine horror films were produced by the same man, and it wasn’t until the mid-sixties—long after his death in 1951—that fans and critics recognized Lewton as the equal of James Whale and Tod Browning.

The islanders have retrieved the bodies of Jessica and Wesley from the ocean.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

1956 Allied Artists

Director: Don Siegel

Producer: Walter Wanger

Screenplay: Daniel Mainwaring

From a Collier’s magazine serial by Jack Finney

Cinematography: Ellsworth Fredericks

Music: Carmen Dragon

Editor: Robert S. Eisen

Running Time: 80 minutes

B&W

Cast: Kevin McCarthy (Miles Bennell), Dana Wynter (Becky Driscoll), King Donovan (Jack), Carolyn Jones (Theodora), Larry Gates (Dan Kaufman), Jean Willes (Sally), Virginia Christine (Wilma), Ralph Dumke (sheriff), Whitt Bissell (Dr. Hill), Richard Deacon (doctor), Dabbs Greer (gas station attendant), Sam Peckinpah.

Synopsis: A doctor, arriving at a Los Angeles hospital, is directed to a hysterical man who was picked up on the highway shouting that the world is in danger. Everyone thinks Miles Bennell is insane, but the doctor agrees to listen to his story.

Miles says that he is a doctor, too, and that his practice is in the nearby town of Santa Mira. Several days ago, he returned home early from an out-of-town conference at the request of his nurse Sally. She told him that many of his patients were suffering from a mysterious malady; they believed that their friends and loved ones were impostors who looked exactly like those they replaced but lacked all traces of emotion. Miles saw this firsthand when little Jimmy Grimaldi insisted that his mother was not his mother; later Becky Driscoll, a longtime acquaintance with whom he has fallen in love, took Miles to visit her cousin Wilma, who insisted that her Uncle Ira was not Uncle Ira. Miles did not know how to explain this phenomenon, and not long afterwards Wilma and several others who had made appointments with him canceled their visits, assuring him that they were wrong in thinking people impostors.

Miles’s friends Jack and Theodora found a half-formed body. It looked like Jack. When Jack napped, it took on more shape. They fled to Miles’s house. Worried about Becky, Miles went to her house. In the basement he found a half-formed body resembling her. He got Becky from her bedroom and took her home. When he brought his friend Dan to show him the two half-formed bodies, they were gone.

Miles almost believed Dan when he said that they were imagining things, but the next night he found four pods, containing half-formed bodies of Becky, Jack, Theodora, and himself, growing in his greenhouse. He and the others destroyed the pods and decided to find help. They tried to call Washington but someone had taken control of the telephone. Taking separate cars, the two couples tried to make it out of town, but, after finding it impossible, Becky and Miles hid in Miles’s office. In the morning they opened the door for Jack only to find out that he and Theodora had been taken over. They were trapped.

Dan, also taken over, and Jack offered them a life without pain, fears, or worries. But because it is a world that has no room for love, Becky and Miles rejected them. Dan and Jack put pods in the office—when Becky and Miles fell asleep they would be taken over.

Becky and Miles stabbed Dan and Jack with hypodermics and escaped. They were chased by the town’s population into the mountains. When Becky fell asleep, she was taken over. She shouted for the other pod people to capture Miles. Miles ran onto the highway.

Miles finishes his story. The doctor doesn’t know whether to believe him. A truck driver is wheeled in—his truck had crashed and he was buried under numerous pods. The truck was coming from Santa Mira. The doctor calls the FBI and the President.

Discovering pods sprouting duplicates of themselves in Miles’s greenhouse, Jack (with the pitchfork), Becky (left), Thea, and Miles figure that their time as the lone human beings alive in Santa Mira may be running out.

During the first few minutes of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, first-time viewers usually laugh raucously at Miles’s breathless, sometimes overly dramatic and trite narration—often repeated verbatim in the dialogue—and lines like Miles’s “Even these days, it’s not as easy to go crazy as you think,” and assume the superior attitude of people watching what they believe to be camp. They do not realize that Siegel has intentionally kept the beginning of the film light, even to the point of inserting silly lines to lull the audience into a false sense of complacency. Soon there is no more laughter, just a few nervous giggles. And from then on, as Siegel has sprung his trap, the theater is absolutely silent but for an occasional gasp or scream or yell to Miles and Becky to “Run!” or “Don’t fall asleep!” Afterward, the audience files out, still shaky, acknowledging that they have seen a genuine thriller.

For me, Invasion of the Body Snatchers rates at the top of fifties horror-science fiction films, along with The Thing (1951) and Them! (1954), two other pictures that make the fantastic seem perfectly credible. In fact, if it does have an advantage over these other films, it is because everything we see we believe—we may even have had similar nightmares. Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers cost about eight times what Siegel’s 1956 picture did, it is in color, has fine special effects and much flashy hip-filmmaker pizzazz, yet, while it holds one’s interest, about halfway through it stops being suspenseful. Where the original totally outshines the remake is in pacing—the excitement just keeps building. Siegel establishes tension through a number of tricks: having characters in constant motion—moving from place to place, racing their cars, running; having characters peer at each other through windows and glass doors; having Miles and Becky hide from invaders in small spaces like closets and the hole beneath the boards in a cave; having characters leave their motors running when they get out of their cars; having many scenes take place in the dark or in shadows; having much activity take place in basements; and most effective of all, establishing that aliens have replaced Miles’s friends in order to make us paranoid about everything that is ordinary and familiar. Interestingly, Siegel, a former special-effects expert, deliberately shied away from the special effects that most SF directors consider necessary to the genre. Instead he relied on diverse camera angles, penetrating close-ups of the characters mixed with mysterious long shots of large areas of Santa Mira, and sharp editing—all staples of the Hollywood action film Siegel knew so well—to create visual tension. By downplaying the special effects, Siegel would not make the mistake Kaufman made years later of having the science fiction elements of the story take precedence over the characters.

A publicity shot of Miles burning a pod that a garage attendant hid in his trunk.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the best of an SF subgenre which deals with aliens taking over the bodies of everyone in a particular community. As in such films as Invaders from Mars (1953), It Came from Outer Space (1953), and I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958), the alien takeovers in Body Snatchers take on horrifying proportions smacking of totalitarianism when the police become part of the invasion. Even more terrifying is when a loved one—your security—becomes your enemy. In Invaders From Mars, young Jimmy Hunt, like Jimmy Grimaldi in Body Snatchers, realizes that his parents have been replaced; in Monster from Outer Space, bride Gloria Talbott notices a drastic change in the personality of her new husband; but probably the most heartbreaking discovery is made by Miles in Body Snatchers. Early in the film, Miles jokingly implies that he will always be able to tell that Becky is Becky by her kiss. Later in the film, in the cave, he kisses her and pulls back in horror, looking into the cold eyes of the woman he knows is Becky’s duplicate. In An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (Capricorn, 1968), Carlos Clarens made this astute observation:

The ultimate horror in science fiction is neither death nor destruction but dehumanization, a state in which emotional life is suspended, in which the individual is deprived of individual feelings, free will, and moral judgment. That the most successful SF films … seem to be concerned with dehumanization simply underlines the fact that this type of fiction hits the most exposed nerve of contemporary society: collective anxieties about the loss of individual identity, subliminal mind-bending, or downright scientific/political brainwashing. (Not by accident the trend began to manifest itself after the Korean War and the well publicized reports coming out of it of brainwashing techniques.) We have come a long way from Metropolis [1927] and the encroachment of the machine. Nowadays man can become the machine himself. The automatoned slaves of modern times look perfectly efficient in their new painless state. From this aspect, they are like the zombies of old—only we never bothered to wonder if zombies were happy in their trance. Zombies, like vampires, seemed so incontrovertibly different; the human counterfeits of … Invasion of the Body Snatchers are those we love, our family and friends. The zombies are now among us, and we cannot tell them and the girl next door apart any longer.

Miles and Jack bring Dan to Becky’s basement where Miles swears he found a half formed duplicate of Becky. But the proof is gone and Dan refuses to believe them. Is Dan one of the duplicates?

Siegel’s films often deal with men who must make enormous choices as to how they lead their lives—and these choices have to do with whether they are willing to relinquish their individuality. In Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), the prisoners choose not to toe the line, to revolt against what they consider to be dehumanizing prison conditions; in Baby Face Nelson (1957), Nelson rejects a life of anonymity as a law-biding citizen for fame as the FBI’s “Most Wanted” criminal; in Madigan (1968), Coogan’s Bluff (1968), and Dirty Harry (1971), hero cops choose to act according to their own devices and moral codes rather than follow the orders of their superiors. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers an individual chooses not to give in to his desire to conform like all those around him. To accept the aliens’ offer to turn him into a pod person would have the same effect as taking a permanent pain-killer—and for Miles, who has suffered the loss of Becky and all of his friends, it is a brave act to reject such peace. Relinquishing his ability to love (which he rediscovered through Becky), laugh, and even cry—the emotions that distinguish one person from another—is too high a price to pay. When Donald Sutherland gives up his individuality by choice in Kaufman’s remake and allows himself to go to sleep—knowing he will wake up a pod person—this is incredibly disturbing to us. (At least Becky tries to fight off sleep!) He has committed the ultimate sellout. But back in 1956, Siegel already believed that “the majority of people in the world unfortunately [have allowed themselves to become] pods, existing without any intellectual aspirations and incapable of love.”

All the pod people of Santa Mira chase survivors Becky and Miles into the hills.

While Siegel contended that Body Snatchers was intended to be an “entertainment” film with the tepid message being that people were becoming podlike stereotypes, the film has long been subject of critical debate regarding its underlying political implications. Considering that it was made during the Cold War, during Eisenhower’s presidency, a few years after Korea, when Joseph R. McCarthy was at his peak of power, it seems unlikely that Siegel’s film was only meant to tell us that we were becoming identical to our neighbors. Much of the film’s cult following is a result of the picture’s ability to be interpreted in two quite contradictory ways: as being anti-McCarthy and an indictment of the red-scare American mentality; and as being an anticommunist allegory.

That the film is anticommunist is the more popular notion. Noel Carroll of the Soho News (Dec. 21, 1978) writes:

The unraveling of the pod conspiracy has the flavor of an FBI exposé. The pod people represent a completely regimented society. Metaphorically, they are all alike as “two peas in a pod” because they have been sapped of their emotional individuality. The vegetarian metaphor literalizes Red-scare rhetoric of the “growth” of Communism as well as the idea that revolutions are made by planting seeds. There is a scene in which the pod people are assembled in the town square, where a loudspeaker reads off the day’s orders; it is the quintessential Fifties image of socialism. And, of course, the simile that without freedom of thought people are … vegetables is a central theme of the narrative.

In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that there are aliens in our midst taking over all phases of our lives and brainwashing our children is shown to be fact, not paranoia. That the takeover is accomplished through the movement of pods from the country into the towns may remind us that in the 1950s Russia was considered an agrarian society. While Siegel’s villains are usually mad or emotionally unstable, the space aliens of Body Snatchers fit the mold that American schoolteachers describe as being characteristic of Russians: ice cold, outwardly peaceful but very authoritarian, emotionless. Of course, most American schoolchildren of the fifties were taught that Communists had no feelings—especially concerning life and death—which is why, we were told, the Russians/Red Chinese would feel no qualms about going to war and losing much of their population. More than anything else I believe we kids were frightened of Communists because we were told they did not cry when people died. (In Body Snatchers it is upsetting when pod person Sally helps transform her child, saying “There’ll be no more tears.”) To dispel this indoctrination, in the antiwar documentary Hearts and Minds (1974), director Peter Davis included a long tragic scene in which a North Vietnamese mother and young son mourn the death of a family member, and directly following this incredible display of emotion is a bit with General Westmoreland, the commander of America’s armed forces during the war, still spouting American rhetoric about how Americans are different from Communist peoples because they consider life cheap.

Exhausted after their escape from Santa Mira, Becky and Miles hide in a cave. It is here that Becky will fall asleep.

Those who argue that Body Snatchers is an anti-McCarthy polemic begin with the premise that Siegel establishes that the fascistic pod people already comprise the American majority, control the government, law enforcement agencies, and communications, and dictate the country’s political line. In other words, Joseph R. McCarthy and his followers already control the country. In Santa Mira, a town where the Spanish must have pushed out the native Indian population, and subsequently English-speaking Americans must have pushed out the Spanish, the pod people are just one more in a long line of invaders who are bent on wiping out the previous culture. In Body Snatchers, the pod people, who, like McCarthy and the other red-baiters, look like typical, fine upstanding Americans, search out rebels like Miles who refuse to conform to what has been newly defined as the “American Way”—just as McCarthy and HUAC destroyed the lives of those who refused to knuckle under to their directives. The mob hysteria, the sense of paranoia, the fascist police, and the witch hunt atmosphere of the picture certainly mirror the ills of McCarthy America.

Frantic, Miles runs onto the highway and tries to tell motorists heading toward Los Angeles what has happened in Santa Mira. No one will listen.

The anti-McCarthy viewpoint comes across more clearly with the quicker ending Siegel originally intended, with Miles still on the highway yelling at the camera to us “You’re next!” At this moment in the 1979 Director’s Cut, Siegel tells us that if we’re not careful, oppressive forces in our society will force us into submission and into conformity. With Miles’s two words, Siegel reminds us of what Miles said earlier: “People allow their humanity to drain away and don’t believe how precious it is until [they believe] it is directly threatened.” Allied Artists made Siegel add the opening and closing scenes in the L.A. hospital because it thought Siegel’s ending too downbeat. I agree. I find open endings terribly frustrating and unsatisfying, and resent sadistic directors who get pleasure from leaving viewers with monsters, killers, and maniacs lurking about. In Body Snatchers, I am relieved that there is still a chance to get rid of those damn pods as Miles does with fire in Jack Finney’s story on which the film is based. I like the studio-imposed ending, I like the fact that Miles’s story is believed, even if this means we might temporarily be placed under martial law. But, unfortunately, this studio-imposed ending blunts Siegel’s original message expressed by Miles on the highway that we should fight off those Americans who wish to make us conform and delivers a new message: we are being infiltrated from the outside by alien forces (as McCarthy suggested) and America must take action through an all-out joint effort by the President, the Congress, the military, and the FBI. This message, of course, is not anti-McCarthy but anticommunist.

King Kong

1933 RKO Radio

Directors: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack

Executive Producer: David O. Selznick

Producers: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack

Screenplay: James Creelman and Ruth Rose

From an original story by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace

From an idea conceived by Merian C. Cooper

Cinematography: Edward Linden, Vernon L. Walker, and J. O. Taylor

Music: Max Steiner

Editor: Ted Cheesman

Running Time: 104 minutes

B&W

Cast: Robert Armstrong (Carl Denham), Fay Wray (Ann Darrow), Bruce Cabot (Jack Driscoll), Frank Reicher (Captain Englehorn), Victor Wong (Charley), Noble Johnson (native chief), Steve Clemento (witch king), James Flavin (second mate), Sam Hardy (Weston), Roscoe Ates (photographer), Dick Curtis (crewman), Paul Porcasi (fruit vendor), Leroy Mason (theater patron), Sandra Shaw (woman dropped by Kong).

Synopsis: Carl Denham has become famous making documentaries in unexplored regions all around the world. He tells Captain Englehorn of the ship The Venture and Jack Driscoll, the first mate, that critics and exhibitors demand that his next film be his first to feature a woman. As no actress will brave going with Denham into unexplored territory, he must search for his star. On the streets of Depression New York he discovers Ann Darrow, a pretty woman without work or money to buy food. He offers her “money, adventure, and fame” if she will come with him. She agrees.

The Venture travels through uncharted waters in search of Skull Island, which only Denham believes exists. On the journey, Ann and Driscoll fall in love. At last The Venture docks on Skull Island. Taking along their film equipment, the men and Ann explore the island. They discover a native village where a ceremony is taking place in honor of a god they call Kong. The natives plan to sacrifice one of their maidens to Kong, who lives on the other side of a great wall. When the natives spot the white intruders and take too much interest in the white-skinned Ann, everyone retreats to the boat.

That night the natives sneak on board The Venture and kidnap Ann. They tie her to two stakes on the other side of the great wall. She hears footsteps, branches breaking, and loud snapping. She screams as she sees that she is to be the bride of a fifty-foot gorilla—Kong. Kong unties her and, pleased with his bride, takes her toward his home. Driscoll, Denham, and several crew members pursue them. Realizing he is being followed, Kong attacks and kills all but Denham and Driscoll. Denham goes back to the boat and Driscoll continues to give chase. Kong rescues Ann from a tyrannosaur and is saving her from a pterodactyl when Driscoll sneaks into Kong’s cave dwelling. Driscoll and Ann escape with a furious Kong at their heels. They make it back to the village, but Kong breaks through the door of the great wall and kills many natives. Denham and the remaining members of his crew finally knock him out with gas bombs. Denham decides to exhibit Kong in New York as “the Eighth Wonder of the World.” Before a large formal gathering in a theater, Denham unveils the chained Kong. When photographers start taking pictures of Ann, Kong breaks his chains and attacks everyone in sight, causing a panic. Ann hides in her hotel across the street, but Kong finds her and carries her through the city, destroying everything and everyone in his path.

Kong carries Ann to the top of the Empire State Building. He is shot numerous times by machine guns in planes that fly around him. He lays Ann down in a safe place, lovingly looks at her one last time, and falls to his death far below. Denham is told that the airplanes killed Kong, but he disagrees: “It was beauty killed the beast.”

(Left to right) Carl Denham, Captain Englehorn, and Jack Driscoll chart a course to Skull Island.

With the exception of The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Citizen Kane (1941), no picture has been the subject of more critical writing than the original King Kong, an irreplaceable part of twentieth-century American culture, the greatest, most popular, most intriguing horror-fantasy film ever made. As King Kong is a testament for those who believe film is a collaborative art, the majority of articles have dealt with the various achievements of the numerous individuals who worked on the project, with the tremendous contributions of special-effects genius Willis O’Brien and composer Max Steiner (who understood that Kong should be scored like a silent picture) being singled out most often.* Because there is so much available material that documents the technical wizardry of Kong, I will confine myself to two other areas.

An Interpretation. Like most producers, Merian C. Cooper insisted that all his films, including King Kong, were strictly “entertaining pictures,” but Kong is so rich in implication that few critics haven’t read added significance into it. It has been interpreted as: a parable about an innocent, proud country boy (probably a muscular, uneducated black) who is humbled and finally destroyed when he comes to the cold, cruel city; an indictment of “bring ’em back alive” big-game hunters; a racist visualization of the fears a white woman has about being abducted by a black—or, as Harry Geduld and Ronald Gottesman suggest, “a white man’s sick fantasy of the Negro’s lust to ravish white women”; and a parable about the Great Depression, an interpretation I have never understood.

Numerous critics contend that Kong was intentionally filmed as if it were a nightmare. (If the picture is indeed a dream, this would explain the frequent changes in Kong’s size, according to scale.) R C Dale writes:

The film manages to bypass the critical, censorious level of the viewer’s consciousness and to secure his suspension of disbelief with what appears to be great ease. A number of French critics have attributed this phenomenon to the film’s oneiric qualities, its pervasive dreamlike control of some subconscious, uncritical part of the mind. Indeed it does succeed in dreaming for us.

I agree that King Kong is dreamlike—in fact, our first view of Skull Island is an exact reproduction of Arnold Bocklin’s dreamlike painting “Isle of the Dead”—but I don’t think that it is our dream we watch on the screen. The film begins in the real world, in dark, cold Depression New York where unemployed, hungry people stand in soup lines; but from the moment The Venture leaves port for uncharted regions, I believe we are on a journey through Carl Denham’s subconscious. Just as Pauline Kael described the landscape of Altair-4 in the Kong-influenced Forbidden Planet (1956) as being “the caves, plains, and the towers of Dr. Morbius’s mind,” Skull (as in cerebral) Island’s expressionistic landscape—fertile, overgrown, reptile-infested, watery, cave-filled—is Denham’s fantasized sexual terrain.

And Kong, I believe, is a manifestation of Denham’s subconscious. Much like Morbius’s Id monster. Whereas Morbius conjures up his monster to kill off the men he fears will take away his daughter (likely his lover in his subconscious), Denham conjures up Kong as a surrogate to battle Driscoll for Ann’s love and to perform sexually with her when he has never been willing (or able) to have a sexual encounter himself. Although young and virile, misogynist Denham has traveled to the far corners of the earth with an all-male crew to avoid intimate liaisons because he believes women will strip him of his masculinity (“Some hard-boiled egg gets a look at a pretty face and he cracks up and goes sappy”). Kong is Denham’s female-lusting side—his alter ego, which he keeps in the dark recesses of his mind, as remotely located as Skull Island, behind a figurative great wall. Kong is evidence of Denham’s desperate need to possess Ann; his birth is a result of Denham’s continuing to suppress his sexual/romantic drive even after he meets and immediately falls in love with Ann.

In New York, Denham tells Ann, “Trust me and keep your chin up.” A few seconds of screen time pass, and Ann, now on board The Venture, is struck accidentally by Driscoll—on the chin. This is a sign that Denham can’t be trusted to protect Ann’s physical well-being even if he wants to. As his secret (even from himself) love for Ann increases, his Kong side overcomes his desire to protect her. He betrays his lack of concern for her safety (from Kong): for her screen test aboard The Venture, he dresses Ann in white—with her bee-stung lips and hair style she looks like one of D. W. Griffith’s virginal Victorian heroines—as if preparing her for sacrifice, or perhaps a sexual initiation rite; then he takes Ann onto Skull Island before he knows if it is safe. Just as Denham saved Ann in New York from jail (for stealing an apple), unemployment, and starvation, Kong continues Denham’s gallantry toward Ann on Skull Island, saving her from a tyrannosaur and a pterodactyl. But the difference is clear: the civilized Denham (the man) believes his interest in Ann is “strictly business,” while the primitive Denham (Kong) has placed no such restrictions on himself.

Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot in a publicity pose.

Since Kong is a side of Denham, Kong needn’t follow the movie formula of having Denham and Driscoll vie for Ann’s affections. Denham can allow Driscoll free rein with her because, in truth, the schizophrenic Denham is moving in on Ann from his Kong side. Also, through Kong, Denham tries to eliminate Driscoll and all other men who “pursue” her. When Driscoll’s kisses bring Ann to her height of sexual passion, and her breathing is heavy and her body is like jelly, he is conveniently (as far as Denham is concerned) called to a meeting with Denham and the captain. Suddenly natives, who to Denham probably represent the link between civilized man (himself) and his simian ancestors (apes), climb aboard The Venture at the very spot where Ann stands, at the first moment she is alone, and kidnap her to be Kong’s bride. Is it the natives’ lucky night? Or were things so easy for them—being part of Denham’s dream—because Denham’s subconscious orchestrated the whole thing in their favor?

Kong saves Ann from the clutches of a pterodactyl, one of the masterful creations of special effects genius Willis O’Brien.

That Denham and Kong are rarely in the same shot further gives one the impression that Kong is being directed by some external force, namely Denham’s subconscious. At one time Kong is on one side of the tree-trunk bridge that holds Driscoll (who climbs off to safety) and several other men pursuing Ann (who fall to their deaths)—while Denham is out of sight on the other side of the bridge and only emerges after Kong has left. Not coincidentally, a later scene in New York shows Kong reaching into a hotel room (to which Denham’s subconscious must have directed him), snatching Ann, and knocking down Driscoll—while Denham is out of sight in the hall and only appears after Kong has left.

Denham and Kong do confront each other (the visualization of Denham’s internal struggle) when Kong breaks through the supposedly impenetrable door of the great wall (Denham’s mental barricade)—just as the Id monster breaks through the supposedly impenetrable laboratory door in Forbidden Planet. Confronted with his bestial side, the civilized Denham—a model for Morbius, who at this point denies his Id monster, thereby making it cease to exist—puts it (Kong) to sleep with gas bombs. Back in New York, Denham still tries to control his sexual side by literally chaining up Kong. However, once Kong breaks out of his supposedly unbreakable chains, Denham’s last barrier, we never see Kong and Denham together again until Kong lies dead.

Denham’s words “It was beauty killed the beast” make sense only if the beast he’s referring to was part of himself. It is an understatement to say that Kong is too big for Ann, but we could overlook this except for the fact that Kong’s size prevents him from considering her a beauty. That he can’t even recognize Ann by her looks is evident when he pulls the wrong woman from the hotel and can only tell she’s not Ann by hair color and smell—not by beauty. That Kong reacts so violently when the photographers take pictures of Ann is not because he thinks they’re trying to harm her—Kong probably doesn’t recognize her—but because filmmaker Denham, a voyeur (as many critics have acknowledged), becomes filled with jealous rage because others are taking pictures of his actress/woman/property/beauty; and it is his subconscious that wills Kong to intervene by breaking his bonds and chasing the photographers away. Once loose, Kong is out of the civilized Denham’s control and goes all out to succeed in his mission of having sex with Ann. On Skull Island, a snake (a Freudian sex symbol) attacks Kong—a symbolic act that shows Denham is trying to suppress his sexual instincts; however, in New York, Kong attacks the snake—the Third Avenue El—making it clear that nothing will get in his way this time. Having no penis—is impotence the reason Denham avoids women?—Kong has symbolic intercourse with Ann when he takes her up the world’s greatest phallic symbol: the Empire State Building. Once this sexual act has been carried out (consummated), Denham is no longer sexually repressed (or a virgin). As his sexual self can surface at last, he no longer has to enjoy sex vicariously through a surrogate—and Kong, now obsolete, can die. Therefore, it makes sense that in the Cooper-Ernest B. Schoedsack sequel, Son of Kong (1933), where Denham is the romantic lead and has a love affair with Helen Mack, the gorilla need not be and is not a sexual being.

Ann stolen from him, Kong breaks through the unbreakable village door and is about to wreak havoc on the natives.

Kong as Hero. That Kong is regarded as a hero rather than the prototype for all monster-villains is quite extraordinary, considering how many innocent people he kills and how much property he destroys, all done with the emotion of someone eating a melting ice cream cone. His hero status is even more unusual since the reinsertion of scenes censored in 1938 from all prints of the film. These scenes of Kong partially stripping Ann (touching her and smelling his finger), viciously trampling and chewing on helpless natives, and dropping the woman he mistakes for Ann to her death from high above the city streets, make Kong’s “beastliness” much more pronounced.

With Jack and Ann at his side, Denham presents the humbled Kong to New York society.

Kong is a hero, I suspect, because he is a great fighter, capable of beating Tunney or Dempsey with his pinky, or the entire United States Air Force if it fought fairly; he gallantly risks his life for his woman. Perhaps black people see him as a black character who fights White America; the poor see him as their champion who wreaks havoc on New York City, home of Wall Street and the least popular city during the Great Depression and not much more popular since; and women see that he doesn’t hide his feelings as most men do. And Kong is certainly sympathetic. We feel sorry for grotesque characters whose love for someone beautiful is not returned—Fay Wray earned her reputation as the screen’s top screamer by shrieking every time Kong comes near her. He is taken forcibly from his homeland, where he was god, to be, as Denham tells the theater audience, “merely a captive to gratify your curiosity.” He is destroyed by airplanes, something he can’t understand, for reasons he can’t comprehend. As his last act, he puts Ann in a safe place so she won’t suffer his horrible fate—what is truly upsetting is that Ann doesn’t verbally acknowledge the nobleness of this gesture. Kong dies so tragically and so theatrically (as a hammy silent movie star might) that we forgive and forget all that he has done. But for all this, as Robert Fiedel writes in The Girl in the Hairy Paw (Avon, 1976), “Most critics have always been at a loss to give adequate explanation for the great feeling of tragedy evoked by Kong’s death.” When the airplanes start firing on Kong we suddenly feel we are losing our best friend, when up till now we have thought Kong our enemy. I believe Fiedel pinpoints the reason for our dramatic reversal:

The answer lies, in fact, in the musical score. . . . Nowhere is the score more manipulative than in the death scene. As Kong realizes that his death is immediately impending, we hear a lamenting variation of the “Ann Darrow” motif played passionately by the strings. . . . Then as Kong finally dies and loses his hold atop the Empire State Building, his motif is resolved by rest chords . . . signifying his acceptance of defeat. . . . Kong’s actual fall is accompanied by a sustained blaring dissonant chord, and finally resolved by an orchestral outburst. It is interesting that his fall is resolved only by the score, and not by the visuals. . . . The score serves the vital function of resolving the tension of the actual fall and denoting the precise moment to trigger our emotional responses. . . . As Denham muses philosophically over the body of Kong . . . a celestial statement of the “Ann Darrow” motif is played in the upper string register which makes a final tragic comment on the death of Kong. A final recapitulation of the resolved “Kong” motif ensues, concluding the film on a negative, disturbing theme.

King Kong is an institution, a folk hero, certainly more real to us today than the defunct studio that created him. Kong has been resurrected so many times—initially by major studio releases in 1938, 1942, 1946, 1952, and 1956, and then by impossible-to-miss television and revival theater screenings—that he has become immortal. The King is dead!, etc., etc.

The heart-wrenching finale where Kong fights a losing battle against airplanes while atop the Empire State Building.

*For those interested in lengthy discussions about the people who contributed to King Kong, as well as articles offering various interpretations of the film and ones that explore the inspirational sources for the picture in literature and film, I recommend the anthology The Girl in the Hairy Paw (Avon, 1976); edited by Harry Geduld and Ronald Gottesman.

The Little Shop of Horrors

1960 Filmgroup

Director: Roger Corman

Producer: Roger Corman

Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith

Cinematography: Archie Dalzell

Music: Fred Katz

Editor: Marshall Neilan, Jr.

Running Time: 72 minutes

B&W

Cast: Jonathan Haze (Seymour Krelboin), Jackie Joseph (Audrey), Mel Welles (Gravis Mushnik*), Jack Nicholson (Wilbur Force), Dick Miller (Fouch), Myrtle Vail (Winifred Krelboin), Leola Wendorff (Mrs. Shiva).

Synopsis: Seymour Krelboin lives with his always sick, always complaining mother and works as a clerk in Gravis Mushnik’s florist shop in Skid Row. Mushnik blames Seymour for losing what business he has and would fire him if his daughter Audrey didn’t love him.

Seymour invents a new plant by combining a butterworth and a Venus flytrap. Audrey is touched when Seymour names it Audrey, Jr. But the plant looks sickly and Seymour decides to stay at the shop and nurse it back to health. At sunset Audrey, Jr., opens up. Seymour accidentally pricks himself and his blood drips into Audrey, Jr. The plant claps.

The next day, Mushnik treats Seymour like a son. Seymour looks at Audrey, Jr., and sees why. It has grown incredibly. Mushnik has put a sign on his window announcing the existence of the plant, and representatives of the Rose Bowl Float Committee say that because of Audrey, Jr., they might order two thousand dollars’ worth of flowers from Mushnik. But suddenly, Audrey, Jr. looks dead. Mushnik tells Seymour that if he doesn’t bring the plant back to life, he will be fired.

That night Seymour pricks all his fingers and feeds Audrey, Jr. his blood. But the plant isn’t satisfied and keeps screaming “Feeed me!!!” Discouraged, Seymour takes a walk by the railroad tracks. He throws a rock at a bottle and accidentally strikes a drunk who stumbles under a train and is killed. Seymour puts him in a sack and feeds him to Audrey, Jr. Mushnik walks in when Seymour is feeding the plant the dead man’s foot. He is disgusted, but decides not to tell the police when crowds line up the next morning to get a look at the even bigger plant. Mushnik has never made so much money.

Seymour goes to Dr. Forbes, a dentist, who insists on treating Seymour without Novocaine. Seymour ends up killing him. He feeds Dr. Forbes to the insatiable plant. Now that two men have been killed, detectives Frank Fink and Joe Smith begin investigations.

Seymour is thrilled with his new notoriety. Even the Society of Silent Flower Observers of Southern California wants to give him a trophy. He takes Audrey home to meet his mother and they eat cod liver oil soup. They announce their engagement. A thief tries to rob Mushnik. Mushnik tells him he keeps his money in Audrey, Jr. The thief reaches inside the plant and is eaten alive.

Seymour and Audrey have a picnic in the store. Every time Audrey wants to kiss him, the plant says “Feeed me!” Seymour tells her he is a ventriloquist. She gets annoyed and walks out. Audrey, Jr. hypnotizes Seymour and sends him out for food. He accidentally kills a prostitute who is trying to pick him up.

Fink and Smith, Mushnik, Audrey, Mrs. Krelboin, and several customers enter the store. Audrey Jr.’s buds open and they can see the faces of the plant’s victims. They chase Seymour through a tire factory and a toilet accessories warehouse. He hides in a toilet and gets away. Seymour returns to the store. Intending to do away with his creation, he climbs into Audrey, Jr., with a knife. Everyone returns to the store. One bloom opens. They see Seymour’s face. “I didn’t mean it!” are his last words. The bloom falls over.

Ironically, both American films that were invited to be shown “out-of-competition” at Cannes in 1960 were about Jewish people. Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960) was about Jewish refugees and freedom fighters trying to establish a Jewish homeland. Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors dealt with a miserly Yiddish businessman, his slow-thinking Jewish princess daughter, his schlemiel employee, the schlemiel’s possessive, hypochondriac mother (“You promised you wouldn’t marry until you bought me an iron lung”), a Jewish lady with a funeral obsession, and a sadistic Jewish dentist who has a business arrangement with the undertaker. Preminger’s film was set in Israel and was seen all over the world; Corman’s was set on Skid Row and played on Skid Row (or within walking distance). Today Exodus is considered an overblown spectacle; The Little Shop of Horrors is considered one of the most efficient pieces of filmmaking ever accomplished.

The story Corman tells is that he made Little Shop because he had the opportunity to utilize sets left standing, temporarily, from another film—worth gold to the low-budget producer—and was excited by the challenge of trying to make a picture before the sets were torn down. This meant working around the clock, but filming took only two days to complete, breaking Corman’s personal five-day shooting record set with A Bucket of Blood (1959). What is remarkable is that despite the minuscule shooting schedule and budget (estimates range from $22,000 to $100,000), Little Shop is inventively written (by Corman alumnus Charles B. Griffith), spiritedly played, and professionally made. It is not sloppy at all, and, unlike A Bucket of Blood, it is consistently amusing. In fact, along with John Landis’s minor cult favorite Schlock (1973), Landis’s An American Werewolf in London (1981), The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Little Shop was for years the best comedy-horror film around, regardless of budgetary considerations.

A film in which the romantic leads are Jonathan Haze, of Stakeout on Dope Street (1958)—and nothing else—nonfame, and Jackie Joseph, a quirky, likable lass whose best work since 1960 has been helping Doris Day save homeless animals in Hollywood, can’t be taking itself too seriously. Nor can a film that has characters named Gravis Mushnik, Seymour Krelboin, Mrs. Shiva, and Sergeant Frank Fink, and which contains a flower-eating man and a man-eating flower. Little Shop is a send-up without pretensions of relevance or artistic merit; if it had turned out to be a disaster, Corman likely would have released it anyway. Fortunately, everything on this film clicked, due to a combination of good writing and energetic direction and performances, and, while it is no masterpiece, Little Shop is a low-budget gem.

The most romantic moment in the film: Seymour and Audrey pucker up while having an indoor picnic.

Little Shop is a spoof of both every mad-scientist picture in which blood is needed to keep some experimental creature alive and of every fifties science fiction film in which the emphasis is on giant mutations. There are also numerous traces of past horror films. When the hypnotized Seymour goes out to bring back victims for his blood-drinking plant, it is like a Dracula film. When the obnoxious plant keeps screaming “Feed me!” one recalls the minute part-man, part-fly screaming “Help me!” as a hungry spider approaches at the end of The Fly (1958). The man-eating Audrey, Jr. reminds me of several giant carnivorous plants in cinema history, including George Coulouris’s in an abomination called The Woman Eater (1958). Corman’s film also deals with a true horror: a trip to the dentist (“Now you’re going to get it!” Dr. Forbes tells his frightened patient).

Little Shop is in a way a takeoff on Jerry Lewis comedies, with Seymour Krelboin as the Lewis-like character with an IQ of seven, a good heart, a lousy personality, and work habits that drive his boss crazy. It is also a takeoff on fifties television comedies, and most of the scenes are staged with the characters facing forward as if they were playing to a live audience. (I truly think the picture might be even funnier if at times a laugh track were used.) The scenes with Smith and Fink are filmed with a little more speed, intensity, and varied angles, as befitting a Dragnet parody. Some of the terse unemotional Jack Webb-like dialogue is hilarious.

SMITH: How are your kids?

FINK: I lost one yesterday.

SMITH: How did it happen?

FINK: Playing with matches.

SMITH: Those are the breaks.

Or, when Winifred tells Fink he has trenchmouth:

FINK: Have me look into that, Joe.

SMITH: Whatever you say, Frank.

And Little Shop is a parody of low-budget films. For instance, in most inexpensively produced films where producers can’t afford to take everyone out on location, the director will try to build up the visceral excitement with close-ups as characters run through makeshift jungles or wade through fake streams. The close-up is used because a long shot would reveal that the character could easily walk next to the water. In Little Shop there is a long shot of a small puddle surrounded by dry ground on all sides. Corman has every character plopping through the puddle. It’s funny.

Little Shop can also be considered satire. The use of Jewish stereotypes may offend some. But they’re so ridiculous, I doubt if anyone can take them seriously. The plant itself can be seen as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of fame. Seymour sees how fame is fleeting—each time Audrey, Jr. looks dead, Mushnik, who loves Seymour when the plant grows, wants to fire him. Seymour learns that one must keep feeding success—you’re only as successful as your last picture—although it means destroying all those around him and finally himself. Even for a nobody like Seymour, life was better before he had recognition and a two-dollar raise.

A thief demands to know where Mushnik keeps his money. He lies that it is in Audrey, Jr., and watches the thief as he is gobbled up while trying to retrieve it.

Importantly, Little Shop works on its own terms as a good, straight comedy. The cast is marvelous. They might be a Yiddish repertory company who had been working with this script for years instead of doing it while it was being written. Particularly memorable are Mel Welles as the petulant Yiddish florist, Corman-regular Dick Miller as the low-keyed flower-eater (“I like to eat in small, out-of-the-way places”), Jackie Joseph (“I could eat a hearse”), whom I’ve always liked although I can’t remember what else I’ve seen her in, and the then little-known Jack Nicholson as the masochistic Wilbur Force, a hero for anyone who goes to the dentist more often than every six months. The picture is filled with funny vignettes, but Wilbur’s is the most popular. A young man with a bow tie, hair parted down the middle, and a squeaky voice like the one Richard Crenna used on TV’s Our Miss Brooks, puts down Pain magazine and joyously enters Dr. Forbes’s office. Since Seymour has killed Dr. Forbes, Seymour pretends to be the dentist and removes several of Wilbur’s teeth, as Wilbur seems to work toward an orgasm. Wilbur leaves saying: “I never enjoyed myself so much.” This scene isn’t for all tastes, but neither is the rest of this often morbid black comedy.

But if you do like Wilbur, you can’t help but appreciate Audrey, Jr. It looks like an ugly egg when Seymour first brings it to the store in a small box. And it grows to be a despicable creature that burps and spits out things it can’t digest. You’ll probably leave the theater imitating his (Audrey, Jr. has a male voice) call to be fed. But even better than “Feeeed me!!” are his ad libs: “I’m hungry!”; “I’m starved!”; “More!”; and, my favorite, “I want some chow!”

Mushnik and Audrey look approvingly at Audrey, Jr. But Seymour realizes the plant has grown so much because it has feasted on blood.

*The character is listed as Mushnik in the end titles, but his shop is called “Mushnick’s.”

Martin

1978 Libra release of a Laurel film

Director: George A. Romero

Producer: Richard P. Rubenstein

Screenplay: George A. Romero

Cinematography: Michael Gornick

Special Effects and Makeup: Tom Savini

Music: Donald Rubenstein

Editor: George A. Romero

Running Time: 95 minutes

Color

Cast: John Amplas (Martin), Lincoln Maazel (Tata Cuda), Christine Forrest (Christina), Elyane Nadeau (Abby Santini), Tom Savini (Arthur), Sarah Venable (housewife victim), Fran Middleton (train victim), Al Levitsky (Lewis), Romero (Father Howard), James Roy (deacon), J. Clifford Forrest, Jr. (Father Zulemas), Richard Rubenstein (housewife victim’s husband), Gornick (voice of talk show host).

Synopsis: Martin, who looks about 20, takes a train from Indianapolis to New York. At night, he breaks into a sleeping car and injects a young woman with sodium pentothal. He tells her not to struggle or be upset because she won’t feel pain. When she is asleep, he makes love to her and slits her wrist with a razor blade so he can drink her blood. She dies.

He is met in Pittsburgh by an elderly, hostile cousin, Tata Cuda. They take a train to Braddock, a dying industrial suburb. Despite Martin’s denials, Cuda accuses Martin of being an 84-year-old vampire from the old country. He has taken Martin in because he’s family, but says: “First I will save your soul. Then I will destroy you.” Cuda puts garlic on the doors and holds up a cross when he fears Martin is attacking him—Martin eats the garlic and pulls away the cross, telling the frightened man “there is no magic.” Cuda tells Martin that he can come and go but he will destroy him if he kills anyone in Braddock. He orders Martin to stay away from his granddaughter Christina, who lives in the house, but she befriends him. She is the only person Martin talks to. She thinks Cuda and others in the family have driven Martin to insanity. She hopes to leave Braddock with her boyfriend, Arthur, even though he treats her badly. She gets Martin a phone. He repeatedly calls a radio talk show and tells what it’s like to be a vampire. He is known as the “Count” to all the listeners. The patronizing host thinks he’s crazy.

Martin works in Cuda’s grocery store. He delivers packages. One customer, Mrs. Santini, is taken with Martin. She’s a friendly young woman who is depressed because her husband is unfaithful. Martin senses she wants to have sex with him. But, he tells the talk show host, he has never had sex with an awake woman.

Martin travels outside Braddock to find victims. He follows a pretty woman home. When her husband is away, he sneaks in and discovers her with her lover, Lewis. He jabs them both with sodium pentothal. He drags Lewis from the house, kills him, and drains his blood. He makes love to the young, drugged woman, but lets her live. In his (real or fantasy) past, he drained blood from a young woman in a mansion and was chased by people carrying torches.

Cuda brings home Father Zulemas to perform an exorcism. Martin remembers in his (real or fantasy) past others trying to perform an exorcism—he fled then; he flees now. He frightens Cuda by wearing a cape and putting false fangs into his mouth.

Martin agrees to have sex with Mrs. Santini. They become lovers and, as he tells the talk show host, he doesn’t have the same desire to attack women. Christina becomes infuriated when Cuda tells Arthur that insanity runs in their family so he shouldn’t consider having children with her. She leaves with Arthur. She promises to write Martin, but she won’t.

Martin tells the talk show host he’s getting “shaky.” He attacks two homeless men and drinks one’s blood. He narrowly escapes from the police. The police chase him and end up clashing with some young thugs. All are killed.

Martin finds Mrs. Santini dead in her bathtub. She slit her wrists with a razor blade. Cuda hears of her death and is sure Martin killed her. He drives a stake through Martin’s heart.

One of the strangest cinema vampires, Martin doesn’t use his eyes to put his victims into a trance before drinking their blood. Instead he uses an injection to dull their senses.

The three pioneering vampire movies, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Tod Browning’s Dracula (starring Bela Lugosi), and Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), had enormous, lasting impact but they left much to say on their subject. Decade after decade, filmmakers worldwide would explore and often diverge from the vampire lore set forth in these classics and in nineteenth-century vampire literature such as John Polidari’s 1819 story, “The Vampyre,” J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871 lesbian vampire novella, Carmilla, and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. And moviegoers would never tire of vampire films because they dealt with such intriguing themes as eternal life and, in some cases, eternal torment, the battle between good (Christians) and evil, sexual conquest/seduction and submission, death as sexual climax, moral decay, power, possession, sacrifice, loneliness, guilt, survival, and bloodlust.

By the late 1980s, an inordinate number of vampire films developed cult followings, including: Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936); Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula (1958), the first of Hammer’s 15-year series starring Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing; Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses (1960); Antonio Margheriti’s Danza Macabre (1964), with Barbara Steele; Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires (1965); Curtis Harrington’s Queen of Blood (1966); Roman Polanski’s spooky spoof, The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967); Count Yorga, Vampire (1970); Jonathan (1970), from Germany; House of Dark Shadows (1970), adapted from the cult television soap; Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970), with Ingrid Pitt (who often played vampires), and its equally sexy sequel, Lust for a Vampire (1971); Vampyros Lesbos (1971), by Spain’s Jess Franco; Stephanie Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire (1971); Harry Kumel’s Daughters of Darkness (1971); Countess Dracula (1971), with Pitt; John Hough’s Twins of Evil (1971); Vampire Circus (1972); Bob Clark’s Deathdream (1972); Blacula (1972); Grave of the Vampire (1972); Dan Curtis’s hit television movies The Night Stalker (1972) and its sequel The Night Strangler (1973); Ganja and Hess (1973); Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1974); Brian Clemens’s Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974); Tobe Hooper’s TV movie, Salem’s Lot (1979); the comedy Love at First Bite (1979); Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, the Vampire (1979); Thirst (1979), from Australia; The Hunger (1983); Vamp (1986), for which I may be a one-person cult; Near Dark (1987); and The Lost Boys (1987). And Martin. Like Daughters of Darkness, it is a vampire film that may have no vampire! In fact, George Romero’s offbeat tale goes out of its way to indicate that vampire-suspect Martin is just a disturbed young man who believes he is a vampire and acts accordingly. It challenges the vampire legend at every turn and even mocks the portrayal of vampires in vampire movies: Martin is fangless, has average strength, wanders around in the daylight, bites into garlic, grabs crosses, attends a church ceremony, eats food, urinates, has orgasms. But still we wonder. It doesn’t prove anything when he is killed by a stake through the heart: A human or vampire would perish.

In the film’s opening sequence, Martin attacks a young woman in her train compartment.

If Martin is not a monster then Romero’s story is even more frightening . . . because it is possible. Surely the disturbed, alienated Martin fits the personality profile of numerous sexual psychopaths in history. In fact, according to Paul R. Gagne’s book on Romero, The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh (1987), when Romero conceived the Martin character he was partly inspired by a Los Angeles serial slasher-murderer who drank the blood of his victims. At first, Romero “didn’t know whether I wanted my character to be a vampire or just think he was a vampire.” He came to a decision when he cast the role of Martin. He chose not to pick the middle-aged actor he had in mind when he wrote the early drafts of his screenplay but selected 27-year-old John Amplas, whom he’d seen at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, in Philemon, as a Christian disciple who is persecuted by the Romans. Romero obviously reasoned that a younger, less mature Martin—Amplas looks about 20—would be less able to withstand harassment by the likes of Lincoln Maazel’s imposing Tata Cuda, less resistant to those who work on his mind (including other family members who previously insisted he was a vampire), and more afraid of adults and sex. Gagne quotes Romero: “I had to decide what Martin was so I wouldn’t get tripped up with contradictions when we were shooting the film, so I decided that he was not a real vampire, and that was what John and I were working with. Understand, though, the film is open to other interpretations.”

In their book Midnight Movies (1983), J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum point out that Martin can be seen as a reworking of Gene Fowler, Jr.’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). In that film, high school student Michael Landon is constantly told by adults that he—a representative of all teenagers—is bad, just as Martin is constantly criticized by adults and reminded by Cuda and past family members that he is evil and “the family shame.” Because of the negative reinforcement, Landon’s teenager loses his head at times and becomes as violent as the adults expect him to be, giving in to “animalistic”/inhuman impulses. Whereas adults have caused Martin to become someone so fiendish that he may as well be a vampire, Landon’s teenager is literally turned into a monster by adults: Villain scientists inject him with a serum that gives him the appearance of a werewolf—interestingly, because of their instructions to him under hypnosis, it still takes a ringing sound to make him act as monstrously as these adults want him to. Vladimir Sokoloff’s janitor, who speaks of werewolves in the Old World, is a benevolent version of Tata Cuda. Martin also recalls two Val Lewton classics. In Cat People (1942), Simone Simon’s lonely young Serbian woman is either insane or intelligent enough to believe she is of a people who are cursed to be large, murderous cats if they dare make love—crazy or not, she soon kills as if she were a great cat. In Lewton’s Isle of the Dead (1945), Ellen Drew’s young Gypsy is so intimidated by superstitious Greek general Boris Karloff that she is almost convinced that she is a vorvolaka (a vampire-like creature) who is responsible for several deaths. I think Martin is equally linked to Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), in which after years of being harangued by her religious fanatic mother, Piper Laurie—who makes her feel wicked and shameful—and humiliated by her classmates, Sissy Spacek’s troubled, lonely high school girl becomes the equivalent of a monster, unleashing her pent-up anger and (using telekinetic powers) committing mass murder.

The religious Tata Cuda, who insists his nephew Martin is a vampire.

We’re inclined to feel as bad for Martin as we do for Carrie, because everyone treats him as subhuman, no one but Christina (perhaps because of her name) attempts to communicate with him, and Cuda gives him no chance to prove his innocence (he immediately warns Martin, “First I will save your soul, then I will destroy you”). We almost think it’s admirable that Martin doesn’t want to hurt the women he attacks and puts them to sleep with an injection. But at this stage in his life, he’s really unsympathetic, like the Carrie in Stephen King’s novel. He may not want to cause the women any pain—he begs them to stop struggling—but he chooses them to be his victims, attacks them when they’re awake, rapes them when they’re asleep and can’t resist, opens their veins and drinks their blood, and leaves them dead. He has no sympathy for his victims. All he worries about (we can deduce from his calls to the radio talk show) is that people around him are crazy and that he will let his guard down and be caught. He is almost caught by police after slaying a derelict, and he feels no remorse that all the policemen and the young thugs he happens upon are killed during his escape. He acts sensitively to his lover, Mrs. Santini (Elyane Nadeau)—he even worries that he should have used a condom—but he admits being relieved when she dies. Cuda kills Martin for the wrong reasons but it’s lucky for the world Cuda is crazy enough to do it—we should all want Martin dead. Someone who thinks he’s a vampire and acts like a vampire is as bad as a vampire.

Martin marked George Romero’s return to feature films after a five-year hiatus. He had burst onto the scene in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, the low-budget, independently produced (by his Pittsburgh-based Latent Image), black-and-white exercise in terror that became a box-office blockbuster and one of the first and most successful midnight movies, and paved the way for the graphic horror cinema of the seventies and eighties. But the failure of his three subsequent films, There’s Always Vanilla (1971), Hungry Wives (1972), and a Living Dead derivation, The Crazies (1973), caused Latent Image to go under. Romero quickly joined forces with producer Richard P. Rubenstein in the formation of Laurel Productions. Laurel stayed in the black by producing television sports documentaries, distributing foreign films, and publishing books. But Romero wanted to make movies. He and Rubenstein were able to get Pittsburgh businessmen Ron Rosen and Barney Guttman to put up $100,000 for a low-budget horror film. This wasn’t enough to finance Dawn of the Dead (which eventually was made in 1978), but Romero and Rubenstein could afford to make Martin instead. It could be made on location in Braddock, an industrial suburb of Pittsburgh, and be shot in 16mm, to be blown up to 35mm. Originally it was intended that the entire film, not just the fantasy-like flashbacks, be in black and white. To keep to the small budget, Romero (doing a humorous turn as a priest who loves The Exorcist), Rubenstein (as a victim’s husband), and Laurel cameraman Michael Gornick (as the talk show host) would take small roles in the film. Friends and acquaintances filled out the semi-pro cast—Christine Forrest, who would play Martin’s cousin Christina, would eventually marry Romero. Donald Rubenstein, the producer’s brother, arranged the effective score. Tom Savini, whose work with Romero would catapult him to the top in the horror special effects makeup field and win him a cult of goreadorers, did double-duty work, playing Christina’s inconsiderate boyfriend Arthur, and making all the bloody moments seem horrifyingly real.

The younger Martin claims a victim in a sequence that is meant to be either a flashback or a fantasy.

Paul R. Gagne writes that Romero considers Martin his “most realized” picture, his “favorite” of his own films, and, “despite its failings,” his “first real filmic success.” Martin is a success, despite its minuscule budget and its faults. It has enough wit and sex to balance its shocking violence, if not its depressing tone. Amplas, Maazel, Nadeau, Sarah Venable (a Libra Films publicist who played Martin’s housewife victim), and Romero come off best of the actors, but the entire picture is well cast—even the amateurs lend authenticity to the film. The choice of Braddock, Pennsylvania, as the film’s major location was inspired. The Transylvania of the classic horror films is no more dying and decayed than this no-longer-thriving steel town: The mills have closed down, the church has burned down, shops have shut down; there are no new houses and no new cars; old cars fill automobile graveyards until they are crushed for scrap metal; married couples break apart, unmarried couples leave town in search of work and hope; the elderly carry on but there are few youngsters around; everything has a washed-out look.

The entire picture has style to burn, but Romero really shines during the two major attack sequences, in the tiny train compartment and in the large house. The second attack is a masterwork, not only by Martin (who uses amazing ingenuity) but by Romero, as well. It is, in fact, composed of several attacks by Martin on Venable’s pretty housewife and her confused lover Lewis (Al Levitsky) and is set all over the house and in the yard. The housewife stays in the bedroom throughout, but Martin and the injured Lewis move from room to room, down corridors, in and out doors. At one point, the three characters are in different rooms, each holding a phone. The sequence begins with Martin breaking into the bedroom and surprising the naked couple on the bed. He is surprised and angry to see the housewife with a man, Lewis is jolted to see Martin because he assumes he’s her husband, and she is terrified to see Martin because, as she tries to get across to Lewis, “I don’t know him!” We understand how Lewis feels and how the housewife feels. Martin flies across the bed, jabs Lewis with the needle, and then quickly leaves the room, locking the door before the bigger Lewis attempts to grab him. It’s the highlight of the film, a moment that is simultaneously amusing and chilling. But the rest of the sequence is not anti-climactic. (Am I correct in thinking Martin lets the housewife live?)

A pretty housewife attempts to get away from Martin.

Most critics regard Martin as Romero’s best film. However, I don’t think it reaches the heights of Night of the Living Dead—even if that film no longer scares us. I wish the ending of Martin weren’t so rushed and that there were another scene or two between the time Martin discovers Mrs. Santini’s body floating in the bath and Cuda executes Martin. While I like the black-and-white sequences, I think Romero should have established that they are what Martin is thinking at the time. I think it’s essential to establish that Martin considers these scenes his past, although we may conclude they are just his fantasies. If Martin isn’t thinking these images at all then they are more misleading than they are enlightening. As mentioned, I think the attack in the train compartment is impressively shot, but it’s an extremely unpleasant scene because it comes across as a prolonged rape. Romero was smart to have the pretty woman (Fran Middleton) wear thick facial cream to de-glamorize her, so viewers wouldn’t be titillated, but the prop and makeup people weren’t on the ball because the cream somehow vanishes early in the attack. It becomes increasingly upsetting as she becomes more terrified and helpless, as Martin strips the drugged woman, as he clutches her nude body, and as he slits open her wrist with a razor blade and drinks her blood, which results in his pleasure and her death. Romero should have turned out the lights.

Martin became a successful midnight movie in 1978, playing 11 months at New York’s Waverly Theater. But it never received the attention of David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), which was promoted more by Libra, their common distributor. Many viewers never realized it was directed by the man responsible for Night of the Living Dead. They stayed away, as did those who didn’t realize it was a horror film—perhaps they feared it was a biography of Billy Martin or Martin Buber. Even today Martin remains relatively unknown, a restless sleeper (as are all vampires) that waits to be unearthed by horror fans looking not for buried coffins but buried, even less-than-full, treasures.

Massacre at Central High

Also known as Blackboard Massacre

1976 Brian Distributing release of an Evan Company production; later distributed by New Line Cinema

Director: Rene Daalder [credited as Renee Daalder]

Producer(s): Harold Sobel (and Bill Lange, uncredited)

Screenplay: Rene Daalder

Cinematography: Burt Van Munster

Music: Tommy Leonetti

Song: “You’re at the Crossroads of Your Life” by Tommy Leonetti

Editor: Harry Keramidas

Running time: 87 minutes

Color

Cast: Derrel Maury (David), Andrew Stevens (Mark), Robert Carradine (Spoony), Kimberly Beck (Teresa), Roy Underwood (Bruce), Steve Bond (Craig), Damon Douglas (Paul), Rainbeaux Smith (Mary), Lani O’Grady (Jane), Steve Sikes (Rodney), Dennis Court (Arthur), Jeffrey Winner (Oscar), Thomas Logan (Harvey).

Synopsis: It is David’s first day at Central High. He sees three bullies named Bruce, Craig, and Paul order Spoony to wash off a swastika he painted on his locker. No forms of protest are permitted here. David meets his old friend Mark, whom he once helped out of a bad jam at their previous school. Mark tells David that the school can be like a country club for him if he becomes friends with Bruce, Craig, and Paul. But the three bullies tell Mark that David seems like a troublemaker.

At Mark’s insistence David tries to ignore the bullying tactics employed by Mark’s friends. They mock fat Oscar and hit him with towels, they dump books on Arthur, the student librarian, and they wreck poor Rodney’s jalopy. David asks Arthur if he wants help to fight the bullies. “We lose our own battles,” he says. David offers to fix Rodney’s car. Mark worries about his friend but tells the others that he will straighten him out.

David’s only new friend is Teresa, Mark’s girlfriend. The bullies decide to rape Spoony’s friends Mary and Jane. When Teresa catches them, they throw her into the hall. David sees this and charges into the classroom. He beats up the three before the rapes are accomplished. The bullies tell Mark he has only one more chance to talk to David.

Mark spots David and Teresa, with whom he has just quarreled, skinny-dipping in the ocean. Jealous, he tells his three friends that he tried to talk to David but he wouldn’t listen. While David is trying to repair Rodney’s car, the bullies drop the car on him and his leg is crushed. He can no longer jog—the one outlet for his anger. Teresa tells Mark that David had refused to make love to her that night on the beach—out of loyalty to Mark. Mark feels guilty.

David kills Bruce by breaking a cable on his hang-glider. He kills Craig by having him dive into an empty swimming pool. He kills Paul by rolling his van down a cliff. Mark discovers David is responsible for the murders. David challenges him to stop him. Mark loves David too much to fight him. David loves Teresa and agrees to let Mark live for her sake.

For a time, everyone in school is on friendly terms. But soon they all try to enlist the help of their hero David so they can obtain power. Fights and arguments break out all over school. David is disgusted and builds pipe bombs to eliminate the students. Arthur, Rodney, Oscar, Spoony, Mary, and Jane are killed.

David challenges Mark to shoot him to put an end to his murder spree. But Mark can’t do it. David locks Mark and Teresa in his workshop and goes to the school, where a student-alumni dance is taking place. He has hidden a pipe bomb in the school. Mark and Teresa break free and come to the dance. David tries to get them to leave the gym before the blast. They refuse and dance. Realizing that they will not leave, that they are willing to sacrifice their lives, David rushes into the basement and retrieves the bomb. He takes it outside where it explodes, killing him. Mark and Teresa agree to tell the police that Spoony had left the bomb and David had given his life to save everyone.

The idea to make Massacre at Central High, the utterly beguiling underground favorite, came from Bill Lange, who served as uncredited coproducer, with his partner Harold Sobel, and released the picture through his Chicago-based Brian Distribution Company. “It was the first film made after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974] that had the word ‘Massacre’ in its title,” Lange told me in 1983. “It was to be a pure exploitation film.” So how did it become a somewhat mysterious art film in which the required violence is not gratuitous—as it is in most exploitation films—but is used to illustrate political themes? According to Lange, director-writer Rene Daalder was responsible “for making it an intellectual film. We gave him some ideas we wanted in the plot and he wrote the script. We lucked into Daalder. He was recommended by Russ Meyer, a good friend of mine, when I was looking for a director. Daalder was a Dutch cameraman.” Although Lange liked the picture Daalder gave him, he admited that the violence wasn’t nearly as strong as he wanted. That, plus the intellectual nature of the film, was what he thought was responsible for the picture’s failing to make back its costs. “Cult films don’t make money,” he stated.

Massacre at Central High was made in three weeks, with the principal photography done at a small Los Angeles college and the hang-gliding sequences filmed in Malibu. It was made nonunion, with actors getting minimum union scale. The fine low-budget cast included Robert Carradine (“He doesn’t remember the four or five days he worked on the picture,” claimed Lange); Andrew Stevens (“a real hot dog in those days”); Kimberly Beck (“Tommy Leonetti’s stepdaughter”), who gives a surprisingly effective low-key performance as the pretty, sweet Teresa; sexploitation vet Rainbeaux Smith; and Lani O’Grady, who in 1977 would star in TV’s Eight Is Enough. Best of all is the lithe, hollow-cheeked star Derrel Maury (“cast by the guy who cast The Godfather [1972]”), yet he’s the only cast member, other than Beck, who seems to have disappeared. The other significant figure on the film, though not on screen, was Tommy Leonetti, whom we remember from TV’s Your Hit Parade, and for giving highly publicized testimony against the Mafia. Leonetti wrote the film’s score (which, as critic Amy Taubin points out, includes “strains of Deutschland Über Alles as David contemplates his scene of destruction”), sang the song that runs over the opening credits, and did most of the television promotion for the picture.

Once a good guy, David carries out his plan to murder many of Central High’s “finest.”

Massacre opened in drive-ins in upstate New York in September of 1976, and did promising business. However, when it played in Washington in October, business was soft. It next opened in Atlanta at Thanksgiving, and attendance was low due to bad weather, a factor also for its poor performance in the Dallas-Houston area. Having had three successive unsuccessful runs in major markets, by Christmas Massacre had a bad stigma attached to it. And though it would eventually play all over America, it rarely was booked by desirable theaters for extended plays. Inconsequential reviews in daily papers contributed to its failure to become a box office hit. Lange says, “It wasn’t until it played at the Thalia in New York in 1980 and Vincent Canby gave it a good review in the Times that people really discovered it. Then everyone was calling up to have it screened for them.”

Canby’s influential review began:

Working within the very conventional frame of the teenage exploitation picture, Miss Daalder has made a witty, surprising, very entertaining low-budget movie that doesn’t easily fit into any category. Massacre at Central High is both a teenage exploitation picture and its send-up. At the same time it’s a morality tale that works a few intelligent variations on Death Wish [1974], which didn’t have a thought in its head. It might even be read as a metaphor for the rise and fall of the Third Reich. . . . Any film that so efficiently juggles so many ideas deserves attention.

Soon after (December 10, 1980), Amy Taubin wrote in the Soho News:

I went to see Massacre at Central High because the Times reviewer said it was a first feature by an unknown woman director. I sat through this coming-of-age-as-Revenger’s Tragedy movie trying to detect traces of a feminist vision. I found an alienated one, and that turned out to be an accurate observation: because Renee Daalder is a Dutch male director whose relation to American high schools was probably about what Brecht’s was to Chicago when he wrote The Irresistible Rise of Arturo Ui. I’m not claiming that Massacre is nearly as complex or as politically focused a work as the Brecht, but there are similarities. Another descriptive comparison—a more politically oriented Carrie [1976].

Massacre is clearly a political allegory, but what exactly is Daalder’s political message? Both Canby (“At times she seems to be saying ‘Don’t mess with established authority. Things can only get worse,’ plus a little of ‘those who live by the sword,’ etc.”) and Taubin (“There is a free-floating Third Reich theme that foreshadows the contradictions of punk”) admit confusion trying to decipher the politics. I’ll go along with them. Nevertheless, let’s look at the film until we reach that point at which one can at least guess Daalder’s intentions.

Paradoxically, Central High is off-center within the frame when we first see it. Daalder has tilted his camera, shot from below, and used a wide-angle lens to give his image a distorted look. We immediately can tell there’s something mighty peculiar about this school—it looks as foreboding as an insane asylum. Seeing the school’s elite—Bruce, Craig, and Paul—feasting on grapes at lunch as if they were decadent Roman emperors, dislocates us in place and time. As do Mark and David’s cloudy references to past events, which sound as if they transpired in some other age, perhaps in some other world (earth?). It’s almost like we’ve entered a parallel world. Central is like no high school we know: Students talk in subdued tones, there is a student lounge, all students own cars; nothing makes sense: the school’s lone political dissident (Spoony) paints a swastika, symbol of repression, as his expression of freedom; the school’s neo-Nazis order him to wash it off because they dislike protest even when it seems to support their politics. Oddest of all is the absence of adults. There are references to the school librarian, Rodney’s father, the school janitor, and the principal, but we never see them or any other parents or teachers. Since none of the teenagers have surnames we must doubt that adults exist in this world. Amy Taubin made this astute observation: “In Massacre repressed rage and its return in apocalyptic violence function entirely within the context of an adolescent peer group that doubles for adult society. . . . These adolescents behave just like the adults on whom they model themselves. It is not necessary to show the adults because they co-exist with the kids, inside their bodies. They, the adults, are Body Snatchers.”

At the end, “adults” do appear. But they are alumni, so in effect still part of the student body. Their cadaverous appearances make it clear that once a teenager stops being a teenager and graduates from Central High, he or she, in essence, dies. We have entered a surreal world, where corpses dance, where in the absence of elders (as in Lord of the Flies) it is the young who set up a caste system and individually come to represent various ideologies. Could Central High be the dream world of some history/political science student? (Daalder’s use of blackouts certainly contributes to the dreamlike effect.) It’s a weird notion I know, with shades of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)—in part a bizarre story by an asylum inmate—but it’s probably the only one that gives logic to the film.

Central High is a blackboard jungle: Craig tries to rape Mary and Bruce holds Jane back.

Central High is controlled by Bruce, Craig, and Paul, who rule by brute force and through fear. Perhaps they are meant to symbolize the German Nazis (“they’re a little-league Gestapo,” Teresa remarks) who infested Daalder’s native country, but they could also represent henchmen in Czarist Russia, or fascists elsewhere in history. They are the oppressors, the rest of the students are the oppressed: Fat Oscar is symbol of the persecuted; Arthur is the intellectual; Mary and Jane (as in marijuana) and Spoony represent burned-out hippies of the anti-intellectual variety, whose sixties activism has disappeared in many whiffs of pot smoke; Rodney is the peasant-farmer (he mentions his father’s chickens); Harvey is the cowardly bourgeois; the rest of the students are the masses. Mark, the conservative, and Teresa, the liberal, don’t like what goes on at Central High, but they are afraid to upset the status quo. David is the outsider, the freedom fighter who helps the oppressed wherever they exist. Because he lives in his workshop, we can assume that he also represents the working people, the class that historically initiates urban revolutions (including the one in 1917 Russia).

Mark and Teresa (Kimberley Beck, a pretty and talented unknown) try to figure out what to do to stop David.

Bruce, Craig, and Paul attempt to crush the rebellion by dropping a car on David. Only injured, David successfully carries on a campaign of guerrilla warfare. It results in the leaders’ fall from power: Bruce plummets from the sky, Craig dives into an empty pool, Paul flies over the side of a cliff. For a time, it appears a classless society has replaced the authoritarian regime at school: Arthur helps Rodney with his math; students cheer Oscar’s rope-climbing; Mary and Jane sense that the students are talking about real things for a change, “questioning their values a little”; students gather together. But everyone treats David as a celebrity and there can be no heroes in a classless society. Perhaps David should have held back his revolution until the students had been politically educated and until there had been established a more solid alliance among the various factions. Or perhaps he should have left the revolution up to the students, when they were ready to participate. Because in brief time everyone is out for personal gain, be it wealth or power; and everyone tries to befriend David so he will help them rule. As David tells Mark, the once oppressed have become as bad as their former oppressors. This is certainly one of Daalder’s themes! Rather than allowing these people the time to get things together, David becomes a Lenin figure who won’t allow the politically naïve to rule, and then a Stalin or Robespierre figure who conducts purges. He kills all those who crave power or who have become decadent (Rodney takes Bruce’s car just as Russian peasants seized land after the revolution). So those people for whom there was need of a revolution are also bad. Now we’ve reached that point at which we can only guess what’s in Daalder’s mind.

First, I guess that there is a minor theme: people and life are more important than ideas and politics; David is wrong to kill the students whose major “crime” was that they were unprepared to take over the school. Even David knows he is wrong. David despises himself by the end of the film but he has more wrath for a disappointing world where people take a neutral position (a centrist position reigns supreme at Central High) while there is oppression. He is especially appalled that Mark and Teresa, the only people in school to have both physical and intellectual attributes (leadership qualities), remain neutral when Bruce, Craig, and Paul torment their classmates, and also remain neutral while David kills the students. Which brings us to what I guess to be Daalder’s major theme: One must fight oppression whether it comes from the extreme right—Nazis, the Czar, and Bruce/Craig/Paul—or the extreme left—Communists, terrorists, and David. Only at the end, when Mark and Teresa break out of their bonds of neutrality and put themselves on the line for what they know is right, does David have his faith in humanity restored. He dies, but knowing he can allow the world (the school) to exist because brave humanists are its watchguards, he dies happy. His mission to politicize Mark and Teresa, to make them activists, has been accomplished.

As Mary (left), Jane, and Spoony look on disdainfully, Arthur is killed by an eardrum-bursting blast that shoots through his hearing aid.

Night of the Demon

Also known as Curse of the Demon

1957 (U.K.) Columbia

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Producer: Hal E. Chester

Screenplay: Charles Bennett and Hal E. Chester

From the story “Casting the Runes” by Montague R. James

Cinematography: Ted Scaife

Music: Clifton Parker

Editor: Michael Gordon

Running time: 95 minutes (British version), 82 minutes (American version)

B&W

Cast: Dana Andrews (Dr. John Holden), Peggy Cummins (Joanna Harrington), Niall MacGinnis (Doctor Julian Karswell), Athene Seyler (Mrs. Karswell), Maurice Denham (Professor Harrington), Ewan Roberts (Williamson), Liam Redmond (Professor Mark O’Brien), Peter Elliot (Kumar), Reginald Beckwith (Mr. Meek), Rosamund Greenwood (Mrs. Meek).

Synopsis: Professor Harrington is terrified. He tells Dr. Julian Karswell that he is willing to call off his investigation of Karswell’s devil cult. It is too late. The parchment which Karswell had secretly passed to Harrington has been destroyed. Harrington drives home. An enormous fiery demon emerges from the woods and flies through the darkness. Trying to escape, Harrington backs his car into a pole and is electrocuted.

Dr. John Holden arrives in London to attend a paranormal psychology convention and help Harrington expose Karswell. He does not believe in witchcraft or the devil. Upset by Harrington’s death, he vows to continue the investigation of Karswell. He befriends Harrington’s pretty niece Joanna, who tries to convince him Karswell is dangerous.

Holden goes to the library to study witchcraft. Karswell introduces himself and invites him to visit his country estate. He secretly slips a parchment with runic symbols into Holden’s papers.

Joanna reads to Holden from Harrington’s diary. It mentions the parchment that Harrington had which flew from his hands into a fireplace as if it were alive. Harrington had believed he was under a witch’s spell. But Holden shrugs this off.

Holden and Joanna visit Karswell’s estate, where he and his mother are holding a Halloween party for orphans. Karswell tries to impress Holden by doing a little white witchcraft. An enormous storm kicks up. Karswell tells Holden he has three days to live.

Karswell tells his mother he does what he does out of fear. He can’t stop.

Holden’s parchment flies from his hand to the fireplace. The cover on the fireplace stops it. Holden admits to Joanna that he has developed some fear. When he visits some satanists to get permission to hypnotize a patient named Hobart at the asylum—who has gone insane while under Karswell’s command—he begins to hallucinate. They tell him he has been chosen to be a victim.

Joanna brings Holden to a seance assembled by Mrs. Karswell. The medium, Mr. Meek, starts talking in the voice of Harrington, telling Holden that he isn’t strong enough to fight Karswell. Holden breaks into Karswell’s estate to steal a book on witchcraft. He is attacked by a huge cat. Karswell appears and says that the cat—now a gentle housecat—is a small demon. When Holden leaves he becomes frightened by a smoke ball that flies through the trees.

Holden hypnotizes Hobart. He learns that the only way he can save himself is to return the parchment to the one who passed it. Hobart thinks Holden is trying to pass him his parchment and jumps out a window to his death.

It is nearing ten p.m., the time Holden is supposed to die. Holden has finally been convinced of the existence of the underworld. He discovers Karswell has kidnapped Joanna and they are on a train to Southampton. Holden enters their compartment. The nervous Karswell makes sure Holden doesn’t pass on the parchment. But when the police enter, Holden slips the parchment into Karswell’s coat. Karswell picks it up and immediately knows he is the one in danger. The parchment blows from the train and the desperate Karswell chases after it. Far down the tracks it burns. The demon emerges from the woods at ten p.m. and tears Karswell apart. The police think he has been run over by a train and burned.

It has a British setting, a laid-back, somewhat stuffy (educated) hero, an intellectual, diabolical villain, a daffy mother and other out-of-the-ordinary characters, and a mixture of wit and suspense; the hero ventures into a den of strangers and feels paranoia, the suddenly nervous hero must solve a mystery and track down the villain before he is killed himself, the hero and heroine stop squabbling and join forces, a train becomes a setting for intrigue. That all these elements found in Night of the Demon were characteristic of early Alfred Hitchcock films is not unexpected. What’s surprising is that critics have never seen the parallels. Charles Bennett, the original scriptwriter on Night of the Demon, wrote the story and/or screenplay for such Hitchcock classics as Blackmail (1929), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), The Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937), and Foreign Correspondent (1940).

I sent Bennett a copy of the first volume of Cult Movies, and he wrote me a letter, from which I excerpt:

Only one thing upsets me . . . gave me desperate nights of sleeplessness, painful days of reflection, agonies with regard to where I must have missed the boat. . . . You omitted Night of the Demon—renamed by Columbia idiots Curse of the Demon because Columbia (the great minds) feared that if they used the word Night the movie would be confused with the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton movie The Night of the Iguana (1964)!!!!

Actually the history of this movie was a sad one. I bought the rights to Montague James’ story, “Casting the Runes,” and wrote a screenplay called “The Bewitched.” It engendered a great deal of excitement out here in Hollywood. Dick Powell, Robert Taylor, and others wanted to play the lead. But time rolled on . . . not as long as I might have waited. . . . and I was in England directing a TV series (ghastly) . . . On the very day that I was leaving . . . Mr. Hal E. Chester turned up and asked me to sign a little letter granting him the rights for a certain amount of money for six months, if he could set it up. Very tired and on the way to the plane, I signed the Goddam thing . . . but as soon as I arrived back in Hollywood I was informed that RKO (Bill Dozier in charge) had okayed the purchase of my script with me as my own director. Too late. Hal Chester held that wretched little piece of paper in England and I hadn’t even received a penny in advance.

Unable to do a damn thing, I had to sit by while Chester made the biggest balls up of a good script that I have ever seen . . . even rewriting . . . but somehow the movie, perhaps because the fundamentals of my screenplay couldn’t be entirely wiped out, succeeded. To add insult to injury I frequently get letters, even now, from cult-type organizations, asking me to write something about Night of the Demon because it is still loved in peculiar areas.

Not that any of this matters, but I am still galled by the fact that, due to my own stupidity and my desire not to miss my plane back home, I was sort of hustled into giving an okay which thereby robbed me of the big chance to direct what I believe could have been the historical movie of my life. Oh, well! These things happen. And my script must have had more than something because even after Mr. Chester’s mangling, it is still, in certain circles, a Cult movie.

As a roaring train whizzes past, Karswell looks up and spots a demon from hell descending on him. Was the inclusion of the physically imposing demon, instead of leaving it to the viewer’s imagination, a good idea? Director Tourneur and screenwriter Bennett thought not.

Night of the Demon/Curse of the Demon certainly deserves its cult following. It is the best pure horror movie of the science fiction-dominated fifties, the most intriguing film ever made with a witchcraft theme, and the most intelligent, visually impressive entry to the genre since director Jacques Tourneur, followed by Mark Robson and Robert Wise, made that classic series of B horror films at RKO for producer Val Lewton in the early forties. Although producer Hal Chester (who gave himself coscreenwriter credit) insensitively rewrote Bennett’s script, several times according to Tourneur, it somehow retained the grace and literate quality, as well as the sinister feel and elements of mystery and suspense (as opposed to shock) that distinguished Bennett’s Hitchcock scripts. (Moreover, Chester couldn’t entirely wipe out the spirit of the M. R. James source that was present in Bennett’s adaptation.) If the picture falters in spots it’s not so much that the dialogue lapses into triteness as because the low budget prevented reshooting awkward moments (i.e., on occasion there are jarring jump cuts). The story itself is powerful, great spooky fun, and well constructed, despite Bennett’s contention that some of his scenes that fleshed out the characters and provided essential motivation for their actions were eliminated. (Also unfortunate is that the print which most often plays in America is minus thirteen minutes of the original, including, I believe, the extremely effective scene in which Holden visits the satanist farmers and hallucinates.)

What really compensated for the excessive alteration of Bennett’s screenplay is that Jacques Tourneur was hired to direct. (Of course, this was no consolation to Bennett, who yearned to direct himself.*) The material was perfectly suited for this exceptional director of Lewton’s first three horror gems: Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Leopard Man (1943). Where he had once convinced viewers that ancient curses (Cat People), voodoo spells (I Walked with a Zombie), and fate/doom signs (The Leopard Man) shouldn’t be too easily discounted, even in a Christian world, now he had them open their minds to the powers of witchcraft. Once again everyday (working) men and women are thrust into a strange environment, where things transpire that are beyond their comprehension. Again we venture into the shadowy Tourneur-Lewton world, where light and darkness, good and evil, science and magic, and fate and free will battle continuously. Here characters are controlled less by reason than by their subconscious: psychologist Holden had his predecessor in Tom Conway’s psychiatrist in Cat People, released when psychiatry (as well as hypnotism) was taboo in the cinema. As in the Lewton films, there is the theme of dehumanization (physical appearance/mental state). In Cat People Simone Simon, whom everyone thinks insane, turns into a cat—because unlike “real” women she can’t have sexual intercourse; in I Walked with a Zombie, Christina Gordan, whom some think insane, becomes, in effect, one of the walking dead—her brain no longer functions; in The Leopard Man James Bell, who has gone insane, dons leopard skin and fangs and satisfies his bloodthirsty, sexually motivated urges. In Night of the Demon Karswell (menacingly played by Niall MacGinnis) doesn’t actually lose his mind but rather becomes temporarily deranged. When things go awry he loses the ability to rationally determine his life’s course. In Tourneur-Lewton, people become dehumanized when they lose their free will. Karswell becomes victim of his own conceit, power lust, and paranoia (a sensation all diabolists must feel). As in the Lewton films, an individual isn’t just presented as insane—we are made aware of the process involved in his losing touch with reality. Karswell realizes that he is tempting fate by consorting with the devil, and tries to retain his humanity by doing such generous things as holding parties for orphan children and treating them to a magic show. But we see he has lost his battle—he is even mean to his mother.

Audiences jump when two little boys in evil masks leap out at Holden during Karswell’s annual magic party.

At this time, Hammer Studios was initiating its series of updated horror classics. The trend was for strong violence and gore (as well as strong sex). But Tourneur went back to his forties roots, preferring to frighten his viewers through such fundamental fears as darkness, sudden sounds, and wild animals. (For Tourneur, “jazzing it up” or becoming gimmicky meant including the bizarre, unnerving séance.) No horror director has ever been able to create an atmosphere so beautiful, yet so ominous. Tourneur always loved having his imperiled hero and heroines walk alone at night through trees, shrubbery, grass: In Cat People Jane Randolph is followed through a park; in I Walked with a Zombie Frances Dee follows a moonlit island trail; in The Leopard Man a young girl is trapped in a cemetery. Night of the Demon is no exception. Following a terrifying fight with Karswell’s housecat—which had turned into an enormous panther—Holden walks through the forest by Karswell’s house. The forest had seemed almost comforting moments before, but now it’s eerie. It’s as if the limbs of the trees are about to reach out and grab Holden. The road to Karswell’s estate is also eerie—it is lined with shrubs so close together that one can’t help feeling trapped. The sky, too, is threatening—it seems to be looking down on Holden. The darkness is more noticeable. Footprints from some large, invisible creature form in the soil. A smoke ball flies through the sky. No wonder Holden runs. He falls, the smoke ball disappears. What a frightening scene, yet nothing has really happened. Holden will try to chalk it all up to his imagination; and viewers are left to decide if everything was indeed imagined by him.

Holden is skeptical during Mr. Meek’s séance. Joanna (standing), Mrs. Meek, and Mrs. Karswell (right) watch the man go into a bizarre trance.

Also visually striking and quite creepy is the windstorm scene where Karswell tries to prove to Holden that he has the ability to perform witchcraft. (A weird atmosphere has already been created by villain Karswell in clown makeup, and kids running around in scary masks.) In The Celluloid Muse (Angus and Robertson, 1969) Tourneur told interviewers Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg:

I had a fight over the staging of the storm scene. We had to rent twelve aerial engines from World War I. We were on an exterior location, and these were great long trees, and if we’d had half a storm it would have been inadequate. We had truckloads and truckloads of dead leaves, and we set the radial engines whirling—cost a fortune, no one would talk to me. They said, “We’ll do it with generators, electric machines,” and I said, “No, it’s got to be a hell of a storm, it’s got to blow over the prams and the nurses in the garden, and all the chairs.” So we had all these huge engines going: There was so much noise you couldn’t hear anything.

It’s such an amazing storm, Karswell apologizes to Holden for miscalculating his power.

Val Lewton was known for not showing brutal acts or proof of the supernatural. He left much to the viewer’s imagination. When Tourneur directed Night of the Demon, he wanted viewers to argue over whether there truly are supernatural occurrences in the picture. When (much to both Tourneur’s and Bennett’s chagrin) producer Chester inserted scenes in which the gigantic, fiery demon flies out of the woods and destroys Harrington and Karswell, he of course changed the picture. There has been enormous controversy about the inclusion of the demon, with critics almost invariably coming out against it in favor of subtlety. Bennett believes “its presence took a major movie down to the level of cheap horror crap.” (Chester added the monster to bring in the kiddie crowd—the demon was the highlight of the promotion campaign—which is odd, since the picture was given an X rating in Britain, so only those sixteen and older could see it.) In the best horror movie book, An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (Capricorn, 1968), Carlos Clarens complains about the presence of the demon—yet it is the demon that graces the book’s cover. So, I believe most critics dislike the demon for no other reason than they know it was studio-imposed. Except for a shot where the demon looks like King Kong in drag, riding an invisible bicycle, I think the demon is terrific. I am in favor of this vile creature as big as a house and ugly as sin, that rips Karswell to shreds with its claws and tosses him to the ground in disdain. Val Lewton’s theory was to not show what takes place in the dark because it can never be more terrifying than what the viewer can imagine. But this demon is more terrifying than anything imaginable. It’s the scariest monster in film history as far as I’m concerned (no matter that others think it ludicrous). As to the complaint that the demon’s presence reveals too much, I can’t buy it. This demon is but one creature from the underworld, just one small part of the world of diabolism.

As in many Hitchcock films, the suspense builds on a train. Holden wants to place the parchment on Karswell (who has kidnapped and hypnotized Joanna), but he knows what Holden is up to.

Tourneur was never great with actors—pictorial quality and the poetic fluidity of his images is what he’s known for—but Night of the Demon does contain some fine performances, particularly MacGinnis’s. I’m glad that the beautiful Peggy Cummins, so outstanding in Gun Crazy (1950), got to be in at least one more top-grade film. Night of the Demon also was the last really good starring film for Dana Andrews, who gives a stalwart portrayal. Tourneur had to convince him to come to England to play the part. The pair, who worked together in Canyon Passage in 1946, would make another film together in 1958. The Fearmakers was not a horror movie, but interestingly the plot bears striking similarity to Night of the Demon. A returning war vet discovers that communists have infiltrated his advertising agency: It’s another witch hunt story!

Night of the Demon is an exceptional, adult horror film. For that we can point to several remarkable twosomes: Bennett and Hitchcock; Tourneur and Lewton; Andrews and Cummins; and last but not least, Karswell and his controversial demon.

*Bennett writes me: “Tourneur was a wonderful person. I would never blame him for what happened to the film. I blame only Hal Chester. Never Jacques. He did the best he could with what he was told to shoot.”

The Night of the Hunter

1955 United Artists

Director: Charles Laughton

Producer: Paul Gregory

Screenplay: James Agee

From the novel by Davis Grubb

Cinematography: Stanley Cortez

Music: Walter Schumann

Editor: Robert Golden

Running Time: 92 minutes

B&W

Cast: Robert Mitchum (Preacher Harry Powell), Billy Chapin (John Harper), Shelley Winters (Willa Harper), Lillian Gish (Rachel Cooper), Sally Jane Bruce (Pearl Harper), Evelyn Varden (Icey Spoon), Don Beddoe (Walt Spoon), Peter Graves (Ben Harper), James Gleason (Uncle Birdie), Gloria Castillo (Ruby), Mary Ellen Clemons (Clary), Cheryl Callaway (Mary).

Synopsis: Children find a murdered woman in a barn. Preacher Harry Powell drives away, having done what he believes is God’s work. He talks to God constantly—he can’t remember if this is the sixth or twelfth widow he has married and murdered. He despises women because they arouse men’s carnal instincts.

Nine-year-old John Harper and his four-year-old sister, Pearl, play in their yard in Cresap’s Landing, a small town on the Ohio River. Their father, Ben, drives up. He has killed for $10,000. He stashes the money in Pearl’s doll and makes both kids swear not to tell anyone, even their mother, Willa, where it is. John is upset when the police knock down and handcuff his father.

Ben awaits hanging in the Moundsville penitentiary. His cellmate is Preacher, serving thirty days for auto theft. Preacher tries to cajole Ben into revealing where the missing money is so he can build a tabernacle. Ben recognizes Preacher is no man of God. He dies without revealing the secret.

Preacher arrives in Cresap’s Landing. He tells Willa he was the preacher at the penitentiary. She’s relieved when he says Ben told him he threw the money in the river. Preacher overwhelms Willa, Pearl, and the rest of the townspeople by quoting scriptures, belting out hymns, and delivering a sermon about good defeating evil. Only John distrusts and fears this strange man who has L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E tattooed on his fingers. Spurred on by busybody Icey Spoon and her ineffectual husband, Walt, her employees at the soda shop, Willa accepts Preacher’s proposal. On their wedding night, Preacher admonishes her for expecting sex, ever. She hopes she will learn to be clean. Falling under his spell, she speaks of her sins at his revival meetings. She doesn’t believe John when he tells her Preacher has been trying to get him to reveal where the money is hidden. But one night she overhears Preacher trying to force Pearl to reveal their secret. The broken woman is resigned to her death. Preacher stabs her with his switchblade. He tells the Spoons she ran off. Uncle Birdie discovers the body in her car at the bottom of the river, but is afraid to tell anyone lest he be blamed.

Preacher threatens the children. Pearl tells Preacher the money is in her doll to stop him from stabbing John. But the children escape with the doll, taking the skiff downriver. Preacher steals a horse and gives chase. The kids’ journey is arduous. John knows that Preacher will never stop hunting them.

Found on the riverbank, John and Pearl are taken into the care of Rachel Cooper, a strong-willed sixty-year-old Bible-storytelling widow. Three other orphans live with her: Ruby, Mary, and Clary. John comes to trust her, but he can’t talk of his past.

Preacher arrives at the farm to claim his “flesh and blood.” Rachel realizes he is no preacher and no father to the kids. She chases him away with a rifle. That night, Preacher lays siege to the house. Then he sneaks inside. Rachel shoots him. Wounded, he runs yelping into the barn. When the police arrest him, John is reminded of what happened to his father. Losing control, he repeatedly hits Preacher with the doll, and the money pours out.

Preacher is convicted of murder. Icey and Walt lead a mob that wants to lynch him. John and Pearl settle in with Rachel. She marvels at the way children abide and endure.

“Lord save little children! For each of them has his Preacher to hound him down the dark river of fear and tonguelessness and never-a-door. Each one is mute and alone because there is no word for a child’s fear and no ear to heed it if there were a word and no one to understand it if it were heard. Lord save little children! They abide and they endure.”

—Rachel, in Davis Grubb’s novel The Night of the Hunter

While Pearl sleeps, John’s awake nightmare begins. A stranger, Preacher, stands outside in the darkness.

First-time viewers are invariably startled by how weird and how brilliant is Charles Laughton’s movie adaptation of Davis Grubb’s riveting bestseller. It is a fascinating, truly unique work, part gothic horror film, part religious parable, part child’s nightmare, part fairy tale. It has a terrifying storyline, uniformly outstanding and offbeat performances, including a chilling portrayal by Robert Mitchum as a psychotic phony preacher, striking cinematography by Orson Welles alumnus Stanley Cortez (who was behind the camera for the 1949 Laughton-starrer The Man on the Eiffel Tower), and excitingly unconventional direction by Laughton. In preparation for the film, Laughton studied the techniques of German expressionists and D. W. Griffith; from Griffith, he also took leading lady Lillian Gish and borrowed, from the Griffith-Gish and independent Gish classics, both a vision of a troubled bucolic America and the theme of innocents being cast adrift in a sinful world. His picture looks different from other films of the period—though Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955), with its unusual camera angles, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), with its multiplane staging (with props located between the characters and the camera), use similar ideas—and his characters are different. In 1955, critics complained the film was self-consciously arty and too vague because of all the symbols. (Actually, there are few major symbols other than Preacher’s phallic stick knife, which opens when he’s watching a stripper and when Ruby suggests something wicked, and the film’s many apples, which represent sexual temptation and, according to critic Robin Wood, fertility and harvest.) The resulting box office was so dismal that the depressed Laughton quit working on his second film, an adaptation of The Naked and the Dead, and never dared direct another film. So he stands as one of the few directors—Leonard Kastle of The Honeymoon Killers (1969) is another—whose batting average for masterpieces is 1.000.

But let me go back to the early fifties, when Laughton found his movie career was sputtering. He joined forces with young, innovative producer Paul Gregory, and served as star and director of several enormously successful stage productions, including Don Juan in Hell and The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Their plays were known for having minimal sets yet bold acting and direction, a combination Gregory and Laughton wanted to employ in their first screen collaboration, The Night of the Hunter. It’s understandable why Gregory was attracted to Grubb’s novel. Like John and Pearl Harper, he was born in the Midwest (on a farm in Waukee, Iowa), experienced poverty and the misery of the Depression, and found he couldn’t simply rely on adults for his welfare (which meant he worked at a very young age). Surely he saw a sorry parade of itinerant preachers warning potential sinners of God’s wrath and passing the collection plate, if not as a youngster then when, as young impresario, he took plays into some 300 towns and villages on the long-neglected “Chautauqua circuit.” Interestingly, when Gregory first approached Laughton in the late forties, it was to propose sending the actor around the country reading the Bible.

Another dramatic, expressionistic visual, conceived by director Charles Laughton and photographed by Stanley Cortez. Willa waits for her husband to kill her.

I guess Laughton was attracted to Grubb’s story because it cried out for an unorthodox visual style, and because of Preacher. Laughton had loved playing villains who were ruthless, narrow-minded, and manipulative; obsessive men who believed in their omnipotence; men who loved to hear themselves talk and become crazy from basking in their own glory. He didn’t really care about the plight of John and Pearl Harper and so detested child actors Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce that he had Mitchum direct them (they do an exceptional job). So it’s remarkable that few films in history convey more heartfelt empathy toward helpless little children than The Night of the Hunter, and few have more insight into the cruel, dangerous, frightening world of young children, particularly orphans. For even when they are seemingly secure under their covers, they worry about being bitten by bedbugs and attacked by huge monsters that make shadows on their walls. And it doesn’t take sleep to project unprotected kids like John and Pearl into a wilderness of fear and confusion. For such children—and this is the theme of the novel and film—nightmares continue even when they are awake.

In an essay printed in On Film, Robin Wood explained why he considers the movie, for all its apparent fidelity to the book’s events, distinct from and decidedly superior to Grubb’s novel:

The difference is primarily of style and tone. That of the book is highly suspect, characterized by that gooey, pseudo-poetic self-indulgence that too often passes for “lyricism.” The concept of nature plays a vital role in both book and film, but in the book this role is vitiated by Grubb’s presentation. In his nature, frogs don’t croak, they “chant their unending litany of love.” . . . [Screenwriter James] Agee manages to trim away the fat of pretentious verbosity and the lush, sticky imagery of the novel. What he retains is the strongly planned structure of the fable which Grubb’s language tends to obscure rather than illuminate. Where the book is self-indulgent and corrupt, the film is rigorous and pure. Here it is difficult to distinguish clearly Laughton’s contribution from Agee’s. In a sense “it’s all in the script”—nearly. Laughton sets himself to realize Agee’s intentions (the script abounds in striking cinematic ideas) with a humility surprising to those who know him only through his screen persona.

Groupings and compositions, camera movements, even the difficult helicopter shots, are for the most part as demanded by Agee. Laughton’s respect for Agee’s intentions shows itself especially in his leaving stark and bare what almost any other director would have filled out and decorated.

Wood is too quick to discredit Grubb for the success of the film, give credit to Agee, and imply Laughton showed wisdom in adhering to Agee’s story ideas rather than Grubb’s and to Agee’s cinematic ideas rather than the ones he formulated himself while directing theater (i.e., the spare sets) and studying classic films (perhaps the helicopter shots were inspired by the opening of Leni Reifenstahl’s 1935 German documentary Triumph of the Will?). It has come to light in recent years, partly through the publication of Elsa Lanchester’s autobiography, that Laughton paid Agee $30,000 for a script to assure studio interest, and then threw it out because it was much too long and wasn’t faithful to Grubb’s novel. The shooting script, which incorporates Laughton’s cinematic ideas, and events and dialogue from the novel, was in fact written by Laughton. It has also been conjectured that Grubb collaborated on the script, but it’s more likely his contribution was limited to providing Laughton with 119 pencil and ink drawings depicting how he saw each character or scene. Titles included: “Harper living room,” “Cooper’s house and farm,” “(Preacher) Weren’t you children afraid down there alone in the dark?,” “Ruby watches lynching”—a scene not in the movie—“Rachel,” “Preacher,” “Ice cream parlor exterior,” “John’s vest-eye view,” “Exterior Miz Cunningham’s second hand shop.” Grubb eventually sent his drawings to a gallery with an explanatory letter. An excerpt:

At a Cresap’s Landing picnic, Preacher impresses Willa and Icey Spoon (with back turned).

Laughton assured me with considerable passion that he intended the film to resemble as nearly my mental pictures in writing the book as was possible to achieve. . . . He was, like Von Stroheim, compulsive in this passion for verisimilitude. Long after I sold the screen rights to Laughton and Gregory for The Night of the Hunter and was well into my second novel I began to be subjected to a daily barrage of wires, phone calls from Hollywood and letters asking me for sketches, more sketches and yet more sketches of what this or the other scene looked like in my mind. So incessant was this interrogation that it kept me busy dividing my time between the new book, A Dream of Kings, and making drawings and sending them off air mail special to Laughton in Hollywood. He would even ask me to draw the expression on a character’s face during certain scenes. I . . . can only declare, perhaps immodestly, that I was not only the author of the novel from which the screenplay was adapted, but was the actual scene designer as well.

I don’t want to imply that Laughton made no changes from the novel, or that some changes (i.e., the wedding night scene) aren’t improvements. However, I think the film’s success is due to Laughton adhering to the tone of Grubb’s novel, and not, as Wood suggests, deliberately seeking an alternate tone. Wood is correct in thinking Grubb preferred waxing poetic or piling on the imagery to making simple, direct statements. But, as Laughton understood, Grubb’s style and tone were correct for the type of story he is telling. His story may be set in contemporary times, but place the words “Once upon a time” before it and you’ll realize that he is writing one of those Tolkien-like fantasies that are set in a timeless, alternate universe, where there is, say, an ill wind to the east, pestilence and plague overtaking the land, an exodus of good people in the face of evil, and a journey/mission of survival undertaken by underdog heroes . . . with a seemingly invincible evil creature breathing down their necks. Grubb suggests that the Depression years, with all their religious hysteria, poverty, crime, lynchings, mobs, and wandering children, hark back to the Dark Ages, to biblical times, to mythical times. He transports Pearl, who’s too young to realize what’s happening, and John, whose trauma is so great that reality gives way to mental disorientation, into a nightmarish fantasy world: They may lose their lives just to keep a promise to their irresponsible father; their father is taken away, then he is dead; a mean stepfather with a knife moves in; their mother sides with him over her children; mother abandons them, then mother is dead; the stepfather wants to murder them; they must flee their home; children ostracize them because of what their father did; adults won’t listen to them; their only adult friend (Birdie) becomes incapacitated when they are in grave danger; they can’t trust the police (John calls them “blue men”) because they beat and abducted their father; and God seems to be on the side of evil men like Preacher. It is, Grubb writes, “a world that hunted the children now,” and like the baby Moses, they flee those who would kill children, and like Hansel and Gretel they wander into the wilderness and enter the house of a strange old lady (luckily, Rachel is no witch). Repeatedly, Grubb has his troubled characters sleep and have bad dreams to draw a parallel between their suddenly unreal world (Grubb’s fantasy world) and any child’s nightmare world; only when peace comes to them in their real lives can their nightmares stop.

Without a means to use Grubb’s flowery prose or the time to include dream sequences, Laughton couldn’t really draw the Depression America fantasy world-child nightmares parallel that is advanced in the novel; he ends the film with Rachel’s “they abide and they endure” speech rather than showing, as I’d prefer, John and Pearl going to sleep in Rachel’s safe home and finally enjoying peaceful dreams. But he does the next best thing: He turns John and Pearl’s story into a combination of a biblical tale and a Grimm fairy tale, and films it as if it were a nightmare. Laughton said: “It’s really a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale we were telling. We tried to surround the children with creatures they might have observed, and that might have seemed part of a dream. It was, in a way, a dream for them.”

In the opening Laughton immediately takes us out of reality. Harsh music is replaced by the sweet singing of children and the heads of Rachel and her five young wards appear in the sky, amidst the stars. She tells them to beware of false prophets (a Bible-story image), of wolves in sheep’s clothing (a fairy-tale image). We realize what we are about to see is a story, a parable to illustrate her point—it might even be the nightmare John has that night after hearing Rachel’s fretful words. An unreal world has been established and Laughton effectively keeps us there with his unusual visuals. He puts his camera in a helicopter and flies through the clouds to give us a bird’s- or God’s-eye view of the dusty landscape and the perspective is eerie: There are so many right angles that buildings and land boundaries look to have been drawn on a large canvas with aid of a straight ruler; houses and barns suddenly have height, width, and depth, while parcels of land and waterways have become flat. Later Laughton situates his camera behind a character’s head (Preacher in his car) or places a prop between the camera and a character’s face, or covers the character with shadows; even indoors the camera is kept at a distance so we see characters in relation to the floors, walls, ceilings, and props. He uses an iris shot to zero in on John and Pearl peeking out their cellar window—and it is quite magical. The hauntingly beautiful shot of John and Pearl floating downriver in their skiff, with the starry sky and fertile far bank in the background and the fertile near bank in the foreground, is an image straight out of a Disney fairy-tale cartoon.

There is other surreal imagery: In a shadowy bedroom with walls that come to a point to make it resemble a chapel, Willa closes her eyes and waits for Preacher, Jehovah’s messenger, to stab her to death; Preacher chases the kids into the river with arms outstretched, as if he were the Frankenstein monster; as the lynch mob rushes through the Moundsville streets at night the town takes on the look and feel of Babylon. Many settings are those a little child might pick to locate an adventure: a soda shop, a cellar, the front yard, the river, a boat, a barn, a picnic area. Laughton takes care to include all that is familiar to small towns—the wooden houses, soda shops, secondhand stores, grocery stores, billiard parlors, the bakery, the Bijou, river, boats, trains, picnics—but none of it looks familiar because of the startling ways Laughton and Cortez light the frame. In the day, it’s either hazy or so bright that everything is washed out; at night there is dust, smoke, fog, and those spooky shadows (caused by stars or kerosene street lamps). Fairy-tale animals abound: bullfrogs, crickets, rabbits, birds, geese, owls, turtles, sheep, a spider in its web, and not only an actual fox but also a howling Preacher, who acts like a frightened fox caught raiding the henhouse when he zooms into the barn after Rachel shoots him.

If Rachel is as much Mother Goose (remember the old lady who lives in a shoe who has so many children . . .) as she is Mother Courage, then Preacher, a human wolf in sheep’s clothing, is the classic deceitful fairy-tale villain who hides under boulders and behind trees in the forest and is ready to pounce on any innocent person who happens along. Like wolves and other sneaky villains in cartoons, including versions of and variations on old fairy tales, Preacher supplies the slapstick humor (only hinted at in the novel) that provides the necessary moments of relief from the truly gruesome proceedings: He tumbles out of his prison bed when Ben Harper punches him in the nose, he is hit square on the head with a hairbrush John throws at him, a shelf with heavy jars falls on his head, he trips in the dark on a jar on the cellar floor and does a pratfall, he has his fingers smashed in the door by John, he falls like Oliver Hardy into the river, his eyes open wide with terror when Rachel points her rifle at his rear and chases him from her property, he wails in pain after Rachel nips him with a shot and races at supersonic speed into the barn. His howling, his mock crying, even his creepy L-O-V-E versus H-A-T-E hand wrestling and his deep-voiced sermonizing have elements of absurd humor. Many fairy tales, from Little Red Riding Hood to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, have sexual subtexts, and in this film, Preacher serves, of course, as the predatory lustful wolf (a figure in many funny Tex Avery cartoons) who waits for unsuspecting, innocent females to cross his path. He represents the manifestation of their subconscious—in other words, they desire sex. But unlike those other wolf figures, Preacher holds back his impulse to ravage women (after all, he believes he serves God) and instead punishes them for trying to arouse his libido and tempting him to sin—like crazy Anthony Perkins in Crimes of Passion (1984). He stabs them with his precious switchblade, obviously a sexual act. (“Don’t touch my knife,” he warns Pearl. “That makes me mad. Very, very mad.”) Males (Ben, John, Birdie, even Walt) recognize his evil, but women, especially lonely widows, let their defenses down. Only Rachel doesn’t fall for his sorry act. I assume this is because she’s supposedly too old to be swayed by sexual longings; more acceptable is that her motherly instincts are stronger than her sexual instincts or that she is just too wise, too pure, and too strong for Preacher. Her attitude toward sex is enlightened, while Preacher’s dates to the Dark Ages. She understands the sexual needs of females so she isn’t disgusted, as Preacher would certainly be, when young Ruby confesses that she’s been sneaking around with the boys in town. By giving Ruby a brooch, Rachel shows she has no intention of suppressing Ruby’s budding sexuality. She understands sex is natural and not something to be ashamed of—she would be horrified at Preacher’s humiliating treatment of Willa on their wedding night, when he made her feel guilty and unclean for desiring sex. Rachel’s concern, which she wants to express to Ruby, is that Preacher and the unfeeling boys in town can turn sex into something quite ugly and perverse.

Clutching a knife in fingers that are marked “L-O-V-E,” Preacher threatens to stab John unless he reveals where the money is hidden.

The Night of the Hunter is a terrifying film, but every time I see it, I get all choked up about halfway through, anticipating Rachel coming to the aid of the two desperate children. How brave, unselfish, and caring she is—John and Pearl couldn’t have found a better protector. She is the only one who recognizes their need for help, and the only one who has the inner strength and the faith to help them. In fact, if you think about it, she serves them as the priests serve the possessed child they don’t even know in The Exorcist (1973), casting out the evil that threatens to destroy them. The strong-willed, God-loving woman proves too much for the strong-bodied heretic. I wish John’s role wouldn’t diminish so drastically toward the end of the film—Grubb includes John’s cloudy impressions of the trial and its aftermath and ends with the children going to sleep on Christmas (a holiday for another endangered child)—but it’s such a pleasure watching Rachel match wits and then do battle with Preacher. Especially since the two characters are played by Gish and Mitchum.

Publicity shot of Rachel and her brood. The troubled Ruby (left) and John eventually learn what a wise and wonderful woman she is.

It’s a triumphant return to the screen for Gish, perhaps the greatest film actress ever. She’s still beautiful, still personifies goodness, and still exhibits tremendous power, grit, and determination. She’s still a wonderfully natural actress and it is the humility and sincerity she projects as Rachel that perfectly counters the conceit and hamminess of Mitchum’s Preacher. So this tiny actress manages to hold her own with massive Mitchum—Rachel is never portrayed as underdog to Preacher—even though Mitchum was never more formidable, even as the sexual sadist in Cape Fear (1962). (Of course, Preacher is meant to be a pathetic coward.) When, in my favorite scene, Rachel, sitting with a gun, starts singing her version (with a reference to Jesus) of the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” to soften the effect on her of the blasphemer’s rendition—and for a moment they harmonize—you know that she can’t be intimidated. She wins your heart and, if you’re worrying about John and Pearl’s welfare, your gratitude. Forget all those movie heroes: Gish’s Rachel Cooper is the answer to every scared child’s prayers.

Night of the Living Dead

1968 Walter Reade Organization release, through Continental Distributing, of an Image 10 production

Director: George A. Romero

Producers: Russell Streinger and Karl Hardman

Screenplay: John A. Russo

Cinematography: George A. Romero

Music: No credit

Editor: George A. Romero

Running Time: 97 minutes

B&W

Cast: Judith O’Dea (Barbara), Russell Streinger (Johnny), Duane Jones (Ben), Karl Hardman (Harry Cooper), Keith Wayne (Tom), Judith Ridley (Judy), Marilyn Eastman (Helen Cooper), Kyra Schon (Karen).

Synopsis: Barbara and her brother Johnny drive to an abandoned cemetery in western Pennsylvania to visit their father’s grave. Suddenly, a zombielike man attacks Barbara. Johnny defends her and is killed when his head strikes a tombstone. Barbara flees to an abandoned farmhouse. Exploring the house, she discovers a half-eaten body at the top of the staircase. She panics and is about to run out of the house when a stranger named Ben comes in, having been chased inside by several zombielike creatures. Barbara helps Ben barricade the windows and doors. Meanwhile the house is surrounded. Barbara slowly withdraws into a catatonic state, having endured more than she can stand.

It turns out that Ben and Barbara are not alone in the house. Judy and Tom, a young couple, and Helen and Harry Cooper have been hiding in the basement with the Coopers’ daughter Karen, who is very ill after having been bitten by a zombie. Ben and Harry don’t get along at all because Harry is domineering, insisting that Ben and Barbara come down to the basement when Ben thinks it wiser to stay above. When Helen finds out that there is a television upstairs, she yells at her husband for being so stubborn and goes to join the others.

Hysterical Barbara, Ben (with the gun), and Tom attempt to keep cool inside the house while zombies walk about outside.

Everyone watches television. Reports say that due to the release of a freak molecular mutation brought back by a Venus space probe, the dead have been rising, killing people and eating them. Reports also state that recently killed people will turn into zombies as well. The police are scouring the country shooting zombies in the head. TV commentators tell people to try to make their way to local national defense stations.

Ben and Tom go outside, hoping to drive a truck to some gas tanks a few hundred yards away, so everyone can then escape. Judy follows them outside. They use torches to keep the zombies away, but the zombies follow them. Gasoline accidentally pours from the tank and catches fire. The truck blows up with Tom and Judy inside. Ben makes his way back into the house. When the terrified Harry won’t let him in, he beats Harry up. Outside, the zombies eat Judy and Tom. Harry tries to get Ben’s rifle away from him so he can be the one to give orders. Ben shoots him, and he stumbles into the basement to die. Helen goes downstairs and finds Karen, who has died and become a zombie, eating Harry. Karen kills Helen and begins to eat her, too.

Upstairs, the zombies’ attack continues. Barbara is pulled outside by Johnny, now a zombie. Karen attacks Ben, but he sidesteps her. He locks himself in the basement and puts bullets in the heads of Helen and Harry so they won’t become zombies. The zombies cannot get into the basement.

In the morning, the police have things under control. They shoot anything that moves. They kill all the zombies around the farmhouse. When they see Ben come upstairs and stand near a window, they think him a zombie and shoot him in the head. Ben and all the dead zombies are thrown into a great fire.

Zombies attempt to break into the house where Barbara, Ben, Tom, Judy, and the Coopers have barricaded themselves.

Seeing Night of the Living Dead today, one can hardly believe that it scared the living daylights out of moviegoers years ago. Not that it isn’t still lots of fun (it is) or doesn’t have moments that are still quite spooky (it does), but it is tame compared to all those gruesome horror films it has spawned, including its more brutal but less satisfying sequel Dawn of the Dead (1978) and, of course, the TV phenomenon, The Walking Dead. Today one is more likely to laugh at the picture’s considerable wit than hide under a chair.

One of the most successful independently made films ever, Night of the Living Dead was produced by a small Pittsburgh production company which had specialized in making industrial films, political spots, and commercials and had never been involved in entertainment films. Likewise, George Romero (now a major “cult director”) had never made a feature before, his only experience in that area having come when he was a nineteen-year-old grip on Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). Romero had written the original story—“an allegory,” he told Filmmakers Newsletter, “meant to draw a parallel between what people are becoming and the idea that people are operating on many levels of insanity that are only clear to themselves”—and he and nine other frustrated filmmakers invested six hundred dollars apiece to convert it into a film. Romero cast the picture with unknowns and amateurs (with townspeople playing the zombies), and production began—although Romero and John Russo were still working on the script. Production was forced to stop cold on several occasions while Romero found additional financing; in time he came up with another hundred thousand dollars by showing potential investors completed footage and selling them stock in the picture. And after thirty shooting days, staggered over a seven-month period, the film was completed.

Columbia turned the picture down because it wasn’t in color, and AIP rejected it because it has no romance and has a downbeat ending; but the Walter Reade Organization agreed to distribute it, and soon it was playing on the bottom of the bill in drive-ins and neighborhood theaters showing triple features. If ever a picture became a hit because of favorable word-of-mouth, this is it. Horror aficionados stumbled upon it in run-down theaters on New York’s Forty-Second Street or in drive-ins in the sticks, and soon spread the word that they had “discovered a masterpiece of the genre.” Critics started tracking down prints, and their reaction was equally enthusiastic. Living Dead had risen out of its coffin and was suddenly in demand all over the country. Lines formed around the block, and the picture quickly made back its cost thirty times over. Art houses booked it, and film societies, and then the Museum of Modern Art. When people had seen it several times, Night of the Living Dead moved to the midnight movie circuit (way back in 1969!), where it attracted a new audience as well as repeaters. Still today, it remains one of the most popular midnight movies.

Some of the zombies that are visible from the house.

Just as many films have been influenced by Living Dead, it likewise is a derivative film. Romero himself cites those lurid, pre-comic-code EC comics (especially Tales From the Crypt) as inspiration, as well as Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the exciting novel about the sole human survivor in a world of mutants that has been the basis of several dull pictures. Among the films with which Living Dead has most in common are: The Invisible Invaders (1959), in which a group of scientists are trapped in a house that is under siege from zombies that like those in the Romero work seem to be sleepwalking; Carnival of Souls (1962), an excellent, eerie independent feature (made in Lawrence, Kansas) about a blonde who refuses to acknowledge that she is already dead and is terrified by the zombies around her; and Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), in which a group of people barricade themselves in a house to protect themselves from creatures (birds) that are inexplicably killing human beings. Hitchcock’s influence on Romero is quite evident: the silent passages, the collision montage (rapid-fire, rhythmic editing of powerful images), the series of (character) reaction shots, filmed from below at sharp angles—just as Hitchcock framed his characters in The Birds when they were fearfully listening to the birds hammer away at the house. When Barbara climbs the stairs and discovers the face of a half-eaten cadaver, we must think of Psycho; as we do when Karen stabs Helen many times with a trowel and the camera aims high to the peak point where Karen lifts the weapon—much like how the camera concentrates on the knife that kills Martin Balsam in the Hitchcock film.

Pessimistic and unsentimental, Living Dead is so effective because it is totally without pretension. It works on basic fears: unrelenting terror, monsters, darkness, claustrophobia. “Aliens” attack us on American soil; protectors, even blood relations, turn on one another (it was wise on Romero’s part to have Johnny be Barbara’s brother instead of her boyfriend because when he “eats” her it becomes strictly an image of horror—and not sexual in any way).

The black-and-white photography, necessitated by the low budget, contributes to the nightmarish look of the film. It starts out as Barbara’s nightmare but it swiftly becomes ours too—especially if we identify with Barbara—and we wish someone was capable of answering her oft-asked question, “What’s happening?”

The burial tag on the zombie on the left seems to indicate that the supply of potential zombies is endless.

In other films in which people are holed up in a house while threatening monsters lurk outside, the people are there for shelter, to protect their house, to plan strategy to battle the monster(s), or to give themselves logistical advantage (the house becomes a fort) in the fight. The Birds and Living Dead are exceptional in that the people congregate in the house for one reason only: fear. These people don’t know what to do or where to go. They only know that they want to get out of the area as quickly as possible—they are not interested in fighting with zombies, just saving themselves. The realization that they are incapable of battling these monsters—their undisguised terror—is one of the major reasons, I believe, Living Dead succeeds in scaring audiences. What also scares them is that they don’t feel that anyone—including Ben (the hero) and Barbara (the heroine)—will survive, especially since the performers are all unknowns and thus are, in movie terms, expendable.

Along the way there are several scary moments. I particularly like the opening sequence. Johnny starts to frighten Barbara, using a Boris Karloff voice, jokingly telling her that the strange-looking man stumbling toward them is “coming to get you.” When the man (being a zombie) does in fact grab her despite Johnny’s presence and without being the least bit sneaky about it, we are startled. When Barbara flees the zombie, who has killed Johnny, she finds “safety” in a car. We remember all those horror films in which the guy tells the girl to stay locked inside the car where she’ll be safe while he goes off to find out what is making the noises in the bushes. But, as we suspected and Romero knew, “the girl” isn’t safe at all—and the zombie starts to pound away at the car, rocking it back and forth and smashing the window with a large stone. Barbara sits inside, helpless and in definite jeopardy. I don’t find anything that happens later as scary as this opening sequence, but it has the lasting effect of letting viewers know that nothing in this film is predictable—even to those who know the horror genre inside out.

Zombies that have been killed for the second time.

Throughout the film there are nice horror touches. I like it when Barbara looks at the face of a dead man lying on the floor and the camera studies (in close-up) its bloody head, which suddenly moves. . . . We jump. . . . Luckily, it turns out that the corpse is not moving by itself but only because Ben is pulling it out of the house. Also I like when the catatonic Barbara—one of the few movie heroines who is not required by cinematic convention to get over the loss of a loved one in five minutes of screen time—sits alone in the living room, the camera alternately making a slow zoom toward her face and toward the radio, on which a newscaster (who wrote his own copy, incidentally) speaks of ghouls on murder sprees across the country. This isn’t meant to build toward a shock moment, and nothing happens, but this scene adds greatly to the film’s tension. The one true “jump-out-of-your-seat” moment comes when Ben walks close to a wall and hands suddenly come through the windows and grab him—much like the asylum patients shooting their hands through the bars in Bedlam (1946).

“The zombies are us,” says Romero. “We create them so we can kill them off, justifying ourselves—it’s a kind of penance, self-exorcism.” Unfortunately, Romero’s zombies aren’t very frightening. In fact, they’re kind of silly, wearing dumpy clothes and walking around as if they’d just downed a fifth of bourbon. (You wouldn’t even have wanted to associate with these people when they were alive.) As for the scenes in which they eat the innards (donated by an investor who was a butcher) of their victims, I think Romero mistakenly lets us see them feast up close. It is much ghastlier when we just hear slurping noises.

Harry and Helen Cooper hope their daughter will recover from a zombie bite. She won’t.

Of course, the zombies are, in a way, meant to contribute to the picture’s absurd humor. Why else have one zombie eat a worm off a tree, or a nude zombie walk by with a morgue ticket still on her, or so many participate in what seems to be an Indian war dance around the truck? They definitely contribute to the film’s intentional campiness. So do the amateurish performances of the lead actors and the overly dramatic internecine squabbling of their characters.

Most interesting is the ongoing rivalry between Ben and Harry. This is played mostly for laughs (“Shut up,” Ben tells Harry to end every conversation), but it also serves to complement the zombies’ attack from outside with some in-the-house hostilities. Much praise has been given the film because the lead, Duane Jones, is black and no mention is made of this in the script. If Romero was, in fact, thinking in terms of color when he cast Jones, he would have certainly made the scowling, clench-fisted, loudmouthed Harry a bigot who would spit racial slurs at Ben—this would have been perfectly believable considering what we already know about Harry.

Harry is a cowardly bully who cares only about himself, and Ben is brave and concerned about the welfare of the others in his house; so whatever our race, we side with Ben. Yet, if we were in the house with these two men, maybe we should think again. It took me many years to realize this, but Ben, our hero, turns out to be terribly wrong when he adamantly tells everyone that they have a better chance for survival if they remain upstairs with him instead of following Harry’s advice and locking themselves in the basement. Everyone dies as a result of following Ben’s lead and coming upstairs—and ironically, Ben alone survives the night and keeps away from the zombies by locking himself in the basement. Has anyone else noticed this?

Peeping Tom

Also known as Face of Fear

1960 (U.K.) Anglo Amalgamated (released in the U.S. in 1962 by Astor; re-released in 1979 by Corinth)

Director: Michael Powell

Producer: Michael Powell

Screenplay: Leo Marks

Cinematography: Otto Heller

Music: Brian Easdale

Editor: Norman Ackland

Running time: 101 minutes

Color

Cast: Carl Boehm (Mark Lewis), Moira Shearer (Vivian), Anna Massey (Helen Stephens), Maxine Audley (Mrs. Stephens), Esmond Knight (Arthur Baden), Bartlet Mullins (Mr. Peters), Brenda Bruce (Dora), Martin Miller (Dr. Rosen), Pamela Green (Millie), Michael Powell (Professor Lewis), Shirley Ann Field, Michael Goodliffe, Jack Watson, Nigel Davenport.

Synopsis: With his 16mm camera turned on and hidden from sight, Mark Lewis approaches a prostitute on the street. She takes him back to her room, where she looks toward him and becomes terribly frightened. That night in his flat, Mark views the film he took of her murder. The next morning, he films the police investigation of her murder for the documentary he is making.

Mark works as a focus puller at a film studio, but for extra money he takes girlie pictures above a corner cigar store. At his house he meets Helen Stephens, a young woman who lives with her blind mother in a downstairs flat. She visits his flat, which has a projection room and a photographic lab. He tells her he wants to be a director.

Mark shows Helen black-and-white films that were taken of him when he was a child. She is horrified to see that his scientist father used him as a guinea pig in various experiments, taking movies of him crying while watching a couple make love nearby and screaming when his father wakes him up by throwing a lizard on his bed. Mark tells Helen that his whole childhood was filmed; that his father was interested in the reactions of fear to the nervous system.

After work at the film studio, understudy Vivian stays behind for a secret rendezvous with Mark, who has promised to give her a screen test. Mark turns on his 16mm camera. A blade extended from the tripod is aimed directly at her throat. She screams. The next day her body is discovered. Mark films the police investigation. Mark promises Helen he will take pictures for a children’s book she is writing. They go on a date. She makes him leave his camera behind and for the first time he seems at ease and to be enjoying himself. Afterward, Helen kisses him goodnight. He goes upstairs to his flat and turns on the projector, not knowing that Mrs. Stephens is there. He is disappointed that Vivian’s face does not have the right expression of terror he is seeking. Mrs. Stephens startles him with her presence. Being blind, she doesn’t know what Mark was screening, but she is suspicious of him nevertheless. He knows that there is no use in trying to con her. He promises that he will never film Helen and put her in danger. She tells him to get psychological help.

At the studio, Mark speaks to Dr. Rosen, a psychiatrist who knew his father. He finds out that the cure for a scoptophiliac (one who obtains sexual pleasure by looking at erotic objects or pictures, nude women, etc.) will take two years, far too long. The detectives investigating the murders of the prostitute and Vivian become suspicious of this conversation. They tail Mark. He knows that he is being followed, but still goes to take pictures of the model Millie above the cigar store. Later, detectives find her dead. Helen enters Mark’s flat. She turns on the projector and sees Vivian’s murder. Mark returns and confesses his crimes. He shows her the blade on the camera and an attached mirror so victims can see themselves being killed. Police arrive. Mark films them. Then he turns the camera on himself and runs into the blade, seeing his own scared face in the mirror.

Upon its 1960 release, Peeping Tom was damned by British newspaper critics like no film in memory. This picture about a filmmaker who murders his subjects as he films them was not merely judged trashy or amoral but was called Sadian, necrophilic, perverted, destructive, a blight on the British cinema. (The most famous quote is Derek Hill’s in the Tribune: “The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain.”) Ironically, director Michael Powell had done more than anyone to establish the proud British film tradition, but suddenly critics were forgetting about such noteworthy achievements as The Thief of Baghdad (1940), 49th Parallel (1941), One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), The Small Black Room (1949), and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951). Instead, they pointed out what they believed was the first sign of Powell’s perversity: when Eric Portman pours glue in a girl’s hair in A Canterbury Tale (1944). After thirty years as a writer and director, Powell was an outcast in his own country as a result of Peeping Tom, and considered unbankable by studio heads. Because of the harsh press, the picture failed miserably, although its backers made a last-ditch effort to make it more “presentable” by excising scenes the critics found objectionable. Unfortunately, it was this badly butchered version that briefly played in United States grindhouses in 1962, and for years we Americans waited to see the notorious full-length version that had created such a furor across the Atlantic. Finally, in 1979, chiefly through the efforts of Martin Scorsese, a beautiful uncut 35mm print was screened at the New York Film Festival and on the art-house circuit. As a result, impressed American critics joined the French and Italians in vindicating a fascinating film that was too far ahead of its time to be appreciated by the British in 1960. (To set the record straight: It was Britain’s daily press which, reflecting the attitudes of its readership, lambasted it; trade reviews were much kinder.) It is certainly worth seeing, especially by film devotees. It is full of cinema in-jokes*, “looks” more like a “cult film” than any cult film around, and raises some interesting questions about the nature of filmgoers and filmmakers. It’s unique and great subject matter for an argument. And it’s part of film history. (It certainly anticipated the subjective camera found-footage horror films of today.)

There are numerous reasons why Peeping Tom was greeted with such hostility in England. For one thing it fell under the broad classification of “horror movie,” and horror movies had always been in disfavor in that country: Horror movies come from a German cinema-theater tradition, and Britons have never been keen on letting the genre become part of their culture. In the late fifties a few British-made horror films were released—Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957) and Hammer Studios’ initial horror efforts, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958)—to be given the tag of disrespectability by the daily press (which would become quite receptive to Hammer films a few years later); but prior to this—other than Dead of Night (1946)—you will find few British horror films. (Even horror films that were imported from America often were given an “X” certificate, which meant they couldn’t be seen by children, and this consequently limited their bookings.) Of all England’s directors, Michael Powell, whose hatred of Nazis is quite visible in his numerous war films, was the only one who allowed German art to enter his work, particularly in his staging, design, and lighting. While no one felt uncomfortable with his quick flights of expressionism in his fantasy films The Thief of Baghdad, A Matter of Life and Death (1946), The Red Shoes, and Black Narcissus, they were disturbed by Powell’s nightmarish Peeping Tom, which not only looks like a film in the German horror tradition but features a lead character not unlike Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s German classic M (1931).

Mark and one of his victims. That Powell strived for a sleazy look to the proceedings is quite evident.

Equally unsettling in 1959 was that Peeping Tom is a psychological horror film. Even in America, where horror films had been mass-produced since the twenties, only a few dealt with psychological disorders as the basis of murders. Karl Freund’s remarkable Mad Love (1935), with Peter Lorre, naturally, and the Val Lewton films of the forties are the only pictures that come to mind in which the reasons for the insanity and the process of losing one’s mind are more important to the story than the murders the insane men commit. Then, of course, there is a nonhorror movie, Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951). But it took his Psycho (1960) to really start the wave of psychological thrillers that is still going strong in theaters and on television more than fifty years later. (Serial killers are everywhere!) But back when Peeping Tom was released, critics (especially in England) considered it perverse to have a lead character who is insane. (As in M.)

Mark shows Helen the documentary that his father made of him when he was a child. She is horrified.

Also making the English critics uneasy was that prior to Peeping Tom only a few films in cinema history had dared make the correlation between a person’s violent acts and his/her sexual gratification/satisfaction. This was a touchy theme that rarely got by the censors. Powell doesn’t try to be subtle in showing that Mark is sexually excited by the murders he commits. Mark may be outwardly calm, but the long, sharp knife that emerges from hiding right before the act of murder immediately “exposes” Mark’s sexual frenzy.

In Mark’s peculiar case, the murder of a woman does not by itself give him sexual satisfaction. The insertion of the blade into her is a necessary step, but his onanistic “climax” takes place back in his room when he projects her dying expression on his wall. And only when his camera has captured in her face the absolute expression of fear (he is always disappointed/frustrated) can he truly be sexually satisfied. Mark’s need to achieve sexual fulfillment through a process which includes murdering young women was hard enough for 1960 British critics to tolerate, but what made it even more difficult was that unlike the other sexual deviants—even the sympathetic Jack the Ripper in Pandora’s Box and Peter Lorre in M—Mark is not presented as a villain. The villain of the piece is Mark’s dead father, who used the young Mark as a guinea pig in his mad experiments. Not only does Powell not condemn Mark for his grisly crimes, but he gets us to like him, even root for him. When there is a point-of-view shot we are Mark’s accomplices. But Powell’s film is even more jarring to our sensibilities because at times we even identify with Mark. By having Mark’s “sexual act” take place in two stages—the murder and the screening of the murder—Powell makes the distinction between participation (count us out) and voyeurism (count us in). Both have their own erotic appeal: For instance, one can enjoy active sex and still derive a different pleasure from watching sexual acts from a distance. To Mark, seeing is even more exciting than participating. We can relate to Mark’s voyeuristic tendencies because like him we moviegoers become entranced by horrible images on the screen. Murders, rapes, even mutilation. This is usually fiction, true, but we even have paid money to see documentaries in which real people are killed. (I recall the scandal many years back when it was rumored that filmmakers on one of those “Mondo” documentaries may have paid off some African natives to kill a man on screen.) Voyeurs like us are in compliance with filmmakers who place brutal pornographic images on the screen for our gratification. Powell won’t let us plead innocent.

Publicity shot of Mark about to kill Vivian, played by Moira Shearer, the star of Powell’s The Red Shoes.

Powell has several “peeping toms” in his films: In a couple of his thirties pictures there are newspapermen who are snoopers by profession (Mark tells detectives in Peeping Tom that he’s with the Observer); in A Matter of Life and Death, friendly Dr. Reeves has a telescopic device which lets him spy on a whole town; in The Red Shoes, the Contessa uses binoculars to look at the people watching a ballet performance. Powell equates voyeurism with the violation of another’s privacy; he believes that everyone is, by nature, a “peeping tom”/voyeur of sorts. This is only dangerous when voyeurism becomes an obsession, as it does with Mark. And it is particularly dangerous in his case because for him to enjoy his voyeurism to the fullest he must create exciting images to observe. This is where Mark the filmmaker comes in.

Mark films the blind Mrs. Stevens, the only person who realizes the seriousness of Mark’s mental state.

If the voyeur is guilty of violating one’s privacy, then Powell sees the filmmaker as being guilty of rape. Filming/photographing someone is an aggressive act whereby you capture on film a moment in time (and personal emotions) that the filmed person can never have back. Mark believes that the camera is a lethal weapon. In fact, he promises not to photograph Helen because by doing so he thinks it means he’ll kill her. He could kill his victims in countless ways, but he does so with a knife attached to the camera. He knows that his father’s camera, which deprived him of privacy when he was a child and was always present when his father scared him, is what drove him crazy and what has destroyed him. His death is recorded in his father’s films—it is only a matter of time until he is buried.

Powell sees the filmmaker as scientist. With a camera in his hands he is no longer a human being: The only time Mark’s father seems kindly is in the home movie which his new wife is shooting; the only time Mark seems like a real person is when he goes out with Helen and leaves his camera home (at her suggestion). Both the filmmaker and the scientist are destructive artists. Both are outcasts. Both are experimenters. Both seek perfection, and to them the end justifies the means. The trouble is that both this filmmaker and this scientist need human guinea pigs. And Mark figures that since his scientist-filmmaker father in effect murdered his “guinea pig,” then he, a filmmaker-scientist, has the right to do the same thing when continuing the experiments.

Mark realizes that his father is responsible for his insanity, but he bears him no grudge. The victims he chooses—the prostitute, the actress-dancer, and the nude model—all remind him of the one person he hates: the woman his father married six months after his mother’s death. He calls her his “surrogate female,” and it is my guess that her presence interfered with the relationship Mark and his father were developing as partners in his father’s noxious experiment. All the movies of Mark as a child were perfectly photographed—except for the one out-of-focus moment when she stepped behind the camera to film Mark and his father. I think it is more than coincidence that Mark earns his living as a focus puller and that when he films his victims he strives for photographic impeccability (“so even he will think it perfect”). By having everything in focus, he can prove to his father that he is a better partner than the woman who didn’t know how to use a camera. This is why Mark is so upset when Viv’s murder is not as well photographed as he had hoped. Of course, Mark’s anger is misdirected. Killing women will never satisfy him. Subconsciously, he wants to punish his father. Only through suicide can Mark complete his father’s experiment and at the same time show the world that his father was a murderer in fact. He is glad he looks frightened when he looks in the mirror attached to the camera. Only now, at the moment of his own death, does he get a glimpse of true fear—an image even his father was unable to capture.

*While Michael Powell insists that screenwriter Leo Marks (whose name is certainly quite similar to Mark Lewis, the main character) was solely responsible for the thematic content in Peeping Tom, film scholars sense Powell’s strong personal attachment to the project. He plays Mark’s father in the home movies and ran the 16mm projector himself. Powell’s son plays Mark as a child. Characteristically Powell populates his film with red-headed women, including Moira Shearer, the great ballerina who starred in his The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann—here she does an odd high-kicking jazz dance. Another Powell favorite, Esmond Knight, plays the director at Mark’s studio—strange casting (in a film about voyeurism) since Knight was almost completely blind.

Picnic at Hanging Rock

1975 (Australia) B.E.F.-South Australian Film Corporation and Australian Film Commission (distributed in the U.S. by Atlantic Releasing)

Director: Peter Weir

Executive Producer: Pat Lovell

Producers: Jim McElroy and Hal McElroy

Screenplay: Cliff Green

From a novel by Joan Lindsay

Cinematography: Russell Boyd

Music: Bruce Smeaton

Editor: Max Lemon

Running time: 115 minutes (107 minutes in director’s cut)

Color

Cast: Rachel Roberts (Mrs. Appleyard), Dominic Guard (Michael Fitzhubert), Vivean Gray (Greta McGraw), Helen Morse (Diane de Poitiers), Anne Lambert (Miranda), Karen Robinson (Irma), Jane Vallis (Marion), John Jarrett (Albert Crundall), Margaret Nelson (Sara Waybourne), Tony-Llewelyn Jones (Tom), Jacki Weaver (Minnie), Christine Schuler (Edith Horton), Frank Gunnell (Edward Whitehead), Kay Taylor (Mrs. Bumpher), Kirsty Child (Dora Lumley), Wyn Roberts, Ingrid Mason, Jenny Lovell, Janet Murray, Bridgette Phillips, John Fegan, Gary MacDonald.

Synopsis: Saturday, Saint Valentine’s Day, 1900. The girls of Appleyard College prepare for a picnic. They exchange valentines, and breathlessly read the love poems enclosed. The only girl who cannot go to the picnic is Sara, a young orphan, who is being disciplined by Mrs. Appleyard. Sara loves the prettiest girl, Miranda, who tells her she should find someone else because “I won’t be here much longer.” The girls ride off in Mr. Hussey’s wagon. They head toward Hanging Rock, a five-hundred-foot volcanic formation. Two instructors accompany them: the beautiful, popular Mlle. de Poitiers and math instructor Greta McGraw, a plain woman with “masculine intellect.”

The picnic is held near the Rock. For some odd reason, everyone’s timepiece gets stuck at twelve o’clock. Love always on her mind, Miranda cuts a cake in honor of Saint Valentine. She, Irma, Marion, and the childish Edith decide to explore beneath the Rock. As they cross a stream they are watched by Michael Fitzhubert, an English lad staying with the Cosgroves, his uncle and aunt, who sleep nearby. Their young chauffeur Albert also sees the girls. Michael immediately falls in love with Miranda. The girls climb into the formation.

They go higher and higher. It is like a maze. The girls rest. When Edith awakens, she sees her three companions, stockings and shoes in hand, climbing farther, as if in a trance. The picnickers below are like ants. The girls climb higher. Edith warns them not to. She screams and runs downward.

The wagon returns late at night. Mrs. Appleyard is informed that Miranda, Irma, Marion, and Miss McGraw are missing.

A search is conducted on the Rock. It continues for several days but no one is found. Michael becomes obsessed with finding Miranda. When everyone else gives up the search he gets Albert to accompany him to the Rock. The next morning Albert finds the nearly delirious Michael with a piece of cloth in his hand. He follows Michael’s trail and finds Irma unharmed. Irma tells the police she remembers nothing.

Michael and Irma wander in the woods. They are miserable. Michael, who still thinks of Miranda, and Albert have nightmares. The stress also gets to Mrs. Appleyard. Her students are ostracized. Parents report they are withdrawing their girls from school. An instructor gives notice. Appleyard takes out her distress on poor Sara, threatening to send her back to the orphanage because her benefactor hasn’t paid her tuition. Sara wishes she could be with her brother, separated from her long ago.

Irma visits the school. The girls attack her, demanding to know what happened on the mountain. Mlle. de Poitiers pulls them off her. Mrs. Appleyard says Sara’s guardian has taken her away. But handyman Tom discovers Sara lying dead in the greenhouse. She either jumped or was pushed from the window above. Albert dreams his orphan sister came to him.

Appleyard goes off. Her body is found beneath the Rock. She jumped. No one else was ever discovered there.

When you go to sleep, people come and steal your body.

—A belief expressed in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977)

The strict Mrs. Appleyard tries to maintain her composure although her world crumbles around her.

On Saturday, Saint Valentine’s Day, in 1900, two instructors and eighteen of the nineteen young ladies who attended Appleyard College, an Australian finishing school located near Woodend, in the state of Victoria, spent the day beneath Hanging Rock, a formidable 500-foot-high, million-year-old unchartered volcanic formation. It was supposed to be their picnic at Hanging Rock, but the insects lunched on the remnants of their cake, and the Rock—or was it nature itself?—devoured, that is swallowed whole, instructor Greta McGraw and three young ladies named Miranda, Irma, and Marion. More than a week later Irma was found on the rock by a young Englishman, Michael Fitzhubert, who had never given up hope. Irma was unharmed, “intact,” but she couldn’t remember what had transpired on the Rock. McGraw, Miranda, and Marion were never seen again. The scandal brought about the ruination of the college; and, following the mysterious death of the young student, Sara Waybourne, which some attributed to stern headmistress Mrs. Appleyard, who was in an awful state of depression, Appleyard committed suicide by jumping from the Rock. Did these astounding events really happen?

In her novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, from which Peter Weir adapted his film (a landmark in Australia’s New Wave), Joan Lindsay manipulates us into believing her narrative is true by cleverly quoting from what are supposed to be actual police transcripts of interviews with witnesses at the scene, and actual extracts from turn-of-the-century newspapers; her introductory cast of characters concludes with “and many others who do not appear in this book.” Yet her brief preface hints that she is playing a game:

Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year 1900, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.

Most Australian book and film critics concluded that Lindsay had based her strange tale on an actual mystery surrounding Hanging Rock. (Has it become a tourist site, like our Amityville House?) However, for her book The Murders at Hanging Rock (Scribe, 1980), Yvonne Rousseau did a little detective work. There was no college for young ladies established in the Woodend locality mentioned until 1919, twenty-seven years after Mrs. Appleyard supposedly migrated from England. In Lindsay’s novel, great importance is given to the fact Saint Valentine’s Day coincided with a Saturday picnic—but in 1900, Saint Valentine’s Day fell on a Wednesday. There were no newspaper accounts of missing or murdered persons during this period or on any day between 1897 and 1905—the extent of Rousseau’s research; and, as far as she could tell, no one in Woodend has ever heard of the so-called “notorious” disappearances. Rousseau: “Hanging Rock, then, has no history so far this century, at least, of mysterious disappearances; and Appleyard College’s disintegration under the rock’s influence is only imagined.”

All is quiet, and time literally comes to a halt during the school picnic beneath Hanging Rock. While four young girls go off to explore the Rock, the other girls, Mlle. de Poitiers (under a parasol), and Greta McGraw (dressed in black) read poetry.

My Australian film correspondent Beth Robinson tells me there was great interest in Australia in the book when it was published in 1967 because Lindsay was the first female novelist in that country to come from a well-known and esteemed aristocratic family. The book was a best seller, despite Lindsay’s unwillingness to join in the debate about its content. With the release of Weir’s movie, its popularity grew considerably. Although I have no way of being sure, I’d guess Lindsay’s inspirations for her first book were an interesting literary conglomeration that includes Henry James (as much for his depiction of Europeans in a barbaric world, and his depiction of upper class snobbery, as for the psychological terror and haunting atmosphere found in The Turn of the Screw), William Wordsworth (serious nature poems), H. H. Munro (bizarre tales), James Barrie (children’s need for escape from the adult world), transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (the divinity of nature), and D. H. Lawrence. Especially Lawrence: not only for his books’ extreme eroticism but, more important, for his belief—central to both Lindsay and Weir—that man, dehumanized by a western culture that stresses intellect at the exclusion of physical/sexual instincts, should realize that he is part of nature.

Lindsay’s book is a delight. And Weir is extremely faithful to it. With minor exceptions, what Lindsay describes is up there on the screen in all its detail. Cinematographer Russell Boyd even put dyed (orange-yellow) wedding veils over his lens in order to capture the feel of Lindsay’s outdoor scenes, to capture a “lost-summer” feeling. Characters are exactly as they are in the book (except that Sara is not as mousy). Casting is impeccable, as if Lindsay chose the actors. So why is the film so much less satisfying?

The first part of the film is absolutely spellbinding. No picture I can think of has a more sinister atmosphere. But once Michael and Albert rescue Irma and the action shifts away from the Rock, I lose interest. Compared to the fascinating occurrences on the Rock, everything, including the girls’ hysterical reaction upon seeing Irma again, Sara’s death, and the deterioration of Mrs. Appleyard, is anticlimatic. I get annoyed that everyone conveniently has some form of amnesia, that the police are so polite while questioning Irma even though delay could be fatal to those on the Rock, that the search doesn’t intensify after Irma is found. (I get the feeling that this wasn’t the best search ever conducted for missing persons.) And, although Weir is making a point (also made by Lindsay), I wish that some of the characters would come out of their guilty silence and theorize about what happened to those girls. I keep wanting Weir to take the camera back to the Rock, if only for an atmospheric “walk” through the dark. I’d even settle for the entire replay of the girls’ ascent instead of the slow-moving Jamesian courtship of Michael and Irma. It’s infuriating.

Those chilling scenes on the day of the picnic (made more ominous by Gheorghe Zampier’s Pan pipes), in which unknown primeval forces are at work and the rock formation seems to take on a sexual, brutal life of its own, are as suitable to Weir as Lindsay—which is why they are so impressive. Only a few directors (Nicolas Roeg in 1971’s Walkabout; Terrence Malick) allow natural surroundings to dominate scenes; so for viewers—all of whom have walked into a strange natural environment (especially at night) and had the creepy sensation that the trees, bushes, rocks, soil, and sky aren’t happy about being disturbed—the films of Peter Weir are special. However, once Weir starts concentrating on the aftermath of the disappearances, we feel we’ve seen it all before. It’s one thing to read about a Victorian boarding school when the author (Lindsay) actually suffered in one (1911–1914, in the very school that eventually left Melbourne and moved to Woodend in 1919): we know that there is autobiographical basis for her observations regarding the bursting sexuality of the girls in an oppressive environment and her angry feelings toward headmistresses who were more interested in keeping up appearances than in students. But when a young male filmmaker like Weir adapts Victorian-boarding-school material, even if accurately, we can’t help missing the first-person perspective. To give Weir his due, his opening—girls wash in flower-scented water, whisper amongst themselves, hold hands, blow kisses, passionately read love poems, exchange valentines, and help each other tie their corsets (love perfumes the air) all counterpointed with cold, austere shots of the unfriendly school building—effectively conveys that Appleyard College is not so much a finishing school as an institute for sexual repression for Miranda and her followers. But after the disappearances, when sexual repression is no longer the major concern, Weir has nothing original to work with. Horror movies with sadistic headmistresses are a dime a dozen. Even Rachel Roberts’s domineering presence can’t make the school scenes interesting (they’re just sad) when we care more about Miranda and the Rock.

In Weir films from cult hit The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) to The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), aliens to any environment are in for a bad time—as a result of the people, as a result of hostile natural forces. As screenwriter Cliff Green points out, a theme of Picnic, reflecting in a way “the history of Australia,” is that “Europeans who intrude into a timeless environment are . . . rejected and in some cases destroyed by subtle forces, beyond [their] comprehension.” It’s an interesting theme, but it’s less clear in the film than the book (“Australia,” writes Lindsay, “where anything can happen”). It may be my foolish oversight but I wasn’t sure that Mrs. Appleyard (played by the Welsh Rachel Roberts) was supposed to be English. In any case, I can’t see where her demise is determined by anything more than the financial collapse of her school; perhaps like English lad Michael (who also is in a constant state of duress), she should have had a vision or two. As for other Europeans Mlle. de Poitiers and English gardener Mr. Whitehead (spared because of his love of nature?), how does the theme apply to them?

Mlle. de Poitiers comforts the unhappy Sara, who is sure her beloved Miranda will never return.

Two other things greatly bother me about the later scenes. That Albert and Sara are brother and sister is only hinted at in the novel, and that’s how it should be. Weir concentrates too strongly on their spiritual attachment. In a film it becomes too coincidental, too predictable, and too contrived. It really doesn’t matter if they’re related. Their not reuniting only adds to all the other frustrations. Their story only serves to distract us further from the mystery. I’m also disappointed that Weir chose to have a narrator tell us of Mrs. Appleyard’s death—vividly detailed in the novel. That it takes place on the Rock could have provided us with one more visit to the intriguing locale that we feel has been abandoned by Weir and the Woodend search team. Why not go out with a bang, with nature again in control, as in The Last Wave, where Richard Chamberlain looks out at the ocean and sees a 500-foot mountain of water heading his way?

English lad Michael Fitzhubert also longs for Miranda, to whom he lost his heart at first sight.

Fiction or not, why do Miranda, Marion, and McGraw vanish? There is no theory that totally works. Because so few females disappeared, the possibility of foul play is always there—although it seems unlikely that Michael and Albert are homicidal sex maniacs as some critics contend. That the Rock would reject the lovely young Irma and accept fossilized Greta McGraw is totally confusing. Of course, that adds to the mystery. Did a UFO pass by, was there bush/nature retribution, did Michael and Miranda elope? All theories have backers. Did they pass through a time warp? Or into another dimension? Is it all a dream?

With this erotic shot of the girls tightening each other’s corsets, director Weir conveys metaphorically that the sexually repressed teenagers are bursting with sexuality.

I believe that the girls’ ascent through the rock formation and their subsequent disappearance represents both their rite of passage into sexual womanhood and an escape (they are embraced, not physically harmed or kidnapped) into another world that has no sexual repression. The time is ripe for a sexual union between nature’s mysterious forces and the horny young ladies who, be they “flowers” (as Weir’s visuals imply metaphorically) or “apples” (from Appleyard), are ready for picking. It’s the first year of a new century, it’s Saint Valentine’s Day (once the day of a pagan fertility ritual), it is high noon. And it just so happens that the girls who picnic below are virgins, dressed in white frocks (perfect for sacrifices or weddings), and bursting (in tight corsets) with sexual feelings (as we saw back at school). Above them looms the very interested Hanging Rock, its mighty protrusions jutting out from perfectly symmetrical boulders—distinct phallic imagery. The girls are aware that it is a volcanic structure, perhaps capable of a second eruption: “Just think, a million years,” marvels one girl, “waiting just for us.” Naturally it’s Miranda, the embodiment of love, who cuts the cake and dedicates it to Saint Valentine, the only saint she knows or cares about. Then she heads for the Rock, three girls behind her, all looking expectant—as if they knew that someone—or rather something—was waiting for their arrival. The small stream (water as sexual symbol) they come to offers them a chance to turn back, but Miranda leads them on. Her leap, which Michael witnesses, is in slow motion. I don’t think Weir did this to show his trick photography but just because her leap over the stream really takes place at the slow speed. Time stopped at twelve, we have gone further into a surreal world. Do we see a naughty look on Miranda’s face, as if she were sneaking off to see her lover? The girls walk up the incline. The shots of the phallic boulders now merge with shots of narrow vaginal passageways through the rocks and womblike caves and caverns. “Metaphorically they are exploring the hidden depths of the instinctual world—a world of sensuality and passion,” writes Ed Roginski in Film Quarterly (Summer 1979). The girls nap, and it’s as if something is watching them, deciding whom to accept and whom (Edith) to reject. Miranda, Irma, and Marion—seemingly intoxicated by the air or hypnotized—climb farther, with no intention of going back. They remove their shoes and stockings so they can walk on the sacred ground. Looking below they notice that the picnickers are like ants—the girls have moved out of our world. With their next steps they will move into a second, sensual world.

As the four girls walk toward Hanging Rock the atmosphere becomes thick with mystery and sex.
(L-R) Irma, Marion, and Miranda follow Edith.

The key to it all is Miranda. Quite simply, she is not of this world. Strictly speaking, she is not a human being. She is a flower to Sara. She is a swan to Michael. A sex object to Albert. A love object to the rest of the girls. A vision, a dream to herself. An ideal (a goddess) to Mrs. Appleyard. A (Botticelli) angel to Mlle. de Poitiers. To us she is the embodiment of sexual desire stifled, as was her namesake in Shakespeare’s otherworldly The Tempest. Except for her reference to “human beings,” Marion could be describing Miranda when she says, “A surprising number of human beings are without purpose, though it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves.” Miranda doesn’t know what her mission is on Saint Valentine’s Day. She only knows that it has something to do with love and, as Sara says emphatically, that “she wasn’t coming back.” I believe that it was Miranda’s mission to deliver sexually repressed girls, and even virginal Greta McGraw, into a world of sexual freedom, far away from adults like Mrs. Appleyard and the uncaring parents who would entrust them to such a witch. I am reminded of a Twilight Zone episode in which two kids whose parents are always squabbling and ignoring them dive into their swimming pool and surface in a happy world for children, looked over by a kindly old lady who has much love to offer them. I am also reminded of Peter Pan: I believe Miranda has taken herself and three others into a sexual never-never land.*

The lovely Miranda leads the way up the rock formation. Does she know what awaits them?

*Interestingly, Never Never Land was first recorded in the late 19th century describing the remote, uninhabitable regions of Australia.

Psycho

1960 Paramount

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Producer: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Joseph Stefano

From the novel by Robert Bloch

Cinematography: John L. Russell

Titles: Saul Bass

Music: Bernard Herrmann

Editor: George Tomasini

Running Time: 109 minutes

B&W

Cast: Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates), Janet Leigh (Marion Crane), Vera Miles (Lila Crane), John Gavin (Sam Loomis), Martin Balsam (Milton Arbogast), John McIntire (Sheriff Al Chambers), Lurene Tuttle (Mrs. Chambers), Simon Oakland (Dr. Richmond), Frank Albertson (Cassidy), Vaughn Taylor (George Lowery), John Anderson (car dealer), Mort Mills (policeman), Patricia Hitchcock (Caroline), Ted Knight (deputy), Virginia Gregg (voice of “Mother”).

Synopsis: Marion Crane, a secretary at a Phoenix real estate office, is unhappy because her boyfriend, Sam Loomis, is too much in debt to marry her. So when her boss, Mr. Lowery, gives her $40,000 to deposit, she steals the money, packs her belongings, and drives toward Fairville, California, where Sam lives. Caught in a storm, Marion accidentally leaves the highway about fifteen miles from Fairville. She takes refuge for the night in the otherwise vacant Bates Motel. Norman Bates, the friendly but strange young proprietor, tells Marion he rarely gets customers since the new highway was put in. Norman goes to his large house on the hill behind the motel to tell his mother that Marion will be coming for a snack. Marion overhears Norman’s shrewish, domineering mother refuse to let Marion, whom she calls a slut, enter her house. So Marion instead snacks in Norman’s office parlor, which is filled with birds that the lonely Norman has stuffed. Norman agrees with Marion that his mother is sick, but he won’t institutionalize her. He says she is harmless, and that he will always care for her.

After seeing poor Norman in his “trap,” Marion regains her senses and plans to return to Phoenix in the morning. Through a hole in the office wall, Norman watches her undress. Then he returns to his house. Marion showers. A tall figure with gray hair and in an old lady’s dress enters the bathroom and stabs Marion repeatedly with a long knife, killing her. Norman is horrified to find the body. But he covers up his mother’s crime. He puts Marion’s body and belongings (he doesn’t notice the stolen money) into her car, which he disposes of in a swamp.

Lila goes to Sam’s hardware store in Fairville, hoping to find her sister Marion. Sam is upset to learn of her disappearance and the stolen money. Milton Arbogast, an insurance investigator trying to recover the money, has followed Lila. Convinced Sam and Lila know nothing of Marion’s crime, he goes to check all the hotels and motels in the area, including the Bates Motel. The nervous Norman lets slip that Marion was there. But he swears she drove off. Norman also lets slip he lives with his “sick mother.” He refuses to let Arbogast meet her. Arbogast calls Sam and Lila, telling them he’s going to sneak into the house to speak to Norman’s mother. At the top of the stairs, a tall figure with gray hair and in an old lady’s dress charges out of mother’s bedroom and slashes Arbogast to death with a long knife.

Sheriff Chambers tells Sam and Lila that Norman’s mother committed suicide ten years before, after poisoning her lover. Confused, they check into the Bates Motel. While Sam keeps Norman occupied, Lila goes to the house to speak to his mother. Norman knocks out Sam and races into the house. Lila hides from him. She goes into the fruit cellar. She finds Mrs. Bates in a chair and spins her around. Mrs. Bates is a corpse. As Lila screams, a tall figure with gray hair and in an old lady’s dress rushes into the fruit cellar, holding the long knife. It is Norman, in a wig and his mother’s dress. Sam saves Lila.

Dr. Richmond informs Sam and Lila that twelve-year-old Norman jealously poisoned his mother and her lover. He later dug up her corpse, and started wearing her clothes, conversing with her, and taking on her personality—killing women Norman was attracted to. Now in a cell, Norman no longer exists. He is Mother at all times.

I’m told that a small boy who stayed up to be scared by this masterpiece said afterwards: “I liked it, but it made me want to sleep in Mummy’s bed.” Let’s hope his reaction wasn’t typical.

—British critic Kenneth Tynan

Norman Bates stands by what has become one of the most famous houses in America. (It stands on the Universal Studios lot in Los Angeles.)

Almost everyone who saw Psycho in 1960 remembers that terrifying experience as if it were yesterday, just as everyone remembers first hearing that President Kennedy had been shot. Today Psycho fans swap stories about how they closed their eyes during the film’s violence (but not the sex) or literally ducked under their seats (I admit measuring the amount of room down there), or how it scared them out of several nights’ sleep. Viewers really were afraid to take showers for a long time afterward (and I’m not alone in still occasionally thinking of Psycho when in a motel shower). I think that almost everyone who saw Psycho when it was released agrees that it is the scariest picture ever made. And it’s a shame that most people, even adolescents, who see it for the first time today don’t find it scary or sexy or innovative, but campy (it may have black humor, but it’s not camp). They don’t feel the impact that we did when we first saw the film or experience the excitement. They don’t realize how much more lurid and violent Psycho was than horror films of the past, and how unprepared everyone was for it. For instance, today’s first-time viewers already know that the major female character, Marion Crane (although played by star Janet Leigh), will be murdered only about forty minutes into the film, and that the murderous “Mrs. Bates” is actually the dead woman’s son Norman. But in 1960, we were completely shocked.

In the opening scene, Marion pulls away from Sam after making love to him in a sleazy hotel.

It wasn’t the sex and violence alone that unnerved us, but—and this is what people usually forget—that we felt guilty about watching the sex and violence. Especially those of us who were youngsters. Today teenagers have seen their fill of gruesome movie murders and nudity, either in theaters (no one checks IDs) or at home, on cable or videos. They’ve been weaned on Night of the Living Dead (1968), guilt-causing The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1985), Herschell Gordon Lewis gorefests, and innumerable gross-out sexploitation films—good and bad films for which Psycho paved the way. But remember, in 1960, in pre-rating-code days, the American cinema was tame. Parents could take their children to any movie without worry. That’s why so many of us youngsters saw Psycho. And let me stress this: While watching the film, with all that exciting sex and horrific violence and the psychiatrist’s endless revelations about the perverse relationship between Norman and his mother (we were happy to have this long scene, which today seems dull, to regain our composure), we knew it wasn’t kiddie material—we knew we were getting away with seeing something meant for adults and we felt guilty about it.

Marion is drawn toward Norman, who—according to critics who contended that Anthony Perkins and John Gavin resemble each other—may represent the sexually perverse side of Sam (the side Marion may secretly desire). However, this mirror-image publicity shot (in the scene itself, Norman carries a tray) confirms Hitchcock wanted us to recognize the link between Norman and Marion.

Of course, our guilt made us enjoy the film more, but it also made us extremely nervous and vulnerable to be terrified. I believe that one reason we were so terrorized when Norman’s mother comes into the bathroom and stabs Marion to death is that we related it to our own mother bursting through an unlocked door and ripping apart a dirty magazine she caught us with. (Hitchcock probably related Norman’s mother in this scene to a mad censor who wanted to cut out all the nudity in his picture.) While staring at Marion nude in the shower, we youngsters (especially we boys) realized that the actress playing her really was nude for the cameraman and, even more titillating, that she posed for him so we could almost see her nude ourselves. So the naked actress became our accomplice in a moment of naughtiness (like that little girl whom little boys play doctor with). To see Marion killed was so devastating because she was punished for what we were doing together, for what we were both guilty of. We felt guilt because she was killed (what an overreaction by Mrs. Bates!) and we weren’t harmed (you can’t die in your own nightmare). Perhaps this explained our whimpers or hiding-in-the-closet silence until the next scene.

Guilt is the key. Hitchcock decided to mercilessly manipulate all our emotions during Psycho—he wanted us to feel as if he were taking us through an amusement park “funhouse”—and I think the reason he was able to do this without resistance from his 1960 audience is that he constantly worked on our guilt. He doesn’t just open the film inside the sleazy hotel room where Marion and Sam make love. Instead he makes us feel like voyeurs by beginning with his camera high in the sky, moving closer and closer to the hotel window, and then going inside into their supposed sanctuary, to where we shouldn’t be. We witness a scene that broke new sexual ground in 1960: Unmarried Marion and Sam are in bed (together!), handsome John Gavin with his shirt off and buxom Janet Leigh in just a half white slip and white bra (in those days, we never saw female characters in bras!). They will begin to dress but it doesn’t become less exciting because we flies on the wall overhear them discuss their illicit relationship and how this hotel is the only place they can make love. Two scenes later, our guilt returns when we are taken into Marion’s bedroom, and find her in a black (she committed a crime!) half slip and bra, preparing to run off with the stolen money.

Because the scene is strategically backlit, we can look directly into the murderer’s face and see only shadows.

Later we see Marion in her motel room as she starts to take off her bra and slip. Hitchcock won’t let us watch her from within the room, but makes us peep at her through the hole Norman drilled in his office wall. So again he makes us into sexual voyeurs, even accomplices to pervert Norman (it’s the first moment we identify with him directly). A few minutes later, Hitchcock lets us follow Marion into the bathroom, a most unusual setting for a movie scene! And for the first time in movie history, we see a toilet flushed, and what’s more, it is flushed by a woman! And to cap this off, we get to watch major actress Leigh disrobe (we see her from the back and above the waist) at a time major stars didn’t do nude scenes, and she doesn’t even get privacy when she enters the shower because Hitchcock takes us inside with her. Such a moment was startling, though two earlier horror films, the Val Lewton-produced The Seventh Victim (1943) and Gerd Oswald’s bizarre Screaming Mimi (1958), had shower scenes that (especially when combined) anticipated the one in Psycho. During both the more pleasant part of Marion’s shower (when she tries to purify herself with soap and water) and the bloody (this too was new!) attack by Mother, we tried in 1960 to catch glimpses of Leigh’s breasts (we didn’t know that she used moleskin strategically and, though Leigh denied it, her double Marli Refro was filmed when the most explicit shots were required). The nudity came across, whether we actually saw it or not. (It took VCRs, with their freeze-frame and slow-motion capacity, to provide proof that viewers saw what they thought they saw twenty-five years before.)

The most famous and terrifying scene in motion picture history. “Mother” attacks the screaming Marion in the motel room shower.

Since there is no more nudity/seminudity in Psycho after Marion’s death, Hitchcock couldn’t just use sex to make us feel guilty about watching his film. Throughout, he makes us share the deep guilt of his characters. There’s not a scene where someone doesn’t feel guilt or paranoia; where someone doesn’t lie or try to cover up a lie or crime, or isn’t suspicious that the other person is lying; or where someone isn’t someplace she or he shouldn’t be. Start at the beginning. Marion is guilty over her secretive sexual encounters (during her lunch hours) with Sam in the cheap hotel. (“This is the last time for this,” she says prophetically.) Obviously they use false names to register. Sam (who hangs his head when she leaves the room) is guilty he hasn’t the money to marry her. In the next scene, we meet Marion’s boss, Mr. Lowery (Vaughn Taylor), who secretly keeps a bottle of liquor in his desk. Marion lies to him that she’s going to deposit the money he gives her. Soon after, she feels guilty for having stolen the money. Her guilt/paranoia builds as Lowery spots her driving through town, the highway patrolman (Mort Mills) peers into her car window and asks questions, the car dealer (John Anderson) questions why she’d accept his first paltry offer on a trade-in. Moreover, she starts imagining the reactions of Sam and the people back in Phoenix over her theft.

Trying to cover her crime, Marion trades in her car, and uses a false name to register at the Bates Motel (Mary Samuels is also the name Meg Tilly’s character, Sam and Lila’s daughter, uses in 1983’s Psycho II). She lies to Norman about where she’s from. Norman feels ashamed (guilty) about his mother’s uncivil response to having Marion visit his house. He feels shame that he can’t defy Mother. Norman makes Marion feel guilty about having suggested he institutionalize his sick mother. He certainly feels guilt about liking Marion (if he weren’t attracted to her, his puritanical mother wouldn’t kill her). He has no business standing at a peephole and watching Marion undress, and this impotent man-child, who can’t say the word “bathroom” to a woman, would certainly feel guilty about such a blatantly sexual act. Soon after, Norman covers up Mrs. Bates’s murder of Marion. Lila (Vera Miles) suspiciously questions Sam about his involvement with Marion. Arbogast suspiciously questions both of them about their involvement. Norman acts guilty and paranoid when Arbogast suspiciously questions him. Arbogast goes into the Bates house, uninvited. Sam and Lila use false names to register at the Bates Motel. Sam makes Norman paranoid with his questioning. Lila walks through the various rooms of the Bates house—it doesn’t seem such an unusual act, but how few times between Myrna Loy’s Nora Charles and 1960 did a female movie character sneak alone into a house/apartment to snoop around? At the end, we learn from Simon Oakland’s glib Dr. Richmond that in addition to covering up his mother’s murders (which, actually, he committed while thinking he was Mrs. Bates), Norman has been covering up his own crimes for ten years: He murdered his mother and her married lover, and he dug up and preserved her corpse. Because of our own uneasiness about sitting in the theater watching Psycho in 1960 we instantly identified with characters who ventured where they shouldn’t be in the film (Marion on the highway with the stolen money; Norman at the peephole; Arbogast and Lila each sneaking into the Bates house) and related to all characters who felt guilty and paranoid about doing something wrong, even Norman. Indeed it is their guilt over the crimes they have committed and paranoia about being discovered that make us aware of the strong link between Leigh’s Marion (Mary in the book) and Anthony Perkins’s Norman.

In Robert Bloch’s hair-raising pulp novel, based on the grisly real-life escapades of Wisconsin fiend Ed Gein (a murderer, grave robber, necrophiliac, and cannibal), we are introduced to Norman immediately (he’s older and fatter and less easy to identify with than in the movie), and though we don’t learn that Mother is dead until the end, throughout the book we are privy to his innermost thoughts. Joseph Stefano’s script is quite faithful to Bloch, but we don’t meet Norman for about twenty minutes, when Marion arrives at the motel. Yet the script, like the movie, is not about Marion’s theft but about our unraveling the identity of Norman Bates—which comes about because of Marion’s crime. What’s interesting about the script is that we learn about Norman long before we meet him, simply by observing Marion. There is good reason that when they finally meet, the guilt-ridden, paranoid Marion can readily identify with Norman, and learns from observing him that if she doesn’t come to her senses, she is in danger of becoming too much like this neurotic, “trapped” young man (scramble the letters in her name and you get Nor-mai—like Norman, not quite Normal). As we watch Marion up until the time she meets Norman, we see how easy it is for a normal person to break a mundane life’s routine and commit a crime, “not act herself,” “go a little mad”—this is a familiar Hitchcock theme. And we see how one impulsive act can lead to other senseless acts, lying, escalating guilt and paranoia, and the submersion of one’s real identity. From watching Marion (a typical boring “bourgeois woman,” according to Hitchcock) go a bit balmy, we can deduce that an abnormal person like Norman would have much more extreme reactions to committing a crime, especially a more heinous crime than theft. Marion can put on the brakes to her building madness once she sees she is in danger of becoming like Norman (although she still doesn’t realize how mad he is). However, Norman was already badly unstable when he killed his mother and her married lover, so he is too far gone to ever come to his senses.

Arbogast had been walking up the stairs toward Mrs. Bates’s bedroom, when “Mother” came out to greet him.

In 1960, theaters wouldn’t let you in if you missed the beginning of Psycho (a gimmick that attracted enormous crowds) and it’s a good thing because the opening scene in the hotel is vital. For one thing, it shows how dead parents can still destroy the happiness of their children. Sam can’t marry Marion because he’s burdened with his late father’s debts. They can’t make love at Marion’s home because, as Sam jokes, they’d have to turn her dead mother’s picture to the wall. Marion isn’t the virgin she is in the novel (where she’s linked to Norman by their mutual sexual repression), but she is uncomfortable with her sex life; she thinks it’s not respectable—her mother, like Norman’s, instilled in her a feeling that sex out of wedlock is wrong (of course, Norman’s puritanical mother would never have let him marry). Marion doesn’t complain that Sam pays alimony to his ex-wife, but she must be jealous that the money which could buy her happiness is going to another woman. Like Norman, who poisoned his mother when she turned her attentions from him to a male suitor, Marion is motivated to commit a crime because the person she loves is giving someone else (her rival) what she desperately needs.

In the next scene, in the office, we meet three people. Coworker Caroline (Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia returned to the screen) is married yet her mother still interferes in the relationship. Mr. Lowery is to Marion what Sheriff Chambers (John McIntire) is to Norman: Having known her for exactly ten years, he would think her incapable of committing a crime. It’s my hunch that the obnoxious, bragging, flirting, drunk client Mr. Cassidy (Frank Albertson) is meant to be the type of man who stole Mrs. Bates from Norman and convinced her to open a motel so they could make money. At any rate, Cassidy is a domineering father who uses his wealth to choreograph and control his daughter’s life. How it must irritate Marion, who is over thirty and miserable because she and Sam don’t have the money to marry, to learn that Cassidy is buying his 18-year-old daughter a house for a wedding present, and that he has made sure she has never had an unhappy day in her life. If Cassidy were a nice man who is using his life’s savings to secure happiness for his unspoiled daughter, we would be infuriated when Marion steals his money. But since the $40,000 is this crude, rich man’s pocket change (“I never carry more money than I can afford to lose”), we feel that Marion should steal it. We further identify with her when she does.

In her apartment, Marion looks at herself in her mirror (one of many mirrors in the film). Thus, the dual-personality theme is introduced. It’s hard to believe that pretty girl in the mirror is a criminal, just as no one suspects that Anthony Perkins’s friendly-looking and -acting Norman is a sexual psychopath. We notice on the wall a picture of Marion’s parents, looking down on her as she commits her crime. The bathroom door is open so we also notice a shower. Along with Sam’s earlier remark that placed a mother in context to sex, and the highway policeman’s subsequent suggestion that Marion should stay in a motel (“just to be safe”), the shower gives us a good indication of what is in store for Marion once she meets Norman. The questions asked of Marion by the policeman and the car dealer put her on the spot, just as Norman will be when interrogated by Arbogast and then Sam. She is just as inept at answering questions, covering her guilt, and swaying their suspicions as Norman will be with his inquisitors. For me, the key early scene that tells us about Norman is when the paranoid Marion drives along and imagines conversations between people who discover her crime. We think Hitchcock is just using an interesting technique to present actual conversations before they happen, without having to cut back to Phoenix and the various characters. But at one point we hear Sam speaking to Marion when she arrives at his door in Fairville—this meeting will never take place. So in fact, Marion is hearing “voices” and fabricating conversations . . . as Norman surely does. However, at this point, she is stronger than Norman, and doesn’t join in the conversations.

Marion and Norman finally meet. Norman comes down from the vertical “California gothic” house (the mother’s womb), along the serpentine steps (the umbilical cord) to the long horizontal motel (which has phallic connotations, especially since this is where Norman commits his sex crimes). They face each other, two friendly people with secrets, false identities, guilt and paranoia, crimes in their pasts. As they talk about “personal traps” and “crazy acts,” they understand each other. They were destined to meet exactly ten years ago: when he poisoned his mother and she began work with the firm from which she’d steal $40,000. We understand how this woman named Crane came to this taxidermist, to her executioner. After committing her crime, she entered hell, Norman’s permanent home, and he was waiting with (a) room enough for her. (There is no such thing as a purifying shower in hell.)

So by the time Marion is murdered, we have learned much about what drove Norman to committing his initial crime and what drove him deeper into madness. We understand irrational behavior. We will learn more about him during the rest of the film because we can relate what he does to what we saw Marion do, such as covering up a crime (when he tosses out the money, we recognize how absolutely meaningless was Marion’s death), and lying when being subjected to questions. We also learn about him when Lila takes her audience-paralyzing tour of the Bates home. We’re surprised by our transfer of identification from Mother’s-victim Marion to Mother’s-victim Norman—who’s as sympathetic a victim of parental dominance as Perkins’s institutionalized Jimmy Piersall in Fear Strikes Out (1957). It happens when Norman tries to sink her car in the swamp and for an instant it won’t go down—we are relieved when it disappears completely. Our sympathies switch to other imperiled characters later on, but we never stop relating to Norman or sympathizing with him—that’s why he is such an unusual villain and, today, a folk hero.

By no means do I want to give the impression that only those people who saw Psycho in 1960 could enjoy it. It is a great movie, with so much to appreciate: Perkins’s astonishing, beautifully conceived performance, exhibiting Norman’s gentleness, feeble wit, and pain . . . along with the deep-rooted madness (no actor ever got more into his character); lovely Leigh’s very intelligent, controlled (even as Marion loses control), and daringly sexy performance; Stefano’s witty yet diabolical script, which is full of many complex, chilling ideas; Bernard Herrmann’s unforgettable violin/cello score that is so vital to the film’s suspense; George Tomasini’s remarkable editing, particularly in the forty-five-second shower sequence but flawless throughout; the art direction by Joseph Hutley and Robert Clatworthy (whose work on 1958’s Touch of Evil—with Janet Leigh’s character terrorized in a deserted motel—explains the similarly seedy look of the two films); the sliced-by-a-knife titles of Saul Bass (who claimed he directed the shower sequence); and the striking black-and-white cinematography of John L. Russell (Hitchcock could only afford his TV show cameraman). Russell moved his camera effectively, as when he twists into the shower drain with the blood and water and then twists out from Marion’s eye (a great moment that, for some reason, is excised from this scene when it is replayed in Psycho II), and when he moves high into the rafters so we can’t see Mother’s face when she attacks Arbogast or when Norman carries her to the fruit cellar. He also gives us some beautifully composed static shots—the motel and house; a vertical phone booth between a car that juts out toward us and a hanging circular sign. Best of all, of course, is the direction of Hitchcock, who oversaw every aspect of his project (Stefano, who borrowed much from Bloch, and Herrmann had the most freedom).

Every director who makes suspense-horror films should study Hitchcock’s work on Psycho, to see how he works his audience, to see how he keeps it off-balance. Never did Hitchcock pay more attention to the time element. We are repeatedly shocked because Hitchcock has violence occur before we expect it. When Marion showers, we see through the shower curtain that Mother has entered the bathroom—she doesn’t sneak in but walks directly toward the shower without fear, and the attack quickly begins (and, as mentioned, Marion is killed long before we expect it—had there ever been a lead female murdered in an American film?). When Arbogast walks up the stairs of the Bates house, we expect him to enter the room where we know Mrs. Bates is hiding behind the door, but instead “the old lady” charges out at him (accompanied by Herrmann’s screechy violins), knife raised high, and starts stabbing him. I like the way Hitchcock “punctuates” his initial shocks to completely unnerve us: Each plunge of the knife into Marion’s body (sexually repressed Norman’s symbolic rape) is like an exclamation point (things move so quickly yet time stands still, as in the equally famous “Odessa Steps” sequence of Eisenstein’s 1925 classic Battleship Potemkin), as are the violin screeches that accompany each slash; after Arbogast seems to walk backward down the stairs (a classic shot utilizing rear projection and a camera on a track), “the old lady” immediately jumps on top of him (how quick she is) and uses the knife to finish him off—period, period, period; when Lila turns Mother around and we are shocked because she is a corpse, Hitchcock adds punctuation by having Lila, like Marion earlier, give a rare Hitchcock scream and slap the bare lightbulb with her hand so that there is an unsettling strobe effect (as in the attic murder in 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray), and having another “Mother” (Norman with a crazed expression) storm in behind her. Psycho’s many classic scenes and images (Mother in the bathroom with knife held high, backlit so we can’t see her face; the crossed metal hands and the body-indented bed in Mother’s bedroom; the almost subliminal shot of Mother’s skeletal visage being superimposed over Norman’s face; etc.) have been analyzed ad nauseam. But one image that is usually ignored sticks with me. It is of Mother fleeing the bathroom after having massacred Marion. With hindsight we can see the enormity of Norman’s (sexual) identity problem: There is no reason for Mother to race out, because there is no one else around to catch her—unless she worries about Norman.

Lila and Sam check into the Bates Motel.

When Psycho was released most critics, perhaps perturbed because they weren’t allowed to give away the plot or to attend special critics’ screenings, attacked Hitchcock with the same viciousness with which Mrs. Bates attacks Marion. They tried to make him feel guilty about adapting Bloch’s sordid novel, and for his unabashed treatment of sex and violence. (Paramount wasn’t behind the project either, which may account for Hitchcock filming it on the Universal lot.) When it became Hitchcock’s biggest hit, most critics changed their minds . . . and the film was soon rightfully regarded as a classic. It would take many years before it lost its notorious reputation (CBS wouldn’t show it, even with nine minutes of deletions, in 1966).

Yet, for those of us who vividly recall our first Psycho viewing, every time we see the picture its power is undiminished.

Seconds

1966 Paramount release of a Joel Productions presentation

Director: John Frankenheimer

Producer: Edward Lewis

Screenplay: Lewis John Carlino

From the novel by David Ely

Cinematography: James Wong Howe

Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Editors: Ferris Webster and David Newhouse

Running Time: 106 minutes

B&W

Cast: Rock Hudson (Antiochus “Tony” Wilson), Salome Jens (Nora Marcus), John Randolph (Arthur Hamilton), Will Geer (Old Man), Jeff Corey (Mr. Ruby), Richard Anderson (Dr. Innes), Murray Hamilton (Charlie Evans), Karl Swenson (Dr. Morris), Kheigh Dhiegh (Davalo), Frances Reid (Emily Hamilton).

Synopsis: Arthur Hamilton, a weary fifty, is tired of his New York banking job and his empty marriage to Emily. While walking through Grand Central Terminal, he’s handed an address by a stranger. That night, in his Scarsdale home, he receives a call from a man claiming to be his deceased college friend, Charlie. He asks Arthur, “What have you got now?” Arthur says, “I don’t know.” Arthur and Emily half-heartedly attempt to make love.

Arthur goes to the address and discovers the Company, a secret organization which, for a huge fee, will perform radical plastic surgery so a man can change his identity and be “reborn.” Charlie, who has a new identity, suggested Arthur to the Company. Arthur is given tea and a sandwich and slips into a drugged hallucination. He sees himself attacking a young woman in a bed. He returns to consciousness. Mr. Ruby outlines the new life Arthur will have after the operation. He also describes Arthur’s fabricated death: The Company’s Cadaver Procurement Section will provide a body his size, carrying his identification, to be found in a hotel room fire. When Arthur balks at the operation, he’s shown a film of his attack on the woman. Arthur is incensed at the blackmail attempt. The Old Man, the founder of the Company, gently asks Arthur, “There’s nothing more, is there? Anything at all?” Having nothing to lose, he signs the Company’s contract.

Through extensive plastic surgery and exercise, Arthur is transformed into the handsome, healthier, younger looking Antiochus “Tony” Wilson. Tony begins his new life as a painter in a southern California beach community. He has trouble adjusting and leads a solitary existence. One day on the beach he meets pretty Nora Marcus. Tony begins to open up to her. At a local wine festival, he enjoys himself for the first time. Tony throws a cocktail party to meet his new neighbors. He becomes drunk and talks of his past and the Company. He’s shocked to discover that all the men at the party are also Seconds, and that Nora is a Company employee who was sent to ease his transition.

Posing as a college friend, the anguished Tony visits Emily. She matter-of-factly tells him that her husband was “dead a long time before they found him in that hotel fire.” Defeated, numb, and with no place to turn, Tony returns to the Company. He wants to take on a new identity. But he won’t refer another candidate because this may delay his own surgery. Tony meets Charlie, who also waits for his second chance at becoming a Second. Charlie is called to surgery . . . or so he thinks.

That night Tony is awakened by the Old Man, who laments about how the Company has grown so fast that the success rate with Seconds is very low. Tony insists he won’t make the same mistakes in his third life because he’ll make his own decisions. Suddenly orderlies strap him to a gurney. He’s wheeled toward the operating room. He protests he hasn’t had time to think through his next life. When he’s read his last rites, he realizes that he is to be killed for the Procurement Section. He protests and struggles, but to no avail. He is gagged with a rubber hose. Heavily sedated, Tony’s final thought/dream is of a man with a child perched on his shoulder and a dog at his side playing on a beach. Antiochus Wilson/Arthur Hamilton slips into unconsciousness, forever, to the sound of a cranial drill boring a hole into his brain.

Essay by Henry Blinder

Seconds had a troubled opening. It was soundly booed at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was America’s official entry. Back home, it did receive some positive reviews (Saturday Review: “I haven’t seen a better American film all year”), and dazzled many of us young cinema students, but it was an unqualified disaster at the box office. It would never be withdrawn from circulation like John Frankenheimer’s other cult film, The Manchurian Candidate (1962)—which Frank Sinatra pulled until 1988 because of its political-assassination theme—but over the years it would rarely play on television or in repertory theaters. It, too, would not be released to the video market, or play on cable until 1988. No doubt Seconds would have drifted into obscurity long ago if not for its avid cult following, in America and around the world (Frankenheimer reported that members of the Royal Shakespeare Company were among those who attended an annual screening of his film in London). Because few movie fans were able to track down Seconds, the raves by its devoted fans went uncontested and its reputation had continued to improve. Frankenheimer: “It’s the only film I know that has gone from failure to classic—without ever being a success.”*

There is no mystery about the reasons people stayed away from Seconds in droves in 1966. While it contained elements of the psychological horror film, the science fiction film (it’s about the ultimate “nose job” of the future), and the search-for-one’s-own-identity picture that proliferated in the sixties and early seventies, viewers couldn’t slot it into any familiar genre. Also, as Frankenheimer observed in Jerry Oppenheimer and Jack Vitek’s Idol (1986), “Those people who would go to see Rock Hudson movies didn’t want to see this one.” Most significant, Seconds is quite possibly the most depressing film ever made—it is a film of unrelieved despair. Lewis John Carlino, its screenwriter, admits it’s “almost too painful to watch.” He told me that he sat with a stockbroker friend at a screening of the film. Halfway through, his friend walked out, ashen-faced, sighing, “That’s my life up there. I don’t want to go to the movies to see that.”

There is much to turn away from in Seconds. For those who are unhappy with their jobs, their love lives, their families, their family routines, their mortality, it hits the rawest of nerves. Although this may not have been intentional, it is also a hard slap in the new faces of those who have sought plastic surgery as a solution to emotional problems. In fact, almost everyone can identify with some depressing aspect of Seconds. Certainly we think of ourselves when Rock Hudson’s Tony Wilson hears Salome Jens’s Nora Marcus give her impression of him: “What kind of a man is he? There’s grace in the line and color, but it doesn’t emerge pure. It pushes at the edge of something still tentative, unresolved—as if somewhere in the man there is still a key unturned.” We’re startled by Nora’s insight. She not only described Tony, but us as well. Tony tells her what we’re thinking: “That’s quite an analysis.” But in the next breath, Nora pulls the rug out from under us: “Not really. When you come to think of it—it sort of fits everybody, doesn’t it?”

A spooky poster incorporating a fish-eye lens shot of the strapped-down Tony being read his last rites.

Indeed, Nora’s analysis does fit everybody, not just Tony and ourselves. We feel foolish for thinking she’d made a great revelation about us, personally; it’s as if we believed the messages we find in Chinese fortune cookies relate to us alone. In our haste to identify with what Nora said, we have been as shortsighted as John Randolph’s Arthur Hamilton, Tony’s original self. A part of everyone’s life is unfulfilled—everyone has a “key unturned.” This is the essence of the film. As Arthur proceeds with his “suicide”—he, in effect, eliminates himself from the living—he makes the fatal mistake of turning his key and becoming a Second, Tony, without having a dream of what he wants on the other side of the door. Nora’s shrewd, offhand remark should serve as a warning to Tony that he had better quickly figure out his dream, what will bring Arthur/Tony fulfillment, or he will fail in this life, too. Unfortunately, Tony is so out of touch with his feelings and who he really is that her words don’t register. True understanding comes too late, when he is awakened by the Old Man (Will Geer), who founded and heads the Company (and wisely never had the operation himself!), just moments before he is taken away and murdered:

OLD MAN: I sure hoped you’d make it, find your dream come true.

TONY: I guess I never had a dream.

OLD MAN: Maybe that’s it. That sure might have been it.

What’s truly sad is that Arthur/Tony does have a dream, which he comprehends only at the moment of death—the film’s last shot of the man, child, and dog playing on the beach. His “Rosebud” is the close family relationships that he never really experienced, that he longs for now. If it’s any consolation, we sense that if Arthur Hamilton, an unformed, incomplete person to begin with, had been granted a second chance as a Second as someone other than Tony, he still wouldn’t have succeeded. The “unturned key” was too much a part of what was Arthur Hamilton. He was a failure in his first life, a failure in his second life, and would have been a failure in every other life. Perhaps only someone like Jimmy Stewart’s popular George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), who succeeds in his first life—although he mistakenly considers himself such a failure that he too would consider suicide—might make a successful Second.

Seconds is the living nightmare of a man who acts to fill his emptiness without having an idea of what to fill it with; he improves his physical appearance but can’t enrich what is on the inside. The film is an unnerving roller-coaster ride into the heart of darkness. We begin by watching Arthur Hamilton figuratively commit suicide (shots of an actual nose job were incorporated into the gruesome operation scene); then we watch Tony Wilson travel a long, painful road to achieve one moment of clarity and hope; and finally we watch helplessly as his new dream of happiness is obliterated when he is a victim in one of the most harrowing murders ever filmed. This is not an easy movie to enjoy. But I think it’s impossible to forget. For those of us who managed to sit through it, Seconds continues to haunt and disturb us.

David Ely’s 1963 novel was inspired by a startling statistic: At the time, 80,000 middle-aged American men left their wives and children each year, never to return. Ely hypothesized that big business might want to capitalize on the legion of wealthy men who wanted to abandon their lives and families but didn’t know how to go about it. In a way, Ely anticipated Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives. In both books, suburban men want to improve their imperfect lives: In Ely’s work, the men pay a great deal of money to alter/replace themselves; in Levin’s, the men pay a great deal of money to alter/replace their wives.

Ely’s book was acquired by the production company of actor Kirk Douglas and producer Edward Lewis, the team that had already made five Douglas features in the sixties. Their previous film, Seven Days in May (1964), had been directed by John Frankenheimer, whom they now brought in to direct Seconds. According to John Randolph, Douglas bought the rights to Seconds so he could star in it, but bowed out because of prior commitments. Lewis told me differently. In any case, Lewis and Frankenheimer pressured Paramount to hire the only actor they felt was capable of portraying both Arthur Hamilton and Tony Wilson: Laurence Olivier. Olivier agreed to play the dual role, but Paramount turned him down because he wasn’t a bankable movie star. Rock Hudson, who was most anxious to break out of romantic comedies and prove himself as a dramatic actor, wanted very much to do the film. Although Hudson wasn’t ranked among the top ten actors at the box office for the first time since 1957, and the film would be a major stretch for him, Paramount was only too happy to agree to his playing the lead.

Lewis John Carlino, who’d written a series of one-act plays that received excellent notices and much attention in New York, took on his first screenwriting assignment, adapting Ely’s novel. His screenplay is quite faithful to the book, but he introduced a few important characters and some of the film’s most powerful scenes. Nora was added, providing Tony with a love interest. Carlino also came up with the wine festival scene, the only time in the picture Tony seems genuinely happy. Because this hopeful scene lifts Tony up, his fall is that much greater in the subsequent party scene, when he discovers that Nora works for the Company and all his male neighbors are Seconds. (Curiously, there are no female Seconds.)

Carlino wasn’t happy with the completed film. He felt that his screenplay was about the importance of “connections”—to a family, to a past, to accomplishments—but Frankenheimer didn’t include the scenes that got this theme across. For instance, he wrote a scene in which Tony, posing as Arthur Hamilton’s friend, visits Arthur’s daughter in Denver. There he sees his new grandson for the first time. When his daughter discovers this “stranger” picking up her baby, she orders him from the house. This scene was thematically tied to a previous scene Carlino wrote in which Tony meets a little girl on the beach and is reminded of his own daughter. The little girl’s father calls her and they run off down the beach with their dog. As in the later scene, Tony is left alone, an outsider. In William Froug’s book The Screenwriter Looks at the Screenwriter (1972), Carlino discussed the significance of the two scenes:

It seemed to me that the way to do [Seconds] was to create sort of a modern Willy Loman. It was really the . . . Faustian thing of man trying to live a new life, and the . . . great tragedy is the sudden realization that what he’s paid for his new life is his total alienation. There is no more continuity of existence for him . . . He is totally alone. That was [to be] the crux of the middle section of the film.

Unlike the Denver sequence, the beach scene was filmed, but Frankenheimer cut it from the film anyway, retaining only a few seconds as the last flash in Arthur/Tony’s brain as the drill is boring it. When Carlino questioned leaving the abstract imagery at the end without including the full scene earlier, Frankenheimer told him it didn’t need explanation: “Well, they’ll get it. It’s sort of a symbolic thing.” Carlino felt the audience was deprived of seeing the complete circle of a man’s frustrated life. I understand Carlino’s point, but I don’t think the final shot is too mysterious—coming right after Tony’s talk about dreams with the Old Man, it clearly represents a dream realized too late. Also, I agree with Frankenheimer that the final shot works on a symbolic level. I find the imagery, without explanation, poignant and evocative. I doubt that it would have such impact if the two scenes Carlino wrote had been included.

What is perhaps the most powerful scene in the film is not in the book. Ely begins his story with Arthur Hamilton going directly to the Company. Carlino restructured the opening so that we see Arthur’s home life. We go home with Arthur to Scarsdale. That night, he and Emily start to make love, realize there is no passion, and simply stop. This painfully intimate, wordless scene is among the most graphic dramatizations of middle-age despair ever filmed. Randolph told me that before directing this scene, Frankenheimer told him to go home and “screw your wife all night” so that when it came time to shoot the next day with Frances Reid, all the passion would be gone. At the time, Frankenheimer was very interested in France’s New Wave directors and worked to incorporate their style into this scene. He took all day, shooting from every conceivable angle. It has a unique, haunting look, due at least in part to the artistry of the legendary James Wong Howe.

Before and after. Left: John Randolph, who plays Arthur Hamilton. Right: After cosmetic surgery, Rock Hudson’s Tony Wilson, once Arthur Hamilton, examines the results with Dr. Innes.

Howe’s distinctive black-and-white cinematography intensifies the grim mood of the film. His dark images, stark angles, cunning choices of lenses, and inventive camera movements create an unsettling atmosphere that conveys Arthur/Tony’s disorientation and heightens his nightmare. Howe’s contributions are a major reason the film has a cult. Interestingly, both Howe and Frankenheimer went on record as being unhappy with their collaboration, and differed as to who was entitled to credit for intelligent decisions. For instance, Frankenheimer told Millimeter:

“I found him terribly difficult to work with . . . The use of the 9.7 millimeter lens in Seconds was my idea by the way, and not his. I think he ended up hurting the movie. I just won’t go along with all the mystique about James Wong Howe.”

Howe told Take One:

“I would say John needs a little help to hold him down a little; he tends to lose control. [For example, he uses a] hand-held camera when you don’t need it. I always ask ‘Why?’ He doesn’t know. He just says, ‘Give me a hand-held shot here, give me a zoom shot there.’ . . . Now he didn’t ask me for the fish-eye lens at the end of the picture. I said, ‘Let’s put the fish-eye on and see if it works.’ He liked it and it worked. For the [Grand Central Terminal] . . . sequence, we put a camera with a wide lens on a wheeled suitcase carrier.”

Oddly, John Randolph told me that Howe and Frankenheimer appeared to get along on the set: “They were like a couple of kids trying new ideas, experimenting with dollies, and attempting strange angles. In the scene where I attack the girl, they were flying me by wires and had the camera strapped to my shoulder.”

Howe’s visuals perfectly capture the sense of alienation Carlino wanted to get across. However, they also contribute to Frankenheimer’s “Gothic” approach, to which Carlino strongly objected. Carlino told me he envisioned the film beginning with a naturalistic feel and then little by little descending into horror, rather than having the horror played up from the outset, with the frightening trip through Grand Central Terminal, and continuing all the way to the shocking murder at the end. He thought that the events that take place were horrifying on their own and didn’t need any bizarre camerawork or spooky music. The tense, look-over-your-shoulder, oppressive quality that pervades the film is unquestionably a John Frankenheimer hallmark. (He never made a comedy!) Seconds forms a kind of “paranoia” trilogy with his The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. Reinforcing Frankenheimer’s scary vision are the terrifying Saul Bass title sequence, with the distorted, bandaged head, and Jerry Goldsmith’s pounding, unsettling score. Goldsmith told me that using an organ was his idea. He felt that what the Company was doing was “a violation of the laws of nature” and he wanted to express that in musical terms. Although much less dramatic, Goldsmith’s simple lament on the piano is surely one of the most melancholy passages ever written; it perfectly conveys the sadness and longings deep within Arthur/Tony.

Tony finds brief happiness with Nora.

Seconds is distinguished by the daringly innovative work of Frankenheimer, Carlino, Howe, Goldsmith, and editors Ferris Webster and David Newhouse, but the film’s true power comes from the performances, especially by Hudson and Randolph. When offered the dual role, Hudson worried that he wouldn’t be believable as Arthur Hamilton. So he settled for Tony, although he wouldn’t make an appearance until about forty-five minutes into the film. When the role was split, Frankenheimer got the opportunity to hire Randolph, who had been blacklisted for the past fifteen years—Randolph was the last blacklisted actor to find work. (Frankenheimer also had enough pull to get Paramount to hire Will Geer and Jeff Corey, two other graduates from the blacklist.) Not only did Frankenheimer admire Randolph’s acting ability, but he also was informed by a plastic surgeon adviser that Randolph had a striking facial resemblance to Hudson and similar eyes. Seconds has an ensemble feel to it, undoubtedly because Frankenheimer, who directed live television in the fifties, had the principals rehearse for a week prior to filming—a rare practice at the time. Significantly, Randolph and Hudson worked closely together although they, of course, wouldn’t act together. To create a single character, they studied each other’s speech patterns and mannerisms. Randolph told me he later found out that Hudson watched his dailies. As difficult as the role was for him, Hudson could see the potential it held for his career. He saw it as his one chance to win an Academy Award. He even went so far as to test for the Arthur Hamilton part after Randolph had filmed all of Arthur’s scenes. This would have meant scrapping millions of dollars’ worth of Randolph footage. If that had happened, says Randolph, “I would have blown up Hollywood.” It’s fortunate the idea was dropped because Randolph’s performance is extraordinary, a blueprint of every middle-aged man who feels he has made the wrong choices in life. His tour de force is the seven-minute scene, without cuts, in which the Old Man coaxes Arthur into acknowledging the emptiness in his life and signing the contract to become “reborn.” Frankenheimer cleared the set and let Randolph take all the time he needed before playing the emotional scene. It has an excruciating intimacy—it’s almost too private to watch.

The chilling last second of Tony Wilson/Arthur Hamilton.

There is a profound sadness in Hudson’s performance, which is so affecting that it clearly transcends acting. His homosexuality was an open secret in the industry at the time, but it was still extremely difficult for him to perpetuate the lie to his public. During the party scene, in which the drunk Tony makes a desperate plea for the right to his own identity, reality came crashing down on Hudson. Frankenheimer wanted Hudson drunk for the scene and got more than he bargained for. Hudson lost control and openly wept. In Idol, Salome Jens recalled:

“A lot of really traumatic feelings began to surface at that time. I’m sure it was because of what came up in the film and what he was dealing with as an actor. I was aware that there was in him a great deal of pain. . . . There was a part of Rock that was very private, a part that was very sad, that he felt incomplete about. And when that thing came unloosed, he broke down completely—he could not stop. Whatever got released, it was an avalanche.”

Hudson was also exceptional during the final sequence, when Tony is strapped to a gurney and wheeled to the operating room. Knowing that he is about to be killed, Tony is more alone than any man has ever been. Frankenheimer shot Hudson from above, using shock cuts to emphasize his struggle for survival. As in the party sequence, Hudson crosses the line between acting and reality. In shooting the scene, Hudson actually broke the heavy restraints. His screams of pain and desperation are agonizingly real. Here, again, the film becomes almost unbearable to watch. It’s as if we’re suffocating.

Reviewers were uncharitable to Hudson. However, he was extremely proud of his performance. With the possible exception of his portrayal of the embittered reporter in Douglas Sirk’s The Tarnished Angels (1957), this was the closest he’d ever come to achieving true stature as an actor. A few years later, he’d give up movies for lightweight work in television. Salome Jens visited Hudson on the set of his hit seventies series, McMillan and Wife. In Idol, Jens recalled:

“When he saw me, he gave this huge, wonderful hug—and I saw at that moment that there was a dream lost somewhere. There was something—I’m not trying to be romantic about this—something he had sold out. Something he had missed. A chance he had lost.”

Another key unturned.

*In addition to interviews I conducted in January 1988 with John Randolph, Lewis John Carlino, Jerry Goldsmith, and Edward Lewis, I have used quotes and incorporated background material on Seconds found in Jerry Oppenheimer and Jack Vitek’s excellent book on Rock Hudson, Idol (1986).

Targets

Also known as Before I Die

1968 Paramount release of a Saticoy Productions film

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Producer: Peter Bogdanovich

Screenplay: Peter Bogdanovich

From an original story by Polly Platt and Peter Bogdanovich

Cinematography: Laszlo Kovacs

Running Time: 90 minutes

Color

Cast: Boris Karloff (Byron Orlok), Tim O’Kelly (Bobby Thompson), Nancy Hsueh (Jenny), Peter Bogdanovich (Sammy Michaels), James Brown (Robert Thompson, Sr.), Sandy Baron (Kip Larkin), Arthur Peterson (Ed Laughlin), Mary Jackson (Charlotte Thompson), Tanya Morgan (Ilene Thompson), Monty Landis (Marshall Smith).

Synopsis: In Hollywood, Byron Orlok, veteran star of horror movies, decides to retire from pictures. He considers himself an anachronism because people no longer are frightened by horror pictures. He contends that real life is more terrifying because every day someone goes berserk and starts shooting down innocent people. Director Sammy Michaels, who is in love with Orlok’s secretary, Jenny, tries to convince Orlok to make a picture he wrote that will cast him as a real-life person rather than a bogeyman; but Orlok is fed up with the whole movie business and refuses to even read Sammy’s script. But at Jenny’s and Sammy’s urging he agrees to make a final promotional appearance at the drive-in that is debuting The Terror, his latest film, which Sammy directed.

Bobby Thompson is a young man with a pretty wife named Ilene, a flashy convertible, and a keen talent for shooting rifles and pistols. He learned his shooting skills from Robert Sr., and since Bobby and Ilene live with Bobby’s parents, it is convenient for the two men to practice and go hunting together. On the shooting range, Bobby points his rifle at his father, who orders him to put it down—because pointing a gun at a human being goes against everything he has taught his son. That night, Bobby tells Ilene that he has been getting strange thoughts in his head and is perplexed. Since she has to work the nightshift at the telephone company, she hasn’t the time to hear him out. When she returns late that night, he no longer wants to talk.

In the morning, when his father is at work, Bobby shoots Ilene, his mother, and a delivery boy. He leaves behind a note that says he will continue his killing spree until he is apprehended. After purchasing many rounds of ammunition, he climbs on top of an oil storage tank and lays out many long-range rifles and pistols he has brought with him. He kills many people as they drive along the freeway, and an oil company attendant who investigates the shooting. When he hears police sirens, Bobby collects most of his guns and runs back to his car. A police car gives chase, but he eludes it by driving into the very drive-in that is showing The Terror. He gets out of his car, and, carrying his rifles in a pouch, he climbs in back of the screen. When it gets dark and the movie goes on, he begins to shoot viewers through a small hole in the screen. He even kills the projectionist.

Orlok arrives for his special appearance and parks close to the screen. Meanwhile, many viewers start to leave because they realize there is a sniper present. A traffic jam ensues. Some male viewers take guns from their trunks and walk toward the screen. Panicking, Bobby climbs down and runs to an area at the side of the screen. He shoots wildly, and one bullet slightly injures Jenny. Orlok angrily walks toward Bobby, who is confused because on the screen the Orlok character seems to be walking toward him as well. He shoots at the wrong Orlok and this gives the real Orlok the chance to knock the gun from his hand with a cane. The police arrest Bobby.

Bobby and his father spend an afternoon shooting at cans. These targets start to bore Bobby.

Just after Bobby has murdered his wife, his mother, and a delivery boy and has left behind a note that promises he will kill people at random until he is caught, he walks into a gun shop and orders several boxes of ammunition. We all have seen this type of scene before and are positive that Bobby will have trouble. We expect that the clerk will be suspicious because Bobby has ordered so much ammunition and seems a bit jittery, and will stall for time to make sure things are on the up-and-up. So we settle back nervously to wait for the suspense to build. Will the clerk call the police? Will Bobby realize he is doing this and shoot him? What actually transpires is a complete shock. There is no suspense at all: The ammunition is sold without question, and Bobby, fully equipped for his deadly endeavor, walks out on the street to kill again. We, the viewers, are the “targets” referred to in the film’s title—the people Bobby will indiscriminately shoot at on the highway and in the drive-in; and as we can tell from this scene in the gun shop, the society that doesn’t care that lethal weapons are accessible to anybody is the target of Peter Bogdanovich’s picture—which was made decades before the NRA became a political force and gun control became a major issue in America following numerous mass killings.

Targets is a remarkable debut film—many consider it Bogdanovich’s best picture—not only because of the sophisticated camerawork (particularly in the scenes along the highway and in Bobby’s house) and overall technical expertise but because it is a Hollywood picture daring enough to have both an anti-Hollywood bias (Orlok even complains that the town itself has become ugly) and a strong social message as well. In The Harder They Fall (1956), Humphrey Bogart makes a plea for boxing to be outlawed even if it takes an act of Congress for this to happen. In wishy-washy Hollywood, no film other than this tried to strike at a specific root of the violence in our country—until Targets. This picture is such a strong indictment of the proliferation of guns in America’s private sector that it is obvious that Bogdanovich is calling for more than gun control—he would like a constitutional amendment to repeal our right to bear arms.

Bogdanovich doesn’t contend that Bobby’s actions are those of the average man on the street—although murder sprees are becoming commonplace occurrences—but he sees the average man as a potential Bobby. He uses a clever tactic to show the similarity between the mentalities of certain members of our society and that of Bobby before he went berserk. As Bobby fires upon people in the drive-in, an all-male vigilante committee forms among the spectators. Car trunks open, and so many guns are exposed that it looks as if these men have been preparing for war. Earlier in the film we had gasped when Bobby had opened his trunk and we saw it filled with numerous rifles and pistols—we had thought this gun craze to be peculiar to him, but, to our dismay, we now see that Bobby is not alone. These men at the drive-in are an unnecessary danger to us; from them and others who consider guns an important part of their lives will come our future snipers, our future mass murderers. In our country, many violence-prone individuals go insane—no one can dispute this; what is terrifyingly true is that many of these people whose minds snap own guns and know how to shoot them. How many times already have there been true stories about characters like Bobby? Too many, thinks Bogdanovich.

Orlok tells Sammy that he wants to retire because horror films are no longer as frightening as real life.

In a world where headlines speak of nuclear bombs and antiballistic missiles, it is quite easy for America’s powerful gun lobby to make antiviolence advocates believe that handguns and rifles aren’t so much weapons as the harmless possessions of hobbyists and sportsmen. Bogdanovich attempts to show us just how lethal weapons are (just as Budd Schulberg wanted to show that boxing isn’t just another sport). He forces us to look through the gun sights with Bobby and help him line up his victim. It is frustrating—we want Bobby to miss but each time we see that his aim is true. It is bad enough when unidentified people fall dead, but often Bogdanovich will have Bobby take aim at someone and pull the trigger only to find himself out of bullets. While he reloads we have time to get to know and suffer with the intended prey. We want to yell “Get the hell out of here!” But each time we must watch helplessly as he is gunned down. And again we have been denied the chance of saving someone. These sniper scenes are so realistic that they give me chills. There is no letup: Bobby shoots often, and, when he misses, he gets a second chance. And it looks so easy to kill with Bobby’s long-range equipment that we fear that anyone, with just a little practice, could be almost as accurate as Bobby.

Left: Frustrated Bobby watches his pretty wife, Ilene, make herself up before going to her night job. Right: The next day, he kills her.

The gun lobbyist’s argument that proper gun instruction will prevent abuse is strongly denounced. Since Bobby was a small boy, his outdoorsman father has raised him on a diet of guns, making Bobby his practice partner and taking him hunting. Robert Sr. has taught Bobby so well that the pupil has become the better marksman; and he has been a good supervisor, telling Bobby all the rules of safety and emphasizing that shooting is a sport. Why then does Bobby move his gun sights away from the practice cans and toward his father’s face? The question arises: How long does it take someone to get bored shooting at cans, or limiting hunting to killing animals? To Bobby, people represent a far more exciting challenge. One realizes that Bogdanovich thinks Bobby sees his snipering as an extension of his previous “games.” As he is being taken off to jail by gun-toting police at the end, he boasts to those he thinks might be interested in his prowess: “I didn’t miss much, did I?” Bobby now makes his own rules.

Bogdanovich refrains from explaining exactly why Bobby goes crazy and starts shooting people. No specific reason would be satisfactory; suffice it to say that people really do go crazy and want to start shooting people and that we must make sure no guns are available to them. I believe Bobby’s actions are meant to be a direct result of his immaturity. (Bogdanovich thinks men who carry guns are subconsciously trying to compensate for their arrested sexual, psychological, emotional, or intellectual development.) In an era when young people wear wild clothes and have long hair, Bobby does his father proud by wearing a suit and keeping his hair trim. He eats Baby Ruths; speeds along the freeway in his flashy convertible, changing lanes without signaling, his radio blaring Top 40 rock; tinkers with his car; and practices shooting. He even addresses his note about his projected killing spree “To Whom It May Concern,” as if he were applying for his first job.

We see that Bobby’s immaturity is not all of his own doing, but stems from a stifling family life. He and his pretty wife, Ilene, live with his parents. He still calls his authoritarian father Sir, and his father calls him Bobby Boy (never Bob); his well-meaning mother calls him dear and says things to him such as “That’s a good boy.” Bobby never acts hostilely to any of this, but how can it not be eating him up? Bogdanovich emphasizes the ordinariness of this family, for many mass killers come from “ordinary” home lives. Robert says “dammit,” Ilene says “darn”; Ilene and Bobby’s mother cook together and have dinner waiting when Robert Sr. comes and says, “Hello, group. Is dinner ready?”; before dinner there is prayer, and during dinner there is idle chatter; at night the family watches The Joey Bishop Show, the old TV talk show for those who found Johnny Carson too erudite; then Robert says, “I’m bushed” and goes off to bed, telling his wife to follow. The house is spotless and has no signs of culture—no bookcases, and the walls are quite bare except for one family portrait, some hunting pictures and certificates, and some antlers. The house has a blue exterior, a blue interior, blue lamps, blue bedspreads, blue dish racks, blue cloth towels, blue paper towels, and even a blue flower in the kitchen. What isn’t blue is a purplish gray or off-white. This house was not decorated by creative people—but their effect on Bobby is obvious, as he wears a gray suit and a white shirt.

Reminding one of crazed gunman Charles Whitman, who killed and wounded a total of forty-six people while stationed in a University of Texas bell tower in 1966, Bobby takes out a whole arsenal—and a typical American lunch—before firing on cars passing on the highway near the oil tank on which he sits.

Bobby, I believe, is jobless; his wife dolls herself up at night and goes out to work as a telephone operator. Bobby asks her if she thinks him a failure, and she replies with a cliché: “You can do anything you set your mind to.” Bobby’s world is without sexual or intellectual stimulation. A great sense of vacancy exists: There is no dirt in the house, no pictures on the wall, and worse, no wife in bed at night. Guns are Bobby’s only companion, his only security.

Bobby doesn’t know what causes him to want to kill people (“pigs,” he tells the gun shop attendant when asked what he’s going to be hunting). “I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he remarks to his wife when she has no time to hear him out. “I get funny ideas.” Later I think he understands where to lay the blame: When he buys the ammunition, instead of writing a check as he did earlier, he charges the purchase to the account of his father. His father is not a bad man—he is kind and generous, allowing his son and daughter-in-law to share his house—but he has always been such an intimidating figure to Bobby that Bobby now believes he was the one who made him into a weakling. That he is still scared of his father despite being willing to take on the whole L.A. police department is clear when he waits until his father is off to work before he shoots Ilene and his mother (the only moment in the picture that is in slow motion).

As this was his first film, former film critic Bogdanovich took the opportunity to pay homage to some of his idols. The scene in which Bobby tries to retrieve his dropped weapon behind the movie screen is reminiscent of Bruno (Robert Walker) reaching into a drain for the dropped cigarette lighter in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951). When the camera moves through the house, it’s Hitchcock. Hitchcock used scenes of dialogue immediately following shock sequences in Psycho (1960): That is one of the main purposes for the amusing scenes with Byron Orlok and Sammy Michaels. When Orlok and Sammy watch television, the movie playing on it is Howard Hawks’s The Criminal Code (1931), which was Karloff’s first major film; Sammy takes the opportunity to say how Hawks could “really tell a story.” When Orlok and Sammy both get drunk and fall asleep side by side in Orlok’s bed, it might very well have been directed by another Bogdanovich favorite, John Ford. And of course the whole film is a tribute to Karloff, one of the greats.

The Byron Orlok story is woven into the film quite well. The scenes between Sammy and Orlok are entertaining and provide levity in an otherwise unrelentingly bleak film. The highlights occur when Orlok tells a brief ghost story and when Orlok looks at himself in the mirror and jumps with fright. The serious script Sammy wants Orlok to do is Targets, although the title is never used, and it is so nice that Karloff, if not Orlok, agreed to do a picture which allowed him to play a real character rather than his one millionth bogeyman in succession. It was fitting that a year before Karloff died, he at last played a hero! That the unarmed Orlok is the one to capture Bobby—who goes into a crouch, after Orlok slaps him, like a child caught stealing—while dozens of armed men scurry about is Bogdanovich’s final statement about the need of guns in our society.

The scenes in which Orlok complains that real life is so horrifying that horror films have lost their ability to scare anyone remind us that we are watching a movie. While Bogdanovich places the sniper in a screen where The Terror (1963), a not-very-scary Roger Corman horror film starring the real Boris Karloff, is being projected, to prove that Orlok is correct in thinking “real” life more frightening than horror films, he is also reminding us that no matter how terrifying we find Bobby’s actions in Targets, it is only a movie we are watching and doesn’t compare to the real real thing.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

1974 Bryanston Pictures release of a Vortex/Henkel/Hooper film

Director: Tobe Hooper

Producer: Tobe Hooper

Screenplay: Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper

Cinematography: Daniel Pearl

Music: Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell

Songs: Roger Bartlett & Friends, Timberline Rose, Arkey Blue, and Los Cyclones

Editors: Sallye Richardson and Larry Carroll

Running Time: 84 Minutes

B&W

Cast: Marilyn Burns (Sally), Allen Danziger (Jerry), Paul A. Partain (Franklin), William Vail (Kirk), Teri McMinn (Pam), Edwin Neal (hitchhiker), Jim Siedow (old man), Gunnar Hansen (Leatherface), John Dugan (Grandfather), Jerry Lorenz (truck driver).

Synopsis: Having heard that vandals have violated the graveyard where her grandfather is buried, Sally wants to check out the family plot. With her fat, wheelchair-confined brother Franklin, her boyfriend Jerry, her friend Pam, and Pam’s boyfriend, Kirk, Sally makes the trip by van into a part of Texas she hasn’t seen since she was a child. Sally and the ill-tempered, sadistic Franklin decide they should all visit their grandfather’s deserted farm. On the way there they pass a slaughterhouse and Franklin graphically explains how cattle used to be slaughtered with a sledgehammer. Now they use an air gun. They pick up a skinny, maniacal-looking hitchhiker. He says the slaughterhouse fired many men who used the old methods. He invites them all home for dinner. They decline. He takes pictures of them with a Polaroid and demands money for the awful results. He then carves the palm of his hand with a knife, and slashes Franklin. They manage to push him out of the van.

The van stops at a Gulf station. The strange attendant tells them he is waiting for the gas tanker. But he invites them to sample some of his tasty meats inside. Franklin really enjoys the “sausage.” They arrive at the deserted house. Pam and Kirk go off in search of a swimming hole Franklin remembers from his childhood. They come to another house. There is a buzzing noise inside. Numerous automobiles are hidden on the property. While Pam waits outside, Kirk goes into the house to inquire about gasoline. As soon as he steps inside the door and calls, the buzzing stops. Suddenly a huge man wearing a mask made out of a human face charges Kirk and knocks his head in with a mighty stroke of a sledgehammer. A few minutes later, Pam goes into the house to investigate what has happened to Kirk. She walks into a room filled with skeletons and human debris. She vomits. Leatherface scoops her up and carries her into the room used for carving meat. He puts the screaming girl onto a meat hook and resumes carving up the dead Kirk with a chain saw. Brought to the area by the sound of a gas generator, Jerry enters the house looking for his friends. He comes into the room where there is the carving table and the meat hooks. No one is in sight. He opens up a Deepfreeze and finds Pam, all blue, but still alive. But he can’t help her because Leatherface kills him.

At night, Sally wheels Franklin through the woods in search of the others. Leatherface charges out of the woods and puts his chain saw through Franklin’s stomach. Sally runs in terror with Leatherface hot on her trail. She runs into a house that unfortunately is Leatherface’s house. She runs upstairs and dives out the window. She hobbles to the Gulf station and asks the attendant for help. Instead he beats her and stuffs her in a bag and takes her home.

The attendant, Leatherface, and the hitchhiker come from the same family. They kill people who pass through the area, eat their flesh, and sell the remains for sausage. They tie Sally to an armchair which has human arms for arms. They present grandpa, who looks like a corpse. He drinks Sally’s blood, and tries to kill her by beating her on the head with a hammer. He is too weak. Sally escapes. She runs upstairs and dives out the window again. Leatherface with his chain saw and the knife-wielding hitchhiker give chase. She makes it to the highway. A gas truck runs over the hitchhiker. A truckdriver stops to help Sally. They drive away as Leatherface holds the chain saw high in the air.

I first heard of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper’s well-made but excruciatingly unpleasant horror film, in the fall of 1974, just prior to its national release. Nationwide news accounts stated that it had been sneak-previewed at San Francisco’s Empire Theater with the Walter Matthau suspense thriller The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three (1974), and that prior to the lights being dimmed the audience had no knowledge of the film’s violent, stomach-turning content or even its forbidding title. It only knew that, like Pelham, it was rated R. Soon unsuspecting viewers were seeing a huge man in a mask, made out of what was once a human face, using a chain saw to make mincemeat out of a bunch of college-age kids. Some viewers threw up; others stormed the lobby to protest what they (and their children) were being subjected to—when no money was refunded, punches were thrown; two city officials in attendance that night threatened to sue the theater on behalf of themselves and other irate viewers. So began the bizarre history of the seventies’ most controversial cult horror film.

Soon after the San Francisco preview, Chain Saw went into general release. It quickly appeared on Variety’s list of top-grossing films although Hooper and others who helped raise the $100,000–$200,000 production costs for the independent picture weren’t getting much money back: The picture’s original releasing company had disbanded and millions of dollars’ worth of ticket receipts mysteriously disappeared. But the picture kept doing great business wherever it played. Horror fans were attracted to the movie because of its newspaper slogan (“Who will survive—and what will be left of them?”), which defied viewers to try to sit through a picture with so much gore, and because it got surprisingly favorable critical response. As its cult grew, so did its reputation for quality: The Museum of Modern Art added a print to its permanent film collection; it was screened during the prestigious Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival; it won the Grand Prize at the 1976 Avoriaz Film Festival. But it has never gained “respectability” despite the obvious talent behind the project; for instance, it has been banned at least twice in France for being an “incitement to violence.” I really detest some of the content in Chain Saw, particularly the scene in which captive Sally is tortured by the depraved villains Leatherface, the hitchhiker, the old man, and the grandfather. But I don’t go along with the French charge against the film. Importantly, we are never manipulated into wanting to see the villains do away with their victims—we always are on the side of the kids. Not so with absolute trash like The Last House on the Left (1972)—which, too, has a cult following. In that picture the filmmakers seem to get great pleasure from the torture, sexual humiliation, and killing of two truly sweet teenage girls by a bunch of unwashed perverts. That is the one film prior to Wolf Creek (2005) where I felt embarrassed to be in the audience and the one film in which I felt paranoid leaving the theater because audience members had been cheering the girls’ misfortune. What saves Chain Saw from being a film that deserves to be banned is that it is made (skillfully) for viewers who see themselves as being the villains’ potential prey—like the young people in the film—and not for those who see themselves as being the killers. Chain Saw is meant to be a nightmare; Last House (and many films like it) is a sick sexual fantasy for predators that is indeed an “incitement to violence.”

Much of the blood on actress Marilyn Burns is real when Sally crawls away from the murderers’ house.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre claims to be a true story, and I would guess that it is based loosely on the ghoulish exploits of one of America’s worst fiends, Ed Gein. I don’t know much about Gein (who died in 1984 in a mental hospital) other than that he was a Plainfield, Wisconsin, handyman who, in the fifties, killed young women and wore their skins—his partner in crime was even more disgusting, wearing the skins only after Gein got tired of them. As stories about Gein are contradictory, I don’t know if he ate human flesh, or dug up bodies from graveyards, or kept his dead mother’s corpse around the house as did the villains of two other films based on the Gein case: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), starring Anthony Perkins, and an obscure, not very good bloodbath called Deranged (1974), which has a surprisingly effective performance by Roberts Blossom in the “Gein” role. In Chain Saw, the villains live with the corpses of their grandmother and the family dog, plus bits and pieces of other people and animals that are scattered about or are part of the furniture (e.g., an armchair has real arms); they eat human flesh; and, I’m sure, they commit every crime against nature that is possible (although they don’t seem to have any sexual urges). The main differences between Chain Saw and both Psycho and Deranged is that its villains are completely unsympathetic, and that it is more about cannibalism than necrophilia.

Terrified and sick, Pam realizes that she has stumbled into an evil house when she finds a living room full of human bones.

Since the days of the Greek tragedians, cannibalism has been an acceptable theme in the arts, although it hasn’t always been handled “tastefully.” Before Paul Bartel’s comedic Eating Raoul (1982), my favorite picture from the cannibalism subgenre was The Folks at Red Wolf Inn (1972), a nifty little black comedy that recalls the works of Roald Dahl. The “humor” and the horror come from watching characters unwittingly wolf down “meat” which they don’t know was carved from the corpses of the latest victims. But Chain Saw, even more so than The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936) and the suitably titled Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970), is the most striking example of a picture about cannibalism that emphasizes the slaughter of human beings for their “meat,” rather than the feast. It can be suggested that Chain Saw was made by vegetarians and animal lovers, making viewers identify with poor animals in a slaughterhouse that have their heads crushed by sledgehammers (like Kirk), are hung on meat hooks (like Pam), are put into freezers (like the alive-but-no-longer-kicking Pam), and are sliced up into little chunks by chain saws in preparation for human consumption.

Leatherface temporarily interrupts his carving up of Kirk to hang Pam on a meat hook. The dimness and graininess of the scene can be attributed to the use of high-speed film.

Ed Gein was born and bred in Wisconsin, but Texan Hooper transported the setting of his film to his own home state. Inadvertently his film reinforces the nonsoutherner’s paranoia about the Deep off-the-main-highway South partly established by the murders of three northern civil rights workers in the early sixties and by such anti-redneck films as Easy Rider (1969). In fact, Chain Saw closely resembles what is probably the most anti-South film in cinema history: Herschell Gordon Lewis’s legendary horror film Two Thousand Maniacs (1964), a picture that tells northerners to change their license plates when driving through the South. In the Lewis picture, six northerners accidentally drive into a small town after following purposely misleading road signs. The always cheerful townsfolk treat them royally and get them to participate in their one-hundredth anniversary celebration, not telling them that their sacrifices are to be part of the festivities. Like the villains in Chain Saw, they have a great time as they torture and kill the visitors one by one.*

I think Chain Saw is much superior to Maniacs, but it is effective for the same reason: It perfectly reproduces our worst nightmare—being in a strange locale where we are attacked for no reason at all by homicidal maniacs we have never seen before. In his article on Chain Saw for The Village Voice (February 9, 1976), titled “A Real Nightmare Makes a Great Horror Film,” Michael Goodwin writes:

The chilling last shot of the film: Leatherface twirls round and round at the edge of the highway, his chain saw’s buzzing drowning out his squealing.

Chain Saw captures the syntax and structure of a nightmare with astonishing fidelity. The quality of the images, the texture of the sound, the illogic by which one incident follows another—all conform to the way we dream. No one’s done that before, at least not in a commercial, mass market movie.

There have been nightmare films . . . but even in these films the filmmakers seemed unable or unwilling to cross an “acceptable” perimeter of terror. This may have less to do with studio censorship than with inborn psychic defense mechanisms; when a real nightmare becomes unbearable, we wake up.

What makes Chain Saw interesting is that since we are watching it with our eyes open, it’s a nightmare from which we can’t wake up.

As Goodwin points out in his article (by far the best piece written on Chain Saw), the picture is extremely well acted and crafted for a low-budget film. Tobe Hooper (whose main Hollywood success has been the 1979 TV movie adaptation of Salem’s Lot and the Spielberg-produced Poltergeist in 1982) credits Alfred Hitchcock with being an influence on his work, but Chain Saw is totally different from anything Hitchcock did. (One similarity, however, is that in both directors’ films viewers imagine there is more blood on the screen than is actually shown.) Hitchcock inserted expository sequences between shock moments so his audience could catch its breath. In this way, over and over he could build suspense—the key to his films. Hooper prefers having one shock after another (giving his audience its money’s worth)—he strives for terror; for him, suspense is secondary. Hitchcock built tension, Hooper totally unnerves us. (Both deliver a wallop.) Hitchcock constantly reminded us that we were watching a movie, Hooper strives for and achieves realism. Hitchcock believed in giving the audience information his characters do not have. For instance, in Psycho, when Martin Balsam sneaks up the stairs in the Bates house, Hitchcock cuts to a shot of a door opening on the second floor. When Kirk enters the house in Chain Saw, neither he nor we are prepared when Leatherface appears. His sudden appearance—when we were expecting to be forewarned by a shadow on a wall or a foot showing from behind a curtain—startles us (particularly when we see what he looks like for the first time); when he charges the rooted-to-the-spot Kirk and smashes his brains in with a sledgehammer we are even more shocked than when “Mrs. Bates,” instead of sneaking up on Balsam, charges out of her room with her knife held high. For one thing, “Mrs. Bates” had reason to kill Balsam (self-protection), but Leatherface kills Kirk without any provocation. That Leatherface and his zany relatives, unlike Anthony Perkins, have no fear of the law or intruders or anything at all makes them absolutely terrifying. If they see you, they kill you.

“All the characters in Chain Saw are horrible,” writes Michael Goodwin, no doubt thinking what a despicable person even “good guy” Franklin is. “People are constantly hurting themselves and others—sometimes emotionally, sometimes physically. Pain, given and received, is the only medium of communication.” Interestingly, Goodwin interviewed many of the technicians and cast members responsible for Chain Saw and arrived at the conclusion that the film is full of pain because the people working on it were in agony. Not only could no one sleep more than a couple of hours a night while working on the film, but actors Paul Partain and Marilyn Burns, who play feuding siblings, couldn’t stand each other, actor Edwin Neal hated director Hooper (“If I ever meet Hooper again I’m gonna kill him”), art director Bob Burns claimed Hooper made the film “by lying and cheating and selling his friends down the river,” Hooper claimed Burns was “crazy” and a “blackmailer.” In addition, there was the physical discomfort of the actors. Of the dinner table sequence, Neal told Goodwin: “The animals on the table were filled with formaldehyde, and they were literally rotting under the lights. . . . As soon as they’d yell ‘Cut,’ we’d run to the windows and throw up. For thirty-six hours straight!” Of the scene in which Sally runs into the gas station, Hooper said, “Marilyn had busted both knees up, she was bleeding badly, she was . . . pretty badly injured. It was terrible, but it played very well.” Of the graphic scene in which Pam is hung on a meat hook, Bob Burns commented, “When she was screaming in pain, she was screaming in pain. All they had to hold her up was a strip of nylon stocking, and it was cutting her in two.” “Everyone was injured at one time or another,” Hooper told Goodwin. “Everyone got sliced, or cut, or was bleeding. Leatherface got hurt a lot of times, falling with the chain saw. His mask had no peripheral vision, so he’d run into doorstalls and crack his head.”

“There’s something about Chain Saw,” writes Goodwin, “that goes beyond technique, some mysterious quality in the texture of the film itself that won’t let go.” I believe Goodwin guessed right that the mysterious ingredient was realism transferred from the set to the screen: “a real nightmare inside a filmed nightmare.” Unfortunately, I think Chain Saw is too realistic for its own good.

*It can be deduced that Two Thousand Maniacs influenced Chain Saw because of the similarity between the grisly events that take place in the two films. In Maniacs a victim is killed by an ax blow that severs her arm—much like Kirk being killed by a blow of a sledgehammer; another is rolled down a hill in a spike-studded barrel—much like Pam being hung on a meat hook that pierces her back; another is drawn and quartered—much like Leatherface’s victims being chopped up by his chain saw. The fourth victim in Maniacs is crushed by a giant boulder: various townspeople throw at a target which when hit will release the boulder that hangs over the unwilling female victim, and the suspense builds as the first few jolly contestants miss the target; we are similarly teased in Chain Saw when the grandfather keeps trying to kill Sally by hitting her on the head with a hammer—this scene is unwatchable—but only manages to injure her repeatedly because his blows are too feeble.

The Thing

Also known as The Thing from Another World

1951 RKO Radio

Director: Christian Nyby

Producer: Howard Hawks

Screenplay: Charles Lederer

From the story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr.

Cinematography: Russell Harlan

Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Editor: Roland Gross

Running Time: 87 minutes

B&W

Cast: Margaret Sheridan (Nikki), Kenneth Tobey (Captain Patrick Hendry), Robert Cornthwaite (Dr. Arthur Carrington), Douglas Spencer (Ned “Scotty” Scott), James Young (Lieutenant Eddie Dykes), Dewey Martin (Bob, the crew chief), Robert Nichols (Lieutenant MacPherson [Listed in credits as Lieutenant Ken Erickson]), William Self (Corporal Barnes), Eduard Franz (Dr. Stern), Jon Dierkes (Dr. Chapman), Sally Creighton (Mrs. Chapman), Paul Frees (Dr. Maurice Vorrhees), George Fenneman (Dr. Redding), David McManon (General Fogerty), Norbert Schiller (Dr. Laurenz), James Arness (“the Thing”).

Synopsis: Air force captain Pat Hendry is ordered by General Fogerty to fly to a North Pole research station. Nobel Prize winner Dr. Carrington and other scientists have reported a crash in their vicinity. A Russian plane? Pat, copilot Eddy, navigator MacPherson, crew chief Bob, Corporal Barnes, and Scotty, a reporter, make the trip. Pat feels fortunate to see Nikki, who works as secretary to Carrington. He liked her immediately when they met in San Francisco, but he’d been too forward with her. A good sport, she’s interested when he suggests they begin over.

Fifty miles from the research center, the soldiers and scientists discover a large flying saucer beneath the ice. They detonate a thermite bomb to free it, but it blows up. They find a hideous eight-foot alien embedded in the ice. They cut out the chunk of ice and take it back to the research station. Carrington and his followers insist they defrost and study the alien. But Pat says they must get permission from General Fogerty. Also Scotty must get Fogerty’s approval before filing his “Man from Mars” story. Carrington and Scotty are angry.

While Nikki and Pat get better acquainted, Barnes sits with the ice block in the storeroom. He covers it with an electric blanket. The ice melts. Barnes fires at the defrosted alien. Unharmed, it jumps out the window. It kills two sled dogs, but has its arm ripped off. Carrington examines the arm and discovers the Thing has no arterial structure, no nerve tissue. It is no animal, but a vegetable, an intellectual carrot that can reproduce asexually, through seeds. Carrington marvels that it has no emotions and no heart, that it is “our superior in every way.”

Carrington and his backers find a dead, bloodless sled dog in the greenhouse. They know the Thing will return and set up guard without telling Pat. They fear Pat will order it killed, and its secrets will be lost. The Thing returns and kills two scientists, draining their blood. Its arm has grown back. Pat and his men lock it behind the greenhouse door, and Pat is almost killed in the process. Pat orders Carrington confined to his lab. There Carrington, who’s too tired to think straight, harvests the seeds from the severed arm. The plants grow at an alarming rate. Nikki realizes Carrington is no longer rational. She tells Pat of his experiment. Pat orders the plants burned.

The men can’t figure out how to fight the alien, who isn’t affected by cold or bullets. Since it’s a vegetable, Nikki suggests cooking it. When it bursts into a room, the men set it on fire. The Thing dives outside into the snow. They know it will be back. The Thing turns off the heat in the research station, forcing everyone into the generator room. Pat agrees with a suggestion by Dr. Redding and Bob that they trap the Thing in an electrical force field. However, when the Thing approaches, Carrington turns off the generator. He runs to the alien and tries to communicate. The alien knocks him aside, breaking his collarbone. It attacks the others, but is caught in an electrical fly trap. It is cooked until it disappears.

Nikki decides she and Pat should marry. While they discuss this, Scotty finally transmits his report. He tells the world of the brave men who won a battle for the human race. He warns everyone to “Keep watching the skies!”

Before he became a television institution as Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, James Arness left his mark on the science fiction cinema as the title character in The Thing. He is never shown as clearly as he is in this publicity shot.

In British critic John Brosnan’s excellent book Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (1978), he contends that “serious SF fans tend to regard [The Thing] with disapproval and consider it a typically Hollywood treatment of an SF masterpiece.” I find this statement startling, completely contradicting my own experience. In America, at least, The Thing is the only science fiction film that every serious SF fan—including today’s SF filmmakers—loves and agrees is a masterpiece, the first masterpiece of the fifties sci-fi cycle. In fact, to qualify as a true fan of the genre, one must see this film many times. Moreover, it’s the rare SF film that has won approval from critics and moviegoers who usually look down on the genre. Because of its monster, violence, use of shadows and darkness, spooky music (by Dimitri Tiomkin), suspense, and shocks (i.e., the marvelous jump-out-of-your-seat moment Pat warily opens a door in order to search the greenhouse, only to find the huge Thing standing right at the entrance), it has appeal for horror movie fans who aren’t necessarily SF fans. And because of the military characters and their military conduct, the military hardware (the plane, radios, guns, bombs, outfits), and the military strategy employed to subdue the monster, the film has appeal for war-movie fans—like Aliens (1986), it can be seen as a war movie posing as a sci-fi film. Also it has perverse appeal for those of us who wonder what the result could be if we defrosted and served those five-year-old vegetables in the freezer.

The Thing may be about a thawed killer carrot on the rampage, but it has class. (This is no Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!) This is to be expected since it was produced by Howard Hawks, the major reason non-SF fans seek it out. Christian Nyby is listed as director, but after years of denials Hawks conceded not long before his death in 1977 that he directed most of the film himself but offered his former editor this screen credit so he could get a union credential. Certainly the picture bears the distinct Hawks signature: It has an unobtrusive waist-level camera; long takes; a frame that serves as a verbal and physical battleground; characters whizzing in and out of that frame; snappy, rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue (it becomes quicker to build tension); improvisation; humor in the midst of turmoil; characters finding refuge from a hostile outdoor environment inside their vehicles (in this case Pat’s airplane) and an indoor “headquarters” (in this case, the research station); a male universe where men respect each other’s talents, knowledge, and rank; men learning to work harmoniously under pressure, with each—professionals all—contributing his singular expertise to get the difficult task done; action heroes (Hawks always liked flyers); a strong, brave leader (Kenneth Tobey’s Captain Patrick Hendry) who can outthink any enemy but is easily outmaneuvered by a beguiling woman; and an attractive female (Margaret Sheridan’s Nikki) who is quite feminine, yet has passed the test and is allowed to pal around with the men. Nikki types and takes dictation, makes and serves coffee, knows how to cook carrots of all sizes and origins (“Boil it, stew it, bake it, fry it!”), wears a tantalizingly tight sweater, and wants to marry, settle down, and have kids, but the men are more impressed by her fortitude and intelligence (she figures out how to oppose the Thing), her ability to drink Hendry under the table, and her ability to keep her wit during a crisis. The men, who give each other nicknames (Scotty, Mac) derived from their last names, show she’s one of them by giving her a male Nikki-name derived from her last name, Nicholson. (We never know her real first name.) Pat further shows his respect for Nikki by letting her remain with the men in the room that the Thing is about to break into, and gives her the important assignment of turning out the lights at a strategic time. Nikki is a prize, and Pat determines that his life won’t be complete, or much fun, without her.

In the first science fiction films of the fifties, George Pal’s seminal Destination Moon (1950) and Rocketship X-M (1950), viewers thrilled to space exploration and, in the latter film, the discovery of an alien race. The Thing was excitingly different in that the alien came here, to Earth; yet because it is set in the frozen Arctic (some outdoor filming took place in Montana, some indoor photography took place in an L.A. meat-packing plant’s refrigerator), we still feel as if we’re exploring alien territory. It was released in April 1951, the peak year for flying saucer hysteria, just eight months into the Korean War. To be germane, Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer (with an assist from Ben Hecht) devised a story that mocked the UFO paranoia (a killer carrot from space?) and simultaneously, on a deeper level, keyed on America’s post-World War II paranoia about invading communists. They immediately make it clear that there is a correlation between outer space aliens and communists: Soon after Pat states, “The Russians are all over the Pole, like flies,” Scotty starts referring to the Thing as “the Man from Mars,” the Red Planet. Ironically, the novella from which their timely script was loosely adapted, the award-winning Who Goes There?, was written by John W. Campbell, Jr. (as Don A. Stuart), back in 1938, long before the UFO phenomenon and Cold War that are integral to the film. From Campbell, they took only the alien-crashes-on-earth premise, the sense of paranoia, and the frozen setting, an ideal environment for a Cold War polemic. But the fact that they switched the locale from the South Pole to the North Pole was an indication that the film and novella would be poles apart. The most drastic and peculiar changes made by Hawks and Lederer had to do with the look and properties of the alien. Their Thing may resemble humans more than Campbell’s, but it is vegetable rather than animal. Carrington and the other scientists are astonished that it can reproduce asexually, through spores/seeds, but this trait is less impressive than what Campbell’s Thing is capable of doing. It’s somewhat surprising Lederer didn’t also give his Thing the ability to transform into the exact replicas of its victims . . . minus the emotions, because Americans in 1951 certainly would have drawn a parallel between a dehumanizing monster and the brainwashing communists that were in the news. Such an alien definitely would have made it more obvious that the film was dealing with the Cold War. Initially Hawks intended his monster to at least look like Campbell’s, a grotesque, tentacled creature with three red eyes, blue hair like worms, and a sucker-shaped mouth, but he abandoned that idea. Some thought was given to making it a spidery creature, but Hawks finally decided to hire tall James Arness (his stunt double was Tom Steele), put him in Frankenstein makeup, and dim the lights—for the scene in which the cooking Thing shrinks, tiny Billy Curtis replaced Arness. (John Carpenter’s 1982 remake was faithful to Campbell’s story and monster concept, and included spectacular transformation scenes. Unfortunately, Carpenter wasn’t interested in a political message, the characters were too shallow for us to be upset when they were dehumanized, and we were more afraid of the filmmakers—with their vicious streaks and large special effects budget—than the monster.)

The scientists and air force men figure out the size of the alien ship beneath the ice.

In Hawks’s films, the action hero manages to perform his duties/tasks admirably even though he is distracted by unfamiliar feelings of love for the beautiful woman who has recently entered his life. To him, love and war are equally dangerous. In this picture a parallel is drawn between the Cold War and the Battle of the Sexes. At first, while the alien monster is on ice, or—to be more precise—in a block of ice, Nikki gives Pat the cold shoulder. Nikki and Pat show signs of “breaking the ice,” and starting their relationship from scratch, at about the time the Thing starts to thaw out. In a strangely kinky romantic scene, Nikki, in a tight sweater, has Pat at her mercy, sitting in a chair with his hands tied behind his back. This sequence was cut from the reissue prints that play on cable television, although it provides Sheridan with enough screen time to justify her top billing and is a vital cog in the Cold War/Battle of the Sexes connection. For just when Pat reveals that his hands aren’t really bound and that he can grab Nikki if he chooses, we see that the Thing has been freed from his ice prison and can attack the humans if it chooses. From this point on, Nikki and Pat are on a blazing path toward marriage and the Cold War literally heats up. There is fire—flames cover the mattress Pat hands Nikki (conveying his desire to go to bed with her, and her acceptance)—and electricity (like that which flows between the soon-to-be lovers). Nikki recognizes she can’t be without Pat and delivers a line charged with sexual innuendo: “If I start burning up again, who’s going to put out the fire?” It’s important to note that Nikki and Pat don’t make love during the course of the film. With the Thing on the loose, and mankind in jeopardy, they have no time. With the “hot war” raging, Nikki and Pat must put their love affair on the back burner. Hawks and Lederer are saying—and this is one of the three major themes of the picture—that if we are invaded, then love, freedom of the press (Scotty angrily points to the Constitution in his vain attempt to convince Pat to let him report the discovery of the alien), and the pursuit of scientific knowledge may have to be put on hold in the national interest, while the military does its job.

The worried Nikki looks at Dr. Carrington, while the rest of the scientists study the thriving plants he has harvested from the seeds of the alien’s severed arm.

This is the first science fiction film to have scientists and the military in conflict over how to deal with aliens. In general, scientists want to communicate with aliens in order to benefit mankind, while the military wants to destroy them in order to save mankind. We immediately distrust Robert Cornthwaite’s Dr. Arthur Carrington, as we do most geniuses in horror and science fiction. Because he wears an insidious goatee and a Russian fur hat and furlined coat and speaks scientific mumbo-jumbo (“Speak English,” Scotty pleads), we recognize his “foreign-ness”—as well as that of his most devoted follower, Dr. Maurice Vorrhees. We worry that he has drifted into the communist camp because of how he beholds the alien. He reveres its ability to reproduce asexually, “without pain or pleasure,” and envies it for having “no emotions and no heart.” These traits, which we were taught in school to associate with communists, are the reason he considers the alien “our superior in every way.” (Notice how Pat Hendry, who’s as patriotic as Patrick Henry, takes his men off to the side so they don’t have to listen to Carrington’s cockeyed, antihuman views.) Carrington doesn’t only talk, he takes action actually facilitates a full-scale invasion by harvesting its seeds (he has some botany box). The evidence is stacked against Carrington and we’d probably convict him of being a traitor. However, I don’t think Hawks and Lederer view him as traitor, or even a villain—that’s why the men are happy Scotty reports Carrington was one of the heroes in the battle with the alien.

In Howard Hawks films, characters work in groups. Here, everyone but Carrington figures out how to dispose of the Thing. Standing, left to right: Dr. Chapman, Scotty, Carrington, Nikki, and Pat, who takes a backseat to those who are more expert. Kneeling, left to right: Eddie, Bob, and Dr. Redding.

At one point, Scotty tells Carrington, “If you were for sale I could get a million bucks for you from any foreign government.” Well, the point is that Carrington will not sell himself to any foreign government, including the Soviet Union. He doesn’t want to deal with politics, or with the military. His alliance is with mankind and he doesn’t choose sides: “There are no enemies in science, just phenomena to study.” Hawks and Lederer actually admire Carrington’s purity of purpose. It’s just that during the tense Cold War, science should be geared for national, not universal, interests. Scientists like Carrington are so devoted to helping mankind that they become blind—Carrington can’t think clearly because he doesn’t sleep—to genuine threats against mankind. Because they work independently from their country’s military, their achievements may actually be in conflict with the interests of the military. They may inadvertently be helping the enemy, mankind’s enemy, as does Carrington. This is why Hawks and Lederer believe that in troubled times, scientists should defer to the military. Which isn’t to say science and scientists have no place in a military operation. This picture is not anti-science, as Vivian Carol Sobchack contends in her book The Limits of Infinity: The American Science Fiction Film (1980). Carrington and his extremists are balanced by reasonable men of science, Dr. Chapman, Professor Wilson, and Dr. Redding (played by Groucho Marx’s TV announcer, George Fenneman), men whose advice Pat seeks out and adheres to. Pat understands nothing about science: When Redding explains how the locale of the saucer was deduced, Pat shrugs, “You lost me”; he has no ability to grasp Carrington and Dr. Stern’s lecture on intelligent plant life on Earth; when scientist Redding and science expert Bob, Dewey Martin’s ingenious crew chief, start laying out and explaining the electrical trap for the Thing, the baffled Pat can only say, “I don’t get you . . . What are you talking about? . . . What do you mean fly trap? . . . We’d better get out of the way.” But he has faith in science, as all men who fly planes must have, and incorporates it into the military game plan. He uses thermite bombs to try to free the saucer that is encased in the ice—although the only thing he knows about them is that they explode—and agrees to let Redding and Bob hook up the electrical trap that confuses him. The Thing is destroyed because of Science, because the scientists willingly join forces with the military. Military strategy coupled with scientific application is a powerful combination—this is the film’s second major theme.

The Thing is set on fire during an attack.

The third major theme is that America’s armed forces can turn back any type of invasion. Our army can defeat any enemy. The soldiers we see are extremely efficient, quick thinking, well disciplined, confident, graceful under pressure, brave (they always volunteer for dangerous assignments), and talented. They know the S.O.P. (standard operating procedure), they know how to take orders—they actually anticipate orders—and, though respectful of superiors, they are not shy about offering sound advice to them. What makes Pat such a good leader is that he realizes that his men are more expert than he in their particular areas and is not embarrassed to take their advice or let them proceed with some action without first fully explaining it to him. His crew functions so well because there is a division of labor, with everyone playing an equal part. He trusts and respects his men. There is a running gag in the film: Know-it-all Bob gives sound advice to Pat, Pat agrees to do what Bob suggests, and Bob tells Pat, “I think you’re right, sir.” Pat doesn’t care about credit (he answers Bob, “I think you are”), just that the job is done correctly. Being an air force captain, he’s wise enough to know he needs all the help he can get in a ground action. Because Pat doesn’t pull rank on his men, because he treats them like friends, because he works side by side with them (taking guard duty, doing menial labor), and because he uses their input to help formulate his decisions, his men will follow his orders without question. And a great percentage of Pat’s dialogue consists of orders. For instance, when at the saucer site, he says, “Bob, clear the slide off and bring it over here. Eddie, get the ship warmed up and be ready to get out of here in a hurry.” When the Thing is about to burst into the room, he tells Eddie, “If it comes in you wet it down,” tells MacPherson, “And you, Mac—touch it off and don’t miss,” tells Bob and Barnes, “You two be ready in case it needs more,” and tells Nikki, “Come here. Get in the corner. And hold this in front of you. Turn off those lights.” Pat gives so many orders during the course of the film that he admits to Nikki, “I’ve given all the orders I want to give for the rest of my life.” “If I thought that were true,” she jokes, “I’d ask you to marry me.” But when he immediately starts giving more orders, she jokes again, “Sorry, General, I’ve changed my mind—it’s all off.” Everyone gives Pat advice, but he knows that only he, as leader, can give the orders. None of his men questions this, and he accepts his responsibility. That’s why everything runs so smoothly, and why in the final battle the Thing is killed without our side suffering any casualties. The Thing is a tribute to our armed forces. Even as we “Keep watching the skies!” as “war correspondent” Scotty exhorts us to do, we can feel secure because these fine men are ready, willing, and able.

The Wicker Man

1973 (U.K.) British Lion (in the United States it was first released in 1974 by Warner Bros., a Brut presentation)

Director: Robin Hardy

Producer: Peter Snell

Screenplay: Anthony Shaffer

Cinematography: Harry Waxman

Music: Paul Giovanni

“Cornrigs” sung by Paul Giovanni

Editor: Eric Boyd-Perkins

Running time: 87 minutes (102 minutes in original form; 94 minutes in the Final Cut)

Color

Cast: Edward Woodward (Sergeant Neil Howie), Christopher Lee (Lord Summerisle), Diane Cilento (Miss Rose), Britt Ekland (Willow), Ingrid Pitt (librarian-clerk), Lindsay Kemp (Alder MacGregor), Russell Waters (harbor master), Aubrey Morris (old gardener-gravedigger), Irene Sunters (May Morrison), Walter Carr (schoolmaster), Roy Boyd (Broome), Ian Campbell (Oak), Leslie Mackie (Daisy), Geraldine Cowper (Rowan Morrison), Kevin Collins (old fisherman), Donald Eccles (T. H. Lennox), Jennifer Martin (Myrtle).

Synopsis (102-minute long cut): The filmmakers thank Lord Summerisle and the inhabitants of Summerisle, a small Scottish island, for being allowed the privilege to film their religious practices.

Sergeant Howie is a middle-aged policeman on the Scottish mainland. He is a deeply religious man, who serves as a lay preacher. Howie is sent a picture from an anonymous person on Summerisle, in his jurisdiction. The picture is of a teenage girl named Rowan Morrison, who is supposedly missing without a trace.

Howie flies his small plane to the island. He is treated with suspicion by all the villagers. He thinks them strange, too. No one there has ever heard of Rowan Morrison, not even May Morrison, the woman Howie thinks is her mother. May has a young daughter named Myrtle who tells Howie she is drawing a picture of Rowan. It turns out to be a picture of a hare.

Howie stays at the Green Man pub, run by Alder MacGregor and his beautiful, sexy daughter Willow. Singing goes on all the time by men at the pub, and Howie is disturbed to hear their bawdy songs. Howie orders some food and is surprised that it all comes out of cans, since the island is known for its fine produce. Howie takes a stroll at night and sees many naked couples copulating in the cemetery. He returns to his room and is disturbed by the bawdy song downstairs directed at Willow’s room. Lord Summerisle has brought her a young boy to initiate into sexual practices.

The next day, Howie visits the school where Miss Rose is teaching the girls about phallic symbolism and the boys are outside participating in a phallic maypole ceremony. He is appalled. Those at the school say they’ve never heard of Rowan Morrison but he finds her name on the school register. Miss Rose admits that she is dead, but says she has returned in some other form.

Howie finds Rowan’s tombstone. He asks permission of Lord Summerisle to dig up the coffin. He suspects she was murdered. Outside the mansion, Miss Rose leads nude young girls in a fertility ceremony. Lord Summerisle is extremely polite to Howie, but Howie is repulsed that he and all the villagers who follow him are paganists.

Howie unearths the coffin and discovers a hare instead of Rowan’s body inside. He figures that she has been kidnapped and will be sacrificed in the upcoming May Day ceremony because this year’s crops have failed. Before the May Day procession, Howie knocks out Alder MacGregor and puts on his fool’s outfit. He joins the parade that leads to the shore. Everyone on Summerisle is there singing and dancing. Rowan is led forward to be sacrificed, or so Howie believes. He tries to rescue her. It turns out that he is the one who is to be sacrificed. The picture of Rowan was sent to him to lure him, a good Christian, to the island for sacrifice, to appease the gods.

The villagers sing a rousing song as Howie is placed in a giant wicker man. It is set afire and burns down as the sun sets.

Lord Summerisle stands in front of the giant Wicker Man, in which Howie is to be sacrificed.

Nothing is more frustrating for a movie fan than to know that a picture about which he or she has heard or read interesting reports has been shelved by its distributor or has been yanked out of the director’s hands and drastically edited by studio hatchetmen before being put into circulation. There is an undeniable mystique surrounding films that, for one reason or another, are unavailable in their directors’ versions. It’s as if those original versions, locked away in studio safes, must be undiscovered masterpieces; and as odd as it sounds, the cults that have formed around some of these largely unseen films consist mostly of people who know them only by reputation. Such is the case with The Wicker Man, which many people are desperate to see. “The Citizen Kane of horror films” according to the influential Cinefantastique, “a cross between King Kong and Gilbert and Sullivan” according to a Boston critic, the Grand Prize winner at the 1973 Festival of Fantastic Films in Paris, this British occult film was nearly impossible to see after it first played here in 1974; especially in the long 102-minute version that was not available at all until the late seventies. The reasons for its inaccessibility has much to do with its fascination.

The strange story of The Wicker Man* began in early 1972 when mystery writer Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy, his partner in a television packaging and production company, decided to make a film about paganism. It would star Christopher Lee, eager to shake his Dracula image, and be produced by Peter Snell, managing director of British Lion films. Hardy, who had once stumbled upon a secret pagan ceremony in a Cornwall village, researched the subject. Then Shaffer wrote his first original screenplay, The Wicker Man. British Lion agreed to finance it, hoping it would be the picture to revive the last of the great British studios. Filming proceeded remarkably well considering that twenty-five spread-out locations were needed for Summerisle and Lord Summerisle’s mansion; filming took place in the dead of winter for a movie set in the spring; and pregnant Britt Ekland, required to take lessons for her nude dance, constantly argued with first-time director Hardy.

But the real problems began during postproduction, when British Lion was unexpectedly sold to EMI. Michael Deeley was placed in charge of film operations and Peter Snell was giving his notice. Deeley assigned aide Barry Spikings to supervise the editing, and the result was a 102-minute print that Hardy found lacking but satisfactory. Christopher Lee was also satisfied, though disappointed that as much as twenty minutes of what he considered the finest role of his career had been excised. Ingrid Pitt, another favorite of Hammer horror fans, also saw her part brutally reduced. But Deeley was not through cutting. When he tried to interest Roger Corman in buying the picture’s American and Canadian distribution rights, Corman turned him down but suggested fifteen minutes of additional trimming to make it more commercial. Without informing the filmmakers, Deeley did away with the introductory Scottish mainland sequence in which Sergeant Howie is seen as a lay preacher, the “Gentle Johnny” number during which Willow initiates a young boy into sexual practices offscreen while Lord Summerisle delivers an eloquent Walt Whitman-like poem to a pair of copulating snails, and other bits. The result was that Howie’s two-night stay on Summerisle appears to be just one night. So it was that an 87-minute version was released in England in late 1973 and was sold to an American tax-shelter group, Beechwood Properties, which didn’t care whether the picture made money or not.

Beechwood found a distributor in National General Pictures, but when NGP ran into financial difficulties, The Wicker Man was transferred to Warner Bros. All Warner did was fill Beechwood’s tax-shelter requirements for bookings by test-marketing it in Atlanta and San Diego. Strictly speaking, The Wicker Man is an occult film with music, but Warner promoted it as a straight horror film. Not surprisingly, it did poor business—it was unable to deliver the shocks and gore ticketbuyers expected. At this time, Variety gave it an excellent review and a bright financial outlook. But Warner put it on its shelf.

Two years later the distribution rights were purchased by Abraxas Film Corporation, a small New Orleans company run by film lovers John Alan Simon, a reporter, and Stirling Smith, host of a popular regional movie-talk show. Soon thereafter, Hardy, who had moved to the United States to help salvage a career he thought irreparably damaged as a result of an unsuccessful debut film, informed Abraxas that possibly there was a 102-minute negative in existence. Calls to Deeley in the United States, from Abraxas, Hardy, Shaffer, Snell, and Lee, were initially unrewarding, then went unanswered. Calls to Spikings in England resulted in an obviously concocted story: The 360 cans of negative film had accidentally been burned. When that story wasn’t believed, another replaced it: the negative had been used as highway filler. Everyone had given up on finding the negative and was trying to locate an existing 102-minute commercial print when, amazingly, a complete print turned up in the offices of Corman’s New World Pictures. Although Corman had an obligation to return it to EMI, he (or an employee devoted to film preservation) shipped it to Abraxas. In the absence of a negative, Abraxas made a dupe negative from this complete original. So the full director’s version was restored!

Because The Wicker Man plays so rarely, I am not sure which versions of the film are available and where they play. However, I believe the 87-minute version is still in circulation, I know there is an even shorter version that plays on television, and I believe the 102-minute version is available in certain parts of the United States (though I am unsure if it plays in England). At the very least, the long version was available on video cassette**, which is how I and, I’m sure, many others were finally able to see it. As it turned out, I found the film somewhat overrated, and much less profound philosophically than I had been led to believe. But it is beautifully photographed, witty, and is such an unusual entry to the genre—particularly because of Paul Giovanni’s extensive and clever use of music (bawdy ballads are sung, acoustic instruments are played throughout)—that I can understand why it would impress many viewers. It’s certainly worth a look, and I’m glad so much effort has been made to make the full version accessible.

The Wicker Man reminds me of a combination of the cult British TV series The Avengers (which twice had Christopher Lee as guest villain) and two British horror films, Horror Hotel (1960), in which Lee played the head of a satanic cult, and Doomwatch (1972). Summerisle is exactly the type of locale in which The Avengers superdetectives John Steed (Patrick MacNee) and Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) often found themselves: full of offbeat characters, with a mannerly megalomaniac dictator, with a deep, dark secret that borders on the supernatural. As in The Avengers, the humor greatly tempers the morbidity that pervades the scenario. The major difference, of course, is that Steed and Peel always solved their mysteries and escaped with their lives, while Sergeant Howie solves his mystery and is killed for his efforts, surprising to all us viewers fooled by the picture’s Avengers-like tone.

Arriving on Summerisle, Howie questions the pleasant townspeople about the disappearance of Rowan Morrison.

Doomwatch is about a London doctor (Ian Ballen) who comes alone to a secluded island to investigate the effects of pollution in surrounding fishing areas. Like Howie, the doctor is treated like an outsider by the island’s populace who, too, are hiding a deep, dark secret (that some islanders are turning into deformed, insane creatures). The difference: In Doomwatch the people seem cruel when actually they’re just scared; in The Wicker Man the islanders seem to be friendly and pretend to help Howie while actually leading him into a trap.

Horror Hotel, which is most similar to The Wicker Man in terms of its premise, shows what might have happened to the doctor in Doomwatch if the islanders weren’t really decent people beneath their hostile façades. A young student (Betta St. John) is lured to a small Massachusetts town to investigate witchcraft. It turns out that she is meant to be sacrificed in a satanic rite—presided over by Christopher Lee, naturally. Like Howie she does not escape. (This picture, one of the first in England to deal with witchcraft because of its longstanding ban on the subject, has often been compared to Psycho [1960] because its heroine is killed off early.) Horror Hotel is also similar to The Wicker Man in its dramatic use of imagery. The satanic Horror Hotel has the Raven’s Inn, the ritualistic Candlemas Eve and Witches’ Sabbath ceremonies, a sprig of woodbine, the shadow of a cross, a dead bird with an arrow through it, and blood sacrifice; the paganistic The Wicker Man has its Green Man Inn, May Day ceremony, plant imagery, sunshine, hare references, and blood sacrifices.

Horror Hotel, filmed in black and white, is very dark, shadowy, and misty. By design, The Wicker Man is brightly photographed by Harry Waxman (a stunning job), because on the surface paganism is a joyous celebration of nature—its crueler aspects are hidden under a shroud of joviality. The songs Howie hears are bawdy, to be sure, but we welcome them because they sound lovely and are quite spirited. Even when Miss Rose philosophizes, we are not turned off by her beliefs: “We believe that after the human life is over, the soul lives on—in trees, in animals, in fire, in water . . .” Fair enough. The film, which opens with the filmmakers’ thank you to (the fictitious) Lord Summerisle and his flock for letting them film on the island, is full of mirth. It contains songs, dancing, happy children, beautiful sexually liberated blond women, parades, a pageantry of colors, comic touches, flowers (individually pasted on trees by the set designer), and sunshine. Lord Summerisle himself seems like a benevolent leader, even if we think he’s pulling off a sham by convincing his followers it is the worship of the sun and the god of the orchards that is responsible for their successful livelihood as apple growers. This liberal fellow compares favorably to the prudish, puritanical, predictable Howie. It is only when Lord Summerisle actually carries through on the terrible execution, burning Howie and animals in a gigantic wicker man, in order to appease the gods, that we side with Howie. In fact, we identify with Howie: We realize that it could just as easily be us, whether we are steadfastly religious (as is Howie) or agnostics (as is Shaffer), whom these crazed paganists are sacrificing.

Not knowing what to expect, Howie joins the parade. In his clown outfit he marches in front of the three blondes, played by Ingrid Pitt, Diane Cilento, and Britt Ekland.

Most horror films are about the triumph of Christianity over Evil. Vampire films are a good example, as we see Evil retreat in the presence of a cross. Some films—The Omen (1976) is a prime example—have shown Evil to be victorious in our decadent world, but these are in the minority. A few films, like Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), show both Christianity and a belief in other gods (voodooism, paganism) as having validity. The Wicker Man is the one film in which both Christianity and paganism are shown to be impotent. We neither believe Howie’s contention that he will be resurrected nor Lord Summerisle’s that Howie will be reincarnated. We neither believe that the blood sacrifice will bring about a successful crop the following year nor that Lord Summerisle will be punished for committing such a sin (except possibly by the villagers if the crops fail again). “The Wicker Man,” said Christopher Lee in Cinefantastique, “is not an attack on contemporary religion but a comment on it, its strengths as well as its weaknesses, its fallibility. [It points out] that it can be puritanical and [still not] always come out on top.”

The inhabitants of Summerisle sing, dance, and dress in colorful and bizarre costumes during a pagan celebration that culminates in Howie’s sacrifice.

Howie, stolidly characterized by British TV actor Edward Woodward, is a queer bird. He’s a man who has an unquestioning belief in God, in fact is a lay preacher, yet works at a profession that relies on logic and science. It’s people he doesn’t understand; so he can’t see that the villagers are obviously laying a trap for him. A virgin although middle-aged, he almost succumbs to temptation when Willow sings an erotic song in the adjoining room and slithers around sexual bedroom props while in the nude. His moment of weakness, considering sex with Willow outside of marriage, is balanced by rival Lord Summerisle’s own moment of weakness in his own beliefs: his worried look when he considers the possibility that Howie’s sacrifice won’t prevent a second crop failure. Howie is presented as a Christ figure, a stranger in a strange land run by a fake lord. What I find fault with is not that he is killed, but that the constant mockery of Howie by the villagers (he ends up dressed as a fool) and Lord Summerisle (who’s amused that Howie has a chance to be a Christian martyr) is presented in such a way that I get the impression it is Anthony Shaffer who is mocking Howie (and not just questioning his beliefs). It’s as if Shaffer is trying to teach a true believer a lesson.

Because every episode that takes place along the way as Howie solves the mystery of the missing Rowan Morrison (a pure man’s quest for the missing Grail) is presented with tongue seemingly in cheek, there is not a frightening moment before the horrifying sacrifice. Yet there is an accumulative effect whereby we become increasingly unnerved. By the end, during the parade in which everyone wears silly costumes and sings a cheery song (while Howie is being burned), we have stopped our smiling. And with hindsight, what we laughed about earlier is no longer amusing. We realize that as weird as these people are, their real-life counterparts may indeed exist. Interviewed for Cinefantastique, Robin Hardy observed:

Maybe it’s not too big a connection to make between the final scene of The Wicker Man and the Nuremberg rallies in Germany. It was no accident that Hitler brought back all those pagan feasts in his rise to power. . . . The idea that it is necessary to sacrifice people for the good of other people is never too far from the human consciousness at any one time. You can’t simply say that it was something people did all those years ago and has nothing to do with us today.

*The story is documented by Stuart Byron in Film Comment (Nov.–Dec. 1977) and David Batholomew in Cinefantastique (Vol. 6, No. 3, 1977).

**When attempting to release the 102-minute version on DVD in the early 2000s, the new rights holders learned it had been lost again. In 2013, an alternate print provided to Abraxas was recovered, allowing the director to prepare the 94-minute Final Cut, the most complete version available today.

Appendix

Featured cult horror movies:

A

Altered States, 1980

Director: Ken Russell

An American Werewolf in London, 1981

Director: John Landis

B

Basket Case, 1982

Director: Frank Henenlotter

The Black Cat (The House of Doom; The Vanishing Body), 1934

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

Black Sunday (The Hour When Dracula Comes; House of Fright; The Mask of the Demon), 1960

Director: Mario Bava

Blood Feast (Egyptian Blood Feast; Feast of Flesh), 1963

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935

Director: James Whale

The Brood, 1979

Director: David Cronenberg

C

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920

Director: Robert Wiene

The Conqueror Worm (Witchfinder General), 1968

Director: Michael Reeves

D

Daughters of Darkness (Blood on the Lips; Children of the Night; Erzebeth; The Promise of Red Lips), 1971

Director: Harry Kümel

F

Freaks (Forbidden Love; The Monster Show; Nature’s Mistakes), 1932

Director: Tod Browning

G

Godzilla, King of the Monsters, 1956

Directors: Ishiro Honda and Terry Morse

H

Halloween, 1978

Director: John Carpenter

House of Wax, 1953

Director: Andre de Toth

I

I Married a Monster from Outer Space, 1958

Director: Gene Fowler, Jr.

I Walked with a Zombie, 1943

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956

Director: Don Siegel

K

King Kong, 1933

Directors: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack

L

The Little Shop of Horrors, 1960

Director: Roger Corman

M

Martin, 1978

Director: George A. Romero

Massacre at Central High (Blackboard Massacre), 1976

Director: Rene Daalder

N

Night of the Demon (Curse of the Demon), 1957

Director: Jacques Tourneur

The Night of the Hunter, 1955

Director: Charles Laughton

Night of the Living Dead, 1968

Director: George A. Romero

P

Peeping Tom (Face of Fear), 1960

Director: Michael Powell

Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975

Director: Peter Weir

Psycho, 1960

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

S

Seconds, 1966

Director: John Frankenheimer

T

Targets (Before I Die), 1968

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 1974

Director: Tobe Hooper

The Thing (The Thing from Another World), 1951

Director: Christian Nyby

W

The Wicker Man, 1973

Director: Robin Hardy

If you’re a fan of cult horror, you might also enjoy these titles from both the heyday of horror movies and today:

(Note: Sequels are not included unless they have a different cult audience from the original.)

A

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 1948

Director: Charles T. Barton

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (The Curse of Dr. Phibes), 1971

Director: Robert Fuest

The Addiction, 1995

Director: Abel Ferrara

Alien 3, 1992

Director: David Fincher

Alice, Sweet Alice (Communion), 1976

Director: Alfred Sole

Alligator, 1980

Director: Lewis Teague

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, 2006

Director: Jonathan Levine

An American Werewolf in Paris, 1997

Director: Anthony Waller

Anaconda, 1997

Director: Luis Llosa

And Soon the Darkness, 1970

Director: Robert Fuest

Angel Heart, 1987

Director: Alan Parker

Anguish (Angustia), 1987

Director: Bigas Luna

Army of Darkness, 1992

Director: Sam Raimi

Alone in the Dark, 1982

Director: Jack Sholder

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, 1964

Director: José Mojica Marins

Atom Age Vampire (Seddok, the Heir of Satan), 1960

Director: Anton Giulio Majano

Attack the Block, 2011

Director: Joe Cornish

Attack of the Giant Leeches (She Demons of the Swamp), 1959

Director: Bernard L. Kowalski

Audition, 1999

Director: Takashi Miike

Autopsy, 2008

Director: Adam Gierasch

The Awful Dr. Orlof (Cries in the Night; The Diabolical Dr. Satan), 1962

Director: Jesús Franco

B

The Bad Seed, 1956

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Baghead, 2008

Directors: Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass

A Bay of Blood (Bloodbath; Carnage; Chain Reaction; The Last House on the Left, Part II; Twitch of the Death Nerve), 1971

Director: Mario Bava

Beast of the Yellow Night, 1971

Director: Eddie Romero

Beauty and the Beast, 1946

Director: Jean Cocteau

Bedlam, 1946

Director: Mark Robson

The Beyond (And You Will Live in Terror; Seven Doors of Death), 1981

Director: Lucio Fulci

Big Bad Wolves, 2013

Directors: Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado

Billy the Kid Versus Dracula, 1966

Director: William Beaudine

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (The Phantom of Terror; Point of Terror), 1970

Director: Dario Argento

The Birds, 1953

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Black Christmas (Silent Night, Evil Night; Stranger in the House), 1974

Director: Bob Clark

The Black Pit of Dr. M (Mysteries from Beyond the Grave), 1959

Director: Fernando Méndez

Black Sabbath (The Three Faces of Fear), 1963

Director: Mario Bava

Blacula, 1972

Director: William Crain

Blade II, 2002

Director: Guillermo del Toro

The Blair Witch Project, 1999

Directors: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez

Blood and Black Lace (Fashion House of Death; Six Women for the Murderer), 1964

Director: Mario Bava

Blood and Roses (To Die of Pleasure), 1960

Director: Roger Vadim

Blood for Dracula (Andy Warhol’s Dracula), 1974

Director: Paul Morrissey

The Blood on Satan’s Claw, 1971

Director: Piers Haggard

Blue Sunshine, 1978

Director: Jeff Lieberman

Le Boucher, 1970

Director: Claude Chabrol

Bluebeard, 1944

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

The Body Snatcher, 1945

Director: Robert Wise

The Brainiac (Baron of Terror), 1962

Director: Chano Urueta

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Bride of the Monster (Bride of the Atom), 1955

Director: Edward D. Wood, Jr.

Brides of Blood (Brides of Blood Island; Danger on Tiki Island; Grave Desires; The Island of Living Horror; Terror on Blood Island), 1968

Directors: Gerardo de Leon and Eddie Romero

The Bride Wore Black, 1968

Director: François Truffaut

A Bucket of Blood, 1959

Director: Roger Corman

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1992

Director: Fran Rubel Kuzui

Bug, 2006

Director: William Friedkin

Burn, Witch, Burn (Night of the Eagle), 1962

Director: Sidney Hayers

C

Cabin Fever, 2002

Director: Eli Roth

The Cabin in the Woods, 2012

Director: Drew Goddard

Caltiki, the Immortal Monster, 1959

Director: Riccardo Freda

Candyman, 1992

Director: Bernard Rose

Cannibal Holocaust, 1980

Director: Ruggero Deodato

Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, 1972

Director: Brian Clemens

Captive Wild Woman, 1943

Director: Edward Dmytryk

Carnival of Souls, 1962

Director: Herk Harvey

Carrie, 1976

Director: Brian De Palma

Castle of Blood (The Castle of Terror; Danse Macabre; Dimensions in Death; The Long Night of Terror), 1964

Director: Antonio Margheriti

The Cat and the Canary, 1927

Director: Paul Leni

Cat People, 1942

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Cat People, 1982

Director: Paul Schrader

The Changeling, 1980

Director: Peter Medak

Children of the Corn, 1984

Director: Fritz Kiersch

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (Revenge of the Living Dead; Things from the Dead), 1973

Director: Bob Clark

Child’s Play, 1988

Director: Tom Holland

Class of Nuke ‘Em High, 1986

Directors: Richard W. Haines and Lloyd Kaufman

Cloverfield, 2008

Director: Matt Reeves

Color Me Blood Red (Model Massacre), 1965

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

The Company of Wolves, 1984

Director: Neil Jordan

Copycat, 1995

Director: Jon Amiel

The Cottage, 2008

Director: Paul Andrew Williams

Countess Dracula, 1971

Director: Peter Sasdy

Count Yorga (The Loves of Count Yorga, Vampire), 1970

Director: Bob Kelljan

The Crazies (Code Name: Trixie; The Mad People), 1973

Director: George A. Romero

The Crazies, 2010

Director: Breck Eisner

Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954

Director: Jack Arnold

Creepshow, 1982

Director: George A. Romero

Crimes of Passion, 1984

Director: Ken Russell

Criminally Insane, 1975

Director: Nick Millard

Critters, 1986

Director: Stephen Herek

Cronos, 1993

Director: Guillermo del Toro

The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957

Director: Terence Fisher

The Curse of Werewolf (The Curse of Siniestro), 1961

Director: Terence Fisher

The Curse of the Cat People, 1944

Directors: Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise

Curtains, 1983

Director: Richard Ciupka

D

Darkness Falls, 2003

Director: Jonathan Liebesman

Dawn of the Dead, 1978

Director: George A. Romero

Dead Alive (Braindead), 1992

Director: Peter Jackson

Dead of Night, 1945

Directors: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer

Dead of Night (Deathdream), 1972

Director: Bob Clark

Dead Ringers, 1988

Director: David Cronenberg

The Dead Zone, 1983

Director: David Cronenberg

Deadly Blessing, 1981

Director: Wes Craven

Death Race 2000, 1975

Director: Paul Bartel

Deep Red (Profondo Rosso), 1975

Director: Dario Argento

Dementia 13 (The Haunted and the Hunted), 1963

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Demon Seed (Proteus Generation), 1977

Director: Donald Cammell

Deranged (Confessions of a Necrophile), 1974

Directors: Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby

The Descent, 2005

Director: Neil Marshall

The Devil Bat (Killer Bats), 1940

Director: Jean Yarbrough

The Devil Commands (The Devil Said No), 1941

Director: Edward Dymytryk

Devil Doll, 1964

Director: Lindsay Shonteff

The Devil-Doll (The Witch of Timbuctoo), 1936

Director: Tod Browning

The Devil Rides Out (The Devil’s Bride), 1968

Director: Terence Fisher

The Devil’s Backbone, 2001

Director: Guillermo del Toro

The Devil’s Rejects, 2005

Director: Rob Zombie

The Diabolical Dr. Z (Miss Death; Miss Death and Dr. Z in the Grip of the Maniac), 1966

Director: Jesús Franco

Diabolique, 1955

Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot

Doctor of Doom, 1963

Director: René Cardonam

Doctor Cyclops, 1940

Director: Ernest B. Schoedsack

Doctor X, 1932

Director: Michael Curtiz

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, 1973

Director: John Newland

Don’t Look Now, 1973

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1931

Director: Rouben Mamoulian

Dracula, 1931

Director: Tod Browning

Dracula’s Daughter, 1936

Director: Lambert Hillyer

Drag Me to Hell, 2009

Director: Sam Raimi

Dressed to Kill, 1980

Director: Brian De Palma

The Driller Killer, 1979

Director: Abel Ferrara

E

Eating Raoul, 1982

Director: Paul Bartel

The Evil Dead, 1981

Director: Sam Raimi

Evil Dead II, 1987

Director: Sam Raimi

The Eye (Gin gwai; Seeing Ghosts), 2002

Directors: the Pang Brothers

Eyes Without a Face (House of Dr. Rasanoff), 1960

Director: Georges Franju

F

Fallen, 1998

Director: Georges Franju

Faust, 1960

Director: F. W. Murnau

The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck, 1967

Director: Roman Polanski

Feng Shui, 2004

Director: Chito S. Roño

Final Destination, 2000

Director: James Wong

Flesh and Fantasy (Six Destinies), 1943

Director: Julien Duvivier

The Flesh and the Fiends (The Fiendish Ghouls; Mania; Psycho Killers), 1960

Director: John Gilling

Flesh for Frankenstein (Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein), 1973

Director: Paul Morrissey

The Fly, 1958

Director: Kurt Neumann

The Fly, 1986

Director: David Cronenberg

The Fog, 1980

Director: John Carpenter

The Folks at Red Wolf Inn (Club Dead; Secrets Beyond the Door; Terror at Red Wolf Inn; Terror House; Terror on the Menu), 1972

Director: Bud Townsend

Frailty, 2001

Director: Bill Paxton

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, 1943

Director: Roy William Neill

Friday the 13th, 1980

Director: Sean S. Cunningham

The Frighteners, 1996

Director: Peter Jackson

Fright Night, 1985

Director: Tom Holland

From Beyond, 1986

Director: Stuart Gordon

From Dusk Till Dawn, 1996

Director: Robert Rodriguez

Funny Games, 1997

Director: Michael Haneke

G

Ganja and Hess (Black Evil; Black Vampire; Blackout: The Moment of Terror), 1973

Director: Bill Gunn

Ginger Snaps, 2000

Director: John Fawcett

God Told Me To (Demon; God Told Me To Kill), 1976

Director: Larry Cohen

Grave of the Vampire (Seed of Terror), 1972

Director: John Hayes

Grindhouse, 2007

Directors: Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino

H

The Haunted Palace, 1963

Director: Roger Corman

The Haunting, 1963

Director: Robert Wise

Häxan (Witchcraft Through the Ages), 1922

Director: Benjamin Christensen

Hellraiser, 1987

Director: Clive Barker

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, 1986

Director: John McNaughton

The Hidden, 1987

Director: Jack Sholder

High Tension (Switchblade Romance), 2003

Director: Alexandre Aja

The Hills Have Eyes, 1977

Director: Wes Craven

The Hitcher, 1986

Director: Robert Harmon

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, 1988

Director: Fred Olen Ray

Homicidal, 1961

Director: William Castle

The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock), 1962

Director: Riccardo Freda

Horror Express (Panic on the Trans-Siberian Express; The Possessor), 1972

Director: Eugenio Martín

Horror Hotel (The City of the Dead), 1960

Director: John Llewellyn Moxey

Horror of Dracula, 1958

Director: Terence Fisher

The Host, 2006

Director: Joon-ho Bong

Hostel, 2005

Director: Eli Roth

Hour of the Wolf, 1968

Director: Ingmar Bergman

House, 1986

Director: Steve Miner

House (Hausu), 1977

Director: Nobuhiko Ôbayashi

The House by the Cemetery (Zombie Hell House), 1981

Director: Lucio Fulci

The House of the Devil, 2009

Director: Ti West

House of a 1000 Corpses, 2003

Director: Rob Zombie

House of Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher), 1960

Director: Roger Corman

House on Haunted Hill, 1959

Director: William Castle

The Howling, 1981

Director: Joe Dante

The Human Centipede (First Sequence), 2009

Director: Tom Six

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1923

Director: Wallace Worsley

The Hunger, 1983

Director: Tony Scott

Hungry Wives (Jack’s Wife; Season of the Witch), 1972

Director: George A. Romero

I

I Bury the Living, 1958

Director: Albert Band

I Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997

Director: Jim Gillespie

I Saw What You Did, 1965

Director: William Castle

I Was a Teenage Werewolf, 1957

Director: Gene Fowler, Jr.

Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1), 2001

Director: Takashi Miike

Identity, 2003

Director: James Mangold

In the Mouth of Madness, 1994

Director: John Carpenter

Inferno, 1980

Director: Dario Argento

The Innocents, 1961

Director: Jack Clayton

Insidious, 2010

Director: James Wan

Invasion of the Bee Girls (Graveyard Tramps), 1973

Director: Denis Sanders

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978

Director: Philip Kaufman

The Invisible Man, 1933

Director: James Whale

Island of Lost Souls, 1932

Director: Erle C. Kenton

It’s Alive, 1974

Director: Larry Cohen

J

Jacob’s Ladder, 1990

Director: Adrian Lyne

Jeepers Creepers, 2001

Director: Victor Salva

Jennifer’s Body, 2009

Director: Karyn Kusama

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, 1966

Director: William Beaudine

Jonathan, 1970

Director: Hans W. Geissendörfer

Joy Ride, 2001

Director: John Dahl

Ju-on (The Grudge), 2002

Director: Takashi Shimizu

Juan of the Dead, 2001

Director: Alejandro Brugués

K

Kill, Baby . . . Kill (Curse of the Living Dead; Don’t Walk in the Park; Operation Fear), 1966

Director: Mario Bava

Killer Klowns from Outer Space, 1988

Director: Stephen Chiodo

King Kong, 2005

Director: Peter Jackson

Kiss of the Damned, 2012

Director: Xan Cassavetes

Kwaidan (Ghost Stories), 1964

Director: Masaki Kobayashi

L

Lake Mungo, 2008

Director: Joel Anderson

The Last Exorcism, 2010

Director: Daniel Stamm

The Last House on the Left, 1972

Director: Wes Craven

The Last Man on Earth, 1964

Director: Ubaldo Ragona

The Last Wave (Black Rain), 1977

Director: Peter Weir

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (The 7 Brothers Meet Dracula), 1973

Director: Roy Ward Baker

Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (The Legendary Curse of Lemora; Lemora, the Lady Dracula; The Rape of the Vampires), 1973

Director: Richard Blackburn

The Leopard Man, 1943

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Let Me In, 2010

Director: Matt Reeves

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, 1971

Director: John D. Hancock

Let the Right One In, 2008

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Link, 1986

Director: Richard Franklin

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, 1976

Director: Nicolas Gessner

Little Otik (Greedy Guts), 2000

Director: Jan Svankmajer

The Lodger, 1927

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

The Lost Boys, 1987

Director: Joel Schumacher

Love at First Bite, 1979

Director: Stan Dragoti

Lust of the Vampire (The Devil’s Commandment; Evil’s Commandment; I Vampiri), 1957

Director: Fernando Méndez

M

M, 1931

Director: Fritz Lang

Mad Love, 1935

Director: Karl Freund

Mama, 2013

Director: Andrés Muschietti

Man Bites Dog (It Happened in Your Neighborhood), 1992

Directors: Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde

Manhunter, 1986

Director: Michael Mann

Maniac, 1980

Director: William Lustig

Manos: The Hands of Fate, 1966

Director: Harold P. Warren

Mark of the Devil (Burn, Witch, Burn; Witches Are Tortured to Death), 1970

Director: Michael Armstrong

Martyrs, 2008

Director: Pascal Laugier

The Mask of Fu Man Chu, 1932

Director: Charles Brabin

The Masque of the Red Death, 1964

Director: Roger Corman

Mighty Joe Young, 1949

Director: Ernest B. Schoedsack

Mimic, 1997

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Monsters, 2010

Director: Gareth Edwards

Mothra (Mosura), 1961

Director: Ishirô Honda

The Most Dangerous Game, 1932

Directors: Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack

The Mummy, 1932

Director: Karl Freund

Murders in the Zoo, 1933

Director: Murders in the Zoo

Murders in the Rue Morgue, 1932

Director: Robert Florey

Mute Witness, 1994

Director: Anthony Waller

My Bloody Valentine, 1981

Director: George Mihalka

Mystery of the Wax Museum, 1933

Director: Michael Curtiz

N

Nadja, 1994

Director: Michael Almereyda

The Nanny, 1965

Director: Seth Holt

Near Dark, 1987

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Night of the Bloody Apes (Gomar: The Human Gorilla; Horror and Sex), 1969

Director: René Cardona

Night of the Creeps, 1986

Director: Fred Dekker

Night of the Demons, 1988

Director: Kevin Tenney

Night of the Ghouls, 1959

Director: Edward D. Wood, Jr.

A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984

Director: Wes Craven

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, 1985

Director: Jack Sholder

Night Tide, 1961

Director: Curtis Harrington

Nosferatu (Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror), 1922

Director: F. W. Murnau

Nosferatu the Vampyre (Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night), 1979

Director: Werner Herzog

The Nude Vampire, 1970

Director: Jean Rollin

O

Of Unknown Origin, 1983

Director: George P. Cosmatos

Oldboy, 2003

Director: Chan-wook Park

The Old Dark House, 1932

Director: James Whale

The Omen, 1976

Director: Richard Donner

Open Water, 2003

Director: Chris Kentis

The Orphanage, 2007

Director: J.A. Bayona

The Others, 2001

Director: Alejandro Amenábar

P

Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Paperhouse, 1988

Director: Bernard Rose

Paranormal Activity, 2007

Director: Oren Peli

Pet Sematary, 1989

Director: Mary Lambert

Phantasm, 1979

Director: Don Coscarelli

The Phantom of the Opera, 1925

Director: Rupert Julian

Phantom of the Paradise, 1974

Director: Brian De Palma

Piranha, 1978

Director: Joe Dante

Pit and the Pendulum, 1961

Director: Roger Corman

Plan 9 from Outer Space, 1959

Director: Edward D. Wood, Jr.

Planet of the Apes, 1968

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner

Play Misty for Me, 1971

Director: Clint Eastwood

Poison Ivy, 1992

Director: Katt Shea

Poltergeist, 1982

Director: Tobe Hooper

Pontypool, 2008

Director: Bruce McDonald

Possession, 1981

Director: Andrzej Zulawski

The Possession of Joel Delaney, 1972

Director: Waris Hussein

Predator, 1987

Director: John McTiernan

The Psychopath, 1966

Director: Freddie Francis

The Purge, 2013

Director: James DeMonaco

The Purge: Anarchy, 2014

Director: James DeMonaco

The Pyx (The Hooker Cult Murders), 1972

Director: Harvey Hart

Q

Q: The Winged Serpent, 1982

Director: Larry Cohen

Quarantine, 2008

Director: John Erick Dowdle

R

Rabies, 2010

Directors: Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado

Race with the Devil, 1975

Director: Jack Starrett

The Rape of the Vampire (Queen of the Vampires), 1968

Director: Jean Rollin

Rare Exports, 2010

Director: Jalmari Helander

The Raven, 1935

Director: Lew Landers

The Raven, 1963

Director: Roger Corman

Raw Meat (Death Line), 1973

Director: Gary Sherman

Razorback, 1984

Director: Russell Mulcahy

Re-Animator, 1985

Director: Stuart Gordon

[REC], 2007

Directors: Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza

The Relic, 1997

Director: Peter Hyams

Repulsion, 1965

Director: Roman Polanski

Requiem for a Vampire (Caged Virgins; Dungeon of Terror; Virgins and the Vampires), 1971

Director: Jean Rollin

Resident Evil, 2008

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Resolution, 2012

Directors: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

The Return of the Living Dead, 1985

Director: Dan O’Bannon

The Ring, 2002

Director: Gore Verbinski

Ringu (Ring), 1998

Director: Hideo Nakata

Road Games, 1981

Director: Richard Franklin

Rodan (Rodan! The Flying Monster), 1956

Director: Ishirô Honda

Rosemary’s Baby, 1968

Director: Roman Polanski

The Ruins, 2008

Director: Carter Smith

S

Santo vs. the Vampire Women (Samson vs. the Vampire Women), 1962

Director: Alfonso Corona Blake

Saw, 2004

Director: James Wan

Scanners, 1981

Director: David Cronenberg

Scary Movie, 2000

Director: Keenen Ivory Wayans

Schlock, 1973

Director: John Landis

Scream, 1996

Director: Wes Craven

Scream and Scream Again (Screamer), 1970

Director: Gordon Hessler

Screaming Mimi, 1958

Director: Gerd Oswald

A Serbian Film, 2010

Director: Srdjan Spasojevic

Se7en, 1995

Director: David Fincher

The Seventh Victim, 1943

Director: Mark Robson

Shadow of the Vampire, 2000

Director: E. Elias Merhige

Shake, Rattle & Roll, 1984

Directors: Ishmael Bernal, Emmanuel H. Borlaza, and Peque Gallaga

Shallow Grave, 1994

Director: Danny Boyle

Shaun of the Dead, 2004

Director: Edgar Wright

She-Beast (Revenge of the Blood Beast; Satan’s Sister), 1966

Director: Michael Reeves

The Shiver of Vampires (Strange Things Happen at Night; Thrill of the Vampires), 1971

Director: Jean Rollin

Shivers (The Parasite Murders; They Came from Within), 1975

Director: David Cronenberg

A Short Film About Killing, 1988

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

The Shout, 1978

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

The Silent House, 2010

Director: Gustavo Hernández

Silent Night, Bloody Night (Death House; Night of the Dark Full Moon), 1972

Director: Theodore Gershuny

Silver Bullet, 1985

Director: Daniel Attias

Sisters, 1973

Director: Brian De Palma

The Sixth Sense, 1999

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Sleepaway Camp, 1983

Director: Robert Hiltzik

Sleepy Hollow, 1999

Director: Tim Burton

The Slumber Party Massacre, 1982

Director: Amy Holden Jones

Snakes on a Plane, 2006

Director: David R. Ellis

Something Wicked This Way Comes, 1983

Director: Jack Clayton

The Son of Kong, 1933

Director: Ernest B. Schoedsack

The Sorcerers, 1967

Director: Michael Reeves

Species, 1995

Director: Roger Donaldson

Spirits of the Dead (Powers of Evil; Tales of Mystery), 1968

Directors: Federico Fellini, Louis Malle, and Roger Vadim

Splice, 2009

Director: Vincenzo Natali

Spider Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told (Attack of the Liver Eaters; Cannibal Orgy; The Liver Eaters), 1967

Director: Jack Hill

Squirm, 1976

Director: Jeff Lieberman

The Stepfather, 1987

Director: Joseph Ruben

The Stepford Wives, 1975

Director: Bryan Forbes

Strait-Jacket, 1964

Director: William Castle

Strangler of the Swamp, 1946

Director: Frank Wisbar

Stuck, 2007

Director: Stuart Gordon

The Stuff, 1985

Director: Larry Cohen

The Wedding Curse (Sukob), 2006

Director: Chito S. Roño

Suspiria, 1977

Director: Dario Argento

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, 1936

Director: George King

T

A Tale of Two Sisters, 2002

Director: Kim Jee-woon

A Taste of Blood (The Secret of Dr. Alucard), 1967

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Taste of Fear (Scream of Fear), 1961

Director: Seth Holt

Teeth, 2007

Director: Mitchell Lichtenstein

The Tenant, 1976

Director: Roman Polanski

Tenebrae (Tenebre), 1982

Director: Dario Argento

The Terror (The Castle of Terror; The Haunting), 1963

Director: Roger Corman

Terror Train, 1980

Director: Roger Spottiswoode

Tetsuo, the Iron Man, 1989

Director: Shin’ya Tsukamoto

Theatre of Blood (Much Ado About Murder), 1973

Director: Douglas Hickox

Them!, 1954

Director: Gordon Douglas

Them, 2006

Directors: David Moreau and Xavier Palud

These Are the Damned (The Damned), 1963

Director: Joseph Losey

They Live, 1988

Director: John Carpenter

Thirst, 1979

Director: Rod Hardy

Thirst, 2009

Director: Chan-wook Park

13 Ghosts, 1960

Director: William Castle

Time After Time, 1979

Director: Nicholas Meyer

The Tingler, 1959

Director: William Castle

The Tomb of Ligeia (Tomb of the Cat), 1964

Director: Roger Corman

The Town That Dreaded Sundown, 1976

Director: The Town That Dreaded Sundown

The Toxic Avenger, 1984

Directors: Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman

Troll 2, 1992

Director: Claudio Fragasso

Trouble Every Day, 2001

Director: Claire Denis

28 Days Later, 2002

Director: Claire Denis

28 Weeks Later, 2007

Director: Danny Boyle

The Twilight People (Beasts; Island of the Twilight People), 1972

Director: Eddie Romero

Twilight Zone: The Movie, 1983

Directors: Joe Dante, John Landis, George Miller, and Steven Spielberg

Twins of Evil, 1971

Director: John Hough

Two Monks, 1934

Director: Juan Bustillo Oro

Two Thousand Maniacs, 1964

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

U

Ugetsu (Tales of a Pale and Mysterious Moon After the Rain; Ugetsu monogatari), 1953

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi

The Unholy Three, 1925

Director: Tod Browning

The Unholy Three, 1930

Director: Jack Conway

The Uninvited, 1944

Director: Lewis Allen

V

Vamp, 1986

Director: Richard Wenk

The Vampire Bat (Blood Sucker; Forced to Sin), 1933

Director: Frank R. Strayer

Vampire Circus, 1972

Director: Robert Young

The Vampire Lovers, 1970

Director: Roy Ward Baker

Vampyr (Castle of Doom; Not Against the Flesh; Vampire: the Dream of Allan Grey), 1932

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Vampyros Lesbos (Lesbian Vampires: The Heiress of Dracula), 1971

Director: Jesús Franco

The Velvet Vampire (Cemetery Girls), 1971

Director: Stephanie Rothman

V/H/S, 2012

Directors: Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, and Radio Silence

Videodrome, 1983

Director: David Cronenberg

Village of the Damned, 1960

Director: Wolf Rilla

W

The Walking Dead, 1936

Director: Michael Curtiz

Warm Bodies, 2013

Director: Jonathan Levine

The Wasp Woman (The Bee Girl; Insect Woman), 1959

Director: Roger Corman

We Are What We Are, 2010

Director: Jorge Michel Grau

Werewolf of London, 1935

Director: Stuart Walker

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962

Director: Robert Aldrich

When a Stranger Calls, 1979

Director: Fred Walton

White Zombie, 1932

Director: Victor Halperin

Willard, 1971

Director: Daniel Mann

The Wizard of Gore (House of Torture), 1970

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Wolf Creek, 2005

Director: Greg Mclean

Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy, 1964

Director: René Cardona

Y

Young Frankenstein, 1974

Director: Mel Brooks

Z

Zombi 2 (Zombie; Zombie Flesh Eaters), 1979

Director: Lucio Fulci

Zombieland, 2009

Director: Ruben Fleischer

Blockbusters with cult followings:

Alien, 1979

Director: Ridley Scott

Aliens, 1986

Director: James Cameron

The Exorcist, 1973

Director: William Friedkin

Ghostbusters, 1984

Director: Ivan Reitman

Jaws, 1975

Director: Steven Spielberg

The Shining, 1980

Director: Stanley Kubrick

The Silence of the Lambs, 1991

Director: Jonathan Demme

About the Author

Danny Peary is an American film critic and sportswriter. His film writing has been featured in Focus on Film, Newsday, Film and Filming, The Philadelphia Bulletin, Movieline, Cineaste, Video Times/Video Movies, The New York Daily News, The Boston Globe, Soho News, Timessquare.com, brinkzine.com, The Sag Harbor Express, and FilmInk. He also authored the highly influential three-volume Cult Movies series in the 1980s. Additionally, he is the writer-researcher on the long-running national sports interview television program The Tim McCarver Show, and has written three books with McCarver, a close friend. He collaborated with Ralph Kiner on his autobiography, Baseball Forever, and coauthored Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero and Gil Hodges: The Brooklyn Bums, the Miracle Mets, and the Extraordinary Life of a Baseball Legend. He is currently collaborating with Olympic gold medalist and cancer survivor Shannon Miller on her memoir, It’s Not About Perfect.