Forgotten Horrors Vol. 7: Famished Monsters of Filmland
Author: Michael Price; John Wooley
Date: 2015-02-12 19:16:25+00:00
Keywords: Performing Arts; Film; History & Criticism
Description: Michael H. Price's celebrated history of the independent horror film -- with science-fiction, offbeat mysteries and Westerns, and strange comedies thrown in for good measure -- continues through the watershed period of 1958-1959 with this seventh volume. Price contributes the customary in-depth appraisals of films including "The Blob," "The Fly," and "The Colossus of New York," but also emphasizes such little-known oddities as "The Monster of Piedras Blancas," "The Space Children," and the weird swamp-water melodramas "Okefenokee" and "Attack of the Giant Leeches. " John Wooley contributes a c
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

From Mexico: Ladrón de Cadáveres.

Vol. 7: FamishedMonsters of
Filmland

Michael H. Price

WITH

John Wooley Jan Alan Henderson

C R E M O S T U D I O S • L O W E R K L O P S T O K I A

ALSO BY

Michael H. Price & Accomplices
Forgotten Horrors ET SEQ. Forgotten Horrors Comics & Stories The Legendary Lydecker Brothers The Big Book of Biker Flicks

(with John Wooley)
...AND OTHERS TOO HUMOROUS TO MENTION

Cover & Interior Design: Cremo Studios, Inc.
Copr. © 2015 Michael H. Price
Recommended video sources: VCI Video • Alpha Video

Something Weird Video
Life Is a Movie–DOT–COM

Relevant Websites: www.johnwooley.com
www.srbissette.com
and the Forgotten Horrors Podcast
at Facebook and iTunes

Essential research derives from the work of George E. Turner and Michael H. Price during 1968–2000 on behalf of the American Film Institute Catalogue of Feature Films. The Forgotten Horrorsbooks have been designated as Standard References by the American Film Institute.

In memory of Phil Hardy (1945–2014), and with grateful acknowledgments to: Gary D. Rhodes • Josh Alan Friedman • Tim Paxton • Steve Felton Drew Friedman • Stephen R. Bissette • Jim Vance • Barret “Dr. Demento” Hansen • David Hickey • Kerry Gammill • Betsy Pepper • Keith & Patrick Reardon • Perry “Buck” Stewart • Allan Turner • David Colton • Robert Tinnell • Joey Hambrick • Mark A. Nobles • Todd Camp • Doug Hopkins Paul Crawford • Craig Yoe • Tillmann Courth • Jasper Bark • Denis Kitchen • the American Film Institute • Turner Classic Movies • Hoblitzelle Archive, Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin

Without limiting Any Rights reserved under the Copyright © Registered Above, no part of This Publication may be reproduced, stored into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the Prior Written Permission of the Copyright © Owners or the Publisher.

ISBN–13: 978–1507821121 EAN–10: 1507821123

Frontispieces:
Ladrón de Cadáveres
Famous Monsters, Issue No. 4

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Frontispiece: Your All–Time

Favorite Monsters . . . . . . . 22
1954 • 1958
The Human Jungle . . . . . . . 23
Half Human: The Story of the Abominable Snowman
(Jû jin yuki otoko) . . . . . .. . 25
Hidden Guns . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Ladrón de cadáveres . . . . . . 28
The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the
Waters of the Great
Sea Serpent . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
My World Dies Screaming
(Terror in the Haunted House) . . . 32
Terror from the Year 5,000 ...36
She Demons . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Teenage Monster
(Meteor Monster) . . . . . . . . 43
The Screaming Skull . . . . . . 44
The Astounding She–Monster ...46
The Beast of Budapest . . . . . 49
The Bride and the Beast
(Queen of the Gorillas) . . . . 51
Demoniac (Les Louves) . . . . . 55
Giant from the Unknown . . . 56
John Wooley on the
Films of Bert I. Gordon . . . . 60
Attack of the Puppet People (Earth VS.) The Spider • The Boy and the Pirates • Tormented The Magic Sword
John Wooley and the
Susan Gordon Connection . . . 79
The Return of Dracula (The Curse of Dracula) . . . . . . . . 86
The Flame Barrier . . . . . . . . 89
The Woman Eater
(Womaneater) . . . . . . . . . . . 91
War of the Satellites . . . . . . . 93
Showdown at Boot Hill . . . . . 95
Attack of the
50–Foot Woman . . . . . . . . . 97
Jan Alan Henderson on
Yvette Vickers . . . . . . . . . . 99
The Space Children . . . . . . 100
The Colossus of New York . . . 103
Space Master X–7 . . . . . . . . 105
Girl in the Woods . . . . . . . . 107 Night of the Demon
(Curse of the Demon) . . . . 109
Teenage Caveman . . . . . . . . 111
I Bury the Living . . . . . . . . . 113 The Haunted Strangler (Grip of the Strangler) and Corridors of Blood (The Doctor from Seven Dials) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
The Fly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 El Ataúd del Vampiro
(The Vampire’s Coffin) . . . 123
Frankenstein 1970 . . . . . . . 125
It! The Terror
from beyond Space . . . . . 127
Curse of the
Faceless Man . . . . . . . . . . 130
The Fiend Who
Walked the West . . . . . . . . 132
Night of the Blood Beast . . . 134
Cry Baby Killer . . . . . . . . . . 138
Ghost of the China Sea . . . . 141
The Brain Eaters . . . . . . . . . 143 La Morte Viene della Spazio (The Day the Sky Exploded) ...144
Queen of Outer Space . . . . . 147
The Blob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
I Married a Monster
from Outer Space . . . . . . . 152
Blood of the Vampire . . . . . 154
Macabre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
From the Earth
to the Moon . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Missile to the Moon . . . . . . 163
Fiend without a Face . . . . . 164
Monster from Green Hell . . . 166
The Lost Missile . . . . . . . . . 167
Frankenstein’s Daughter . . . 168
Most Dangerous
Man Alive . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Wild Women of Wongo . . . . 170 The Trollenberg Terror
(The Crawling Eye) . . . . . . 173 The Strange World of Planet X (Cosmic Monsters) . . . . . . 174
Jack the Ripper . . . . . . . . . 175

1959

The Cosmic Man . . . . . . . . . 179
The Hideous Sun Demon . . . 181
Have Rocket, Will Travel . . . 183
Guns, Girls and Gangsters ...185
Attack of the
Jungle Women . . . . . . . . . 186
House on Haunted Hill . . . . 188
First Man into Space . . . . . 190
The Tingler . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Forbidden Island . . . . . . . . . 197 Misterios de Ultratumba
(Black Pit of Dr. M) . . . . . . 199 The Flesh and the Fiends
(Mania; The Fiendish
Ghouls) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
The Hellfire Club . . . . . . . . . 204
The Four Skulls of
Jonathan Drake . . . . . . . . 204
The Headless Ghost . . . . . . 209
The World, the Flesh
and the Devil . . . . . . . . . . 211
Teenagers from Outer Space . . . 213

Invisible Invaders . . . . . . . . 215
Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow . . . 219
The Bat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
The 30–Foot Bride
of Candy Rock . . . . . . . . . 223
Return of the Fly . . . . . . . . 225
Face of Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
Beast from Haunted Cave . . . . 229
A Bucket of Blood . . . . . . . . 231

Attack of the
Giant Leeches . . . . . . . . . . 234
The Alligator People . . . . . . 236
Behemoth, the Sea
Monster (The Giant
Behemoth) . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
The Monster of
Piedras Blancas . . . . . . . . 241
Okefenokee . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
The Giant Gila Monster . . . 244
The Killer Shrews . . . . . . . . 248
4D Man (Master of
Terror) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
Terror Is a Man
(Blood Creature) . . . . . . . . 252
On the Beach . . . . . . . . . . . 254
Caltiki, the
Immortal Monster . . . . . . 256
The Devil’s Hand (Devil’s
Doll; The Naked Goddess; Witchcraft; Live To Love) ... 262
Night of the Ghouls
(Revenge of the Dead) . . . 264
Stop the Presses: A Coda
from John Wooley . . . . . . 267
Index of Relevant
Nomenclature . . . . . . . . . . 268
The Inevitable Sequel . . . . . 280

WORDS TO THE FORE

From MICHAEL H. PRICE

Famous Monsters of Filmland : I spotted Forrest J Ackerman’s audacious new magazine on the news–rack at Plains Boulevard Rexall, the neighborhood drugstore that I would visit every day on the way home from Margaret Wills Elementary School in Amarillo, Texas. What I was doing at Plains Rexall on that day in 1959 is a bit of a mystery, inasmuch as by that time the family had resettled on the opposite side of town—a different grammar school, with two friendly drugstores within strolling distance—but I figure the stop must have had something to do with my father’s intention to move back to the West Side. Anyhow, Plains Rexall is where I noticed the magazine (Issue No. 4) depicted upon the facing page.

I scarcely needed any magazines devoted to make-believe monstrosities: An uncle in the movie-theatre business kept promotional kits dating all the way back to Draculaand Frankenstein—the watershed titles of 1931—and occasionally he would pick up a pictorial horror-stories pulp at the newsstand. These books paled by comparison with the movie kits, whose illustrated file–folders were crammed with 8-by-10-inch glossy photographs and poster reproductions and background information on the motion pictures.

Still and all, the newer publications exerted a forbidden appeal:

Still and all, the newer publications exerted a forbidden appeal: cent comic books during the middle 1950s; some of the publishers had retrenched in 25- and 35-cent magazines that fell outside the repressive province of the Comics Code Authority. My uncle, Grady L. Wilson, had purchased copies of Myron Fass’ Monster Parade and Shock Talesmagazines, which proved concerned not so much with the movies’ chillers as with photo-illustrated schlock fantasies professing to portray the erotic inclinations of werewolves and vampires and suchlike.

The interest quickened upon the arrival of Famous Monsters of Filmland. This fourth issue, the first I had noticed, featured a Batrachian Whatzus on its cover—a Martian invader, as it turned out, from George Pal’s The War of the Worlds—and covered films of the sort that had begun cropping up in 1957 via syndicated television’s weekly Shock! Theater, a showcase for Universal Pictures’ chillers and offbeat mysteries of the 1930s and 1940s. Famous Monsters delved deeper, what with such oddities as a skeletal menace from the silentscreen age. Editor Forrest J Ackerman was less interested in scholarship than in exhibiting rarities from his collection and indulging a taste for puns and puerile gee-whiz blathering. The photographs made the nonsense tolerable, and the subject matter was as certain to raise the parental hackles as Shock! Theater and the occasional copy of Tales from the Crypt or Voodoo comics (rendered extinct in a Congressional witch–hunt of 1954) that would show up now and again at a neighborhood store called the Magazine Exchange.

The so-called Monster Boom of the 1950s was in early bloom. The commercial interest had transferred itself from the now-bland comicbook industry into the movies. New pictures in abundance matched the TV-reissue frenzy. Paramount Pictures deployed big-screen reissues of such Depression Era shockers as Island of Lost Soulsand Dr. Cyclops. Bubble-gum trading cards, long devoted to sporting figures

and general-interest movie stars, began featuring monsters. Cheesecake pin-up images took on the trappings of Halloween, here, and science fiction, there (above). Halloween, for that matter, seemed to have become a year-’round phenomenon.

Any movie that so much as hinted of a haunting—even a straightforward high-adventure piece such as 1931’s The Sea Ghost(Page No. 16) stood a chance of finding a new audience among spook-crazed schoolchildren. Even Walt Disney got in on the act, not only with a family-style werewolf yarn called The Shaggy Dogand the hair-raising banshee sequence in Darby O’Gill and the Little People, but also by resurrecting Winsor McCay’s silent-screen animated piece, “Gertie the Dinosaur” (Page No. 19) as a showcase attraction on the Disneyland TV program. We can skip over a great deal of the rest; you get the picture.

This seventh volume of Forgotten Horrorsfalls in synch with the resurgence. The narrative picks up at 1958—with selective backtracking, the better to touch on films that dovetail with the preceding two volumes—and continues through 1959. The chapters dovetail, in turn, with John Wooley’s and my Forgotten Horrors to the NTH Degree, a more selective collection that spans the 1960s into the 1980s as an anthology of our long-running series in Fangoriamagazine.

• • •
“Horror triumphant” is Phil Hardy’s description of the later 1950s. The influential historian adds: “What began as a drift away from science fiction rapidly became a full-scale horror revival.” If 1957 is Hardy’s annus mirabileof horror (see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6), then 1958 et Seq. represent a fuller fruition. Not since the inauguration of the talking pictures’ horror genre with Draculaand Frankensteinin 1931 had such an outpouring occurred. The larger U.S. studios had scored with the likes of Jacques Tourneur’s British-made Night of the Demonand the U.K.-based

independent Hammer Films’ reinterpretations of Dracula and Frankenstein, but the bandwagon drew greater impetus from such lowbudget impresarios as Roger Corman, Herman Cohen, William Castle, and Bert I. Gordon. The studios finally recognized youth as the primary audience: “Henceforth,” writes Phil Hardy in The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986), “adolescents ... would be regularly featured.” Hence Cohen’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and its kind. Yes, and hence a preponderance of rock ’n’ roll music and fast cars and sullen delinquents.

A TV test-pattern image of the 1950s—the signal to
stand by for the promise of televised terrors.

While the Los Angeles-based studios sought hipper variations upon the standard Gothic motifs, their counterparts in Mexico tapped into the renewed appeal of Universal’s classics of the Depression Era but infused the style with distinctively Latinate interests such as exhibition wrestling and Aztec superstitions. Our discussion of Ladrón de Cadáveres, alias The Body Snatcher(Page No. 28), touches upon such interests, which were stoked in the U.S. more by the occasional appearance of a still from some Mexican chiller in Famous Monsters of Filmlandthan by any consistent pattern of importing such titles for an English-speaking marketplace.

“By the end of the decade,” writes Hardy, “...the science-fiction film had (temporarily) lost ground. The creature features—devoted to monsters and monstrous aliens—increasingly took on the characteristics of the horror film.” (Choice examples: It! The Terror from beyond Space and Fiend without a Face.) Hardy adds: “But the 1950s had proved that there were a market and a place for science-fiction films.”

A market and a place, indeed, as these pages attest. The blurred genres find any number of outlets for the independent horrors and SF shockers, which often infiltrate the major studios. Case–in–point: Paramount’s packaging of Jack H. Harris’ maverick production of The Blob (1958) on a double–bill with Paramount’s own I Married a Monster from Outer Space

The staying power of Roger Corman and his collaborative circle figures here repeatedly, as does the willingness of Bert I. Gordon to inflict larger-than-life (and sometimes smaller) monstrosities upon the motion-picture screen. John Wooley contributes a reminiscent ramble about his friendship with Gordon’s family. Boris Karloff and John Carradine persist as Grey Eminences of a genre they had helped to

invent. Jan Alan Henderson weighs in with a personalized appreciation of Yvette Vickers, a star player within the genre who became a Forgotten Presence despite a body of memorable work.

I regard the period with a similarly nostalgic fondness that may threaten to compromise the Scholarly Imperative. Nostalgia when overindulged becomes a disease—note the sound-alike resonance of neuralgia—but can apply productively to the arena of scholarship. George E. Turner’s nostalgia for the 1930s and the 1940s had colored our earliest volumes in the Forgotten Horrorsseries, and all the better for that.

So now comes my turn in the Nostalgia Barrel: I would look at Bert I. Gordon’s The Spiderand Kurt Neumann’s The Flymuch differently if I had not discovered those titles on a midnight-show dualer at my Uncle Grady Wilson’s State Theatre (see Page No. 18). I would see William Castle’s The Tinglerthrough a different lens if I had not helped to install the film’s seat-buzzer gimmicks at that same State Theatre.

The so-called Monster Boom of the 1950s helped to assure the enthusiasts that such ghastly delights were not just for Halloween any longer.

I would be more empirically inclined toward such pictures as a class if I had not known Castle and Corman and their low-budget role–model, Sam Katzman, as friends of my movie-crazed uncle.

That inside track, in turn, gave me leverage toward a career: Close communion with such prolific figures in the essentially Yiddish motion-picture business provided leverage into the similarly Yiddish retail-clothing business, whose outposts surrounded my uncle’s picture-show palaces in Downtown Amarillo, Texas. I began working for many of these mercantile entrepreneurs at age 13—as close as a Shabbat Goy can come to a Bar Mitzvah—while honing my chops as a writer for an eventual berth as a film critic with the New York Times

In which the influence of the Monster Boom infiltrates the grown–ups’ Lounge Culture with an infusion of Voodoo.

News Service. The strategy has paid off over the longer term, and the time spent among those movie-biz figures has proved more valuable than any number of courses in journalism in high school and college.

No, and I would not have things any other way. The background made it possible for me to connect with George Turner while he was holding forth during the 1960s as film critic and editorial art chief at our hometown newspaper, and to impress him with an enthusiasm for cinema to match his own. George’s tutelage proved sufficient to turn my de factoapprenticeship into a collaborative situation, and for us to invent this whole Forgotten Horrorsracket. Nice woik if you can geddit, as George would say, and although he looked askance at most of the horror movies of the 1950s—“they’re not a patch on Universal in the 1930s”—this volume would be neither necessary nor possible without his influence and immense generosity of spirit.

—M•H•P
From Charlton Publications’ monster-bandwagon magazines:

T H E H U M A N J U N G L E

1954-1958

The Human Jungle

(Allied Artists • 1954)

Allied Artists’ descent from Monogram Pictures Corp. makes the studio’s crime melodramas all but interchangeable with its horror pictures. The most readily recognized Allied Artists film, Jack Pollexfen’s Indestructible Man (1956), derives as much from film noir as from Frankenstein—and pivots, as well, upon the same premise of a reanimated corpse that drives Monogram’s most striking crime melodrama of the 1940s, Decoy(see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 3). The atmosphere is consistent between genres.

Such a creepy policieris Joseph M. Newman’s The Human Jungle which pivots upon Chuck Connors’ low-billed, scene-stealing portrayal of a monstrous thug. Police Captain John “Danny” Danforth (Gary Merrill) seeks to quit the force in order to become a lawyer. Chief Abe Rowan (Emile Meyer) resists: The department is in turmoil over a murder case in a crime-ridden precinct.

Rowan is under pressure from City Hall. Danforth is under pressure from his impatient wife, Pat (Paula Raymond). Upon acknowledging the ineptitude of a burnt-out precinct captain (James Westerfield), Rowan offers Danforth the jurisdiction, arguing that a successful investigation will help to promote his law practice. Danforth submits a resignation, which Rowan rejects in order to force the assignment.

The slaying of a striptease dancer becomes the focus of Danforth’s campaign to uproot the criminal element. Having jolted the crew out of complacency, Danforth homes in on Earl Swados (Connors), a lover of the victim, who has an alibi in escrow with another stripper, Mary Abbott (Jan Sterling). The generalized crackdown finds the local rackets under control of a prominent businessman, Leonard Ustick (Florenz Ames), who keeps Swados and another hoodlum, George Mandy (Claude Akins), on a secretive payroll.

An alcoholic detective, Lannigan (Lamont Johnson), whom Danforth has busted to patrolman, proves sufficiently contrite to nab Mary Abbott in a prostitution sting. She refuses to cooperate, but she serves unwittingly as murder bait after Danforth bluffs Swados into believing that Mary has retracted the alibi. A police tail connects Swados with Ustick, who orders the fabrication of evidence of brutality against Danforth’s cops. Pat Danforth, meanwhile, nags her husband to set up a law practice in some other city. He sticks with the case, for good or ill.

Ustick has arranged for Mary Abbott to be released—the better to give Swados an opportunity to kill her lest she blab. Danforth proves willing to risk the hooker’s life in order to catch Swados up to no good. Swados lures Mary to a brewery, where Danforth arrives in time to rescue her. Swados, panicked following a rooftop confrontation, surrenders and promises to expose Ustick’s racketeering. Danforth assures a fellow enforcer (Regis Toomey) that he intends to stick with the job for the long haul, and so much for the law-practice ambitions.

William Sackheim adapted his hard-boiled story for the screen in collaboration with Daniel Fuchs and an uncredited Dan Ullman. The telling is unremittingly grim, helped along by Ellis Carter’s gritty photography and a brooding orchestral score by Universal horror-factory

T H E H U M A N J U N G L E • H A L F H U M A N
veteran Hans Salter. A jazz-based incidental number by Max Rich, “It Ain’t Gonna Be You,” seals the film noircredential. A bit more emphasis upon Chuck Connors’ menacing Earl Swados could have turned the film more strikingly along the lines of Joseph Losey’s M (1951), a distinctive remake of Fritz Lang’s German masterwork of a generation earlier. But the greater point lies with Gary Merrill’s portrayal of a stalwart, conflicted detective who finds in a daunting case the very reasons he had wanted to become an officer of the law.

An adaptation for TV of The Human Jungle, with Dennis O’Keefe and Joan Vohs, appeared in 1955 as an installment of Lux Video Theatre

Half Human.

Half Human

A .K.A.: Half Human: The Story of the Abominable Snowman JAPANESE ORIGINAL: Jû Jin Yuki Otoko (Toho • Distributors Corp. of America • 1955–1958)

The middle 1950s’ transformation of Inoshiro (Ishiro) Honda’s epic Gojirainto the shallowly Americanized Godzilla, King of the Monsters is hardly unique as a job of corruption for the sake of the Occidental box office. Honda’s Jû Jin Yuki Otokosuffered a similar retooling into Half Human, whose saving grace is the presence of John Carradine.

Carradine, in desultory footage commissioned by the American distributor and directed by Kenneth G. Crane, serves merely a framing function: Carradine is Dr. John Rayburn, who describes to his colleagues the startling findings of a two-year expedition to Japan.

In a flashback excerpting the Honda film, a group of Japanese students sets out upon a skiing excursion. Two participants travel ahead to locate a distant cabin; they are found crushed to death. Evidence of an attack includes a trail of hair and huge footprints. Back in the moment, Dr. Rayburn presents samples of the evidence: The assailant must have stood nine feet and weighed almost a ton.

Rayburn describes an investigation by a Japanese scientist, who hypothesizes that the creature is a Missing Link between apes and

Fuminori Ohashi’s cliff–dweller of Half Human.

human beings. The flashback resumes with a search into uncharted mountain territory, where a hidden jungle contains a tribe that worships the so-called Abominable Snowman as a deity. Signs of tenderness are detected in the creature, whose offspring seems a hybrid of apelike and Neanderthal traits. (The costumer is Fuminori Ohashi.)

Back–story tangents depict the abduction of the younger Snowman by hostile villagers, here, and a carnival sideshow crew, there. The slaying of the son drives the father to a vengeful rage: He decimates the tribe and endangers the searching party. A volcanic pit claims the Snowman. In the U.S. framing sequence, Carradine’s Dr. Rayburn has imported the corpse of the offspring for study. He laments the death of the adult creature as a setback for science.

The original scenario, adapted by Gorjira’s Takeo Murata from a story by Shigeru Kayama, packs an epic resonance along the lines of King Kong (1933) and its immediate sequel, Son of Kong. That attitude persists (though subdued) in the corrupted American version, which plays out more like a Cliff’s Notescondensation. An intrusive narration track is rendered more tolerable by Carradine’s Shakespearean timbre.

Hidden Guns

(Gannaway–Ver Halen Productions • Republic Pictures • 1956)

John Carradine (speaking of whom) had been among the candidates to play a homicidal evangelist in 1955’s The Night of the Hunter (see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6and our companion volume, Hounds of Zaroff). The role went to Robert Mitchum, who delivered an imperishable performance. Some wag once suggested an alternate title: Preacher from the Black Lagoon. Which is neither here nor there in any Larger Scheme, except perhaps to suggest that The Night of the Hunteroffers as vivid a portrait of menace as any more readily defined monster movie. No time like the present to invoke the Core Philosophy and Overriding Mission Statement of these books: Horror Is Where You Find It. So there.

H A L F H U M A N • H I D D E N G U N S

One can only wonder how Carradine would have handled Hunter’s Rev. Mr. Harry Powell, a serial killer of mercenary inclinations. Carradine’s Shakespearean Grand Manner style is a far cry, certainly, from Mitchum’s more relaxed approach. And Mitchum, bad-guy credentials notwithstanding, hardly seems the type to have challenged Carradine’s ability as a horror-film dependable—certainly not in terms of bombastic oratory. Each actor conveyed intensity as a natural attribute; each had a distinctive approach.

Meanwhile, Al Gannaway’s Hidden Gunsoffers a tantalizing hint of how Carradine might have approached The Night of the Hunter Carradine, as a hired killer, upstages star players Bruce Bennett and Faron Young at every turn. Carradine is bigger than the movie.

A frontier settlement is the fiefdom of saloon boss Stragg (Bennett), who has bought every politician but Sheriff Ward Young (Richard Arlen). Stragg conspires to remove Young from office. Young’s last act as a lawman is to seek evidence against Stragg. Stragg summons hitman Snipe Harding (Carradine) to kill a citizen (Ron Ganz, A.K.A. Kennedy) who had promised to testify.

Young’s son, Faron (Young, known to the country-music crowd as the Singing Sheriff), resigns as deputy in contempt for the townspeople. Stragg maneuvers Sheriff Young into an ambush. The son dodges Harding’s gunfire while revealing the killer’s hidden post.

Carradine commandeers the tale as readily as his character, coldblooded but charming, manipulates his cowardly employer—raising the ante on the hit and coaching Bruce Bennett’s Stragg in the finer points of faking a showdown. Carradine seems by turns genial and demonic, as charming to fellow passengers on a stagecoach (a nod to his memorable role in John Ford’s Stagecoach) as he is intimidating to the hoodlums who believe him to be in their service.

Former Tarzan Bruce Bennett makes a hateful mob boss, though overshadowed by Carradine. Richard Arlen is a stalwart sheriff. Faron Young launched a half-hearted attempt here at a movie career; he contributes as well to the musical score, with songs that advance the story. (Carradine also does a bit of singing, embellishing his character with melodic mutterings that emphasize the gunslinger’s fiendish nature—not unlike Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter.) Gannaway would reunite Bennett and Young later in 1956 for a cruel and unnerving historical drama, Daniel Boone, Trail Blazer, with Lon Chaney, JR.

Key exteriors were shot at Corriganville, the ranch operated by stuntman-turned-actor Ray Corrigan in Simi Valley, California.

Ladrón de Cadáveres

I N AMERICA: The Body Snatcher
(Cinematográfica Internacionál • Columbia Aztéca • 1956–1958) And herewith, a choice specimen from a Mexican horror-movie
revival that ran apace with Hollywood’s regathering interests. Fernándo Méndez’ Ladrón de Cadáveresexploits its country’s obsession with freestyle wrestling (or lucha libre) in a manner altogether unlike the better-known rasslin’-hero movies from Mexico.

A wrestler is the protagonist, whose experiences shape the story, but he also is the tragic monster. A ghastly portrait of the creature (see the first Frontispiece) haunted the nightmares of many a reader of Famous Monsters of Filmlandmagazine, but the picture in its day was scarcely to be found in the United States, aside from the Southwestern barriothe

Protagonist as tragic monster inLadrón de Cadáveres.

atres that would play imports in the original language. (Aside from Mike Price: This film and a few others like it, such as La Marca del Muerto and Misterios de la Magia Negraand Méndez’ Misterios de Ultratumba[Page No. 199] provided my incentive to learn Spanish. Those, and the Latinate comic books that I would purchase on every visit to the borderlands. Beats the insipid academic approach, and el gústo es totalmente mío.)

Athletes have become an endangered species: A chain of murders finds Police Capt. Carlos Robles (Crox Alvarado) hard–pressed to track the killer, who proves to be a Mad Doctor (Carlos Riquelme) in need of experimental brain-swapping subjects.

An aspiring wrestler, Guillermo Santana (Wolf Ruvinskis, A.K.A. Rubinski), agrees to help Robles, whose trap backfires. The scientist replaces Santana’s brain with that of a gorilla and sends the transformed wrestler into the ring—where his bestial state erupts. Overriding the doctor’s control, Guillermo kills his tormentor and proceeds to make like King Kong: He abducts a loved one (Columba Domínguez), leads the police on a rooftop chase, and falls to his death under a ballistic barrage.

Reminiscent in key respects of Stuart Heisler’s The Monster and the Girl(1941), Ladrón de Cadáverestrades upon not only a similar man-into-beast brain-switching device but also a film noirattitude in the depiction of an underworld setting that becomes the hunting ground for a renegade surgeon. Subdued lighting renders Wolf Ruvinskis’ monstrous appearance all the more horrifying, as does the actor’s depiction of Guillermo Santata as a boyish, dashing sort with a flirtatious streak. His transformation to a rampaging creature drives the film to a precipitous finale—but it is his abrupt and jarring lapse from heroism to victimization, early on in the proceedings, that renders the film a study in terror. Méndez’ use of the wrestling-ring demimonde—seedy and energetic, with an assortment of colorful eccentrics—provides a vivid backdrop.

A haunting image from Misterios de la Magia Negra.

Mexican cinema had declined during the 1950s. Méndez found a vigorous new approach by absorbing and advancing the Gothic influence of Universal Pictures’ horrors of the Depression and WWII years. His follow–throughs to Ladrón, El VampíroETSEQ.(Page No. 123), proved successful both as box-office attractions and as an inspiration to a surge of horror and grim fantasy among the Mexican studios.

The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent

A.K.A.: Viking Women and the Sea Serpent (Malibu Productions • American International • 1957–1958)

Roger Corman’s chump-change epic packs a wealth of ferocity into scarcely more than an hour. Irving Block’s story, adapted by Lawrence Louis Goldman, tells of an ancient community seemingly abandoned by its chieftain and a majority of its men. Desir (Abby Dalton), betrothed to Chief Vedric (Bradford Jackson), calls for a search.

A dozen women, including Desir’s rival, Priestess Enger (Susan Cabot), set sail upon turbulent waters in an unstable craft. Ottar (Jonathan Haze), the only excuse for a man remaining in the village, has stowed away—determined to prove himself a heroic figure. An immense serpent wrecks the ship. Half of the women (and Ottar) survive, only to become castaways in the land of a savage tribe. The women determine that the sturdy fortress of the leader, Stark (Richard Devon), can only have been built by the vanished Viking menfolk. Desir rescues Stark’s conniving son, Senya (Jay Sayer), from a boar. Lest word spread that he has been bested by a woman, Senya offers to provide information about the surviving Viking men in exchange for Desir’s silence.

Stark takes the women captive but reunites them briefly with their men, who have become slaves in a quarry. Ottar is imprisoned with the men. Stark orders the women offered as trophies to his band of barbarians. One woman, Asmild (June Kenney), escapes. Enger flees during a commotion. Asmild seeks to free the men. Enger, who covets Chief Vedric, informs Stark of the jailbreak.

The barbarians intercept the Vikings. Stark allows Enger a chance to flee with Vedric—who refuses, swearing loyalty to Desir. Enger demands the execution of Desir and Vedric, but she balks and repents when Stark orders the lovers burned alive. Enger prays for intervention. A storm extinguishes the pyre; a lightning bolt does away with Senya. Ottar frees Vedric and Desir; they lead an exodus to the coast while Stark is distracted by grief.

Stark orders a pursuit. Enger sacrifices herself to the barbarians’ hunting dogs. Ottar remains ashore long enough to kill Stark’s chief thug (Mike Forrest), and then swims to join his fellows. Vedric steers into a whirlpool, intent upon luring the savages to their doom. He drives the serpent to attacks Stark’s warriors. Their enemies drowned or devoured, the Vikings steer homeward.

Special-effects artisans Jack Rabin and Irving Block had overcome Corman’s objections that financing was inadequate for so ambitious a project—“a One Million B.C. concept on a $25,000 B.C. scale,” as Corman quipped during a visit in 1999. “ Viking Womenwas hardly a dud,” he added, “but it taught me better than to attempt another epic adventure on a low budget.”

The players, at least, convey an epic-calibre attitude in addition to an appropriate Nordic aspect. Susan Cabot stands out—a striking brunette amidst all those blondes. Inadequate production values aside, Monroe P. Askins’ camerawork nonetheless finds an illusion of depth in shallow settings; there is a resemblance to Joe Kubert’s accomplished comic-book series, The Viking Prince, from the same period. The marauding serpent is a matter of simple puppetry, helpfully obscured by the bogus seascape.

My World Dies Screaming

A .K.A.: Terror in the Haunted House
(Brevilana Productions • Precon Process &
Equipment • Howard International (Howco) • 1958)

A Wuthering Heightsand/or Gaslightknockoff of Freudian pretensions, Harold Daniels’ My World Dies Screaming compounds its absurd conceit with the use of split-second subliminal images calculated to manipulate the emotions of an audience. These single-frame insertions appeared an innovation in 1958—Howco International termed the gimmick Psycho–Rama—until one considered that unscrupulous theatre operators had been doing precisely that for years, the better to whet their customers’ appetites for over-salted popcorn and over-watered soft drinks.

The cornball device (thank you, Dr. Pavlov) offers little distraction from the general absurdity. A video edition of the 1980s replaces the original single-frame images, such as heart–shapes to suggest romance and snakes and skulls to convey menace, with split-second

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animated insertions.) The story centers upon Sheila Wayne Justin (an inexpressive Cathy O’Donnell), an American at large in Switzerland, who complains of a chronic nightmare to a psychiatrist, Victor Forel (Barry Bernard). The ghastly dream, seemingly beyond explanation, finds Sheila approaching the desolate mansion of a family named Tierney. Within, a hidden stairway leads to an attic that holds an indescribable terror. Dr. Forel suspects that Sheila’s subconscious mind is shielding her from some ghastly memory.

M Y W O R L D D I E S S C R E A M I N G

Sheila describes an uneventful existence. Her sojourn in a Swiss sanitarium has cured her of a case of tuberculosis, she says. She seems content with her recent marriage to one Philip Justin (Gerald Mohr). Justin insists upon returning to America, where he has leased a house in a Southern marshland.

Sheila recognizes the property as the old mansion of her nightmare. A caretaker, Jonah (John Qualen), reveals that the house has stood vacant for 17 years. An exploration finds the place just as Sheila had described it from her dream. They would leave, but for a disabled automobile. Jonah reveals that the house belongs to a family named Tierney. Sheila recalls a childhood encounter in the surrounding yard, with a boy who had carved their initials upon a tree.

Wakened by ghostly intrusions, Sheila goes prowling in search of a gun, only to find the car’s missing distributor cap in Justin’s baggage. Elements of her nightmare become manifest in waking life. She notices a tree bearing the initials S.W.and P.T. The concentration of strangeness seems to peak when a chap named Mark Snell (Bill Ching) introduces himself as the owner of the estate and demands that Sheila leave. Following a tense exchange with Justin, Snell discloses that Sheila had known the house, years before, and that Philip Justin is in fact Philip Tierney. Philip informs Sheila that her stay at the sanitarium had more to do with a mental collapse than with any bout with T.B.

Complications pile upon complications. Jonah tells of the slaying of Philip’s uncle and father in that ominous attic, supposedly by the patriarch, who had believed the family cursed by insanity. Sheila locks herself away. Mark and Philip prove to be cousins. Jonah takes a fatal fall from a staircase. Philip hides the corpse, then forces Sheila to enter the attic—where it develops that she, as a child, had witnessed the murders. Jonah had married Philip’s widowed aunt and had become Mark’s father. At stake is the ownership of the property, which Jonah, in fact the killer of the Tierney brothers, had coveted.

Mark arrives and attacks Philip with an axe, only to wind up croaked. Philip, his family’s name cleared, comforts Sheila, whose nightmare has been resolved at last.

My World Dies Screaming incurs a debt to the Bronte Sisters (among other Gothic-romance novelists) without compounding the worth of the approach. The set–to between Gerald Mohr and Bill Ching suggests a meeting of Jane Eyre’s Rochester and Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff—the concept of meta–fiction before there was such a term for the practice. Harold Daniels directs with forced intensity if little dramatic urgency, and Cathy O’Donnell makes a weak and overemotional ingenue.

Gerald Mohr, on the other hand, is effective as the romantic lead and chief suspect: His luminous eyes hint of madness while his air of benevolence, however impatient, coaxes the Absorbed Viewer to hope for the better. A noticeable difference in ages between Mohr and Miss O’Donnell leaves one wondering whether the characters could have been childhood sweethearts. More disorienting is Frederick E. West’s outdoor photography, which waffles between nighttime and daytime in single sequences, notably in a passage where Mohr sneaks into the house to remove the caretaker’s body.

The original theatrical presentation included a prologue and an epilogue in which Gerald Mohr explained subliminal imagery as “a process that allows you to see something with your brain that your eye does not.” The television edition removed these segments.

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Terror from the Year 5,000

(LA Jolla Productions • American International • 1958)

No amount of self-serious ban-the-bomb political rhetoric can top Robert J. Gurney, JR.’s Terror from the Year 5,000 for persuasive intensity. Though compromised by clunky editing, scientific inaccuracies, and occasionally wooden acting, the film nonetheless registers a memorable impact with an innovative menace, alluring and toxic, and a resolution that ascribes the ghastly developments of a distant future to the present day’s belief in atomic energy as a force for good.

Physicist Howard Erling (Frederic Downs) has developed a machine that will pierce the time barrier. Erling and an overeager assistant, Victor (John Stratton), retrieve a statuette from the future. Archeologist Robert Hedges (Ward Costello) carbon–dates the relic to 5,000 A.D. and finds it radioactive. En route to Erling’s distant coastal outpost, Hedges encounters Claire Erling (Joyce Holden), Howard’s daughter and Victor’s fiancée. A widespread power drain courses from the laboratory, where Victor proves to be conducting experiments in secret, against Erling’s orders. A power surge materializes a menacing figure, which leaves Victor with a radiation burn. A servant, Angelo (Fred Herrick), lurks about. The time–warp yields a coin, inscribed with the words Save Us, in Greek.

In a drunken stupor after fleeing a hospital, Victor cranks the machine’s power to summon forth a human form; the encounter leaves him unconscious. The time–traveler (Salome Jens) kills Angelo but remains hidden from the scientists. Hedges retrieves the carcass of a freakish cat from where Victor had hidden it. A nurse is slain, her face removed to provide a mask for the scarred visitor, who infitrates the household. She wants Victor to travel with her to the future, where his healthy genetic materials might save her people from extinction. In a struggle to protect Claire, Victor topples the traveler into the timemachine apparatus; both are electrocuted.

Hedges and Claire ponder a visit to 5,000 A.D. to help reverse the damages to civilization. Howard argues, rather, that by changing the course of present-day science they can prevent an atomic holocaust.

The lurching pace of the film derives largely from procucer–direc

The lurching pace of the film derives largely from procucer–direc minute preview cut to a 66-minute release cut), in dissatisfaction with the performance of Joyce Holden—this, according to editor Dede Allen, who would graduate to such larger assignments as The Hustler(1961) and Bonnie and Clyde(1967).

The image of a malevolent, radioactive woman is more memorable than many other films’ assorted werewolves, vampires, and bug-eyed monsters. Mutilated faces are a near–constant with American International Pictures and the close-kin Allied Artists (as in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Horrors of the Black Museum and The Hypnotic Eye), but the spectacle of a peeled normal face disguising a scarred face raises the stakes most formidably. The foreshadowing of Henri–Georges Clouzot’s Eyes without a Face (1961) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas ChainSaw Massacre(1974) is remarkable.

And speaking of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein: In a cross-promotional interlude, typical of American International, where Year 5,000’s embattled scientists take in a drive-in movie, that Herman Cohen production happens to be the featured attraction.

She Demons

(Screencraft Enterprises • Astor Pictures • 1958)

A throwback to Monogram Pictures’ Nazi-buster/Mad Doctor chillers of the 1940s, She Demons caroms from breezy repartée, to romance, to cheesecake, to Shock Value, to prophetic science–fiction and a surprising measure of suspense in scarcely over an hour. It ties up, or shreds, its loose narrative ends with the overkill finale of a military strafing run atop a volcanic eruption. Though incomprehensible at times and ludicrous at others, She Demons is the most accomplished specimen of a flurry of low-budget horror pictures handled by Richard Cunha. (His others are Frankenstein’s Daughter and Giant from the Unknownand Missile to the Moon, all likewise from 1958. Three are gems of their kind, counteracting cheap production values with earnest narrative craft, fitting musical emphasis, and artistic flourishes of cinematography. Missileproves wanting by comparison.)

She Demons has dancers with ugly faces and dynamite bodies. It has a Nazi named Egore, played by that cagey veteran, Gene Roth, né Stutenroth. The film has manly Tod Griffin, in his first starring role. Another veteran of the B–movie scene, Victor Sen Yung, supplies comic-relief quips reminiscent of his recurring role in the Charlie Chanseries. And She Demons has Rudolph Anders—better known for his Man of Science portrayals in the W. Lee Wilder epics Phantom from Space (1953) and Snow Creature (1954)—as a Nazi butcher with a once-beautiful wife, turned ghastly to behold.

Best of all, She Demons has pin-up queen Irish McCalla as its heroine. Miss McCalla, who found a more lasting success with her

series of art prints and collector’s-edition plates, had endeared herself to television audiences—particularly the male contingent—in the syndicated series Sheena, Queen of the Jungle(1955–1956).

Miss McCalla serves She Demonsas spoiled heiress Jerrie Turner, who finds herself shipwrecked by a hurricane on an uncharted island, along with heroic Fred Maklin (Griffin) and crewmen Sammy Ching (Sen Yung) and Kris Kamara (Charles Opuni). The Navy has selected the island for a test–bombing, but there is a more pressing danger: Kamara is slain, and the remaining three are captured by troopers in the service of Herr Osler (Anders). Osler, once a death-camp commandant, also had been the Third Reich’s leading researcher in both thermal energy (hence the volcanic island outpost) and scar-tissue replacement (hence the proliferation of disfigured jungle–dwellers).

By experimenting with captive women—all of whom, incidentally, are alluring dancers—Osler has learned how to transfer the facial characteristics of one woman to another. This development lends hope for Osler’s disfigured wife, Mona (Leni Tana), but means bad news to the local beauties. Once Osler has seen Jerrie, however, all bets are off. She cold–cocks Osler with a bottle of champagne. Osler proposes to give his wife Jerrie’s features, but his timing is off: The volcano and the Navy make short work of the island.

“It’s a lot of fun to be rescued,” the pressbook quotes Miss McCalla. “In TV, I usually am the one fording rivers and climbing high mountains to rescue some man in danger, but now I’m enjoying being swept to safety in strong masculine arms.” More from the pressbook: Irish was born on Christmas

Day, 1930, in Pawnee City, Nebraska, one of eight children of Lloyd and Nettie McCalla. She grew up in Marshalltown and Des Moines, Iowa; Omaha, Nebraska, and Seneca and Marysville, Kansas, before coming back to Pawnee...

Winner of numerous beauty contests, she came to California to study dramatics [and] became
an overnight pin-up sensation.

A brief appearance on [network television’s] The George Gobel Show led her to an interview for the role of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle , which she won over 200 contestants.

One of those contestants, incidentally, was Anita Ekberg. Miss McCalla told us: “The copy of my contract for She Demonswas signed on September 27, 1957. [The film] was shot in about a week or 10 days, as I recall. The outdoor location was the much-used Paradise Cove beach in Malibu, and the rest was done in a rented studio.”
Early on, Miss McCalla is menaced by a python and runs to Griffin’s Fred Maklin. This first time the scene was shot, however, things didn’t exactly go according to plan:
“We did the snake scene very early one morning,” recalled Miss McCalla. “The rehearsal went fine, but by the time for the take the snake was ... searching for a warm body... As I turned..., I found the snake’s head—which in rehearsal had been several feet away—just inches from mine! I screamed, which I was supposed to do, and instead of running to bury my head in the hero’s shoulder, I leaped one great leap and knocked him off his feet. The snake was warmed, the scene reset, and Tod and I did it according to script.”
Miss McCalla said that she and Richard Cunha “got along fine until he got pushy in trying to get me to do a seminude scene. I refused, as

Irish
McCalla.

I felt that if I could work as a pin–up for years and reach the top in that without baring my breasts, I certainly shouldn’t have to do it for his movie. Also, I had two small sons, and I didn’t want them to be ashamed of their mother or suffer remarks later from their peers.”

The scene to which she referred is memorable for its tantalizing brevity. Cunha displays a workmanlike grasp of the overall dynamics of linear feature–film narrative, but his command of gemlike tiny scenes goes beyond competence: The discovery of a slain crewman is a rightly bewildering shocker, and so is a glimpse of the deformity that afflicts the wife. The native-dance sequence is more titillating than informative, a spot of choreography thrown in as a diversion. The title characters’ facial make–up is hideous but laughable, with snaggletoothed grimaces and a skin texture like congealed oatmeal.

The ensemble acting is inconsistent. Anders slices the ham generously as the boastful Nazi, suggesting Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre, by turns. Sen Yung tosses off his stock-in-trade one–liners with a thoroughgoing professionalism. (Anders’ speech about the possibilities of geothermal energy foreshadows by a good 15 years the emergence of industrial efforts to harness natural steam as a power source.) Tod Griffin looks the part of the stalwart rescuer, which is all the role requires. Miss McCalla manages a suitably snooty tone in her early scenes but lets her personable self show through as the character finds her own streak of heroic decency and indignation.

Miss McCalla said she was less than favorably impressed with the finished product: “I thought, when I read the script, that there were a lot of really corny lines, and when I saw it in the theatre, I really didn’t care much for it, or for my acting. I was amazed ... that many of

S H E D E M O N S • T E E N A G E M O N S T E R
the people seemed to enjoy it. I am even more amazed that it has become a cult film. I’ve never been a horror-movie fan, anyway. I guess that’s why I don’t see what the fans have seen in it.

“My grandchildren ... think it’s a fun film and love to imitate the monster women,” she added. “The thing I find most interesting is that a little film like that, which was more or less thrown together on a very cheap budget, … should still be of interest.”

—Incorporating John Wooley’s essay from Hot Schlock Horror! (1992)

Teenage Monster

A.K.A.: Meteor Monster (Marquette • Howco • 1958)

A languid and pitiable excuse for a matinée thriller, Jacques Marquette’s Teenage Monsterbelongs in name only to the teenage-horror cycle of the fading 1950s. The rechristening (from Meteor Monster) represents an opportunistic coattailriding ploy in shallow evocation of Herman Cohen’s I Was a Teenage You–Name–Itcycle of 1957–1959 (see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6) and the broader range of J–D, or juvenile-delinquent, pictures as a class.

This picture’s 19 TH-century setting is wrong for that subgenre, what with a dearth of hotrod automobiles and rock ’n’ roll music, to say nothing of an absence of rampant bad-boy hooliganism. Billy the Kid notwithstanding, of course.

Nor is the monster any teenager. Stuntman–turned–actor Gil Perkins was well into middle age at the time—an all–around talent since the 1920s, with genre credentials including King Kong(1933) and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man(1943). Perkins’ robust presence enlivens the proceedings to a degree, but urgent pacing and melodramatic thrust are lacking. Anne Gwynne’s portrayal of an overprotective mother is a sad echo of her days as a leading lady with Universal Pictures’ monster-movie factory.

Ray Buffum’s scenario hangs upon a forbidden secret: In 1880, in the Western frontier, Jim Cannon (Jim McCullough) searches in vain, if not in vein, to find gold in an abandoned mine. Cannon and his son, Charlie (Stephen Parker), are struck by a meteor while exploring the played-out lode. Cannon is killed. The boy becomes irradiated.

Seven years later, Charlie has grown into a strapping youth, but the strange accident has left him in a childlike mental state, with a hideous, wolflike countenance. (The makeup is the work of Jack P. Pierce, late of Universal Pictures—by now, reduced to slumming in the wake of a collapsed big-studio framework of job security.) Charlie’s mother, Ruth (Miss Gwynne), has kept him hidden in the mine, but he

often goes roaming. Charlie has (unwittingly) killed livestock. The slaying of a man sets the authorities on Charlie’s trail; Ruth redoubles her efforts to cover his tracks.

Further attacks complicate Ruth’s discovery of a vein of gold and balk her hopes of settling into a nearby town. Rumors spread of a monster at large in the backwoods. Charlie’s abduction of a scheming waitress, Kathy North (Gloria Castillo), compromises Ruth’s secrecy.

Persuaded by Kathy to kill her abusive boyfriend (Charles Courtney), Charlie becomes furious upon learning of a romantic attraction between his mother and the local sheriff (Stuart Wade). Greed drives Kathy to attempt blackmail against Ruth, and then to goad Charlie to further acts of mayhem. The halfwit finally sees through the deceit and hurls Kathy off a cliff. The sheriff opens fire upon Charlie, who topples to his death.

The working titles had been Monster on the Hill and Meteor Monster. Some surviving prints bear Meteor Monsteras a proxy title.

The Screaming Skull

(Madera • AIP • 1958)
“So terrifying it may have an unforeseen effect: it may kill you. Therefore, its producers feel they must assure free burial service to anyone who dies of fright...” Or so declares the prologue, which goes so far as to mark a casket as “Reserved for You.”

Yes, and death seemed a scarier prospect in 1958. No evidence suggests that anyone has croaked from the experience of viewing Alex Nicol’s The Screaming Skull, a sombre mood–piece. The tale recalls Harold Daniels’ My World Dies Screaming (Page No. 32) in its trappings of Gothic romance

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and emotional instability—with an added ghostly presence. The Screaming Skullalso is a more nearly tolerable film than My World Dies Screaming, if only because the present endangered leading lady, Peggy Weber, has a dramatic range broader than an arsenal of shrieks and neuroses. The Screaming Skullalso foreshadows Bert I. Gordon’s more accomplished Tormented(Page No. 72) in terms of a virile and outwardly affable protagonist of murderous inclinations.

Eric Whitlock (John Hudson) brings his bride, an heiress named Jenni (Miss Weber), to his estate, which he has shunned since the death of his wife, Marion. The grounds are immaculate, but the house stands as if abandoned. Whitlock informs a neighbor–couple, the Rev. Mr. and Mrs. Edward Snow (Russ Conway and Tony Johnson), that Jenni has an aversion to morbid topics, what with her having witnessed the drowning of her parents. Jenni, however, seems most interested in the circumstances of Marion’s demise, which the Snows ascribe to an accidental drowning. A dimwitted handyman, Mickey (Alex Nicol), professes to hear Marion screaming in the dead of night; he blames Whitlock for her death. A portrait of Marion bears a resemblance to Jenni’s mother.

Pounding and shrieking noises disturb Jenni’s slumbers. Eric ascribes the pounding to Mickey and the high-pitched call to one of the peacocks that roam the courtyard. A disembodied skull appears to move about, defying Jenni’s attempts to dispose of it. Eric denies the presence of any skull. Jenni confides to the Rev. Mr. Snow that she had been hospitalized for a breakdown. Mickey retrieves the skull and displays it to the Snows. Whitlock proposes to vacate the house. A ghostly figure in a white dress terrifies Jenni. Whitlock attacks her, only to be interrupted by a skeleton in a white dress. He throws a chair at the apparition. A skull rolls in his direction. Panicked, he stumbles into the pond where Marion had died.

The Snows arrive with Mickey. Jenni finds the white dress. The Rev. Mr. Snow finds Whitlock dead. Snow suspects a campaign to drive Jenni to madness, or to kill her for her inheritance. All concerned wonder if Marion’s death was accidental, after all. This pleasing residue of mystery compounds the dream-state texture.

The Astounding She–Monster

(Ashcroft Productions • Hollywood International • AIP • 1958)

Ronnie Ashcroft’s The Astounding She–Monster charts a course parallel to the milquetoast idiocy of many of Stan Lee’s comic-book scripts from the same period: What if the invader from Interplanetary Space had in fact approached on a mission of good will, and what if we Ignorant Humans had killed the visitor in a reactionary outburst? What will the visitor’s society think when its emissary fails to return? Will the Outworlders send another emissary in peace, or in vengeance? And who gives a Flying Damn?

Lee schlepped that bucket back–and–forth from a shallow well of inspiration until the bottom fell out. Only the emphatic artistry of such illustrators as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, toiling for chumpchange sweatshop wages while Lee held forth as a Corporate Executive, made the inept writing vaguely palatable. Of course, Lee had a Comics Code Authority to mollify—the censors’ agency had forbidden horror for horror’s sake since 1954—and he played both ends against the middle by alternating insipid pacifism with frequent outburts of Commie-baiting rhetoric.

THE SCREAMING SKULL • THE ASTOUNDING SHE–MONSTER

And as with those proto-Marvel funnybook stories, The Astounding She–Monsterendures by grace of an evocative visual quality. The photography (by Brydon Baker and William C. Thompson) captures a dreamlike air of foreboding, and the pacing is brisk. The production suffers from desultory special effects but compensates with mood. The premise—involving an inscrutable alien beauty with a radioactive touch—is a memorable inversion of monstrous stereotype, comparable with that of Terror from the Year 5,000(Page No. 36).

The Astounding She–Monster bears a tainted influence from Edward D. Wood, JR., whose halt-and-go mid-1950s production of Plan 9 from Outer Spacewas still awaiting release in 1958. The film editor and aspiring producer–director Ronnie Ashcroft was sufficiently naïve to perceive artistry in Wood, whom Ashcroft enlisted as a consultant. Frank Hall’s screenplay, a crime melodrama crossed with an invasion angle, reflects the pacifism that courses through Wood’s signature work. A redeeming touch is the presentation of the alien as a figure of aloof voluptuosity, played by a striptease artist and pin-up model named Shirley Kilpatrick.

Geologist Dick Cutler (Robert Clarke), at work in a mountainous region of California, notices the descent of what appears to be a meteor. Meanwhile, kidnappers Brad Conley and Nat Burdell (Ewing Brown and B–Western alumnusKenne Duncan, since become an Ed Wood hanger–on) flee Los Angeles with their victim, heiress Margaret Chaffee (Marilyn Harvey), and Burdell’s boozy moll, Esther Malone (Jeanne Tatum). Conley crashes the getaway car when he swerves to avoid a shimmering figure. The party commandeers Cutler’s cabin. The apparition lures Conley outside and leaves him dead from radiation burns after he has opened fire. Burdell takes Cutler’s pet collie on a search. The alien, sensing a threat in the dog, kills it and retreats under fire.

Cutler detects radiation in Conley’s corpse and pronounces Burdell likewise infected. Burdell agrees to release Margaret if Cutler can disable the invader. A siege upon the creature leaves her standing—and Burdell and Esther dead. Cutler disintegrates the alien with an acid solution. A medallion from her costume contains a message of benevolent intentions from some distant Council of Planets. How very ironic.

Robert Clarke plays the put-upon protagonist with the same resourceful forthrightness he had brought to Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X(see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 5). In his autobiography, Clarke laments the cheapening of The Astounding She–Monster (slashed to $18,000 on a week-long shoot, from an intended budget of $50,000) but acknowledges that he benefited from a profit-percentage deal after Ashcroft had sold the picture to American International for $60,000. Clarke also found in the project the inspiration to tackle the next year’s The Hideous SunDemon(Page No. 181) as producer and star player.

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The Beast of Budapest

(Allied Artists • 1958)

The enthusiasts who encouraged the late 1950s’ outpouring of horror films were naturally drawn, as well, to the horrors of Real World political uprisings, and to the efforts in general of such brash and aggressive studios as Allied Artists. Many so-called Monster Kids of the period also thrived upon film noir, upon true-crime publications, and upon such books of sensationalized mock–scholarship as William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a controversial massmarket phenomenon of 1960. Scarcely a mystery, then, why Allied Artists took pains to market Harmon C. Jones’ The Beast of Budapest with the trappings of some fantastic chiller, to the finer point of presenting the film on a double–bill with Adrian Weiss’ The Bride and the Beast(Page No. 51).

Scenarists Louis Stevens and John McGreevey derived The Beast of Budapestfrom an incident in October of 1956 in which Hungarian students mounted a protest against the entrenched Communist government. Hungary’s chief of state, Erno Gero, ordered the police to fire upon the demonstrators. (Newsreel footage figures extensively in Beast.)

The film is accurate in its depiction of the Hungarian Army’s support of the rebels in reponse to Gero’s summoning of Soviet reinforcements. The story concerns a rift between a Red-compliant youth, Charles Tolnai (Michael Mills), and his father, Ernst Tolnai (John Hoyt), a professor who had been sacked in light of his anti-Communist leanings. The university has offered reinstatement if Prof. Tolnai will modify his views, but he prefers the company of the more rebellious students. Arrested during a demonstration and pronounced “hopelessly diseased” in view of his contrarian attitude, Ernst is slain by Col. Otto Zagon (Gerald Milton), chief of security, who announces the execution of an Enemy of the State.

Overcome with remorse, Charles joins the rebellion. A military officer, Gen. Foldessy (John Mylong), defies an order to open fire upon the protestors. Zargon takes Foldessy’s daughter, Marissa (Violet Rensing), hostage. An armed revolt develops. Zagon becomes ever more brutal, inviting for himself a suitable comeuppance. The rebels recede upon witnessing a Soviet withdrawal—which proves to be a ruse designed to catch the opposing forces off guard. Charles Tolnai and his surviving associates vow to carry on the fight.

Gerald Milton is a study in caricatured cruelty as the police-state commandant, who orders torture and murder with scarcely a second thought. Unlike many another Red Scare picture of the period—the studios delivered many a reassuring sop to the witch-hunting House Committee on UnAmerican Activities—The Beast of Budapestdraws upon historical immediacy for its pageant of atrocities. Despite some ham-fisted patriotic preachments and moments of schmaltz, the film achieves a gripping dramatic tone in addition to some stirring sequences of thrilling action. Director Harmon Jones (of 1954’s Gorilla at Large) emphasizes personal struggles more so than ideologies.

The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 had begun as a student demonstration against Soviet occupation. As unrest spread, the State Security Police attacked peaceful objectors. Rioting ensued, and Russian troops at length invaded Hungary to crush the resistance.

John Hoyt (of Attack of the Puppet People, Page No. 60) makes a stalwart martyr to intellectual freedom, John Birch–style. Greta

B E A S T O F B U D A P E S T •

B R I D E A N D B E A S T

Thyssen, Miss Denmark of 1951, serves a similar function. Violet Rensing, as a loyalist to the Russians, makes a convincing turnabout once motivated.

John McGreevey’s script imposes a hopeful finale, and never mind the oppressive longterm outcome of the Real World episode. History demonstrates that the Soviet army gradually withdrew from Hungary after Imre Nagy regained power as Prime Minister. Nagy, in turn, called for abolition of the singleparty system and Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and then asked the United Nations to recognize Hungary. Whereupon Soviet forces reoccupied the country. So what else is new?

The Bride and the Beast

A.K.A.: Queen of the Gorillas (Allied Artists • Weiss • 1958)

Trans-species nyphomania is the motivating obsession in Adrian Weiss’ The Bride and the Beast, an odd patchwork entry that exhibits the gumption to declare outright what all those women-love-apes movies since Ingagi (1930) had hinted.

Weiss (1918–2001), though a fringe–dweller in the larger scheme of Hollywood, was no newcomer to this strange terrain of ape-escape escapades: His immediate forebears (see the first ForgottenHorrors ET SEQ.) had gone traipsing through the backlot jungles since the 1920s; the closest the Weiss Bros. ever came to a sure-enough rainforest was a library of stock safari footage.

Weiss had entered the family’s trade during the 1930s, starting as a production manager and assistant director. By the 1950s, he had landed a director’s berth with the

Weisses’ short-lived television series, Craig Kennedy, Criminologist (1952). That program derived from an early talking picture, Betrayed which the Weiss Bros.’ Artclass Pictures had produced in 1929. (See Forgotten Horrors:The Original Volume.)

The family reasserted an interest in feature–fimmaking in 1956, spurred by a popular craze for tales of reincarnation and primitive regression—as also demonstrated in such films of the day as Spell of the Hypnotist, The She–Creature, and I Was a Teenage Werewolf. to say nothing of the classier The Search for Bridey Murphy. Louis Weiss announced to Varietythat Adrian Weiss (Louis’ son) would write and direct Queen of the Gorillas. Much of the film was already in the can: Louis Weiss had acquired abundant jungle footage from 1948’s Man–Eater of Kumaon, among other sources.

Adrian Weiss found his bizarre story at the mercy of a hired-gun screenwriter, Edward D. Wood, JR. Wood, the prolific crackpot filmmaker responsible for such recent misfires as Glen or Glenda?and Bride of the Monsterand Plan 9 from Outer Space, personalized the screenplay to such an extent that his overriding psychosexual obsessions could only come to the fore.

Yes, and where Adrian Weiss had imagined a character driven by incomprehensible primitive longings, Wood saw a tale of romantic entanglement between a delicate young woman and a horndog gorilla. Hence The Bride and the Beast. Discretion prevailed sufficiently to slip the screenplay past the Legion of Decency and the Production Code Administration. Suggestive footage that appears in the coming-attractions trailer but not in the feature indicates pre-emptive self–censorship. Allied Artists double–billed the picture with The Beast of Budapest, whose all-American wholesome Commie-buster agenda helped to camouflage the lurid essence of both films.

The leading lady, Charlotte Austin, has spoken disparagingly of The Bride and the Beastin times more recent, but she is quite effective as Laura Fuller, new wife of big-game hunter Dan Fuller (Lance Fuller). Laura finds herself fascinated with a captive ape known as

T H E B R I D E A N D T H E B E A S T

Steve Calvert and Charlotte Austin.

Spanky (a hair-suited Steve Calvert), whom Fuller proposes to donate to a zoo. Laura proves unafraid of the ape—even after it has escaped its cage and torn away her nightgown—and grows to sense that she had known the beast in some past existence. Dan guns down the beast. A physician (William Justine) imposes a hypnotic trance: Laura comes to comprehend that she is a gorilla by nature, reincarnated as a human being. Which of course makes all that creepy bestiality business perfectly okay, y’know.

While accompaning her husband on a safari into Africa, Laura confides that she feels as though she has
come home. After a menacing encounter with a wounded tiger, Laura finds herself drawn to a tribe of big apes. Dan Fuller is struck down while attempting to rescue Laura. A search proves futile. The doctor suggests that Laura has returned to her natural state—scant comfort to her distraught (human) husband.

There is little at play here to make or break any careers. The most significant pattern of constancy and success belongs to ape impersonator Steve Calvert, whose station (as a protègé of ace gorilla man Ray Corrigan) had been assured ’most anytime any movie found itself in need of a hairy primate. This one marks Calvert’s last such assignment. Charlotte Austin was on her way out, as well; despite early major-league credentials, she had faded to the genrefied low-budget ranks and would make a decisive departure after Frankenstein 1970(Page No. 125). Lance Fuller had handled he-man roles since the 1940s, but he never overcame a dead-eyed inexpressive appearance.

T H E B R I D E A N D T H E B E A S T • D E M O N I A C

The mismatching of talents on the screen is as striking as the awkward spectacle of Ed Wood attempting to fit in with a near-the-mainstream studio production. Director Weiss achieves a measure of (melo)dramatic coherence, although the forced inclusion of the jungle sequences makes for a dull middle stretch. The use of East Indian settings requires a maladroit subplot to explain what business a group of Asian tigers might have in Africa. A bravura finale, playing out like some of the more stirring moments from Sam Katzman’s Jungle Jim series, is almost worth the wait.

Demoniac

IN FRANCE:
Les Louves • 1957
(United • 1958)

Henri–Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique (France; 1955), a tale of a murderous conspiracy with erotic undercurrents, brought such widespread international attention to the novelists Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac that Hollywood could only beckon. The authors followed through in France with an adapted screenplay for Luis Saslavsky’s Les Louves A.K.A. Demoniac), and in the United States with the source–story for Alfred Hitchcock’s liberal adaptation of Vertigo (1958).

Demoniac is the near–equal of those two better-known pictures. The U.S. title was calculated to evoke memories of both Diabolique and Jacques Tourneur’s Curse of the Demon (1957). A sensationalized marketing campaign courted the established audience for horror. The overriding quality is one of desperate suspense:

Two prisoners of war escape. One, Bernard Pradal (Marc Cassot), dies in a rail-car accident, unfilfilled in his desire to marry a woman he had known only by correspondence. The other, Gervais Larauch (Francois Perier), impersonates his defunct friend, only to find himself entangled in intrigues and creeping suspicions. Hélène Vanaux (Micheline Presle) accepts the masquerade. Her clairvoyant sister, Agnès Vanaux (Jeanne Moreau), senses the approach of trouble. More troubling yet: Julia Pradal (Madeleine Robinson), the dead man’s sister, embraces the phoney as “dear little Bernard.”

The tense quadrangle shifts inexorably back–and–forth en route to a harrowing climax. The rewards of a concentrated viewing are manifold throughout. Suspense gathers in a precipitous manner, from the soldiers’ bid for freedom, to a menacing railyard setting where the trains barrel along, seemingly from nowhere, and care not what luckless pedestrians they might strike.

The sense of random misfortune transfers gracefully to a desolate countryside manor. Director Saslavsky blocks and frames the four principals for maximum claustrophobia, often employing severe close–ups and medium shots that emphasize the secretive eyes: The deceits are reciprocal. Francois Perier’s nominal protagonist, trapped within his own impulsive lie, is scarcely a match for the women who have inverted his masquerade to their advantage—but to the benefit of no one. So dreamlike is the telling that the Absorbed Viewer will feel relieved upon waking, figuratively speaking, and grateful for the experience.

A similar situation figures in Don Siegel’s The Beguiled (1971), from Thomas Cullinan’s novel about a Union soldier in the clutches of Confederate women.

Giant from the Unknown

(Screencraft Enterprises • Astor Pictures • 1958)

The Spanish Conquistadoresnot only spread disease and the tortures of the Inquisition among the Original People of the so-called New World. (New to the conquerors, that is, and so who invited them?) The colonial invaders of the 16TH century also left behind an agent of mayhem in the form of a reanimated corpse. That is, according to Richard Cunha’s Giant from the Unknown, a seething tale that implies as much retrospective social criticism as it dispenses the thrills.

The modestly mounted film saves its greater ferocity for the finale, when the monstrous conqueror–zombie known as Vargas leads a running battle from a windmill and across a dam, against a precipitous backdrop of turbulent waters.

“That was my Dad’s homage to Frankenstein,” Rick Cunha told us in 1984, citing James Whale’s celebrated picture of 1931 as an inspiration to director Cunha. “Dad wanted to recapture that dodgy snatch-and-grab interplay between Boris Karloff and Colin Clive that had climaxed their windmill struggle. I believe it worked, and Buddy Baer and Edward Kemmer played the confrontation as if it were a matter of life–and–death. Dad structured the sequence in such a way as to make the audience cringe every time Buddy darts in for the kill. Works for me, anyhow.” (It helps that Jack Pierce, makeup artist for the 1931 Frankenstein, also designed the scowling deathlike facial contours for Baer.)

The circumstances of the visit with Rick Cunha, a fine session musician and audio engineer, had less to do with motion pictures than with a recording session. Mike Price and his affiliated string band, the Salt Lick Foundation, were producing a record album featuring the Texasstyle fiddler and country-rock pioneer, Byron Berline—in whose band Cunha served as guitarist. No time like the present to bring up the elder Cunha and his body of work along Poverty Row, and Rick seemed delighted to have found someone who connected the names.

“Dad got absolutely no respect for his quartet of horror movies,” Rick added, “except among the paying customers who appreciated the generous scares.” (See Page No. 39 for additional references.) “Dad was a cinematographer first and a director second, but when he got the occasional chance to direct, he delivered the goods. He brought a

D E M O N I A C • G I A N T F R O M T H E U N K N O W N

great knowledge of his chosen genre and its history to everything he did.”

Yes, and that snatchand-grab sequence works for our purposes, as well.

History (according to screenwriters Frank Hart Taussig and Ralph Brooke) records the death of a renegade Spanish conqueror named Vargas, alias the Diablo Giant, in the vicinity of a tribal burial ground known as Devil’s Crag. Feared by the Indians, Vargas is said to haunt the region. The curse reasserts itself in the present day after a villager dies from an unexplained beating.

A tribal representative, Indian Joe (Billy Dix), warns of worse things waiting unless the settlers steer clear of the burial ground. Sheriff Parker (Bob Steele) scoffs. The victim is known to have argued with a visiting scientist, Wayne Brooks (Edward Kemmer), but Brooks dismisses the altercation as a simple disagreement.

A celebrated archæologist, Prof. Cleveland (Morris Ankrum), arrives unbidden. Brooks offers his services. Cleveland and his daughter, Janet (Sally Fraser), intend to search for the remains of the Diablo Giant. The professor examines relics that Brooks has unearthed, including a living reptile that Brooks believes to be centuries old. From Brooks’ artifacts, Cleveland pieces together a Spanish crucifix—then insists upon visiting the site where Brooks has been digging.

The sheriff follows the party to Devil’s Crag and reprimands Brooks for leaving town without permission.

G I A N T F R O M T H E U N K N O W N
The Diablo Giant strikes.

Indian Joe threatens the explorers, as well, but proves receptive to Brooks’ promise to respect the burial mounds. Days of tedious excavation are rewarded by the discovery of armor and weaponry and a skeleton. An ancient axe cannot be dislodged from the earth.

While the searchers have retired to a campsite, a bolt of lightning strikes—reanimating the buried figure of Vargas, the Diablo Giant, who arises with the axe in hand. The creature has departed by the time Cleveland and Brooks return to the dig. A medallion lying nearby affirms the identity of Vargas.

The giant stalks the campsite to retrieve his armor and the medallion, then kills a young woman (Joline Brand). Brooks falls anew under suspicion. Vargas abducts Janet. A searching party frees her and leaves Vargas on the run. The slain woman’s vengeful brother (Gary Crutcher) is injured in a confrontation with the monster. Brooks takes up the pursuit alone. The homage-toFrankenstein sequence ends with the Diablo Giant, defiant to the last, plunging into the frothing waters below the damsite.

Buddy Baer, brother of the prizefighter Max Baer, portrays the Diablo Giant as a malevolent force of nature, more ogre than man. Denied a speaking role, Baer renders the menace eloquent in visual terms, with an array of facial expressions that speak volumes of malicious intent and treachery: Scarcely a mystery as to why this jerk, Vargas, had become an outcast in life. Edward Kemmer makes a persuasive heroic protagonist—himself an outsider among a provincial community that looks upon science as an intrusive element. Bob Steele is ideal as an impatient lawman, and Morris Ankrum anchors the extravagant pseudo-science fantasy with a tone of authority.

More stagecraft than optical effects: Puppet People.

JOHN WOOLEY ON
The Films of Bert I. Gordon

M EMO FROM M.H. PRICE: Bert I. Gordon looms large—or, per his signature initials, B.I.G. —in the history of this transitional period for an essential genre. The producer–director and effects artist became the midcentury’s riposte to Tod Browning via an obsessive interest in freakish growth (and also shrinkage) and its consequences. Our coverage of Gordon’s films continues, now, from the prior volume of Forgotten Horrors, with this Insider’s Account from John Wooley:

Attack of the Puppet People (Alta Vista & American International; 1958)—The film was released in April of 1958, a couple of months before Bert I. Gordon’s War of the Colossal Beast (see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6.) Attack of the Puppet Peoplefinds Mr. B.I.G. reversing his penchant for “playing with size”—as he often would put it.

A gentle old dollmaker, Mr. Franz (John Hoyt, of The Beast of Budapest), is promptly revealed as a weirdo who has found a way to shrink people to Barbie-doll dimensions. He does so with alarming regularity and little regard for consequences. He is so blatant about it, in fact, that he displays the miniaturized humans, rendered immobile by a gas, in the reception room of Dolls, Inc.

A reunion with a compadrefrom the circus, Emil (Michael Mark), provides back–story: Franz was a puppeteer, married to a beautiful woman. She took a powder, and a disconsolate Franz left behind his puppetry, and his Big Top career. Although it is told (mostly by Emil) in almost a throwaway sequence, the implication—reinforced by Franz’s closing line, “There’s nothing worse than loneliness”—is that

the old puppeteer became so desperate that he figured out a way to shrink people so that (1) they could not run away and (2) they would be dependent upon him.

An attempt at pseudo-scientific explanation, involving a slide projector and a tuning fork, is not particularly convincing. The sequence nonetheless provides a psychological underpinning for George Worthing Yates’ script, based upon Gordon’s story. Yates (a nephew of Republic Pictures’ founder, Herbert J. Yates) was in the middle of a stretch of fantastic-film work that had begun with his story for the seminal big-bug picture, Them! (1954), and would continue through 1960—including two additional B.I.G. features.

The array of genre reliables includes Hoyt and Mark (still recognizable from the 1931 Frankenstein); the luminous June Kenney, as a receptionist who stumbles onto the incredible truth; John Agar, as her romantic interest; and Gordon regular Jack Kosslyn, as a skeptical police sergeant. The picture police sergeant. The picture year-old Susan Gordon, daughter of Bert I. Gordon and Flora M. Gordon. (Mrs. Gordon assisted with the technical effects.) Susan plays a Brownie Scout who brings a doll for Mr. Franz to fix. Her discovery of a tiny cat in a matchbox is a pivotal moment.

“Dad had no intention of letting one of his daughters be in the movies,” Susan told me in a 2002 interview for Fangoriamagazine. “He used to say it was a rotten business for children. But I want

ed to act, and he did humor me by letting me read for Puppet People.” He asked if she’d like to be an extra, playing one of the Brownies. She agreed, and fate intervened.

“...[C]ame the day of the shooting, and the little girl he had hired for the [speaking] part came to work sick,” Susan recalled. “She had a 102-degree fever, but her mother, being a typical stage mother, didn’t want her to lose a day of work, so she brought her to work sick. But the girl couldn’t perform... So my father handed the script to my mom

Jack Kosslyn and John Agar.

and said, ‘Teach Susie the lines. I’ll give you 20 minutes, and she can only have one take, as I don’t want it to appear that I am favoring my own child.’ And I did do the scene in one take.”

It was the beginning of a child-star career that would capture the hearts of untold numbers of Monster Kids. As a grown–up, Susan would return to Puppet Peopleto resurrect Albert Glasser’s big-band composition, “You’re My Living Doll,” sung in the film by Marlene Willis. Susan performed the song (as “You’re a Dolly”) for the 2003 Scarlet Street disc Jeepers Creepers: Great Songs from Horror Films.

Also dear to Monster Kids is the self-referential business that Gordon put into his pictures. When the Kenney and Agar characters finally go out in Puppet People, they visit a drive-in theatre, where Mr. B.I.G.’s The Amazing Colossal Man( see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6) is showing. By way of explaining his date-night choice of entertainment, Agar says, “I get tired of the same things all the time. Don’t you?”

As with Colossal Man, Bert and Flora Gordon handled the playingwith-size camera-and-stagecraft effects for Puppet People, with AIP monster–maker Paul Blaisdell and his wife, Jackie, creating most of the outsized props. In Randy Palmer’s Paul Blaisdell, Monster Maker (1997), Blaisdell remembers: “We either had to make props that were six times larger than life–size, or six times smaller, or both, because there were these scenes where John Hoyt took all the props back from the puppet people. It was all a bit confusing, believe me.”

Less confusing, but sort of astounding, is the under-reported part that Attack of the Puppet Peoplehad in the Watergate scandal. Had it not been for Bert Gordon’s picture, Richard M. Nixon and his band of miscreants might have gotten away clean with their June 1972 bur

B E R T I . G O R D O N • P U P P E T P E O P L E • T H E S P I D E R
glary of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington. Paul Bedard revealed the tale in a Washington Whisperscolumn, which ran in the July 1, 2002, issue of U.S. News & World Report:

John Barrett, the undercover District cop who was the first to bust up the Watergate burglars, was telling his favorite anecdote at a 30TH-anniversary party on the same sixth floor where he made the arrests. It was a little-known story. Seems the lookout in the Howard Johnson motel across the street didn’t see Barrett arrive because he was watching a 1958 thriller, Attack of the Puppet People . His failure to walkie–talkie the thieves in time, said Barrett, “was the difference in Watergate.”

And if that anecdote doesn’t justify Bert I. Gordon’s working title for the picture, The Fantastic Puppet People, I don’t know what does.

The Spider , A.K.A. Earth vs. the Spider(American International Pictures, 1958)—First sent out in September on a double bill with Bruno VESota’s The Brain Eaters, The Spider completes Bert I. Gordon’s 1958 trifecta. As with the other two— War of the Colossal Beastand Attack of the Puppet People—Mr. B.I.G. handled production, direction, original story, and special technical effects, assisted in the latter by his wife, Flora. Paul and Jackie Blaisdell contributed the dessicated corpses found in the wake of the giant arachnid (seen twice, they are the same dummy, dressed differently) and a giant tarantula leg, constructed of balsa wood and broomstraw. The first creation is shocking and believable, the latter far less so.

The husband-and-wife teams are hardly the only elements in common between Puppet Peopleand The Spider; the respective casts feature many recurring players, from June Kenney, the female lead, to Hank Patterson (later known as Green Acres’ Fred Ziffel), doing a brief turn as a janitor in each. The Brownie Scouts’ leader in Puppet People June Jocelyn, becomes the mother of Miss Kenney’s Carol Flynn in The Spider. Jack Kosslyn and Troy Patterson also take encores. Several others, notably Sally Fraser, return from War of the Colossal Beast Gordon was churning the pictures out so fast that one blended into another. A stock-company environment proved expedient.

George Worthing Yates fleshed out Gordon’s story, in collaboration with Lazlo Gorog, a 1945 Oscar nominée (for The Affairs of Susan), who by now was writing for television and genre pictures. Albert Glasser, another Gordon regular, provided a musical score that did the job and then some—business as usual for Glasser, whose compositions lent a big-picture sensibility to many a low–budgeter.

Budget, though, often has little correlation to entertainment value: The Spideris nothing if not entertaining. As in Puppet People, the writers make a decent attempt to flesh out the characters, even secondary ones like Carol’s father, Jack Flynn (Merritt Stone, who played small parts in several B.I.G. pictures). Stone, the first person seen on screen, sets up a grisly, effective sequence that renders him the first victim, even as he heads home with a bracelet for his daughter. Hints surface that he was a philanderer, or at least not a thoughtful parent, and Carol figures his failure to show up for her birthday is in character. The viewer, however, knows better, and that knowledge creates a bit of sympathy.

While its similarities to Universal–International’s 1955 box-office hit Tarantula are assuredly not coincidental—according to Blaisdell,

“AIP wanted to make a kind of spinoff of Tarantula”—Gordon’s picture distinguishes itself with the teenage energy that AIP’s James Nicholson and Sam Arkoff relished. Unlike the more staid Tarantula The Spiderincorporates hot–rods, high-school scenes, and a rock ’n’ roll combo anchored by bassist Skip Young, known to television audiences as Wally on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The band’s boogie-woogie racket in a school auditorium leads to the (allegedly) deceased spider’s pulling a Lazarus.

The film also benefits from location shooting in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns, where the creature hangs its web. The setting lends scope and even veracity—a vast and eerie dreamscape, and a perfect retreat for a giant spider.

Decent performances are given by Ed Kemmer, as a science teacher and authority figure; Gene Persson, as Mike Simpson, Carol’s beau; and Miss Kenney. Veteran scene–stealer Gene Roth portrays a gruffly humorous small-town sheriff. Upon entering the cavern, he mutters that the place would make “a nice Elks Hall.” Then he shoots a bat.

Bert I. Gordon was making self-referential movies long before Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Streetpictures brought the term into the horror-film vernacular. This time around, a movie-house marquée heralds The Amazing Colossal Man. Lobby cards from Attack of the Puppet Peoplecover a wall. “Something about puppet people,” says Persson. “Sounds pretty wild.”

Ecologically astute viewers may cringe at the scene in which a pestcontrol expert (Bob Garnet) looks to Kemmer’s high-school teacher for advice on how strong a mixture of D.D.T. must be to croak a spider.

“Two to four percent solution is the usual,” Garnet says. Without hesitation, Kemmer’s character snaps back: “Make it 50.”
B E R T I . G O R D O N • T H E S P I D E R • B O Y & P I R A T E S

The Boy and the Pirates (Bert I. Gordon Productions & United Artists, 1960)—Somewhere in those years between the 1960s, when Marvel Comics became big and famous for giving the world superheroes with everyday problems, and 1986, when DC Comics upped the ante by injecting a brooding fatalism into the costumed-hero genre with Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, one of the major comics fanzines published a piece by a pretty well-known comic-book writer. I’m sorry to say that I remember neither the writer, nor the publication, nor the year, although

I’d guess it was in the mid-to-late 1970s, when many fanzines were being written and published by people who took the comics seriously.

What I have not forgotten, however, is the writer’s point, which was that comics were for kids. Period. Comic books—with their bright, colorful panels, balloons filled with simple sentences, and action rooted in fantasies of power and escape—were best suited for youngsters as

Susan Gordon, Murvyn Vye,
and Charles Herbert.

a storytelling medium, the writer believed. That is the audience for which he wrote, and he did not intend to change. He wound up by suggesting that all the emerging critics and writers who wanted to take comics in an adult direction should reconsider.

His was certainly a voice in the wilderness, unheeded as all the innocence was subsequently squeezed and twisted out of superhero comics, on their painful trek to maturity or whatever else one might call it. But I was reminded of that writer’s point when I viewed The Boy and the Piratesfor the first time in almost 55 years.

This is a kids’ picture, with all the wonder and excitement and relative innocence that a youngster at the time would have gotten from an issue of World’s Finest Comicsor Adventure Comics. It has great kid-attracting elements: pirates, time–travel, a genie, a boy hero protecting a young distressed damsel, sea battles, humor, suspense—all pointing toward the kind of moral about parents and responsibility that marked young people’s entertainment in that more innocent era.

The story, told in gorgeously oversaturated color, has to do with a pirate-obsessed boy named Jimmy Warren (Charles Herbert). Jimmy hates doing stuff like applying himself at school and cleaning his room. While he is hanging out around one of his favorite sites, an ancient wreck near his home on the Massachusetts coast, a strange bottle washes up on shore. Jimmy picks it up, wishes he were on a pirate ship, and—boom!—he finds himself aboard The Queen’s Revenge, a remarkably spic-and-span vessel under the command of the bloodthirstiest freebooter of them all, Capt. Blackbeard (Murvyn Vye).

It does not take long for Jimmy to realize that being aboard a real pirate ship has its downside. Blackbeard keeps him alive only on a whim, regularly threatening his life while making him swab the deck

Susan Gordon and Charles Herbert.

and fetch casks of rum. When Jimmy stands up for a beautiful little captive (Susan Gordon) from one of the buccaneers’ raids, it looks as though both kids are headed ass–over–teakettle for Davy Jones’ locker. Jimmy talks Blackbeard into a reprieve.

In addition to the piratical threats, something else hangs over Jimmy’s head: If he cannot get the bottle back to the exact place he found it within three days, he must take the place of the genie (Joseph Turkel). As the genie reminds Jimmy, this can be a very long and not particularly pleasant gig. These elements coalesce into a chase: Blackbeard and the ship’s cook (Archie Duncan) pursue the kids and a sympathetic crewman (Paul Guilfoyle).

By 1960, Charles Herbert had become a familiar face, what with substantial roles in The Flyand The Colossus of New York(Page Nos. 119 and 103); a few months after The Boy and the Pirates’ April-of1960 release, he would cement his horror-movie reputation with William Castle’s 13 Ghosts. Herbert was a Monster Kid himself, as I found out during my big show-biz summer of 1962, when I accompanied my actor–cousin, Scott McCartor, to an audition at Desilu Studios. Just about every young male actor in Hollywood had showed up to try out for the part of Lucille Ball’s son in The Lucy Show. We sat on a big wooden bench, arranged outdoors on the Desilu lot in a rectangle. I found myself next to Mr. Herbert, chatting about horror movies, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and related topics, as the boys trooped in and out for their auditions.

We will get to Herbert’s Boy and the Piratesco–star in a moment. But first, a nod to the rest of the cast, most of whom were veteran character actors. Murvyn Vye had been in films since the late 1940s. A year before The Boy and the Pirates, Vye had been seen to good advantage as Bugsy Moran in Al Capone, with Rod Steiger in the title

Charles Herbert and Susan Gordon.

role. The crafty ship’s cook, Scoggins, is Archie Duncan, known to kids of the time as Little John in television’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. Good-guy pirate Paul Guilfyole had just about reached the end of an impressive career that had begun in the early 1930s. Although cult-film favorite Timothy Carey receives half of a title card—the other part belonging to the genie, Joseph Turkel—Carey does not have a lot to do in his turn as Morgan, the famed pirate.

Once again, Mr. B.I.G. handled production, direction, story, and visual effects, with an assist on the latter by wife Flora. Fleshing out the storyline was the veteran husband-and-wife writing team of Lillie Hayward and Jerry Sackheim. Hayward seemed especially suited to this task; she was associated at the time with Disney material like The Shaggy Dog(1959), Toby Tyler(1960), and TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club. Her family-film credentials stretched back at least two decades, when she had co–scripted a boys-and-dog film for Paramount, The Biscuit Eater, which Don Miller’s book “B” Movies(1973) called “easily the most talked-about `B’ picture of 1940.” The Biscuit Eaterwas remade by the Disney machine in 1972.

The Boy and the Pirates marks a change for Gordon—toward kid adventure and away from horror. Retained, however, is Gordon’s playing-with-size trademark, as seen in several effective sequences featuring the bottle-sized genie, Abu.

By this time, Bert’s daughter Susan had done several television appearances and a couple of mainstream features, but this is the picture that cemented her in the hearts of who-knows-how-many film-loving boys. In The Boy and the Pirates, Susan plays not only the abducted Katrina, but also, in the framing tale, Jimmy’s beach-loving friend, Kathy.

“Except for the small [and uncredited] part of Jimmy’s mother, I was the only girl in the whole movie,” Susan noted in our 2002 interview. “My father was very protective of his daughters... Oh, if he had only known when he was making the movie that he was creating a vehicle for young boys across the country to fall for his daughter!”

Indeed. Which brings us back around to the beginning of this piece. As much as I would have liked to view The Boy and the Pirates anew with the 11-year-old eyes that saw it at that small Minnesota picture show in 1960, that didn’t happen. It probably couldn’thave — for me or for any of the rest of us who, a half–century ago, fell hard and hopelessly for Bert I. Gordon’s bewitching child.

Some pictures, like old comic books, were just meant for kids. Looking at them from an adult perspective ends up simply being superfluous. So what if the comical effect of adding bubble gum to Blackbeard’s slumgullion seems childishly goofy now? And do I really need to devote a lot of space to making something of the fact that Blackbeard’s alleged pirate ship was far cleaner and shinier than the U.S. Navy helicopter carrier that took me to Vietnam? As much as I might wish otherwise, there are sweet and beautiful movies out there that are not sweet and beautiful for anyone but wide-eyed children. The Boy and the Piratesis one of those.

Tormented (Cheviot Productions & Allied Artists; 1960)—Like The Boy and the Pirates, Tormented finds its setting in a mostly deserted stretch of New England beachfront. Unlike The Boy and the Pirates Tormentedis anything but a kids’ picture. Instead, it is a moody and impressive psychological study, not only of guilt and its consequences, but also of the nature and effects of various kinds of love, experienced in three different forms by jazz pianist Tom Stewart (Richard Carlson).

First is the hotcha kind of love he has found with an admitted “second-rate singer,” the slinky Vi Mason (Juli Reding), encountered in the smoky neon wilderness of the jazz-club scene. Second is a more nearly pure love, shared with Stewart’s perky fiancée, Meg (Lugene Sanders), of the upscale Hubbard clan. And before we get too busy with the whole Madonna–whore thing, add a third: the torch that with the whole Madonna–whore thing, add a third: the torch that year-old Sandy, was 11 at the time.)

An abandoned lighthouse accommodates pivotal scenes, starting with a confrontation. A former flame who is now an unwelcome presence in the ambitious musician’s life—he is set to play Carnegie Hall— Vi threatens blackmail. She slips through a collapsed railing. She calls for Stewart to save her. He hesitates. She drops into the ocean.

Stewart retrieves what he believes to be her body. The object turns out to be a clump of seaweed. Thus begins the haunting. This ordeal is accomplished, for the most part, subtly and well—with other seaweedrelated weirdness, as well as whiffs of an exotic perfume, footprints in the sand, disembodied hands, a bouquet that turns into Vi’s accusing face, and a recording of hers called “Tormented” (sung by Margie Rayburn) that inexplicably begins playing as Stewart noodles at a piano.

A hipster boat jockey (Joseph “Joe” Turkel), who had brought Vi onto the island, becomes another problem. Even young Sandy finally gets hip to her crush’s guilty secret. A creepy but logical conclusion gives her the last word: an anguished “Tom!”

The introspective quality that Richard Carlson brought to many of his performances—including starring roles in well-remembered SF and horror pictures of the 1950s—serves well in Tormented. Carlson delivers a nuanced portrayal of a haunted man trying to keep the cracks in

B E R T I . G O R D O N • B O Y & P I R A T E S • T O R M E N T E D

his psyche from showing, Although a couple of voice–overs recall the often fervid monologues of I Led Three Lives, his popular Commie-busting television show of the early 1950s, the character Carlson plays here is neither hero nor villain. Tormentedis, essentially, a film noirwith a ghost—dark and shadowy, accented with a moody jazz score (reliable Albert Glasser, once again, with pianist and composer Calvin Jackson), and centering upon a doomed protagonist who finds the consequences of one bad choice piling up on him until he suffocates.

Perhaps scripter George Worthing Yates, once again working from a story by Mr. B.I.G., put out a little extra effort on this one, since, in a way, it hearkened back to Yates’ novels of the 1930s and 1940s. While Yates did not deal with the supernatural in his books, he had been a specialist in the murder-mystery genre, known for a series of works with the word bodyin the titles (including If a Body, The Body That Came by Post, and The Body That Wasn’t Uncle). This dark tale of passive murder and gathering guilt was right in Yates’ wheelhouse—at least, a welcome change from his other Gordon assignments.

Besides Yates and Glasser, Hungarian cinematographer Ernest Lazlo also returned (from Attack of the Puppet People) for Tormented his skillful use of the black-and-white chiaroscuro and strong radial compositions, particularly in the seaside scenes, enhances the sense of gathering doom. (Lazlo’s other project of 1960, the recognized classic Inherit the Wind, earned him an Academy Award nomination.)

The ensemble cast for Tormentedincludes Gordon regulars Gene Roth as a benevolent lunchroom owner (a portrayal far different from his raucous lawman of The Spider); and The Boy and the Pirates genie, Joe Turkel, as the edgy hustler who raises the stakes for Tom Stewart. Oklahoma City-born Lugene Sanders, familiar from her long

B E R T I . G O R D O N • T O R M E N T E D • M A G I C S W O R D
stint as Babs Riley in television’s The Life of Riley, proved unable to make a lasting jump from small to big screen; Tormented is her only documented feature-film credit. As Tom Stewart’s fiancée, Miss Sanders offers a solid performance in a thankless role.

One screen credit reads, “Presenting Juli Reding,” as if to introduce the actress. In fact, she had been around in films for a couple of years by then and had co–starred with Lex Barker in Mission in Morocco, an English–Spanish adventure picture from 1959. The vocalist who dubbed Miss Reding’s singing, Margie Rayburn, had achieved two Top 20 pop singles: 1957’s “I’m Available,” and 1958’s “Hey, Mr. Banjo,” with a group known as the Sunnysiders.

As in The Boy and the Pirates, Susan Gordon is second–billed on screen (third, behind Juli Reding, in the advertising materials), and this is indeed a star turn for her. Not only has Miss Gordon never been cuter; as the innocent counterbalance to Tom Stewart’s eroding soul, she gives a sympathetic and occasionally heartbreaking performance.

Although Bert I. Gordon was once again in charge of directing, producing (with Joe Steinberg), original story, and visual effects (with Mrs. Gordon), Tormentedrepresents a seismic shift for the filmmaker. No playing with size here, no jolly references to his other pictures, just a concerted attempt to tell a really good scary story.

The Gordons’ effects work includes the site of much of the horror. As Susan Gordon revealed, “[T]here was no lighthouse at all on the beach where we filmed, only a prop door that we would walk through in the scene. The whole of the lighthouse was later matted in.”

Released by Allied Artists in September of 1960 on a double–bill with the Italian blob-creature picture, Caltiki, the Immortal Monster Tormented eventually reached the Maribel Theatre in Chelsea, Oklahoma. I had been in a state of wild anticipation for a long time, after reading about it in the monster magazines and, probably, in Boxoffice. Like many small-town theater owners, the Maribel’s Walter and Mary Bell were subscribers to that trade journal, and I stayed up on the Hollywood happenings by perusing their stash with their son, Walt, my best friend at the time.

Knowing of my love for Susan and her father, the Bells gave me a handbill prior to their showing of Tormented; now that I think of it, they may have had a stack of them as giveaways at the concession stand, in order to whip up interest. Although mine unfortunately got away from me many years ago, I can still recall what it was: the reproduction of a positive review from one of the trades, with the heading “TormentedGood Ghost.” Indeed, it is.

The Magic Sword (Bert I. Gordon Productions & United Artists, 1962)— By virtue of his work in 2001: A Space Odysseyand a Star Trekpilot, among other TV-and-movie appearances, Gary Lockwood found himself a popular attraction on the autograph-show circuit during the 1990s. At the late John Harper’s Tulsa-based Trek Expo conventions, Lockwood proved an entertaining and voluble guest, ready to hold forth on just about any topic.

Unless that topic was The Magic Sword, that is.
During one Trek Expo, I asked Lockwood about the picture, in which he wields the titular weapon as the knight who will come to be known as ST. George. (The working title was ST.George and the Seven Curses.) I figured Lockwood would be as forthcoming on that as he had been on other topics, especially since the film had given him his first starring role.

B E R T I . G O R D O N • T H E M A G I C S W O R D

However, I was wrong. The question seemed to bring him up short. “There’s not much I can tell you about that,” he said, indicating with a subsequent silence that the subject needed changing. I may have asked a related question, and he may have said that he felt he didn’t get enough money for the job—although I may have inferred the latter—and then someone else brought up something else and we never returned to The Magic Sword.

Lockwood’s autobiography, 2001 Memories: An Actor’s Odyssey (with R.A. Jones; 2001), indicates the same aversion: “I had already finished Splendor in the Grassand was back in California, where I had done a cheap movie called The Magic Sword.”

Lockwood’s desire to sheathe The Magic Swordremains curious, especially given that he does a pretty doggoned good job as the heroic adopted son of a sorceress (Estelle Winwood, in one of her familiar dotty-old-woman portrayals). Against her wishes, he heads out to save a princess (Anne Helm) from being fed to a two-headed dragon by the evil Lodar (Basil Rathbone). Obstacles include an ogre (an unrecognizable Jack Kosslyn, the detective from Puppet People); bubbling pools that strip flesh from bone; and an attractive woman who turns into a bloodsucking hag (Vampira, under her real name, Maila Nurmi). While the final scene with the slow-moving dragon seems anticlimactic, the film is a swift and untaxing 80 minutes, replete with monster- and adventure-movie set–pieces and solid production values, including rich color cinematography; it does not look much like, as its star tabbed it, “a cheap movie.”

For his sixth film in the stretch from 1958 through 1962, Bert I. Gordon returned to the colorful kids’-adventure approach he had taken with Boy and the Pirates. The Magic Swordis a bit more grown–up,

Above: The climactic battle of The Magic Sword ; below: Bert I. Gordonsizes up a miniature dragon–slayer.

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however, with adults in all the leading roles (meaning, sadly, no Susan Gordon) and more sophisticated and darker story elements. Still, childish humor is peppered throughout the action, mostly revolving around Miss Winwood’s character, Sybil, who keeps a pair of bald-headed Siamese twins (Nick and Paul Bon Tempi) around for some reason or other, along with a chimpanzee in human clothing.

The Magic Sword also found Mr. B.I. G. shaking up his crew. While he still produced, directed, conceived the story, and created the special visual effects—once more, in tandem with wife Flora—the film had a new screenwriter (Bernard Schoenfeld, of Warner Bros.’ 1950 women-in-prison picture Cagedand Paramount’s The Space Children [Page No. 100), a new composer–orchestrator (Richard Markowitz), and a new cinematographer. Camera chief Paul Vogel would receive an Academy Award nomination for a similar, albeit higher-budgeted, picture from the same year, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm The Magic Sword, with an April release, beat Brothers Grimmto the theaters by four months.

The Magic Sword also gave Gordon an opportunity to play with size once again. The effects scenes with the ogre are persuasive, and a cage full of puppet-sized people figures in the conclusion.

While he would make a lot more movies—in fact, early 2014 found the 91-year-old filmmaker in post–production on Secrets of a Psychopath— The Magic Swordbrought to an end Mr. B.I.G.’s most prolific filmmaking stretch, one that caught and held forever the hearts and minds of his monster-bopper audiences.

Thanks in great part to him, his daughter did the same thing.

JOHN WOOLEY AND
The Susan Gordon Connection

M IKE PRICE, AGAIN: And herewith, John Wooley’s memoir of a long-term friendship with the movie-star daughter of Bert I. Gordon:

This whole thing started in the summer of 1960, when I was 11 years old, on vacation in Minnesota with my younger brother, Mark, and my mother. We were visiting my late Dad’s aunt, who lived simply and frugally with her husband on a farm near the Canadian border. Their friends were mostly other farmers, and their fun centered upon smorgasbords and other collegial events, usually involving food.

We were to attend an ice-cream social at a church in the nearby town of Hallock. The small community’s movie theater happened to be showing an adventure film called The Boy and the Pirates. By that time, I had become marinated in the elements that had created the national monster-bopper brigade— Famous Monsters of Filmlandand the other monster magazines, network television’s Thriller and The Twilight Zone, paperback collections of horror stories, the old Universal chillers on late-night television’s Shock! Theater, the horror B’s playing at my own hometown’s picture show. I’d like to think I looked over the poster, recognized the name of producer–director Bert I. Gordon as someone who made films for kids like us, and put my foot down, then and there. I can only say for certain, however, that Mark and I were given the choice of attending the ice-cream social or the movie, and we chose the movie.

When I say it turned out to be a life-altering choice, I’m hardly being melodramatic. The Boy and the Piratesintroduced me to my first and greatest movie love, Susan Gordon, who reached out from the screen and so thoroughly captivated me that I’ve never gotten over it. What I laughingly refer to as my career is studded with some pretty good essays involving Susan Gordon and what she did to my 11-yearold self that night—making me into a young man in a deep dream. I suppose I keep going back to it because I haven’t quite awakened yet.

But then, I’m getting ahead of the story.
A year or so later, back in my hometown and still eaten up with Susan, I organized my brother and several of the local kids into an ad hocfan club as an excuse to write to her. By that time, I’d seen her in another movie—her father’s Tormented, a picture both much more grown–up and far creepier than The Boy and the Pirates—and I suspect it was that film that gave me the impetus to take the next step.
Laboriously typed out on a half–sheet of paper, the letter read: Dear Susan,
It may interest you to know that some of your best fans live in Chelsea, Susan Oklahoma. We have organized a Susan Gordon. Gordon Fan Club.

We would like to know a few more things about you. #1—How old are you? #2—How many pictures have you played in? #3—We are also avid horror-movie fans and would like to know if the distinguished name in horror movies—Bert I. Gordon (Cyclops , The Spider , Attack of the Puppet People, Tormented , andST. George and the 7 Curses ) is any relation? How about Flora M. Gordon, so great with the special effects of Tormented ?
We would like to hear from you answering these questions.
Enclosed is an envelope for mailing us the answers. Thank you.
Ending with a “Yours Truly,” I typed in my name and the notation “president” just above the list of the eight slightly bemused kids I’d recruited. It went out to “Miss Susan Gordon” via Air Mail, in care of Allied Artists, Hollywood, California, on August 7, 1961; imagine my joy, shock, and awe when I received a response just about three weeks later, mailed back in my stamped, addressed envelope—and written in gold ink!
In addition to answering all my questions, Susan informed me that she had a national fan club and could supply me with the address. She gave me her address (in care of the William Morris Agency), and asked me to use it if I wrote her again, concluding with, “Thank you for your very nice letter, & if there is anything I can help with, please write me.”
Please write me? That letter was my passport to the stratosphere, and I didn’t come down for a good long time. In fact, as I remember it, just this little connection with Susan Gordon was enough for me to turn my back on my grade-school sweetheart, Mary Alice Littlejohn, in favor of a plunge toward Dreamstream Hollywood. If the video-game phrase had been around at the time, it would’ve been appropriate: Welcome to the next level.

With Charles Herbert:The Boy and the Pirates.

I joined the national fan club, making my loose little group one of the chapters. Susan and I wrote one another a few more times. And then, in 1962, we met.

Let me make this clear: I was already hopelessly enraptured by the movies in general, and horror movies in particular, by the time I saw The Boy and the Pirates. And although I lived in a map-dot town 1,600 miles away from Los Angeles, I was enveloped by the dream as surely as if I were stepping along Hollywood & Vine, searchlights blazing around me.

Susan, of course, lay at its heart. But there was also a little show–biz in my Dad’s side of the family. His sister, Aunt Marion, had taken a run at the movies in the 1940s, with rather modest success; her biggest triumph had been a steady gig as Mad Agnes in an L.A. stage production of The Drunkard, part of a cast that included a man who would shortly become a busy character actor, Nestor Paiva. She was from ST. Paul, Minnesota, and one of the Wooley family stories had to do with her friends and family turning out en masseat a theater there to see her in a film about the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. As my grandmother, Marion’s mother, remembered it, every time the crowd spied a young blonde woman, the whispers went up: “Is that Marion?”—“That’s Marion, isn’t it?”—It never was, though; she had ended up on the cutting-room floor. (Although Aunt Marion always maintained that the title of the picture was The Lives and Loves of Joseph Goebbels, and that Martin Kosleck was its star, it was probably Enemy of Women, a 1944 release with Paul Andor, A.K.A. Wolfgang Zilzer, playing Goebbels. Monogram was responsible for the picture, which would also make sense, as Aunt Marion met my Uncle Stan while he was working as a guard at that studio.)

In addition, Aunt Marion’s son, Scott McCartor, a couple of years my junior, had started carving out a nice little child-actor career. He

On the set with Bert I. Gordon.

would become best-known, probably, as a new-kid bully in an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, “One-Punch Opie,” which aired in late 1962. That same year, during summer vacation, Mark and my mom and I traveled to the L.A. suburb of Sepulveda to spend some time with the McCartors. I was 13. Magic was in the air, mingled with the smell of saltwater and set to a Beach Boys melody. Everybody seemed to be in the business of making dreams. The kid next door was doing a Bactine commercial, and his folks radiated show–biz—one was a film editor, the other the daughter of Valentine Davies, writer of Miracle on 34THStreet I believe it was that couple—Dick and Judy Bracken—who connected with Susan on the telephone, with assistance from Aunt Marion. Later that year, I wrote a highly idealized and allegedly humorous version of how it happened for Suzie Darlin’, the Susan Gordon International Fan Club yearbook, printed in the familiar purple ink of the duplicating machine. It was the first thing I’d written that had seen print, and I was delighted, even though the second page of my two-page account was MIA, and would remain so forever.

The story, as printed, began with dialogue between Scott and me, as I wondered aloud if we could make a phone call to Susan. After some highly dubious patter, I continued:

We entered the kitchen, where Dick Bracken, assistant film editor at Universal, and his wife, Judy, were chatting with Aunt Marian [sic ]. She had just finished telling Judy about the fan club, so Judy got the phone number for us from Universal.

My Aunt did the talking, but before I knew it I was handed the phone—talk about being tongue–tied! “Hello.” “Hello, S–Susan?”

“Yes.”
“This is–er —John.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting you.”
“Yes, I’m—uh —very—er —I’m looking forward to
meeting you, too.”
“Well, Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”

As it turned out, my aunt, never a shrinking violet, had managed to wangle us an invitation to visit the Gordons. And the fact that I was still living and breathing inside a Hollywood dream in no way saved me from going into a state of absolute petrification. I was a shy kid under the best of circumstances, and the thought of ratcheting things up another level and actually meetingSusan became one of the most terrifying prospects of my young life.

Luckily for me, I only had a couple of days to suffer before we rolled up in front of the Gordons’ West Hollywood home—my aunt, my brother, my mother, my cousin, and I. I’m still surprised that I didn’t spontaneously combust when the car stopped and I glimpsed Susan through the picture–window. Instead, clutching some sort of mosaictile kit I’d bought earlier in the day to give her for her recent birthday, I trooped with the family up to the door and let it all happen.

What can I tell you about that day, besides the fact that even in my abject panic, I knew from the beginning that it would be one of the most transcendently outstanding days I would ever experience? I remember how Mark seemed to immediately fall for Susan’s non-actor sister, Patty. I remember how kind the Gordons were to us, with Bert

John Wooley and Susan Gordon.

taking us boys into a room full of ham-radio equipment and onesheets from his movies and giving us each a Dell comic book of his newest picture, The Magic Sword, as well as a still of him holding its star (Gary Lockwood) and his steed in the palm of his hand. (See photograph, Page No. 78). I remember walking with Susan and her pet spider monkey, Tammy, down the ivy-bordered sidewalks of her neighborhood. (For years, I told stories about how Tammy, at one point when we were all in the house together, formed an embarrassing erotic attachment to my leg, but now I hope I had made that up.)

That was, indeed, the apex of my infatuation with Susan Gordon. I continued to be a huge fan, and Scott and I started the International Bert I. Gordon Fan Club a year or so later, after I’d ridden the bus to L.A. at the age of 14 to try to break into pictures—which is another story.

As I grew older, the Hollywood-dream bubble I lived in began to shimmer and fade, and when I went off to college and got involved in the sorts of things university life offers a young man, I dropped the ball on the Bert I. Gordon Fan Club. The golden threads that had bound me to the Gordons fell away.

Of course, I would still think warmly about Susan Gordon. But she had left acting—her last film, Picture Mommy Dead, dates from 1966— and in those pre-Internet days finding someone wasn’t easy. I probably didn’t know what I’d do if I found her anyway, beyond perhaps sharing the couple of snapshots that had been taken when I visited her. I did write about her, and I dedicated my 1992 book, Hot Schlock Horror!, “to Susan Gordon, whose movies, TV shows, and magical presence were a deep and wondrous part of my childhood.” I doubted she would see it.

And then, oddly enough, she found me. Or, rather, a New Yorkbased stage director, Robert Armin, did. On December 15, 2001—nearly 40 years after my visit to the Gordons—he eMailed me at the Tulsa World, the newspaper where I was working as an entertainment writer.

Susan Gordon, John Wooley, and
Tammy, the spider monkey.

“Susan Gordon mentioned this evening that you were once the president of the Susan Gordon Fan Club in Oklahoma,” said the note. “If you are the same John Wooley, it would be fun for her to hear from you.” He included a Web address, which told about Susan’s starring in an upcoming play called A Magic Place in a New Time, directed by Armin and debuting in January at the 45TH Street Theatre in New York.

As I found out later, the two of them had been talking, and Susan had mentioned the fan clubs of her youth, remembering some of the names associated with them. I turned out to be pretty easy to find.

Before long, Susan and I were communicating, which led to a ’phone call or two, which in turn led to my sending her a copy of Hot Schlock Horror—wondering what she’d think of having something titled Hot Schlock Horror!dedicated to her. She wrote back that she was “quite touched (and honored).” She sent me a copy of the letter I’d written her back in 1961, with a Sticky Note that read “John, Thanks for the memories! [ signed] Susan,” with a smiley–face by her name. I did an interview with her for Fangoriamagazine.

Her Off Broadway appearance notwithstanding, Susan had been out of the acting business for years, raising children and becoming involved in the jewelry business and other enterprises with her husband. She also began appearing at horror-fan conventions; I like to think that my Fangoria story had something to do with that.

Her preferred form of communication was the Instant Message, which was my least favorite—although I never would have told her that. So even though it was worth putting up with the disruptions of my work to hear from Susan, as the years went by, our correspondence dwindled.

Still, I kept every one of our IM exchanges. And in looking them over as I prepared to write this piece, one from May 13, 2004, jumped out at me.

“Thinking about it,” she wrote, “I am quite honored that your firstever published story was about me. Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome,” I wrote back. “And then consider that 40 years later, I did another one!”
“There’s a story in that alone,” she replied.
“I agree. Let’s hang on for another 40 years and then complete the trifecta, all right?”
“It’s a deal,” she wrote, adding an “LOL,” a smiley-face emoticon, and a “... poof,” which was her online way of saying goodbye.
Susan Gordon died of thyroid cancer on December 11, 2011. These probably won’t be my last words about her.

The Return of Dracula

A.K.A.: The Fantastic Disappearing Man • The Curse of Dracula (Gramercy Pictures • United Artists • 1958)

The return to the popular consciousness of Dracula, Bram Stoker’s vampire nobleman, had been accomplished well before the close-in-time productions of Paul Landres’ The Return of Draculaand Hammer Films’ Horror of Dracula. Universal Pictures’ Dracula films, from Tod Browning’s 1931 version to 1948’s Bud Abbott & Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein, had returned during the 1950s via theatrical reissues and syndication packages for television—not to mention variations upon the theme from Turkey and Mexico. Fresh examinations from America and Great Britain seemed a foregone conclusion. (Coverage of the Hammer-to-Hollywood connection appears in Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6.)

Where Hammer Films retained and embellished upon the Gothic climate with Horror of Dracula, director Landres and screenwriter Pat Fielder chose a modern-day American setting for The Return of Dracula. Their follow–through to the SF-based The Vampire (1957) draws entirely upon supernatural lore.

Francis Lederer, a recurring figure in the Forgotten Horrorscollection, makes a persuasive Dracula, as suave as Bela Lugosi but more understated. Landres and cinematographer Jack MACKenzie depict the Southern California locale in a film noirmanner, with overtones reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut. The story recalls Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) as strikingly as it rechannels Bram Stoker. One surrogate for Van Helsing, played to tragic effect by an unbilled Charles Tannen, poses as an inspector from the Bureau of Immigration, dispatched to investigate new arrivals from a plague-stricken European province.

A Mittel European vampire–hunter, Meyerman (John Wengraf), finds his quarry vanished. At a railroad depot, Belak Gordal (Norbert Schiller), an artist, is leaving for America. The fleeing vampire (Lederer) kills Gordal in order to assume the artist’s identity—thus establishing himself as Patient Zero in a concerted effort to spread the disease.

In Carleton, California, teenage Rachel Mayberry (Norma Eberhardt), her brother, Mickey (Jimmie Baird), and their mother, Cora (Greta Granstedt), await Cora’s cousin, Gordal, whom Cora has not seen since childhood. Rachel finds the impostor elegant and sophisticated, however distant and reclusive. Mickey finds his pet cat dead in an abandoned mineshaft. The bogus Gordal has established a hidden retreat in the mine.

Gordal develops an interest in a blind neighbor, Jennie Blake (Virginia Vincent). At the parish house of the Rev. Mr. Whitfield (Gage
S U S A N G O R D O N • T H E R E T U R N O F D R A C U L A

Clark), Rachel finds Jennie obsessed with a premonition of death. Rachel is gripped by a hypnotic force that is broken by the arrival of her boyfriend, Tim (Ray Stricklyn). Gordal materializes in Jennie’s room. Next morning, Whitfield summons Rachel to Jennie’s bedside. Frantic, Jennie gives to Rachel a crucifix, insists upon closing a window—and collapses in death.

Mack Bryant (Charles Tannen), a cohort of Meyerman’s, introduces himself as an Immigration officer: A death in Gordal’s village

has prompted an investigation of recent depatures from that country. Bryant finds the poseur’s papers in order, but secretly takes a photograph of Cora and Gordal with a hidden camera. Meyerman arrives and takes custody of the film.

Gordal summons Jennie from her crypt and sends her to lure Bryant into a fatal encounter. (The eerie sequence “reveals a flair worthy of Georges Franju,” writes genre historian Phil Hardy.)

Meyerman asks Whitfield to open Jennie’s crypt and displays to the preacher the photograph that Bryant had taken of Gordal and Cora: The print shows only Cora.

In Gordal’s room, Rachel finds a painting depicting her, lying in a casket. Rachel is startled to see that Gordal casts no reflection in a mirror. Gordal places her in a trance.

Meyerman stakes out Jennie’s crypt. Rachel meets Gordal at the mine, but he is repelled by Jennie’s crucifix. Just as Rachel removes the cross, Meyerman meanwhile punctures Jennie’s undead heart—causing Gordal to suffer a pang of agony. In a final surge of menacing ferocity, Gordal falls into a mineshaft, where he is impaled.

Landres directs throughout with a seething restraint— quite unlike the bravura approach of Terence Fisher on Horror of Dracula—with one concession to sensationalism: The black-and-white image turns to livid color with the staking of Virginia Vincent in the crypt. The reduction of Francis Lederer to a skeleton is as striking, in its subdued way, as the showier deterioration of Christopher Lee at the climax of Horror of Dracula

T H E R E T U R N O F D R A C U L A • T H E F L A M E B A R R I E R

The Flame Barrier

(Gramercy • UA • 1958)

Corrosive blobs of primordial
protoplasm had gripped the pop
ular imagination via pulp fiction,
comic books, and radio melodra
ma, what with such celebrated
stories as Joseph Payne
Brennan’s “Slime”; Theodore
Sturgeon’s “It”; and Arch Oboler’s
“The Chicken Heart” and “The
Dark,” episodes of the broadcast
series Lights Out! Comic-book
and animated-cartoon variants
proliferate, too, from The Heapto
Swamp Thing—and even Bugs
Bunny’s amorphously conceived
Nemesis, Gossamer. (Yes, and
even the town of Shapeless,
Mass., owes a debt. Just woofing.)

Best known of this globular
lot is Jack H. Harris’ production
of The Blob (Page No. 149), at
once derivative and innovative.
The Blob’s more immediate
ancestry includes Hammer
Films’ Quatermasspictures andX the Unknown (see Forgotten

Horrors Vol. 6 ), and two more
thoroughly forgotten pictures of
1958: Paul Landres’ The Flame
Barrier, and Edward Bernds’
Space Master X–7(Page No. 105).
The Flame Barrier finds Landres
and screenwriter Pat Fielder (in
collaboration with George
Worthing Yates) reverting to a
science-fictional approach, so
soon after the supernatural
unease of The Return of Dracula.

The U.S. Space Program
presumes an experimental
satellite lost in a zone known as
the Flame Barrier, 200 miles
into the void. No such luck.

Meanwhile, socialite Carol
Dahlmann (Kathleen Crowley)
seeks to mount a search for her
husband, chemical industrialist
Howard Dahlmann, in a
Mexican jungle—where he had
traveled in the hope of finding a
trace of the launch. Two guides,
brothers Dave and Matt

T H E F L A M E B A R R I E R • T H E W O M A N E A T E R

Hollister (Arthur Franz and Robert Brown), dismiss her quest as a fool’s errand. Dave suspects an attempt to have Dahlmann declared dead so that Carol can claim the estate.

The film’s response to Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s breakthrough to space, is patent in terms of exploiting a newfound popular fear of venturing into unknown spheres. That fear is rendered palpable when the guides, accepting the promise of a mercenary stake in the Dahlmann Chemical Co., go barging into a radioactive Green Hell against all better judgment. Far from having vanished, the vessel has brought back a ghastly phenomenon which the superstitious tribal locals regard as some terrible god of fire. The Flame Barrier has come to Earth.

A charred skeleton, presumed to be that of Dahlmann, proves to belong to an Indian. A dying native declares that he has been touched by the fire–god—and then evaporates in a sizzling blur. A chimpanzee, launched as a passenger aboard the rocket, turns up at an abandoned campsite. A viscid mass surrounds the wreckage of the satellite. Carol recognizes her husband, petrified within the ooze. The chimpanzee is vaporized. Field notes left by Howard Dahlmann describe the acidic glob as an organism capable of smothering the planet.

Whereupon Dave Hollister determines to electrocute the mass, using a solar generator wired to metallic ore within the earth. Matt Hollister sacrifices himself while setting up the circuit. Dave fries the blob of caustic tissue and destroys the satellite that had housed it.

Arthur Franz is squarely in his intellectual–heroic element. Kathleen Crowley is suitably imperious as the secretive searcher, whose motives are kept in doubt for a good suspenseful while. Landres directs with a fine grasp of anxiety and anticipation. The atmosphere renders palatable the substandard visual effects.

An additional author, Sam X. Abarbanel (of 1950’s Prehistoric Women), was cited in a preproduction report from Daily Variety Gramercy Pictures had purchased a rough-draft scenario outright from Abarbanel for George Worthing Yates to adapt, with Gramercy standby Pat Fielder as the final-draft screenwriter.

The Woman Eater

IN ENGLAND: Womaneater • 1957–1958 (Fortress Film Productions • Columbia Pictures • 1958–1959)

W. Lee Wilder’s U.S.–British production of The Man without a Body (see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6) had suffered from the wasteful hovering presence of a featherbedding crew, imposed by a bureaucracy upon American studios that sought the economic advantages of shooting in the U.K. That superfluous team—including a token backup director, Charles Saunders—absorbed enough ambition from Wilder to mount Womaneateras a prompt follow–through. The films share the starring presence of George Coulouris, wild of eye and grand of manner, in roles that bear mentioning alongside such generous Mad Genius specialists as Lionel Atwill and John Carradine. The title refers to a carnivorous tree, although it might suit Coulouris, as well.

Coulouris serves Womaneateras Dr. James Moran, seeker after immortality. He supplies a captive Third World Triffid with nubile female flesh. The plant provides him with a sap that re–animates the dead. The process works, but only just: Resurrection also causes a destructive madness sufficient to destroy Moran’s laboratory. But we are getting ahead of the game at the risk of giving away the finale.

The combination of Edward Palmer’s cold grey cinematography, shadow-laden interiors and bad-side-of-London exteriors, and stock jungle footage recalls the sombre aspect of films from Monogram and PRC Pictures of almost a generation before. The dream-state visual style, in turn, looks ahead to a peculiarly Germanic series of prurient crime thrillers, or krimi, such as Alfred Vohrer’s Dead of Eyes of London, that would emerge as practically a self-contained genre during the 1960s. Edwin Astley’s musical score for Womaneaterlends disturbing undertones, with an insistent throbbing that suggests an unwholesome force of vitality.

Brandon Fleming’s screenplay indulges Coulouris’ lunatic flamboyance at every turn. Colouris lends the Faustian madman a walleyed stare that is as persuasive as it is repulsive, and his Oxfordian delivery conveys an utter belief in the scientist’s outlandish quest. Marpessa Dawn brings a laconic, erotic mournful quality to a danceof-death sequence where she succumbs to a primitive rhythm as a prelude to a feeding. Vera Day shows gumption as a rebellious likely victim. Joyce Gregg, as Coulouris’ lover–turned–servant, accounts for a walking-dead sequence that leads into the final conflagration.

The title creature appears to owe a debt of influence to the cartoonist Chester Gould’s ghastly Muerte Vine, a horticultural menace that had provided the horrors for a memorable episode of the comic strip Dick Tracyduring the early 1950s. A far cry from the laughable killer tree of 1957’s From Hell It Came, this animated sculptural monstrosity sports fungoid branches and an array of tentacles, suggestive of some predatory mollusk. Its rooted stance is made all the more frightening by an evidently sentient willingness to grasp any luckless soul whom Coulouris might shove within its reach.

T H E W O M A N E A T E R • W A R O F T H E S A T E L L I T E S

War of the Satellites

(Allied Artists • 1958)

While Paul Landres responded to the Soviets’ Sputnik launch with The Flame Barrier(Page No. 89), Roger Corman took the cue in a different direction with War of the Satellites. Corman’s haste—a shoot of slightly more than a week—grated against his concept (more imaginative and ambitious than Landres had pursued) to the extent that War of the Satellitesbecame a disjointed effort. Live-action and special-effects sequences are awkwardly matched, and Corman’s purposeful direction bogs down under the over–wordiness of Lawrence Louis Goldman’s screenplay. A Red Menace subtext, in which alien invaders represent a stand–in for Russia, renders the film leaden and predictable, at odds with Corman’s customary never-a-dull-moment approach.

The United Nations’ space program faces disaster in the inexplicable destruction of 10 manned satellites. A missile arrives with a warning from an alien civilization: Humankind is a disease that must be quarantined; hence a barrier to discourage exploration. The project’s chief, Dr. Van Ponder (Richard Devon), terms the message a fake and declares that he will lead the next mission. In private, however, Van Ponder acknowleges that the warning is of unknown origin.

An alien force kills Van Ponder but raises duplicates of the scientist to inflitrate the project. Councilman Hodgekiss (Robert Shayne) is astonished by the reappearance of his defunct colleague. The bogus Van Ponder arouses the suspicions of an astronomer, David Boyer (Dick Miller, Corman’s favorite good-luck actor). Boyer locates Van Ponder’s wrecked automobile and concludes that no one could have survived such an accident. Later, Boyer catches Van Ponder in the act of duplicating himself. Boyer’s report meets with disbelief.

W A R O F S A T E L L I T E S • S H O W D O W N A T B O O T H I L L

Van Ponder’s clone becomes infatuated with crew member Sybil Carrington (Susan Cabot). While attempting to seduce her, Van Ponder sends a replica to kill Boyer, who turns the tables upon his antagonist: Boyer discharges a blast of radiation to eliminate the threat to space exploration.

At best a lesser cousin of Corman’s excellent Not of This Earth (1957), War of the Satellitesbenefits from a sustained show of otherworldly monomania from Richard Devon and a rare heroic turn from Dick Miller, who dealt as a rule in eccentric comedy, even in his more antagonistic portrayals. Susan Cabot is fine as the researcher who awakens sufficient lustful feelings in Devon to keep him distracted from the campaign of sabotage. Robert Shayne anchors the space-program council in steadfast determination.

Corman had vowed in 1957 to beef up the screenplay with a stern criticism of the Real World bureaucrats who had allowed the United States to lag behind the U.S.S.R. in the quest for space. (This, according to a report in Daily Variety, the tradepaper.) Corman told us in 2001 that he had encountered objections from the Production Code Administration, which “feared that too much editorial criticism of Uncle Sam would get us accused of treason, or some such nonsense.”

“So we were allowed to keep the criticism,” Corman added, “as long as we couched it in terms of a pro-space argument—and refrained from mentioning the good ol’ U.S. of A. by name. Which was too much make-nice hogwash to suit me, but of course we had a picture to get out to the box office.”

Showdown at Boot Hill

(Regal Films • 20TH Century–Fox • 1958)

Regal Films, an independent studio attached to big-time 20 TH Century–Fox, is responsible for such Forgotten Horrorscenterpieces as Kurt Neumann’s matched set of Kronosand She Devil. Gene Fowler, JR., the director of such additional essential Forgotten Horrors entries as I Was a Teenage Werewolf (see F.H. Vol 6) and IMarried a Monster from Outer Space (Page No. 152), delivered his single most accomplished film, Showdown at Boot Hill, at Regal–Fox. The film is a fine example of the Frontier Gothic style, as much a film noiras it is a Western, with deep and turbulent currents of Existential Self–Doubt.

And who better qualified than Charles Bronson to carry such a picture? The actor, compact and wiry, recalls the hair-trigger intensity that had characterized Bob Steele’s Hamlet-on-horseback heyday of the Depression years, with a comparably reflective, brooding quality. (Steele had gradually abandoned cowboy-star duties in order to become an all-’round character man. His supporting turn as an impatient small-town lawman in Giant from the Unknown[Page No. 56] is a welcome reminder of the horse-opera period.)

Bronson serves Showdown at Boot Hillas Luke Welch, a U.S. marshal–turned–bounty hunter, who seeks the notorious Con Maynor (Thomas B. Henry). Maynor leads a double life—a wanted man in one region, but a respected citizen in the town where Welch provokes a showdown, with lethal results for Maynor. An inquest exonerates Welch, but the authorities’ refusal to identify the corpse as Maynor prevents Welch from collecting the reward.

Friends notify Maynor’s ill-tempered brother, Charles (George Douglas), that Welch has remained in town. Doc Weber (John Carradine), a philosophical barber who doubles as an undertaker, warns Welch.

Weber and Sally Crane (Fintan Meyler), a lonely waitress, seem the only souls about who can sympathize with Welch’s plight. Townsman Sloane (Robert Hutton) rallies a lynch mob. Les Patton (Michael Mason), the trigger-happy lover of Sally’s saloonkeeper mother (Carole Mathews), proposes more direct action— which backfires with the slaying of the mother as she attempts to intervene.

Con Maynor’s mourners head for the burial ground on Boot Hill. Welch confides to Sally that he had become a bounty hunter because he had felt insecure about his short stature; killing presented a way to earn respect. Welch goes unarmed to Boot Hill, where he declines to defend himself against an assault from Charles Maynor. Sloane breaks up the fracas.

Welch explains that he had owed it to Charles to let him avenge his brother. Sally, relieved that Welch has survived, embraces him.

Louis Vittes’ elegaic screenplay makes for a picture as contemplative as any acknowledged classic of the so-called Adult Western subgenre (for example, Shane or High Noon or The Ox–Bow Insident). The depiction of an outwardly peaceable village, poised to erupt in indignant violence, accounts for a strong element of tension. Bronson receives helpful support from Fintan Meyler, as a hesitant romantic interest, and John Carradine, as a voice of reason and mordant wit. Carradine supplies momentary comic relief with a barbershop monologue involving the blackly humorous tale of a severed ear and a hungry dog.

S H O W D O W N A T B O O T H I L L • 5 0 – F O O T W O M A N

Attack of the 50–Foot WomanAllison

(Allied Artists • Woolner Bros. • 1958)Hayes. Commentary by JAN ALAN HENDERSON
A neurotic socialite goes motoring
through the desert. A prized diamond
adorns her neckline, an invitation to
greed and lustful mayhem. An alien
spacecraft lands. A gigantic bald extrater
restrial abducts the woman—intent upon
heisting the jewel to power his craft. She
escapes and runs, bedraggled, into town.
Meanwhile, her parasitic cad of a husband
is fooling around with the town floozy.

The dilemma facing Nancy Archer is as
many-faceted as her conspicuous diamond—
as cosmically attuned as it is soap–operatic.

Nathan Juran’s Attack of the 50-Foot Woman
sports a title more famous than the story it graces,
an oddly metaphorical–cornball combination of cheesecake, erotic jealousy, and proto-feminist rage, writ large and literal.

An after–effect of the too-close encounter with the spaceman is a hyperactive pituitary gland. The malady renders Mrs. Archer (played by Allison Hayes) as immense as King Kong—and like Kong, intent upon retrieving the strayed object of her affections from an interloper, if only for the sake of revenge. Her philandering husband, Harry, is played with impudence and arrogance by William Hudson, in striking contrast with his heroic physician of 1957’s The Man Who Turned to Stone. The local tramp, Honey Parker, is a study in kittenish malice from Yvette Vickers—a show-stopping performance that makes more of the role than anybody had bothered to write.

Juran travels here under the pseudonym of Nathan Hertz. Attack of the 50-Foot Womanis drive-in fodder of conspicuous cheapness, though touched with performances of generous intensity, a wealth of edgy dialogue, and a bracingly frank sexuality on a par with Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll(1956). Juran’s bigger picture of 1957, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, seems the work of some other director entirely—mock-Disney pageantry in lieu of concerted storytelling, topheavy with lulls out of proportion to Ray Harryhausen’s splendid time-lapse animation sequences, a vast and featureless plain interrupted by the occasional outcropping of artistry.

Attack of the 50-Foot Woman has the advantage of a merciless and momentous script (by Mark Hanna, a recurring figure in these pages) that makes no apologies for its overriding emotionalism. Juran plays

Attack of the unconvincing prop-department hand.

the ordeal straightforwardly, seeking not so much to generate scares as to convey the fear and contemptuous indignation that drive the foredoomed Nancy Archer.

The film makes no concessions to camp (a self-conscious failing of a 1993 telefilm remake) but insinuates subtle humor with the occasional double-entendreline from an earnest sheriff (George Douglas) who attempts in vain to contain the onslaught and finally resorts to riot-gear weaponry. More overt comedy relief comes from Frank Chase, as a deputy who seems a cross between Curly Howard and Don Knotts’ Barney Fife, with his speed raps and fidgety mannerisms.

Attack ’s production values suffer from the same special-effects deficiencies as those in Bert I. Gordon’s close-in-time trilogy of biggerthan-real human-monster movies— The Cyclops and The Amazing Colossal Man ETSEQ.( Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6). Purportedly immense characters appear more superimposed than integrated with normalsized settings, and ragged bleed–lines and a ghostly translucency jar the viewer out of a willingness to believe. An oversized prop–hand in Attacklacks fluid mobility and betrays the rigidity of papier–maché (In fairness to the low-budget sector, it bears noting that awkward image–bleeds also detract from the urgency of Jack Arnold’s big-studio gem of 1957, The Incredible Shrinking Man.) Attack of the 50-Foot Womanexerted a remarkable box-office clout, grossing approximately six times its $88,000 investment, in testimony to the truism that a persuasive attitude can succeed where pictorial realism is deficient.

The giant who triggers the crisis is played by Mike Ross, who also appears as the bartender at a dive where Honey Parker and Harry Archer flaunt their affair. Miss Vickers’ improvised dance sequence is a touch suggested by supporting player Chase. (Miss Vickers cited Rita Hayworth in 1946’s Gildaas an inspiration for the shimmy.)

Attack of the 50-Foot Womandraws conviction from its very locale, the area surrounding Tarzana, California. The desert figures as a will
A T T A C K O F T H E 5 0 – F O O T W O M A N • Y V E T T E V I C K E R S
sapping, suffocating expanse in other kindred pictures of the period, from the science–fantasy of The Monolith Monstersand the treacherous yearnings of The Tattered Dress(speaking of Jack Arnold) to the Existential Quandary of The Beast with a Million Eyes ( Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6). More in the manner of The Tattered Dressthan any other film of fantastic conception, Attack of the 50-Foot Womantrades with alarming cynicism upon the petty provincialism that often characterizes isolated, landlocked towns.

• • •

In 2000, 10 years before her death in unwarranted obscurity, Yvette Vickers sat for an interview with Cult Movies magazine. Journalist Coco Kiyonaga asked, “Would you have preferred playing the 50-Foot Woman?”

“I never wanted to play the part,” Miss Vickers answered. “For one thing, I think I wasn’t old enough to play that part.” (At 30 in 1958, she was two years older than title player Allison Hayes. Go figure.) Miss Vickers continued: “I always wanted to play the wicked girlfriend. It was a fun part, and I had a chance to go crazy with that role. Many people told me that I was too convincing as the naughty girlfriend, and would give me these strange looks as if to say, ‘We know what you’re reallylike!’ Most of the time, I got a lot of praise for my work, because I think that they could tell I always had a lot of energy, and put 100 percent into whatever I did.”

Miss Vickers had told us in 1987: “I had a lot of fun working with Allison Hayes, a great gal, and we both took the parts seriously, no matter how unbelievable the story was. We had the same agent, Jack Pomeroy, so we sort of knew each other through Jack.”

In Mark Thomas McGee’s Faster and Furiouser (1991), Miss Vickers amplifies the thoughts on Miss Hayes, who died in 1977. “I thought she was beautiful. There have been few women in this town who have been really nice, really warm… But she was.”

JAN ALAN HENDERSON ON
Yvette Vickers

One spring day in 1987, I sat in the living–room of a Hollywood publicist, waiting to meet Yvette Vickers. My mind flashed back to almost three decades earlier, when I had visited the Pix Theater on Hollywood Boulevard to see Attack of the Giant Leeches.The film had come alive when Yvette Vickers arrived on screen.

This image snapped out of my head when in stepped a tall, thin fellow with jet-black hair, followed by a small, blonde woman. I was introduced to artist Dave Stevens and Yvette Vickers—the centerpiece of my daydream. We talked about Stevens’ comic-book creation, The Rocketeer

Miss Vickers spoke of reviving her musical career, and of a play she was writing. I mentioned that my band, Nyck Varoom’s Tomb, had recorded a song called “Leeches.” One thing led to another.

A few weeks later, Miss Vickers showed up for a rehearsal with Nyck Varoom, and after a rundown she sang “Leeches” with us. Our first gig with Yvette came at a notorious Goth club, the Zombie Zoo, in West Hollywood—former site of the equally notorious Millionaire Club, a 1960s hangout for Hugh Hefner.

The opening act, a punk-rock band, produced 20 minutes of sonic feedback. How could I explain this mayhem to Miss Vickers? Our band made music, not noise, and this audience was out of control. We might

Yvette Vickers and
Jan Alan Henderson.

as well have been playing for Martians: The audience seemed more interested in launching saliva rockets in our direction. (We were told later that this was a sign of affection.)

But we played on, ducking objects and liquids, while being heckled by intoxicated customers. Then Miss Vickers arrived, accompanied by Dave Stevens. The audience began to get into the groove.

We announced Miss Vickers and the song, “Leeches,” to a great reception, and we rocked the rafters with the slimy tale of woe. Yvette Vickers had tamed the savage punk–rockers.

We had Miss Vickers as a guest artist for 19 shows, and she recorded a version of “Leeches” with us. We got great press from a Japanese science-fiction magazine, and we were featured in the 11TH volume of the nostalgia buffs’ encyclopædia, Whatever Became Of…?

Yvette Vickers was a great artist. She saved the day at the Zombie Zoo, so long ago, just as she had enlivened the low-budget horror-movie scene.

The Space Children

(Alland Productions • Paramount • 1958)

Warnings against nuclear proliferation are rare in the midcentury’s commercialized popular culture, which was controlled by Old Wealth, with its wasteful industries and its voracious appetite for lucrative warfare. How William Alland’s production company managed to get away with The Space Childrenduring the warlike late 1950s is less a mystery than that of how Alland managed to place the film with big-time Paramount Pictures. Neither question should cause anyone to lose any sleep: The film hardly provoked any stampedes to the box office.

A larger mystery, though more simply explained, is that of how Stanley Kramer’s well-heeled independent production of On the Beach (Page No. 254), from Nevil Shute’s anti-nuclear-war novel, managed to get made, much less distributed by United Artists, at such a time. The rattling of sabres between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. was the prevail

Y V E T T E V I C K E R S • T H E S P A C E C H I L D R E N

– 1O1 –
ing fashion, after all, and hostilities surrounding Cuba and Vietnam were growing all out of proportion to the global insignificance of those Third World outposts, whether near to or far from American shores.

Kramer obscured the central situation of Shute’s tale—a man-made apocalypse and its poisonous aftermath—with the marquée appeal of Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins, et Al., and reduced urgent concerns to mere pageantry. Shute’s headlong narrative momentum becomes a meandering exercise in movie-star posturing, barely recognizable as a polemic against belligerent American leadership and unlikely to leave anyone questioning the Status Quo.

But we were talking about The Space Children. William Alland had been involved more prominently with Universal–International Pictures—as in 1957’s The Deadly Mantis, a desultory entry in the 1950s’ big-bug craze—but rallied with the attachment to Paramount for The Space Childrenand The Colossus of New York(Page No. 103). Often mistaken for a commonplace juvenile adventure, The Space Childrenhas the distinction of being the final SF film directed by Jack Arnold, who had developed a following at Universal with such cosmically attuned pictures as It Came from Outer Spaceand The Incredible Shrinking Man(1953–1957).

Bernard C. Schoenfeld’s screenplay, a drastic reworking of a story by Tom Filer, tells of a missile project that will launch a hydrogen bomb into orbit. Children of the project’s technicians fall under the telepathic control of a peace-seeking alien creature. The creature also intervenes against an episode of child abuse—a drunken thug of a stepfather (Russell D. Johnson) dies from the shock of seeing the alien—and takes up residence briefly with an engineer (Adam Williams) and his family.

The youngsters develop mental powers sufficient to sabotage the launch. The alien refuses to confront any figures of authority until after the rocket has been destroyed—and then, the creature emerges only long enough to transport itself into outer space. When questioned by the officer–in–charge (Richard Shannon), the principal youngster (Michel Ray) explains that children throughout the world have been leading the charge to destroy nuclear arsenals. The film closes on a note of sanctimony, courtesy of ST. Matthew: “...[E]xcept ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Filer’s original story, “The Egg,” runs along the lines of Invasion of the Body Snatchers(1956) or John Wyndham’s “The Midwich Cuckooos” (filmed in 1960 as Village of the Damned), in terms of estraterrestrial control. Filer had described an organism that absorbs and transforms a young girl. The film’s creature is an immense sculpture of plastic and neon, built by Paramount Pictures’ propmaster, Ivyl Burks.

Performances are by turns befuddled and purposefully eerie, with few standouts. Michel Ray makes a determined ringleader for the possessed offspring of warmongers. Johnny Crawford, of network television’s The Rifleman, has a prominent lesser role. A low-billed Orison Whipple Hungerford, JR., appears as a guardsman—quite at odds with his greater ambitions. Hungerford soon resurfaced at Warner Bros.’ new television-production subsidiary as Ty Hardin, a prospective rival to an established Western star, Clint Walker. Originally brought in as a likely replacement for Walker on the teleseries Cheyenne, Hardin instead received a starring series of his own, the enormously popular Bronco TV Westerns had supplanted the big screen’s B–picture Westerns.

T H E S P A C E C H I L D R E N • T H E C O L O S S U S O F N E W Y O R K

The Colossus of New York

(Alland Productions • Paramount • 1958)

Eugène Lourié’s The Colossus of New Yorkis consistent thematically with the director’s handling of monsters–at–large in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms(1953) and Behemoth, the Sea Monster(Page No. 239). Each such creature radiates a mournful longing as much as it dispenses menace. Colossusraises the emotional stakes by giving its creature a humanoid aspect and a transplanted human brain, then forcing upon it the duty of protecting the offspring of its brain–donor. Lourié would return to the compounded theme with Gorgo(1961), in which a gigantic lizard, rampant, proves to be the progeny of an even larger lizard, driven by maternal instinct.

As a companion to Alland–Paramount’s The Space Children (Page No. 100), The Colossus of New Yorkcompletes a view of childhood as an age of wonder and terror, in much the same way William Cameron Menzies had done with Invaders from Marsin 1953 (See Forgotten Horrors Vol. 5). The child here, played with manly determination by Charles Herbert (of The Boy and the Pirates), is the son of a humanitarian scientist who finds himself resurrected as a mehanical giant.

Upon returning from a ceremonial honor in Stockholm, Dr. Jeremy Spensser (Ross Martin) is killed in a traffic accident while attempting to retrieve a toy airplane for his son, Billy (Herbert). Spensser’s father, Dr. William Everett Spensser (Otto Kruger), demands that the corpse be taken to his laboratory—where he removes the brain and preserves it in a living state. The surgeon insists that the mind of a genius must be independent of the body; a colleague (Robert Hutton) counters that the brain requires its natural body in order to retain human emotions.

Their argument seems a matter of theoretical gibberish until William enlists his other son, engineer Henry Spensser (John Baragrey), to fashion a body to house the brain. Jeremy wakes as an eight-foot robot; his anguished outcry causes his widow, Anne (Mala Powers), to sense a resurrection. William and Henry keep the breakthrough to themselves.

William maintains that Jeremy must resume his work to end world hunger. Though deprived of ordinary human senses, Jeremy develops a sixth sense. After a year of toiling in secret, Jeremy visits his own grave. There, he encounters his son. Billy befriends the creature, which he calls “the giant.” Jeremy becomes enraged: William had told him that Anne and Billy also had been killed in the accident. Jeremy declares independence and, in a surge of gathering madness, grows to resent Henry’s infatuation with Anne.

The robot kills Henry with a blast of radiation. Jeremy renounces his humanitarian nature and places William in a hypnotic thrall. William denies the existence of such a monster as has been reported to the police. Jeremy begins a murderous rampage at a United Nations conference. Billy rushes to the colossus and denounces him. Aware of his lost humanity, Jeremy asks the boy to trip a power switch hidden beneath the robot’s left arm. The colossus collapses. William acknowledges at last that a mind without a soul can only turn monstrous.

Thelma Schnee’s mournful scenario (from a story by Willis Goldbeck) is given a cold grey visualization by cinematographer John F. Warren—a crystallization of Existential philosophy, aimed at a mass audience that could not have distinguished Existentialism from eggnog. The title creature, like its Promethean story, takes a cue from Mary W.

T H E C O L O S S U S O F N E W Y O R K • s p a c e m a s t e r x – 7

Shelley’s Frankenstein—to the extent of a physical aspect that recalls Boris Karloff’s presence in the Frankensteinpictures of the 1930s. The creature–suit was designed by the stunts-and-costuming artist Charles Gemora, in collaboration with sculptor Ralph Jester. (Gemora’s greater prominence, as an impersonator of gorillas, had dated from the Depression years.) The framework of burlap, plastic, rubber, and fencing wire contained an electrical apparatus to move the limbs and a breathing mechanism for its wearer, stuntman Edward Wolff.

Wolff had portrayed Bela Lugosi’s scowling robot–servant in 1939’s The Phantom Creeps and one of the mutant creatures in Invaders from Mars. At a gathering of stunt artists during the 1960s, Wolff told Forgotten Horrors’ George E. Turner that the donning of Colossus 160-pound costume required almost an hour; the studio built an immense reclining rack for Wolff to rest between takes. Visual-effects artist John P. Fulton supplied the creature with glowing eye–beams in a process similar to that of his transformation of Boris Karloff to a luminous predator in The Invisible Ray(1936).

Strapped for orchestral accompaniment by a Musicians’ Union strike, producer William Alland resisted the temptation to use existing recordings from other films and resorted instead to an original solopiano score by Van Cleave. This remarkable music, a pyrotechnical concerto in itself, emphasizes the morbid loneliness of the story. So does Ross Martin’s soulful voice, as the disembodied intelligence forced to live within a machine.

While working as art director—his principal occupation—on the 1970s teleseries Kung Fu, Eugène Lourié related a humorous anecdote from the shooting of Martin’s funeral scene: “Ross, now, he dozed off in the casket while we were rolling. Which was okay, because he was supposed to be dead, in any event. But then he started snoring, and the microphones picked up Ross’ nose-flute recital along with the dialogue. So we had to cut, wake him up, and reshoot.” Martin related the same tale to George Turner in 1973 on the set of The Return of Charlie Chan. Apocryphal or not, at least the participants had bothered to get their stories straight.

Space Master X–7

(Regal Films • 20TH Century–Fox • 1958)

The influence of Nigel Kneale’s BBC teleplay, The Quatermass Experiment (filmed by Hammer, in 1955), persists in Edward Bernds’ Space Master X–7, which concerns a corrosive fungus from outer space. The film also echoes Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (Fox; 1950) in its account of a rampant contagion, and as such foreshadows the plague scenarios of David Cronenberg ( Rabid, E.G) and George A.

Romero ( Night of the Living Dead ETSEQ.), not to mention any numberof disease-borne disaster melodramas. X–7’s growing mass of corruption runs on a parallel track to Irvin S. Yeaworth, JR.’s The Blob (Page No. 149), which was filmed earlier but released later.

Space Master X–7 is distinctive as a documentarylike film noirriff on a theme of cosmic menace. (The musical score employs the ominous stock recordings that Romero would use for 1968’s Night of the Living Dead.) The toxic substance, borne by a space–probe, is claimed by a reclusive scientist, Charles Pommer (Paul Frees, one of the great off-screen voices, in a rare turn on camera).

Lifting an ominous term from Ray Bradbury, Pommer dubs the fungus Blood Rust. Pommer’s experiments infect his combative com

S P A C E M A S T E R X – 7 • G I R L I N T H E W O O D S Paul Frees and Lynn Thomas.

mon-law wife, Lora Greeling (Lynn Thomas), before the fungus can devour him. She departs in a taxicab driven by the Three Stooges’ Moe Howard. The contagion spreads.

The Stooges connection runs deep: Associate producer Norman Maurer was Moe Howard’s son–in–law, and director Bernds had handled many of Columbia Pictures’ Stooges comedies. Maurer, a cartoonist who had packaged the Stooges’ comic-book series, appears with Howard in a scene where the cabbie describes his poisonous passenger to a police station’s sketch artist.

The hunt for Lora Greeling drives the film. The spread of the infection is inconsistent: Scenarists George Worthing Yates and Daniel Mainwaring allow the searchers to wander unprotected, without consequence. The gathering fungus is a patch of carpeting, stage-dressed with nasty-looking blotches and manipulated from beneath by simple puppetry.

Suspense is lacking until a hasty finale. The fungus spreads over a trans-Pacific airliner. Lora turns herself in as a fugitive. The ’plane makes a pancake landing without waffling, and all aboard are placed in quarantine for decontamination. Similarly fungoid cringe–inducers figure in Mutiny in Outer Space(1965) and The Green Slime (1968).

Girl in the Woods

(AB–PT Pictures • Republic Pictures • 1958)

A tale of legalized treacheries and the horrors of hick-town mob violence, Tom Gries’ Girl in the Woods benefits from a vivid portrayal of martyred righteousness by Paul Langton and a gruff show of heroic protagonism–under–pressure from Forrest Tucker. Tucker is a wandering logger, torn between the urge to settle down and the desire to help an outlaw lumberman (Langton) at odds with a crooked company. The monster of the piece is a lynch-mob mentality.

Luke Plummer (Langton) steals timber from land their family had owned until driven out by big-shot lumberman Whitlock (Murvyn Vye, the villain of The Boy and the Pirates). The townspeople resent

Whitlock’s intrusion. While fleeing, Plummer suffers a fractured leg. Newcomer Steve Corby (Tucker) sets the break and promises to keep Plummer’s hiding–place a secret.

Corby secures work as high–rigger for Big Jim (Barton M ACLane), the resentful manager of Whitlock’s company. Big Jim’s antsy teenage daughter, Sonda (Diana Francis), ogles Corby. Corby’s wife, Bell (Maggie Hayes), blames their rootlessness on his fondness for gambling; a losing lumberman, elsewhere, had caused Corby’s blacklisting.

Corby’s skill and courage impress the workers. Corby protects Sonda from a group of horndog toughs. The girl, in turn, attempts to seduce Corby—who rebuffs her. Whitlock promises a reward to anyone who will reveal Luke Plummer’s hiding–place. Sonda notices Corby sitting in at a hand of poker and informs Bell. Whitlock tempts Sonda further with an offer to blame Corby for her betrayal of Luke. She buys into the scheme, and Corby finds himself not only blamed but also framed for the murder of Plummer by Whitlock. Bell accepts the accusation as fact. Corby becomes an outcast on the run—the quarry of a lynching posse.

Sheltered by the village’s doctor (Bartlett Robinson), Corby waits out the mob until evidence can gather against Whitlock and Sonda. Bell finally senses the truth. Big Jim goes to capture Whitlock, only to find himself overpowered. Corby apprehends Whitlock and bests him in a fistfight. All ends well for all who deserve it.

Forrest Tucker (also seen in the British-made Cosmic Monsters and The Crawling Eye) carries the show as the harried, resilient forester. Barton MACLane fares well in an unusually sympathetic part. Newcomer Diana Francis, in her only film despite favorable reviews, is memorable as a small-town tart with a taste for petty vengeance.

G I R L I N T H E W O O D S • C U R S E O F T H E D E M O N

Curse of the Demon

IN ENGLAND: Night of the Demon
(Associated British • Sabre Films • Columbia • 1958)

In Dana Andrews, a major-league leading man on the skids, Jacques Tourneur found a star player ideal for the role of a beleaguered sort in conflict with forces beyond comprehension. Andrews and Tourneur examined such devil-and-the-deep situations on two memorable assignments: The Fearmakers (1958) pits a corporate executive (Andrews), weakened by a prisoner-of-war ordeal, against a Fifth Column conspiracy to weaken his influential company for a Communist infiltration. In Curse of the Demon, Andrews is a paranormal psychologist (however skeptical) who lands amidst a devil-worship cult. The villainous antagonism is formidable in each instance; the heroic protagonism is likewise, despite crippling doubts.

Tourneur had developed a mastery worthy of Alfred Hitchcock at depicting ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations. Tourneur’s proving–ground was Val Lewton’s production unit at RKO–Radio Pictures of the 1940s, where such poetic studies in nightmarish subtlety as Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Manestablished a nuanced standard quite the opposite of the literalized terrors of Universal Pictures’ monster-movie assembly line. The style merged to defining effect with the film noir movement in Tourneur’s Out of the Past(1946) and Nightfall(1957).

Andrews serves Curse of the Demonas John Holden, who arrives in London on business, only to learn of the death of a colleague, Henry Harrington (Maurice Denham), who had been investigating a cult headed by Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MACGinnis). A preamble reveals that

C U R S E O F T H E D E M O N • T E E N A G E C A V E M A N

Karswell had invoked a curse against Harrington. At the British Museum, Holden retraces Harrington’s research and discovers that a demonic manuscript is missing. Karswell appears, unbidden, and invites Holden to his estate to peruse a translation of the manuscript. Karswell leaves Holden with a cryptic and ominous message in vanishing ink.

Harrington’s niece, Joanna (Peggy Cummins), reveals that a parchment from Karswell had caused her uncle to believe himself under a spell. Although Holden dismisses the notion, he visits the Karswell estate. Karswell summons a bolt of lightning and threatens Holden unless the investigation is dropped. Later on, Holden finds a runic parchment that Karswell has planted. The page flies from Holden’s grasp and drifts toward a fireplace—only to be kept away from the flames by a grate. A séance seems to bring a warning from Harrington’s restless spirit.

Holden seeks to return the parchment, the better to cause the curse to backfire. A last-ditch ruse aboard a departing train leaves Karswell attempting to chase down the menacing scrap of paper, which summons a demon. Crushed and thrown into the path of an approaching train, Karswell is pronounced the victim of an accident. Holden muses that the truth is often better left unknown.

A splendid show of outwardly jovial menace from Niall M ACGinnis makes Karswell an ideal counterweight to Dana Andrews’ level-headed man of determined action. The adaptation of a story by Montague R. James, “Casting the Runes” (from More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary; 1911), honors the source in both letter and spirit, barring an element of sensationalism imposed by the production company.

An opening sequence, set among Druidic ruins, declares that “supernatural creatures exist in a world of darkness.” Tourneur had intended accordingly to keep the demon in suggestive shadow, in a manner consistent with his projects with Val Lewton.

“The scenes with the demon were shot without my involvement. My insistence upon subtlety was overriden,” Tourneur told George E. Turner during an interview in 1962, while the director was at work with Roger Corman at American International Pictures.

Tourneur continued: “I had established a demonic presence in the woodlands sequence, where Dana Andrews is chased by a vague shape, sort of cloudy. But then, the studio insisted that the audience must seethe creature from the very beginning.” (Tourneur acknowledged that he had agreed to a split-second glimpse at the finale.) He added: “But after I had returned to America, that fool of an English producer [Hal E. Chester] made that horrible thing the greater point of the picture—and thencarried it over into the advertising campaign.”

Teenage Caveman

(Malibu Productions • American International • 1958)

Roger Corman’s opportunistic homage to One Million B.C.(1940) is hardly so respectful as to refrain from lifting footage from Hal Roach’s famous lizards-as-dinosaurs picture. The appropriation was fair-and-square legal, of course—Roach had long since licensed the stock footage, final-cut clips and outtakes alike, for lease by other producers in need of prefabricated visual effects—but it serves to mark Teenage Cavemanas one of those films that could not exist without the influence of a more highly pedigreed ancestor. (Stock footage also comes from 1948’s Unknown Island. A prominent monster costume and its wearer appear, as well, in another Corman production of 1958, Night of the Blood Beast.)

T E E N A G E C A V E M A N • I B U R Y T H E L I V I N G

And speaking of opportunistic impulses: Teenage Cavemantakes its title from Herman Cohen’s simultaneous cycle of youthful-monster movies, which had begun in 1957 with I Was a Teenage Werewolf Corman’s film had begun shooting during April of 1958 under a more pedestrian title, Prehistoric World, until studio honcho Samuel Z. Arkoff realized he had a craze worth exploiting. Hence Teenage Caveman, a subversive anti-nuclear piece that pretends for much of its 66 minutes to be a chronicle of the dawn of humankind.

A rebellious tribesman known as the Boy (Robert Vaughn, the star–in–waiting of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) breaks with his reclusive clan to explore a land more fertile than the barren known world. A perilous expedition results in disaster and discovery, by turns, and earns the Boy the hatred of a fellow primitive known as the Clansman (Frank DE Kova). The Boy becomes an outcast, befriended only by a blonde tribeswoman, the Girl (Darah Marshall). A hideous creature (Ross Sturlin, also of Night of the Blood Beast) lurks about. A traveler bearing a message of peace faces a stoning.

At length, the Boy and his father (Leslie Bradley) defy tribal law and explore further. The creature approaches, attempting to communicate. The Clansman, following with malicious intent, destroys the creature—which proves to be an old man in a cumbersome garment. Inside the suit is a book that tells of an atomic holocaust that had wrecked civilization. Though perplexed, the Boy and his father decree an end to their tribe’s isolation and set out to rebuild a society free of the shackles of superstition. File that one under Yeah, Okay, Right, Whatever You Say, Boss.

The simplistic and hopeful pacifism of The Astounding She–Monster(Page No. 46) reasserts itself here to the extent of a didactic, hopeful preachment—at unusual stance for Corman, who more commonly anticipates devastation. (There remains a cynical tag–ending, however.) The performances are expressive, seasoned with such patches as a quicksand crisis and the threats posed by Frank DE Kova’s Clansman, who represents the tyranny of religion.

A coda reveals the monstrous aspect of the old man as a radiationproof suit. As the last specimen of his race, he had believed that the new primitives might develop a civilization immune to the temptations of warfare. The grim punchline is the revelation that modern-day society—the audience, that is—is the unpromising result of this evolution. The Cold War allegory could scarcely be more blunt.

I Bury the Living

(Maxim Productions • United Artists • 1958)

Richard Boone, the haunted protagonist of network television’s noir-flavored Western Have Gun, Will Travel, suits up in modern-day attire for I Bury the Living, a tale of Existential Anguish disguised as a horror thriller. The disguise is persuasive.

Boone is Robert Kraft, a small-town businessman and councilman, who finds himself pressed into an unwanted responsibility for the local cemetery. A map of the burial grounds contains pins designating the sites—white for reserved plots, black for occupied graves. Caretaker Andy McKee (Theodore Bikel) is none too pleased to face retirement, but Kraft assures McKee that his service will entitle him to a pension. Kraft mistakenly inserts black pins in the mapped location of graves reserved on behalf of his friend Stu Drexel (Glenn Vernon). Word arrives of the deaths of Drexel and his wife (Lynn Bernay) in an

automobile accident. A newspaper reporter, Jess Jessup (Herbert Anderson) assures Kraft that the seeming connection between the black pins and the accident is a coincidence.

A second black-pin insertion is followed by a matching death. Kraft’s father (Howard Smith), who had imposed the graveyard duties, scoffs at Kraft’s misgivings. The father selects a plot at random in which to place a black pin; he proclaims that if the owner, Henry Trowbridge (Russ Bender), should die, then Kraft may resign.

Kraft learns of Trowbridge’s death. The Town Council convenes to debate Kraft’s request to resign. The members insist that their own white plot–pins be replaced with black pins, the better to demonstrate the ludicrous nature of Kraft’s suspicions. The councilmen begin dying, as if in fulfillment of a supernatural prophecy. A further test finds Kraft ordered to place a black pin in the gravesite of businessman Jake Mittel. A detective, Lt. Clayborne (Robert Osterloh), explains that Mittel is in Paris—and should he die, then the police may consider Kraft’s strange explanation of cause–and–effect.

Kraft, tormented by the belief that he has the power to bestow death, reasons that perhaps he has the power to restore life. He replaces the black pins for all the recently deceased townspeople with white pins—and then collapses. He wakes to find an unearthed gravesite, which he recognizes as the plot for Mr. and Mrs. Drexel. Kraft finds many victims’ graves empty. Driven to a near-suicidal despair, Kraft receives a report of Jake Mittel’s death in Paris.

Whereupon Andy McKee, the ousted caretaker, arrives to deem the report false: Mittel cannot have died, McKee insists. McKee reveals himself as the killer of all concerned, having strangled each citizen in indignation at having been forced into retirement. The police arrive; McKee, now convinced that his victims have returned to claim him, collapses in death. Lt. Clayborne informs Kraft that McKee had been a suspect all along. The detective admits that the false report of Mittel’s death was a ruse to force McKee to confess. (McKee had

I B U R Y T H E L I V I N G • T H E H A U N T E D S T R A N G L E R
unearthed the graves in an extravagant attempt to torment Kraft further.) Kraft abandons the unwanted job and takes solace with his fiancée (Peggy Maurer, wife of the big-time director Arthur Penn).

Albert Band, directing from a script by Louis Garfinkle, paces I Bury the Living like a dream-state fugue, experienced by Richard Boone’s morose and hapless character. Inconceivable fears mount, rendering credible the crackpot illogic of Theodore Bikel’s outlandish scheme of petty vengeance. Bikel, a folksinger–turned–actor, informs the caretaker with a Gælic attitude of almost supernatural intensity.

Bikel mutters an off-key melody that, in turn, is assimilated into Gerald Fried’s eerie, droning musical score. Frederick Gately’s photography achieves a surrealistic quality—the film works on an experimental level, contrasting a nightmarish situation against the homely provincialism of the setting—with its concentration upon the huge map of the graveyard, displayed in a room as bleak and cold as a grave. (The design of the map grows to resemble a leering face.) The mundane, anti-supernatural resolution, which finds the killer gone as mad as he had hoped to drive Boone’s character, suggests influences from Edgar Allan Poe and Cornell Woolrich.

With his natural air of strong-jawed manliness and simian warmth, Richard Boone suits well the role of a purposeful businessman intimidated by the demands of Civic Duty (Robert Kraft would prefer to stick with running the local department store) and reduced to a state of cowering by force of worry and an overwrought imagination. Robert Osterloh, the film’s closest approximation of a heroic presence, plays the police lieutenant for full measure of manipulative cynicism: If the scheme to betray a killer should cost Kraft his sanity, then so be it. Herbert Anderson—soon to become the embodiment of cartoonist Hank Ketcham’s near-autobiographical Henry Mitchell on the television series Dennis the Menace—contributes a memorable portrayal of a friendly and sensible newspaperman.

The Haunted Strangler AND Corridors of Blood

I N ENGLAND: Grip of the Strangler
AND Doctor from Seven Dials
(Producers Associates • MGM • 1958)

His first extended return to Great Britain since the 1930s found Boris Karloff in the service of producer John Croydon and director Robert Day for Grip of the Stranglerand Corridors of Blood. These pictures were conceived as companion–pieces, the better to trade upon Karloff’s resurgent presence on American television with, first, the Shock! Theater package of his Universal starrers of the Depression-into-wartime years and, second, preparations for his starring teleseries, Thriller, to launch in 1960. A U.S.–English distribution pact was sealed with MGM Pictures.

The Haunted Strangler (to use the American title) trades upon the notion of a killer hidden within a respectable citizen. The device had served for SoDark the Night, one of Columbia Pictures’ finer B-unit thrillers, during the 1940s, and would return during the 1980s as the pivot of Alan Parker’s unnerving devil-cult mystery, Angel Heart

Strangler tells of James Rankin (Karloff), a novelist studying a longago case of serial murder. Rankin grows to believe that an innocent man may have been executed—and furthermore, that the killer, a Dr. Tennant, has vanished beyond the possibility of capture. Upon fondling a scalpel that the murderer had used, Rankin finds himself possessed

by the killing urge: Rankin is the missing madman, Tennant. There follows a rampage that often seems a desultory replay of Scotland Yard’s perpetually baffling Jack–the–Ripper case.

The imaginary history of Dr. Tennant, alias the Haymarket Strangler, is so written as to date from ca. 1860–1880, where in fact the Ripper’s killing spree took place several years later. The screenplay, by Jan Read and John C. Cooper, nonetheless plays fast–and–loose with history in the Ripper references.

The greater point, often obscured by the psychological twists and a contrived pageant of stalkings and chases, is to show the casual brutality that characterized polite English civilization during the repressive Victorian years. A public hanging might as well be a carnival, for all the enjoyment the crass populace derives from it. The attitude of documentary realism is just right for an indictment of brutality as a matter of national policy—but entirely wrong for a stylized tale of an aberrant mind. Karloff is, nonetheless, quite believable in the two-in-one role: A kindly scholar, here, and a murderous fiend, there.

During a marathon career interview in 1968 at Los Angeles, Karloff told George E. Turner and Michael H. Price that The Haunted Strangler represented “my cheapest and quickest monster-makeup job ever—yes, quite a change from all those hours I spent in the chair to become Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster.” He elaborated: “I simply removed my lower plate [denture] and bit my lip. A bit of a squint helped, as well. As we’d head into another scene, the director would say to me, ‘Mind the squint, now!’”

The Haunted Strangler also finds director Day mindful of the elegaic manner of Isle of the Dead and Bedlam, which Karloff had toplined during the 1940s for Val Lewton’s department at RKO–Radio Pictures. Strangler is nothing to mention in the classier company of Val Lewton, but Karloff dispenses finery and validation.

The companion film, Corridors of Blood, is altogether a grislier affair. In the United States, Corridorsseldom played its intended twinbill engagements with The Haunted Strangler. Contrary to expecta

T H E H A U N T E D S T R A N G L E R

HAUNTED STRANGLER • CORRIDORS OF BLOOD • THE FLY
tions of the U.S.–U.K. production-and-marketing agreement, the films were slow in coming to America. Both played more extensively, Stateside, during the early 1960s. (Stranglerfound its greatest prominence in 1963 in America as a backup feature to Reginald LEBorg’s Diary of a Madman, a starring picture for Vincent Price.)

Corridors of Blood concerns the horrors of surgery in an age before the development of anasthæsia around the middle of the 19TH century. Karloff is a kind-hearted surgeon who, dismayed by the lack of drugs to deaden the pain of surgical procedures, bucks the Status Quo and experiments upon himself with a variety of addictive chemicals. Maddened by the experience, the physician gravitates to the criminal underworld where greater terrors await.

Christopher Lee, while beginning an ascent to horror-movie stardom at Hammer Films, has a small, intense role as a murderous figure. Robert Day directs in a straightforward manner that emphasizes the element of sadism but fails to impose any dreamlike qualities upon Karloff’s fevered lapse from normalcy. The story recalls Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, as filmed in 1935 by Stuart Walker at Universal Pictures—with Claude Rains in a dope-fiend role originally intended for Karloff.

A notice to theatre operators imposes conditions for the use of a promotional gimmick: A $100 bounty to any weisenheimer customer who might demonstrate that the tale of The Fly is beyond the realm of possibility.

The Fly

(20TH–Fox • 1958)

Kurt Neumann’s The Flyis anything but a forgotten film—as well known and as fondly regarded in the here–and–now as it was when it first became an unusual crossover hit from the genre enthusiasts to a mass audience. The grim finale, in which an insect with a shrunken human head pleads in vain to be rescued from a spider’s web, is more widely remembered out of context. Many wiseacres find the scene laughable. Other souls, more respectful in outlook, relish the tragic irony and find it as poignant as it is grotesque. No accounting for taste.

What lies forgotten about The Flyis a controversy as to its origins. The playwright, radio producer, and filmmaker Arch Oboler sued 20TH Century–Fox and related parties for plagiarism in September of 1958, claiming that George Langelaan’s like-titled short story (published in 1957) was an unatttibuted knockoff of a similarly conceived Oboler story called “Across the Gaby.” A dramatized version of “Across the Gaby” had been broadcast in 1937. And more about that presently.

Another obscure aspect of The Flyis its origin as a Poverty Row project. The long-term infiltration of the major studios by the lowbudget independents had been typified during the 1940s and 1950s by producer Sam Katzman’s lateral move from Monogram Pictures to Columbia. The trend reached a pinnacle of critical and commercial

T H E F L Y

success at 20 TH–Fox with The Fly. Tiny Regal Pictures, Kurt Neumann’s base of operations for such films as She Devil and Kronos (see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6) had announced a plan to develop The Fly, from Langelaan’s story in Playboymagazine (1957). The pinchpenny tyrant Robert Lippert was attached as producer. Fox called the shots, however, as the distributor for Regal’s productions. (Neumann had foreshadowed The Fly with She Devil, based upon Stanley Weinbaum’s “The Adaptive Ultimate,” which concerns the corruption of human flesh with insectoid genetic material.)

Though also bound to agreements with Lippert, Fox chose to sack him as producer of The Fly. The big studio worried that hostilities between Lippert and the Screen Actors Guild might provoke the attendant threat of a strike. (Lippert had angered the union with his reluctance to pay residual fees, beyond an actor’s flat-rate payment for appearing in this film or that.) Fox also reasoned that the Playboycredential offered a more sophisticated literary pedigree than was associated with Regal Films. The Fly became a 20th–Fox project, with B–movie workhorse Neumann attached as producer and director. The tactic was to apply Regal’s budget-conscious methods to Fox’s larger arsenal of talents and resources.

The Fly tells of a doomed research scientist, André DELambre (Al Hedison), who is found crushed in the jaws of a massive press at his family’s factory. André’s brother, François DELambre (Vincent Price), is baffled by a confession from André’s widow, Helene (Patricia Owens): She could not have known how to operate the complicated machinery. Helene declines to explain. Police Inspector Charas (Herbert Marshall) finds Helene distracted by the buzzing of a housefly. André’s laboratory lies in wreckage. Helene becomes obsessed with the search for a fly with a white head and a strangely shaped leg.

Helene reflects upon a time when André had made a breakthrough involving the disintegration and reintegration of atomic particles. The objective was to revolutionize mass transportation. In experimenting upon himself, André entangled his molecules with those of a common fly. The transformation became apparent by ominous degrees. André believed he must capture the human-headed fly if he was to reverse the process. No such luck, of course. Hence the fatal crushing—more an assisted suicide than a murder.

The detective prepares to take Helene into custody. As François waits, a fly with a white head, trapped in a spider’s web, squeaks, “Help me!” Francois cannot hear the tiny voice. Francois’ nephew, Philippe (Charles Herbert), summons François and Charas to see the fly—or rather, Andre’s shrunken head, fused with the body of a fly. The spider is about to devour the fly when the inspector crushes both creatures. Charas declares André’s death a suicide. François explains to Philippe that his father had died in the search for truth—a gentler twist upon the creaky old horror-movie tagline about Tampering with Things That Man Was Meant To Leave the Hell Alone.

A generally favorable critical response was typified by Variety’s observation: “[A] strong factor of the picture is its unusual believability.” The Flylent momentum within the genre to third-billed Vincent Price, even though his sympathetic and resourceful role defies badguy typecasting. The tragic leading role is well handled by Al Hedison, later known as David Hedison, who would find further prominence in network television. Charles Herbert, all but ubiquitous as a kid star within the genre, strikes a manly presence as Hedison’s son, bewildered but determined to help solve the mystery. Patricia Owens, whose angular beauty recalls the feminine ideals of science fiction’s master cartoonist Wallace Wood, plays the widow with an unnerving calmness that gives way at the right moments to emotive outbursts.

Special effects and creature makeup, advanced for the day, are the work of L. B. Abbott and Ben Nye. The laboratory equipment, seen to striking effect in a destructive rampage by the fly–man, is an imaginative fabrication of military machinery. The aspect of the title creature involves a mask with iridescent domes for the faceted eyes, with a mobile proboscis designed to fit into Al Hedison’s mouth.

The Hollywood Reporter broke the news in September of 1958 that Arch Oboler had filed suit against Fox, author Langelaan, and Playboy magazine on grounds that The Flywas plagiarized from his short story “Across the Gaby.” Documents on file with the American Film Institute do not describe an outcome; the custom among the larger corporate studios so accused was to settle privately, the better to dodge the notoriety of the courtroom. (Oboler is a recurring figure in the Forgotten Horrors canon, with such films of the WWII-and-after years as the Nazitakeover fantasy Strange Holiday, the 3–D thriller Bwana Devil, and a bitterly comical indictment of television, The Twonky.)

The commercial success of The Fly prompted cartoonists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby to develop an opportunistic, unrelated comicbook called The Fly, involving a costumed hero. Fox delivered two sequels: Return of the Fly(Page No. 225) and Curse of the Fly(1965). In 1986, producer Mel Brooks and director David Cronenberg developed a radical remake, also called The Fly, and in 1989, the studio produced The Fly II. In a visit in 1986, Vincent Price complained of the visceral excesses of the Cronenberg version: “We did it right the first time.”

T H E F L Y • E L A T A U D D E L V A M P I R O

El Ataúd del VampiroIN AMERICA: The Vampire’s Coffin

(Cinematográfica Internacionál • Columbia Aztéca • 1957–1958)

Director Fernándo Mendéz had fared so well with a merger of underworld intrigues and Mad Doctor horrors in Ladron de Cadaveres(Page No. 28) that he forged straightaway into El Vampiroand a hasty, less atmospheric, sequel, El Ataúd del Vampiro, or The Vampire’s Coffin These attempts to recapture and embellish the Depression-era and WWII styles of Universal Pictures reached an American audience, as a consequence of the aggressive distribution of English-dubbed versions.

Mexico and other Latinate nations remained Mendéz’ principal market, but a receptive U.S. climate for chillers from elsewhere— helped along during the 1960s by an ambitious American schlock merchant, K. Gordon Murray—assured a gradual breakout. Murray did no courtesies to the Mexican cinema as a class, what with a poorly matched dubbing process, awkward translations into English, and a tendency to re–edit his acquisitions without respect for nuances.

Murray’s principal embellishment occurred in the advertising campaigns—a skull-and-crossbones symbol, surmounted by the slogan, “Recommended by Young America Horror Club.” (No such organization existed.) The films are best experienced in the original language, even by non-fluent viewers who can draw upon gestures, facial expressions, pictorial narrative, and vocal inflections to keep track of a story. (A fine way to learn a language, incidentally.)

ElVampiro is a genre-defining picture near the level of Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula(England; 1958), and a variation upon familiar themes worthy of favorable comparison with Paul Landres’ The Return of Dracula(Page No. 86). Mendéz offers Germán Robles as Count Karol DE Lavud, who places in thrall the inhabitants of an estate in the Sierra Negra mountains—a Mexican equivalent of Mittel Europe’s forbidding Carpathians. Producer Abel Salazar plays a doctor who, though susceptible, nonetheless puts up a fight. Alicia Montoya stands out as a half-dead scrapper who intrudes to heroic effect.

El Ataúd del Vampiro is quite a different matter. (“Sadly lacking,” as Phil Hardy describes the sequel.) The replacement of camera chief Rosalio Solano with Victor Herrera imparts a jarringly different visual style, less evocative by far. Consistency is achieved primarily through Germán Robles’ return as Count DE Lavud and Abel Salazar’s reprise of the determined physician. Original scripter Ramón Obon, working from a story by Raúl Zenteno, finds graverobbers caught in the act of rifling Lavud’s coffin—and inadvertently resurrecting Lavud, who claims the thieves as undead servants. Lavud’s lair is a wax museum outfitted with imprements of torture. An additional set, in an abandoned Vaudeville theatre, allows for an extended stalking of leading lady Ariadna Welter.

Once again, a vandalized English-language version arrived from K. Gordon Murray, often paired with The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, a corruption of Rafael Portillo’s La Momia Azteca contra el Robot Humano (1957), itself a sequel in a worthy series rooted in the indigenous culture of Mexico. The tangled and ill-documented history of the Latinate horror film is a tangent for another day. Meanwhile since the 1990s, the cineaste and author Rogélio Agrasanchéz has blazed some helpful trails with his archival projects and occasional books.

The sequel, driven more by commerce and less by attempted artistry, betrays haste in the plotting, an over–reliance upon comic relief, and a

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lack of care in set design and atmospheric detail. If the original El Vampirorepresents Méndez’ homage to Universal Pictures’ Gothic style of the 1930s, then El Ataúd del Vampirois more an emulation of the socalled New Universal style that took root after a change in that studio’s ownership during the later 1930s. The accidental resurrection of Count Lavud—the vandals remove a stake from the corpse—recalls nothing so much as the revival of Lon Chaney, JR.’s Lawrence Talbot in the opening reel of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man(1943).

The reunited principal players provide a greater consistency with the source–film. This cannot be said of Germán Robles’ next appearance as a vampire—a parody of the Lavaud character, in the similarly hasty El Castillo de los Monstruos(1957), directed by Julian Soler as a comedy along the lines of 1948’s Bud Abbott & Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein. (Robles would play things straight again in 1959, in Federico Curiel’s La Maldición de Nostradamus ET SEQ.). Fernando Méndez and screenwriter Ramón Obon teamed again in 1958 for Misterios de Ultratumba(Page No. 199).

Frankenstein 1970

(Allied Artists • 1958)

In 1970, an American television crew at large in Germany leases the castle of Baron Victor VON Frankenstein (Boris Karloff) to produce a program—Reality Teevee in rancid prototype—about the squire’s ancestor and his obsession with bringing the dead to life. The (fictional) director, Douglas Row (Donald Barry) and his leading lady, Carol Hayes (Jana Lund), find the setting none too pleasant. Baron Frankenstein, damaged in body and soul from Nazi tortures suffered during World War II, plans to use the studio’s payment to install an atomic reactor, which he explains will fuel a heating system.

Mary Shelley’s Promethean myth of the 19 TH century—an example of science fiction before there was any such term for the idiom—has seldom received so strange a treatment as in Howard W. Koch’s Frankenstein 1970. Producer Aubrey Schenck conceived the film as a coattail-riding response to Hammer Films’ dawning Frankenstein series of 1957–1958. Screenwriters Richard Landau and George

Boris Karloff.

Worthing Yates added satirical and futuristic touches (and yes, A.D. 1970 seemed futuristic in 1958), what with the conscious prediction of nuclear fission as a source of mass-market energy and an anticipation of the role of television as an invasion of privacy.

Boris Karloff serves the piece in straightforward Gothic fashion, in sharp contrast with the fools who intrude to take advantage of his hospitality. His welcoming attitude is more along the lines of Count Zaroff, the lurking hunter–of–men from The Most Dangerous Game(as filmed in 1932), and the television crew serves primarily to annoy and to provide body parts for the construction of a new Frankenstein Monster. (The fission-reactor element, of course, is a stand–in for the lightning–bolt that lends vigor to the Monster in James Whale’s Frankenstein, as portrayed by Karloff in 1931.)

Rudolph Anders serves Frankenstein 1970 as estate manager Wilhelm Gottfried—the conscience of the piece, ill heeded. Gottfried worries that Baron Frankenstein intends to use the reactor to resume the ancestral Dr. Frankenstein’s experiments. Carol Hayes grows fond of the Baron’s butler, Shuter (Norbert Schiller). Judy Stevens (Charlotte Austin), Row’s former wife–become–assistant, rankles at Row’s interest in Carol; Judy resists the advances of Mike Shaw (Tom Duggin), the crew’s publicist. Meanwhile, bodies have been reported missing from the local morgue.

While the television crew tests the Baron’s patience, he spies upon them, in turn, via hidden recording devices. The Baron finds that the bodies he has stolen from the morgue are incompatible with his research: He requires vital organs. The Baron kills Shuter and places the servant’s brain in the Monster but accidentally destroys Shuter’s eyes before they can be installed. The Baron brings the creature to a lurching semblance of life, the better to prey upon Judy Stevens and

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cameraman Morgan Haley (John Dennis). Carol Hayes dodges an ambush. Row summons the police. The Baron accuses Shaw of having faked the disappearances for the sake of publicity.

Gottfried confronts the Baron, who slays his old friend as an eyeball donor. The Baron orders the capture of Carol, who recognizes Shuter in the creature’s manner and appeals to its better nature. The Monster touches off a lethal blast. Following an impossibly brief pause for decontamination, Row removes the bandages from the creature’s head to reveal the face of Baron Frankenstein—a touch of vain self–reproduction that reasserts, however briefly, Karloff’s claim to the role of the Monster and recaptures the godly conceit of the 1931 Frankenstein

Director Koch paces the ordeal to suspenseful effect, drawing largely upon the culture–clash between Karloff’s air of obsessive impatience and the American crew’s vain and vulgar disrespect for Old World civility. Carl E. Guthrie’s camerawork, taking advantage of the elongated CinemaScope screen, lends the illusion of a much bigger and more finely wrought picture.

It! The Terror from beyond Space

(Vogue Pictures • United Artists • 1958)

From the futuristic setting of 1970 (above), we lurch ahead to 1973, when the U.S. Space Commission dispatches a ship to rescue Col. Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), lone survivor of the first crew to reach Mars. The premise of Edward L. Cahn’s It! The Terror from beyond Spaceis a template for Ridley Scott’s Alien(1979).

Suspected of murdering his fellow explorers, Carruthers faces a court–martial. As the rescue ship prepares to leave Mars, an alien predator (Ray “Crash” Corrigan) stows away. Cmdr. Van Heusen (Kim

Spalding) questions Carruthers’ story of an attack by some ghastly creature. Aboard the return flight, the monster begins to deplete the crew. One astronaut (Robert Bice) escapes an ambush. Carruthers asserts his authority to order the hatchway mined with grenades. The creature survives the blast and defies further firepower. A gas attack and an electrocution are suggested. It develops that the creature has drained its victims’ blood. (Hence the working title, It! The Vampire from beyond Space.) An elaborate capture finds the stowaway barely

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scathed by electricity. Carruthers falls under suspicion anew, now accused of having abandoned a fellow soldier. Surviving victims have been infected by the creature’s bite. Heusen orders that the ship’s reactor core be exposed in an attempt to irradiate the creature. The Martian renews its attack. At length, Carruthers protects the crew with oxygen masks and drains the ship of air— suffocating the beast. Back on Earth, Heusen orders Carruthers exonerated, and the Space Commission ponders an order to declare Mars off–limits.

Its title creature notwithstanding, It! The Terror from beyond Space is more a virile exercise in conflict among heroic figures than it is a monster movie. The monster fails the piece, in any event, what with a desultory performance by Ray “Crash” Corrigan in an ill-fitting costume, however repulsive in aspect. Corrigan, a former action–adventure star, had developed a sideline since the 1930s at playing gorillas in jungle pictures and Mad Doctor thrillers. The present film’s alien getup is a comedown from Corrigan’s signature apesuit wardrobe. The headpiece was manufactured without Corrigan’s exacting supervision; the vicious mouth moves awkwardly.

Jerome Bixby’s screenplay reflects the influence of John Ford’s many dramas about resourceful characters at odds with one another in desperate situations, such as Red River Fort Apache, and The Searchers. Ford’s Western frontier is not all that different from the frontier of outer space, in terms of challenges. Marshall Thompson serves It! with authority as the beleaguered officer, and Kim Spalding makes a worthy accuser–turned–ally for Thompson. Shawn Smith and Ann Doran, as the helpful women aboard the seemingly doomed ship, provide practical support. Cahn directs with ferocious efficiency.

Ridley Scott’s Alienis hardly the first film to appropriate the situation of It! The Terror from beyond Space. Nor is It!the first of its kind, if considered in a broader sense. The notion of entrapment and mortal peril in a confining space derives from a popular strain of Gothic horror, as perfected on Broadway in John Willard’s The Cat and the Canary—which Paul Leni filmed most famously in 1927. An unattributed takeoff on It! The Terror from beyond Spacearrived in 1966 as Queen of Blood, for which writer–director Curtis Harrington replaced the hideous monster with a seductive, semi-human female vampire.

Curse of the Faceless Man

(Vogue Pictures • United Artists • 1958)

The ancient ruins of Pompeii yield the petrified figure of a human being. The thing comes to murderous life, as suits the occasion, and begins haunting the dreams of an artist, Tina Enright (Elaine Edwards), who appears to have some ancestral connection. The kinship to Karl Freund’s The Mummy (1932) is patent, but scenarist Jerome Bixby takes inventive liberties in playing to the directorial strenghs (emphatic, and far from subtle) of Edward L. Cahn. Their collaboration is as sturdy as the result they had achieved with It! The Terror from beyond Space, and here the artists have the advantage of dealing with an expressionless monster, more a force of nature than a conscious predator, that is essentially an animated lump of volcanic rock.

The figure is the shell of Quintillus Barelius (stuntman Bob Bryant), a gladiator who had lived 2,000 years ago as a slave of the Roman Empire. In Naples, museum chief Carlo Fiorella (Luis Van Rooten), connects the figure with an ominously inscribed medallion. Fiorella’s scholarly daughter, Maria (Adele Mara), perceives a link with the ancient Etruscans, a death-worship cult.

Paul Mallon (Richard Anderson), an expert in antiquities and fiancé of Miss Enright, notices traces of blood and skin on the figure’s fingertips. Mallon is astonished to find Miss Enright at work on a painting of a subject that resembles Quintillus; she explains that she had been inspired by an unsettling dream. She describes the mummfied man, its slaying of a lorry driver, and a premonition that the creature must be searching for her. She demands to see the mortal remains of Quintillus, who has pegged her as a reincarnation of his doomed Ruling Class lover from the last days of Pompeii, B.V. (Before Vesuvius, that is.)

The mummy stalks Miss Enright and seeks to retrieve the accurséd medallion. Miss Enright seems possessed by the soul of the daughter of a Roman senator; Quintillus scarcely could agree more emphatically. After perpetrating further mayhem, Quintillus carries Miss Enright toward the ocean, as if to re–enact or possibly avert a tragedy of antiquity. (The motivation is ripe for speculation, but it might be that Quintillus intends to rescue his belovéd from a cataclysm.) The seawater dissolves the creature. Mallon rescues Miss Enright and is relieved to find that she has no recollection of the experience.

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Hugh O’Brian and Robert Evans.

The Fiend Who Walked the West

(20TH Century–Fox • 1958)

Gordon Douglas, a seasoned hand at comedy and high adventure, directed two Westerns in 1958, in addition to an episode of Warner Bros.’ hit teleseries, Maverick. One of the features, Fort Dobbs, has a connection with another Warners teevee Western, Cheyenne—not as a spinoff, but rather in that it sought to make a big-screen star of Cheyenne’s Clint Walker. Walker serves Fort Dobbsas a fugitive who must run a gauntlet of ordeals en route to clearing his name.

Douglas’ other feature of 1958, The Fiend Who Walked the West centers upon a similarly conflicted heroic protagonist, played by another television frontiersman, Hugh O’Brian, of The Life & Legend of Wyatt Earp. The scare-mongering stakes run higher in Fiend, what with its being a B-unit elaboration upon 20TH Century–Fox’s big-time mob-war thriller of 1947, Kiss of Death. Some enterprising Southwestern drive-in theatres of the day cobbled together an ad hoc double–bill of The Fiend Who Walked the Westand Fiend without a Face(Page No. 164)—unrelated by genre or studio pedigree, but united in horrific intent: One good Fienddeserves another.

An impoverished rancher, Dan Hardy (O’Brian), resorts to banditry, only to find himself captured when deserted by his accomplices. A fellow prisoner, baby-faced Felix Griffin (Robert Evans), shuns human contact. Griffin carries about a statuette of glass. He kills an antagonistic inmate (Mickey Finn) by secretly lacing the man’s chow with ground glass from the shattered effigy. When freed, aware of Hardy’s crime, Griffin seeks out Hardy’s betrayer, Finney (Ken Scott), and skewers Finney’s aged mother (Georgia Simmons) with an arrow. He removes an inscribed ring from the woman’s hand.

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Griffin threatens to kill Finney unless he turns over the stolen money. Finney reveals the hiding–place; Griffin backshoots Finney and sets the house ablaze. Griffin locates Hardy’s ranch, where the rancher’s pregnant wife, Elena (Linda Cristal) suffers a miscarriage as a result of Griffin’s torments. Griffin flaunts his newfound wealth so conspicuously that the law becomes suspicious.

The sheriff (Stephen McNally) informs Hardy that Griffin may have had something to do with Elena’s misfortune. Hardy agrees to name his accomplices in exchange for a pardon. At the mention of Finney’s name, the sheriff realizes that Griffin killed the bandit, stole the money, and then made the murders look like an Indian raid. When it is discovered that the other two robbers have been killed, Hardy is denied freedom.

Griffin kills two deputies. The sheriff proposes vigilante justice. He and a judge (Edward Andrews) arrange a jailbreak so that Hardy can entrap Griffin. In a confrontation with Griffin, Hardy finds only lies and a strained cordiality. Hardy finds Finney’s mother’s ring in Griffin’s possession.

Griffin taunts Hardy with a veiled threat to the rancher’s family. Hardy feigns politeness toward Griffin, alienating Elena as a consequence. Griffin comes to realize that Hardy’s escape is a trap. Though arrested, Griffin regains freedom with false testimony from a terrified witness (Dolores Michaels). Hardy is pardoned, nonetheless. Griffin’s lying witness turns up dead; Griffin feigns mournful bereavement. Hardy gives Griffin a good roughing–up, challenges the punk to a gunfight, and stalks away.

The showdown occurs at a saloon. Hardy slaps Griffin, who appears to be unarmed. Griffin agrees to a duel. As Hardy turns to leave, Griffin draws a pistol from his boot and shoots Hardy in the back. Hardy guns down Griffin. Hardy survives the ordeal as a cat’s–paw of Law & Order and collects a reward sufficient to restore his ranch to prosperity.

Twentieth Century–Fox, in appropriating The Fly(Page 119) from its low-rent stepchild affiliate Regal Films, had learned many lessons in adapting the cost–efficiency of Poverty Row to larger productions. Since the Charlie Chanand Michael Shayne detective pictures of the Depression-into-wartime years, Fox had perfected B-unit production values to a point where its so-called Little Foxes could look as polished as any top-of-the-line effort.

The Regal connection brought Fox to a new level of cheapness. Where Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Deathhad emerged as a classier Fox a decade earlier, its loose remake as The Fiend Who Walked the West makes no pretense at being more than an exploitation picture, heavier on the Shock Value. The equivalent cackling maniac of Kiss of Death was a starmaker role for Richard Widmark. Fiend’s title role proved no such thing for Robert Evans—his greater fortunes lay far ahead, as a controversial and influential producer for Paramount Pictures—but Evans gives the character full measure of hateful ferocity.

The modest framing of the story is lent a texture of finery by Joe MACDonald’s brooding camera compositions and lighting and Leon Klatzkin’s tense orchestral scoring. New screenwriters Harry Brown and Philip Yordan take practical liberties with Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer’s screenplay for Kiss of Death—largely in making the fiend more of a criminal manipulator, with delusions of importance—and in transplanting the complications of the plot to a desolate frontier setting. Fox delivered another elaboration upon Kiss of Deathin 1995, directed by Barbet Schroeder.

Night of the Blood Beast

(Balboa Productions • American International • 1958)
“[F]inally ... a story about a pregnant man!”
—A snark from the Varietyreview

The imaginary phenomenon of male pregnancy is hardly the greater point of Bernard L. Kowalski’s Night of the Blood Beast, but that element proved so salient as to provoke some published critics to foolish flights of gee-whiz oversensationalism. The film is consistent, however, with producer Roger Corman’s chronic interest in reproductive anxieties. The depiction of pregnancy as a parasitic infestation proves recurrent in Corman’s more unnerving efforts as late as The Terror Withinand Carnosaur(1989–1993).

Director Kowalski’s bleak outlook (more so than Corman’s) comes across strikingly in Night of the Blood Beastand 1959’s The Giant Leeches. Blood Beast is the more disturbing film, given its Quatermass-like speculations about what horrors might lurk in the frontier of outer space. Martin Varno and Gene Corman’s scenario unfolds in a confined earthbound space quite like the claustrophobiainducing setting of It! The Terror from beyond Space(Page No. 127). Each film boasts an otherworldly creature with a taste for plasma,

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although the creature–at–large in Blood Beast proves keener upon spreading its progeny via human hosts. One might suspect that Dan O’Bannon, the screenwriter responsible for Ridley Scott’s Alien(1979), had pondered the breeding-and-seeding angle of Blood Beastas well as the shipboard rampage of It! The Terror from beyond Space

An experimental satellite is designed to eject Maj. John Corcoran (Michael Emmet) Earthward, in order that he may record data during the descent. A malfunction crashes the satellite. Its designer, Dave

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The Blood Beast costume also is seen in Teenage Caveman .

Randall (Ed Nelson), and photographer Donna Bixby (Georgianna Carter) affirm Corcoran’s death in a report to Dr. Alex Wyman (Tyler McVey); John’s fiancée, Dr. Julie Benson (Angela Greene); and Steve Dunlap (John Baer). Wyman finds that Corcoran shows signs of life despite the absence of a heartbeat. At a makeshift laboratory, a gash in Corcoran’s arm appears to have been cut from within. Corcoran registers a blood-pressure reading, although the blood does not appear to circulate. Communications and power sources begin to fail.

Randall survives an attack by a seemingly invulnerable creature. A blood sample from Corcoran contains a strange organism. Wyman turns up dead, and Corcoran’s body goes missing. Corcoran reappears, as if restored to life, but has no recollections beyond his struggle to land the satellite. A fluoroscope, unaccountably still functioning, reveals fetal alien tissue in Corcoran’s body. The lurking creature intrudes but flees under a barrage.

Corcoran seems possessed by an emotional connection to the monster, whose tracks lead to the crash site. Its attempted abduction of Donna provokes a backlash, but Corcoran promises to lead them to the creature if his teammates will attempt to communicate. He confronts the alien and finds to his surprise that the being has absorbed Wyman’s consciousness. The alien speaks of peaceable intentions, but Corcoran senses that the fetuses he is carrying are the advance guard of an invasion force. He kills himself. Dunlap and Randall incinerate the creature, which declares that others will follow. The survivors can only wonder whether they have saved the world or doomed it.

American International issued Night of the Blood Beastin a package with Roger Corman’s She Gods of Shark Reef, which had sat unissued since 1956. The alien costume also appears in Corman’s Teenage Cave Man, worn by stuntman Ross Sturlin in both pictures.

Cry Baby Killer

(Santa Cruz • Allied Artists • 1958) The juvenile-delinquency scare of the post-WWII years provoked many cheap-thrills movies, aimed at exciting a teenage audience from a safe distance and then sending the younger customers away with a Stern Warning (subliminal) about the consequences of criminal misconduct. What Forgotten Horrors’ founding author, George E. Turner, often characterized as “the true horror of the Public Enemy,” proved ever more relevant as the hot-blooded gangland films of George’s childhood in the 1930s gave way to the brooding film noir style of the 1940s and, then, to the seamier punk-hoodlum pictures of the restless 1950s.

The bluenosed Fun Police of this period condemned the J.D. (as in juvenile delinquent movies as conducive to the very behavior they professed to condemn. In fact, such pictures served more of a civilizing influence by negative example. Such condemnations were a matter of Shooting the Messenger, when all the messenger had intended was a cautionary statement in the sleaziest and most sensationalized terms possible. So who wants to pay the price of admission in exchange for a lecture about Good Citizenship? Sanctimony and force-fed wholesomeness are more conducive to antisocial misdeeds.

A film emblematic of this craze is Justus Addiss’ Cry Baby Killer, a starring-role break for Jack Nicholson (at age 20) and an essential component in the evolution of the crime melodrama from a fleeting trend (hot rods and hoodlums and rock ’n’ roll) to a fullcircle reconnection with the more psychologically percep

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tive killer-at-large pictures of Old Hollywood, such as The Public Enemy(1931) and I Wake Up Screaming(1941). Not long before Cry Baby Killerand its kind brought the image of the loose-cannon punkster to the fore, Stuart Heisler’s I Died a Thousand Times(1955) had confronted an indignant Old School mobster (played by Jack Palance) with the midcentury’s new breed of stupid-jerk youthful criminals. Even the underworld has its notions of class–and–culture, and even the J.D. crowd has its put-upon innocents.

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Carole Field (Carolyn Mitchell), 16 and ripe for inspection by the local horndogs, has ditched her more-or-less respectable boyfriend, Jimmy Wallace (Nicholson), to be with tough kid Manny Cole (Brett Halsey). Cole and a chum, Joey Klamer (Ralph Reed), have subjected Wallace to a beating and left him unconscious in an alley. In a nearby restraurant run by bootlegger Gambelli (Frank Richards), Cole treats Carole to a soda; she is unaware that he has spiked the drink. Wallace, reviving, telephones Carole, who avers that she prefers Cole’s manlier company.

Wallace barges in for a confrontation. A struggle leaves Cole and a pistol-packing pal (James Fillmore) wounded. Wallace, who had seized the weapon in self–defense, locks himself into a storeroom with an employee (Jordan Whitfield) and a customer (Barbara Knudson) and her child. The police are on the case, but Detective Porter (Harry Lauter) is distracted by the ruckus outside the storeroom.

Klamer admits to ownership of the gun and reveals that Gambelli has been peddling booze to minors. A television reporter (Ed Nelson) makes a spectacle of the scene. A waitress (Lynn Cartwright) urges Carole to accept responsibility for provoking the violence. Finally baited out of the inadvertent hostage situation by the sound of Carole’s voice, Wallace steps outside, only to find himself in the gunsights of an overzealous cop. Wallace drops the gun and surrenders.

The simple scenario plays out in an hour’s running time, kept taut and suspenseful by Addis’ brisk pacing—Roger Corman supervised the project as executive producer and directing coach—and Nicholson’s portrait of a bewildered youth goaded to violence. The actor’s instinctive grasp of emotional economy makes the overwrought character seem persuasive, not unlike Michael Landon’s title-role performance in the previous year’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf. In Cry Baby Killercan be seen the germ of Nicholson’s career-making portrayal of the 1970s, as a tormented soul in Five Easy Pieces. (More about director Addis at Page No. 267.)

Corman hastened Cry Baby Killer into release in an attempt to capitalize upon news coverage of the Real World rampage of Charles Starkweather, a murderous hoodlum who at length provided the backhanded inspiration for James Landis’ The Sadist (1963), Terence Malick’s Badlands (1973), and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1992). A similarly conceived film of 1958 is Edward Mann’s Hothead (A.K.A. The Teenager and the Tramp), with John Delgar. Hotheadsat unissued until a sporadic release of 1963.

Ghost of the China Sea

(Charles B. Griffith Productions • Columbia Pictures Corp. • 1958)

The last picture of the prolific director–actor Fred F. Sears—five titles were issued posthumously—is Ghost of the China Sea, which is no more a ghost story than a Welsh Rabbit is a rabbit. The film is, however, a ghost of a career devoted in significant measure to the creepier fantasies in addition to any and all other genres. Sears is a significant figure in the Forgotten Horrorscanon in view of the upstart finery of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers(1956; with Ray Harryhausen) and the bizarre foolishness of The Giant Claw(1957).

Ghost of the China Sea also represents a departure from American International Pictures for Charles B. Griffith, Roger Corman’s protègé–turned–colleague, who had been responsible for such ambitious scripts as It Conquered the World, The Undead, and Not of This Earth (1956–1957). Griffith, as co–writer and producer, and Sears mounted Ghost of the China Seaas an old-fashioned horrors-of-war thriller.

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Contributing scenarist David Brian plays Martin French, an embittered reluctant hero, stranded in a Japanese-occupied jungle in 1941, in the company of an Americanized Japanese accountant, Matsumo (Chinese actor Harry Chang), and cane-plantation boss Justine Woolf (Lynn Bernay). American International mainstay Jonathan Haze, a friend of long standing who had brought Griffith to the attention of Corman, is a soldier whose presence encourages French to attempt a more useful stance.

A generous 79-minute running time accommodates such bracing elements as Harry Chang’s courageous attempt to impersonate a Japanese warrior (with tragic results), a combative gradual attraction between Brian and Lynn Bernay, and a philosophical death scene for Norman Wright, as the self-sacrificing conscience of the piece.

A sense of lurking danger keeps the tension cranked right up to a combustible finale, in which the survivors attempt to signal a ship with a fire that surges out of control. Ghost of the China Seawas issued by Columbia Pictures, where Sears had hacked out many Western adventures and general-purpose exploitation films for producer Sam Katzman. The independent production, stock battle footage and all, catches the director at a comparative peak of artistry and marks a dignified exit. Sears died of a heart attack at 44 on November 30, 1957, two weeks after the completion of this assignment.

The Brain Eaters

(Corinthian Productions • American International • 1958)

Robert A. Heinlein’s novel The Puppet Masters(1951) anticipates the soul-hijacking shenanigans of Invaders from Mars, It Came from Outer Space, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Conquered the World and I Married a Monster from Outer Space(1953–1958). Heinlein had ignored such derivations, but in 1960 the author sued American International Pictures for $150,000, charging plagiarism in connection with a more unassuming film, Bruno VESota’s The Brain Eaters

The elapsed time between the release of The Brain Eatersand the lawsuit had left the film hardly worth any such sum and lacking, moreover, in further box-office potential. The Brain Eaterssoon lapsed to late-night local-market television, a likely remedy for insomnia. Archives of the Motion Picture Academy and the American Film Institute contain no record of an outcome for Heinlein’s complaint.

The notion of alien possession, the most resonant concern of midcentury science fiction, scarcely can be confined to any one author or any one story. The Brain Eaters’ greater crime (against literary standards) is that of sublimating Heinlein’s mind-control angle to a commonplace monsters-at-large scenario. Though staged for foreboding moodiness, Gordon Urquhart’s script lurches about as if in search of a story that never quite materializes.

Motorists discover a huge cylinder and summon the authorities. A Congressional committee investigates. Scientist Paul Kettering (Ed Nelson) finds himself at odds with Sen. Walter Powers (Jack Hill), who senses a hoax. Kettering finds the interior laced with dead-end tunnels. In a nearby town, the mayor (Orville Sherman) goes missing, then turns up in an entranced state. A tumor-like growth spurs the mayor to violence; after his slaying by a policeman, an autopsy finds the parasitic attachment connected to the mayor’s brain. Such nuisances afflict additional figures of authority. Zombie-like marauders show up when least welcome. Kettering and his assistant, Alice

Sommers (Joanna Lee), backtrack to the cylinder. Kettering and the mayor’s son, Glenn Cameron (Alan Frost), find therein an array of bottled creatures and an aged man (Leonard Nimoy), whom Kettering recognizes as a fellow scientist, long missing and presumed dead.

The occupant discloses that the parasites have long existed within the planet; a guiding intelligence intends to reduce humanity to a peaceable, however passive, state of being. Kettering and Cameron flee in search of juice enough to electrocute the creatures. Alice, now under parasitic control, guns down Kettering—too late to block the electrical circuit. The surge of power fries Kettering and Alice and destroys the tower. Cameron and his fiancée (Jody Fair) return to town to dispense with the remaining infected citizens.

Hardly a career-making picture, The Brain Eatersnonetheless saw three cast members escape to comparatively higher ground: Leonard Nimoy, with the Star Trek franchise; Jack Hill, with such gems of exploitation cinema as Spider Baby (1967) and Switchblade Sisters (1975); and Ed Nelson, with the television version of Peyton Place

La Morte Viene dallo Spazio

IN AMERICA: The Day the Sky Exploded (Lux–Royal Film • Excelsior Pictures • 1958)

Unissued in the United States until 1961—by which time, its success in Europe had triggered a movement toward science fiction mingled with horror—Paolo Heusch’s La Morte Viene dallo Spazio describes a cosmic ordeal very like that of George Pal’s Hollywood epic of 1951, When Worlds Collide. A jointed spaceship falls into the sun—two–thirds of the vessel, at any rate, representing the U.K. and the U.S.S.R. The American segment returns to Earth, which falls under threat of an

THE BRAIN EATERS • LA MORTE VIENE DALLO SPAZIO

LA MORTE VIENE DALLO SPAZIO • QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE
asteroid shower triggered by the resulting flares from the sun. Amid the upheavals of sudden climate change—typhoons, wildlife stampedes, and heat–waves are the least of the threats—surviving astronaut John MACLaren (Paul Hubschmid) rallies all nations to deplete their nuclear arsenals by firing bombs into outer space. The assembled scientists rise to the occasion or go mad, by erratic turns. Universal disarmament saves the planet. And so what else is new?

Though beautifully photographed by director–to–be Mario Bava (of Black Sundayand Black Sabbath), this visual banquet called La Morte Viene dallo Spaziois a feebly written, woodenly directed, and indifferently enacted variation upon valid pacifist themes that had long since been handled to a definitive turn Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still(1951). The redeeming strength, made all the more striking by Bava’s crystalline vision, is the veneer of horrific content.

The greater influence of La Morte Viene dallo Spaziois that its boxoffice performance opened a gate for more accomplished films of this general type, including Antonio Margheriti’s splendid Il Planeta degli Uomini Spenti(in the U.S.: Battle of the Worlds) and Romano Ferrara’s splendid Il Planeti contro di Noi(U.S.: Planets against Us, A.K.A. Hands of a Killer). Those 1961 productions helped to lend belated momentum for an English-language edition of La Morte Viene, rechristened as The Day the Sky Exploded. Though butchered and crudely dubbed in the U.S. re–edit, this version nonetheless helped to awaken the interest of American enthusiasts in the Italianate fare as a class.

Queen of Outer Space

(Allied Artists • 1958)

A veritable warehouse of relics from space-thriller films of the 1950s, Edward Bernds’ Queen of Outer Space stands its ground as what the English historian Phil Hardy considered “a bizarre study in sexual politics.” Bernds’ own World without End(1956; see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6) is represented in stock-footage visual effects. Queen also uses weaponry, costuming, and jungle-setting properties from the much bigger Shakespeare-in-space film Forbidden Planet(1956). The starship is a salvage job from Lesley Selander’s Flight to Mars (1951), a much smaller production from a rocket-jockey craze that had been triggered by George Pal’s production of DestinationMoon(1950).

Laurie Mitchell serves Queen of Outer Space as Yllana, a Venusian ruler who, having slaughtered the men of her race, now trains a disintegration ray upon Earth. Astronauts Neil Patterson (Eric Fleming), Larry Turner (Patrick Waltz), and Michael Cruze (Dave Willock), and a scientist, Prof. Konrad (Paul Birch, of 1957’s Not of This Earth) are conducting a routine space-station patrol when one of Yllana’s beams grazes their craft. The party crashes onto Venus, where the men find themselves under surveillance. Armed women arrive to pronounce the party under arrest and subject to proto-feminist ridicule.

At her palace, Yllana (masked, for reasons that will become patent) demands to know why the Earthmen have intruded. (As though she did not know.) She seems to believe, nonetheless, that they have come to conquer Venus. Her contempt for Earth and its warmongering ways stems from years of observation.

Patterson seeks assistance in repairing their ship. Venusian scientist Talleah (Zsa Zsa Gabor) countermands Yllana’s order that the men be put to death. An underground resistance seeks to depose Yllana, who had seized power in a revolt against the warlike men of Venus. The

Q U E E N O F O U T E R S P A C E • T H E B L O B
men decide to undermine Yllana’s regime by seducing the women. Patterson removes the ruler’s mask and finds her scarred by radiation burns from Venus’ last interplanetary war. Talleah shelters the men, offering an escape if they will help to destroy the death-ray mechanism.

Yllana takes aim upon Earth. Two revolutionaries (Lisa Davis and Barbara Darrow), have meanwhile sabotaged the machinery. Talleah leads an attack that leaves Yllana dead. The men’s ship is repaired, but a message from Earth instructs them to remain until a rescue ship. Faced with a long waiting period, the astronauts take solace with their Venusian lovers.

Charles Beaumont’s screenplay, from a story by the big-league playwright and journalist Ben Hecht, is long on suspense but short on payoff—more pageantry than narrative thrust. Laurie Mitchell is suitably imperious as Yllana, whose facial disfigurement accounts for a Phantom of the Opera-style gimmick, right down to the money-shot removal of her ornate Mardi Gras mask. (Allied Artists would exploit a similar facial malformation in 1960’s The Hypnotic Eye.)

The ruler’s man-hating tyranny suggests the influence, exaggerated, of William Moulton Marston’s WWII-era tales of the Amazonian Paradise Island in the Wonder Womancomic-book stories. Eric Fleming, better known as a TV-Western hero, cuts a stalwart heroic figure. Zsa Zsa Gabor lays it on thick with her signature Hungarian accent.

The Blob

(Tonylynn Productions • Paramount Pictures • 1958)

Much as 20 TH Century–Fox had benefited from The Fly(Page No. 119), so Paramount found The Blobone of its bigger moneymakers. Both represent rare crossovers to mass appeal for genre-bound films. Where Fox had produced The Flyin–house, however, Paramount left The Blobto its own low-budget devices until novice producer Jack H. Harris could finish the job, and then purchased the film outright for $300,000—more than twice Harris’ negative cost.

As early as September of 1958, after a well-received pre-release showing in Los Angeles, Paramount boasted of an anticipated domestic gross of $1.5 million. The studio hedged its bets with a conventional B–movie double-feature release, pairing The Blobwith Gene Fowler, JR.’s I Married a Monster from Outer Space(Page No. 152), but The Blob proved a popular sensation larger than many top-of-the-line Oscar-bait productions. A Latin-flavored hit song, “The Blob,” composed by Burt Bacharach and Mack David, lent momentum.

Movies about lumps of corrosive flesh seemed a dime–a–dozen during this period, but The Blobraised the stakes. Likewise for movies about misunderstood teenagers, an element that The Blobexploited as ably as Nicholas Ray’s higher-minded Rebel without a Cause had done in 1955. The headlong momentum achieved by director Irvin S. Yeaworth, JR., accounts for word-of-mouth appeal. So does the likable insolence of Steve McQueen. The horror–at–large, mindless and hungry, suggests a takeoff, simplified, upon H.P. Lovecraft’s famous short story of 1927, “The Colour out of Space.”

At a small-town lovers’ lane, Steve Andrews (McQueen) and Jane Martin (Aneta Corseaut) notice an object as it falls to Earth. They seek the landing–place. At a shack nearby, an old man (Olin Howlin) finds the space-borne stone. He prods at it, and the rock cracks open to reveal a gelatinous substance. The material attaches itself to his hand, and he runs into a roadway, where Andrews and Jane approach. They

At the ominous crater.

drive the man to the home of Dr. Hallen (Steven Chase), who finds the substance baffling. The shapeless mass has covered the old man’s arm. Andrews and Jane and a group of schoolmates find the empty meteor shell. Meanwhile, the alien mass has absorbed the old man and begins to devour the doctor’s nurse (Lee Payton). Neither acid nor gunfire affects the creature. Andrews, returning to Hallen’s house, sees the doctor’s struggle as he is devoured by the monster.

Police Sgt. Bert (John Benson) dismisses Andrews’ urgent report as a prank, but Lt. Dave (Earl Rowe) senses an element of truth. Jane’s parents forbid her to see Andrews; she steals away to meet him. The mass has found additional victims. After hours at the Andrews family’s grocery store, Andrews and Jane find themselves stalked by the creature, which retreats when the youngsters take refuge in a cold-storage compartment. Andrews and his hot-rodding pals wake the town to summon help.

The mass attacks a movie theatre. A last stand for survival takes place in a roadside diner. A fallen power line starts a fire, and when the café’s owner (Vince Barbi) deploys an extinguisher, Andrews notices that the alien retreats from the carbon-dioxide spray. Additional extinguishers are gathered—enough to freeze the creature, which the authorities arrange to transport to the Arctic circle. The closing title, “The End,” transforms into a question mark, as if to contradict the customary safe-and-sound resolution of horror-movie tradition.

Jack Harris, a motion-picture distributor, weighed in emphatically here as a producer. Despite the mass-market success of The Blob Harris and director Yeaworth followed through only with additional genrefied films ( 4D Manand Dinosaurus!, from 1959–1960) that had

T H E B L O B

scarcely a chance of breaking out beyond their built-in audience. Steve McQueen, a small-parts actor until now, found his starmaker role in The Blob, in terms of popular recognition, but steered clear of Poverty Row from here on out. His fellow players remained working actors, primarily on stage and in television. Olin Howlin, who plays the first victim, died the following year; Howlin is a key figure in the long run of Forgotten Horrorson the strength of one portrayal—the homicidal geezer who motivates the mayhem in Home in Wyomin’, a Gene Autry starrer from 1942. The Blob itself (never mentioned by that name in the film) required more than six months for the animation and superimposition of its silicone-gel mass, as opposed to the four weeks required for principal live-action photography.

The Bacharach & David novelty, “The Blob,” not only dominates the film’s main-title sequence but also became a hit via jukeboxes and pop–rock radio. Columbia Records attributed the performance to the Five Blobs—a spoofing reference to such pop-harmonizing acts of the day as the Four Lads and the Four Aces—but in fact the five voices were all provided by one singer, Bernie Knee, in multitrack mode. Paramount Pictures had commissioned the song over the objections of Jack Harris, who had preferred to use dramatic scoring under the titles by the film’s overall composer, Ralph Carmichael.

Harris did, however, claim the coup of plugging another of his properties in the (melo)dramatic context of The Blob. The ominous motion picture that plays during the panic at the movie theatre is 1955’s Dementia (see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6), which Harris had acquired in 1957 and rechristened Daughter of Horror.

The Blob still had legs—or pseudopods, anyhow—in 1964, when Harris bought back the property from Paramount and placed the film on a double-feature reissue with Dinosaurus! Harris Enterprises mounted an odd sequel in 1972, Beware! The Blob, directed by Larry Hagman and featuring Robert Walker, JR., in addition to such career comedians as Shelley Berman and Godfrey Cambridge. The sequel wavers among improvisational gallows humor, Theatre of the Absurd, and outright Shock Value. The films reappeared in 1980 as a dual-feature release. (See also: Forgotten Horrors to the NTHDegree.)

Chuck Russell’s revisionist remake of 1988 betrays the original concept of random cosmic misfortune in favor of a conspiracy-theory angle. A peculiar mutilation called Blobermouth(1991) imposes a personality upon the creature of the authentic 1958 picture, with absurdist dialogue spouted from off–camera by members of the L.A. Connection, a comedy troupe. An additional remake has remained in limbo since its announcement around the start of the 21ST century.

I Married a Monster from Outer Space

(Paramount Pictures • 1958)

All thanks to The Blob and its surprising mass-market appeal, Gene Fowler, JR.’s I Married a Monster from Outer Spacereceived far more popular attention via the lower berth of a double–bill than it would have if launched solo or paired with any other picture. I Married a Monster is the more accomplished and provocative effort, but The Blobin its day packed such a charge of ineffable magnetic oddity that even customers who disliked the spookers would feed the box office. If ever there had been a Horror Chic movement, The Bloband Fox’s The Fly would be its trendsetters.

I Married a Monster from Outer Space found more of a piggyback success at first but earned respect via word–of–mouth. Customers who found the True Confessions-styled title ridiculous, found instead a stylized film noir, laced with horrific science fiction and erotic tensions. (Another audacious fusion of noir with SF, also from Paramount, is 1942’s The Monster and the Girl, which marries a gangland melodrama with Mad Doctor shenanigans.)

T H E B L O B • I M A R R I E D A M O N S T E R

Bill Farrell (Tom Tryon), soon to be married, is shanghaied by an alien intelligence. He turns up late for the wedding. His odd manner suggests an otherworldly control. Farrell’s bride, Marge (Gloria Talbott), grows ever more bewildered and anxious. Additional townsmen are similarly waylaid.

Marge consults a physician (Ken Lynch) to seek an explanation for her childlessness. A similarly possessed neighbor, Sam Benson (Alan Dexter), suffers an accidental near–drowning; the doctor administers oxygen, which proves lethal to the alien within. It develops that the intruders seek to mutate human females so that a dying race may be fortified by new offspring—hardly a unique plotting device, but applied here to lend an urgent poignancy to the menace.

Marge confronts Farrell, who explains the conspiracy. She and the doctor rally a posse of uninfected men; they find the bodies of Farrell and the others in a comatose state. The doctor disconnects the circuitry, and the alien impostors are killed. The men are revived, and the invading craft is destroyed.

Director Fowler plays the marital-strife angle for persuasive naturalism while addressing the alien-invasion scenario with sober matter–of–factness. Louis Vittes’ screenplay captures the friendly smalltown setting as an ideally inconspicuous locale for an incompatible race to attempt to assimilate. Haskell Boggs’ camerawork is rich in shadowplay, punctuated by bursts of illumination which afford tantalizing glimpses of the hidden monsters. The creature costumes, developed by Charles Gemora, are distinguished by faces of nightmarish distortion; simple animation effects depict their destruction.

Gloria Talbott is just right as the wife, worried but determined to settle the crisis. Tom Tryon (later, a novelist of eerie distinction) is similarly credible as the inhabited husband, who gradually develops a sympathy with the species he seeks to corrupt. A strong scene-stealing presence is low-billed Max Rosenbloom—the former prizefighter, better known as a rough-and-tumble comedian—as an indignant bartender who cannot comprehend why his regular crowd of boozers has gone on the wagon. (The invaders are allergic to spiritus frumenti.)

An old-fashioned ballyhoo stunt went awry when Paramount Pictures sent a model named Jack Sterling (in monstrous costume) and an anonymous actress to visit the Los Angeles County Marriage Bureau. (This, according to The Hollywood Reporter.) The bureaucrats were not amused and responded with an order to scram.

Blood of the Vampire

(Artistes Alliance, Ltd. • Eros Films • Universal–International)

Alfred Shaughnessy’s Cat Girl (1957) had established Barbara Shelley as a genre star. Miss Shelley serves Henry Cass’ Blood of the Vampire(English-made, with U.S. underwriting) in a more conventional role, one of endangered heroism. Jimmy Sangster’s screenplay concerns a campaign by the living–dead Dr. Callistratus (Sir Donald Wolfit) to use the inmates of a prison as livestock. This twist upon The Most Dangerous Game(1932) hardly equips Callistratus with any sporting nature akin to that tale’s antagonist, but the depiction does extend to a similar finale, in which Callistratus falls prey to his pack of hunting dogs.

Vincent Ball is the hapless protagonist, a wrongfully accused physician forced to serve Callistratus, who also commands a deformed assistant (Victor Maddern). Miss Shelley, as Ball’s lover, seeks to free him. In a magnificiently well-photographed build–up to a showdown,

I MARRIED A MONSTER • BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE • MACABRE

Ball and Miss Shelley wind up shackled as Donald Wolfit ponders how best to dispose of them. Taking a cue, perhaps, from Tor Johnson’s childlike giant in Bride of the Monster(1956), the hunchback becomes enamored of Miss Shelley and rebels.

Wolfit gnaws the scenery in a manner reminiscent of Tod Slaughter, Great Britain’s greatest and most overcooked ham actor of the 1930s. Director Cass plays the climactic pursuit for sustained suspense. (A tedious midsection lingers overmuch upon strange but uneventful doings in Wolfit’s laboratory.)

Producers Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker progressed into The Trollenberg Terror(Page No. 173), an inventive Jack the Ripper (Page No. 175), The Flesh and the Fiends (Page No. 201), and The Hellfire Club (Page No. 204). Berman and Baker followed the example of Hammer Films in securing American co–financing, and they took a leading role in mollifying the pusillanimous British censors with tamed versions while preparing more jarring and salacious editions for export.

Macabre

(Susina Associates • Allied Artists • 1958)

William Castle had become a seasoned hand at suspense and grim humor: His entries from Columbia’s mysterious Whistlerseries of the 1940s represent the B–picture phenomenon in a most favorable light. Castle’s rugged artistry needed no gimmicks but received them, anyway, as a result of his desire for recognition as a showman, rather than merely a working producer–director.

Macabre marks Castle’s emergence as Hollywood’s leading sideshow impresario—daring the customers to see his preposterous films, promising rewards in case some sucker should die of fright, and paying off in terms of empty-calorie entertainment value. Emphasis

upon the entertainment value, for only an irremediable grump could come away from a Castle picture with feelings of resentment. Macabre for that matter, is a respectable whodunnit, played throughout for oppressive grimness in a setting of reciprocal hatreds. A twist ending worthy of H.G. Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques(1955) reveals the tale as a shaggy-dog story with just one measly punchline, but the humor is strictly that of the gallows and the graveyard.

Castle’s inaugural gimmick was to publicize an insurance policy that would pay $1,000 to the survivors of anyone who died of fright during a showing. A prologue (absent from some surviving prints) proposes to brace the audience for a pageant of shocks. As Phil Hardy has noted, “Lloyds of London had little to fear from the film.” (A similar stunt figures in the publicity for The Screaming Skull, Page No. 44.)

The source is The Marble Forest, a novel attributed to one Theo Durrant but in fact written in ’round–robin fashion by 12 members of

the Mystery Writers of America. (The authors are Terry Adler, Anthony Boucher, Eunice Mays Boyd, Florence Ostern Faulkner, Allen Hymson, Cary Lucas, Dana Lyon, Lenore Glen Offord, Virginia Rath, Richard Shattuck, Darwin L. Teilhet, and William Worley.) Robb White’s screenplay opens with a complaint from small-town mortician Ed Quigley (Jonathan Kidd) that a child-sized casket has been stolen.

Police Chief Jim Tyloe (Jim Backus, also the cartoon voice of UPA Studios’ Mr. Magoo) suspects a ruse to distract attention from Quigley’s gambling debts. Quigley is at the same time making preparations for a midnight funeral, at the orders of wealthy Jode Wetherby (Philip Tonge). Wetherby’s wayward daughter, Nancy (Christine White), has died. Jim Tyloe, one of Nancy’s lovers, upbraids Dr. Rodney Barrett (William Prince) with suspicions that the physician is responsible for the deaths of both Nancy and her sister, Alice (Dorothy Morris), who had been Barrett’s wife.

The town is a veritable Peyton Place—a hotbed of treacheries and lustful intrigues. Barrett, troubled by rumors linking him to the Wetherby sisters’ deaths, takes little comfort in a reminder from his

nurse, Polly Baron (Jacqueline Scott), that he had been drinking with Sylvia Stevens (Susan Morrow), when Alice died during childbirth. Barrett suggests that he and Polly take his 3-year-old daughter, Marge (Linda Guderman), for an excursion. But the child is nowhere to be found. A menacing ’phone call informs Polly that Marge is “now with the dead.” Marge is said to be inside a coffin, with hours to live. Citing Tyloe’s contempt for him, Barrett refuses to summon the police. Miss Kushins (Ellen Corby), the housekeeper, wants to inform Jode Wetherby, but Barrett reminds her that the patriarch has a weak heart. Miss Kushins, ever the busybody, waits until Barrett and Polly have left and then contacts Wetherby against all good sense.

A clue leads to the graveyard. Patches of loose dirt suggest a hidden coffin. Ominous noises prompt Barrett and Polly to hide in an open grave. The caretaker, Hummel (Howard Hoffman), appears, brandishing a shotgun. A hidden assailant clubs Hummel to death. As Barrett examines the body, a hand grabs Polly from behind a tombstone. Wetherby stumbles out to admit he attacked Hummel, believing the caretaker to be Marge’s abductor.

Marge is all the kin Wetherby has left after the death of his wildat-heart daughter, Nancy. A dreamlike flashback reveals the selfdestructive, hedonistic streak with which Nancy had hidden her despondency over being blind since birth. Her many lovers had included Tyloe, whom she had seduced despite the knowledge that he had loved her sister and resented Alice’s marriage to Barrett.

The flashback persists with a diagnosis of pregancy for Nancy. Barrett had refused her request for an abortion. Nancy would not consider bearing a child who might prove blind. Soon thereafter, Nancy had died under peculiar circumstances.

Back in the moment, Barrett orders Polly to take Wetherby home without reporting the slaying of the caretaker. The search for Marge

leads to Quigley’s funeral parlor—a desolate setting, lighted by the intermittent flashing of a neon sign. The time draws near for Nancy’s funeral. Polly accuses Barrett of bringing these crushing experiences upon himself by becoming involved with Sylvia during Alice’s difficult pregnancy. Hummel’s body turns up, to jarring effect, in the Tyloe family’s mauseoleum.

As the townsmen begin shoveling dirt onto Nancy’s grave, Barrett’s spade strikes a hidden object—a child’s coffin. Barrett collapses upon opening the casket. Wetherby rushes to look and suffers a fatal heart attack. Inside the coffin is a gruesome mannequin.

Barrett is suddenly gunned down by Quigley. The mortician hurls a wad of money at Barrett and confesses to having been the doctor’s paid accomplice in the last stage of a scheme to inherit the Wetherby estate. En route to a hospital, Barrett insists upon stopping at his clinic, where he plays for Polly a tape–recording of the kidnap message. As Barrett collapses in death, Polly finds Marge asleep in a back room. A closing bit of narration implores the viewer not to give away the ending, lest the experience be spoiled for the next audience.

The advertising piece reproduced above is modeled after William Castle’s closing gag—an end-credits sequence featuring animated, horse-drawn hearses and a procession of mourners, with cards to indicate the players and their roles. The technical credits feature ghoulish images, in a style imitative of Charles Addams’ famous cartoons for The New Yorkermagazine.

FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON • MISSILE TO THE MOON

From the Earth to the Moon

(Benedict Bogeaus Productions • Waverly Productions • Warner Bros.)

As early as 1948, William Castle had proposed a feature from Jules Verne’s 19TH-century novel, From the Earth to the Moon, and its sequel, ’Round the Moon—more documentary than dramatized narrative, as Castle described the project. The film never launched. Castle remained a hired-gun director of B-unit melodramas. George Pal stepped forth with Destination Moon—no kin to Jules Verne, except in spirit—which triggered a rush of rocketship adventures.

Interest in Verne remained keen within the industry. A French–Italian coalition in 1956 announced that Genevieve Page would star in a takeoff on From the Earth to the Moon, another abortive project. Only after Benedict Bogeaus, an independent producer attached to Warner Bros., had singled out the story in 1957 for development, did the prophetic novel gain traction as a motion picture. Bogeaus failed, however, in his stated aim of signing Errol Flynn for the leading role. He landed Joseph Cotten, instead.

(It goes without saying that the French filmmaking pioneer Georges Mèliés had scooped everybody during 1899–1902 with two versions of “Le Voyage dans la Lune,” both derived from Verne.)

Bogeaus and director Byron Haskins’ production of From the Earth to the Moonis a fine-looking but tedious entry. Cotten, as munitions manufacturer and inventor Victor Barbicane, orders an expedition to the moon, where he proposes to test an explosive substance too dangerous to be deployed on Earth. A fanatical opponent, Stuyvesant Nicholl (George Sanders), challenges Barbicane; the rivalry will take the men to recognition as martyrs of science.

Though set in historic times, From the Earth to the Moonmakes little of its period setting except to present President U.S. Grant (Morris Ankrum) and Jules Verne himself as interested parties. Scenarists Robert Blees and James Leicester play it coy with the Verne character, referring to him as “J.V.” until a closing sequence where Verne (Carl Esmond) makes his identity known in a curtain speech. Lee Zavitz and Albert M. Simpson’s visual effects are competent but unspectacular. Debra Paget and Don Dubbins supply gratuitous romantic interest.

The exploitation of popular interest in Real World rocket projects could scarcely have been more timely. The Soviet Union had launched Sputnik in 1957, and in 1958 the United States inaugurated the National Aeronautical & Space Administration with the launching of Explorer I. Verne remained an inspiration to Hollywood, and in 1967 American International Pictures worked a twist on From the Earth to the Moonwith Those Fantastic Flying Fools

Missile to the Moon

(Layton Film Productions • Astor Pictures • 1958)

The least of Richard Cunha’s films (see also Page No. 39) is Missile to the Moon, a gratuitous remake of Arthur Hilton’s C at–Women of the Moon(1953). A flaccid new script by H.E. Barrie and Vincent Fotre is no improvement, but Cunha’s brisk pacing and grim approach to the material render the film at least distinctive.

Scientist Dirk Green (Michael Whalen) finds his moon-shot project hijacked by military personnel. Before the bureaucracy can take charge, Green captures two escaped convicts (Tommy Cook and Gary Clarke) who have taken refuge in the rocket’s control room. He offers

the thugs a proposition: They will become his crewmen, or he will kill them. With Green’s fiancée, June Saxton (Cathy Downs), and a colleague, Steve Dayton (Richard Travis), also in tow, the party encounters an onslaught of meteorites. Green dies in transit, but not before he has instructed Dayton to hold the course.

The moon (represented by the Mojave Desert’s adjoining Red Rock Canyon) is inhabited by menacing rock creatures, an immense spider, and voluptuous women, most of them played by an array of beautypageant winners. The female ruler (K.T. Stevens) mistakes Dayton for Green. Dayton concludes that Green must have been a fugitive from the moon tribe, now bereft of men. June finds herself in conflict with a native (Nina Bara) over the affections of Dayton. Deadly ordeals persist, some to suspenseful effect, until the surviving expeditioners return to the ship and haul out for Earth. None too soon.

Fiend without a Face

(Producers Associates • Amalgamated • Eros • MGM • 1958)

In which invisible atomic monsters attack a Canadian outpost of the U.S. Armed Forces and a neighboring village. One of the sharper examples of British genre filmmaking, Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend without a Facealso represents a shot at popular acceptance in the United States, what with the North American setting and the casting of Marshall Thompson as marquée bait for the U.S. genre enthusiasts. The tactic is akin to Hammer Films’ casting of the lapsed Hollywood star Brian Donlevy in the Quatermass films of this same period.

The basis is Amelia Reynolds Long’s story “The Thought Monster,” as published in 1930 in Weird Talesmagazine. Miss Long’s vision of mind-over-matter abilities as a generator of palpable menaces had

M I S S I L E T O T H E M O O N • F I E N D W I T H O U T A F A C E

proved influential over the long haul: The story appears to have lent an inspiration, for example, to Forbidden Planet(1956), which trades upon the notion of monstrous thoughts made flesh. Miss Long, though retired from science fiction since the 1940s, kept a hand in via a literary agent, Famous Monsters magazine’s Forrest J Ackerman, who helped to keep her early work in print and arranged the sale of “The Thought Monster” as a movie property.

The dour matter-of-fact directing style of Arthur Crabtree (of Horrors of the Black Museum) works wonders with Herbert J. Leder’s adapted screenplay for Fiend without a Face. The visual-effects crew (Peter Neilson, Flo Nordhoff, and Karl–Ludwig Ruppel) literalizes the menace with a cringe-inducing array of monstrous animated brains with propulsive spinal cords. Invisible—though not for long—the creatures represent the crueler thoughts of an inventor (Kynaston Reeves), inadvertently materialized by a mind-reading device with telekinetic properties. A nuclear-power plant provides the energy. “Some mental vampire,” declares Thompson.

Unusually visceral for its time, Fiend without a Face caused a furor of indignation upon its premiere in England—a decisive test of the British Board of Film Censors’ X Certificate as a signal of horrific content. The clincher lies in the animated sequences and their integration with live action—hardly in a class with Ray Harryhausen’s work of the day, but right for the circumstances. The creatures radiate malevolent glee as their strategic intelligence deepens. Here is a most brainy picture, in both literal and figurative terms, which (along with the period’s Hammer productions) represents an infusion of vigor for the British film industry and its export potential.

Monster from Green Hell

(Gross–Krasne, Inc. • Distributors Corp. of America • 1958)

From brainy film (above) to brainless film in scarcely the breadth of a page: Monster from Green Hell betrays the essence of its genre as a vessel for provocative ideas, settling instead for a giant-bug scenario almost as silly as Bert I. Gordon’s rampage of enlarged grasshoppers in Beginning of the End(1957). The creatures of Monster from Green Hell represent the (stolen) work of Paul Blaisdell, who had been invited in 1956 to handle the designs but then found himself stiffed. Blaisdell’s signature lies in the scowling, cartoonish monsters.

Scenarists Louis Vittes and Endre Bohen had envisioned a livelier experience, what with the combination of a jungle setting, a humanitarian mission gone awry, and a nuclear crisis. Heroism is beside the point: It is left to Old Mother Nature to stumble in and clean up the mess, and a capable ensemble cast is left hanging amidst director Kenneth G. Crane’s stodgy pacing.

A rocket, laden with wasps to test the creatures’ rate of survival in space, goes off course near Africa. A jungle region known as Green Hell finds itself under siege by freakish monsters. A missionary physician, Lorentz (Vladimir Sokoloff), finds a native dead of an infusion of venom. In Washington, rocket-program chief Quent Brady (Jim Davis) surmises that the wasps in the missing rocket have been rendered immense by cosmic radiation. Brady and colleague Dan Morgan (Robert E. Griffin) head for Equatorial Africa.

Lorentz’ daughter, Lorna (Barbara Turner) reports her father missing. A native (Joel Fluellen) finds the doctor dead and retrieves a huge stinger as evidence. Brady, Lorna, and Morgan mount a safari. They

F I E N D • G R E E N H E L L • T H E L O S T M I S S I L E

find a village littered with corpses. Brady proposes to find the colony of monsters and eliminate the queen wasp.

At a volcanic ridge, a barrage of grenades serves but to anger the creatures. The explorers take shelter in a cave too small for the wasps to enter. Just as the party retreats through another passage, the volcano smothers the wasps in a burst of lava. Morgan muses that nature has its ways of correcting its mistakes.

The slovenliness of the production extends to a failure to register Monster from Green Hellfor copyright, barring a common-law declaration. A claim of second-unit location work in Africa is patently false: The safari footage is lifted from 20TH Century–Fox’s production of Stanley & Livingstone (1939). The theatrical-release prints featured intercut color footage in the volcanic-eruption sequence, but surviving prints from television syndication are entirely in black–and–white.

The Lost Missile

(William Berke Productions • United Artists • 1958)

The last film of cinematographer–turned–director Lester William Berke—he died amidships in early 1958—is a weak representation of a career devoted largely to Westerns and crime melodramas. The Lost Missile suffocates a Cold War allegory in soap-operatic hysterics and marital intrigues, despite such harsher concerns as the leveling of a city, the martyrdom of a dedicated scientist, and a threat from outer space.

David Loring (Robert Loggia) and his assistant and fiancée, Joan Woods (Ellen Parker) have placed his warmongering rocket project, code-named Jobe, ahead of their plan to marry. Loring finally agrees to a hasty wedding. A colleague, Joe Freed (Philip Pine), is likewise conflicted: Freed’s wife (Marilee Earle) is due to give birth any moment, now, and here he is, slaving away on a doomsday venture.

An alien missile circling Earth provokes the Soviet Union to launch a counterstrike to what the Russians see as an American attack. The Soviet missile alters the course of the U.F.O., bringing it nearer. Loring and Joan go shopping for wedding rings—oblivious to the crisis. Annoyed by Loring’s apathy, Joan calls off their engagement.

Loring finds the Eastern Seaboard on alert; a lockdown confines him and Freed to the laboratory. The rogue missile heads for Ottowa and New York. Canada and America deploy a counter–attack. Freed’s greater concern is to rejoin his wife.

Loring proposes a launch of the unfinished Jobe rocket, reasoning that he can install a trigger in short order. Freed argues that the missile should be intercepted for study—then steals away in defiance.

Personal tensions, generalized panic, and random misfortunes compromise Loring’s mission. Finding the plutonium fuse–box opened, Loring braves the deadly radiation in a struggle to reach the launching–pad. The killer missile incinerates Ottowa and proceeds toward New York. Loring installs the fuse, then collapses in death as the missile is fired. Joe finally joins Ella and their new baby in a bomb shelter. Jobe destroys the alien weapon. The battle against time is as nothing when compared with the viewer’s struggle through a seemingly interminable 70 minutes’ screening time.

Frankenstein’s Daughter

(Layton Film • Astor Pictures • 1958)

Richard Cunha’s entry in the teenage-monster sweepstakes is notable, even for that repetitive and opportunistic subgenre. Frankenstein’s Daughtersuffers from shoddy production values and the padding of insipid rock ’n’ roll music and hedonistic kid-stuff shenanigans, but Cunha’s handling of H.E. Barrie’s awkward script has a fierce efficiency. Donald Murphy is a conniving and self-important descendant of the Frankenstein clan, with Wolfe Barzell as the requisite homicidal halfwit assistant. The convoluted plot bears exploring:

Susie Lawler (Sally Todd) cringes from an attack by a deformed prowler. Susie’s friend, Trudy Morton (Sandra Knight), suffers a dream about the same apparition. Trudy is unaware that she has been drugged by Oliver Frank (Murphy), assistant to Trudy’s uncle, scientist Carter Morton (Felix Locher). Frank hides his true identity as Oliver Frankenstein, grandson of the notorious renegade surgeon.

Carter seeks a miraculous curative formula. Oliver’s furtive behavior and arrogance annoy Carter. Trudy becomes upset upon hearing Susie’s story of the attack. Trudy describes her dream to her boyfriend, Johnny Bruder (John Ashley).

Frank(enstein) and gardener Alfred Heslo (Barzell) have hidden a collection of body parts. Frank subjects Trudy to a potion that transforms her into a monster. She recovers but finds herself haunted by vague memories of the experience. Oliver, rebuffed in his advances toward Susie, kills the girl and transfers her brain into the body of a patchwork creature (Harry Wilson), which proves uncontrollable.

Oliver proposes to use Trudy to build another monster, but Heslo intervenes. Oliver looses the creature upon Heslo. Trudy escapes.
The killings mount in number. Oliver orders the creature to attack Johnny, who throws a beaker of acid at the scientist. The creature, confused, stumbles into a laboratory burner. Oliver and his monster

T H E L O S T M I S S I L E • F R A N K E N S T E I N ’ S D A U G H T E R

roast while Trudy and Johnny make tracks for safety. The last of the Frankensteins has failed as emphatically as his ancestors in the quest to create a perfect humanoid being.

Cunha had performed better work, and he would remain an occasional fixture of the film industry, as a director (Girl in Room 13and Dog Eat Dog, from 1963–1964), and as a backup cinematographer on Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind(1977). Cunha’s concentrated burst of productivity of 1958 is a distinguished body of work in itself, however uneven in its range of raw material and accomplishment.

Most Dangerous Man Alive

(Trans–Global Films • Columbia Pictures • 1958)

Benedict Bogeaus’ lapse as an influential independent producer was abrupt—as decisive as the failure of his next-to-last picture, Most Dangerous Man Alive, to achieve a timely release. Stuffed and mounted in 1958, this deficient trophy of a Brilliant Career run aground remained unissued until 1961.

The story of a criminal rendered invulnerable by Big Science reflected an intense popular interest—such themes were a commonplace in comic books of the day—that had waned by the 1960s. Bookings proved scarce, and a half-hearted marketing campaign was of no help. Bogeaus’ final production, a proto-Disaster Movie called Jet over the Atlantic(1959), had come and gone by the time Most Dangerous Man Alivecould find a tenuous footing. The film’s greater exposure would lie in the wastelands of night-owl television.

The jinxed picture also marks an exit for veteran director Allan Dwan, of 1948’s Angel in Exile (see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 4), among many others. No one in charge seems up to snuff on Most Dangerous Man Alive, which seems a pointless riff upon themes explored in two oddly matched gangster films of 1955–1956, Stuart Heisler’s I Died a Thousand Times and Jack Pollexfen’s Indestructible Man

The script, by James Leicester and Phillip Rock from a story by Rock and actor Michael Pate (of 1959’s Curse of the Undead), finds racketeer Eddie Candell (Ron Randell) framed on a charge of murder. He escapes to the site of an experiment in cobalt mutation, survives an explosion, and discovers that his body has become metallic. Having become his own instrument of vengeance, Candell sets out after Andy Damon (Anthony Caruso), who had arranged the frame–job in order to take over Candell’s gang. Candell finds solace with a woman (Elaine Stewart), whom he had befriended. Damon kills Candell’s former lover (Debra Paget), and Candell dispatches Damon. The National Guard puts an end to Candell with a flamethrower barrage.

A faint echo of Most Dangerous Man Alive surfaces in Wim Wenders’ The State of Things(1982), which explores the treacherous waters of the moviemaking process. Wenders told us in 1996 that he intended his film–within–a–film as “a reference to Allan Dwan’s Most Dangerous Man Alive, which to me represents a textbook example of an exercise in futility.”

Wild Women of Wongo

(Tropical Pictures • Jaywall Productions • Wolcott • 1958)

A persistent legend has Tennessee Williams directing portions of Wild Women of Wongo, given the more reliable account that the playwright, a friend of producer–director James Wolcott, had spent time on the set as an observer. So give that one a rest, already. The film is enough of a blotch on the Art of the Moving Image without dragging Tennessee Williams into the mess.

Cedric Rutherford’s derivative screenplay borrows from the usual linchpins of Goona–Goonacinema, to the extent of giving the name of Goona to one nation of a primitive society. The Goona–Goona subgenre, so called after a like-titled film of 1932, had flourished since an outpouring of jungle-expedition pictures of the silent-screen years. Some examples are valid documentaries, some are fabricated documentaries, and many others are mere exotic fantasies.

M O S T D A N G E R O U S M A N • W I L D W O M E N

Wild Women of Wongo imagines a struggle: The ruler of Wongo (Rex Richards) is confronted by Engor (Johnny Walsh), a prince of Goona, with a request for assistance in repelling a murderous tribe of apemen.

Engor proves fascinating to the women of Wongo, what with his sleek, beardless good looks in contrast to the Neanderthal slobs of Wongo.

The Wongan men suspect a plot to steal their women, and never mind any predatory apemen. Tribeswoman Omoo (Jean Hawkshaw) foils a plot to kill Engor. The opposing enclaves seem ideally matched, in any event: The Wongan women are beauties, and the Goonan women are as ugly as the Wongan men. This early revelation fairly well gives away the ending, which arrives none too soon— but only after sieges by a purported Dragon God (a crocodile) and the massed (but conveniently off-camera) apemen. Seldom has a 72-minute running time felt so interminably overlong.

Sporadic distribution continued into 1959–1960. The primeval setting is coastal Florida, with underwater shooting at Silver Springs. The film went unregistered for copyright. Some tribesmen wear Fruit–of–the–Looms beneath their animal-hide costumes. One of the women of Goona, Adrienne Borbeau, often is mistakenly identified as the much younger and more accomplished actress Adrienne Barbeau. The Goona–Goona subgenre, faded but deathless, also figures during this period in Bowanga Bowanga(1951) and Untamed Mistress (1956).

W I L D W O M E N O F W O N G O • T H E C R A W L I N G E Y E

The Crawling Eye

IN ENGLAND: The Trollenberg Terror
(Tempean • Eros • Distributors Corporation of America • 1958)

One of screenwriter Jimmy Sangster’s better pieces apart from his work at Hammer Films, The Trollenberg Terror derives from an English teleseries (by Peter Key) in much the same way that Hammer’s Quatermass features had spun off Nigel Kneale’s BBC scripts. Minuscule budget and lacking special effects notwithstanding, Trollenbergis an atmospheric marvel that delves into extra-sensory perception in addition to its concern with an alien invasion.

An ominous cloud materializes near a Swiss village. A professor (Warren Mitchell) notifies scientist Alan Brooks (Forrest Tucker), visiting on behalf of the United Nations. Mountain-climbing athletes begin turning up decapitated or in the thrall of some otherworldly control. The fog envelops the town. An evacuation leaves the professor and Brooks to take a stand. Anne Pilgrim (Janet Munro), a telepath, proves capable of communicating with the alien force.

Forrest Tucker had lately completed the British picture The Strange World of Planet X(A.K.A. Cosmic Monsters); both films reached American screens simultaneously in 1958. Tucker serves Trollenberg with resourceful heroism, especially in the rescue of a girl from an emerging monster. Janet Munro is similarly persuasive as the empath. Both players meet the threat as if imagining horrors more lifelike than Les Bowie’s primitive special effects come prepared to supply. The monstrous tentacled-eyeball creatures are as absurd as the cotton wadding that represents their cloud–shelter.

Cosmic Monsters

I NENGLAND: The Strange World of Planet X (Artistes Alliance • Eros & Distributors Corporation of America • 1957–1958)

Delayed in reaching America, Gilbert Gunn’s The Strange World of Planet Xmade for a striking double–billing with DCA’s acquisition of The Trollenberg Terror. Forrest Tucker serves each in a leading role, and each compromises its speculative impact with cheap special effects. Strange World, too, derives from British TV.

Tucker is a scientist whose overzealous boss (Alec Mango) conducts experiments that leave the ionosphere open to cosmic radiation. The barrage transforms a tramp into a rampaging maniac, here, and, there, enlarges insects and spiders to monstrous proportions. A strange intruder (Martin Benson) arrives, presumably from space, to help set matters right.

Gunn’s stodgy pacing gradually develops momentum. Tucker is stalwart and determined, and Gaby André makes an impressive leading lady, although her anonymously dubbed British voice (she spoke English with a thick French accent) is a distraction.

Barring one scene of grisly horror—an enlarged ant devours human flesh— the visual effects are ill timed and unpersuasive. The imposed images would have worked to finer effect, if only the bug footage had been shot for rear–projection at a slower rate.

C O S M I C M O N S T E R S • J A C K T H E R I P P E R

Jack the Ripper

(Mid–Century • Embassy Pictures • Paramount • 1958–1960)

Long in reaching America though financed in part by Joseph E. Levine’s Hollywood-based Embassy Pictures, Robert S. Baker’s Jack the Rippercaused as keen a popular sensation among the Yanks as it had with the English. The lone concession to gimmickry in an otherwise conservatively staged black-and-white picture is a burst of crimson (at the finale) as blood oozes through the floorboards of an elevator.

Hardly an innovation, the stunt nonetheless registered sufficiently to lend a word-of-mouth momentum that no advertising budget could have secured. Simple as that—and no more than a fluke of timing: Similar color-burst effects had figured in the B&W War of the Colossal Beastand I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, among others, but passed largely unnoticed among those pictures’ primarily juvenile audiences.

This Jack the Ripper(not to be confused with many another such film) advanced the ambitions of producers Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman to give the Hammer company a run for its money at home and in the export market. (See also: Blood of the Vampire, Page No. 154.) Baker and Berman sought maximum Shock Value for the Continental European trade, then tempered the finished products to comply with stricter British and American standards of censorship. Jimmy Sangster’s screenplay owes little to Marie Belloc–Lowndes’ often-dramatized Ripper novel, The Lodger, but imagines instead a persuasive solution to Scotland Yard’s most perplexing case.

An opening narration implores the viewer to watch for clues and detect the murderer in this unsolved historical mystery. The Real World case involves the murders of five prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London during the late 1880s. As described in the present film, the condition of the bodies indicated that the so-called Ripper possessed a knowledge of anatomy. The case provoked a public outcry in its day, causing the resignation of the Home Secretary and a police commissioner. Sangster based this script upon a story by Peter Hammond and Colin Craig, whose research is evident despite the dramatic liberties.

The story: A string of prostitute slayings moves Inspector O’Neill (Eddie Byrne, a Hammer stock player) to muster all policemen. The investigation proves futile. The public begins accusing strangers at random and turns against the police. O’Neill rescues a visiting American lawman, Sam Lowry (Canadian actor Lee Patterson), from a mob and accepts his offer to help investigate.

The Ripper’s customary greeting to a victim is, “Are you Mary Clarke?” Meanwhile at a charity hospital, Chief Surgeon Tranter (John LEMesurier) prepares for an operation; his patient is Kitty Knowles (Barbara Burke). An autopsy upon the latest victim by the chief–of–staff, Sir David Rogers (Ewen Solon), establishes that the wounds bespeak a familiarity with surgical procedures.

Tranter is chagrined that his ward, Anne Ford (Betty McDowall), has taken charge of charity cases. He disapproves of her work with the lower classes and declares the Ripper’s victims unworthy of his benevolent attention. O’Neill and Lowry protect Tranter and Anne against an angry mob. Anne complains that the killings have been assigned a lesser priority because of the victims’ social standing.

Tranter disapproves of Anne’s friendship with Lowry. She rebels and takes Lowry to a dive where one of the victims had worked. There, the manager (Philip Leaver) sends two dancers, Hazel and Margaret

J A C K

(Jane Taylor and Dorinda Stevens), to entertain two patrons in a backroom. Hazel flees the building, horrified that she must prostitute herself. A barroom worker, sent to recapture her, passes a cloaked stranger but does not find Hazel until after the Ripper has ripped ’er. Tranter, lurking outside, demands that Anne return home. An angry mob accuses the hospital's hunchbacked handyman, Louis Benz (Endre Muller), of the crime after he drops a bag of surgical tools. O’Neill intervenes and places Benz in protective custody despite the commissioner’s assumption of guilt. It comes to light that the stranger had asked, “Is your name Mary Clarke?” just before Hazel’s slaying.

Now seeking Mary Clarke, O’Neill finds only her father (George Rose), who recalls that a chap carrying a doctor’s bag had inquired about Mary some months ago. Anne learns that a fiancé, a surgeon–in–training, had committed suicide upon learning of Kitty’s promiscuity. Anne suspects that the Ripper is near; Rogers appears and claims to have been shadowing Anne for her protection.

Anne prepares to claim welfare benefits for Kitty. A birth certificate reveals Kitty to be the elusive Mary Clarke. At Kitty’s apartment, the Ripper springs from hiding and locks Anne into a pantry. Kitty returns to finds the Ripper— now unveiled as Sir David Rogers—waiting. He addresses her as Mary Clarke, accuses her of killing his son, Kitty’s fiancé, and croaks her. Anne barricades the pantry. Lowry breaks in. Rogers flees before Anne or Lowry can recognize him.

T H E R I P P E R

Rogers kills a guard at the hospital. Lowry arrives to inform Rogers that the Ripper must be inside. Sensing the truth, Inspector O’Neill lies that the slain guard is still alive and demands that Rogers must minister to the victim. Rogers darts into an elevator shaft. The descending lift crushes Rogers. Because they cannot prove Rogers’ guilt, O’Neill and Lowry declare the case beyond solution.

Baker and Berman, as co–directors, prove less concerned with precipitous momentum than with suspenseful atmosphere. The performances are almost uniformly vivid, from Eddie Byrne and Lee Patterson’s companionable but unalike detectives to Betty McDowall’s defiant social worker and John LEMesurier’s pompous but essentially decent surgeon. As the deranged pillar of society, Ewen Solon registers an indefinable chill throughout as a prelude to his emergence as the menace. The imaginary solution grates against various popular notions that a political conspiracy lay behind the Ripper killings, but Solon’s personal motivations ring true within the film’s context.

The film saw a gradual spreading through England during 1958–1959. The American Production Code Administration granted a Purity Seal in mid–1959, with surprisingly few cuts. Although Paramount Pictures reneged on a deal to absorb Joseph E. Levine’s Embassy Pictures as a subsidiary, the big studio nonetheless purchased American distribution rights to Jack the Ripper.

The case has been a staple of filmmaking since the silent age. The Lodger(1944) is among the more dynamic adaptations. Others include Das Ungeheuer VONLondon City(Germany; 1964), Jack el Destripador de Londres(Spain; 1971); From Hell(2001); and a documentary teleseries, Jack the Ripper(England; 1973).

J A C K T H E R I P P E R • T H E C O S M I C M A N

1959

The Cosmic Man

(Futura • Allied Artists • 1959)
A provocative clash
between scientific curiosity
and reactionary military
might receives a naïve
interpretation in Herbert
Greene’s The Cosmic Man
The film borrows altogether
too much of its central
argument from Robert
Wise’s The Day the Earth
Stood Still(1951), and alto
gether too little of Wise’s
urgently realistic approach
to fantastic storytelling.

In a larger perspective,
The Cosmic Manbelongs to
a cycle of films exploiting
prevalent fears of nuclear
warfare, including the
classier likes of On the
Beach (Page No. 254) and
The World, the Flesh and
the Devil(Page No. 211).

John Carradine, howev
er, is the embodiment of
class (slumming) in the title
role of The Cosmic Man
The great Shakespearean,
who used such low-budget
paydays to finance a prac
tice of bring finer dramatic
values to provincial play
houses around the country,
also accounts for the film’s
lone concession to special
effects: Carradine casts an
image like a photographic
negative, with darkened
complexion and a white
shadow.

Air Force Intelligence
tracks a UFO to a moun
tainous region in the west
ern part of the country.
Gen. Knowland (Herbert
Lytton) overrides a call for
secrecy and contacts Dr.
Karl Sorenson (Bruce
Bennett), a professor of

astrophysics and alumnusof the Manhattan Project. Belligerent Col. Mathews (Paul Langton) suspects extraterrestrial foul play and orders a squadron stationed about a hovering sphere.

Innkeeper Kathy Grant (Angela Greene) and her crippled son, Ken (Scotty Morrow), defy Mathews’ objections to civilian intrusions. Mathews commandeers Kathy’s lodge as temporary military quarters. Dr. Sorenson considers the sphere unthreatening. A strange glow radiates from the object; an Air Force sergeant (Lyn Osborn) hears footfalls but sees no one about.

Kathy laments to Mathews that, for all the recent advances made by science, there is no cure for Ken’s paralysis. A shadowy figure cause general panic. It steals into Sorenson’s laboratory and modifies a blueprint; a colleague, Dr. Richie (Walter Maslow), is astonished to find that the additions complete a photon-chamber diagram. Sorenson senses an alien presence and assumes it must be benevolent.

Sorenson surmises that the alien being is composed of anti–matter. Mathews orders the dismantling of the sphere. Meanwhile, a cloaked man rents a room at the lodge.

Mathews’ troops cannot move or penetrate the sphere. Sorenson and Richie discover the sphere’s capacity to generate sonic blasts. Sorenson notes that the vessel has landed, as if by design, near ionpropulsion and radiation plants. Knowland accepts the decision to cut into the sphere but calls for an opinion from another scientist.

The shadowy figure (Carradine) announces himself as the alien visitor. He explains an interest in sharing his knowledge with other civilizations; praises science as the hope of an immature human race; and seeks permission to depart without interference. Mathews, sensing a threat, opens fire—to no effect. Knowland orders the alien’s cap

T H E C O S M I C M A N • T H E H I D E O U S S U N D E M O N
ture and destruction. Mathews learns that nuclear stockpiles nearby have been contaminated. Sorenson insists that the contamination bespeaks good will on the alien’s part. Mathews orders the scientist placed under house arrest.

Kathy finds the stranger visiting with Ken. The boy goes missing. As the military continues to assail the spaceship, the alien materializes, carrying Ken, and proposes to enter his craft. A treacherous deed causes the spaceman to collapse. To Kathy’s amazement, Ken stands and walks toward her. A light beams from the sphere, which disappears with the alien aboard. And so much for a welcoming reception for a well-intentioned visitor from the void. Even so, the film registers an optimistic closing note.

Arthur C. Pierce’s scenario lacks the richness of characterization necessary to put across the tacit argument for progressive thinking. The human characters are facile cyphers, inviting no emotional investment. The subplot about the handicapped youngster is unnecessarily sentimentalized. Carradine bears watching under any circumstances. Hawk-nosed Bruce Bennett (néHerman Brix), like Carradine a recurring figure in the Forgotten Horrorscanon, registers a fitting indignation when the military establishment makes plain its hostilities.

The Hideous Sun Demon

(Clarke-King Enterprises • Pacific International • 1959) MEMORANDUM FROM MIKE PRICE: The boy-howdy big-deal World Premiere of Robert Clarke’s The Hideous Sun Demon took place in August of 1958—four months before its formal release—at a Northside drive-in theatre in my hometown of Amarillo, Texas. My Uncle Grady L. Wilson, who managed indoor theatres for the Dallas-based Interstate Circuit, was among the guests, owing to friendships with the drive-in operators.

Grady and I attended, with all due enthusiasm (I was 10, going on 18); he had an interest in seeing how a prospective sucker-bait attraction would play, and we shared an interest in the spookers as a class. Local dignitaries thronged the outdoor theatre, including many who under normal circumstances would not have been caught dead taking in a low-budget horror movie at a drive–in on the seedier side of town. But then, this was a World Premiere, after all. The film, though hardly in a class with anything that Roger Corman was turning out at the time, at least counteracted the tedious ceremonial pageantry. I got to wear the SunDemon’s stinky old rubberized headpiece.

Had Robert Clarke, intent upon taking charge of his moviemaking ambitions, thought to entrust the directing chores to his friend Edgar G. Ulmer, then The Hideous Sun Demon—or simply The SunDemon as it had premiered—might have turned out as something more than this routine offering. Clarke’s rudimentary grasp of the director’s craft reduces the film to scarcely more than pageantry.

Charke’s title-role enactment, vivid and soulful, owes a debt of influence to Lon Chaney, JR.’s tormented Larry Talbot of the 1940s’ Wolf Manpictures, which also provide the inspiration for E.S. Seeley, JR.’s screenplay: Swap the sun for The Wolf Man’s transformational

THE HIDEOUS SUN DEMON • HAVE ROCKET, WILL TRAVEL
full moon, replace the supernatural with Big Science— et voila! The Hideous Sun Demon. Clarke’s altered state is more a matter of de–evolution, triggered by atomic radiation.

Dr. Gilbert McKenna (Clarke) suffers exposure during an experiment. he is rushed to a nearby hospital. A physician (Robert Garry) finds no damage consistent with such an accident. Taken to a hospital’s solarium to soak up some Vitamin D, McKenna finds himself transformed into a scaled creature. The doctor concludes that radiation poisoning has caused a reversion to a primitive state, triggered by sunlight: Perhaps isolation and darkness can control the symptoms.

McKenna ditches the hospital and abandons his work. A drunken tryst with a barroom entertainer (Nan Peterson) leads to another transformation. Circumstances can only worsen. McKenna proves protective toward a child (Xandra Conkling) but finds his lizard-like aspect predominating. In a White Heat-styled standoff against police officers atop an oil rig, McKenna takes a lethal bullet and topples to the ground.

The Hideous Sun Demon marks a debut as producer–director for Clarke (1920–2005), a regular in low-budget thrillers of the postwar years. Clarke enlisted a crew from the film school at the University of Southern California and shot the works on locations around Los Angeles. Technical inexperience is evident throughout, but Clarke’s dramatic ferocity is a saving grace. The creature (designed and fabricated by Gianbattista “Richard” Cassarino) looks formidable enough, but only in fleeting glimpses; it parades about in daylight as though crashing some Sunday School picnic, and none the better for that.

Clarke’s further efforts as a producer include Beyond the Time Barrier(1960), shot on location at the State Fairgrounds in Dallas. Here, Clarke did exhibit the sense to enlist Edgar G. Ulmer, who had directed one of Clarke’s more effective pictures, The Man from Planet X(1951).

Have Rocket, Will Travel

(Columbia Pictures • 1959)

Just as their bread-and-butter short-subject comedies were fading away into extinction, the Three Stooges became one of the most sensational attractions to hit commercial television. The TV–syndication of Columbia Pictures’ Stoogesshorts (dating from the 1930s into the 1950s) became an after-school favorite with millions of youngsters— especially after Bill Camfield, a broadcasting executive in Fort Worth, Texas, had devoted an entire program called Slam–Bang Theatreto the Stooges and reinvented himself as a Stooge-like character named Icky Twerp. Many other provincial teevee stations ran the Stooges package; Camfield ran withthe Three Stooges.

Camfield’s aggressive and influential silliness paced similar localTV programs nationwide. The upshot was a popular outcry for new Stoogescomedies. The team had all but disbanded, as consequences of Columbia’s gradual dismantling of its short-subject unit, and of a decision by first-among-equals Stooge Moe Howard to work as a solo, if at all. (See Space Master X–7, Page Nos. 105–106.)

“I was tryin’ to retire,” Howard told us during the early 1970s. “We were, all of us, gettin’ too oldfor that roughhouse stuff, anyhow. So here we went, right back into the ol’ grind—us two original Stooges [himself and Larry Fine], plus our first GoyisheStooge, Joe DE Rita.”

Joe D E Rita had been a solo player, his work including short comedies for the Stooges’ home-base studio, Columbia. DE Rita replaced an

interim Stooge, prissy Joe Besser, who had succeeded the late Shmuel “Shemp” Howard in 1955. Shemp, a diehard trouper in defiance of a chronic circulatory ailment, had recommended Mantan Moreland, the pioneering black comedian, as a successor; per Moe Howard’s account, Columbia balked in view of Moreland’s blacklisting as a presumably negative stereotype by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Shemp briefly succeeded himself (via posthumous stock-footage insertions and body-doubling) until Columbia made Joe Besser—another short-subject solo artist—a third Stooge. Besser, leery of Moe Howard’s eye-gouging routine, had it specified in his contract that Moe could not lay a hand upon him. Besser never quite fit, despite an agile mastery of fat-boy slapstick timing and wordplay. But we digress. As usual.

Which brings us to Joe D E Rita and the forced feature-film resurgence of the Three Stooges in Have Rocket, Will Travel, whose title alludes to a network-TV Western, Have Gun, Will Travel. Though hardly “their first full-length feature motion picture!” (per the publicity campaign), the film served nonetheless to launch a new stage. As Curly Joe, a name evocative of the late Jerome “Curly” Howard, DE Rita proves an apt recruit of distinctive manner.

Young at heart if overlong in the tooth, the Stooges play janitors at a rocket base, where they inadvertently launch themselves into space and land on Venus. They encounter such phenomena as a loquacious unicorn, a Univac computer with a mind of its own, and a flame-spouting gigantic spider. An epic custard-pie battle (essential to slapstick since the day of Mack Sennett and Hal Roach) climaxes the adventure, and the Stooges return to Earth as harbingers of the Right Stuff.

HAVE ROCKET, WILL TRAVEL • Guns, Girls & GANGSTERS

Guns, Girls and Gangsters

(Imperial Pictures • United Artists • 1959)

United Artists’ dabblings in the Poverty Row sector were beneath the dignity of the big-time bandleader Ray Anthony, who nonetheless agreed to handle a role in Edward L. Cahn’s Guns, Girls and Gangstersas a nod to his wife, Mamie Van Doren—who was perfectly at home in the low-rent setting. Anthony wound up nottaking the part, contradicting UA’s confident press release and its appearances in the show-trade newspapers.

Miss Van Doren toplines as nightclub sincer Vi Victor, wife of jailed bandit Mike Bennett (Lee Van Cleef). Bennett and Chuck Wheeler (Gerald Mohr) plan an armored-car heist. To launder the take, Wheeler proposes an alliance with mobster Joe Darren (Grant Richards), who is involved with Vi. Wheeler tests a tire-shooting strategy, calculated to strand a money-courier truck at an isolated site, upon Darren’s limousine, and then coerces Vi into arranging a meeting with Darren. Informed by Vi that Wheeler is responsible for the blowout, Darren agrees to talk with the schemer.

Wheeler’s flunky, Lou Largo (Paul Fix), rigs a short-wave radio to pick up police transmissions. With a $2 million payroll up for grabs, Darren plays along and persuades Vi to help. She settles in at a motor lodge and develops an envy of the innkeepers, Steve and Ann Thomas (John Baer and Elaine Edwards), and their stable existence.

Bennett escapes from prison, angered by a letter from Vi about her affair with Darren. Wheeler offers to protect Vi—if she will accompany him to Mexico after the robbery. Bennett forces Largo to reveal Vi’s whereabouts, then kills him. Tense despite a jovial New Year’s Eve party at the motel, Vi agrees to Wheeler’s demand on condition that he refrain from harming the Thomases. Bennett kills Darren after forcing the gang boss to drive to the inn for a confrontation. Chuck, unnerved by the slaying of Largo, proposes to scrap the robbery. Bennett insists otherwise and proposes to take Largo’s place.

After Wheeler has disabled the armored car, Bennett imprisons Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, slaughters the truck’s guards, and intimidates Wheeler into an agreement to kill the innkeepers. Bennett and Wheeler commandeer the truck, but their pirated police-band checkin codes (from the hacked radio signals) do not match the New Year’s revised codes. A roadblock ambush leaves Bennett and Wheeler dead.

Ann and Steve Thomas appear, unharmed: Wheeler had reneged upon his promise to kill them. As the police close in upon Vi, the Thomases assure her that they will testify on her behalf.

Edward L. Cahn, whose genre credentials ranged beyond the horror-and-SF pictures, directs with a ferocity such as he had applied to It! The Terror from beyond Space. Mamie Van Doren registers a brassy vulnerability. Lee Van Cleef is the soul of vicious indignation. Veteran crime-melodrama producer Edward Small had launched Guns, Girls and Gangstersunder his Vogue Pictures banner but transferred the project amidships to a companion company, Imperial Pictures, with a simultaneous distribution deal with United Artists.

The film was still circulating in second-run situations in 1960, when an independent screenwriter, Art Estrada, sued Small Productions and United Artists for plagiarism. The $150,000 complaint claimed that Small had rejected a story, “Blueprint for Crime,” by Estrada and Steve Masino, who then sold the piece to another producer, Al Gannaway. Gannaway had scrapped his plans for the story upon the release of Guns, Girls and Gangsters. Estrada’s case was settled out–of–court for $10,000 in July of 1962—by which time, Guns, Girls and Gangstershad become a forgotten picture.

Attack of the Jungle Women

A.K.A.: Barbarian Women • Jungle Hell (Sampson Productions • Barjul International • 1959)

Seldom has an authentic Natural Drama, or empirical documentary study, been so thoroughly corrupted by petty commercial interests as in this piecemeal assemblage called Attack of the Jungle Women. William Phillips, who pursued parallel careers as a smallparts actor and an ethnologist with the American Museum of Man in San Diego, had launched the project in 1952—intending a chronicle of the construction of the Pan–American Highway, a project intended to cross the Western Hemisphere from Alaska through South America.

Phillips and his wife, Evelyn “Eve” Phillips, made expeditions to Panama through 1955; the journeys were underwritten by the Museum of Man. The assigned director of photography, Wayne Mitchell, had envisioned a documentary account describing negotiations with two jungledwelling tribes, the Cuna and the Choco, whose leaders had opposed the industrialization of their lands. Mitchell’s footage attracted the attention of two short-lived exploitation outfits, Sampson Productions and Barjul International, which found the tribal nudity on display sufficient to inspire a bid to acquire and amend the simple story.

“Originally,” Mitchell has recalled, “I was asked to film a short subject about the Choco Indians in Panamanian jungles. Excited by the scenes of topless Indian women, the Hollywood producers then added

GUNS, GIRLS & GANGSTERS • ATTACK OF THE JUNGLE WOMEN

a ‘story’ about them as headhunters, using made-up ‘actresses’ from the bars of Tiajuana, Mexico, filmed in San Diego Park’s eucalyptus forest. The credited director [Joseph R. Juliano] was only involved in this phoney part of the film. The promotional sheets are classics of fiction, telling how these guys suffered through the jungle during filming.”

The hijacking, with Phillips’ participation, also involved the addition of Paul Frees, one of the industry’s busiest voice-over actors (and a versatile character voice with Spike Jones’ musical-comedy revue and the cartoon studio of Jay Ward), as narrator and supporting player. The corrupted educational film plays out like this:

Amid a work stoppage along the Pan–American Highway, William Phillips and guide Tom Guardia (themselves) are enlisted to seek the natives’ permission to proceed. Phillips and his wife find the Choco villagers afflicted with amoebic dysentery. In another stretch of the jungle, Guardia finds the Cuna tribespeople more warlike and threatening, despite a superficially Westernized appearance.

Phillips’ search for Guardia leads to a village decimated by disease. Meanwhile in Panama City, a colleague (Frees) organizes a search for both explorers. Guardia’s party is surrounded by the Cuna, whose women torture Guardia and his companions as a prelude to a headhunting ritual. The searching crew finds the remains of Guardia and his helpers. Phillips leaves for San Diego, having found Guardia’s report describing a safer route for the highway. (At the start of the 21ST century, a stretch of the Pan–American Highway through Cuna and Choco territory has remained incomplete.)

Sporadic distribution kept the film obscure even as a new release. Advertising materials and contemporary reviews describe EastmanColor photography, but the surviving prints we have found are in black–and–white. Barjul International Pictures had issued one title ahead of Attack of the Jungle Women, a harsh and provocative Western called Lust To Kill(1958), and would release another exploitation film, The Beatniks(1960), before fading into the shadows of Poverty Row.

House on Haunted Hill

(Allied Artists • 1959)

William Castle described House on Haunted Hill, a brisk and unnerving black comedy, as a homage to RKO–Radio Pictures’ 1932 production of The Most Dangerous Game: “We just transformed [the] shipwreck trap to a formal invitation, changed the jungle into a creepy ol’ mansion, like The Cat and the Canaryor And Then There Were None, and put Vincent Price, with his elegant manners and that creepy stare, in charge of the mayhem.” Castle also equipped House on Haunted Hillwith a ticket-selling gimmick that would send a skeleton–effigy soaring over an audience on a wire-and-pulley apparatus (Page No. 190). In certain theatres, in any event; the device was irrelevant to the drive–ins where Houseoften played.

Wealthy Frederick Loren (Vincent Price) rents the purportedly haunted mansion of Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook, JR.), the better to stage an elaborate party for his wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart). Guests include pilot Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), newspaper columnist Ruth Bridges (Julie Mitchum), psychiatrist David Trent (Alan Marshal), and stenographer Nora Manning (Carol Craig). Loren promises each a sum of $10,000 on condition that all spend the night. The house has seen seven murders; Pritchard, nervous by nature, believes that the spirits of the victims haunt the property.

J U N G L E W O M E N • H O U S E O N H A U N T E D H I L L

Loren seeks to unnerve Annabelle sufficiently to reveal her as a gold–digger. Pritchard describes the murder scenes, which include a vat of acid. Ghastly apparitions terrify the guests. Annabelle warns Nora and Lance of Loren’s intentions. Nora recognizes two servants (Leona Anderson and Howard Hoffman) as the parties responsible for the scares. Party favors are dispensed—miniature caskets, containing guns. The servants lock the guests inside the house. Annabelle turns up hanged. Someone severs the telephone lines.

Annabelle proves to have faked her death in a plot with Trent to madden Nora sufficiently that she would kill Loren; mission accomplished as the secretary opens fire. Trent and Annabelle land, by turns, in the acid tank. A skeleton appears to speak in Loren’s voice. Loren, wounded but hardly deceased, emerges from hiding to reveal himself as the plotter of a night of mayhem.

A composite photograph by
Arthur “Weegee” Fellig, the cel
ebrated photographer of New
York streetlife, demonstrates
the so-called Emergo gimmick
with which William Castle pro
moted House on Haunted Hill .

Robb White’s screenplay is a generous array of contrivances, all calculated to alternate scares with gallows humor. Carol Ohmart and Vincent Price play well off one another as the antagonistic couple. Elisha Cook, JR., an essential bundle-of-nerves presence in the film noirmovement, contributes as much to the thrall of unease as any of Castle’s mechanically timed shock-value effects.

A 1999 remake stars Geoffrey Rush as a near–ringer for Vincent Price. The elaborations of plotting and extravagant visual effects detract none in the least from the cold simplicity of William Castle’s original (derivative) vision. The remake yielded a sequel in 2007.

First Man into Space

(Amalgamated • Rank • Producers Associates • MGM • 1959)

The U.S.–British production of First Man into Spaceusurped the title of an intended project that an unrelated producer, George Moskov, had announced in 1958. The hijacked title goes to waste on a drab film, which also squanders a striking concept—the transformation of an astronaut into a bloodthirsty monster—that scenarist Wyott Ordung had lifted from Nigel Kneale’s teleplay for The Quatermass Experiment First Man into Spaceis of interest primarily as an example of Kneale’s overriding influence, and of the fallacy of imitation without comprehension of any qualities greater than the superficial horrors.

The story hangs upon a conflict between rocket-program commander Charles Prescott (Marshall Thompson) and his daredevil brother, Dan Prescott (Bill Edwards). Dan lands an assignment to take an experimental craft into space—only to lose control. A portion of the

H O U S E O N H A U N T E D H I L L • F I R S T M A N I N T O S P A C E

ship lands, but no sign of Dan can be found. The cone is encrusted with a strange substance, slimy but impervious. Reports surface of slain livestock, and of the murder of a nurse at a blood bank. The same substance is found; it proves to have parasitic and transformative properties. Charles reasons that Dan may be the killer. Meanwhile, a monstrous fugitive kills two police officers

A confrontation at the rocket base leaves the brothers locked into a high-pressure chamber, where Dan regains a measure of coherence

F I R S T M A N I N T O S P A C E • T H E T I N G L E R
and explains his altered state. He suggests that the cosmic slime might represent a breakthrough, but the pressurized chamber kills both Dan and the organism that has covered him. Charles Prescott emerges safely. A senior officer (Robert Ayres) wonders aloud whether the quest for space is worth the bother. Probably not.

Marshall Thompson is his usual stalwart self, though merely going through the motions this time out. Robert Day directs in desultory fashion, although the transformed astronaut registers some chilling moments. Marla Landi, as the doomed astronaut’s sweetheart, offers a reactive performance, laced with piercing shrieks. The English shooting locations and studio settings purport to represent New Mexico.

The Tingler

(William Castle • Columbia • 1959)
“The Tingler stamps ... William Castle as an imaginative, often ingenious showman,” declared Varietyupon the arrival of this provocative and (yes) ingenious contender. “The film abounds in hokum, camouflaged as science, and it has been gimmicked to ensure exploitation... [A] highly entertaining property.” The assigned critic Got the Joke, all right, although no one among the critical brethren seems to have noticed that The Tingleralso was the first motion picture to touch upon the psychotropic properties of lysergic acid as a narrative element. ( LSDwas hardly a familiar or scandalous term in 1959.)

Castle’s third out-and-out horror film (after Macabreand House on Haunted Hill) trades cannily upon a facility at suspenseful construction, gained since the 1940s as a journeyman director on B–picture crowd–pleasers (as in The Whistlerand Crime Doctorfranchises). His When Strangers Marry(Monogram; 1944), a killer-at-large mystery, is as much a model for the film noiridiom as anything from the betterrespected noirfactories of RKO–Radio or Universal Pictures.

Castle’s postwar commercial failure with It’s a Small World, concerning a midget’s struggle to assimilate, hardly diminished his taste for offbeat exploitation. By the time he had tackled Macabre, with its irresistible death-by-fright insurance come–on, Castle felt assured that the future of populist moviegoing lay as much in extravagant gimmicks as in cinematic thrust or an engaging story. He devoted his energies from there to horror for the sake of horror—breaking the Fourth Wall between Art and Life with such external devices as a hovering skeleton for House on Haunted Hilland a seat-vibrating mechanism for The Tingler.

Yes, and as keenly as Castle had been influenced by the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Castle in turn proved influential upon Hitchcock: It is scarcely a coincidence that Hitchcock’s development of Psycho (1960) followed closely upon the box-office blitz of Castle’s Macabre House on Haunted Hill, and The Tingler

The Tingler is Castle’s first sui generispicture, unique among cinema as a class. “Both in tricks and story, it’s superior to [Castle’s previous films],” added Variety. “The major gimmick, labeled Percepto, is comprised of a series of war-surplus vibrating motors, attached to the undersides of the theatre seats and set off at the proper moment to send tingling sensations through the customers.”

Pilot showings in Detroit and Baltimore assured Castle that the process would work and helped him to decide how extensively the vibrators would be deployed during the general run. He ordered 100,000 vibrating units, in all. According to Variety: “Castle, in a

A summit meeting of stalwarts of Poverty
Row and the B–picture scene: William
Castle, left, Sam Katzman, and Spencer
Gordon Bennet.

tongue-in-cheek filmed prologue, tells the audience that not everyone is susceptible ..., thus leaving an ‘out’ for fewer motors than seats.” (The sensation, Castle explains, can be alleviated by a good rousing scream. His conspratorial communion with the Absorbed Viewer is most effective; the Unabsorbed Viewer need not apply.)

“ Perceptoitself is effective,” added the tradepaper, “not so much because of the tingle, but because it menacingly moves closer and closer in waves and, coupled with a whirring noise and soundtrack heartbeats and screams, puts the filmgoer in the midst of the horror.

“Castle additionally has incorporated a second trick, bringing the film to a halt and the house lights up, at which point ... Vincent Price calms the audience via a side–speaker, and two hasty gentlemen rush down the aisle with stretcher in hand to pick up a shrieking female who supposedly has fainted from fright. House lights will go up in all houses, ... with the little play to be enacted in key situations.” (The term key situationswould describe big-city bookings, although the auditorium scenario was enacted, as well, in some small-town engagements. Much depended upon the willingness of local thatremen to stretch to the proverbial Next Level of promotional oscamazoola; the urge to perpetrate ballyhoo was more widespread during the midcentury. Castle traveled often to the provinces to encourage picture-show operators to indulge his extravagant sense of showmanship: “The hicks need their thrills as much as the city slickers,” he averred.)

Again, Variety: “[Robb White’s screenplay] is adeptly constructed to let the gimmicks sneak in... Most effective is a hair-raising sequence in which a bathtub full of blood blares out in all its rich sanguinary color amid the remaining blacks and whites. When things are on the move—

T H E T I N G L E R

gimmicked or otherwise, White’s script is fine, as is Castle’s direction. On occasion, however, the film tends to become excessively talky, and until the wild moments begin, there is more than one obvious contrivance.” A central contrivance involves a silent-movie revival theatre— the story is set in the present day—run by a fearful, deaf-and-mute woman (Judith Evelyn) and her husband (Philip Coolidge); the element of forced silence runs at odds with the necessity of screaming for one’s life when attacked by the Tingler. The Tingler is fear–made–flesh.

“ The Tinglertells of a pathologist [Vincent Price] who ... [theorizes] that [fear] has force to produce tension which, if not relieved through screaming, can kill,” added Variety. “From a deaf–mute who dies of fright because she can’t wail, the doctor extracts a living creature which has formed around the victim’s backbone, snapping it in two. The isolating and eventual handling of the creature constitutes the picture’s main action.”

Dr. William Chapin (Price) becomes so intent upon capturing such an essence of terror that he injects himself with a hallucinatory chemical, with the objective of generating sufficient fear. His anguished scream saves his life and serves notice that only a person incapable of speech will be suited to the lethal experimentation. Price’s Mad Doctor act is part scheming, part serendipity. Dr. Chapin is saddled with a malicious wife (Patricia Cutts) whose misdeeds help to propel the story and set up Price as something of a Red Herring, a character who seems too guilty to be guilty.

The revelation of a greater (human) menace occurs satisfyingly late. At last, Price addresses the audience with a warning: If they are still unconvinced about the existence of the Tingler, then the next time they become frightened, they should refrain from screaming.

T H E T I N G L E R • F O R B I D D E N I S L A N D

Forbidden Island

(Chas. B. Griffith • Polynesian Productions • Columbia Pictures • 1959) Charles B. Griffith’s releasing arrangement with Columbia
Pictures ennobled his small-studio bearings—a spinoff from his affiliation with American International Pictures—and gave the large studio
a bankable run of offbeat exploitation pictures in much the same way
that the independent trailblazer Sam Katzman also served Columbia.
Columbia had obscured its Poverty Row origins since the Depression
years with such Oscar-bait pretensions as Frank Capra’s It Happened
One Night, but its commitment to scrappy cheapskate pictures for the
shirtsleeves audience persisted all along.
Varietyfound writer–director–producer Griffith’s Forbidden Island
promising for exhibitors “because of its color, alluring locations, and
its fascination for skin–divers ... an offbeat programmer that will fill
the bills.” The assigned critic added: “It will not be remembered for
stirring performances or an unusual storyline, but there is something
to be said for a macabre underwater tussle with a decaying skeleton.” Griffith makes a seamless whole of location photography around
Florida and Hawaii; the sites represent a single dangerous region. The
cinematographers are Gilbert Warrenton and, handling the underwater cameras, Lamar Boren.
Jon Hall, an exotic-adventure star since the 1930s, plays Dave
Courtney, leader of a corps of war-veteran Frogmen assigned by a
wealthy client, Edward Stuart Godfrey (John Farrow), to dive for an
emerald lost in a shipwreck. The searcher who retrieves the jewel
stands to receive a $1,000 bonus. Joining the hunt is a wayward
beauty named Joanne (Nan Adams), posing under duress as Godfrey’s
wife. A deadline looms: A Naval salvage crew will take charge of the
area within three weeks.
Diver Dean Pike (Greigh Phillips) finds a woman’s skeleton, its
neck knotted with Godfrey’s monogrammed belt. His accusing confrontation with Godfrey leaves Pike susceptible to treachery: On a subsequent dive, Pike finds the emerald, only to drown as a result of a
compromised aqualung. Godfrey seeks to frame Courtney in the
killing. As the grimmer truth comes to light, Godfrey opens fire with a
pistol and a spear–gun—his six-shooter appears to contain 10
rounds—and then winds up croaked by his own bullwhip. Joanne,
wounded in the affray, takes solace with Courtney.
John Farrow commandeers the story as a criminal mastermind of
sufficient cunning to manipulate the heroic contingent. His framing of
Jon Hall’s Dave Courtney provokes a ferocious altercation in which
Courtney’s partner–turned–antagonist (Jonathan Haze) dies from a
backfired underwater flare–gun. As Farrow’s purported wife, so posing
under threat of exposure and retribution for a criminal act, Nan
Adams tempers a voluptuous aspect with a touching performance—
rendered all the more so by her helplessness to defy the villain’s
orders. (She is instructed to distract Griegh Phillips while Farrow
tampers with his breathing mechanism.)
True to Griffith’s greater identification with upstart American
International Pictures, Forbidden Islandplays out with undercurrents
of naturalistic improvisation. Phillips’ response to the discovery of a
strangling victim’s remains lends a persuasive weight to the eerie
underwater setting. The finer production values demanded by
Columbia Pictures assure top-of-the-line camerawork and brisk, cohe

F O R B I D D E N I S L A N D • M I S T E R I O S D E U L T R A T U M B A
sive editing (by Jerome Thoms). A crowning touch is an evocative and bracing musical score by Alexander Laszlo, supplemented by a haunting theme, “Forbidden Island,” by Martin Denny. Denny, who became a popular recording artist during this period with a series of exotic instrumental albums, also serves the film in a supporting role.

Florida’s scenic Silver Springs region receives a screen credit. The Hawaiian site is the island of Kauai. We first encountered Forbidden Islandin a vivid color edition, but the surviving prints we have found— prepared for television syndication before color became the teevee standard—are in black–and–white.

Misterios de Ultratumba

I N AMERICA: Black Pit of Dr. M
(Alameda Films • Clasa-Mohme • United Producers • 1959–1961) An outpouring of deadly earnest chillers from Mexico during the
mid-to-late 1950s often beat the Hollywood players at their own game while intending little more than an attitude of homage to Universal Pictures’ Gothic horrors of the Depression and WWII years.

If the Mexican artists brought little of influence to bear upon the likes of American International and Regal Films, then certainly the Latinate spookers worked a tantalizing spell upon the genre enthusiasts. Occasional photographs in Famous Monsters of Filmlandmagazine only raised the stakes of temptation: Some of the more dedicated hunters began staking out the barriotheatres, to be rewarded with the likes of Fernándo Méndez’ Misterios de Ultratumba. The Stateside interest paid off in the eventual release of this one in an English-dubbed edition, Black Pit of Dr. M. A proxy TV title is Black Pit of Dr. X

Misterios de Ultratumba marks a rallying for Méndez after a lapse with El Ataúd del Vampiro(Page No. 123), that hasty sequel to the director’s more accomplished El Vampiro. Méndez had achieved the momentum with the yet earlier Ladrón de Cadáveres(Page No. 28). The restoration here of a more forbidding atmosphere and a compelling narrative momentum suggests that El Ataúd del Vampirocan only be a fluke in an otherwise accomplished string of Gothics.

The setting is a madhouse where two doctors, Mazali and Aldama (Rafaél Bernard and Antonio Raxel), strike a pact: The first to die will allow the other to experience the Great Hereafter and live to tell about it. Aldama dies; he returns in a séance to inform Mazali that he will learn all about the afterlife in three months. Waves of destructive madness sweep the clinic. A romantic triangle develops among Mazali, an intern (Gastón Santos), and Aldama’s daughter (Mapita Cortés). An act of murder by a disfigured servant (Carlos Ancíra, in a broad mimicry of Peter Lorre) leaves Mazali accused on grounds of circumstantial evidence. The doctor’s conviction and death sentence seem a darkened affirmation of Aldama’s three-month prediction. The servant, meanwhile, repents of the crime and delivers a confession. A ghastly resurrection follows in short order.

The fanatical religious fundamentalism of Ramón Obón’s screenplay reinforces the cruel superstitious dogma of Mother Church that anyone who tampers with forbidden mysteries must suffer the Torments of the Damned. The film’s excesses, thrilling and horrific, prove an unwitting indictment of that very doctrine. Méndez and Obón combine an accurate reconstruction of Universal-style atmosphere with such Mexican pop-cultural staples as soap-opera romanticism,

M I S T E R I O S D E U L T R A T U M B A • F L E S H & T H E F I E N D S

overwrought poetic morbidity, intense physicality, and emotionalistic overkill. The ensemble acting may not be the best of its kind, but it is arguably the mostof its kind.

The resurrected corpse–creature is as jarring an apparition as the wrestler-turned-apeman monstrosity in Ladrón de Cadáveres(see the first Frontispiece). Memorable visual elements include the fog-shrouded exterior of Dr. Mazali’s hospital. The gravesite eruption foreshadows a celebrated scene in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday. A lilting music-box sequence, at once calming and disturbing, anticipates George A. Romero’s use of such a device in Night of the Living Dead

The English-language version, Black Pit of Dr. M., retains camera chief Victor Herrera’s rich visual qualities but sacrifices much of the ebb-and-flow pacing. The greater corruption is the imposition of flat, literalized English line–readings in place of the colorful and idiomatic Castilian Spanish. Scarcely an epiphany that one should grasp a film’s original language as a condition of a fuller enjoyment.

The Flesh and the Fiends

A.K.A.: Mania • The Fiendish Ghouls
(Triad • Embassy • Pacemaker • 1959–1960)

Donald Pleasence once told us he considered Death Line(A.K.A. Raw Meat; England, 1972) to be about as close as he had come to doing a film in the Hammer style. Certainly his antagonistic casting opposite Christopher Lee, in Gary Sherman’s tale of an ancient underground society that lives on as an embarrassment to the Ruling Class, plays out with a playful nod to Hammer Films. And yet perhaps Pleasence was disremembering that his pairing with Peter Cushing—a star player as crucial as Lee to Hammer—in The Flesh and the Fiendsrepre

sents a much more conscious attempt to emulate Hammer. Where Death Linerepresents more of a homage to Hammer in its better days (the 1950s), The Flesh and the Fiendsbespeaks an immediate rivalry: Producers Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman (Page No. 155) were doing their damnedest to beat Hammer at its own game of reinventing classical horror with a sumptuously mounted ferocity. Their The Flesh and the Fiendsand The Hellfire Club(see the following chapter) may be the most accomplished Hammers that Hammer nevermade.

Director John Gilling, for that matter, found in The Flesh and the Fiendsa foot–in–the–door to Hammer Films, where he would become a mainstay. Gilling had directed a slumming Bela Lugosi in Great Britain’s first vampire picture (such as it is), Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952), and a bracing Orwellian science–fictioner, The Gamma People(1956), but The Flesh and the Fiendstapped an epic sensibility to match Gilling’s sense of Gothic atmosphere.

Like Val Lewton’s production of The Body Snatcher(1945; from R.L. Stevenson’s story), The Flesh and the Fiends draws upon the crimes of the body-snatching partnership of Burke & Hare, turned killers in collusion with a respected surgeon, Dr. Robert Knox, in Edinburgh of the 1820s. Knox (Cushing) requires corpses as laboratory specimens. Burke & Hare (George Rose and Pleasance, slicing the ham with caricatured working-class speech patterns) care not how they procure the merchandise.

Cushing’s Dr. Knox, a riff on his Baron Frankenstein of the Hammer series, is a figure of obsessive determination. Knox’s toleration of the slayings of fringe–dwellers renders him subject to scandal. When captured in the killing of a sympathetic prostitute (Billie Whitelaw, in a fine turn), Hare plea–bargains his way out of a hanging. Hare suffers the mutilations of a lynching–mob. Knox faces the Medical Society; his persuasive confidence assures him of greater renown.

Gilling captures an essence of shabby and poverty-wracked Old Edinburgh. Co–producer Berman’s hard-contrast, radial camera compositions provide the right atmosphere for a cruel and unforgiving study of a society that counts its lower classes as livestock, ripe for the slaughtering—so long as the Right People commission the slaughter.

T H E F L E S H A N D T H E F I E N D S

The Hellfire Club

(New World, LTD. • Embassy • 1959–1963)

A sporadic pattern of release—not until 1963 did the film reach America, despite U.S. co–financing—prevented Berman & Baker’s The Hellfire Clubfrom experiencing the success that the partners’ other productions, such as Jack the Ripperand Blood of the Vampire, had found on an international scale. The Hellfire Club is among the grander emulations of Hammer Films’ lavish Gothics.

In England, ca. 1750, young aristocrat Jason Netherden (Martin Stephens) blunders into an orgy staged by his father, Lord Netherden (Andrew Faulds), head of the degenerate Hellfire Club, and receives a sound trashing as a consequence. Removed to Holland by his mother (Jean Lodge), the better to escape His Lordship’s depravity, Jason is soon orphaned. He grows up under the protection of a tenured servant (David Lodge).

Fifteen years later, Jason (now played by Keith Mitchell) returns to England as trouper with a circus. His cousin, Thomas Netherden (Peter Arne), has usurped the title and the estate—and assumed the leadership of the Hellfire Club. Assisted by a lawyer (Peter Cushing), Jason hires on as a stablekeeper at his family’s manor while seeking to depose Thomas. Thomas discovers the ruse and orders Jason executed on grounds of treason.

His circus friends rescue Jason, who also is reunited with a sweetheart from childhood (Kai Fischer). He finds allies within the British Empire, which cares not so much about a stolen title as about disbanding the Hellfire Club. Thomas kidnaps Yvonne. Jason, adopting a new disguise, rescues her and kills Thomas. All ends well for all who deserve as much.

As radiantly mounted as Blood of the Vampire, The Hellfire Club looks nothing like its close-in-time companion film, The Flesh and the Fiends (Page No. 201), despite their having co–producer and –director Monty Berman as chief of photography. (Berman’s partner, Robert S. Baker, joins in as co–cinematographer.) The visual style shifts here to a lushness in keeping with the Ruling Class setting.

As usual, Berman and Baker reserve their greater sympathies for the second-class citizens (the colorful and devoted carnival folk), and for the aristocrat who appreciates the ways of the downtrodden sector. Keith Mitchell wears the heroic protagonism well, without resorting to the swashbuckling manner one might expect, and Kai Fischer presents a romantic interest worth rescuing.

The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake

(Vogue Pictures • United Artists • 1959)

Robert E. Kent and Edward L. Cahn’s companion–piece to the science-fictional Invisible Invaders (Page No. 215), the supernaturally motivated The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, is by far the more unnerving piece. Jonathan Drakewas dismissed in its day as a “weak horror meller” ( melodrama, I.E.) by the influential tradepaper Variety but a consensus of times more recent validates the opinion of the English historian Phil Hardy: “Preposterous but undeniably lively.”

Taken together with star player Henry Daniell’s close-in-time appearance in an episode of network television’s Thriller (“Well of Doom,” from 1961), Jonathan Drakecrystallizes an essence of midcentury horror that draws upon the Gothic spirit of Old Hollywood while edging toward the more visceral terrors that would take root during the 1960s. Daniell was hardly as prominent an eminèncé grisé

H E L L F I R E C L U B • F O U R S K U L L S O F J O N A T H A N D R A K E
From the French–Belgian cam
paign for The Hellfire Club.

as Boris Karloff or John Carradine or Basil Rathbone, but Daniell boasted credentials dating from much earlier—and he could summon an infernal presence of haunting intensity. Daniell cinched this image not so much in film or on television, as in an advertising campaign for Bacardi Distilleries (Page No. 207), which featured his glowering countenance as the very embodiment of that old Demon Rum. Few people outside the movie business knew the actor’s name, but practically

T H E F O U R S K U L L S O F J O N A T H A N D R A K E

everybody during this period recognized Daniell’s face from the Bacardi company’s ubiquitous billboards and magazine spreads.

The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake , from a script by Orville H. Hampton (of The Alligator People), tells of a curse inflicted by a tribe of headhunters. Prof. Jonathan Drake (Eduard Franz), upon learning that his brother, Kenneth Drake (Paul Cavanaugh), has received the gift of a shrunken head, sets out to investigate. Before Jonathan can arrive, however, Kenneth is slain by a stalker, Zutai (Paul Wexler), from the Ecuadoran Jivaro tribe. The zombie-like Indian is frightened away before he can sever the head.

A physician, George Bradford (Howard Wendell), ascribes Kenneth’s death to natural causes, and never mind the vanished stalker’s poisonous blade. Police Lt. Jeff Rowan (Grant Richards) consults with a scientist, Dr. Emil Zurich (Henry Daniell), whom Bradford had summoned after Kenneth’s butler, Rogers (Lumsden Hare, from the 1931 Svengali), had found the shrunken head.

Zutai steals into the house unobserved. Jonathan Drake arrives, unaware until now of his brother’s death, and demands that the cas

ket be opened. He finds Kenneth’s head missing. Elsewhere, in a hidden laboratory, Zutai is revealed as an undead servant of Dr. Zurich. They prepare the severed head for a Third World shrinking process.

Rowan informs Jonathan’s daughter, Alison (Valerie French), of the ghastlier complications that have made the case a police matter. Jonathan takes Alison to a burial crypt, where four generations of the Drake family lie entombed. He tells her that his great–grandfather had incurred a curse by ordering the massacre of a tribe in an Amazon jungle, in retaliation for the slaying of a Swiss trading-post agent. A cabinet in the crypt contains the skulls of Jonathan’s grandfather and father: Each had died inexplicably at age 60; their heads were removed under mysterious circumstances, only to turn up in the vault.

Zurich orders Zutai to place Kenneth’s head in the Drake crypt. Alison and Rowan explore the vault and discover a third skull. Zutai, meanwhile, attacks Jonathan Drake, but flees when Rogers appears. Bradford draws from Jonathan a blood sample, which police scientist Lee Coulter (Frank Gerstle) analyzes to reveal the poison curare. Bradford administers an antidote.

Rowan and Coulter examine the new skull for fingerprints; each print reveals the outline of a skull. A book in Kenneth’s library yields crucial clues, as does the crime scene where Rowan had opened fire upon the vanished zombie. A bullet, embedded in a tree where it had passed through the escaping Zutai, contains traces of curare. A moccasin, dropped by Zutai, proves to have been fashioned from human flesh.

Zurich and Zutai conduct a ritual to bedevil Jonathan with hallucinations. Bradford confronts Zurich. Zutai kills Bradford and takes his body to the laboratory. Rowan visits Zurich to inquire about the Jivaro culture. Zurich explains that the tribe believes that the severed

F O U R S K U L L S • T H E H E A D L E S S G H O S T head of an enemy bestows immortality upon the headhunter. Zurich hastens the attack upon Jonathan.

A trap–door reveals Zurich’s laboratory. Rowan finds Bradford’s severed head. Coulter determines that Zurich had been a Swiss trading agent—almost two centuries ago. Zurich abducts Alison. Jonathan Drake reveals that Zurich is an immortal spirit, his head sewn onto the body of a vengeful Jivaro shaman. Jonathan threatens suicide, which would transfer the Drake curse to Zurich. Zutai attacks Rowan, only to vanish when the detective throws him into a fire. The bamboo blade leaves Zurich paralyzed. Jonathan severs Zurich’s head.

Apart from Daniell’s seething performance, the creepiest thing about Jonathan Drakeis the wordless eloquence of Paul Wexler as the cadaverous Indian, his lips stitched shut. The zombie’s makeup is the work of Charles Gemora, since retired from his signature ape impersonations but still a masterful designer. These “superbly sinister presences” (to cite Phil Hardy’s description) elevate director Edward L. Cahn’s matter-of-fact naturalistic style to a dreamlike eeriness.

The Headless Ghost

(Carmel • Anglo–Amalgamated • American International • 1959)

In its original double-feature engagements, Peter Graham Scott’s The Headless Ghost provided an ideal leavening for the prevailing madness and meanness of Horrors of the Black Museum (see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6). Its ominous title notwithstanding, The Headless Ghostis a sprightly and veddy English comedy–of–manners that, when separated from its grimmer companion–piece, holds up impressively well on its own.

Herman Cohen served as lead producer on both pictures, calculating international youth-market appeal by populating Ghost with American collegians on holiday in the U.K., and by making Museuma coda to a lucrative cycle that Cohen had launched in 1957 with I Was a Teenage Werewolf. (The teenage monster in Horrors of the Black Museumis a takeoff on Jekyll & Hyde.)

And herewith, The Headless Ghost, from George E. Turner and Michael H. Price’s original Frank Synopsis for The American Film Institute Catalogue of MotionPictures

American students Bill and Ronnie (Richard Lyon and David Rose) and their Danish schoolmate, Ingrid Jorgensen (Liliane Sottane), visit ancient Ambrose Castle. The Earl of Ambrose (Jack Allen) declares the place haunted. Ingrid believes him. Ronnie suggests that the friends hide and spend the night.

In the Grand Hall, surrounded by portraits of Ambrose royalty dating from the 14TH Century, the visitors find themselves confronted by the spirit of the Fourth Earl of Ambrose (Clive Revill). This Ambrose reveals a curse against Malcolm Ambrose, who was beheaded for treason. The ghost seeks assistance in recovering Malcolm’s head, lest the haunting lapse from the chronic to the acute.

An incantation and an enchanted pouch figure into the equation. Another spook, Sir Randolph (Alexander Archdale), threatens to interfere. Ronnie and Ingrid chance upon a spectral re–enactment of a royal murder. A suit of armor, animated, threatens Bill. A disembodied voice—Sir Malcolm’s—insists that he will not allow the visitors to depart until they have freed his spirit. At a ghostly banquet, Randolph forbids the mission and offers the students an eternity of merry–making.

Outside in a more recognizably mundane reality, the police arrive to investigate the ruckus within. The students resist arrest, lest their quest be thwarted. The necessary magical business accomplished, the headless body of Sir Malcolm appears, soon to be joined by its hovering head. With a sigh of contentment, the figure recedes into his royal portrait.

Conceptually stranded somewhere between Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost (as filmed in 1944) and Antonio Pietrangeli’s mildmannered Fantasmi a Roma (Italy; 1961), The Headless Ghost works on the levels of youth-market pandering—the stock–in–trade of American International Pictures—and broad-stroke screwball slapstick. Old–timer Scott recaptures the atmospheric eeriness of his Panic at Mme. Tussaud’s(1948), but The Headless Ghost suggests none of the ferocity that Scott would bring to bear upon his most accomplished picture, 1961’s Captain Clegg A.K.A. Night Creatures), in which a bogus haunting serves as a distraction from Peter Cushing’s activities as an 18TH-century pirate and provincial vicar.

Publicity materials and accounts from The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety disagree as to whether The Headless Ghost was shot in London or on location at a historic castle in Scotland. Richard Lyon, who plays the more aggressive American student, was the son of Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels, Hollywood- and New Yorkbased actors who had taken up residence in Great Britain.

HEADLESS GHOST • THE WORLD, THE FLESH & THE DEVIL

The World, the Flesh and the Devil

(HarBel Productions • MGM • 1959)

Harry Belafonte’s ambitions outstripped mere popular acclaim as a pop–folk singer: He organized HarBel Productions during 1956–1957 with an eye toward producing films that would challenge the Status Quo. At around this same time, producer Sol C. Siegel acquired Matthew Phipps Shiel’s 1901 novel, The Purple Cloud, which Paramount Pictures had proposed as a film project as early as 1940 under the intended title The Last Man in the World. Randall MACDougall, who became the director of The World, the Flesh and the Devil, characterized Shiel’s source–novel as “one of the first to concern itself with man’s growing capacity to utterly destroy himself.”

Following the atomic bombings of Japan in August of 1945, many Hollywood producers set out to portray such epochal horrors. (See Forgotten Horrors Vols. 4– 5.) Paramount sought to revive the Purple Cloud/Last Man project late in 1945, with Ray Milland, director Zoltan Korda, and screenwriter James Hilton. The idled prospect surfaced again in 1950, with producer George Pal’s name now attached to Hilton’s script, again at Paramount. Each such proposal retained Sheil’s entirely Caucasian dramatis personae

Siegel stepped in with the 1956 acquisition, intending to complicate the story with a tale of racial tensions among three survivors at large in a world blasted to hell. Siegel jettisoned Hilton’s scenario and enlisted MACDougall as screenwriter–director. “Siegel felt strongly,” MACDougall wrote in press materials for The World, the Flesh and the Devil, “... that these two problems [racial strife and common-good survival] are inter–related, and that we must solve both in order to solve either.”

Siegel’s project attracted Belafonte’s attention, and Siegel and HarBel formed an alliance to produce the film.
MACDougall’s retooling of Shiel’s novel bears the patent influence of Arch Oboler’s Five (1951), especially in the integrated casting. (Belafonte, a black leading man in an industry deficient in black talent as a class, takes top billing in The World, the Flesh and the Devil.) Where Oboler had concentrated upon a nuclear holocaust, MACDougall raised the confrontational stakes with what the historian Phil Hardy terms “a blunt allegory about race relations.”
The white man (played by Mel Ferrer) is a plain-spoken bigot. The woman (Inger Stevens) is a bewildered innocent. Belafonte’s character scarcely could care less about any color bar. The players present a seamless ensemble characterization and work most effectively at turning MACDougall’s self-righteous polemic into seemingly spontaneous dialogue. Under normal circumstances, Belafonte cautions the amorous Miss Stevens, she would not even be acquainted with him.
Left to die in a cave–in, mining engineer Ralph Burton (Belafonte) digs his way free. He finds only desolation, then notices newspaper headlines proclaming, “U.N. Retaliates for Use of Atomic Poison” and “End of the World.” He hot–wires a car and reaches New York, its thoroughfares clogged with abandoned vehicles. He learns that all-out war had been provoked by some rogue nation.
Sarah Crandall (Miss Stevens) watches from afar as Burton sets up housekeeping. He arranges an imaginary family with two departmentstore mannequins, and he cobbles together a source of electricity. In a fit of desperation, Burton throws one of the dummies from a balcony. Sarah, believing Burton has jumped, screams. He confronts her. She

explains that she had survived by taking refuge in a decompression chamber. The two become friends, but when Sarah proposes to move in, he replies facetiously that people might gossip. Indignant, she declares that she is “free, white and 21” and will do as she pleases. Burton is further annoyed when Sarah talks of marriage: He reminds her of the racial barriers of their defunct society. Her tears in response soften his attitude, but only just.
Sarah and Burton encounter Benson Thacker (Mel Ferrer). Tensions arise. Sarah rebuffs Thacker’s advances. Burton defies Thacker’s order to leave the city. Burton and Thacker exchange gunfire in a running battle. Ralph notices an antiwar slogan written on a landmark. He disposes of his gun. Thacker follows suit.
Benson announces his departure. Sarah asks him not to go, and he takes her hand. She calls out to Thacker, who takes her other hand, and the three walk together. As Phil Hardy points out, the

W O R L D – F L E S H – D E V I L • T E E N A G E R S F R O M O . S .

swords-into-ploughshares argument and the tacit challenge to the social norms of monogamy and ethnic separatism are “highly unusual for a 1950s film.” The film belabors such elements.

It is tantalizing to imagine how an earlier version of the story might have turned out under such never-to-happen teamings as director René Clair and Conrad Viedt (in 1940), Zoltan Korda and Ray Milland (in 1945), and George Pal’s Paramount unit (in 1950). (Even a silentscreen filming had been envisioned, around 1927.) The Siegel–Belafonte–MACDougall version is more a benchmark of the Civil Rights Movement than a vision of the Apocalypse, but its dramatic force is beyond denial. Harold J. Marzorati’s photography is suitably bleak, and Miklos Rozsa’s music captures a stirring quality to echo the closing note of hopeful ambiguity. “The spirit of man is indomitable, unconquerable and impervious...,” wrote MACDougall.

Following the release of The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Arch Oboler registered a modest complaint about the resemblance to his post-holocaust drama Five. In a letter to the Los Angeles Mirror–News Oboler termed the new film’s ending “indecisive” and cited aspects “somewhat similar” to his 1951 picture.

And yes, MGM, the big-time distributor of the independent Siegel–Belafonte production, had demanded the revision of portions of The World, the Flesh and the Devil—which explains why the mid-1958 production was delayed in release until 1959. “Some of the stuff we had for our ending as well as the footage ... done in Hollywood was not so powerful and authentic as the material we got [in New York],” MACDougall said in an interview. “The precise ending must take place in the minds of those who see the picture...”

Belafonte told us in 1996: “I had to be constantly haranguing Sol Siegel about the need to be more confrontational with the racial tensions. His heart was in the right place, but Sol kept bogging things down in namby-pamby Political Correctness, where I found it more urgent to be frank, and unafraid to ridicule bigotry in its own language—call a spade a spade, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

All attempted frankness aside, some conspicuous reviews balked at the open–endedness of the tale and belittled the race-relations angle. Time magazine complained of “an irrelevant wrangle about racial discrimination.” An unimaginative salvo from The Saturday Review of Literatureasked: “Are we to assume ... some sort of polygamous arrangement ..., or will ... entirely sexless lives [doom] both white and colored races to extinction? [W]e must assume that the color question was injected ... more as a gimmick...”

Teenagers from Outer Space

(Tom Graeff • Warner Bros. • 1959)

If The Saturday Review of Literature (above) had fancied The World, the Flesh and the Devila gimmick film, then what would that highfalutin’ and condescending bastion of Cultural Enlightenment have made of Tom Graeff’s turn-key production of Teenagers from Outer Space? Yes, and how fortunate that such films were as a rule beneath the notice of such publications, except when some constipated intellectual of an editor might go prowling about for a sitting duck.

The show-business publication Variety, in its role of predicting boxoffice prospects for the picture-show trade, found Teenagers from Outer Space to be “oddly appealing” and “carefully thought–out,”

though “often inescapably inept.” The Varietycritic made much (and so shall we) of Graeff’s having produced and directed the film, in addition to having handled the writing, photography, editing, music and sound engineering, and (under a stage–name) a supporting role. Variety also admired Graeff’s gumption in placing the ragged independent production with a major studio, Warner Bros., for distribution. No doubt the Warners suits had been impressed by the box-office returns for American–International’s cycle of teenage-monster pictures.

“While Graeff may not have made a good picture,” added Variety citing a “pathetically makeshift” overall texture, “he has made an interesting one that every now and again smacks of brilliance.”

Extraterrestrial youths visit Earth in search of grazing land for their livestock, a herd of lobster-like creatures known as Gargons. An act of violence against a dog provokes a peaceable member of the expedition, Derek (David Love) to rebel against the cruel nature of his fellow spacemen. Derek becomes an outcast, hunted by tribesman Thor (Bryan Grant). Thor goes on a rampage of serial murder. A clever contrivance finds Derek taking shelter at the home of the slain police–dog’s owners. His host, Betty Morgan (Dawn Anderson) proves a vulnerable romantic interest. Tom Graeff, posing as actor Tom Lockyear (his middle name), plays a newspaper reporter.

Bryan Grant commandeers the tale as the homicidal Thor. Avuncular Harvey B. Dunn (also seen in Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster) plays a genial townsman. Sonia Torgeson leaves an impression greater than her brief appearance might suggest, as a victim of Grant’s ray–gun rampage. Following a laughable rampage by one of the Gargons, the story wraps with the revelation that Derek is a member of his planet’s Ruling Class; his oath to steer the invaders homeward proves secondary to his urge to remain on Earth. To this end,

TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE • INVISIBLE INVADERS

Derek maneuvers the entire alien fleet, himself included, into a fatal crash. And so much for Earth’s being overrun by a herd, or horde, of gigantic man-eating lobsters.

Graeff bookends the picture with atmospheric if rudimentary ironies, starting with an observatory sequence in which an astronomer dismisses a U.F.O. as an illusion. The epilogue emphasizes David Love’s promise to Dawn Anderson: “I shall make the Earth my home, and I shall never, never leave.”

Invisible Invaders

(Premium • United Artists • 1959)

The dark, militaristic opposite number to Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1956–1959) is Edward L. Cahn’s Invisible Invaders—a film likewise concerned with alien terrorism and the raising of the dead, but far and away the more accomplished piece in terms of production values, overall professionalism in the acting, pacing, and writing— and a damned sight scarier.

Invisible Invaders also lacks the figuratively lustrous glow of delusional self–confidence that Wood had applied to the piecemeal assembly of Plan 9, an intensely personal project whatever its crippling flaws. Invisible Invaders represented a workaday assignment to Cahn, and the director applied to it full measure of pragmatic energy.

The picture is more a forerunner of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) than any manner of riposte to Plan 9: Cahn, for that matter, may well have been unaware of Wood, who was essentially a nonentity in the greater scheme of smallstudio filmmaking.

Conceptual drawing (above), and finished campaign piece (facing page).

Cahn, a prolific workhorse, often recaptured the cold grey ambiance that had defined Monogram Pictures’ spookers of the 1940s. Cahn fared especially well with variants upon zombiism, or the reanimation of what Smiley Burnette would have called “them old dead corpses.” Cahn’s phalanx of suit-and-tie croakers in Creature with the Atom Brain(1956) retains a nightmarish charge despite the absence of sensational spectacle. The better-financed Invisible Invaders—studio chief Edward Small was more liberal with the purse–strings than Atom Brain’s Sam Katzman—raises the stakes on unnerving imagery

I N V I S I B L E I N V A D E R S

The raising of the dead in Invisible Invaders.

and benefits from a memorable walking-dead portrayal by the great John Carradine, slumming as usual between major-studio characterman assignments. Carradine opens the film as a scientist, Dr. Karol Noymann, who dies in an explosion. Noymann returns as an apparition to a colleague, Dr. Adam Penner (Philip Tonge), who stands in opposition to nuclear proliferation. Noymann reveals that he is now an invisible alien, inhabiting the corpse to deliver a warning: The nations of Earth must cease atomic testing or face destruction.

Penner’s account is met with derision until the invaders kill and resurrect an airline pilot (Don Kennedy) in a conspicuous display of menace. Panic spreads. Defiance from the United Nations only encourages mass destruction. (As with Creature with the Atom Brain, these calamities are depicted via stock footage, smartly matched here by film cutter Grant Whytock with the dramatic-narrative cinematography of Maury Gertsman.) Mighty governments send their leaders into hiding.

Penner, under orders to assist the military, settles into a bunker in the company of his daughter (Jean Byron), cowardly fellow scientist John Lamont (Robert Hutton), and Air Force Maj. Bruce Jay (John Agar), a combative sort. Penner seeks to undermine the invaders’ advantage of invisibility. One such creature is waylaid.

A struggle between Lamont and Maj. Jay sets off an alarm system; the noise affects the captive alien. An applied concentration of sound kills the creature. A signal from space, traced to the invading spacecraft, leads Jay to train the sound–waves upon the ship. The menace having been routed, a meeting at the United Nations concludes that mutual preparedness must be preferable to Cold War tensions.

Philip Tonge, who died before the film could open, makes the stalwart scientist the leading man–by–default. Top-billed John Agar yields throughout to Tonge’s stabilizing presence.

INVISIBLE INVADERS • GHOST OF DRAGSTRIP HOLLOW

Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow

(Alta Vista Productions • American International • 1959)

An amiable trifle after the fashion of Allied Artists’ Bowery Boys comedies, William J. Hole, JR.’s Ghost of Dragstrip Hollowworks at once as a desultory coda to American–International’s deteriorating cycle of monster-at-large pictures, and as a bridge toward the studio’s Beach Party ETSEQ.shenanigans of the 1960s. No accounting for taste.

This Ghost is more a pop-rock musical than a comedy or a chiller, and although the casting lacks hit-record artists, the rock ’n’ roll thus deployed is of a more authentic stripe than the ersatz–rock that figures in AIP’s teenage-monster epics of 1957–1958. The musicians responsible include Jimmie Maddin and Nick Venet; both became significant producer–arrangers within the recording industry.

The desultory plot finds the members of a hot-rod club seeking a haven in a spooky old house. Scares issue from a skulking parrot and a scaly monster, modified from sculptor Paul Blaisdell’s title-role costume for The She–Creature(1956). Blaisdell himself plays the monster, and when unmasked he delivers the closing gag (such as it is) about how he no longer has the privilege of playing movie monsters.

The haunting thus debunked, the gang resumes its revelries—until a genuine ghost, annoyed by the loud music, materializes and departs the scene. Performances are uniformly desultory, but the music for the most part includes some valuable relics of obscure 1950s rock. The selections include three rockabilly instrumentals by Venet, a smart novelty called “Tongue–Tied,” by Maddin; and romantic trifles by Charlotte Braser and Bruce Johnston (yes, the Beach Boy–to–be) and Judy Harriet. The film overall is more a promotional device for AIP’s affiliated record label.

The Bat

(Liberty Pictures • Allied Artists • 1959)

In 1958, C.J. Tevlin, an independent producer who had managed RKO–Radio Pictures, purchased remake rights for The Batfrom Mary Pickford, a silent-screen star and studio chief who had produced the story’s first filming in 1926. Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood’s stage play The Bat—drawn from Miss Rinehart’s 1908 novel, The Circular Staircase—had caused a sensation in 1920 at New York’s Morosco Theatre, running for 867 performances.

Roland West, an important figure in the transition from silent films to the talking-picture revolution, directed the 1926 Batfor release by Miss Pickford’s studio partnership, United Artists. Four years later, West directed two distinct talkie versions of The Bat—one in conventional screen dimensions, the other in a prototypical widescreen process—for United Artists, both starring Chester Morris and Una Merkel. (The title was amended to The Bat Whispers, the better to suggest the added dimension of sound.)

The three West versions, marvels of nightmarish production design, combine eccentric stagecraft and cinematic visual effects in a manner that would prove influential upon the emergence of the film noirstyle. All, too, capture the combination of humor and horror that is crucial to the Mystery Farce tradition of Broadway, the silent screen, and the earlier talking pictures. And more about all that in our companion book, Forgotten Horrors: The Original Volume.

Judged against such standards as Roland West had established, the 1959 remake is a pallid reflection. New director Crane Wilbur’s adapted screenplay tracks the Reinhart–Hopwood original with reasonable fidelity, but David Milton’s art direction is scarcely a patch upon the vertigo-inducing designs of 1926 and 1930. Joseph Biroc’s camerawork is more a matter of passive observation. And yet Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead bring to bear an Old Hollywood-styled Grand Manner intensity to the tale of an elusive master criminal, at

T H E B A T
The 1926 version.

large in a confined setting. The film also affords an opportunity to see Darla Hood, all grown up from her familiar presence as an Our Gang kid-comedies player, quite vibrant in a supporting role.

Mystery author Cornelia Van Gorder (Miss Moorehead) and her nervous-Nellie companion, Lizzie Allen (Lenita Lane), lease a smalltown mansion known as the Oaks, owned by banker John Fleming (Harvey Stephens). A killer known as the Bat has caused a stir within the community. Fleming has heretofore refused to allow anyone to occupy the Oaks. The lease is the responsibility of Fleming’s nephew, Mark Fleming (John Bryant).

Banking officer Victor Bailey (Mike Steele) and his wife, Dale (Elaine Edwards) report a surreptitious theft to Police Detective Andy Anderson (Gavin Gordon). John Fleming is away on a hunting trip with the town’s physician, Dr. Malcolm Wells (Vincent Price).

Meanwhile at a secluded cabin, John admits to a million-dollar embezzelment of $1 million and offers Wells half if the doctor will help him fake his own death. Wells ponders the possibilities—and kills the banker outright. Victor stands accused of the theft, and also of John Fleming’s death in a fire. Strange noises plague the occupants of the Oaks. A figure cloaked in black sets loose a (real) bat in the bedchamber of Corneila and Lizzie. Anderson suggests that the (cloaked) Bat is lurking about, but the detective also suspects that John had performed the bank theft. Bank secretary Judy Hollender (Darla Hood) promises testimony that can exonerate Victor.

Cornelia wonders whether John Fleming might have hidden the money in the house. Mark, while searching for blueprints that would show the Oaks’ floor plan, is slain by the Bat, who also cuts the telephone lines before searching for the hidden fortune. The Bat, fleeing upon his being noticed, kills Judy. The butler, Warner (John Sutton), goes missing, then reappears and claims to have been knocked uncon

t h e b a t • t h e 3 0 – f o o t b r i d e
scious while following Anderson. Dr. Wells’ furtive arrival complicates matters. Cornelia Van Gorder discovers a secret room but accidentally locks herself inside. Wells confronts the Bat, who guns down the doctor. Freed from the hidden room, Cornelia, notices a safe. A fire breaks out. The Bat menaces Cornelia and Lizzie, but Warner shoots the criminal—who is unmasked as Detective Anderson.

Variety bemoaned a lack of suspenseful qualities but singled out Elaine Edwards for praise (as the wife of the wrongfully accused banker) and reserved admiring words for Vincent Price (as a lesser villain). The tradepaper also liked Alvino Rey’s musical contribution, “a weird set of notes played on the electric guitar.”

The 30–Foot Bride of Candy Rock

(D.R.B., Inc. • Columbia Pictures)

Any perceived resemblance to Attack of the 50-Foot Womanis beside the point, though perhaps not coincidental, given the earlier film’s popularity. Funnyman Lou Costello’s conspicuous bid for solo-star acceptance—his only picture without Bud Abbott—proved to be a death–rattle, issued five months after Costello had died of a heart attack, and difficult to market as much more than a grotesque memorial gesture. The film finds Costello still locked into the familiar Bud & Lou routine, however, paired for the occasion with a smart robotic creature named Max.

Essentially a kids’-matinée diversion, The 30-Foot Bride of Candy Rockallows Costello a vaguely more serious role than usual, as Artie Pinsetter, a rubbish collector and amateur inventor in a hick town known as Candy Rock. A despotic politician, Raven Rossiter (blustery Gale Gordon), controls the local economy. Pinsetter courts Rossiter’s niece, Emmy Lou (Dorothy Provine), against the windbag’s objections.

The running gag is that Pinsetter’s seemingly crackpot invention, Max, is a genuine example of Artificial Intelligence, despite its being afflicted with Pinsetter’s addled personality.

Emmy Lou, likewise infatuated with Artie, proposes marriage. Max forbids the union. Emmy Lou, angered, runs into a mysterious cave— and emerges (inexplicably so) as a giant. Panicked, Pinsetter informs Rossiter that Emmy Lou has “gotten big.” Misunderstanding that Pinsetter means she is pregnant, Rossiter orders a hasty marriage. Emmy Lou fashions a parachute into a wedding gown. A justice–of–the–peace (old-time funnyman Jimmy Conlin) flees in terror as the colossal bride approaches.

Now aware of his niece’s immensity, Rossiter fears a political scandal. He deeds to the couple a distant barn as a honeymoon cottage. Emmy Lou grows taller. A military sighting provokes panic.

Emmy Lou rebels against her uncle and warns the village roundheels (Veola Vonn) to stay away from Pinsetter. The Army launches missiles, which Max disables. A bazooka attack leads to a nonsensical timetraveling interlude. Max shrinks Emmy Lou to a miniature state. Pinsetter boasts that he has developed a machine that can bend time and space. The Military–Industrial Establishment confiscates Max. Emmy Lou returns to normal size. Pinsetter’s dog becomes a giant.

Director Sidney Miller, a onetime child actor who had developed a new career behind the cameras in television, plays the story for full farcical value and balances Costello’s fumbling attempts at more-orless straightforward acting with the comedian’s greater command of physical slapstick. Dorothy Provine plays the title character for full

3 0 – F O O T B R I D E • R E T U R N O F T H E F L Y
measure of exasperated indignation. Gale Gordon is a sputtering, selfimportant delight. Winstead “Doodles” Weaver, of Spike Jones’ musicand-comedy revue, appears in a small role.

The production company, D.R.B., Inc., was a partnership of the special-effects artisans Louis DEWitt, Jack Rabin, and Irving Block. Rabin and Block contributed the outlandish germ of a story. Executive producer Edward Sherman was Costello’s manager. The 30-Foot Bride, even if it could have benefited from Costello’s promotional presence, hardly appears a career-advancing effort. Following Costello’s death, a disconsolate Bud Abbott teamed briefly with Candy Candido, a versatile comedian, cartoon-voice actor, and big-band vocalist.

Return of the Fly

(Associated Producers, Inc. • 20TH Century–Fox)

Assembled in haste to cash in upon the runaway success of Kurt Neumann’s The Fly(Page 119), the sequel suffers from contrived dialogue, a denouemént that rings false, and editing so clumsy that the promise of one sensational plot–point goes unfulfilled, as if forgotten.

Director and scenarist Edward L. Bernds was hardly incapable of dealing in Big Ideas (as in The Flame Barrier, for example), but here he proves lacking in every respect. The very title, in view of its origin, raises expectations. And where that title was sufficient to draw respectable opening-week traffic, word–of–mouth from the paying customers could only lead to diminished returns: “It’s punk,” as a school-days chum of ours said after a first-run matinée—hardly a paragon of Critical Thinking, but eloquent enough for the circumstances.

Neumann’s The Fly suffers only from guilt–by–association; it remains a superior tale of Existential Anguish, with a savory garnish of Shock Value. What little value Return of the Flycan boast, lies in its station as a coincidental precursor of Roger Corman’s cycle of E.A. Poe movies of the decade–to–come: Bernds’ script echoes the Poe hallmark of an accurséd family, and Vincent Price would make a graceful transition from the Flypictures to the Corman Poes.

Return of the Fly opens with the death of the widow of a foredoomed inventor, long after her acquittal in connection with his killing. François DELambre (Price, the only player from the original) presents a Frank Synopsis of The Flyto the inventor’s now-adult son, Philippe (Brett Halsey). François, Philippe’s uncle, administers the customary boilerplate about Tampering with Things That Man Was Meant To Leave the Hell Alone. This warning only deepens Philippe’s resolve to vindicate his father’s dangerous theories.

Whereupon Philippe hires an assistant (David Frankham), retrieves the father’s journals, and proceeds to bankrupt the family with an obsessive campaign of research. The assistant, secretly a fugitive from justice, intends to steal the plans for a matter-transmitting device. An experiment proves surprisingly successful, but an attempt to arrest the assistant proves disastrous for a police inspector (Pat O’Hara), who finds himself fused with the mortal remains of a laboratory rodent. The turncoat overpowers Philippe and subjects the scientist to a flesh-scrambling ordeal with a common housefly.

François, wounded while confronting the assailant, finds Philippe reassembled, crowned with the head of an immense fly. A tiny fly, bearing Philippe’s head, calls for help in an unintentionally laughable reference to the first film. Philippe kills a crook (the mountainous Dan

Seymour) who had encouraged the assistant’s treacheries. A police inspector (John Sutton) captures the human-headed fly. Philippe dispatches the disloyal assistant. After a round of gratuitously menacing further appearances, Philippe lands in the transmogrification chamber with the fly. François restores Philippe to normalcy.

More a matter of pageantry than of engrossing narrative, Return of the Flysports the polished appearance of its predecessor but none of the coherent ferocity. Some of the transformational business is impressive. A subplot about a bothersome newspaper reporter— doubtless intended to meet a ghastly karmic end—trails off into nothingness. The musical score, by Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter, lends urgency, and the visual effects are persuasive. “But without the reputation of The Flyto trade on,” noted Variety, “this one would be a dud.”

Face of Fire

(Mardi Gras Productions • Svensk Filmindustri • Allied Artists)

Albert Band’s follow–through to I Bury the Living(Page No. 113) is essentially a foreign production, bankrolled in Great Britain and filmed in Sweden, though with a cast of Hollywood talents, both established and up–and–coming. Face of Firederives from Stephen Crane’s 1898 story, “The Monster,” which concerns a small American town’s assembled response to a heroic laborer’s disfigurement in a chemical explosion. The film, dour and ponderous but also passionate and intense, presents James Whitmore as Monk Johnson (written as a black man by Crane), a stablekeeper with Dr. Ned Trescott (Cameron Mitchell).

A favorite personality among the villagers, Johnson finds his idyllic and hopeful existence shattered when a fire levels Trescott’s house. Johnson steals through a barricade to rescue the doctor’s son, Jimmie Trescott (Miko Oscard). Johnson stumbles along a burning stairway

R E T U R N O F T H E F L Y

• F A C E O F F I R E
and falls into a laboratory table, where an explosion scalds away his face. Dr. Trescott carries the boy to safety, then returns for Johnson.

Trescott finds Johnson’s mind also affected. The doctor arranges for Johnson to stay with a farmer, Al Williams (Richard Erdman). Williams proves mercenary in his supposed benevolence. The neighbors fear Johnson’s veiled appearance, especially when he wanders about in search of friendly faces. One woman (Jill Donahue), whom Johnson had hoped to marry, collapses at sight of him. Only a friendly neighborhood dog appears glad to see Johnson.

The ordeal takes on an aspect of savage intolerance, rather like the villagers’ uprisings in the Frankensteinfilms of the 1930s and 1940s, as the vigilante impulse spreads. False sightings and false alarms proliferate.

Johnson is declared missing and presumed dead. The very yokels who had hounded him, now praise him as a hero. Johnson turns up alive, after all, and finds shelter with the Trescotts. Cruel rumors mount, once again. Johnson’s state of mind appears to improve. An overbearing judge (Robert Simon) proposes to send Johnson to an asylum.

Meanwhile, a mob of brats taunts Johnson. The distant ringing of a fire bell interrupts their malicious game. Johnson lurches to his feet, cringing in fear—then extends a hand and calls for Jimmie Trescott by a familiar affectionate nickname. Moved by the voice and remembering that Johnson had rescued

The horrors of the vigilante impulse.

F A C E O F F I R E • B E A S T F R O M H A U N T E D C A V E him, Jimmie takes his hand and leads him into the house.

Often cited by the playwright Horton Foote as an influence upon his screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird(1962), Face of Fireranks with such close-in-time films as The Night of the Hunter, Goodbye, My Lady,and The FoolKilleras a Southern Gothic of rare power and poetic subtlety. (Billy Bob Thornton, of 1996’s similarly concerned Sling Blade, also has spoken admiringly of Face of Fire.)

Famous Monsters magazine, notorious for its puerile gee-whiz silliness and lack of discriminating taste, made the occasional case for Face of Fire as a horror film, on grounds of Monk Johnson’s deformity—but many juvenile enthusiasts who accepted that recommendation came away in pouting disappointment: Not scary enough.

And yet the film is as scary as the storytelling art gets, if one takes reactionary intolerance and the vigilante urge as elements of horror. James Whitmore and Cameron Mitchell carry the proceedings ably, with impressive support from Robert Simon as a pompous bastion of provincial law–and–order. Bettye Ackerman makes a promising début as Mitchell’s wife. Albert Band directs with documentarylike detail.

A prologue pays fitting if overzealous homage to the author: “Stephen Crane, in his classic Tales of Whilomville, was [ among] the first to depict American townsfolk as they really were. Neither evil nor saintly—but all-too-human... The time is 1898. The place, any hometown...” The prose story ends with no sign of recovery for the maimed laborer, and with a persistent social banishment for the doctor’s family.

Beast from Haunted Cave

(Gene Corman, Inc. • The Filmgroup, Inc. • 1959)

A seeming hangover from the monster-at-large period of American International Pictures, Monte Hellman’s Beast from Haunted Cave issues in fact from Roger Corman’s Filmgroup outfit, a base of operations that also supplied attractions to AIP and Allied Artists. Brother Gene Corman’s production company is responsible, and first–timer Hellman directs in an efficient manner that suggests the guidance of Roger Corman. “If there’s still a market for horror pix,” suggested Variety, assuming a cautionary tone for its readership of theatre operators, “[the film] should do fairly well.”

There remained a popular demand, but evolution was necessary lest the genre’s enlivening of the past few years become enmired in formula. Hence the dawning, satirical sophistication of A Bucket of Blood (Page No. 231) and the imposition of a Southern Gothic attitude upon the Cormans’ production of Attack of the Giant Leeches (Page No. 229). (Roger Corman was paying attention to Elia Kazan, whose misbehaving Southerners of Baby Dolland A Face in the Crowdhad provoked controversy and paid admissions in equal measure. Roger also was preparing to fuse the higher artistry of E.A. Poe and Vincent Price into a new cycle for the dawning 1960s: A story for another day, and for another volume of ForgottenHorrors.)

“We’ve grown inured to monsters,” added the Variety review of Haunted Cave, “and hardly blink when this one guzzles its customary quarts of blood.” The terrors–at–large may be desultory, but the scenic values are vivid—the location is the Black Hills of South Dakota— and the creature is a surprisingly effective cobble–job, encrusted in a cringe-inducing web-like substance. Improvised, stagecraft-inspired special effects remained a staple of Corman’s studio.

A skiiing instructor, Gill (Mike Forrest), is an unwitting accomplice to a mob of bandits posing as vacationers. Ringleader Alex (Frank Wolff) plans an explosion as a distraction from a bank heist. Alex’s moll, Gypsy (Sheila Carol), takes refuge in booze from Alex’s foul temperament. Henchman Byron (Wally Campo) lures a barmaid, Natalie (Linné Ahlstrand) to a romantic tryst in a cavern. She winds up abducted by a spidery creature (a costumed Christopher Robinson). Byron plants the explosive charge.

The blast leaves the coast clear for the robbery. At a getaway campsite, gang flunky Marty (Richard Sinatra) finds Natalie, weak from loss of blood and lashed to a tree by a viscous web. Gill notices unidentifiable tracks. Victims accumulate further. Alex plots murder. Gypsy lures Alex and Byron into the monster’s path. Byron dispatches the creature with a flare gun.

A prologue makes plain the company’s “grateful appreciation to the people of South Dakota, whose cooperation made this picture possible.” The Black Hills shooting sites also served a close-intime Filmgroup project, Ski Troop Attack, with which Beast from Haunted Cave shares several cast–and–crew members.

The Cormans’ affiliated Alta Vista Productions and Balboa Productions, meanwhile, set out in more intellectually adventurous directions, with the Beat Generation satire A Bucket of Bloodand the Swamp Water-meetsTobacco Road fantasy Attack of the Giant Leeches—coming right up.

B E A S T F R O M H A U N T E D C A V E • A B U C K E T O F B L O O D

A Bucket of Blood

(Alta Vista Productions • American International Pictures • 1959)

Roger Corman’s nothing-sacred marvel, A Bucket of Blood, nods to its ancestry— Secrets of the French Police and Mystery of the Wax Museum(1932–1933) and House of Wax (1953)—while delivering a trenchant satire of the pseudo–intellectualism that Corman and screenwriter Charles B. Griffith perceived in the demimondeof jazz, poetry, and art. A grisly procession of cruelties emphasizes the wit.

So-called sick humor was quite the rage during this period, as well— from the New Yorker cartoons of Charles
Addams to stand-up comedy and bub
ble-gum trading cards for school
children. The studio emphasized
this quality in the advertising
campaign (Page No. 232). An
abrasive study in excess
deserves excessive promotion,
which the studio provided in
print, in music (eyes right),
and in radio commercials
imitating the cartoon voice of
Warner Bros.’ Foghorn
Leghorn: “Say, there, boy—
whatcha got in that bucket?”

“It’s too comic to be a
typical horror film,” said
Variety, “and the horror is
too explicit ... to be a come
dy, but for the youth mar
ket at which it’s aimed, the
feature looks like a winner.”

Dick Miller, Corman’s
deadpan good-luck actor, is
Walter Paisley, a dimwitted
busboy at a beatniks’
espresso hangout. Paisley
yearns to become an artist,
like the scornful, preten
tious phoneys whom he
serves. One of these, a

Radio personality and tunesmith Bill Anson (inset) provided an eerie promotional recording for A Bucket of Blood —a melodic poem recited in a florid imitation of Peter Lorre. The similarly voiced flip–side is “The Leeches” (as in Attack of the Giant Leeches ). The pieces do not figure in the respective films, but rather were distributed to disk jockeys during the dual-bill theatrical run.

stream-of-consciousness poet named Maxwell H. Brock (Julian Burton), is a dead-on-the-money caricature of Howlauthor Allen Ginsberg.

Paisley finds his longings fulfilled after he accidentally kills his landlady’s pet cat. He covers the carcass in layers of clay—then finds the object championed as a masterpiece of sculpture. A brilliant career awaits, if only Paisley can graduate to human figures.

Undercover cops Art Lacroix and Lou Raby (Ed Nelson and Burt Convy) stake out the café. A customer, Naolia (Jhean Burton), offers Paisley a small vial. Raby follows Paisley home and discovers that the vial contains heroin. Frightened when Raby draws a gun, Paisley siezes a frying pan and kills the officer. Meanwhile, café owner Leonard DE Santis (Anthony Carbone) discovers fur beneath the statue’s clay. Sensing a moneymaking artistic scam, DE Santis keeps mum—but is appalled when Paisley announces the completion of a

A B U C K E T O F B L O O D
Barboura Morris and Dick Miller.

new sculpture called Murdered Man. DE Santis’ urge to summon the authorities is sidetracked by an offer to buy the cat. De Santis and a sympathetic established artist, Carla (Barboura Morris), visit Paisley’s apartment to see the new work—the detective’s corpse, troweled over with clay. Shocked but greedy, DE Santis pays to Paisley a fraction of the cat-sculpture sale and encourages additional pieces—but suggests that the homicidal knucklehead move away from realism.

Paisley affects a man-about-town manner. He invites a contemptuous model (Judy Bamber) to pose, with predictable results, and begins prowling for new victims. DE Santis pleads with Paisley to stop sculpting. Carla rebuffs Paisley’s proposal of marriage, and he invites herto pose. She examines a statue and finds its ghastly foundation. Paisley argues that he has killed only worthless people. Detective Lacroix gets wise. Paisley’s great fear is not arrest, but rather exposure as a phoney. He ends his brilliant career (to anticlimactic effect) in suicide.

A Bucket of Blood is at its best when emphasizing the satiric element, especially in Anthony Carbone’s opportunist and Julian Burton’s self-important but perceptive poet. The film lapses from sardonic humor to an increasingly grisly second act—including a lumber-saw decapitation—but Miller unifies the disjointed construction with a sustained leavening of poignancy, despite a gathering arrogance.

Barboura Morris is terrific as an innocent romantic interest. Her queasy discovery of flesh–beneath–clay echoes a pivotal moment in Secrets of the French Police, and she seems ever likelier to become a gallery piece, as in Wax Museumand its remake. Fred Katz’ music (with saxophonist Paul Horn) lends the right atmospheric touches.

A T T A C K O F T H E G I A N T L E E C H E S
Bruno VESota and Yvette Vickers.

Attack of the Giant Leeches

A.K.A.: The Giant Leeches
(Balboa Productions • American International Pictures • 1959)

The power of A Bucket of Bloodto overshadow its companion picture is evident in Variety’s failure to publish so much as a review of Bernbard Kowalski’s Attack of the Giant Leeches. The tag-along feature pales by comparison, yes, but Leechescompensates for its desultory monster-at-large gimmick—the Law of Diminishing Returns strikes again—with a nightmarish swampbound setting and a populace of inbred grotesques; a haunting, sibilant musical score by Alexander Laszlo; and a vibrant portrayal of a small-town tart by the earthy and coquettish Yvette Vickers.

Production chief Roger Corman told us in 1999 that he had intended a superficial resemblance to Swamp Water, Jean Renoir’s naturalistic Southern Gothic of 1941. (“Just add Giant Leeches, of course,” Corman quipped.) He also averred that the pairing of Miss Vickers with a slovenly Bruno VE Sota “places the picture a great deal closer to Baby Doll.” The reference to Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams’ notorious film of 1956 takes into account that Miss Vickers (despite an under-written role) is as able and alluring an actress as Carroll Baker in Baby Doll.

Williams, with his pulp-fiction background and Broadway affectations, was among the few dramatists of his day who could characterize seamy exploitation as High Art and get away with it. Corman, on the other hand, poured artistry into exploitation but seldom cared who might notice—as long as they shelled out at the box office.

Leo V. Gordon’s screenplay for Leechesopens in a Florida backwater. Several cracker-barrel skeptics ridicule game–poacher Lem Sawyer (George Cisar) as he describes a strange apparition. A few nights later, Game Warden Steve Benton (Ken Clark) and his girlfriend, Nan Greyson (Jan Shepard), follow a scream and find Liz Walker (Miss Vickers) near Sawyer’s mauled corpse. The complacent sheriff, Kovis (Gene Roth), blames an alligator. Benton informs Nan’s father, Dr. Greyson (Tyler McVey), of a plan to investigate Sawyer’s ominous report.

Liz and her husband, merchant Dave Walker (Bruno V E Sota), quarrel over his refusal to move away from the swamp. Walker catches his wife in a tryst with a neighbor (Michael Emmet). Before the cuckold can take revenge, an impossible waterbound creature surfaces and does away with Liz and the interloper. Jailed for murder, Walker hangs himself. Dr. Greyson, sensing truth in Walker’s terrified rantings, suggests the swamp be dynamited; Benton argues against such an ecological disruption. Further disappearances occur. Greyson touches off a small charge—which raises a few corpses, scarred in a strange manner, newly deceased, and drained of blood.

Benton wonders if the men might have been held captive, and if Liz might remain imprisoned. A diving expedition finds Liz intact but under attack. Greyson speculates that radiation from a nearby spaceexploration base must have affected the leeches indigenous to the swamp; Liz’s neck bears suction marks. Benton consents to a generalized blast. As the townspeople leave the scene, a surviving creature watches from the edge of the marsh. (No sequel was forthcoming.)

Corman termed Leo Gordon’s scenario “more a matter of an idea, fleshed out with communal improvisation” than of formal scripting, and said the film fell together almost in Real Time: Eight days’ shooting yielded an hour’s running time, with few retakes or outtakes. The special-effects budget covered a few large black rubberized raincoats, which when obscured by distance and shadowplay look just about like one might expect Giant Leeches to look. The Floridian setting is represented by the Los Angeles County Arboretum.

The Alligator People

(Associated Producers, Inc. • 20TH Century–Fox • 1959)

A throwback at odds with its period, old–timer Roy D EL Ruth’s The Alligator Peoplewould fit more persuasively into the wartime 1940s, in a day when a Mad Doctor looked like Lionel Atwill or George Zucco and his renegade tampering had more to do with the manipulation of life than with its spontaneous mutation into unnatural forms.

George Macready takes the meddling crackpot role, here, as if making up for lost time from his WWII heyday as a somewhat more conventional villain. Lon Chaney, JR., has a showy supporting part as a drunken and vengeful Southerner, driven by a hatred of alligators. Beverly Garland, a spirited leading lady for the more cynical 1950s, assimilates smartly into the old-fashioned scenario, which screenwriter Orville H. Hampton structures like a film noir, with drug-induced flashbacks. Richard Crane, who had emerged as a heroic figure in the newer medium of commercial television, plays a transformed subject of Macready’s experiments in what would have been a Chaney role during the 1940s.

Originally billed as a secondary feature to Return of the Fly(Page No. 225), The Alligator Peopleoutshone that sequel as “dramatically the stronger of the two,” as Varietynoted. On its own, long removed from the double-bill context, The Alligator People holds up in most respects, barring a stiff and inexpressive ’gator-man headpiece.

A troubled nurse, Jane Marvin Webster (Miss Garland), is under psychiatric treatment. Infused with the drug pentothal, she relates a story that her conscious mind had rejected: Her husband, Paul Webster (Crane) had abandoned her on their wedding night. Months

T H E G I A N T L E E C H E S • T H E A L L I G A T O R P E O P L E

of searching led her to the bayous of Louisiana, where she met Mannon (Chaney), a laborer at the secluded mansion she seeks. En route to the plantation, deep in the swamplands, Joyce was horrified when Mannon tried to run over an alligator and then exhibited a prosthetic hook: One of the creatures had severed his hand.

The unwanted memory persists: At the house, Joyce introduced herself to the severe Lavinia Hawthorne (Frieda Inescort), who bristled when Joyce inquired about Paul’s connection with the property. Invited nonetheless to stay the night—on condition that she not leave her room—Joyce heard disturbing noises and received from a maid (Ruby Goodwin) a warning to leave

Lavinia reported the arrival of Webster’s wife to Dr. Mark Sinclair (Macready), the operator of an experimental clinic on the plantation. Webster, a disfigured lurker, ordered Lavinia to send Joyce away. Lavinia admitted to Joyce that Webster was her son. Having rescued Joyce from an assault by Mannon, Webster pressed Sinclair to administer an untested cobalt treatment. Sinclair agreed to do so.

Sinclair informed Joyce of his experiments with reptilian hormones, the better to regenerate severed limbs. Webster had been mangled in a plane crash, Sinclair explained, and the doctor had administered the serum to Webster and other victims. The treatment had appeared to work—until the patients began to turn into reptiles.

Sinclair explained that he had notified Webster of a prospective repair—hence the wedding-night disappearance. Joyce demanded to observe the new treatment. But no sooner did Sinclair begin the procedure, than Mannon burst into the laboratory and destroyed the mechanism. The radiation, out of control, transformed Webster into a humanoid alligator. Webster fled into the swamp, where he grappled with a (genuine) ’gator and stumbled into a quicksand bog.

T H E A L L I G A T O R P E O P L E • B E H E M O T H

And so much for the flashback: Back in the present day, it is concluded that amnesia has allowed Joyce to repress the horrors and resume a normal life: Leave well enough alone, in other words.

The creature-effects makeup, by The Fly’s L.B. Abbott and Ben Nye (unbilled), is effective during the passages where Richard Crane appears merely scaly and obscured in shadow. The alligator-man costuming is absurdly immobile and altogether too visible. This excessive presentation grates against the script’s success at providing “plausible explanations for the implausible,” as Varietyput it.

The acting is persuasive, too, overall, barring an overcooked-ham performance by Frieda Inescort as the headstrong matriarch. Chaney and Macready are right for their roles, and Crane lends a desperate poignancy to the victim of Big Science and Bad Medicine. Karl Struss’ camerawork makes much of the dank and forbidding setting.

Behemoth, the Sea Monster

I N AMERICA: The Giant Behemoth
(Artistes Alliance, Ltd. • David Diamond • Allied Artists • 1959)
It’s widely acknowledged—and mourned—as the last monster movie from the stop-motion animation pioneer and “father” of King Kong , Willis O’Brien. “How the mighty had fallen” is the consensus view; an unfair assessment of the film, O’Brien’s career, and [fellow animator] Pete Peterson, whose work here and in the equally impoverished ... The Black Scorpion ... remains extraordinary, given the conditions...

—S TEPHENR. BISSETTE From a Detailed Study in Monster! No. 12 (2014) We defer to Steve Bissette’s diligent research into Behemoth, the

Sea Monster and direct the reader straightaway to Tim Paxton & Steve Fenton’s Monster!, a generous upstart of a magazine that has more of value to say in just a year’s run (A.D. 2014 marked the launch) than many another such title can express in a 10-foot shelf.

As Bissette points out, the finer work of Willis O’Brien and Pete Peterson, with miniature designer Phil Kellison, suffers by its proximity to lesser work from a creature-effects crew supervised by Jack Rabin, Irving Block, and Louis DeWitt. Behemoth’s rampant dinosaur is formidably lifelike, here, and unpersuasive and distracting, there— depending upon which team of effects artists was handling the properties. A crew member’s careless handling of one of O’Brien’s miniatures left the articulated sculpture immobilized and inflexible.

Yes, and be that as it might: The British-made Behemothoccupies the middle position in a trilogy of resurrected-dinosaur pictures from Eugène Lourié. The director’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms(1953) had triggered a craze for monstrous immensity within the genre, ranging from bugs and spiders to lizards and sea–creatures and Cyclopean human beings. Lourié would complete his contribution to the cycle in 1961 with Gorgo, a combination of monstrous terrors with social criticism.

The aftermath of an atomic explosion brings a prehistoric creature, seething with radioactive menace, to London. The Varietyreview concluded that “the true terror is in the reaction of the people, the fear of the victims ..., rather than in the ugly sight of the creature itself.” The critic–historian Phil Hardy, appraising the film from a greater distance of time (1984), found that the film “reveals Lourié as a master of

creating suspense through mood and evocative lighting.” The story is essentially that of Steve Karnes (Gene Evans), a marine biologist, who decries atomic testing as a threat to the oceans. Lourié’s collaborative screenplay literalizes Karnes’ fears in the arrival of the creature. (The co–authors are Daniel James, Robert Abel, and Allen Adler.)

Evans and André Morell, as level-headed scientists, handle the heroic protagonism about equally. Likewise impressive is Leigh Madison, in a small but telling role as the daughter of an early victim (Henry Vidon). Camera chief Ken Hodges’ strong radial compositions convey the atmos

B E H E M O T H • P I E D R A S B L A N C A S
phere of siege. Some of the effects photography, however, betrays the use of miniatures that should not look tiny, in the context. The term Behemoth, after all, denotes extreme size—a truism that renders the U.S. proxy–title, The Giant Behemoth, redundant in the extreme. As though Behemoth, the Sea Monsterwere not sufficiently repetitive.

Any suggestion of a Biblical allegory is confined to the title: The film is more a cautionary ecological manifesto (ill heeded, naturally) than a vision of any Apocalyptic upheavals, the collapse of London Bridge notwithstanding.

The Monster of Piedras Blancas

(Vanwick Productions • Filmservice Distributing • 1959)

Another species of sea monster—not a behemoth, this time, but rather a seven-foot, two-legged knockoff of Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon of five years earlier—accounts for the terrors in Jack Kevan and Irvin Berwick’s The Monster of Piedras Blancas. The little-seen film is a vicious account of a strange relationship between a superstitious lighthouse–keeper and a cave-dwelling predator.

The Real World kinship between Black Lagoon and Piedras Blancasis more peculiar, yet: Kevan, a make-up technician who had toiled anonymously in Hollywood since The Wizard of Oz(1939), was among the contributors to Creature from the Black Lagoon at Universal–International. Berwick, a tenured dialogue director, had crossed paths with Kevan at Universal.

The artists’ one-shot outsider company, Vanwick Productions, produced Piedras Blancasas a crudely inventive variant upon Black Lagoon Sparse theatrical distribution and a prompt lapse to television syndication afflicted The Monster of Piedras Blancas, whose ghastlier excesses suffered further from censorship for broadcast presentation. Not until 1986 did the film, undiminished, find a wider exposure—via a homevideo edition from a company descended from Republic Pictures.

The Pacific Coast town of Piedras Blancas is so impoverished that its general store’s meat locker must double as a morgue after two mutilated corpses are found on the beach. Nor is the storekeeper, Kocheck (Frank Arvidson), particularly concerned with the dignity of the deceased: He frightens his customers with a claim that the unexplained deaths are the work of a legendary monster.

The sullen, widowed lighthouse–keeper, Sturges (John Harmon), demands scraps of meat from Kocheck. Sturges also fears for the safety of his daughter, Lucile (Jeanne Carmen), who pursues a secretive romance with a marine biologist, Fred (Don Sullivan). While indulging one night in a nude swim (alone), Lucile hears the harsh breathing of the lurking monster. She reports the noise to her father, who heads for the beach to investigate. The creature enters the village and kills Kocheck. The scene yields a large fishlike scale, which Fred determines to belong to some prehistoric throwback. (The creature is portrayed by Pete Dunn, who also plays a villager.)

Sturges is found, wounded, along the shoreline. Recovering, he explains the legend’s basis in fact. He declines to reveal his secretive habit of leaving food as a ceremonial offering. Another corpse is found. The monster reappears at the store, in search of meat. Fred finds Sturges’ feeding–pail at the cliffs. A posse encounters the head of a victim.

Sturges finally acknowledges his complicity in keeping the creature appeased. The monster captures Lucile but drops her upon hear

ing a shout from Sturges, whom it pursues atop the lighthouse and then throws over the railing. Distracted by a flash of light, the monster falls to its death.

Cinematographer Philip Lathrop captures the natural settings (around Point Concepción Lighthouse at Lompoc, California) to striking advantage, what with the formidable outcroppings of rock and the precipitous heights of the conclusive chase. Kevan’s creature-suit design reflects the Black Lagooninfluence but adds an absurd grimace that resembles the monster-mask creations of Paul Blaisdell for American International Pictures. Berwick’s mere competency as a director allows the beast too much exposure where fleeting glimpses and suggestive shadowplay would have served a more suspenseful function. The intended resemblance to a Universal shocker is undone by the sub-par production values. Piedras Blancassaw sporadic release on a doublefeature bill with Filmservice Distributing Corp.’s Okefenokee

Okefenokee

(Filmservice Distributing Corp. • 1959)

The more provocative companion–feature to The Monster of Piedras Blancasrepresents an earnest study of Seminole Indian folkways in the Florida Everglades, with a thick veneer of violent sensationalism. The title is a tribal place–name; it would have sounded more exotic in 1959 if the cartoonist Walt Kelly had not made Okefenokeea household word in the popular comic strip Pogo

Producer Aaron A. Danches, descended from the Danches Bros. company that had bankrolled the similarly swampbound Untamed Fury in 1947 (see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 4), developed Okefenokee from an original story, “Mangrove,” by débuting director Roul Haig.

P I E D R A S B L A N C A S • O K E F E N O K E E

The tale concerns a tribesman, Chekika (Peter Coe), who returns to his backwater village with a shell-shocked drinking habit he had acquired while serving with the Army. In Chekika’s absence, criminals from the civilized world have infiltrated the Okefenokee Swamp as a base of smuggling operations. The villagers, leery of the white man’s laws, fear to summon the police, even though gangster Joe Kalihari (Henry Brandon, title player of 1943’s Drums of Fu Manchu), has pressed several Indians into his service and then killed them.

Chekika’s father (Roy Elkins) demands that the prodigal sober up and challenge the outsiders. Chekika’s greater frustration stems from his unpopular belief in education as a benefit to his people. His fiancée, Lowheeya (Serena Sande), is a hidebound traditionalist.

Kalihari’s lover, bar owner Ricki Hart (Peggy Maley), lures Chekika into an enounter with the mobster. Chekika’s brother, Alomah (E.W. Swackhamer), runs afoul of Kalihari; Alomah’s disappearance provokes Chekika to take action. A bigoted drunkard, Pulley Mack (Walter Klavun), rapes Lowheeya, who in imagined disgrace stumbles into the swamp to begin a suicidal tribal ritual of cleansing. Chekika rescues the maiden from predatory wildlife—and then confronts Mack, who reveals the truth about Alomah’s slaying.

The Seminole menfolk assemble a vigilante posse, equipped with airboats and prongéd poles. Kalihari summons a hydroplane to flee to Cuba. Chekika rams the departing aircraft and leaps free before an explosion can kill Kalhari and his accomplices. Having re–established safety for his people, Chekika marries Lowheeya in a traditional ceremony.

The peculiar fusion of a straightforward thriller and an educational documentary study lurches unsteadily between conflicted narrative imperatives. An opening voice-over track by Patrick McGeehan describes the peaceable ways of the Seminoles and intrudes occasionally upon the action to over–explain plot–points and describe aspects of the tribal culture. The film works better when depicting the corruptions afflicting the otherwise unspoiled region—white bigotry, criminal exploitation of the natives, and the indifference of Polite Society. Jess Abbott’s screenplay at length errs in favor of separatism—a stick-withyour-own-kind argument that also has compromised such well-meaning but condescending Tolerance Fables as Freaks(1932), Imitation of Life(1934), and It’s a Small World (1950).

The Giant Gila Monster

(Hollywood Pictures • McLendon Radio Pictures • 1959)

McLendon Radio Picures, an outgrowth of broadcaster Gordon McLendon’s KLIF–Radio empire in Dallas, lasted long enough to deliver three films—two horrific hits and a wholesome family-entertainment dud—during 1959–1960. McLendon and his bankroller father, B.R. McLendon, had established the Dallas frequency with proceeds from the sale of a small radio station in Palestine, Texas, the better to seek higher marketplace ground with a combination of brash promotional stunts, aggressive sports coverage, and right-wing political pandering.

By the middle 1950s, the McLendons’ affiliated Liberty Broadcasting System had acquired half–a–dozen stations and gained some 500 affiliates nationwide. The eruption of rock ’n’ roll music as a social force gave KLIF a crowning touch of marketing energy that would give rise to the boss-jock school of boisterous (even obnoxious) radio-announcer mannerisms. The appeal to youth—and never mind the contempt toward

O K E F E N O K E E • T H E G I A N T G I L A M O N S T E R

youthful rebellion that was implicit in McLendon’s political stance— worked as great an influence upon the broadcasting industry as American International Pictures’ teen-exploitation attitude had imposed upon the moviemaking racket.

“Neither sales nor general administration nor engineering comes first,” McLendon wrote in a memoir. “Programming does.” A KLIF salesman, Ed Routt, has reminisced further about prospective advertisers’ resistance to the young-audience bias: “‘Nobody listens to that kid stuff,’ the advertisers would say, and even the other Dallas radio stations looked down their noses at us... But then, we began to just outsell [the competition].” McLendon’s ironic decision to ban the more conservative forms of entertainment—classical music and Nashvillestyled C&W were forbidden—proved revolutionary.

“There’s good pandering, and there’s bad pandering,” McClendon said in a late-in-life presentation to a trade group in Dallas, during the 1980s. “Bad pandering is the kind that doesn’t make youany money.”

And so it had developed in 1959 with McLendon’s back-to-back productions of The Giant Gila Monsterand The Killer Shrews(Page No. 248). Movie production was nothing new to Dallas, but the pioneering North Texas films of Yiddish businessman Al Sack (see Forgotten Horrors Vols. 2–3) had sought only ethnic marketplaces, primarily in black-neighborhood theatres. Short-lived Freebar Pictures, also of Dallas, had joined a bandwagon in 1957 with Rock Baby—Rock It (starring Johnny Carroll, Decca Records’ answer to Elvis Presley) but found only sparse distribution. McLendon, armed with off-Hollywood massaudience connections, demonstrated that a provincial company could attract widespread attention with the right exploitative elements.

T H E G I A N T G I L A M O N S T E R

The more conventional of McLendon’s inaugural pictures, The Giant Gila Monster, trades upon the angles of rock ’n’ roll and restless youth. The more audacious The Killer Shrewsis a twist upon Mad Doctor conventions, with the setting of a desperate siege. Their double-bill campaign promised lurid thrills and delivered in kind. (McLendon’s follow-through, 1960’s My Dog, Buddy, is a dull thud of a tear–jerker—monstrous in itself, in the demands that it imposes upon a viewer’s patience and emotional state.)

McLendon boasted that he had budgeted $300,000 for Gila Monster but brought the film in under the wire at $138,000. The Gila–Shrewspackage saw simultaneous premieres during mid–1959 at Dallas and neighboring Fort Worth and 11 other Texas cities. The blitz persisted nationwide, with robust traffic.

Ken Curtis, McLendon’s producer–of–record, grew to regard the films as an embarrassment, after the busy character actor had found massed recognition as Festus Hagen on the network teleseries Gunsmoke. But Curtis acknowledged as late as the 1970s that the McLendon assignments had equipped him with a working knowledge of the practical realities of life behind the cameras. Director Ray Kellogg was a prolific visual-effects artist who landed no further directing assignments until a brief foray into television and, then, on John Wayne’s jingoistic The Green Berets, during 1966–1968.

Kellogg’s competent direction is at the mercy of a vaguely adequate youth-ensemble cast whose alternating passive and reactive performances clash with the better-than-the-material confidence of veteran actor Fred Graham, as a diligent and fair-minded sheriff. A young couple has gone missing, and in his search—accompanied by Don Sullivan, as hot–rodder Chace Winstead—the lawman chances upon the bloodstained wreckage of an automobile. Survivors of a train wreck report the sighting of a huge reptile. A cursory pseudo-scientific explanation ascribes the immensity to industrial pollution.

Kellogg and co-scenarist Jay Simms give Winstead a pitiable back–story involving a crippled kid sister. The pace bogs down further with three distracting musical showcases for Sullivan’s bland poprock compositions. The tale makes much of a culture–clash confrontation between Sullivan’s working-class Winstead and a wealthy figure of authority (Bob Thompson). The racket of a teenage dance party attracts the lizard—a hater of rock ’n’ roll music?—which Winstead dispatches with a load of nitroglycerine, sacrificing his cherished automobile in the process. Greater love hath no punk...

Ralph Nanneras and Wee Risser’s rudimentary special effects, involving miniature construction and the optical enlargement of a sluggish, two-foot lizard, are adequate for the circumstances. The crisp black-and-white photography (by Wilfrid M. Cline, a busy talent in regional television commercials) is more scenic than dramatically propulsive but serves as an impressive document of distant regions including the desolate landscape near Cielo, Texas. McLendon promotes his radio interests with a cameo for disk jockey Ken Knox.

Fred “Slugger” Graham, who carries the show as the determined sheriff, had broken into the movies in 1934 from a career in baseball. His dependable presence, though usually unbilled, persisted into network television, and during the 1960s he became a pivotal figure in the development of a motion-picture industry for Arizona. Graham retired from the screen in 1973 and died six years later, at age 70.

The Killer Shrews

(Hollywood Pictures • McLendon Radio Pictures • 1959) “Gordon McLendon ... has been acting as he preaches [in the] hard–sell of regular Hollywood releases,” said Variety. “McLendon believes, ‘If we can sell pictures, we can makepictures.’” (He also owned a small chain of theatres.) Not to mention that McLendon could make pictures on the cheap for a greater return on investment: As with Gila Monster, McLendon had budgeted Shrewsat $300,000 and then brought the thing in for much less—$123,000, in this instance, he declared.

Ray Kellogg directs this one with a more assured command of suspense than he applies to Gila Monster. Kellogg’s special-effects strategy is to disguise dogs in shaggy pelts (the better to pass for gigantic rodents). He keeps things moving briskly enough to evade close scrutiny, but a failure to match the shots persuasively with stock footage betrays the make–believe imagery.

Dr. Marlowe Craigis (Baruch Lumet) is a scientist whose tampering has transformed the voracious creatures into wolf-sized predators. A storm frees the beasts from Craigis’ island laboratory. A charter–boat, bearing supplies, runs afoul of the siege. Capt. Thorne Sherman (James Best), finding the monsters immune to rat poison, contrives a strategy to use steel barrels as armor for a mad dash back to the boat. Jay Simms’ screenplay allows for some smart characterizations, notably from McLendon himself as a scientist and Ken Curtis as an impulsive fugitive from Killer Shrewdom.

Ingrid Goude, a former Miss Sweden, serves well as the Mad Doctor’s daughter. Baruch Lumet, who enacts the scientist with helpful conviction, was the father of major-league director Sidney Lumet.

T H E K I L L E R S H R E W S • 4 D M A N

M EMORANDUM FROM MIKE PRICE: A cousin,
Howard Price, and I relished The Giant Gila
Monster and The Killer Shrews during their
opening in 1959 at my Uncle Grady L.
Wilson’s State Theatre in Amarillo, Texas.
On the way home with another uncle
(Howard’s father), we heard a country-pop
song called “Waterloo” on the car’s radio.
Howard made up a rhyming lyric on the
spot: “Killer Shrews—Killer Shrews—
Where will you meet the Killer Shrews?”—
like that. This uncle was not amused: “You Caninegoddamn’ kids just shut the hell up ,Killeralready, back there!” Shrew.

And so much for spontaneous humor in
the baleful glare of a grouch. My cousin’s fleet
ing spoof lay forgotten until 2014, when I pulled
my American Film Institute files to refresh the impressions of the movie. And damned if that childish lyric didn’t spring to mind. I telephoned Howard to ask if he remembered; he drew a blank.

Whereupon I undertook to turn that scrap of juvenile nonsense into a fully fledged novelty song, as silly as a summit meeting between Spike Jones and Captain Beefheart. I rushed the verses into the recording studio, produced an ensemble performance, and sent the thing off to my pal Barret Hansen at The Dr. Demento Show in Los Angeles: Strike while the irony is hot. The tune also will surface sooner or later on one of our Music of Forgotten Horrors compact-disk albums.

4D Man

A.K.A.: Master of Terror
(Fairview Productions • Universal Pictures • 1959)

The runaway success of The Blob(Page No. 149) had been a fluke, predicated more so upon an audacious (though hardly original) and ably developed concept, ripe with youth appeal, than upon any masterful narrative techniques or compelling subject matter. For director Irvin S. Yeaworth, the only door that The Blobopened led back to the Front Office at Jack H. Harris’ off-Hollywood production company in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Harris and Yeaworth spent the next two years in attempts to recapture that box-office magic, but all they turned up amounted to two perfectly tolerable genre exercises, 4D Man and 1960’s Dinosaurus!

Harris imagined 4D Man as a twist upon H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, coupled with such figuratively vampiric themes as had been explored in 1944’s Man in Half Moon Streetand 1957’s The Man Who Turned to Stone—one unnatural existence, prolonged at the sacrifice of many other lives. Universal Pictures, hoping for a re–enactment of Paramount’s bonanza with The Blob, purchased distribution rights.

The SF–horror trade was showing signs of dwindling, and Variety doubted the film’s prospects: “Assuming there is [a market], this Universal release should do moderately well. It is not offensively gruesome and has a fairly interesting gimmick.” Praise by faint damnation.

The value of the Variety reviews has not so much to do with æsthetic or cultural insights, as it does with the publication’s barometer of whether a picture would drive traffic for the theatres. A barometer can be accurate as often as not, and a slog through the mouldering bound volumes of Variety can be more than an engrossing time–waster.

Scientist Tony Nelson (James Congdon) tampers with phenomena of the fourth dimension sufficiently to wreck his laboratory and earn for himself a firing. He retrenches at the research plant of his estranged brother, Scott Nelson (Robert Lansing), who seeks to invent an impenetrable metal. Tony finds himself attracted to Scott’s fiancée, Linda Davis (Lee Meriwether), a lab assistant. Scott absorbs a radioactive bombardment. Tony, too honorable to pursue an affair with Linda, plans to leave the project; Scott assumes his brother is insufficiently dedicated to the job at hand.

Scott’s apparent success inspires his parasitic boss, Theodore J. Carson (Edgar Stehli), to claim credit for the discovery. A fortune awaits, after all, in military and industrial revenues.

Tony questions the validity of the breakthrough. The exposure to radiation has caused Scott to develop both enhanced brain impulses and a mean streak. Tony reconsiders his intentions to depart and accepts a position with the laboratory; his research inspires Scott to tamper with the findings. Scott achieves the ability to force one hand through a block of cement, but

4 D M A N

the breakthrough only maddens him further. Scott embarks upon a series of crimes, passing his body through shop windows and industrial safes. Realizing he is losing his mind, Scott approaches his physician (Elbert Smith) for help—but a blast of radioactivity kills the doctor. Scott, exhausted by the strain, determines that he can replenish his energies by draining the vital energies of others. Hence the rampage central to the film, including the welcome destruction of Edgar Stehli’s crooked laboratory chief.

A trail of evidence includes a thousand-dollar bill, found embedded in the wall of a safe. Tony, now aware that Scott must be the culprit, develops an elaborate trap. His machinations, however, do less good at trapping the monster than Scott’s own romantic longings. As he approaches Linda, she opens fire on him. Raving that he is indestructible, Scott scrambles his atomic structure in a futile attempt at escape. (One might perceive an influence upon the character of Dr. Manhattan in the popular graphic novel, Watchmen.)

As with the closing title for The Blob, 4D Manfades out on an inconclusive question: “The End?” This annoying refusal to accommodate narrative closure only compromises the overall effect of a nothalf-bad study of crazed ambition. Robert Lansing’s title portrayal is ferocious in a dour and understated way: The actor (in his feature-film début) registers an intensity of the sort one associates with religious zealots and political extremists.

Producer Harris allowed himself a cameo role, as a nightclub patron. The question-mark end-title card notwithstanding, no sequel was forthcoming. Harris and Yeaworth moved along in 1960 to Dinosaurus!A reissue of 4D Manin 1966 was treated as a first-run opening, primarily for drive-in theatres, with a new title: Master of Terror.

T E R R O R I S A M A N

Terror Is a Man

A.K.A.: Blood Creature
(Lynn–Romero • Premiere Productions • Valiant–Hemisphere • 1959)

The missing link in Eddie Romero’s so-called Blood Island Trilogy (U.S.–Philippines; 1965–1970) is Terror Is a Man, a stripped-down variation upon H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau—better known by the title of its Paramount adaptation of 1932, Island of Lost Souls Romero’s intended title, here, had been Creature from Blood Island for that matter: His partnership with co–director Gerardo DE Leon had taken the lead in the Filipino filmmaking industry—specializing in earthy fantasies—and Terror Is a Man re–ignited an international craze for visceral Third World horrors. The partnership became a trio with the strategic addition of an American co–producer, Kane Lynn, head of the grindhouse wellhead known as Hemisphere Pictures.

The formally acknowledged Blood Islandpictures are but loosely connected: Brides of Bloodand Mad Doctor of Blood Islandand Beast of Bloodshare a greater consistency in the setting and the casting than in any connected storylines. Their ancestry, nine years removed, lies in Terror Is a Manand its central figure, a renegade surgeon played by Francis Lederer, the very embodiment of Mysterious Old Hollywood. Lederer’s character provides a basis for the Mad Doctor portayals of Ronald Remy and Eddie Garcia in the Blood Island Trilogy

Lederer had recently completed The Return of Dracula(Page No. 86). He found the Third World setting of Terror Is a Manto be “appealing to my sense of adventure, what with our shooting in Manila,” as Lederer told us in a late-in-life visit, “and challenging to my abilities to read qualities of longing and sad dignity into a scoundrel. I had prospered sufficiently in real estate and other investments that I could take a project on merely the grounds of adventure.” The outlandishness of the situation becomes persuasive in light of Lederer’s commanding presence, and Romero and DE Leon play things seriously enough to override screenwriter Harry Paul Harber’s hellbent-for-hokum dialogue.

Petroleum engineer William Fitzgerald (Richard Derr), survivor of a shipwreck in the South Pacific, drifts onto the Isla DE Sangre—that Blood Islandreference, yet again. Surgeon Charles Girard (Lederer) and his assistant, Walter Perrerra (Oscar Keesee), take Fitzgerald into custody. Girard and Perrerra search for an escaped animal. The doctor experiments upon jungle creatures, with the reluctant assistance of his wife, Frances (Greta Thyssen), and the willing assistance of the sadistic Perrera. Meanwhile, the catlike beast kills two natives in a nearby village. The panicked tribespeople flee to a neighboring island, leaving behind two villagers, Selena and her brother Tiago (Lilia Duran and Peyton Keesee), who are servants to Dr. Girard.

Fitzgerald finds Girard evasive. The surgeon dismisses the natives’ fear as a matter of superstition. Girard explains that he and Frances had come here from Manhattan to pursue his unusual research. The animal he seeks is a panther, or a close facsimile.

While Girard and Perrera resume the hunt, Frances confides to Fitzgerald that she lives in perpetual fear and has decided to leave on the next supply ship. Girard returns to report the capture of the panther. Fitzgerald steals into Girard’s laboratory to glimpse the animal and is surprised to see a man-sized figure (Flory Carlos), swathed in gauze and strapped to a gurney. Frances laments a series of killings caused by Girard’s obsessive tamperings with nature. Even Perrera expresses doubts about the validity of Girard’s quest. A tense romantic attraction develops between Frances and Fitzgerald. Girard invites Fitzgerald to observe a surgical procedure—one of many performed upon the panther in an attempt to transform it into a human.

An attempt by Perrera to seduce Frances enrages the bound creature, which breaks free to wreck the laboratory. Perrera sets the creature ablaze. Amidst a gathering thunderstorm, the creature kills Perrera and runs outside—then kills Selena and takes Frances captive.

The creature leaves Frances near a cliffside, the better to hurl Girard into the sea. The beast staggers into the water. Tiago awaits Fitzgerald and Frances with the dinghy in which Fitzgerald had arrived.

Francis Lederer acts circles around his less accomplished co–stars. Richard Derr cuts a figure of stolid determination. Greta Thyssen appears too voluptuous for the circumstances but registers ably enough her distaste for the grisly circumstances. Oscar Keesee (whose son plays the endangered native boy) has little to do as Lederer’s hulking handyman until a mid-course drunk scene allows him to display his contempt for the business at hand; from there, Keesee takes more of a pivotal role in undoing the surgeon’s handiwork. Flory Carlos, confined by turns with bloodstained bandages and the cat–creature makeup (by Remedios Amazan), nonetheless manages a soulful, wordless eloquence with the eyes—less the monster of the piece, than a dangerous result of scientific perversion.

Hemisphere Pictures imposed a gimmick: “Warning—The picture you are about to see has a scene so shocking that it is necessary to forewarn you. We suggest that the squeamish and faint-hearted close their eyes at the sound of the bell and reopen them when the bell rings again. [signed] The Management.” True to the promise, a bell is heard just prior to a surgical close–up. The New York Times’ review suggested that if the horrors on display were not sufficiently frightening, then the startling clang of the bell would suffice.

On the Beach

(Lomitas Productions • United Artists • 1959)

The prominence of Stanley Kramer’s On the Beachamong the period’s antiwar films has more to do with a concentration of star power, a basis in a popular novel, and an aggressive publicity campaign, than with any overriding excellence. Source–novelist Nevil Shute’s propulsive narrative force becomes lost in Kramer’s dull and meandering manner of directing and a tedious job of screenwriting by John Paxton. Randall MACDougall’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil (Page No. 211), for all its overwrought Social Consciousness, relates a similar story with greater tension and more identifiable intimacy.

“If you never see another motion picture in your life,” declared the promotional campaign, “you must see On the Beach.” The implication was that the threat of nuclear warfare might make On the Beachthe last motion picture anyonewould see—so why not mark the End of Life as We Know It with an end-of-the-world movie? Seldom has the risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy sounded so menacing.

“For all its good intentions (and the majestic cinematography of Giuseppe Rotunno),” said the historian Phil Hardy, “[the film] transforms the tragedy ... into a series of personal melodramas.” These episodes are ill served by the celebrity distractions provided by Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Ava Gardner, and Anthony Perkins. Added

T E R R O R I S A M A N • O N T H E B E A C H

Hardy: “The result is a film about issues in which the issues get quickly buried.” The central concern, after fallout from a nuclear war (in 1964) has obliterated life in the Northern Hemisphere, is that clouds of irradiated dust are drifting toward Australia.

U.S. Submarine Capt. Dwight Towers (Peck) contacts the Royal Australian Navy, which assigns him a lieutenant, Peter Holmes (Perkins), to help track the lethal drift. Holmes would prefer to remain with his wife, Mary (Donna Anderson), and their infant daughter. He insists to Mary that they must ignore the threat and live as though all were normal. Mary arranges for Towers to meet a jaded socialite, Moira Davidson (Miss Gardner). At a party, adventurous scientist Julian Osborn (Astaire) distresses Mary with a drunken rant about the war. Towers’ optimistic talk about his family proves no less distressing to Moira: It is accepted that everyone in America has died. Moira, likewise stewed, demands to know why Australia must await a slow death.

Naval meteorologists determine that Australia may be spared. Towers’ vessel must travel north to test the theory. Moira apologizes to Towers for her excessive behavior and presses for a romantic involvement. Osborn joins Towers’ expedition. Lt. Holmes, anxious about leaving his family, obtains suicide pills offered by the government; the suggestion horrifies Mary. Moira dreads even the distant prospect of survival without Towers, who remains aloof.

Osborn’s radiation tests in the Northern Pacific invalidate the hopeful theory. Holmes confesses his anguish to Osborn, who berates the lieutenant for failing to appreciate the love he has known while others—such as Osborn and Moira—have wasted their lives. The submarine finds San Francisco a desolate ruin. A sailor from that city (John Meillon) jumps ship and
swims ashore, intent upon dying
at home, no matter how ghastly
the circumstances.

Osborn ascribes the destruc
tion to a popular acceptance that
the road to peace must be paved
with nuclear weapons. In San
Diego, a telegraph signal draws a
hopeful response. A seaman
(Harp McGuire) in anti-radiation
gear tracks the signal: A bottle
has fallen onto a Morse key.

The ship returns to
Australia. Towers admits his
feelings for Moira. Osborn pur
chases a racing–car, which he
plans to drive in a grueling com
petition. He admits that he has
entertained the possibility of a
quick death in the midst of such
hectic action. Towers and Moira
watch, aghast, as numerous
drivers are killed or injured in
fiery collisions. Osborn wins the
tournament.

As signs of radiation poison
ing spread, the government dis
penses the suicide pills in ever
greater numbers. Some people
turn to hedonistic excess; others
become religious fanatics.
Towers’ crewmen ask that he
return them to America. Osborn
commits suicide with automotive
exhaust. Dwight and Moira part
ways. Mary and Lt. Holmes
reflect upon a happy marriage
before subjecting themselves and
their child to the lethal dosage.
Moira watches as Towers’ ship
heads northward.

A bolder midsection—the
heartbreaking sojourn in
California—enlivens On the
Beach with a dreamlike
poignancy. The telegraph-key
sequence is particularly riveting.
The struggle between hope and
disillusionment rallies briefly as
the principal players become
more thoroughly invested in the
roles—only to dissipate in a fog
of morbid despair.

O N T H E B E A C H • C A L T I K I , T H E I M M O R T A L M O N S T E R

Caltiki, the Immortal Monster

IN ITALY: Caltiki—il Mostro Immortale (Climax Presentations • Allied Artists • 1959–1960)

One good Blobdeserves another, but Caltikidoes not amount to much, as foreign knockoffs go. Where The Blob(Page No. 149) had raised the stakes on shapeless-menace movies, Caltiki, the Immortal Monsterserves more as a proving–ground for the emerging brilliance of Mario Bava—brought in as a pinch-hitter director after Riccardo Freda had ditched the assignment amidships.

Bava, an established cinematographer, completed Caltikiwithout appropriate billing—he received credits as cameraman and specialeffects artisan—and then suffered the indignity of being listed under a pseudonym (John Foam) for the American edition. (There is no mistaking the film for a U.S. production, what with the Italianate visual style and preponderance of Pan-European acting talents.) Freda would profess many years later that he had jumped ship in order to give Bava a shot at directing; the claim rings false, inasmuch as Freda retained the formal credential, although Allied Artists’ North American campaign also assigns him a bogus name, Robert Hampton.

Slights notwithstanding, Bava would emerge early in the 1960s as Italy’s leading director of horror tales, with such international crossover champions as the witch-hunting marvel Black Sundayand the distinguished anthology feature Black Sabbath. Not to mention the stylish SF nightmares Terrore nello Spazio (A.K.A. Planet of the Vampires) and Diabolik A.K.A. Danger: Diabolik).

Filippo Sanjust’s screenplay (U.S. billing: Philip Just) exhibits the audacity to ascribe the collapse of Mexico’s ancient Mayan civilization to a blobulous monster whose rampage seems tied to cosmic radiation from the passage of a comet. (Yes, and never mind the predatory Spanish Conquest of the 16TH Century, with its fanatical ties to Torquemada’s Inqusition.) As the same comet repeats the circuit in the present day, an archæological expedition led by Dr. John Fielding (John Merivale) finds the monster emerging from Mayan ruins. The explorers disable the creature with fire—and then exhibit no better sense than to extract a specimen. Which comes to destructive life in a laboratory.

The English-dubbed rewrite job is overwrought and overobvious; better to experience the Italian cut for its natural speech and more matter-of-fact statements. Bava renders the rudimentary special effects fascinating and repulsive. The monster is made of bunched cattle intestines, given a rhythmic throb in a mixture of Real Time and time-lapse photography, in the manner of Japanese Bunraku puppetry. One memorable sequence depicts the creature as it absorbs a victim, then recedes to expose a skull. Fire proves the only workable defense—the perfect one-size-fits-all reflexive denouemént.

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die

A.K.A.: The Head That Wouldn’t Die
(Rex Carlton • Sterling Productions • American International • 1959)

Between the close-in-time productions of Joseph Green’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Dieand Victor Trivas’ German-made Die Nackte und der Satan(A.K.A. The Head), the cinema’s recurring motif of the animated severed conk found itself stood on its figurative ear; you should pardon the expression.

The Man without a Body and The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1957–1958) had raised imaginative possibilities, but Green and Trivas stuck out their necks to a more outlandish extent—each unaware of the other’s accomplishment until the pictures crossed paths at the U.S. box office. The arrival from Mexico two years later of La Cabeza Viviente (A.K.A. The Living Head) would demonstrate the overriding influence of the Green and Trivas epics.

One film often is confused with the other, in that each relies upon the capture of voluptuous women to supply a chassis for a bodiless head. (Trivas was an old–timer from the Weimar Republic, driven into exile after the Nazi Party had condemned his antiwar picture of 1931, Neimandsland Green was an upstart novice seeking a foothold within Hollywood’s Poverty Row enclave. Once a bizarre idea has wormed its way into the Communal Dream–Stream, there is no telling whom it will infect.)

The most memorable element of Die Nackte is the disembodied head, played to the double-chinned hilt by Michael Simon, a veteran of German cinema. The disembodied head of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, played by Virginia Leith with all due indignation, is less impressive than a captive giant played by the genuine article.

Eight-foot-nine Eddie Carmel (1936–1972), made up here as the pinheaded ogre, was a victim of the glandular disorder known as acromegaly, invariably fatal in a day of less enlightened medicine. Carmel’s expressive intensity, once freed to put an end to a Mad Doctor’s shenanigans, bespeaks a sensitive intelligence at odds with the

C A L T I K I • T H E B R A I N T H A T W O U L D N ’ T D I E

Detail from Diane Arbus’ 1970 portrait of Eddie Carmel and his parents.

monstrous role. Carmel attempted careers in radio announcing and recording-studio artistry after The Brain, but found himself reduced at length to freak-show appearances. His recording of “The Good Monster” (pictured on the page following) was a commercial failure but survives as a good-natured document of a life of enslavement to a rebellious body. The photographer Jenny Carchman, a cousin of Carmel’s, discovered the anomaly within the family via a famous photograph (above) by Diane Arbus; Miss Carchman produced a poignant documentary piece, “The Jewish Giant,” in 1999 for National Public Radio.

Joseph Green takes cues from Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein and Kurt Siodmak’s often-filmed novel, Donovan’s Brain, in establishing surgeon Bill Cortner (Herb Evers, A.K.A. Jason Evers) as a criminal maverick, willing to plunder graves to obtain materials for his experiments. These specimens include the disfigured giant (Carmel). Cortner’s more

T H E B R A I N T H A T W O U L D N ’ T D I E
Eddie Carmel and Adele Lamont.

nearly conventional romantic life is sidetracked in an automobile accident that leaves his fiancée, Jan Compton (Miss Leith), decapitated.

Cortner preserves the head in a living state and shanghais a candidate (Adele Lamont) for a transplant. Jan, resentful,
establishes a telepathic link with the giant. The creature escapes, kills the doctor, and torches the laboratory. The prospective donor is freed, and Jan’s death–wish is granted.

The film, sleazy in mood and aspect, foreshadows the gore-movie eruptions of the early 1960s more so than it reflects the style one associates its distributor, American International Pictures. Variant copies abound: Some surviving prints are grislier than others—notably in the monster’s attack. The tamer editions differ in content according to the impositions of regional boards of censors, and of course to scissorings for television.

Green and producer Rex Carlton (also of The Devil’s Hand, below) shot Brainaround Tarrytown, New York. In 1964, Green tackled a patchwork Americanized version of Tetsuji Takechi’s erotic fantasy Hakujitsumu(A.K.A. Day–Dream). Green resurfaced in 1986 with Perils of P.K., a grotesque vanity picture for The Angry Red Planet’s Naura (A.K.A. Nora) Hayden.

T H E D E V I L ’ S H A N D

The Devil’s Hand

A .K.A.: Devil’s Doll • The Naked
Goddess • Witchcraft • Live To Love
(Rex Carlton Productions • Bubis–Hole
Productions • Crown–International • 1959–1961) ASIDE FROM MIKE PRICE: George E.Turner, co–founder of the Forgotten Horrors project, was an easygoing sort who nonetheless rankled at the occasional petty irritation—a habit he probably had picked up from watching W.C.Fields’ movies, such as It’s a Gift (1934), in which Fields becomes annoyed upon hearing the name of an off-screen character called Carl LAFong. The Real World name of screenwriter Rip Van Ronkel had such an effect upon George, to the extent that he found George Pal’s 1950 production of Destination Moon bothersome merely because Van Ronkel had received billing. (This, despite a general admiration for Pal.)
“You’d think anybody with a name like RipVan Ronkel would either change it, or else stay out of sight,” grumped George. He also reserved a contempt for the conjoined producer–director names of Alvin K. Bubis and William J. Hole, JR., and especially for their short-lived company, Bubis–Hole Productions. When George and I attended a reissue showing of The Devil’s Hand around 1968, the billing card, “A Bubis–Hole Production,” practically wrecked the viewing for him before the first act could begin. “What kind of a cockamamie fershlugginer name is Bubis–Hole Productions ?” George would mutter, for days after the fact. “How’d you like to have a sign on your door reading, ‘Bubis–Hole Productions’?”
No doubt W.C. Fields would have found the name as grating (and therefore, as funny) as that of the fictional CarlLAFong. To say nothing of Rip Van Ronkel. Anyhow, herewith—the picture that moved George Turner to a state of High Dudgeon and Black Affront, notwithstanding his fondness for the acting of star player Robert Alda:
Producer Rex Carlton, flush with delusions of success from the placement of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die with American International Pictures, joined with another novice, Alvin K. Bubis, and small-time director William J. Hole, JR. (of The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow), to deliver The Naked Goddess. The title would change at least twice before a formal release in 1961 as The Devil’s Hand Additional proxy titles were imposed as the film struggled to find a receptive marketplace in sporadic distribution. At length, Crown–International Pictures, the impatient distributor, bought out Carlton’s interest and reissued the picture without a producer credit for him. Some surviving prints retain Carlton’s name. Others list only Alvin Bubis, and yet others bear the euphonious nomenclature of Bubis–Hole Productions. Film archæology can be a messy business. The film is a tidier affair, though a distinct comedown for Robert Alda from the major-league assignments he had known. The father of Alan Alda had starred in 1946 in a classier study of manual menace, The Beast with Five Fingers, at Warner Bros. Robert serves The Devil’s

Hand as a malleable, indecisive chap named Rick Turner, who dreams repeatedly of a beautiful woman. In waking life, he wanders into a curio shop—unaware that the place is a front for a demon-worship cult. Rick purchases a doll that resembles the woman of his dream. He learns further that the doll is modeled after one Bianca Milan (Linda Christian), whose address he obtains. Never mind Rick’s engagement to the innocent Donna Trent (Ariadna Welter).

Storekeeper Francis Lamont (Old Hollywood veteran Neil Hamilton), chief of the cult, inserts a pin into a doll that resembles Donna, who falls ill.

Bianca seduces Turner into joining the wicked circle. Turner de–jinxes Donna’s doll to assure her recovery. Lamont takes Donna hostage as a sacrificial victim. Turner kills Lamont and escapes with Donna as the temple burns. Bianca’s fate is left hanging, the better to leave Turner wondering if he and Donna are free of the influence.

Carlton’s collaborative screenplay (with Jo Heims) is a straightforward affair, compromised by an open-ended anti–denouemént and a simplistic misperception of the generally peaceable religion (Vodun, or Voodoo) that it seeks to demonize. The ragtag production values place at a disadvantage the vivid portrayals from Robert Alda, Linda Christian, Ariadna Welter, and especially Neil Hamilton, a recurring figure in the Forgotten Horrors books and the Commissioner Gordon–in–waiting of the network teleseries Batman

Alda quit Hollywood after determining that this demeaning exercise seemed unreleasable (until 1961, in any event). Alda resettled in Rome and launched a productive fresh career. Yes, and what selfrespecting lapsed Hollywood star wouldwant to work for a company called Bubis–Hole Productions?

Night of the Ghouls

A.K.A.: Revenge of the Dead
(Edward D. Wood Productions • Atomic Pictures • 1959)

If Robert Alda had grown impatient with the long invisibility of The Devil’s Hand, then how must Ed Wood have felt upon finding Night of the Ghoulsheld captive by a film-processing laboratory? The picture went unseen from its completion in 1959 until a videocassette release of 1982. By which time, incidentally, Wood had achieved posthumous acclaim—not for any cinematic brilliance, but rather for a naïve confidence in mistaking his own primitive amateurism for artistry.

Night of the Ghouls , a loosely conceived sequel to Wood’s Bride of the Monster(see Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6), finds that film’s eerie setting more-or-less unchanged from its leveling by an atomic explosion in the earlier film. (The architecture here varies from a sprawling ranch-style layout to the Victorian Old Dark House labyrinth of Bride of the Monster, and continuity be damned.)

Jeron King Criswell, crackpot psychic of West Coast television and a Wood crony of long standing, introduces the film from a casket, warning of monsters both pitiable and despicable. In place of Bela Lugosi’s classic-manner Mad Doctor of Bride, Night of the Ghouls presents Kenne Duncan as a charlatan who bamboozles bereaved clients with promises of contact with the Great Hereafter.

The christening of Duncan’s character as Dr. Acula betrays the infantile influence of Forrest J Ackerman, editor of Famous Monsters magazine and Wood’s literary agent, who often used that pun on

T H E D E V I L ’ S H A N D • N I G H T O F T H E G H O U L S

The Wood imprimatur had become a kiss of death to the box office.

Dracula as a pen–name. The greater touchstone to Bride of the Monster is the mountainous wrestler Tor Johnson, whose character, Lobo, appears to have survived (or to have been resurrected) with some ghastly facial alterations. From Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space(1956, but unissued until 1959) comes Maila “Vampira” Nurmi, who cavorts through Night of the Ghoulslike some spectral beatnik. Paul Marco, another Wood regular, repeats his signature goofball-cop shtik

Dr. Acula’s chicanery attracts the attention of an undercover debunker of ghostly phenomena, Police Lt. Daniel Bradford (Duke Moore). The fraud inadvertently raises the dead, only to fall prey to the otherworldly revenants. The karmic comeuppance is hardly the salient point, obscured as it is by the prevailing unintentional lunacy.

When Wade Williams secured permission to revive Plan 9 from Outer Spacein 1982, he also learned of Night of the Ghouls’ existence in a limbo of unpaid laboratory fees. Williams paid the dormant tab and acquired Ghouls, which he released in a videocassette edition, with a fanfare out of proportion to the film’s gleeful ineptitude.

A backhanded popular discovery of Ed Wood was in flower during the 1980s, thanks to the snarkheaded badfilm movement. Tim Burton’s more respectful picture, the fanciful Ed Wood, was still a decade years away from development.

Phil Hardy’s indispensible book, The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies(1986), offers a more telling perspective on Wood, without the unrealistic romanticism of Burton or the confessed cynicism of the Forgotten Horrors crew: “[H]is perverse films have an indefinable something: The disarmingly vulnerable sincerity of Glen or Glenda? (1953), for instance, in which a home-movie/neorealist account of a transvestite’s mental torments is intercut with shots of Bela Lugosi

Tor Johnson, as seen in a suit-and-tie civilian setting around the time of his unfortunate association with Edward D. Wood, JR. Nor is it necessary to say, “Tor Johnson, standing, center.” The wrestler–turned–actor tended to stand out in any crowd. Such photographs as this one are valuable in that they show Johnson in a human-scale context—quite a difference from his exaggerated appearance in most of his films.

madly cackling ... in a necromancer’s laboratory; or simply an ineffable weirdness, as in the meaningless footage, repeated again and again in Plan 9 from Outer Space, of Lugosi entering ..., looking ’round, and departing again...

“[ Night of the Ghoulsis] grotesque, incoherent nonsense,” Hardy’s essay concludes, “yet like other Wood films it has moments when—all proportions maintained—one is faced by the sort of hallucinating disorientation systematized by Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr(1931).”

And yes, Ed Wood most certainly would have had at least a nodding acquaintance with Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, and with any number of other Gothic Expressionist films. Wood never came close to approximating such higher artistry, but he spent his career in a chronic attempt to pay homage to the masters who had inspired him.

N I G H T O F T H E G H O U L S • C O D A

STOP THE PRESSES

A Coda from JOHN WOOLEY

M IKE PRICE, HERE: On Page No. 138, we discuss a crime melodrama called The Cry Baby Killer , with an admiring nod—but little else—to the director, Justus “Jus” Addiss (1917–1979). John Wooley weighs here in with a primary-source appreciation of the artist, whose stage and big-screen work has gone largely neglected.

It was the summer of 1971, a few months before I was to go on active duty with the United States Naval Reserve. A helicopter carrier would transport me to both the

Gulf of Tonkin and Haiphong Harbor. Steve Olim, a great friend and fellow film buff from our days at Oklahoma State University, came up with the idea of the

Jus
Addiss.

two of us taking a trip to Hollywood, where he had worked the past couple of summers as an assistant to makeup artist Ben Lane at Screen Gems, before I had to shove off and serve my country.

We did it, and it was great. We visited the sets of Bewitched and The Partridge Family, got V.I.P. seating for a taping of The Dean Martin Show (thanks to Steve’s friend Kay Medford), and had cocktails at the home of Hayden Rorke, who at the time was playing Dr. Bellows on I Dream of Jeannie,another Screen Gems show on which Steve had worked.

The experience was Old Hollywood all the way. Rorke met us at the door in a burgundy smoking jacket, bade us enter, and introduced us to his roommate, the busy TV director Justus Addiss. Addiss will perhaps be forever best known as the director of Jack Nicholson’s first feature, The Cry Baby Killer. And while Nicholson’s star had risen at the time of our visit—thanks in great part to his career-making role in 1969’s Easy Rider—Addiss seemed most proud of a touring production of White Cargo he had done in the early 1940s with the famed stripper Ann Corio. He brought out a scrapbook with stills showing, among other things, that Ms. Corio was certainly an eyeful as Tondelayo, the exotic temptress in the middle of a love triangle on an African rubber plantation.

I didn’t know at the time that both he and Rorke had produced the touring show, with Rorke also taking the role of Langford, the young man Tondelayo eventually marries. And I didn’t realize until much later that Rorke and Addiss’ personal relationship was already cemented by the time they collaborated on the play, leading to one of the most enduring romantic unions in Hollywood.

But the general perception of gay relationships was different in 1971; so much so, in fact, that—while it pains me to admit it—one of the most amusing things Steve and I took away from that wonderful cocktail-hour visit was the fact that our drinks were served on napkins that read, “Hayden & Jus.”

That was the damnedest thing we’d ever seen.

INDEX OF RELEVANT
NOMENCLATURE

Aa
Abarbanel, Sam X. 91
Abbott, Bud 223, 225
Abbott, Jess 242
Abbott, L.B. 122, 239
Abel, Robert 240
Ackerman, Bettye 229
Ackerman, Forrest J 13, 166, 264
“Across the Gaby” 119, 122 Adams, Nan 197
“Adaptive Ultimate, The” 121 Addams, Charles 161, 231 Addiss, Justus 138, 141, 267 Adler, Allen 240
Adler, Terry 158
Adventure Comics69
Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The66
Adventures of Robin Hood, The71
Affairs of Susan, The 65 Agar, John 61, 63, 218 Agrasanchez, Rogelio 123 Ahlstrand, Linné 230
Akins, Claude 23
Al Capone70
Alda, Alan 263
Alda, Robert 263, 264
Alien127, 130, 136
Alland, William 100, 102, 105
Allen, Dede 37
Allen, Jack 209
Allied Artists 23, 49, 52, 75, 80, 149, 219, 229, 257 Alligator People, The207, 236–239
Alta Vista Productions 230 Alvarado, Crox 29
Amazan, Remedios 254 Amazing Colossal Man, The 63, 66, 98
American Film Institute 122, 143, 209, 249
American Film Institute Catalogue of Motion Pictures209
American International Pictures 48, 65, 111, 137, 163, 197, 199, 214, 219, 229, 242, 260
American Museum of Man 186 Ames, Florenz 23
Ancíra, Carlos 199
And Then There Were None 188
Anders, Rudolf 39, 40, 42, 126
Anderson, Dawn 214, 215 Anderson, Donna 255
Anderson, Herbert 114–115 Anderson, Leona 189
Anderson, Richard 130 Andor, Paul 81
André, Gaby 174
Andrews, Dana 109–111 Andrews, Edward 133
Andy Griffith Show, The83 Angel in Exile170
Angry Red Planet, The261 Ankrum, Morris 57, 59, 163 Anthony, Ray 185
Arbus, Dianne 260
Archdale, Alexander 209 Arkoff, Samuel Z. 66, 113 Arlen, Richard 28
Armin, Robert 84–85
Arne, Peter 204
Arnold, Jack 98, 99, 102, 241 Artclass Pictures (see:
Weiss Bros.)
Arvidson, Frank 241
Ashcroft, Tony 46, 48
Ashley, John 168
Askins, Monroe P. 32
Astaire, Fred 102, 254–256 Astley, Edwin 92
Astounding She–Monster 46–48, 113
Ataúd del Vampiro, El 123–125, 199
Attack of the 50–Foot Woman97–100, 223
Attack of the Giant Leeches 99, 134, 229, 230,
234–236
Attack of the Jungle
Women186–188
Attack of the Puppet People 60–65, 77
Atwill, Lionel 91, 236
Austin, Charlotte 52, 54, 126 Autry, Gene 152
Ayres, Robert 190

Bb
“B” Movies71
BBC–TV 173
Baby Doll229, 235
Bacardi Distillery 205–207 Bacharach, Burt 149, 152 Backus, Jim 159
badfilmmovement 265 Badlands141
Baer, Buddy 56, 59
Baer, John 137, 185
Baer, Max 59
Baird, Jimmie 86
Baker, Brydon 48
Baker, Carroll 235
Baker, Robert S. 155, 175,

178, 202, 204
Balboa Productions 230 Ball, Lucille 70
Ball, Vincent 154–155
ballyhoo 194
Bamber, Judy 233
Band, Albert 115, 226, 229 Bara, Nina 164
Baragrey, John 103
Barbeau, Adrienne 170 Barbi, Vince 150
Barjul International

Pictures 188
Barker, Lex 75
Barrett, John 65
Barrie, H.E. 163, 168
Barry, Donald 125
Barzell, Wolfe 168
Bat, The220–223
Bat Whispers, The220 Batman(teleseries) 264 Batman: The Dark Knight

Returns 67
Battle of the Worlds (see:
Planeta degli Uomini
Spenti, Il
Bava, Mario 147, 201,
257–258
Beach Party et Seq.219 Beast from Haunted Cave
229–230
Beast from 20,000
Fathoms, The103, 239 Beast of Blood253
Beast of Budapest, The
49–51
Beast with Five Fingers263

Beatniks, The 188
Beaumont, Charles 149 Bedard, Paul 65
Bedlam116
Beginning of the End166 Beguiled, The 56
Behemoth, the Sea Monster

103, 239–241
Belafonte, Harry 211, 213 Bell, Walter and Mary 75 Belloc–Lowndes, Marie 175 Bender, Ross 114
Bennett, Bruce 28, 179, 181 Bennet, Spencer Gordon 194 Benson, John 150
Benson, Martin 174
Berke, Lester William 167 Berline, Byron 56
Berman, Monty 155, 175,

178, 202, 204
Berman, Shelley 152
Bernard, Barry 34
Bernard, Rafaél 199
Bernay, Lynn 114, 143 Bernds, Edward 89, 105,

107, 147, 225
Berwick, Irvin 241, 242 Besser, Joe 184
Best, James 248
Betrayed52
Beware! The Blob152
Bewitched267
Beyond the Time Barrier183 Bice, Robert 128
Bikel, Theodore 113, 115 Birch, Paul 147
Biroc, Joseph 220
Biscuit Eater, The71
Bissette, Stephen R. 239 Bixby, Jerome 129, 130 Black Hills (South Dakota) 230
Black Pit of Dr. M(see: Misterios de Ultratumba Black Pit of Dr. X(see: Misterios de Ultratumba Black Sabbath147, 257 Black Scorpion, The239 Black Sunday147, 201, 257 Blaisdell, Jackie 63, 65 Blaisdell, Paul 63, 65–66, 166, 219, 242
Blees, Robert 163
Blob, The17, 89 149–152, 249, 251, 257
Blobermouth152
Block, Irving 30, 32, 225, 239 Blood Creature(see: Terror Is a Man
Blood Island Trilogy253 Blood of the Vampire
154–155, 175, 204
“Blueprint for Crime” 186 Body Snatcher, The202 Body Snatcher, The(see: Ladrón de Cadáveres Body That Came by Post, The74
Body That Wasn’t Uncle, The74
Bogeaus, Benedict 163, 170 Boggs, Haskell 154
Bohen, Endre 166
Boileau, Pierre 55
Bon Tempi, Nick and Paul 79 Bonnie and Clyde37
Boone, Richard 113, 115 Borbeau, Adrienne 170 Boren, Lamar 197
Boucher, Anthony 158 Bowanga Bowanga172 Bowery Boysseries 219 Bowie, Les 173
Boxofficetradepaper 75 Boy and the Pirates, The 67–72, 74, 77, 79, 80, 81, 103
Boyd, Eunice Mays 158 Bracken, Dick and Judy 83 Bradbury, Ray 105
Bradley, Leslie 113
Brain Eaters, The65, 143–144 Brain That Wouldn’t Die, The258–261, 263
Brand, Joline 59
Brandon, Henry 242
Braser, Charlotte 219
Brennan, Joseph Payne 89 Brian, David 143
Bride and the Beast, The 49, 51–55
Bride of the Monster52, 155, 214, 264
Brides of Blood253
British Board of Film
Censors 166
Brix, Herman (see:
Bennett, Bruce)
Bronco102
Bronson, Charles 95, 96 Bronte sisters 35
Brooke, Ralph 57
Brooks, Mel 122
Brown, Ewing 48
Brown, Harry 134
Brown, Robert 91
Browning, Tod 60, 86
Bryant, Bob 130
Bryant, John 221
Bubis, Alvin K. 263
Cassot, Marc 55
Castillo de los Monstruos, El 125
Castillo, Gloria 44
“Casting the Runes” (see: Night of the Demon
Castle, William 16, 19, 20, 70, 155–161, 163, 193–196 Cat and the Canary, The 130, 188
Cat People109
Cat–Women of the Moon163 Cavanaugh, Paul 207
censorship 13, 46, 52, 155, 166, 175, 241, 261
Chaney, Lon, JR. 28, 125, 181, 236, 237, 239
Chang, Harry 143
Charlie Chanfranchise 39, 105, 134
Charlton Publications 22 Chase, Frank 98
Chase, Steven 150
Chester, Hal E. 111
Cheyenne102, 132
“Chicken Heart, The” 89 Ching, Bill 35
Choco Indians 186–188 Christian, Linda 264
Circular Staircase, The (see: Bat, The
Cisar, George 235
Civil Rights Movement 213 Clair, René 211, 213
Clark, Gage 86–87
Clark, Gary 163
Clark, Ken 235
Clarke, Robert 48, 181–183 Cleave, Van 105
Cline, Wilfrid M. 247
Clive, Colin 56
Close Encounters of the Third Kind169
Clouzot, Henri–Georges 37, 55, 156
Coe, Peter 242
Cohen, Herman 16, 37, 43, 113, 209
Colossus of New York, The 70, 103–105
“Colour out of Space, The” 149
Columbia Pictures 107, 115, 119, 143, 155, 183, 197
Columbia Records 152 comic-book medium 67–69, 72, 107
Comics Code Authority 46 Cook, Elisha, JR. 188, 190 Congdon, James 250
Conkling, Xandra 183
Conlin, Jimmy 223
Connors, Chuck 23, 25 Convy, Bert 231
Conway, Russ 46
Coolidge, Philip 196
Cooke, Tommy 163
Cooper, John C. 116
Corby, Ellen 160
Corman, Gene 134, 229 Corman, Roger 16, 17, 20, 30–32, 93–95, 111, 134, 137, 141, 143, 181, 225, 229, 231–233, 235
Corridors of Blood115–119 Corrigan, Ray 28, 54, 127, 128
Corriganville (shooting site) 28
Corseaut, Anita 149
Cortés, Mapita 199
Cosmic Man, The179–181 Cosmic Monsters(a.k.a.: Strange World of Planet X, The) 108, 173, 174 Costello, Lou 223–225
Costello, Ward 37
Cotten, Joseph 163
Coulouris, George 91, 92 Courtney, Charles 44
Crabtree, Arthur 164, 166 Craig, Carol 188
Craig, Colin 175
Craig Kennedy,
Criminologist52
Crane, Kenneth G. 25, 166 Crane, Richard 236, 239 Crane, Stephen 226, 229 Craven, Wes 66
Crawford, Johnny 102 Crawling Eye, The(a.k.a.: Trollenberg Terror, The) 108, 173, 174
Creature from the Black Lagoon241, 242
Creature from Blood Island (see: Terror Is a Man Creature with the Atom Brain216, 218
Crime Doctorseries 193 Cristal, Linda 133
Criswell, Jeron King 264 Cronenberg, David 105, 122 Crowley, Kathleen 89, 91 Crown–International
Pictures 263
Croydon, John 115
Crutcher, Gary 59
Cry Baby Killer138–141, 267Bubis–Hole Productions 263, 264
Bucket of Blood, A229, 230, 231–233, 235
Buffum, Ray 43
Bugs Bunny 89
Bunny, Bugs (see: Bugs Bunny)
Burke & Hare case 202
Burke, Barbara 175
Burks, Ivyl 102
Burnette, Smiley 216
Burton, Jhean 231
Burton, Julian 231, 233
Burton, Tim 265
Bwana Devil122
Byrne, Eddie 175, 178
Byron, Jean 218
Cc
Cabeza Viviente, La258
Cabot, Susan 31, 32, 95
Caged79
Cahn, Edward L. 127–130, 185–186, 204, 209, 215, 216
Caltiki—il Mostro Immirtale (see: Caltiki, the
Immortal Monster
Caltiki, the Immortal
Monster256–258
Calvert, Steve 54
Cambridge, Godfrey 152
Camfield, Bill 183
Campo, Wally 230
Candido, Candy 225
Canterville Ghost, The210
Capra, Frank 197
Captain Beefheart 249
Captain Clegg210
Carbone, Anthony 231, 233
Carchman, Jenny 260
Carey, Timothy 71
Carlos, Flory 253, 254
Carlsbad Caverns (New Mexico) 66
Carlson, Richard 72–74
Carlton, Rex 260, 261, 263
Carmel, Eddie 258–261
Carmen, Jeanne 241
Carmichael, Ralph 152
Carnosaur134
Carol, Sheila 230
Carradine, John 17, 25, 26–28, 95, 96, 179, 180, 181, 205, 218
Carter, Georgianna 137
Caruso, Anthony 170
Cass, Henry 154, 155
Cassarino, Gianbattista “Richard” 183
Cullinan, Thomas 56
Cult Moviesmagazine 99 Cummins, Peggy 111
Cuna Indians 188
Cunha, Richard 39–43, 56–59, 163–164. 168, 169
Cunha, Rick 56–57
Curse of Dracula, The(see: Return of Dracula, The
Curse of the Demon(see: Night of the Demon
Curse of the Faceless Man 130–131
Curse of the Fly122
Curse of the Undead170
Curtis, Ken 247, 248
Cushing, Peter 201, 202, 204, 210
Cutts, Patricia 196
Cyclops, The80, 98
Dd
DC Comics 67
DCA 174
D.R.B., Inc. 225
Dalton, Abby 30
Danches, Aaron 242
Danches Bros. 242
Danger: Diabolik(see: Diabolik
Daniel Boone, Trail Blazer28
Daniell, Henry 204–206, 209
Daniels, Bebe 210
Daniels, Harold 32, 35, 44
Darby O’Gill and the Little People15
“Dark, The” 89
Darrow, Barbara 149
Daughter of Horror(see: Dementia
David, Mack 149, 152
Davies, Valentine 83
Davis, Jim 166
Davis, Lisa 149
Dawn, Marpessa 92
Day, Robert 115, 116, 119
Day, Vera 92
Day the Earth Stood Still, The147, 179
Day the Sky Exploded, The (see: Morte Viene dallo Spazio, La
Day–Dream (see: Hakujitsumu
DE Kova, Frank 113
DE Leon, Gerardo 253
DE Rita, Joe 183–184
Dead Eyes of London92
Deadly Mantis, The102
Dean Martin Show, The267
Death Line201–202
Decoy23

D
EL Ruth, Roy 236
Delgar, John 141
Dementia152
Democratic National

Committee 63
Demoniac55
Denham, Maurice 109
Dennis the Menace115 Dennis, John 127
Denny, Martin 199
Derr, Richard 253, 254 Desilu Studios 70
Destination Moon147,

163, 263
Devil’s Doll(see: Devil’s
Hand, The
Devil’s Hand, The261,
262–264
Devon, Richard 31, 93
DEWitt, Louis 225, 239 Dexter, Alan 154
Diabolik258
Diabolique55
Diary of a Madman119 Dick Tracy92
Dickens, Charles 119
Dinosaurus!150, 152, 249,
251
Disney, Walt 15, 71, 97 Disneyland(teleseries) 15 Distributors Corporation of
America (DCA) 174
Ditko, Steve 46
Dix, Billy 57
Dr. Cyclops13–14
Dr. Demento Show, The249 Doctor from Seven Dials
(see: Corridors of Blood Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde209 Dog Eat Dog169
Dominguez, Columba 29 Donahue, Jill 227
Donlevy, Brian 164
Donovan’s Brain260
Doran, Ann 130
Douglas, George 95, 98 Douglas, Gordon 132–134 Downs, Cathy 164
Downs, Frederic 37
Dracula13, 15, 16, 86–88
( Return of...; Horror of... Dreyer, Carl 266
Drums of Fu Manchu242 Dubbins, Don 163
Duggin, Tom 126
Duncan, Archie 70, 71 Duncan, Kenne 48, 264 Dunn, Harvey B. 214
Dunn, Pete 241
Duran, Lilia 253
Durant, Theo (collective
pen–name) 156–158
Dwan, Allan 170
Ee
Earle, Marilee 168
Earth vs. the Flying
Saucers141
Earth vs. the Spider(see:
Spider, The
EastmanColor process 188 Easy Rider267
Eberhart, Norma 86
Edwards, Bill 190
Edwards, Elaine 130, 185,
221, 223
“Egg, The” 102 (see also:
Space Children, The Ekberg, Anita 41
Elkins, Roy 242
Embassy Pictures 175, 178 Emmet, Michael 136, 236 Encyclopedia of Horror
Movies, The16, 265
Enemy of Women81
Erdman, Richard 227
Esmond, Carl 163
Estrada, Art 186
Evans, Gene 239
Evans, Robert 132, 134 Evelyn, Judith 196
Evers, Herb 260
Evers, Jason (see: Evers, Herb)
Explorer I 163
Eyes without a Face37 Ff
Face in the Crowd, A229 Face of Fire226–229
Fair, Jody 144
Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine 13, 17,
28, 70, 79, 166, 199, 229 Fangoriamagazine 15, 61, 85 Fantasmi di Roma210 Fantastic Disappearing
Man, The(see: Return of
Dracula, The
Fantastic Puppet People,
The65 (see also: Attack
of the Puppet People Farrow, John 197
Fass, Myron 13
Faster and Furiouser99 Faulds, Andrew 204
Faulkner, Florence Ostern
158
Fearmakers, The109
Fellig, Arthur “Weegee” 190 Fenton, Steve 239
Ferrer, Mel 211, 212
Fowler, Gene, JR. 95, 149,
152, 154
Francis, Diana 108
Franju, Georges 88
Frankenstein et Seq.13,
15, 16, 56, 61, 86 (Bud
Abbott & Lou Costello
Meet...), 105, 116, 125
( A&C Meet...), 125 (Hammer series), 126, 202
(Hammer), 227, 260 (novel) Frankenstein Meets the
Wolf Man43, 125–127 Frankenstein 197054,
125–127
Frankenstein’s Daughter
39, 168–169
Frankham, David 225
Franz, Arthur 91
Franz, Eduard 207
Fraser, Sally 57, 65
Freaks242
Freda, Riccardo 257
Frees, Paul 105, 188
French, Valerie 208
Freund, Karl 130
Fried, Gerald 115
From Hell178
From Hell It Came92
From the Earth to the
Moon162–163
Frontier Gothic style 95 Frost, Alan 144
Fuchs, Daniel 23
Fuller, Lance 52, 54
Fulton, John P. 105
Gg
Gabor, Zsa Zsa 147, 149 Gamma People, The202 Gannaway, Al 28, 186 Ganz, Ron 28
Garcia, Eddie 253
Gardner, Ava 102, 254–256 Garfinkel, Louis 115
Garland, Beverly 236
Garnet, Bob 66
Garry, Robert 183
Gaslight32
Gately, Frederick 115
Gemora, Charles 105, 154,
209
Gero, Erno 49
Gerstle, Frank 208
“Gertie the Dinosaur” 15 Gertsman, Maury 218
Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow
219, 263
Ghost of the China Sea
141–143
Giant Behemoth, The(see: Behemoth, the Sea
Monster
Giant Claw, The141
Giant from the Unknown
39, 56–59, 95
Giant Gila Monster, The
242–247, 248
Giant Leeches, The(see:
Attack of the Giant
Leeches
Gilda98
Gilling, John 202
Ginsberg, Allen 231
Girl in Room 13169
Girl in the Woods107–108 Glasser, Albert 63, 65, 74 Glen or Glenda?52, 265 Gobel, George 41
Godzilla(see: Gojira
Goebbels, Joseph 81
Gojira25, 26
Goldbeck, Willis 103
Goldman, Lawrence Louis
32, 93
“Good Monster, The” 260 Goodbye, My Lady229 Goodwin, Ruby 237
Goona–Goonasubgenre
170, 172
Gordon, Bert I. 16, 17, 19,
46, 60–86, 98, 166
Gordon, Flora M. 61, 63,
65, 75, 80
Gordon, Gale 223, 225 Gordon, Gavin 221
Gordon, Leo V. 235, 236 Gordon, Susan 61, 63,
71–72, 75, 77, 79–86 Gorgo103, 239
Gorilla at Large49
Gorog, Lazlo 65
Goude, Ingrid 248
Gould, Chester 92
Graeff, Tom 213–215
Graham, Fred 247
Gramercy Pictures 91
Granstedt, Greta 86
Grant, Bryan 214
Grant, President U.S. 163 Green, Joseph 258, 260 Green Acres65
Green Berets, The247 Green Slime107
Greene, Angela 137, 180 Greene, Herbert 179
Gregg, Joyce 92
Gries, Tom 107
Griffin, Robert E. 166
Griffin, Tod 39, 40, 41, 42 Griffith, Charles B. 141, Hayes, Allison 97, 99
Hayes, Maggie 108
Hayward, Lillie 71
Hayworth, Rita 98
Haze, Jonathan 31, 143, 197 Head, The(see: Nackte und
der Satan, Die
Head That Wouldn’t Die,
The(see: Brain That
Wouldn’t Die, The
Headless Ghost, The209–210 Heap, The89
Hecht, Ben 134, 149
Hedison, Al (A.K.A. David)
121
Heims, Jo 264
Heinlein, Robert 143
Heisler, Stuart 29, 140, 170 Hellfire Club, The155,
202, 204
Hellman, Monte 229
Helm, Anne 77
Hemisphere Pictures 253–254 Henderson, Jan Alan 19,
97–100
Henry, Thomas B. 95
Herbert, Charles 69, 70,
81, 103, 122
Herrera, Victor 123, 201 Herrick, Fred 37
Hertz, Nathan (see: Juran,
Nathan)
“Hey, Mr. Banjo” 75
Hidden Guns26–28
Hideous Sun Demon, The
48, 181–183
High Noon96
Hill, Jack 143
Hilton, Arthur 163
Hilton, James 211
Hitchcock, Alfred 55, 86,
109, 193
Hodges, Ken 240
Hoffman, Howard 160, 189 Holden, Joyce 37
Hole, William, JR. 219, 263 Hollywood Reporter, The
(trade journal) 122, 154,
210
Home in Wyomin’151
Honda, Ishiro 25
Hood, Darla 220
Hooper, Tobe 37
Hopwood, Avery 220
Horn, Paul 233
Horror of Dracula86, 88 Horrors of the Black
Museum37, 166, 209 Hot Schlock Horror!43
Hothead141
Hounds of Zaroff26
House Committee on
UnAmerican Activities 49 House of Wax231, 233 House on Haunted Hill
188–190, 193
Howard, Jerome “Curly”
98, 184
Howard, Moe 107, 183 Howard, Shmuel “Shemp”
184
Howco International 32 Howlin, Olin 149, 151–152 Hoyt, John 49, 60, 61, 63 Hubschmid, Paul 147
Hudson, John 46
Hudson, William 97
Human Jungle, The23–25 Hungarian Uprising 49 Hungerford, Orison
Whipple, JR. (see: Hardin,
Ty)
Hustler, The37
Hutton, Robert 96, 103, 218 Hymson, Allen 158
Hypnotic Eye, The37, 149 Ii
I Bury the Living113–115, 226 I Died a Thousand Times170 I Dream of Jeannie267 I Led Three Lives74
I Married a Monster from
Outer Space17, 95, 143,
149, 152–154
I Wake Up Screaming140 I Was a Teenage
Frankenstein37, 175 I Walked with a Zombie109 I Was a Teenage Werewolf
16, 52, 95, 113, 141, 209 Icky Twerp (see: Camfield,
Bill)
If a Body74
“I’m Available” 75
Imitation of Life242
Imperial Pictures 186
Incredible Shrinking Man,
The98, 102
Indestructible Man23, 170 Inescort, Frieda 237, 239 Ingagi51
Inherit the Wind74
Interstate Circuit Theatres
181
Invaders from Mars103,
105, 143
Invasion of the Body
Snatchers143
Invisible Invaders204,
215–218
Kazan, Elia 97, 105, 229, 235 Keesee, Oscar 253, 254 Keesee, Peyton 253, 254 Kellison, Phil 239
Kellogg, Ray 247, 248
Kelly, Walt 242
Kemmer, Edward 56, 57,
59, 66
Kennedy, Don 218
Kennedy, Ron (see: Ganz,
Ron)
Kenney, June 32, 61, 63, 65 Kent, Robert E. 204
Ketcham, Hank 115
Kevan, Jack 241
Key, Peter 173
Kidd, Jonathan 158
“Killer Shrews” (novelty
song) 249
Killer Shrews, The247,
248–249
Kilpatrick, Shirley 48
King KongET. SEQ.26, 29,
43, 97
Kirby, Jack 46, 122
Kiss of Death132, 134 Kiyonaga, Coco 99
Klatzkin, Leon 134
Klavun, Walter 242
Kneale, Nigel 105, 173, 190 Knee, Bernie 152
Knight, Sandra 168
Knotts, Don 98
Knox, Ken 247
Knox, Dr. Robert 202
Knudson, Barbara 141 Koch, Howard W. 125, 127 Korda, Zoltan 211, 213 Kosslyn, Jack 65, 77
Kowalski, Bernard 134, 235 Kramer, Stanley 100, 102,
254–256
krimi(German cinematic
idiom) 92
Kronos95, 121
Kruger, Otto 103
Kauai (Hawaii) 199
Kubert, Joe 32
Kung Fu(teleseries) 105 Ll
L.A. Connection (comedy
troupe) 152
LSD 193
Ladron de Cadaveres17,
28–30, 123, 199, 201 Lamont, Adele 260
Landau, Richard 125–126 Landi, Marla 193
Landon, Michael 141
Landres, Paul 86–88,
89–91, 93, 123
Landis, James 141
Lane, Ben 267
Lane, Lenita 221
Lang, Fritz 25
Langelaan, George 119, 122 Langton, Paul 107, 180 Lansing, Robert 250, 251 Last Man in the World, The
(abortive project) 211 Laszlo, Alexander 235
Lathrop, Philip 241
Lauter, Harry 141
Lazlo, Ernest 74
Leaver, Philip 175
LeBorg, Reginald 119
Leder, Herbert J. 166
Lederer, Charles 134
Lederer, Francis 86–88,
253, 254
Lee, Christopher 88, 119,
201
Lee, Joanna 144
Lee, Stan 46
Leghorn, Foghorn 231
Leicester, James 163, 170 Leith, Virginia 258, 260 LeMesurier, John 175, 178 Leni, Paul 130
Leopard Man, The109
Levine, Joseph E. 175, 178 Lewton, Val 109, 116, 202 Liberty Broadcasting
System 242
Life & Legend of Wyatt
Earp, The132
Life of Riley, The75
Lights Out!89
Lippert, Robert 121
Live To Love(see: Devil’s
Hand, The
Living Head, The(see:
Cabeza Viviente, La
Lloyds of London 156
Locher, Felix 168
Lockwood, Gary 75–77
Lockyear, Tom (see: Graeff,
Tom)
Lodge, David 204
Lodge, Jean 204
Lodger, The175, 178 (1944
filming)
Loggia, Robert 167
Lompoc (California)
locations 241
Long, Amelia Reynolds
164–166
Long, Richard 188
Lorre, Peter 42, 199
Los Angeles County

Fielder, Pat 86, 91
Fields, W.C. 263
Fiend Who Walked the

West, The 132–134
Fiend without a Face17,
132, 164–166
Fiendish Ghouls, The(see:
Flesh and the Fiends, The Filer, Tom 102
Fillmore, James 141
film noiridiom 29. 49, 74,
86, 95, 152, 193, 236 Filmgroup, Inc., The 229–230 Fine, Larry 183
First Man into Space
190–193
Fischer, Kai 204
Fisher, Terence 88, 123 Five211, 213
Five Blobs, the (see: Knee,
Bernie)
Five Easy Pieces141
Fix, Paul 185
Flame Barrier, The89–91,
93, 225
Fleming, Brandon 92
Fleming, Eric 147, 149 Flesh and the Fiends, The
155, 201
Flight to Mars147
Fluellen, Joel 166
Fly, The18, 19, 70,
119–122, 133, 152,
225–226, 237
Flynn, Errol 163
Foam, John (see: Bava,
Mario)
Foghorn Leghorn 231
Fool Killer, The229
Foote, Horton 229
Forbidden Island197–199 “Forbidden Island” (melodic
theme) 199
Forbidden Planet147, 166 Ford, John 28, 129–130 Forgotten Horrorsseries
15, 19, 21, 23, 26, 43,
48, 51, 52, 60, 63, 86,
89, 91, 95. 103, 122,
138, 141, 147, 151, 152,
170, 209, 211, 220, 229,
242, 249, 263, 264
Forrest, Mike (A.K.A. Forest,
Michael) 32, 230
Fort Apache130
Fort Dobbs132
Fotre, Vincent 163
4D Man150, 249–251 Four Skulls of Jonathan
Drake, The204–209143, 197–199, 231
Grip of the Strangler(see:
Haunted Strangler, The Guardia, Tom 188
Guderman, Linda 160
Guilfoyle, Paul 70, 71
Gunn, Gilbert 174
Guns, Girls and Gangsters
185–186
Gunsmoke247
Gurney, Robert J. 37
Guthrie, Carl E. 127
Gwynne, Annd 43
Hh
Hagman, Larry 152
Haig, Roul 242
Hakujitsumu261
Half Human25–26
Hall, Frank 48
Hall, Jon 197
Halsey, Brett 141, 225
Hamilton, Neil 264
Hammer Films 16, 86, 89,
105, 125, 155, 164, 166,
173, 175, 201–202, 204 Hammond, Peter 175
Hampton, Orville H. 207, 236 Hampton, Robert (see:
Freda, Riccardo)
Hands of a Killer(see:
Planeti contro de Noi, Il Hanna, Mark 97
Hansen, Barret 249
HarBel Productions 211 Harber, Harry Paul 253 Hardin, Ty 102
Hardy, Phil 15, 16, 17, 88,
123, 147, 156, 204, 209,
211, 239–241, 254–255,
265, 266
Hare, Lumsden 207
Harmon, John 241
Harriet, Judy 219
Harrington, Curtis 130 Harris, Jack H. 17, 89,
149, 150, 152, 249, 251 Harryhausen, Ray 166
Harvey, Marilyn 48
Haskins, Byron 163
Hathaway, Henry 134
Haunted Strangler, The
115–119
Have Gun, Will Travel113,
184
Have Rocket, Will Travel
183–184
Hawkshaw, Jean 172
Hayden, Naura 261
Hayden, Nora (see: Hayden,
Naura)

Invisible Man, The 249 Invisible Ray, The105
Island of Dr. Moreau, The

253
Island of Lost Souls13–14,
253
Isle of the Dead116
“It” (T. Sturgeon) 89
It Came from Outer Space
102, 143
It Conquered the World
141, 143
It Happened One Night197 It! The Terror from beyond Space17, 127–130, 134,
186
It’s a Gift263
It’s a Small World193, 242 Jj
Jack el Destripador de Londres178
Jack–the–Ripper case 116 Jack the Ripper155,
175–178, 204
Jackson, Bradford 30
Jackson, Calvin 74
James, Daniel 240
James, Montague R. 111 Jane Eyre35
Jeepers Creepers: Great Songs from Horror Films
63
Jens, Salome 37
Jester, Ralph 105
Jet over the Atlantic170 “Jewish Giant, The” 260 Jocelyn, June 65
Johnson, Lamont 23
Johnson, Russell D. 102 Johnson, Tony 46
Johnson, Tor 155, 265–266 Johnston, Bruce 219
Jones, Harmon C. 49
Jones, R.A. 77
Jones, Spike 225, 249
Jû jin yuki otoko(see: Half Human
Juliano, Joseph R. 188 Juran, Nathan 97–98
Just, Philip (see: Sanjust, Filippo)
Justine, William 54
Kk
KLIF–Radio (Dallas) 242 Karloff, Boris 17, 56, 105,
115–119, 125–127, 205 Katz, Fred 233
Katzman, Sam 20, 119,
143, 193, 197, 216
Kayama, Shigeru 26
Arboretum 236
Losey, Joseph 25
Lost Missile, The167–168 Lourié, Eugene 103, 105, 239, 240
Louves, Les55
Love, David 214, 215
Lovecraft, H.P. 149
Lucas, Cary 158
Lucy Show, The70
Lugosi, Bela 42, 105, 202, 264, 266
Lumet, Baruch 248
Lumet, Sidney 248
Lund, Jana 125
Lust To Kill188
Lux Video Theatre25
Lynch, Ken 154
Lynn, Kane 253
Lyon, Ben 210
Lyon, Dana 158
Lyon, Richard 209, 210 Lytton, Herbert 179
Mm
McCalla, Irish 39–43
McCartor, Scott 70, 81–83 McCay, Winsor 15
McCullough, Jim 43
MACDonald, Joe 134
MACDougall, Randall 211, 213, 254
McDowall, Betty 175
McGee, Mark Thomas 99 McGeehan, Patrick 242 MACGinnis, Niall 109, 111 McGreevy, John 49, 51 McGuire, Harp 256
MACKenzie, Jack 86
MACLane, Barton 108
McLendon, B.R. 242
McLendon, Gordon 242–249 McLendon Radio Pictures 242–247
McNally, Stephen 133
McQueen, Steve 149, 151 McVey, Tyler 137, 236
M 25
MGM Pictures 115, 213 Macabre155–161, 193
Macready, George 236, 237, 239
Mad Doctor of Blood Island 253
Maddern, Victor 154
Maddin, Jimmie 219
Madison, Leigh 240
Magic Place in a New Time, A85
Magic Sword, The75–79, 84 Mainwaring, Daniel 107Maldición de Nostradamus, La ETSEQ. 125
Maley, Peggy 242
Malick, Terence 141
Man from Planet X, The48, 183
Man from U.N.C.L.E., The 113
Man in Half Moon Street249
Man Who Turned to Stone, The249
Man without a Body, The 91, 258
Man–Eater of Kumaon52
Mango, Alec 174
“Mangrove” (see: Okefenokee
Manhattan Project 180
Mania(see: Flesh and the Fiends, The
Mann, Edward 141
Mara, Adele 130
Marble Forest, The156
Marca del Muerto, La29
Marco, Paul 265
Margheriti, Antonio 147
Mark, Michael 60, 61
Markowitz, Richard 79
Marquette, James 43
Marshal, Alan 188
Marshall, Darah 113
Marshall, Herbert 121
Marston, William Moulton 149
Martin, Dean 267
Martin, Ross 103, 105
Marvel Comics 46, 48, 67
Morzorati, Harold J. 213
Masino, Steve 186
Maslow, Walter 180
Mason, Michael 96
Master of Terror(see: 4D Man
Mathews, Carole 96
Maurer, Norman 107
Maurer, Peggy 115
Maverick132
Medford, Kay 267
Meillon, John 256
Mèliés, Georges 163
Méndez, Fernándo 28–30, 123–125, 199
Menzies, William Cameron 103
Merivale, John 258
Meriwether, Lee 250
Merkel, Una 220
Merrill, Gary 23, 25
Meteor Monster(see:
Teenage Monster
Mexican cinema 17, 28–30, 123–125, 199–201
Meyer, Emile 23
Meyler, Fintan 96
Michael Shayneseries 134 Michaels, Dolores 133
Mickey Mouse Club, The71 “Midwich Cuckoos, The” 102 Milland, Ray 211, 213
Miller, Dick 93, 95, 231 Miller, Don 71
Miller, Sidney 223
Mills, Michael 49
Milton, David 220
Milton, Gerald 49
Miracle on 34th Street83 Missile to the Moon39, 163–164
Mission in Morocco75
Misterios de la Magia Negra 29, 30
Misterios de Ultratumba 29, 125, 199–201
Mitchell, Cameron 226, 229
Mitchell, Carolyn 141
Mitchell, Keith 204
Mitchell, Laurie 147, 149
Mitchell, Warren 173
Mitchell, Wayne 186–188
Mitchum, Julie 188
Mitchum, Robert 26–28
Mohr, Gerald 35, 185
Momia Azteca contra el Robot Humano123
Monogram Pictures 23, 39, 81, 92, 119, 193, 216
Monolith Monsters, The99
Monster!genre survey 239
“Monster, The” 226
Monster and the Girl, The 29, 152
Monster from Green Hell 166–167
Monster of Piedras
Blancas, The241–242
Monster Parademagazine 13
Montoya, Alicia 123
Moore, Duke 265
Moorehead, Agnes 220, 221
More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary111
Moreau, Jeanne 55
Moreland, Mantan 184
Morell, André 240
Morosco Theatre (New
York) 220
Morris, Barboura 233
Morris, Chester 220
Morris, Dorothy 159
Morrow, Scotty 180
Morrow, Susan 160
Morte Viene dallo Spazio, La 144–147
Moskov, George 190
Most Dangerous Game, The 126, 154, 188
Most Dangerous Man Alive 170
Motion Picture Association 143
Mr. Magoocartoons 159
Muller, Endre 177
Mummy, The130
Munro, Janet 173
Murata, Takeo 26
Murphy, Donald 168
Murray, K. Gordon 123
Music of Forgotten Horrors, The249
Musicians’ Union 105
Mutiny in Outer Space107
My Dog, Buddy247
My World Dies Screaming 32–35, 44, 46
Mylong, John 49
Mystery Farce idiom 220
Mystery of Edwin Drood, The119
Mystery of the Wax
Museum231, 233
Mystery Writers of America 158
Nicol, Alex 44, 46
Night Creatures210
Night of the Blood Beast 111, 113, 134–137
Night of the Demon15, 55, 109–111
Night of the Ghouls264–266
Night of the Hunter, The 26, 229
Night of the Living Dead ET
SEQ.105, 201, 215
Nightfall109
Nightmare on Elm Street series 66
Nimoy, Leonard 144
Nixon, Richard M. 63
Nordhoff, Flo 166
Not of This Earth95, 141, 147
Nurmi, Maila 77, 265
Nye, Ben 122, 239
Oo
O’Bannon, Dan 136
Oboler, Arch 89, 119, 122, 211, 213
Obon, Ramón 123, 125, 199
O’Brian, Hugh 132–135
O’Brien, Willis 239–241
O’Donnell, Cathy 34, 35
Offord, Lenore Glen 158
O’Hara, Pat 225
Ohashi, Fuminori 26
Ohmart, Carol 188, 190
O’Keefe, Dennis 25
Okefenokee242–244
Oklahoma State University 267
Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire202
Olim, Steve 267
On the Beach179, 254–256
One Million B.C.32, 111
Opuni, Charles 40
Ordung, Wyott 190
Orwell, George 202
Osborn, Lyn 180
Oscard, Miko 226
Osterloh, Robert 114, 115
Out of the Past109
Owens, Patricia 121, 122
Ox–Bow Incident, The96 Pp
PRC Pictures 92
Page, Genevieve 163
Paget, Debra 163, 170
Paiva, Nestor 81
Pal, George 13, 144, 147, 163, 211, 213, 263
Palance, Jack 140
Palmer, Edward 92
Palmer, Randy 63
Pan–American Highway 186, 188
Panic at Mme. Tussaud’s 210
Paramount Pictures 13, 17, 71, 79, 100, 102, 134, 149, 152, 154, 178, 211
Parker, Alan 115
Parker, Ellen 167
Parker, Stephen 43
Partridge Family, The267
Pate, Michael 170
Patterson, Hank 65
Patterson, Lee 175, 178
Patterson, Troy 65
Paul Blaisdell, Monster Maker 63
Paxton, John 254
Paxton, Tim 239
Payton, Lee 150
Peck, Gregory 102,
254–256
Percepto gimmick 193–194
Perier, Francois 55, 56
Perila of P.K.261
Perkins, Anthony 102, 254–256
Perkins, Gil 43
Persson, Gene 66
Peterson, Nan 183
Peterson, Pete 239
Peyton Place144
Phantom Creeps, The105
Phantom from Space39
Phantom of the Opera, The 149
Philippines film industry 253
Phillips, Evelyn “Eve” 186
Phillips, Greigh 197
Phillips, William 186–188
Pickford, Mary 220
Picture Mommy Dead84
Pierce, Arthur C. 181
Pierce, Jack P. 43, 56
Pietrangeli, Antonio 210
Pine, Philip 167
Plan 9 from Outer Space 52, 215, 265
Planet of the Vampires (see: Terrore nello Spazio
Planeti contro di Noi, Il 147
Planeta degli Uomini
Spenti, Il147
Planets against Us(see: Planeti contro di Noi
Playboymagazine 119, 121, 122
Pleasence, Donald 201
Poe, E.A. 115, 225, 229

Nn
Nackte und der Satan, Die

258
Nagy, Imre 51
Naked Goddess, The(see: Devil’s Hand, The
Nanneras, Ralph 247
Narcejac, Thomas 55
National Aeronautics & Space Administration 163 National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People 184
National Public Radio 260 Nazi Party 39, 81, 122,
125, 258
Neilson, Peter 166
Neimandsland258
Nelson, Ed 137, 141, 143,
144, 231
Neumann, Kurt 19, 95,
119, 121, 225
New York Times254
New York Times News
Service 20–21
New Yorker, Themagazine
161, 231
Newman, Joseph M. 23 Nicholson, Jack 138–141,
267
Nicholson, James 66

Pogo 242
Pollexfen, Jack 23, 170 Pomeroy, Jack 99
Powers, Mala 103
Prehistoric Women91
Prehistoric World(see:

Teenage Caveman
Presle, Micheline 55
Price, Howard 249
Price, Michael H. 29, 56,

116, 181, 209, 249
Price, Vincent 119, 121,
122, 188–190, 194, 196,
220, 221, 223, 225, 229 Prince, William 159
Production Code
Administration 95, 178 Provine, Dorothy 223–225 Psycho193
Psycho–Rama gimmick 32 Public Enemy, The140 Puppet Masters, The143 Purple Cloud, The211
Qq
Qualen, John 35
Quatermassseries 89, 105,
134, 164, 173, 190
Queen of Blood130
Queen of Outer Space
147–149
Queen of the Gorillas52 Rr
RKO–Radio Pictures 109,
116, 188, 193, 220
Rabid105
Rabin, Jack 32, 225, 239 Rains, Claude 119
Randell, Ron 170
Rath, Virginia 158
Rathbone, Basil 77, 205 Raw Meat(see: Death Line Raxel, Antonio 199
Ray, Michael 102
Ray, Nicholas 149
Rayburn, Margie 72, 75 Raymond, Paula 23
Read, Jan 116
Rebel without a Cause149 Red River129
Red Rock Canyon (Mojave Desert) 164
Reding, Juli 72, 75
Reed, Ralph 141
Regal Films 95, 121, 133, 199 Remy, Ronald 253
Renoir, Jean 235
Rensing, Violet 49. 51
Republic Pictures 61
Return of Dracula, The
86–88, 89, 123, 253

Return of the Fly 122, 225–226, 236
Revill, Clive 209
Rey, Alvino 223
Rich, Max 25
Richards, Grant 185, 207
Richards, Rex 172
Rifleman, The102
Rinehart, Mary Roberts 220
Riquelme, Carlos 29
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The49
Risser, Wee 247
Roach, Hal 111, 184
Robinson, Bartlett 108
Robinson, Christopher 230
Robinson, Madeleine 55
Robles, Germán 123, 125
Robot VS. the Aztec
Mummy, The(see: Momia Azteca contra el Robot Humano
Rock, Phillip 170
Rocketeer, The99
Romero, Eddie 253
Romero, George A. 105, 201, 215
Rorke, Hayden 267
Rose, David 209
Rose, George 177
Rosenbloom, Max 154
Roth, Gene 39, 66, 74, 236
Rotunno, Giuseppe 254
’Round the Moon163
Rowe, Earl 150
Rozsa, Miklos 213
Rubinski, Wolf (see:
Ruvinskis, Wolf)
Ruppel, Karl–Ludwig 166
Rush, Geoffrey 190
Russell, Chuck 152
Rutherford, Cedric 170
Ruvinskis, Wolf 29
Ss
Sackheim, Jerry 71
Sadist, The141
The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the
Great Sea Serpent30–32
St. George and the Seven Curses(see: Magic Sword
Salazar, Abel 123
Salter, Hans 25
San Diego Park 188
Sande, Serena 242
Sanders, George 163
Sanders, Lugene 72, 74–75
Sangster, Jimmy 154, 173, 175
Sanjust, Filippo 258
Santos, Gastón 199
Saslavsky, Luis 55, 56
Saturday Review of
Literature, The213
Saunders, Charles 91
Sawtell, Paul 226
Sayer, Jay 32
Scarlet Street63
Schenck, Aubrey 125
Schiller, Norbert 86, 126
Schnee, Thelma 103
Schoenfeld, Bernard C. 79, 102
Schroeder, Barbet 134
Scotland Yard 116, 175
Scott, Jacqueline 160
Scott, Ken 132
Scott, Peter Graham 209–210
Scott, Ridley 127, 130, 136
Screaming Skull, The
44–46, 156
Screen Actors Guild 121
Screen Gems 267
Sea Ghost, The15–16
Search for Bridey Murphy52
Searchers, The130
Sears, Fred F. 141, 143
Secrets of a Psychopath79
Secrets of the French Police 231, 233
Seeley, E.S., JR. 181
Sen Yung, Victor 39, 40
Sennett, Mack 184
7THVoyage of Sinbad, The97
Seymour, Dan 225–226
Shadow of a Doubt86
Shaggy Dog, The15, 71
Shane96
Shannon, Richard 102
Shattuck, Richard 158
Shaughnessy, Alfred 154
Shayne, Robert 93, 95
She–Creature, The52, 219
She Demons38–43
She Devil95, 121
She Gods of Shark Reef137
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle40
Shefter, Bert 226
Shelley, Barbara 154–155
Shelley, Mary W. 105, 125, 260
Sherman, Edward 225
Sherman, Orville 143
Shiel, Matthew Phipps 211
Shirer, William L. 49
Shock Talesmagazine 13
Shock! Theater13, 79, 115
Showdown at Boot Hill95–96

Shute, Nevil 100, 102, 254 sick humor (trend) 231 Siegel, Don 56
Siegel, Sol C. 211, 213 Silver Springs (Florida)

172, 199
Simon, Joe 122
Simon, Michael 258
Simmons, Georgia 132 Simms, Jay 247, 248
Simon, Robert 227, 229 Simpson, Albert M. 163 Sinatra, Richard 230
Siodmak, Kurt 260
Ski Troop Attack230
Slam–Bang Theatre183 Slaughter, Tod 155
“Slime” 89
Sling Blade229
Small, Edward 186, 216 Smith, Elbert 251
Smith, Howard 114
Smith, Shawn 130
Snow Creature39
So Dark the Night115 Sokoloff, Vladimir 166 Solano, Rosalio 123
Soler, Julian 125
Solon, Ewen 175, 178
Sottane, Liliane 209
Southern Gothic idiom

229. 235
Space Children, The79,
100–102, 103
Space Master X–789,
105–107, 183
Spalding, Kim 127–128, 130 Spanish Conquest 56, 258 Spell of the Hypnotist52 Spider, The18, 19, 65–66, 74 Spider Baby144
Spielberg, Steven 169
Splendor in the Grass77 Sputnik 91, 93, 163
Stagecoach28
Stanley & Livingstone166 Star Trek75, 144
Starkweather, Charles 141 State of Things, The170 Steele, Bob 57, 59, 95
Steele, Mike 221
Stehli, Edgar 250
Steiger, Rod 70
Steinberg, Joe 75
Stephens, Harvey 221
Stephens, Martin 204
Sterling, Jack 154
Sterling, Jan 23
Stevens, Dave 99
Stevens, Dorinda 177

Stevens, Inger 211
Stevens, K.T. 164
Stevens, Louis 49
Stevenson, R.L. 202
Stewart, Elaine 170
Stoker, Bram 86
Stone, Merritt 65
Stone, Oliver 141
Strange Holiday122
Strange World of Planet X,

The (A.K.A.: Cosmic
Monsters) 173, 174
Stratton, John 37
Stricklin, Ray 87
Struss, Karl 239
Sturgeon, Theodore 89 Sturlin, Ross 113, 137 Stutenroth, Gene (see:
Roth, Gene)
Sullivan, Don 241, 247 Sunnysiders, the 75
Sutton, John 221, 225 Svengali207
Swackhamer, E.W. 242 Swamp Thing89
Swamp Water230, 235 Switchblade Sisters144 Tt
Takechi, Tetsuji 261
Talbott, Gloria 154
Tales from the Crypt13 Tana, Leni 41
Tannen, Charles 86, 87 Tarantula65–66
Tarrytown (New York) 261 Tarzanfranchise 28
Tattered Dress, The99 Tatum, Jeanne 48
Taussig, Frank Hart 57 Taylor, Jane 177
Teenage Caveman
111–113, 137
Teenage Monster43–44 Teenager and the Tramp,
The(see: Hothead
Teenagers from Outer
Space213–215
Teilhet, Darwin L. 158 Terror from the Year 5,000
36–37, 48
Terror in the Haunted
House(see: My World
Dies Screaming
Terror Is a Man252–254 Terror Within, The134 Terrore nello Spazio258 Tevlin, C.J. 220
Texas Chain Saw
Massacre, The37
Them!61
Thing That Couldn’t Die,
The258
13 Ghosts70
30–Foot Bride of Candy
Rock223–225
Thomas, Lynn 107
Thompson, Bob 247
Thompson, Marshall 127,
130, 164, 166, 190, 193 Thompson, William C. 48 Thoms, Jerome 199
Thornton, Billy Bob 229 “Thought Monster” 164–166 Those Fantastic Flying
Fools163
Three Stooges98, 107,
183–184
Thriller79, 115, 204
Thyssen, Greta 49, 253, 254 Timemagazine 213
Tingler, The19, 193–196 To Kill a Mockingbird229 Tobacco Road230
Toby Tyler71
Todd, Sally 168
Tonge, Philip 159, 218
Toomey, Regis 23
Tormented46, 72–75, 80 “Tormented” (song) 72
Tourneur, Jacques 15, 55,
109–111
Travis, Richard 164
Trivas, Victor 258
Trollenberg Terror, The
(A.K.A.: Crawling Eye, The
155, 173, 174
Truffaut, François 86
Tryon, Tom 154
Tucker, Forrest 107, 108,
173–174
Turkel, Joseph 71, 72, 74 Turner, Barbara 166
Turner, George E. 19, 20, 105
111, 116, 138, 209, 263 20TH Century–Fox 95, 119,
121, 122, 132, 149, 166 Twerp, Icky (see: Camfield,
Bill)
Twilight Zone, The79
2001: A Space Odyssey75 2001 Memories: An Actor’s
Odyssey77
Twonky, The122
Uu
UPA Studios 159
U.S. News & World Report65 Ullman, Dan 23
Ulmer, Edgar G. 48, 181, 183 Undead, The141
Ungeheuer von London

City, Das 178
United Artists 185, 186, 220 United Nations 51
Universal Pictures 13, 17,

21, 23, 30, 43, 65, 79,
86, 102, 109, 115, 119,
123, 125, 193, 199, 241,
249
Unknown Island111
Untames Mistress172
Urquhart, Gordon 143
Vv
Vampira (see: Nurmi,
Maila)
Vampire, The86
Vampire’s Coffin, The(see: Ataúd del Vampiro, El Vampíro, El ETSEQ. 30,
123–125, 199
Vampyr266
Van Cleef, Lee 185, 186 Van Doren, Mamie 185– 186 Van Ronkel, Rip 263
Van Rooten, Louis 130
Vanwick Productions 241 Variety52, 91, 95, 122, 134
193–197, 204, 210, 213–
213–214, 223, 226, 229,
231, 236, 239, 248, 249–250 Varno, Martin 134
Vaughn, Robert 113
Veidt, Conrad 211, 213 Venet, Nick 219
Verne, Jules 163
Vernon, Glenn 113
Vertigo55
VESota, Bruno 65, 143,
235–236
Vickers, Yvette 19, 97, 98,
99–100, 235
Vidon, Henry 240
Viking Prince, The32
Viking Women and the Sea Serpent(see: Saga of...) Village of the Damned102 Vincent, Virginia 86
Vittes, Louis 96, 154, 166 Vogel, Paul 79
Vogue Pictures 186
Vohrer, Alfred 92
Vohs, Joan 25
Vonn, Veola 223
Voodoo(comics magazine) 13 “Voyage dans la Lune, Le” 163 Vye, Murvyn 69, 70, 107 Ww
Wade, Stuart 44
Walker, Clint 102, 132
Walker, Robert, JR. 152 Walker, Stuart 119

Walsh, Johnny 172
Waltz, Patrick 147
War of the Colossal Beast

60, 65, 175
War of the Satellites93–95 War of the Worlds, The13 Ward, Jay 188
Warner Bros. 79, 132, 214, 231, 263
Warren, John F. 103
Warrenton, Gilbert 197 Warsaw Pact 51
Washington Whispers65 Watergate 63–65
“Waterloo” 249
Watchmen251
Wayne, John 247
Weaver, “Doodles” 225 Weber, Peggy 46
Weegee (see: Fellig, Arthur

“Weegee”)
Weinbaum, Stanley 121 Weird Talesmagazine 164 Weiss Bros. 51–52
Weiss, Adrian 49, 51–52,

54, 55
Weiss, Louis 52
“Well of Doom” (Thriller) 204 Wells, H.G. 249, 253
Welter, Ariadna 123, 264 Wendell, Howard 207
Wenders, Wim 170
Wengraf, John 86
West, Frederick E. 35
West, Roland 220
Westerfield, Paul 23
Wexler, Paul 207, 209
Whale, James 56, 126 Whalen, Michael 163

Whatever Became Of…? 100 When Strangers Marry193 When Worlds Collide144 Whistlerseries 155, 193 White, Christine 159
White, Robb 158, 190, 194 White Cargo267
Whitelaw, Billie 202
Whitfield, Jordan 141
Whitmore, James 226, 229 Whytock, Grant 218
Widmark, Richard 134 Wilbur, Crane 220
Wild Women of Wongo

170–172
Wilde, Oscar 210
Wilder, W. Lee 39, 91
Willard, John 130
William Morris Agency 80 Williams, Adam 102
Williams, Tennessee 97,

170, 235
Williams, Wade 265
Willock, Dave 147
Wilson, Grady L. 13,

19–20, 159, 181, 249 Wilson, Harry 168
Winwood, Estelle 77, 79 Wise, Robert 147, 179 Witchcraft(see: Devil’s

Hand, The
Wizard of Oz, The241 Wolcott, James 170
Wolf Man, The et Seq.181 Wolff, Edward 105
Wolff, Frank 230
Wolfit, Sir Donald 154–155 Woman Eater, The91–92 Womaneater(see: Woman

Eater, The
Wonder Woman149
Wonderful World of the

Brothers Grimm, The 79 Wood, Edward D., JR. 48,
52, 54, 214, 215, 264–266 Wood, Wallace 122
Wooley, John 15, 17, 43,
60–86, 267
Woolrich, Cornell 115
World, the Flesh and the
Devil179, 211–213, 254 World without End147 World’s Finest Comics 69 Worley, William 158
Wright, Norman 143
Wuthering Heights32, 35 Wyndham, John 102
Xx
X the Unknown89
Yy
Yates, George Worthing 61,
65, 74, 89, 91, 107,
125–126
Yates, Herbert J. 61
Yeaworth, Irvin S., JR. 149,
150, 249, 251
Yordan, Philip 134
Young, Faron 28
Young, Skip 66
“You’re My Living Doll” 63

Zz
Zavitz, Lee 163
Zenteno, Raul 123 Zilzer, Wolfgang (see: Andor, Paul)
Zucco, George 91, 236

The captive ogre breaks out in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die .
I N P R E P A R A T I O N F O R 2 0 1 5 . . .
. . . F R O M C R E M O S T U D I O S

Table of Contents

WORDS TO THE FORE

1954-1958

The Human Jungle

Half Human

Hidden Guns

Ladrón de Cadáveres

The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent

My World Dies Screaming

Terror from the Year 5,000

She Demons

Teenage Monster

The Screaming Skull

The Astounding She– Monster

The Beast of Budapest

The Bride and the Beast

Demoniac

Giant from the Unknown

JOHN WOOLEY ON The Films of Bert I. Gordon

JOHN WOOLEY AND The Susan Gordon Connection

The Return of Dracula

The Woman Eater

War of the Satellites

Showdown at Boot Hill

Attack of the 50– Foot WomanAllison

JAN ALAN HENDERSON ON Yvette Vickers

The Space Children

The Colossus of New York

Space Master X– 7

Girl in the Woods

Curse of the Demon

Teenage Caveman

I Bury the Living

The Fly

El Ataúd del VampiroIN AMERICA: The Vampire’s Coffin

Frankenstein 1970

It! The Terror from beyond Space

Curse of the Faceless Man

The Fiend Who Walked the West

Night of the Blood Beast

Cry Baby Killer

Ghost of the China Sea

The Brain Eaters

La Morte Viene dallo Spazio

Queen of Outer Space

The Blob

I Married a Monster from Outer Space

Blood of the Vampire

Macabre

From the Earth to the Moon

Missile to the Moon

Fiend without a Face

Monster from Green Hell

The Lost Missile

Frankenstein’s Daughter

Most Dangerous Man Alive

Wild Women of Wongo

The Crawling Eye

Cosmic Monsters

Jack the Ripper

1959

The Cosmic Man

The Hideous Sun Demon

Have Rocket, Will Travel

Guns, Girls and Gangsters

Attack of the Jungle Women

House on Haunted Hill

First Man into Space

The Tingler

Forbidden Island

Misterios de Ultratumba

The Flesh and the Fiends

The Hellfire Club

The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake

The Headless Ghost

The World, the Flesh and the Devil

Teenagers from Outer Space

Invisible Invaders

Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow

The Bat

The 30– Foot Bride of Candy Rock

Return of the Fly

Face of Fire

Beast from Haunted Cave

A Bucket of Blood

Attack of the Giant Leeches

The Alligator People

The Monster of Piedras Blancas

Okefenokee

The Giant Gila Monster

The Killer Shrews

4D Man

Terror Is a Man

On the Beach

Caltiki, the Immortal Monster

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die

The Devil’s Hand

Night of the Ghouls

STOP THE PRESSES

INDEX OF RELEVANT NOMENCLATURE