“The Empty House” (Algernon Blackwood, 1906)

Despite the fact that this tale was first published in 1906, it’s a wonderfully cinematic examination of a notoriously haunted house. Blackwood wastes no time, jumping in immediately with a paragraph that defines what a haunted house is and describes the effect it has on anyone brave, ignorant, or foolish enough to enter it.

“And, perhaps, with houses the same principle is operative, and it is the aroma of evil deeds committed under a particular roof, long after the actual doers have passed away, that makes the gooseflesh come and the hair rise. Something of the original passion of the evil-doer, and of the horror felt by his victim, enters the heart of the innocent watcher, and he becomes suddenly conscious of tingling nerves, creeping skin, and a chilling of the blood. He is terror-stricken without apparent cause.”

That, to coin a phrase, says it all.

In the story, Jim Shorthouse receives what appears to be a semi-urgent request from his Aunt Julia that he come to visit her at once. She’s acquired the keys to an infamously haunted house on the other side of town and she wants Shorthouse to accompany her while she goes exploring. She makes him promise that he will not leave her side even for a minute because “persons who had spent some time in the house, knowing nothing of the facts, had declared positively that certain rooms were so disagreeable they would rather die than enter them again.”

As the two ghosthunters enter the old house, Aunt Julia relates a brief history of the brutal crime that initiated the haunting.“’It has to do with a murder committed by a jealous stableman who had some affair with a servant in the house. One night he managed to secrete himself in the cellar, and when everyone was asleep, he crept upstairs to the servants' quarters, chased the girl down to the next landing, and before anyone could come to the rescue threw her bodily over the banisters into the hall below.’"

’And the stableman—?’

"’Was caught, I believe, and hanged for murder.’”

Blackwood then takes us on a regulated tour of the house, first downstairs and then up. He is an absolute master at describing everyday items in such a way that they assume personalities, and none too pleasant ones at that. He evokes that feeling that things change as soon as you look away from them—“There was the inevitable sense that operations which went on when the room was empty had been temporarily suspended till they were well out of the way again.”

The tension continues to build as Shorthouse and Julia are certain they hear a man sneeze next to them. Shadows are cast when there is nothing there to cast a shadow. Every time they turn a corner or move from one room to another, you wonder what they are about to encounter. Shorthouse “felt as if his spine had suddenly become hollow and someone had filled it with particles of ice.” The aptness of the simile is dazzling.

Then it happens, with a sudden jolt as powerful as the one that accompanies the first appearance of the old woman in “House on Haunted Hill,” a movie moment which may very well have been inspired by this story. “Facing them, directly in their way between the doorposts, stood the figure of a woman. She had dishevelled hair and wildly staring eyes, and her face was terrified and white as death.

“She stood there motionless for the space of a single second. Then the candle flickered and she was gone—gone utterly— and the door framed nothing but empty darkness.”

This is one of the most effective old school haunted house stories you will ever read. Take a look at it here -- http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/authors.html -- and you’ll know why Algernon Blackwood was one of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite writers.

Midnight Movie (2008) and A Cat in the Brain (1990)

Today let’s take a look at the perils, both to yourself and others, of making horror movies.

Midnight Movie is an enjoyable chiller that has ambitions beyond its director’s and writer’s current capabilities. Jack Messitt (director, co-writer) and Mark Garbett (co-writer) have attempted something a little unusual, which earns them a lot more credit than just hacking out a remake of some 1970s cow cookie that was overrated then and is practically unwatchable now.

Back in the day, actor/writer/producer/director Ted Radford shot a horror movie that is something of a cult item now called “The Dark Beneath,” and it drove him mad. The movie has been sitting on the shelf collecting dust for 40 years, and Radford has been in an asylum doing pretty much the same thing. It seems that watching his cinematic masterpiece makes him do unpleasant things, especially to people who are made out of meat. One night, a well-meaning psychiatrist runs the film for him and, well, let’s just say that the hospital is suddenly in the market for a new night staff.

Eight years later a neighborhood theater decides to screen “The Dark Beneath” as a midnight movie and every few scenes the movie killer, portrayed by Radford, somehow manages to step out of the picture and into the theater. Think of it as Sherlock, Jr. meets The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

It’s a clever gimmick that never quit crosses over into a genuinely frightening experience, but it does generate some legitimate suspense and goes all batshit nuts during the last reel. You won’t love it, but you won’t go hunting for whomever recommended it to you, either.

Where Midnight Movie is a mostly serious attempt to be a spookshow about fictional horrors coming to life, A Cat in the Brain toys with the notion that directors who make these films might be a little touched to begin with.

There are actually people who claim to take Lucio Fulci’s A Cat in the Brain (Un gatto nel cervello, 1990) seriously. They see it as a statement about the nature of success in art, but you know what I think? I think it’s just Fulci jabbing an elbow into the ribs of people who have to find serious messages in gore-horror because to do so makes viewing it acceptable. Just look at that title: Fulci, who co-wrote the script with John Fitzsimmons, Giovanni Simonelli and Antonio Tentori, is making a joke at the expense of Dr. Seuss.

Fulci frequently popped up in cameos in his films, but this is the only one in which he starred. He plays Lucio Fulci, a director of gore-horror movies who is beginning to suspect that his preoccupation with sex and violence is causing him to lose his mind, and is turning him into one of the serial killers who inhabit his movies.  He goes to a psychiatrist for help and we quickly learn that the head shrinker has been driven mad by watching his patient’s films, and he is the killer who hypnotizes Fulci into blaming himself.

It’s the ultimate giallo plot and, no, it can’t be taken seriously.  As Fulci tries to finish his latest film, which apparently is the film we are watching, he frequently hallucinates moments not only from his own pictures, but also from those of other directors who work in the same genre. Much of this movie is a mash up of gory death scenes from other gialli.

So why don’t I think this is all commentary on art overtaking nature, or nature overtaking art, or the painfulness of a director becoming so associated with a certain kind of movie he can’t escape it? A couple of reasons. At one point the psychiatrist tells Fulci that the old idea of violent entertainment leading to violence in real life has been discredited.  And he’s grinning like a madman when he says it. Also, the movie ends with an act that would tend to support that interpretation, until a second ending tags along that makes you mumble, “Are you f***ing kidding me?” a question Fulci answers with a gleeful, “Sure am.”

So I suspect a serious reading of the film is naïve, but something we can all agree on is that the production values are strictly from hunger. This is a low, low budget movie, and every negative cent of it is clearly up there on the screen.  Fulci once complained that the only difference between his films and those of Dario Argento was budget. Ah, maybe not, but this is obviously a production that would have to move up to a better neighborhood to be on Poverty Row.

So if your passion for horror movies scratches away like a cat in your brain, fix up a little steak tartar and red wine, and here’s just the picture for you. But if you’ve never sampled Fulci and you’d rather start with one of his better efforts, check out Paura nella citta dei morti viventi (City of the Living Dead, 1980) or E tu vivrai nel terrore – L’aldila (The Beyond, 1981). Stare in guardia, bambini.

“The Incredible Dr. Markesan” (1962)

Some things stick with you. Fifty years later I can still remember an episode of The General Electric Theater that scared the bejabers out of me (it was a ghost story and when the young heroine got into bed and comfied up, the covers began to slip down her figure as if being pulled from the bottom).  Then there was “An Unlocked Window” on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1965. The one with the serial killer who specialized in a certain kind of woman.  “You’re such a pretty nurse.” Writer James Bridges won an Edgar Award for the script.

The third leg in my childhood Triple Crown is “The Incredible Dr. Markesan” from Thriller. Originally broadcast on February 26, 1962, “Markesan” summed up the chilling delights of old school, black and white filmed horror.

Thriller was an anthology program that lasted a mere two years on NBC. It’s said now that when Hitchcock moved his show from CBS to NBC the competition from Thriller got a little too warm and he was instrumental in its cancellation. Maybe so.

Thriller’s host was Boris Karloff who, frequently, went a little too over the top. His introduction to “Markesan” comes dangerously close to pure ham, but since he was introducing himself as actor in the play (he appeared in only five stories during the show’s brief run), he can be forgiven for chewing a little scenery.

He’s Dr. Konrad Markesan, retired (or was it fired?) from his job in the science department of the local university. His once beautiful home has run to ruin and he lives alone. His nephew Fred (Dick York) and Fred’s wife Molly (Carolyn Kearney) come to see him hoping that he will give them a place to stay while they look for jobs at the university. Markesan agrees, unwillingly, with the proviso that they stay in their room after dark and not go roaming around the house. To assure their compliance, the old man locks them in at dusk.

I don’t want to give away too much since the entire Thriller run is now available on DVD and you might get to see it, but know that the young couple’s curiosity gets the better of them, especially when Fred sees his uncle hosting a bizarre meeting in the library with three of his former colleagues, one of whom, he learns from an old newspaper, died several years ago. As did Uncle Konrad. (Richard Hale as the late Professor Latimore is magnificently creepy.)

Karloff, as you might expect, steals the show as the dusty, disheveled, rambling Dr. Markesan. Long pauses fit in between questions from Fred and his answers, and his smile is a hideous reminder of Conrad Veidt’s in The Man Who Laughs. It’s the forced smile of a dirty old man—literally, a dirty old man. Markesan is easily among the most sinister of Karloff’s later creations. The man is just not right.

Robert Florey directs with full-on Expressionist vigor. He gets such good work from Karloff, it makes you wonder what Frankenstein would have been like with him at the controls. (Although Florey, who was attached to the film before James Whale, wanted to use Bela Lugosi as the Creature.)

Benjamin H. Kline is the director of photography and Howard E. Johnson is the art director, both men doing superb work in making this look like a Universal horror picture from the early 1930s. Morton Stevens’ music is all strings, sighing and sobbing, and Jack Barron’s makeup work is a lot better than you’d expect from 50 year old television. The script is by Donald S. Sanford from a 1934 Weird Tales short story by August Derleth and Mark Schorer.

The film is in gothic overdrive from beginning to end, with a last shot (the one that creeped me out when I was 13 years old) that could have been lifted from one of E.C.’s horror comics.

This is one vintage TV play that still pulls the plow. If you’ve no fondness for the good old stuff “The Incredible Dr. Markesan” may come across to you as campy. Too bad for you.

THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1971)

Well, you can’t hit one over the fence every time at bat. The House That Dripped Blood is the third of Amicus Productions’ portmanteau horror anthologies, and it’s at best a shaky single achieved as the result of a fielder’s error.

The script is by Robert Bloch and based on four of his short stories: “Method for Murder,” “Waxworks,” “Sweets to the Sweet” and “The Cloak.” The last two are classic Bloch, but here, the scripts are weakened, especially in “The Cloak,” by producer Max Rosenberg’s insistence on putting humor onscreen and keeping the horror off.

The cast makes the film sort of worth watching. Denholm Elliott stars in the first story, about a writer of horror stories who begins to think that his creations are coming to life. Peter Cushing and Joss Ackland are in segment two, about a creepy wax museum and the nutjob who operates it. Christopher Lee tops a tale of a man trying to live with an adolescent witch, and Jon Pertwee and Ingrid Pitt finish off with a comic vampire yarn.

The film contains no thrills or chills — not even a weak shiver — and is for Cushing/Lee fans only. Note that Vincent Price was originally offered, but turned down the role of the snotty, egotistical horror movie star eventually played by Pertwee. Price got his chance to burlesque hammy actors two years later in Theatre of Blood, and that one’s a must-see.

TOWER OF SILENCE by Sarah Rayne

Something has got to be done about this woman. Her name is Sarah Rayne and she writes the absofreakinglutely most horrifying set pieces going.

Take this, for instance. Fourteen-year old Mary Maskelyne, after a short lifetime of emotional abuse from her parents, has murdered her father by driving a spike into his brain from the base of his skull. She has bound his corpse to her mother, face to face. When Leila Maskelyne awakens she sees her husband’s dead face only inches from her own.

“And then realization slowly dawned in her face, and with it had come panic and revulsion, and that had been the best moment of all. Mary had laughed once again to see those emotions on her mother’s face, although she had instantly put her hand over her mouth to push the laughter back down. But it had been a moment to store away and remember.”

There’s a reason, mad though it is, behind Mary’s act. It has a lot to do with a group of British children who were captured by Indian separatists in 1947. The Indians threatened to kill the young ones if certain political demands were not met. I don’t want to peel too much away. Rayne’s technique is to cut back and forth from current days to this night of horror. I like the way she suddenly, quietly and unexpectedly plops revelations in front of you and then glides along, leaving you going back to re-read what just happened in a state of surprise.

The modern part of the story features Selina March, a spinster in her late 50s. She’s timid and bound to Teind House in the Scottish village of Inchcape. It’s not that she’s particularly happy in the house where she grew up, but she has committed several murders there and you know how that creates a tie. The house is also a couple of miles from Moy, the hospital for the criminally insane that is now the permanent residence of Mary Maskelyne. We suspect that there must be a connection between the two women, and that becomes a certainty when we learn that Selina survived the massacre in India and Mary’s older sister died in it.

If the book has a weakness—and that depends on how you look at it—it’s an over-abundance of coincidences. But that’s also part of its strength. This novel is a throwback to the glory days of the Sensation Novels of the 1860s, fiction that was intended to appeal to the emotions of the new reading classes and stimulate sensations rather than thoughts. Sensation novels like THE WOMAN IN WHITE, EAST LYNNE, and LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET were early psychological thrillers and huge bestsellers. I still get a kick out of them and if you enjoy the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins—both of whom wrote about evil deeds done in India—you’ll probably like TOWER OF SILENCE.

And by the way, the scene referenced above, with Mary and her mother, is not the most horrific one in the book. Imagine dead bodies being lugged to the top of a tower and placed on a platform running around the outside of the wall. Now imagine vultures swooping down for a freshly killed feast. Now imagine human screams emanating from the top of the tower. Now imagine the details I’m leaving out.

Now start reading.

Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn (1935)

Murder in the Red Barn was the perfect vehicle for Tod Slaughter’s introduction to movie-goers. It was one of the Victorian melodramas in which he had been barnstorming the provincial theaters for years, the play having been based on an actual 1828 murder case. Since he had been portraying the villainous Squire Corder so long on the stage, Slaughter had made the hypocritical landowner one of his signature roles.

The film is introduced as if it were a play. A host walks on stage from the wings and offers to introduce the characters. Each is greeted with applause. Even Corder takes a bow under the proscenium to the approbation of the theater audience. This literal stage-setting, which will never be referred to again, only adds to the film’s time-machine feel. Just as the movie’s creaky plot and characterizations take us back to British neighborhood cinemas of 1935, the faux theatrical introduction would have removed audiences of 1935 back 70 years to the days of mid-Victorian melodrama.

At the village dance, Squire Corder appears to be the very soul of amiable generosity. Surely then as now audiences knew not to trust any man in a melodrama who seems to be that pleasant and courtly. He will certainly prove to be Up to No Good. Actually, you can see it in Slaughter’s body language. He stands stiff-backed, head erect, arms held oddly in front of his torso looking for all the world as if he were a praying mantis.

All goes well for Corder at the dance until he makes the mistake of allowing a gypsy woman—where would these pictures be without gypsy women—to read his palm, in which she sees death and the Squire hanging from the end of a rope. Talk about your buzz kills . . .

Next we cut to a humble cottage and see the lovely village maiden Maria Marten (Sophie Stewart)—where would these pictures be without lovely village maidens—telling her mother that she is off to choir practice. But—cue the organ—she is really sneaking off to Corder’s manor house because the cad has been promising her a life of luxury and respectability in London when he weds her, which he has absolutely no intention of doing after he gets what he wants from her. Have some Madeira, m’dear.

When Maria’s father (D.J. Williams) finds out that there was no choir practice that night, they gypsy lad Carlos (Eric Portman), who is smitten with our heroine, lies to Farmer Marten and says that he was with Maria. He’s trying to protect her but it isn’t made clear why spending night time hours with him is better than anything else she could have been doing.

Livid, Farmer Marten calls on the Squire and asks him to run the gypsies out of town.

This scene is a grand one for Slaughter as he gets to scale the heights of justified hypocrisy. He paces back and forth in his parlor, his steps stiff and forced as if he were counting “one, two, three, stop, turn, speak, pace back, one, two, three.” He dabs gently at his nose with his handkerchief, then paces to the bell cord, tugs on it manfully, and deliberately paces back. It’s stage movement of the most mechanical sort but it is oddly mesmerizing.

Slaughter is like the modern computer generated Scooby-Doo at the heart of the drama. He’s too large for the other actors. He stands out because he doesn’t seem to be quite real, and yet all the other characters in the movie accept his presence. His hand-wringing and eye-rolling, his way of underlining every laugh and condescending lip-curl are the most unsubtle ways of virtually commanding center stage. This is a Tod Slaughter film the way John Wayne’s later pictures belonged entirely to the Duke. He exists on his own plane, and the spotlight follows him wherever he goes.

Now we cut to a gaming room in London where Corder is experiencing a terrible run of bad luck at the dice table, losing toss after toss to a dandified Dennis Hoey (later Inspector Lestrade to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes). So busted does Corder become, he determines to marry a wealthy, plain, psalm-singing old maid for her money. When the winner of his fortune gives him but one month to pay up, it becomes clear that poor Maria is old news.

Of course all sexual action has taken place off screen but we can tell by Maria’s shamed demeanor that she and the Squire have been involved with some slap and tickle, and soon it will become obvious to the entire village. Her father, declaring her a “wanton,” throws her out of his house. She hastens to the manor to claim what is her due by former promise, but Corder dismisses her distress with a delicious “I meant what I said at the time.”

“You shan’t kick me into the gutter,” she cries, thinking her despair will melt his cold heart. So certain is she that Corder will do the right thing, she drives away the love-struck Carlos, who offers to marry her.

The Squire tells Maria to meet him that night at the red barn and they will slip away to London. When they meet, a storm is raging. Where would these pictures be without raging storms? Maria senses that all is not well with Corder. Slaughter allows his shoulders to hunch as he hisses, “Didn’t I promise to make you a bride? You shall be a bride, Maria. A bride of death!”

She screams. He shoots her with a dueling pistol. He digs a hole in the barn and buries her as thunder and lightning crash and flash. Director Milton Rosmer even places his camera in the grave so we can watch Corder as he shovels dirt onto our faces.

From this point on the movie hastens to its close. Maria is missed by her grieving parents. Carlos is tracked down and accused of causing her disappearance. He remembers seeing her with the Squire on the last night anyone saw her. The town officials take Corder and Carlos to the barn where Corder’s dog Tiger begins to sniff around a patch of disturbed earth. Corder offers to dig around to prove that there is nothing amiss and he digs up the pistol he had inadvertently dropped in the grave.

When the corpse is exposed—not to us but to the characters on screen—Slaughter give us a nicely overwrought mad scene right out of Edgar Allan Poe. “Don’t stare at me like that, Maria,” he gibbers. He is finally led away, barking mad, by the authorities.

But he has one last horrible indignity awaiting him as he is led to the gallows. He doesn’t see it coming—if people in old-fashioned melodramas like this had an ounce of imagination or self-restraint, there wouldn’t be any old-fashioned melodramas like this—but you’ll spot it as soon as you hear that the hangman is too sick to attend to his duties and so a “volunteer hangman” has been procured for the day.

As it is with other of Slaughter’s lead roles, in the end there’s a grandeur in Squire Corder’s evil. He covers all the bases: snobbishness, vanity, lechery, violence, greed, hypocrisy—he’s the complete villains of Charles Dickens all rolled into one. Slaughter is sui generis, and you wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

Dumplings (2004)

Wow. Just wow.

Set in contemporary Hong Kong, Dumplings is the story of Mrs. Li, a former TV star who is married to a man 15 years her senior. She’s 35 and he lost interest long ago in favor of his 20-something secretary/bimbo.

To regain her youth, Mrs. Li begins a regimen of eating dumplings — bite-sized, meat-filled, dough-covered — cooked by Aunt Mei, who appears to be in her early 30s. The dumplings are reputed to restore one’s youth, vigor and sexual attractiveness. Mrs. Li is at first repulsed by the lumps of dumps floating in broth, and we become so as well as hints begin to drop as to just what the meat in the concoction is. Aunt Mei — who, we discover, was 20 in 1960 — is a former nurse with a straight line to mainland China, where abortions are still performed in the thousands.

Written by Pik Wah Li (under the name Lillian Lee), who wrote the novel on which Farewell My Concubine was based, and directed by Fruit Chan, the film is — on the surface — about a power struggle between two women. Under the surface, it’s a biting revelation of how the rich, beautiful and powerful use the poor, pitiful and helpless. As Marie Antoinette said, “Let ‘em eat jiaozi.”

This one is as disturbing as any movie you’re likely to see unless you go so far underground even I won’t follow you.