"We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes"

Here’s the thing about what you’re about to read, assuming that you don’t hate pieces that begin “Here’s the thing about what you’re about to read” and go on to something else instead.  This is where I tell you that something you know about Paycho is dead wrong.  I’m writing it, but I don’t know if I believe it or not.

Well, hell, it’s Halloween and if you can’t make a complete fool of yourself at Halloween, when can you?  Oh yeah, St. Patrick’s Day.  Okay, if you can’t make a complete fool of yourself at Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day, when can you?

Here’s the bit of revealed wisdom about Psycho, and I mean revealed repeatedly, in just about every critical essay ever written about the film: the least involving, most boring, most unnecessary scene in the entire movie is the penultimate one in which Simon Oakland, as psychiatrist Dr. Fred Richmond (you never knew the character had a name, did you?) tells the cops, Lila, and Sam that all is not well with Norman’s inner child.

Wait a minute—you have seen the film, haven’t you?  If not, don’t read further, even if you can’t resist pieces in which the fourth paragraph admonishes you “don’t read further.”  Beyond this point are spoilers.  And I promise that I won’t use that gag again, the one in which I repeat at the end of the sentence what I wrote at the beginning, even if you tell me that you love it when I repeat at the end of the sentence what I wrote at the beginning. 

Anyway, that scene in the movie is universally reviled as being unnecessary because it spells out in agonizing detail what the audience has already figured out, i.e., that Norman is a member-for-life of the Ed Gein Fan Club.

But I would like to suggest that in 1960, when the film was new and the world was still able to keep the mask of sanity in place, audiences may not have known as much about what ailed the kid as we do now, and that we know more about it today because Norman introduced us on a pop culture level to this type and degree of mental aberration.  Putting oneself into the mind set of obviously historical characters is hard enough and yet still easier, in some ways, than recapturing the thinking of characters who were contemporary when the film was made but have retreated into history since.  Norman looks, talks, and acts enough like us now that we see him as a 21^st. century man, but he is far from that.

Okay, now we come to my particular hobby horse, the theory that appeals to me greatly while at the same time lacking in rational believability.  For this it’s best that you watch the scene, but I’ll try to describe the relevant action.

Richmond enters the room in which his audience is gathered.  He comes in from the left and crosses to a central position in the room.  Over his right shoulder we see a picture on the wall and, above that, a light fixture.  The fixture has two prongs for the light bulbs, reaching out to left and right from a sort of metal centerpiece.

Oakland doesn’t move around much because Richmond wants to remain in the center of our, and his listeners’ attention.  He occasionally takes a step or two toward the camera to speak directly to Lila (Vera Miles) or to react to something Sam (John Gavin) says, but before he returns to his original spot in the room, he moves a little closer to the light, allowing us to see more of it.  Then he will take a step toward us and resume talking.

His explanation of Norman’s peculiarities is loaded with psychobabble, but whenever he has a point to make that he thinks is particularly telling—“So he began to think and speak for her,” “After the murder, Norman returned as if from a deep sleep,” “These were crimes of passion, not profit”—the lamp on the wall appears directly over his head, sometimes even forming glowing horns.

Here’s what I see: a cartoon in which someone is expounding an idea he thinks explains the ways of the world, with a light bulb coming on over his head to let us know how bright he thinks he is.

It’s as if Hitchcock, whose earliest job in films was providing illustrations to adorn the dialogue title cards in silent movies, is winking at us, letting us know that he thinks all this psychiatric gobble-de-gook is just whistling in the graveyard to hide our fear of the boogie man.

As Richmond snaps a cigarette out of a pack to light up and take a bow, Hitch cuts to the outside of the room and follows a policeman carrying down the hall a blanket for the chilled Norman.  We cut to the inside of the room where Norman, as Mother, sits before a blank wall.  As Richmond delivered his monologue in front of a wall with a couple of items on it—one of which served to ridicule everything he had to say—Mother delivers her monologue in front of a wall that is blank, as empty as a serial killer’s conscience, as spotless as a freshly cleaned bath tub.

There it is.  Do I really believe Hitchcock intended the scene with the doctor to be read this way?  I wish, but no.  I think it’s there to explain to the unworldly what the hell has been going on.  But do I think Hitch was aware of the cartoon cliché regarding the light bulb over the head?  Sure I do.  Maybe he set and blocked the scene the way he did because unconsciously he wanted to suggest that Dr. Richmond was just too content living in his jargon of earthly delights.   

You can’t have too many ways of looking at a film as rich as Psycho.  And it is Halloween.  Trick or treat.

THE RUINS (2008) and LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960)

     No horror film of 2008 was anticipated more than The Ruins, which means that if it failed there was going to be a long drop to the bottom. It did. It was.

     What happened? The movie was based on a bestselling novel by Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan, and Smith wrote the script himself. For some reason, he signed it Scott B. Smith. As in “Johnny B. Good”? It’s not that the script stuck too close to the book; Smith changed up many elements. Should we blame it on the director, Carter Smith? This Smith didn’t bring much to the picnic, but plenty of horror movies about college kids in peril are poorly directed and no one seems to care.

     For me, the problem is embedded in the story’s hook.

     Our four American students, two couples, are on holiday in Mexico . At poolside they meet Mathias (Joe Anderson), a young German whose brother is off visiting a Mayan ruin, a pyramid that has only recently been discovered and is the exclusive archaeological site of a small group of scientists. Mathias is going to join his brother the next day and he invites the Yanks to go with him. Sounds like fun, right?

     When they get there they climb to the top and look around. No brother. No archaeologists. And when they climb down and try to leave, the local Indians won’t let them. Guns, bows, arrows, knives, that sort of thing.

     Back on top, they start finding remains of a deserted camp, and then body parts, and then it becomes clear that the plant that is encasing the ruin is not your average African violet. It will trap you and eat you. If you have an open wound or sore, it will grow into your body and mess you up from the inside. It can even mimic sounds to try to trap you.

     And at that point I threw up my hands and tried, unsuccessfully, not to laugh. The plant wants to make Stacy (Laura Ramsey) jealous my mimicking the sounds of her boy friend

     Eric (Shawn Ashmore) making whoopee with Amy (Jena Malone). And how, you ask, does a plant know what those sounds are? Yes, you may ask.

     I also suspect that many audiences were turned off by the high voltage cruelty of the violence. Mathias breaks his legs. The last member of the student quartet is Jeff (Jonathan Tucker), a medical student who decides that the legs have to come off in order to keep the plant from killing the victim. This entails breaking the leg bones with a large rock and then cutting the limbs away with a small hunting knife. It’s one of the most queasy-making scenes since the advent of torture porn.

From the film’s first frame, we spend 90 minutes watching four human beings disintegrating, with primal screaming every step of the way. Smith and Smith provide us with no comic relief—the picture is relentlessly grim. Even Seneca tossed in a few chuckles. It may have been the darkest humor of all time, but these guys won’t give us that much.

     Hard to believe, given the fact that sound reproducing, man-eating plants register pretty low on the Terror-O-Meter—so when it comes to meat-munching ivy, I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it.

     Now our second feature is a certified drive-in, B movie classic—Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). Not the musical remake. This LSH is the original black and white, shot in two days, 14^th-billed Jack Nicholson, star on top of the Christmas tree beaut.

     The plots of the two films are essentially the same. Seymour Krelboin (Jonathan Haze) works for Gravis Mushnik (Mel Welles), the “Skid Row Florist.” Yeah, that’s a sample of the movie’s innate silliness. Seymour is a human Shmoo—ordered around, yelled out, psychologically abused by the older man. All for ten bucks a week. What a deal.

     The shop’s only other employee is Audrey Fulguard (Jackie Jospeh, who made a career of sweet-natured dimbulbs). She has a secret crush on Seymour . He likes her, too, and shows it by naming the new plant he created “Audrey Junior.”

Unfortunately, Audrey Junior is part Venus flytrap and demands blood in order to thrive. The more blood Seymour gives it, the larger it gets—and the more blood it demands. Finally, Seymour has to knock off the neighbors to provide skid row Miracle Gro. Seymour’s conquest of Audrey depends on the plant because the plant has become a local attraction. Money flows into the shop and even Mushnik is happy. Until, that is, the night he sees Seymour feeding body parts to his new Flower of Evil.

     The musical is a Faustian fable, the moral of which is “Don’t feed the plants.” Corman’s and screenwriter Charles B. Griffith’s moral is, borrowing from another musical, “Morals tomorrow; comedy tonight.”

     Griffith ’s script is a lot funnier than you expect it to be, with gags you have to be on your toes to get. Dick Miller plays Burson Fouch, a man who comes into the shop looking for something to eat. He eats flowers. A movie about man-eating plants features a character who is a man eating plants. That’s not even a visual pun. I don’t know what the hell kind of gag that is, but it works.

     Jack Nicholson enters late and doesn’t stay long. He’s Wilbur Force, a Peter Lorre-esque masochist who calls on the skid row dentist (John Shaner) because he knows the guy will inflict the maximum amount of pain. Nicholson is funny, as is much of the film, in a Mad Magazine sort of way. You’ll enjoy him but, trust me, you will not see two Oscars in this guy’s future.

     Corman famously shot the film in two days and part of the intervening night. It looks cheap and rushed, but not that cheap and rushed. Corman’s pictures are like those crafts you see at Farmers’ Markets that are made out of empty milk cartons. You know it’s something modified and you may like to look at it, but it’s perfectly plain that, at heart, it’s an empty milk carton.

     And yes, as in the musical version, Audrey Junior talks. The voice is supplied by writer Griffith, who also plays a couple of uncredited roles. What, you expect Roger Corman to pay for additional actors? Please.

     This is a subversive little gem—well, rhinestone anyway—that is not only a memorable way to spend 75 minutes, but is also a finger in the eye of big budget floparoos from the same era (Cleopatra, I’m looking at you.)

     Which reminds me, I haven’t watched Carry On, Cleo is a long time

WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP (1999)

Between 1890 and 1900, a plague of bad luck and madness settled over the area around Black River Falls, Wis., about 68 miles west of Plainfield, Ed Gein’s stomping ground. Based on Michael Lesy’s book, Wisconsin Death Trip is a documentary that tells the story of dangerous, eccentric, insane happenings of that time and place.

I especially like the story of the farmer who committed suicide by digging a small hole in the ground, placing a stick of dynamite in it, lighting the fuse and then lying down with his head over the hole. And there’s former schoolteacher Mary Sweeney, aka the Wisconsin Window Smasher, who traversed the state several times, breaking panes when the mania came upon her to do so. One trip cost window-owners over $50,000.

Locals are continually being hauled off to the Mendota Asylum, from which they frequently escape by just walking away or, more drastically, by hanging themselves.

Many of the film’s visuals are derived from period photos taken by Charles Van Schaik, including a lot of children in their coffins, and the narration by Ian Holm comes entirely from newspaper articles and obituaries of the time. Many of the incidents are re-created using actors.

This is easily one of the most unusual pictures you will ever see, but don’t expect a lightning pace or answers to your questions. No one seems to have figured out what was going on, beyond economic hard times and real estate sellers who lied to the under-educated Norwegian immigrants about the value of the land they bought sight unseen. And maybe lead in the water. This is one creepy movie.

Joe Dante

Not too long ago director Joe Dante (Gremlins, The Howling) programmed a 7-part film festival, called “Dante’s Inferno,” for the New Beverly Cinema in Hollywood . Twelve movies, mostly from the B to B- range, made the cut and the whole thing wrapped up with the screening of a 259-minute fruitcake called The Movie Orgy. It had originally run 7 hours. Here’s how Dante defined it on Tim Lucas’ “Video WatchBlog”:

“This [is] the first, one nite only public showing in many years of my first project. In 1968 when ‘camp’ was king, Jon Davison and I put together a counterculture compendium of 16mm bits and pieces (TV show openings, commercials, parts of features, old serials etc.), physically spliced them in ironic juxtapositions and ran the result at the Philadelphia College of Art interspersed with parts of a Bela Lugosi serial. The reaction was phenomenal. This led to The Movie Orgy, a 7-hour marathon of old movie clips and stuff with a crowd-pleasing anti-war, anti-military, anti-establishment slant that played the Fillmore East and on college campuses all over the country for years -- always the one print, viewed through a haze of beer and controlled substances. We called it a 2001-splice odyssey. It's still a pop time capsule that will bring many a nostalgic chuckle from baby boomers and dazed expressions of WTF?! from anyone else.”

There was no plot to The Movie Orgy so audience members could spend a lengthy break in the rest room, step outside to smoke a cigar, or go home to feed the dogs and when they got back to their seats they knew they hadn’t missed anything. You know, like watching Star Wars, Episodes 1-3 back to back.

Certainly Dante’s films have garnered a loyal fan base since Piranha in 1978. Most of his pictures pull off the wonderful trick of parodying popular genres or specific movies--Piranha spoof Jaws—and being a certifiable example of the genre at the same time.

No one in my part of the country seems interested in sponsoring a whacktrospective of this sort. I tried a few years ago to generate some interest in the idea of a series of short retrospectives and put together some single-weekend programs (on the themes of the influence of vaudeville on early talkies, and various aspects of film noir) but money for advertising wasn’t forthcoming and the project suffered a quick demise.

I would love to have been able to attend “Dante’s Inferno,” but even more I’d like to see a retrospective of Dante’s films.  So many people write him off, looking at his work and seeing only the genre trappings—and too often, the disappointing box office returns. I think, however, that were they to look a little closer they would realize that the films contain a thread of themes that repay attention, and more significantly a repeated approach to the material that is steady and refreshingly off-kilter.

There’s absolutely nothing to prevent you from staging your own Joe Dante Film Festival. Here are my six favorites, counting down to number one.

Masters of Horror: Homecoming (2005)

            This is an approximately hour-long episode of the premium cable series. The corpses of dead soldiers return as zombies and win the right to vote. Losers get their brains eaten. Solid political satire with a concept Swift might have loved.

Explorers (1985)

            One of Dante’s, or anyone else’s, oddest films. It starts off like a Spielbergian nostalgia-rama about a group of boys who construct their own space ship out of dreams, wishes, and star dust, and then morphs into the most unexpected cinematic shaggy dog story since The Last Laugh. Odds are you’ll hate it (most viewers do) but after you quit being pissed off at the way Dante’s played you, you may enjoy the joke.

The Howling (1981)

            Released the same year as John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London , and with a similarly black humored approach to its subject, Dante’s film, co-written by John Sayles, is just wicked. Watch it once for the story, a second time for Rob Bottin’s hotdamn prosthetic effects, and once more for the inside jokes and cameos. You still won’t be tired of it.

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979)

            Alan Arkush is the credited director, but Dante and Jerry Zucker (Airplane!) helped out. Dante and Arkush came up with the original story, which concerns the last days of a southern California high school brought low by dat ol’ devil music and The Ramones. Note a handmade recruiting poster on the wall for the People’s Temple. They’re offering free Kool-Aid. Never has the anarchic spirit of rock ‘n’ roll been so much fun.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

            Six years passed before this sequel to the 1984 hit Gremlins came out, and although Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment was still involved, this time the movie is almost pure Dante. The jokes are faster, slyer, and much more satirical, and the entire enterprise is wildly surreal at a level Dali would have appreciated.

Matinee (1993)

            For me, this is the great one. It’s my childhood—except for the fact that the kid involved actually has a date. Young Gene (Simon Fenton) has turned the makers of cheesy horror movies into his personal friends. It’s 1962, his dad is in the Navy, and his family is based at Key West when the Russians decide to ship missiles to Cuba . Luckily for Gene, horror director Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), a stand-in for that wonderfully loony Hollywood showman William Castle, has brought his new shocker Mant! to town for a try out. Woolsey’s movie within the movie is a feast of lousy special effects and overwrought acting from genuine stars of ‘50s-60s sci fi—Kevin McCarthy, William Schallart, and Robert Cornthwaite, with Cathy Moriarty as Woolsey’s perennial leading lady.

GHOST RIDER (2007)

I guess there’s something inherently schizophrenic in a story about a guy who is one person during the day and another person at night, and Ghost Rider displays its schizo qualities from beginning to end. Its overwrought visuals are interesting in a comic book splash panel sort of way and star Nicolas Cage hits the dialogue notes right, especially with the lines one suspects he wrote himself. But writer/director Mark Steven Johnson can’t seem to decide whether the Ghost Rider can stand alone or whether he needs camp to stay the night.

Cage is Johnny Blaze, stunt motorcyclist. As a young man he rode with his dad in circus sideshows, but when he found out that Papa Blaze was dying of cancer, he sold his soul to Mephistopheles (Peter Fonda—yup, old Wyatt himself--trying really hard not to let his dialogue break him up) in exchange for a remission of the disease. The cancer vanishes overnight but dat mean ol’ devil man than allows Blaze the Elder to die in a bike accident. I would love for him to have been killed by a shotgun blast from a redneck in a pickup, but that would have been just too cheesy, rider.

Johnny grows up, still riding stunt bikes on the southern circuit, a sort of boll weevil Knievel. Then, Mephistopheles’ son Blackheart (Wes Bentley) decides to oust his old man, claim 1,000 of the worst souls and take over the world. Mephistopheles calls in Blaze’s debt and makes him the new Ghost Rider, the devil’s bounty hunter, assigned to stopping Blackheart in exchange for release from his contract. If any of this makes sense to you, you need to seek professional help.

Enlisting the aid of a cemetery caretaker (Sam Elliott, who chews his scenes with the same gusto Caretaker chews his plug) and trying to explain his predicament to unbelieving love Roxanne (Eva Mendes, who easily comes off the worst in the cast because she’s the one who can never quite cover up the fact that she thinks this is all absurd), Blaze becomes one mean motor scooter.

Watching the film, I could never get beyond the belief that Mark Steven Johnson had a lot less to do with what ended up on screen than Cage did. An admitted fan of the “Ghost Rider” comic book, Cage had to have a tattoo of the character covered by makeup so he could play it. Much of his natural goofiness comes across. It’s hard not to believe that Blaze’s Elvis accent, love for jelly beans sucked out of a martini glass, video tapes of chimps acting like martial artists, and constant background music supplied by The Carpenters didn’t originate with the actor. Maybe the film sat on the shelf for two years because no one could figure out how to reconcile Johnson’s footage with Cage’s add-ons.

Russell Boyd’s photography provides some nice visuals, the effects are frequently sub-par in a nice “B” movie way, and the actors appear to be having a good time. I especially liked Elliott’s Caretaker, who spends most of his work day doing what all stereotype manual laborers’ do—leaning on a shovel.

I don’t know whether or not Ghost Rider is an accurate adaptation of the comic book, but I don’t care either. I just wish it had taken one path or the other—camp or seriousness. As it is, it isn’t a flat tire, but the air is leaking out pretty rapidly.

HANNIBAL RISING (2007)

Well, it isn’t “Hannibal Risible,” which I was afraid it might turn out to be. The latest chapter in the Hannibal Lecter saga almost fails because of a miscast director (Peter Webber, “Girl With a Pearl Earring’) and almost succeeds because of great cinematography from Ben Davis and some gloriously sleazy characters. It exists somewhere in the middle—watchable but never memorable. Anthony Hopkins put his brand on this character as surely as Anthony Perkins did on Norman Bates.

The film begins in Lithuania in 1944. The war is on and Hannibal, who appears to be around eight years old, flees the family castle, moving into a hunting lodge with his parents and young sister Mischa. Advancing Soviets arrive only to be fried by German aircraft. The parental Lecters are killed as well. Then five local collaborators show up and decide to hide out at the lodge.

But it’s winter and times are hard. In order to survive, they eat Mischa, whom they claim will soon die of pnuemonia anyway. More bombs fall and one of the snackers is killed and the other four scatter. Hannibal is rescued by the good guys and then spends the next ten years in an orphanage established by the Soviets in his family castle. He finall runs away to find relatives in France.

He locates an aunt by marriage, Lady Murasaki (Gong Li) who is conveniently able to teach him how to decapitate scumbuckets with a Japanese sword. Now that all the pieces are in place, let’s get ready to rumble.

From this point on the film is a series of revenge murders, and not just against those who ate Mischa. It seems that Hannibal has developed an aversion to all bullies as well.

Thomas Harris, who wrote the novels these films were based on, wrote the script and  does some interesting things with it. Even knowing what kind of monster this young man will turn out to be, we can’t help but sympathize with him the way we do with other out-of-control revengers. As long as he has a good reason and the killings don’t cross an undefined border of sadism, we can go along with them. Harris knows this and moves Hannibal slowly to the point where he and we have to say sayonara.

But the moment does come, and while it seems inevitable, it’s still shocking. I can’t be more specific. Sorry.

Gaspard Ulliel plays Hannibal adaquately but not spectacularly. He comes across like a good actor protraying evil in a movie he thinks is kinda silly. I could sit next to him in a restaurant and never think he’s about to order some fava beans and a nice chianti. On screen, his madness is all in his facial expressions, and they are limited to two.

Gong Li adds some class to the essentially thankless role of aunt/ennabler, and Dominic West is convincing as the French cop who understands Hannibal’s tragedy but wishes he’d commit his murdere outside of France. Rhys Ifans, as the chief villain, is so slimey he makes your average garden slug look like a strip of beef jerkey.

It’s all mid-tier nastiness.  A Hannibal Lecter story could be a lot worse than this, but a couple of them have been a lot better.

UNCLE SILAS by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (1864)

We forget sometimes that writers were producing popular literature hundreds of years ago, especially when a novel that’s been around for a century or two is still in print. Longevity makes it a “classic,” but readability and a thumping good narrative is what give it longevity.

Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s Uncle Silas was one of the last significant attempts at a full-blooded gothic novel after Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820 and before the phenomenal revival of the form in Stoker’s Dracula in 1897.

As the story opens, young Maud Ruthyn is living a blandly idyllic life (you figure it out) with her wealthy father. When he dies suddenly, she is told by his odd Swedenborgian friend Dr. Bryerly that she must go to live at the run-down estate Bartram-Haugh, the home of her paternal Uncle Silas. Silas will care for her until she reaches her majority, at which time she will inherit her father’s money. In the intervening years, Silas will be paid out of the estate for her upkeep.

One problem: if her own father was eccentric, Maud’s uncle is nuttier than a rest stop at Stuckey’s. In fact, most of his neighbors think that, years before, he slaughtered a Mr. Clark, to whom he owed money, as Clark slept in one of Bartram’s guest rooms.

Two problem: if Maud dies before she gets her inheritance, Silas gets it all. If she marries Silas’ repulsive son Dudley, Silas gets it all by taking it away from Dudley.

The novel is an interesting blend of the gothic—detailed landscape description, characters who wear evil the way Paris Hilton wears stupid, and a crumbling, near-ruin of a country house—and the more popular for the time sensation novel—a domestic setting, mysteries to be solved, and a sinister servant in the person of the French tutor Madame de la Rougierre. LeFanu plays with the supernatural—he is the author of the wonderful vampire story “Carmilla,” so he could play with the best of ‘em—but the book is really a study in psychological suspense.

Yes, the dialogue can get pretty stilted in that patented second-tier mid-Victorian author sort of way, and the three-volume stretching is all too obvious when Maud and Silas have confrontation after confrontation that are all cut from the same pattern: Maud accuses someone in the house of tormenting her, Silas listens and then dismisses her complaint as coming from just a silly little girl, she becomes angry, he becomes sullen and insulting, she rushes from the room. It’s the sort of thing that comes with the territory, but it is more than made up for in the parts that LeFanu could really get into to—those subtle hints that the mold and rot of the house and grounds have infested the souls of Silas and his household.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the corruption and madness that have been growing in Silas all his life have tainted his physical surroundings.

Every fan of modern horror owes it to him/herself to look backward now and again to see where the contemporary genre came from. Many of the original gothic novels are deadly slow and about as chilling as a midday hike across Death Valley, but Uncle Silas isn’t one of them. Many of today’s go-for-the-jugular grossout-a-paloozas aren’t near as creepy.

"Wolves of Darkness" by Jack Williamson (1932)

Most pulp fans agree that Weird Tales’ most significant rival in the realm of dark fantasy was the short-lived Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, which lasted only 10 issues from 1931 to 1933. Perhaps the strongest novelette published in Strange Tales was Jack Williamson’s always-fascinating “Wolves of Darkness” in the January 1932 issue.

Clovis McLauren has received a telegram from his father, Doc McLauren (one-time professor of astrophysics and currently an independent researcher), asking for help with an experiment. Clovis rushes to the small town of Hebron, Texas, and arrives on a snow-covered night and asks the station agent for help getting out to Dad’s ranch.

The agent does all he can to talk Clovis out of visiting the ranch, especially at night, but the younger man finally determines to find his own way. He hires farmer Sam Jenson to convey him to his father’s place. On the way, they are attacked by a pack of wolves. Jenson is killed and Clovis is horrified to see a beautiful young woman running with the pack. She is Stella Jetton, the daughter of his father’s assistant.

“Her head was bare,” Clovis tells us, “and her hair, seeming in the moonlight to be an odd, pale yellow, was short and tangled. Her smooth arms and small hands, her legs, and even her flashing feet, were bare. Her skin was white, with a cold, leprous, bloodless whiteness. Almost as white as the snow.

“And her eyes shone green.

“They were like the gray wolf’s eyes, blazing with a terrible emerald flame, with the fire of an alien, unearthly life. They were malevolent, merciless, hideous. They were cold as the cosmic wastes beyond the light of stars. They burned with an evil light, with a malicious intelligence, stronger and more fearful than that of any being on earth.

“Across her lips, and her cheeks of alabaster whiteness, was a darkly red and dripping smear, almost black by moonlight.”

Now, of course that’s overwritten in that grand, penny-a-word way of the pulps, but it also adds to the eerie suspense Williamson has been building from the beginning. Tod Browning’s film of Dracula had hit theaters about a year before this novelette was published, and the opening scenes reflect the movie quite closely: Innocent stranger arrives at country town and the locals tell him not to go to the castle — or, in this case, ranch. He goes anyway and is followed by wolves
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When he arrives, he is welcomed by Doc McLauren and Stella (think Dracula and his vampire bride) and given a meal in which they do not participate. And just as the film displays several telling details, Williamson give us this carefully placed observation: “Another fearful thing I noticed. My breath, as I said, condensed in white clouds of frozen crystals, in the frigid air. But no white mists came from Stella’s nostrils, or from my father’s.”

But you sense a shift from the supernatural to the science fictional as Clovis talks more and more of Doc and Stella acting and speaking like aliens. Williamson presents us with a grab bag of popular genres, from the supernatural and science fiction to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the physical grotesqueness and pain of weird menace:

“Her teeth caught my trousers, tore them from my leg from the middle of the right thigh ownward,” Clovis tells us about the torture his father demands that Stella institues when his son refuses to help him. “Then they closed into my flesh, and I could feel her teeth gnawing … gnawing….

“She did not make a deep wound, though blood, black in the terrible red light, trickled from it down my leg toward the shoe — blood which, from time to time, she ceased the gnawing to lick up appreciatively. Occasionally she stopped the unendurable gnawing, to lick her lips with a dreadful satisfaction.”

And later, when Clovis escapes, he is pursued by the wolves and what appear to be zombies:

“Judson, the man who had brought me out from Hebron, was among them. His livid flesh hung in ribbons. One eye was gone, and a green fire seemed to sear the empty socket. His chest was fearfully lacerated. And the man was — eviscerated! Yet his hideous body leaped beside the wolves.”

More and more, we sense that these are not just ordinary wolves. We assume they are werewolves, but as the adventure progresses we begin to question that explanation. Will the final answer come from the horror genre or from science fiction?

“Wolves of Darkness” is one of Williamson’s most popular early novelettes and it has been reprinted many times. You can read it for free online. Enjoy.

The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957)

There is one bit in this little programmer that scared the hell out of me when I was eight years old. The picture opens and closes with a close-up of actor Arthur Shields in werewolf makeup. He turns to the camera and says . . . Well, it won’t make any sense unless you know what he’s responding to, so I’ll save the punch line for later.

1950s B movie goddess Gloria Talbott stars in the title role. She’s Janet Smith, returning on her 21^st birthday to the home she left long ago. Accompanying her is fiancé George Hastings (John Agar); greeting her is her guardian and old family friend Dr. Lomas (Shields), who has for her some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Janet is an heiress; the bad news is something she never knew about her father—that he was the infamous Dr. Jekyll. Fearing that she may have inherited the gene that made him turn into a monster, she now refuses to marry George.

Complicating matters even more is the fact that the villagers, led by handyman Jacob (John Dierkes), want to kill her to prevent any more of those Jekylly murders. And, of course, the killings do recommence.

I guess we’re not supposed to know that Lomas is the guilty party—in true weird menace form, he wants to claim the money and property—but his appearance in werewolf drag at the beginning pretty much gives the game away.

The true villain attacks Janet, but to maintain the picture’s last secret I will not reveal whether or not she is rescued. So there.

With the demise of the monster we are informed, quite seriously, that nevermore will a creature so vile and deadly roam the countryside—and at this point we get that close-up of Shields as the werewolf turning to look us directly in the eye and saying, “Are you sure?”

Director Edgar G. Ulmer’s daughter thinks that Shields and her dad tossed the bit in as a joke, but for some reason I cannot explain it shot down my spine like a bolt of electricity hitting a wet golfer. I never carried the fear that monster movies engendered back home from the theater, but that night visions of a wolfman laughing at me because he and I knew he was real, and no one else believed it, kept me awake and tossing. My step-dad said that was it, no more horror movies for me—an admonition that was forgotten by the time the next one hit town. To this day, the question “Are you sure?” makes me nervous and sets me to looking for a gun with a silver bullet, or a mallet and stake.

Working from a script by Jack Pollexfen, Ulmer does his usual wondrous job of fashioning a respectable house out of moldy crumbs of gingerbread. There’s no way he could hide the non-budget entirely—every exterior shot of the house exposes an obvious miniature. Fog is used as much to hide cheapness as it is to create atmosphere. We see from these exteriors that the house is isolated—it’s a low rent Baskerville Hall—but during one interior scene, Hastings and Lomas are seated at a lamp table in front of a window, and through the curtains outside automobile traffic can clearly be seen zipping past.

I doubt that even an eight-year old, seeing the movie for the first time today, would be frightened by it. It’s purely a nostalgic pleasure with little to recommend it despite Ulmer’s direction and good efforts from the cast. It is, though, a good example of the kind of picture kids ate up during the late 1950s, and then chuckled over when it landed on late night TV a few years later.

Am I sure?

Hell. I just scared myself.

Parasomnia (2008)

I’ve been following the career of horror director William Malone since his Tales from the Crypt days. He’s got a good eye for the creepy visual. Check out House on Haunted Hill. Unfortunately, he’s got the story sense of a 6-year-old — check out House on Haunted Hill — and doesn’t know when to stop. His endings leave a lot to be desired. And by “a lot,” I mean everything.

In Parasomnia, Dylan Purcell stars as Danny, who is wandering around in an asylum one day, gawking at the creepy inmates as if it were Bedlam, circa 1750. He sees Laura (Cherilyn Wilson), who suffers from the title condition, which keeps her asleep most of the time. Her doctor (Timothy Bottoms), who has never heard the phrase “medical ethics,” tells Danny her story, and the young man sneaks her out so she won’t get caught in the MacGuffin.

Now the guy in the room next to hers is a serial killer named Volpe (Patrick Kilpatrick). So dangerous is this monster, he’s kept standing up in chains and masked so he can’t hypnotize the staff. Right, he’s in the room next to a sleeping girl. This place is not on the shortlist for Asylum of the Year honors.

Anyway, when Danny takes Laura home, Volpe escapes to track her down and kill everyone in the world. Jeffrey Combs is wasted in the cop role. Malone has outdone himself because not only is the ending bad, the rest of the flick is, too. Okay, there are some nice visuals when we get to Volpe’s Dr. Phibes-ish lair, but my God, this thing is stupid.

Mark of the Vampire (1935)

Some film reviewers try to slip by saying that the actors in the movie seemed bored. What that generally means is that there is nothing in the plot or characters to energize the interest of intelligent or experienced actors—or audiences.

Well, the actors in Mark of the Vampire appear absolutely catatonic and I would guess that the staff and crew weren’t far behind. Among classic horror films with any kind of pedigree, this may be the worst. And if it’s true that director Tod Browning lost interest in Dracula after the death of its intended star, Lon Chaney, this somnolent remake of Chaney’s original London After Midnight, also directed by Browning, is a Nyquil cocktail.

The name above the title is Lionel Barrymore’s. He’d worked with Browning before (The Show, 1927; West of Zanzibar, 1928) and would again (The Devil-Doll, 1936) but I wonder if he wanted to make this one, if he’d lost a bet, signed contracts in his sleep, had to do what MGM told him to do, or just wanted to help a pal after the fiasco that had been Freaks (1932).  Barrymore plays a police detective posing as a doctor and his performance is so hammy you expect it to come with a hunk of Swiss between two slices of rye. 

The story is set in 1934. Sir Karell (Holmes Herbert) has been killed and his blood drained, apparently by a vampire. The Professor (Barrymore) has been called into the case by Inspector Neumann (Lionel Atwill) and Baron Otto (Jean Hersholt) because they fear the monster may return to kill Sir Karell’s daughter Ilsa (Elizabeth Allen).  Of course, she has a worried fiancé Fedor (Henry Wadsworth) and the household is rounded out by the usual 1930s staff of comic relief servants.

The villains next door are the vampire team headed by Count Mora (Bela Lugosi) and the wide-eyed Luna (Carol Borland). Their abode is filthy and bedecked by cobwebs. Opossums hiss and scurry, representing, I suppose, mutated rats. Lugosi and Borland, in mostly non-speaking roles, even descend a grand staircase, passing through (off camera) a large cobweb without breaking it.

Any single element of this movie, no matter how insignificant, that reminds the viewer of Dracula is purely intentional.

Lugosi is said to have disliked what was done with his character and petitioned Browning to make changes, but the director stuck with the script as written by Guy Endore, Bernard Schubert, John L. Balderston, H.S. Kraft, Samuel Ornitz, and Browning himself (the latter four uncredited).  Even with the talent involved, the screenplay is such a mess, determining whether director or actor was right is a waste of time.  Nothing could salvage this stinker and I suspect that everyone but Lugosi knew it. Without Chaney’s unique talent for verisimilitude through makeup and gesture, this one became silly on page one.

Only the cults of Browning and Lugosi have kept this one breathing as long as it has—those pus one of the most gob-smackingly out-of-left-field endings you’ve ever not-quite-believed you were seeing.

Mark of the Vampire is a must for classic horror and/or Browning and/or Lugosi fans, but even at a little over an hour it will tax the patience and credulity of anyone else. I mean, I’ve seen it a half dozen times and I still don’t believe it. It just reminds me how much, like Browning, I miss Lon Chaney.

“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.