Goals for 2016

I fell behind a little bit in my plans for the blog... things got a little crazy toward the end of the year.  But 2016 is going to be much more productive.
At the top of my plans?
To be a healthier Monster.
Right now, this is me:

and this is the Monster I want to be:

So there's a challenge.

We recently got a new television with a Roku device, so I'm going to be watching more movies.

I'll be writing about those.

I'm going to read more.

I'll be writing about that as well.

And I'm going to continue working on "the novel."  Because the Monster has to have a dream, right?

The Howling & Moon of the Wolf

I need to watch more werewolf movies.
Really, heck, who don't, right?
I decided that the other morning while watching the 1972 tv movie The Moon of the Wolf, starring David Janssen as a small town sheriff in Louisiana where... something is killing people.  The poster sort of spoils it, while the movie itself is rather like a murder mystery, with suspects and clues, til the third act reveal, where you actually get to see the killer for the first time.
It was pretty by the numbers, but workable for the constraints of the medium   In fact, the murder mystery aspect of the story was reminiscent of The Beast Must Die, which was part of my decision to try and watch more in the genre- the idea that werewolf movies- at least the ones where the identity of the werewolf is unknown, like Silver Bullet or Moon of the Wolf, are sort of a cross genre thing, the horror mystery.  I'll be getting back to that in future posts.

One the other hand,  sometimes the werewolves are right in front of you, a point as old as Lon Chaney's The Wolfman and An American Werewolf in London... and of course, The Howling.

Dee Wallace plays a reporter who, after getting attacked while on an assignment, leaves the city to visit a colony/spa run by a psychotherapist to recuperate.

While there, she hears the howling of wolves and realizes... somethings wrong.

Because, yes, it's a colony of werewolves.  Things go downhill for her from there.  But not for the viewer- The Howling is full of references to wolfishness, from clips of the original The Wolfman, including an after the credits bit, vintage Big Bad Wolf cartoons, and (my favorite) a copy of Ginsberg's poem Howl on a character's desk.

I haven't seen this in years, and I was really surprised at how similar it was to Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, which was essentially another film version of Gary Brandner's novel the The Howling that the movie The Howling was based on.  Similar, but so very much better than IV to a degree of noon and midnight.

Children of the Corn

I recently decided I was going to try and not re watch  any movie I'd seen within the last five years.
Instead of limiting my choices, I've found myself revisiting things I'd consigned to background noise and I'm pleasantly surprised.  This morning's movie, Children of The Corn (1984), is a terrific example of this.

I remember when it came out in the mid eighties, the cover to Stephen King's short story collection Night Shift was changed to the poster art in a tie-in.

The movie stars a pre-Terminator Linda Hamilton and a pre-Thritysomething Peter Horton as Vicky and Burt, a couple driving to Seattle by way of Nebraska.  Unlike their bickering counterparts of the short story, they're a cute couple- Vicki sings along with a "school's out" song to celebrate Burt's graduation from med school and his getting a position in Washington state.

Of course their journey is interrupted by them running over someone in the middle of the road, a child who was a good as dead, since he'd had his throat cut.

Since the movie starts with a flashback to the small town of Gatlin being taken over by it's children, the slaughter of diner patrons after church being effective since they really do look like small town churchgoers eating at a diner after the service, the boy's death wasn't as much as a surprise as it was in the short story.  In fact, the flashback is kind of a flaw for me- what I loved about the short story is the eerie discovery, the reader is along for the ride with Burt and Vicky as they discover this town, empty of adults, a sense of unease seeps from the pages.
The viewer knows what the couple are getting into even if the reader doesn't.

The monster at the center of all this is... something.  Wisely unseen, He Who Walks Behind the Rows, works through the children, appearing for the most part as a travelling disturbance of earth, rather like a large mole, but later re-animates the body of a follower and appears as a technicolor stormcloud.

Despite some of the special effects not aging gracefully (the technicolor stormcloud), Children of the Corn holds up pretty well, thanks to a foundation of a good Stephen King short story and two pretty above average -for an eighties horror film- leads.

Apparently, there are eight sequels.  I've seen the second movie in the series, IN A THEATER!, because a classmate and an acquaintance had roles.  I may re watch that, but from what I've  read about the others, I'll probably be avoiding them.

Ghostwatch

I still haven’t seen many of the found footage/mocumentary movies other than  The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, but I’ve almost actively avoided the Paranormal Activity series, for… who knows why. I think perhaps the hype scared me away.

(Scared me.  Heh.)

So I decided to go back to one of the best examples of the genre, Ghostwatch, from the BBC in 1992.

A single mother and her two daughters are being bothered by a ghost in their suburban London house.  A paranormal researcher has joined with the BBC, broadcasting from the studio while a team of reporters is on the scene on Halloween night.

It’s amazingly effective.  It’s slow and quiet, aside from the shreiking of two little girls, until the end as things accelerate til things go very, very wrong.

Apparently the effect Ghostwatch had on the viewers was quite unsettling, including, tragically, a suicide. It reminded me of 1983's Special Bulletin, about an atomic bomb threat in Charleston, and 1938's The War of the Worlds., except there are time gaps in those pieces while Ghostwatch takes place in real time.

I have to say it’s one of the creepiest pieces I’ve seen, at one in the morning, chilling, raising goosebumps.

Normally, I wouldn't link to youtube for something like this, but it's just too good not to share.

Terror in the Aisles

I couldn't decide what to watch tonight, so I compromised- I watched Terror in the Aisles, a 1984 compilation movie of  scenes from over seventy-five horror movies, linked by commentary from Donald Pleasence from Halloween and Nancy Allen from Dressed to Kill.

It's like That's Entertainment, but with a body count.

Most of the clips are from Universal Studios movies, with extra attention paid to Halloween, Psycho, and, for some unknowable reason, the thrillers Vice Squad and Sylvester Stallone's Nighthawks.

It's great background noise for a mindless evening, since it's a lot of screaming and running, with the occasional montage of doors slamming or killers stabbing.

There's lots of "thoughtful" commentary that just serves to set up a new sequence of clips, but Pleasence does ask a good question- why do people like horror films?- and offers the beginning of an answer: "Perhaps we create artificial horrors to help us to cope with the real ones."

Looking at the recent news and that sounds as good a theory as any.

The House on Sorority Row

Tonight’s movie is The House on Sorority Row.  I’ve been watching the tv show “Scream Queens” and it’s more than inspired by the 1983 movie.

So if I’m going to properly appreciate the derivative work, I should be familiar with the original.  

Just after graduation, a group of sorority girls kills their housemother in a prank gone wrong.  Because they’re horrible people, they’re throwing a graduation for themselves while her corpse sits weighted at the bottom of their dirty, algae filled swimming pool.  When they’re killed off, one by one, the killer using the woman’s spike tipped walking stick, it’s not really a surprise.

They do a pretty good job obscuring the killer, several kills from the killers point of view, almost giallo style, while some of the deaths take place with a cut-away, one of the earlier ones is even done in silhouette, but there’s no shortage of red paint.

Because I’m doing this usually around 2 am, I miss some ideas until late in the game- like how this movie was influenced by the original 1974 Black Christmas,  with the sorority house setting and the attic based killer.  Which would mean Black Christmas would be an influence on Scream Queens as well.

I’m going to give Scream Queens a couple of more episodes to convince me, but I think the Glee + Slasher film mashup isn’t really working.  In the concept of humorous slasher stories, the genre savvy cast of Scream- both cinematic and television- is a better mix versus Mean Girls with a bodycount. 

Of course, both Scream Queens and Scream (the Series) don’t quite measure up when compared to Harper’s Island, a much more effective presentation of the slasher genre on television.  While all three have the structure of ensemble cast and kill of the week, Harper’s Island ups the ante by containing the cast in a limited range, an island(!), while honestly, someone from the other shows always has the option to leave town (yes, I know that NEVER works out, but they’ve got the option, still).

I may give the remake a try, just to see how badly they butcher it- I looked on IMDB and didn’t recognize any of the cast.  On the other hand, I’m probably going to give the remake of Black Christmas a view on the strength of the cast, including Kristen Cloke, Michelle Trachtenberg, Andrea Martin, and Oliver Hudson (who has a role on Scream Queens, so that brings this full circle for me.  Time for bed.)

Satan's School for Girls

Earlier this year, I was doing reasearch for something I was writing and it involved watching lots and lots of seventies movies, theatrical and televised.  Somehow I missed Satan's School for Girls (1973).

I'd seen it... or at least thought I'd seen it years ago.  Honestly, even while watching it, I'm not sure.  I dimly recall watching something girls school and occulty on RealPlayer back in the nineties or so (I vaguely remember watching Suspiria, which kind of pairs nicely with this, as well as this).

Elizabeth (Pamela Franklin) Sayer's sister kills herself and she goes to her sister's school to find out why.  Her classmates at the Salem Academy for Women are the future Charlie's Angels Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd.

Soon her classmates start dying, and she has her suspicions regarding the professor responsible.

This is a great example of the early seventies fascination with the occult, actually pre-The Exorcist talk of Satan- but that's the seventies for you, when even McMillan and Wife go up against a Satanic cult a month later on NBC.

The Church

The nice thing about Shudder, it's allowed me to rewatch films I haven't seen in a long time, like tonight's movie La Chiesa- The Church.

During the Middle Ages, the Teutonic Knights massacre a village of people accused of witchcraft, and after the slaughter, a cathedral is built on the site to contain the evil.  This lasts until the eighties when an art restorer and a archivist accidentally break the seal.  The chance of this was expected by the alchemist architect, who designed the building to lock down in case of Demons.  And as these movies go, there's a diverse group of people in the church when it closes up- a school group, models and photographers for a photo shoot, tourists and parishioners.

They will, of course, die horribly.

The Church is the un-numbered third movie in the series started by Lamberto Bava, this instalment directed by Michele Soavi, who also directed the slasher movie Stage Fright as well as the Rupert Everett zombie movie, Cemetery Man.

It's a stylishly shot movie that balances contemporary Euro-ness of the late eighties with the timeless gothic atmosphere of the old cathedral that's the setting for more than three-quarters of the movie.

I think, so far, finding The Church, has been the highlight of my Shudder experience.

Monsterfest Memories...

 One of the best light conventions for horror fans I've been to is Monsterfest in Chesapeake, Virginia.  I've not been in a while, but as there's one today, October 3rd, I decided to go to my old blog and s̶t̶r̶i̶p̶m̶i̶n̶e̶   walk down memory lane.

2006

 Seven am trip to Chesapeake on the bus. Got some reading in, the bus dropped me off right by the library where MonsterFest was being held, with about twenty minutes to spare before the day began.

A selection of Universal Era horror trailers started things off setting the tone for the day.

Michael Joyner hosted as discussion of the sixties boom in monster fandom.

There was a panel discussion about Horror Hosts, wonderful interplay between the characters, some of whom I'd never heard of (like Penny Dreadful) or just knew of by reputation (like Count Gore De Vol)... but of course, I was there for Doctor Madblood.

Those were the only events I took in, most of the day spent checking out the dealers tables- finding some great deals- and chatting with the other attendees, including some who recognized me from MySpace.


First batch of pictures is up on Flickr, and I've posted a video of Bowman Body, one of the hosts, on YouTube


There was a break when I went up to Great Bridge for dinner... still amazed at how much the area has changed in the last few years.

Saturday night it was movies, so many movies.
Frankenstein - The Edison version that I commented on in Bookworm Friday.
Preview for The House Between- John Kenneth Muir's independent video program... I'd seen it at FantaSci last summer and I'm just as eager to see it now as I was last summer.
Fankenstein - The Universal classic.
Curse of the Werewolf - The Hammer classic. Lurid colours. Great sets, great costumes. Spanish peasants who say things like "'ere now, wot's this?".
Rob, one of the gentlemen running the show, said that the last two movies would be group choice... I shouted out "Ilsa," knowing how completely impossible it was.
Rob's reply was a yeah-right.
Phantasm II- I saw this at Lynhaven Mall when it came out. Man, that was a long time ago.
Nightmare on Elm Street- When discussing trivia about NoES, a girl in the back piped up that it was Johnny Depp's "first premeire". I was restrained from smacking her.
Trailers from Hell- I got my Ilsa. The actual theater trailer for Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. Shocked the hell out of me, that's for sure.
Freddie Vs Jason- Mindless fun.Didn't totally suck. Same reaction I had when I saw it at the theater.


I won one of the door prizes, a bag o' VHS, which totally rocked- I'd been eyeing Squirm for a while and it was one of the videos included. There were a couple of Universals, Invisible Man and Bride, since I had those two, I gave them to a couple of ladies there who knew how to appreciate the classics- one of whom actually was a big Invisible Man fan, and the original Chaney Phantom.


I've had my Halloween. Much fun. The 31st? That'll be ok. But MonsterFest rocked.

2007


The opening bit today dealt with cartoons, freaky black and white public domain cartoons.  There's something about those cartoons... Betty Boop and her dogboyfriend hiding in a cave while a walrus ghost is singing with the voice of Cab Calloway , backed by skeletons.  
Or Walt Disney's dancing skeletons in a Silly Symphonies cartoon, playing xylophone on another's spine.
Or two keystone style policemen investigating the theft of a mummy by the phantom of the opera looking baddie, who then brings the mummy to life- she looks like Cleopatra and sings like Betty Boop.
All of it made me thing of Grant Morrison's "manic pop thrill" theory of comic books... all the crazy stuff from the fifties that made comics fun, but illogical.


The second thing on the schedule was "Further Than Man Should Go: Transgression and Censorship in 1930's Horror Films"--presented by Tony Mercer.  He talked about the Hayes Code and pre-code horror films, how movies during the golden era pushed the moral envelope, with examples from Dracula, Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde- which I now realize I've never seen- were some of the highlights.
Actually, since I was sort of fixated on him earlier this month, the introduction to the Whale Frankenstein was the highpoint, Edward Van Sloan and his "How do you do?" speech.
Mercer Knows his stuff.  His presentation was brilliant and- most awesomely- he's got a hc of David Skal's Monster Show, the one with the Edward Gorey cover.


I skipped the next piece of programming- a showing of Back to the Black Lagoon- since I've got the Creature Legacy set.  I went shopping instead.  I picked up a Burger King Frankenstein promo figure, a collection of short stories by Matthew Warner- autographed, since he was here- and copy of a Brian Keene chapbook, autographed by Deena Warner, the cover artist, House of Secrets #140, featuring DC's own Frankenstein Monster, The Patchwork Man, and most sweetest was a hc of Skal's Hollywood Gothic, with pictures, the deluxe edition, cover price $39.95.  I got it for $9.  Who can say 'no' to that?


The Bowman Body returned to Chesapeake this year, getting an hours time of interview with Mike Joyner and just telling great stories.  I got a kick out of Joyner asking the audience if they'd seen the Bowman Body footage on youtube... 'cause the first on on the search is mine.


Mercer was back for the next panel, joined by Chris Johnson and Lee Hansen, Mercer's castmate from The House Between, a discussion of eighties horror.  It was an hour and a half was of sweet sweet nerdspeak.


We're on dinner break right now, and I'm in the parking lot eating up wi-fi bandwidth, playing music and praying the raccoons won't get me before they get back.


Seriously.  Raccoons.  I still get shivers thinking about it.  Sometime after midnight last year, after Phantasm 2 and Nightmare on Elm Street, I step outside to have a smoke... and I see a pair of eyes gleaming in the dark from inside a stormdrain.  Rationally, I know it was a raccoon, but the monkeybrain fear/flight/fight part just saw "EYES" and well, that was totally eek.
Special effects I can handle.   Creepy, probably rabid, night animals- not so much.

Creature From the Black Lagoon
Brides of Dracula
From Beyond (Director’s Cut)
Pumpkinhead
The Burning

2008


I'm there now.  The day is over, and I'm outside using the library's wifi.
The first discussion at 10 was Partners in Crime: The Coupling of Horror Art & Fiction by Couples in the Biz – Presented by: Elizabeth Massie/Cortney Skinner & Matt/Deena Warner.
11-  I caught Doctor Madblood talking about one of his "classic" episodes - The Umpire Strikes Back- from 1980.
I got a couple of Ms Massie's book, including A Little Magenta Book of Mean Stories from Borderlands Press.  Much sweetness, and Mr Warner's latest book Horror Isn't A 4-Letter Word
Elizabeth Blue and Pamela Kinney talked about Female Voices In Horror Literature at noon, which for the most part was the two of them and me.
I had to skip Justin's discussion on Writing Your First Horror Novel (but I did buy his first four chapters chapbook), because there was a discussion about Frankenstein In Film, which I had to disagree with one of the moderators opinion on Bride of, which he didn't hold in the same regard I held it.  Heresy.
Tony Mercer, of The House Between, gave a talk about Euro Horror, which I left after the clip of Suspiria, to catch the panel retrospective of the Friday The Thirteenth movies, the panel made up of The House Between's Jim Blanton, also one of Monsterfest's organizers, and Lee Hansen with Chris Johnson.
--
Tonight's movies:

Lost Skeleton of Cadavra – Rated PG - Hosted by: Cortney Skinner
Ghost of Frankenstein – Not Rated
The Mummy (1959) – Not Rated
Halloween 2 – Rated R
Nightbreed – Rated R
Diary of the Dead – Rated R

Discopath

One of my favorite non-genre movies is Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco.  I probably saw it at least five times- at a movie theater.  

Obviously, I love horror movies, so when I discovered the existence of Discopath, I knew it had to go to the top of my list.  I thought it would be like a cinematic Reese's Cup.  Right.

Duane is a young man who reacts badly to the percussive beat of disco music.  After killing someone in New York City in 1976, he escapes to a new life in Montreal under an assumed name.  That works out until he's exposed to music and goes on a killing spree.

There's an over the top scene of naked Duane dancing around to a disco version of The Flight of the Bumble-Bee with two decapitated heads.  You've been warned.

Well.... as I was writing this piece, I had my notes:

Investigation montage 

Cardboard characters

Devolves quickly into an exercise in cruelty bookended by weakly humorous bits regarding the schools administrators or the police investigating the case

Almost as if the filmmakers didn't know what direction they wanted to take the movie in.

Technically, it's pretty good.  It's stylishly shot, and the eras of 1976 and 1980 were recreated well enough.

I wasn't really sure how I felt about the film; partially based on my expectations- Shudder describes it as "tongue in cheek", which I imagined it to mean humorous or light hearted. when I was looking for an poster or dvd cover image, I came across a another piece about this movie (on AnythingHorror.com) and they point out that it's a homage to Italian giallo movies- stylish, glossy thrillers usually about serial killers.  It clicked.  SURE.  That's exactly what it was.  And it succeeded.

The graphic excesses of the movie, too much for a horror comedy, aren't out of place in an Argento film like Tenebrae or Profondo Rosso.  I'm not sure if I'd recommend Discopath,  I guess you could give it a watch after you've seen all the movies it's trying to emulate.

Shock Waves

Who knew there was actually a specific sub genre called Nazi Zombie movies?  Makes sense, of course  Apparently Shock Waves, from 1977. started it off.

It's kind of like Gilligan's Island gone worse.   The crew and passengers of a Caribbean tour boat are marooned on an island after hitting an uncharted wreck.  The island is occupied by a former SS commander played by Peter Cushing... and his aquatic Nazi Zombies, uncontrollable weapons left over from World War II.  The castaways soon become hunted, hilarity ensues.

The zombies are different from the standard flesh eaters as they just kill, rather than feed upon the living.

The castaways are by the book victims- nice guy, pretty girl, jerk, jerks wife, jock.  The boat captain was played by John Carridine.

I'm not sure why I skipped this one for so long- I remember the box from when I worked at a video store in the late eighties, but had a tendency to get this mixed up with Zombie Lake and Oasis of the Zombies, because, well... Nazi Zombies.

(Here's why you should watch the credits- the zombie makeup designer was Alan Ormsby, writer and lead in the (ahem) "classic" Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things.  He has other credits but that's the one that'll go on his grave- that and the fact that he created the Hugo: The Man of a Thousand Faces doll.)

Dead & Buried

I remember, or maybe just imagine I remember, the novelization of Dead & Buried showing up the Scholastic Book Club in elementary school (there's a chance- I recently found a Scholastic edition of The Amityville Horror), somehow though, I never managed to actually see the movie.
So I was pleasantly surprised to see it on Shudder.

The one thing that stands out the most is Melody Anderson, best know as Dale Arden in the De Laurentis Flash Gordon.

She plays the wife of the sheriff, who's investigating deaths of strangers in the small Maine town of Potter's Bluff.  As viewers, we're treated to the deaths, so the circumstances are no mystery: crowds of locals, armed with rocks and pipes, are beating these people to death and taking pictures- lots of Kodak Instamatic flash bulbs.

The mastermind behind this- no spoilers, don't worry- will be apparent to anyone who's seen an episode of  The Avengers or Murder, She Wrote.

It's an effective and atmospheric small town chiller, with a couple of rather gruesome episodes- an eye impalement and death by acid- that somehow managed to get it on the infamous British "Video Nasties" list of banned movies.  Aside from the Kodaks and rotary phones, it holds up very well.

(I almost forgot- it was promoted as being by the creators of Alien, but Dan O'Bannon, the man who wrote the screenplay for Alien, didn't actually have anything to do with it and disavowed the movie.)

The Beast Must Die

The Beast Must Die.  I’ve been looking for this Werewolf Whodunnit for a while, and after watching Ten Little Indians, I felt inspired to go look once more- and I didn’t have to look far since it’s on Shudder.

Simple, classic premise: a group of people is gathered at a country house for the weekend, and their host announces that one among them is a killer- only this time, a killer werewolf.

It’s from Amicus, which is like Hammer-lite, in 1974.

Calvin Lockhart plays the host, a self made millionaire hunter who’s going for the most dangerous game of all.  His guests include Peter Cushing, Charles Gray, and Michael Gambon, all mainstays from Hammer.

The Beast Must Die works best as a crazy whodunnit, because as a horror film, it has issues, mostly with effects: lots of blue filter day for night filming and the werewolf… well, it’s a gussied up German Shepherd.  

There’s also a swingin’ hip score that’s THERE during the first sequence of the movie, but thankfully fades less intrusively into the background.

As I’m writing this, another aspect of the movie occurs to me- there’s no sex, no profanity.  The Beast Must Die is a terrific, watch-it-with-the-kids starter film for genre loving parents who want to start the kids on the scary but don’t want to go too terrifying to begin with.

It’s a fun film, and were there not so many other films out there to watch, I’d consider giving The Beast Must Die another go, if only to see how it holds up as a mystery.

Ten Little Indians

When I was a kid, on the afternoon movie- there's a phrase I'll probably
use a lot on this blog- I saw a movie that scared the beejeebus out of me.

I've finally gotten around to seeing it again- the 1965 version of Ten Little Indians.  It wasn't a horror film, but with a small, isolated cast being killed in a variety of ways, it served as a template for any number of horror thrillers.

But oddly enough, it was the second death, a mountain cable car plunging to it's doom after the cable is cut... that was the thing that scared me.

Upon re-watching... not so scary.  Compared to... well, all manner of genre pieces, it's prettty tame.

I'm a big fan of Agatha Christie, and this was probably where I got my start, though it always seemed to linger as some sort of boogeyman in my mind. I'm glad I finally managed to see it again.  It's kind of dated- Fabian plays a swinging singer and the love interest is played Shirley Eaton- the other Bond girl from Goldfinger.  Christopher Lee even has a small role as the voice of their host, Mr U.N. Owen.

The producer maintained his rights and did a version in the seventies, starring Elke Sommer, and the eighties, with um... Frank Stallone.  Yeah.

When I told Igor about my history with this movie he told me I should keep it... nope, I'll put it in the sell pile.

I'm content to watch, and rewatch, and rewatch again  Десять негритят,  the 1987 Soviet adaptation- of the book rather than Christie's stage play, because it's true to the source material and the costumes and sets are amazing. Yes, it's in Russian, but it's so good that hardly matters.

I think I'll try and watch some movies inspired, directly or indirectly from this source over the next few days.

The Essential Dracula

Today's score was this hardcover edition of The Essential Dracula, edited by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu.

Now, of course I've got a copy of Dracula.  A couple actually.  Some nondescript mass market copy.  The Norton Critical edition edited by David Skal and Nina Auerbach. Leonard Wolf's The Essential Dracula from Byron Preiss's iBooks, which was a repackaging of The Annotated Dracula.

So, I guess there's always room for another one, right?

And what an edition this is!

As it would be with something like this, it's not the Bram Stoker novel that's the draw, it's the annotations and pictures.  There are pictures from most of the film portrayals up until Frank Langella- who gets the cover- and maps and hundreds of annotations from the scholars who were responsible for the book In Search of Dracula.

Even though it's a seventies edition of a Victorian novel, it's rather immune to being dated, in fact, the only thing that really dates it at all is the Langella photo and dedication.

Mostly because MY seventies Dracula was Michael Nouri.

Howling IV: The Original Nightmare

Another fun choice- Howling IV: The Original Nightmare.  I've seen the original Howling a couple of times and I've seen Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf at least a half a dozen times- it's really really awesomely bad, with Christopher Lee, Sybill Danning and TV's Captain America Reb Brown.
Knowing that movies get worse the further away from the first in the series, and taking degree of aweful that is H2 into consideration, I figured anything subsequent would be cataclysmically bad.  ... and well, may be it is, or maybe not.

IV is essentially a remake of the first movie, going back to Gary Brandner's original novel as a source.  Filmed in South Africa, pretending to be Callifornia, with a small town sheriff with a Southern twang and a town doctor with an odd combination of Down East and British so it's kind of low budget wacky.

A writer takes time away from Los Angeles, because she's having a nervous breakdown.  She gets away from the city to a small town called Drago, where she hears howling but no one else seems to.   It's not actually a nervous breakdown, it was visions.  ... and the howling?  Werewolves.

The actual Werewolves don't get much screen time, and it's more "suspense" than horror, but as a "paranoid city dweller in a scary rural environment story" it works pretty well.

(Additional points for having a theme song sung by Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues.)

"There's always the 'gators... dirty, nasty, slimy 'gators..." The Alligator Prople

Mmmmm.  Today's movie was fun- The Alligator People.
Beverly Garland plays a newly wed who's abandoned by her husband.  She goes seeking him at what seems to be his childhood home, a Tennessee Williams-esque household in the Louisiana bayou called The Cypresses.  There she encounters the alligator hating Lon Chaney, with a hook for a hand, the matriarch of the manor, and a mysterious doctor- not to mention a figure in the shadows, playing the piano.

Clocking in at just under seventy-five minutes, for the most part The Alligator People is mostly a Southern Gothic piece that veers into science-fiction toward the end.

I know it's blasphemy, but I just don't get Lon Chaney.  He was terrific as Larry Talbot in the Wolfman, and of course Lennie in Of Mice and Men,  Even in the Inner Sanctum movies of the forties, he was starting to show some wear, and by time he was doing parts like the hook handed Cajun, it was like he was phoning it in.

Choosing today's movie was a random decision, it was shorter than I'm used to, and it isn't a Universal Movie... but it really was a pleasant surprise.  I'm going to try and find more like it.

Nadja

Rewatching Nadja tonight, cheating a little and reusing my reaction to it from another blog I used to write:

I'm not sure how I missed this, but Nadja is amazing.
For all intents and purposes, it's a remake of the 1936 movie Dracula's Daughter.
Filmed in black and white, it's a slow dreamy thing, like a vampire film by David Lynch, which isn't surprising as Lynch is a producer and has a cameo as a morgue attendant.

Nadja, Dracula's daughter, lives in New York and is lonely. She's having to deal with the death of her father at the hands of Van Helsing.

Elina Lowensohn is haunting as Nadja, while Peter Fonda is delightfully manic as Van Helsing.

Aside from the black and white, it's got footage filmed with the Fisher Price pixel-cam, adding another layer of dreamy-ness to it, capped off with the use of My Bloody Valentine on the soundtrack.

A nice touch for Universal fans is the use of Bela Lugosi from White Zombie in a cameo as Dracula.

I think I'm going to try and pick this up for my permanent collection- it's the perfect movie to watch while sipping bitter, licorice flavored, green liqueurs.
--

Post script:  Well, now I'm going to have to rewatch Dracula's Daughter tomorrow night.

Post-Post script: Well, I thought I'd hit "publish" last night- oops.  So, here's the trailer to make up for that:

The Giant Gila Monster!

I've probably seen The Giant Gila Monster half a dozen times and it's just as entertaining now as it was when I saw it the first time when I was a kid.

It's one of those things that you'll either love or hate- hot rodding teenagers in rural Texas in 1959 versus... you guessed it a giant gila monster!

The kids are like the Archie gang, hanging out at the malt shop and working on their roadsters.  Chase, the Archie of the story, has a Polio stricken little sister and a French exchange student girlfriend.  Chase also sings and plays the ukulele.

The acting is... sort of there.  But with a movie like this, you're not looking  for  graduates of the Strasberg School, it's the monster.  He's an actual lizard on a small scale set, stoically plodding across fake scrub and desert, bringing a subtle dignity to a production where most of the performances are sustained with mostly youthful enthusiasm.

But don't take my word for it- The Giant Gila Monster is a public domain movie so you can watch it here:

Crestwood House Monsters

Well, I mentioned the Crestwood House books a couple of posts ago... well it was these beauties that gave me my love of the movies- prior to actually seeing any of these films.

The first wave of these titles, as seen on the back of one of the books, was King Kong, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein, Dracula, Godzilla, and Mad Scientists.

Heavily illustrated with black and white photographs, these books tell the stories of the movies and then supplement them with information about the sequels and behind the scenes production stories.

Later sets included The Mummy, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, and- as seen in the second picture- The Murders in the Rue Morgue, an adaptation of the 1932  Bela Lugosi Universal movie, which is... an odd choice for a children's book.

The covers were distictively orange (someone's even made t-shirts of them).  They fade into yellow but some schools had them rebound into sturdier, but less attractive volumes- see the brown Draculas in the pictures, as well as The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets Wolfman.

This is my collection so far- I've picked them up at library fairs and thrift stores and trained Igor to keep an eye out for them in our travels.

For years, I thought I was the only person who remembered these outside of a small circle I'd been lucky to meet- and then came the internet.
Cinemassacre has a great video about them here.
Branded in the 80s deconstructs the Frankenstein volume here, and Titans, Terrors and Toys does a nice quick overview here.

Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy

Watched Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy for the first time in years and... hmmm.  It was enjoyable enough.

I didn't enjoy it as much as I did when I watched it last- five or six years ago- mostly because I've rewatched The Mummy's Hand several times in the interim and the idea of two Americans in Egypt (A&C here and Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and Babe Jensen (Wallace Ford) in TMH), down on their luck, enmeshed in an adventure that takes them to a lost tomb where they have to contend with a Mummy and the head of an ancient cult... well it kind of wore out with me.

Fortunately, it had A&C hijinks and the comedy made up for what I'd seen before, including some sufficiently silly parts I had to rewind to watch again- including a bit where the femme fatale is trying to seduce Lou by giving him all her contact information.

Also, the wonderfully disconcerting presence of  Richard Deacon as Semu, the high priest of the Mummy cult.  He's best known as Mel Cooley from the Dick Van Dyke Show.  Yes, him, playing an Egyptian priest.

All in all, it's a good rainy day movie, not necessarily part of a Mummy marathon, but definitely part of an A&C double or triple bill.

Thank You Universal! Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters Collection.

As October approaches, I make a point to check the video sections of Target, Walmart and other such places, because that's when Horror Movies season is at its peak in the bargain video sections.

Today I was in our local Walmart with Igor and saw last year's Legacy collection releases for the Mummy and Dracula.  Having both, from a previous legacy release, I decided to check them anyway for the extras... and there they were: Abbot and Costello Meet The Mummy and Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, I had a moment of nerdrage- I DON'T WANT TO BUY THESE AGAIN! - when I noticed Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters Collection, featuring the two mentioned above and ...Meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and ...Meet the Invisible Man.

...Meet Frankenstein is special because it's the last movie in the original arc of Universal Horror films as well as the return of Bela Lugosi in the role that made him famous.

Plus there's commentary and a documentary.
The documentary is David Skal's Abbot & Costello Meet the Monsters from 2000, with commentary from Costello's daughter, Lugosi's son and other genre scholars.
Tom Weaver, one of the authors of Universal Horrors is one of the commentators on Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy.

It's been a crazy kind of week, so it was nice to find this collection- it'll be hours of fun.

Getting Started On Horror Part One

In my last post, I mention something that frightened me as a kid- so where did the fascination with horror movies come from?

Books, actually.  First, The Dynamite Monster Hall of Fame.  This was from Scholastic and I probably got it through my English teacher.  It concentrated mostly on Universal Monsters, but looked at King Kong and Godzilla, as well as the monsters of the fifties.  It was pretty simple, not surprising for a kid's book,  but it was a good introduction.

I've since lost my original copy, but they're available on Amazon.

Great Monsters of the Movies was the other gateway into horror, more of a "grown-up" book- geared more for a sixth or seventh grader!

There's even a still picture from London After Midnight.

I found my copy recently and it's got my name scrawled in it in my elementary school handwriting.

After these two books, I got hooked on the Crestwood House
books, which I'll touch on in my next post.

--

I told Igor I was starting a new blog and that I'd be referring to him as Igor.  I think he thought I was joking.

Facing My Fears: Dan Curtis' Dracula

When I was a kid, I saw a commercial for a movie that TERRIFIED me.  Now that I've identified the movie and approximately placed when I saw it, I understand why.  I was probably younger than six at the time, at my grandmother's house, and I'm sure it was later than my bedtime, broadcast sometime during a movie of the week as an upcoming attraction.  It was Dracula, produced and directed by Dark Shadows' Dan Curtis and scripted by Richard (Twilight Zone, I Am Legend, The Legend of Hell House) Matheson, so it's completely nightmare fuel for someone who's not even in second grade.  Here's the trailer.  The moment I remember most vividly is at the one minute mark, just before he bursts through the door, the closeup on the doorknob.

I've figured out that it was on CBS- it was broadcast February eighth, 1974, a Friday.  According to wikipedia, CBS was the network running movies on Friday night.

I'm watching it now, for the first time ever.  I'm not sure why I hadn't gotten around to it, I guess it wasn't as available when I was doing the "read too much Anne Rice" phase in the nineties, After that  I took time away from Vampire fiction and literature, but recently came back to it, even going so far, much to Igor's annoyance, as starting a 365 movie project (do you have any idea how many Lesbian vampire movies there are?). This version is now readily available on HULU, which is where I'm watching it.


It's pretty good.  The costume and production values are practically cinematic.  Jack Palance is understated, but menacing and effective.  The rest of the cast isn't as memorable, just stiff and British. Apparently, one of the Brides of Dracula is played by Sarah Douglas, later in Superman II.  It didn't really register.

Ultimately, it seems a lot like a European companion to the big screen House of Dark Shadows, also directed by Dan Curtis.  I'm glad I finally got around to seeing it and the forty-years older me thinks the childhood me must have been adorable to be scared by something like this.

(Oh, and if you've somehow found me via something other than facebook, I've got a page there, please like it (here) and you'll get notifications of future blogposts.  Thanks)

Monday, Monday

Well, I'd certainly planned in posting more often, but life gets in the way sometimes.  My "roommate", who I'll refer to henceforth as Igor, another confirmed bachelor of a certain age with an interest in antiques and Italian, is going in for a root canal Friday and we're trying to put all of our ducks in a row for then. But I've got several pieces lined up for this week, including a look at The Most Dangerous Game and another required reading.

Also, I've got a Facebook page- give it a like if you get the chance.  Thank you.

Required Reading: Universal Horrors and The Monster Show

You know, film history is such a broad topic that it's hard to pinpoint the best books on the subject, even within a genre.  But I'm going to try...

First, you've got to know the classics.  And the true classics of horror are, for the most part, Universal Horrors- Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man.  Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas  do an exhaustive study  of the Universal Studio's horror and monster films, including the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies.  These movies didn't just start a horror boom in the thirties and forties, but they also provided the core of the Shock Theatre syndication package for television, giving rise to Forrest Ackerman's magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, and instilling a love of the genre into Monster Kids all over America.

At $55, Universal Horrors is a little expensive for the casual fan, but it's so data rich to give hours of browsing pleasure- it's broken down film by film, so you can just read about a single movie at a time.

Of course, other studios had their classics- RKO and King Kong, Warner Brothers and Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and David Skal's The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror covers those as well as silent movies, the Universal canon, and covers nearly a centuries worth of the genre, including the fifties Bug monsters and the slasher films of the seventies and eighties.

The important thing about the Monster show is the fact that it puts the films into a cultural perspective, be it the Great Depression, The Cold War or the Counter Culture, looking not only what the influenced the genre, but what the genre influenced as well.

Skal also wrote the definitive history of Universal's Dracula, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web ofDracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, and a companion volume focusing on Dracula's director, Tod Browning, Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood's Master of the Macabre with Elias Savada.

I'm going to try and get on a more consistent posting schedule and I think I'll be focusing on books on Mondays.  Thanks for reading!

Kong!

Last night, I rewatched the original 1933 King Kong  and... wow.  It's one of those movies that you can watch over and over when you're younger: hey, monsters!  A Giant Gorilla!  Dinosaurs!  A Giant Gorilla vs a Tyrannosaurus Rex!  What's not to love?

But then, you watch it with older eyes, and the stuff you miss as a kid becomes evident- the parts of the story in New York City at the beginning and the end.    Anne Darrow, stealing an apple,  Bread lines.  An attendee at the unveiling commenting that he'd payed twenty dollars for his ticket.  In 2015 dollars, that $20 in 1933 would have been equal to over three-hundred and fifty dollars.  Disaster on an elevated train, and, of course, the Empire State Building.  All in glorious black and white,

In fact, I rewatched the first NYC sequence tonight and then re-read Caitlin Kiernan's short story The Ape's Wife from the

collection of the same title,  It's a remarkably melacholy meditation on Ann Darrow's life of maybes and could haves in the wake of the the movie, punctuated with clips from songs Brother Can You Spare A Dime and Life Is Just A Bowl of Cherries, incorporated into the story so seamlessly that you can hear them, scratchy and tinny across the years.

"She sits alone in the Natural History Museum off Central Park, a bench all to herself in the alcove where the giant ape's broken skeleton was mounted for public exhibition after the creature tumbled from the top of the Empire State, plummeting more than twelve hundred feet to the frozen streets below. There is an informative placard (white letters on black) declaring it Brontopithecus singularis Osborn (1934), only known specimen, now believed extinct. So there, she thinks. Denham and his men dragged it from the not-quite-impenetrable sanctuary of its jungle and hauled it back to Broadway; they chained it and murdered it and, in that final act of desecration, they named it. The enigma was dissected and quantified, given it's rightful place in the grand analytic scheme, in the Latinized order of things, and that's one less blank spot to cause the mapmakers and zoologists to scratch their heads. Now, Carl Denham's monster is no threat at all, only another harmless, impressive heap of bones shellacked and wired together in this stately, static mausoleum. And hardly anyone remembers or comes to look upon these bleached remains. The world is a steamroller. The 8th Wonder of the World was old news twenty years ago, and now it is only a chapter in some dusty textbook devoted to anthropological curiosities."

The story is available here,  Kiernan works similar magic with her short story “From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6", exploring The Creature from The Black Lagoon,

First Post.

This is always the fun one.  The "Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself" post.
I like horror movies and horror fiction.
I like non-fiction, both related and unrelated to the genre.
I don't eat drink, sleep and breathe horror, but I do snack, nap and sigh it.

And who doesn't love a good nap?

In order of importance, my cinematic genre interests are Universal Horror, Hammer Studios, and Seventies/Eighties Drive-In/Grindhouse/Midnight Movies.  Oddly enough, that's also in chronological order.

For reading, of course I appreciate Lovecraft, Stephen King, mostly the early stuff, Thomas Ligotti, and Clive Barker.  For non-fiction, genre related, Kim Newman, Tom Weaver, and David Skal lead the pack.

So, I'll be recommending books and movies, with the occasional warning to avoid something if it's... unworthy of your time.

Thank you for your time, and I'm pleased to make your acquaintance.