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AN ELECTRIC DREAMHOUSE OF HORROR, plus TWO HAMMER GREATS FOR HALLOWEEN
Yesterday, amid a crush
of sweaty people desperate for last-minute props, I visited a local Halloween
superstore with my daughter, looking for a Pikachu mask. Well, there wasn’t
much to choose from in the Cute Kid Division. But this particular hall of
Halloween hell definitely had the adult sensibility covered. Of course there
were the usual skimpy or otherwise outrageous costumes for purchase —ladies,
you can dress up like a sexy Kim Kardashian-esque vampire out for a night of
Hollywood clubbing, and gents, how about impressing all the sexy Kim Kardashian
vampires at your party by dressing up like a walking, talking matched set of cock
and balls! It’s been a while since I’ve shopped for fake tools of terror, but
it seems there’s been a real advance in sophistication in the market for
“Leatherface-approved” (I swear) chainsaws with moving parts and authentic
revving noises, as well as axes and machetes featuring self-contained,
ever-flowing spattered blood. And the masks, of course, are even more grotesque
and gruesome that ever—flesh-eating zombies (some with flesh stuck in between
their mangled teeth), up-to-the-minute super-terrifying clowns, mutants of
every misshapen sort and, of course, the most terrifying of all, Donald Trump
in mid-rally shouting form.
We walked out sans the
countenance of my daughter’s beloved Pokemon favorite, and I was reminded once
again that when it comes to Halloween, and especially movies for Halloween, I
am definitely a classicist. I prefer the mist-laden moors, the graveyard
overgrown with thickets of weeds and thorns and low-hanging trees, the figure
moving through said graveyard draped in a shroud, the bolts of lightning
illuminating a laboratory crammed with elaborate, spark-spewing coils and
rotors and other evocatively eerie equipment, over the extreme envelope-pushing
nihilism of the average modern gorefest. Make no mistake—I like the gore,
especially the variety found in a typical Hammer horror from the ‘60s and ‘70s,
when pushing the envelope was a decidedly quainter, if slightly salacious
proposition. I just don’t like my nose rubbed in it for nose-rubbings’ sake.
Endurance tests tend to lack the element of genuine pleasure, a perspective
which might seem counterintuitive to horror fans who groove on the
indiscriminate all-stops-out cornucopia of perversion evident in the average
episode of American Horror Story. But
I prefer my horror movies to have a touch of elegance and style, no matter how
outdated that style might be to modern eyes, as a counterbalance to the relentless
chills and fear.
Which is why I’ve spent
this Halloween in the company of some of my old favorites, like Son of Dracula (1943), one of
Universal’s least-seen and most underappreciated horror sequels, starring Lon
Chaney Jr. as the titular heir to the legendary vampire’s bloodsucking legacy
and directed by the splendid Robert Siodmak who when he made this terrific
chiller was only a year or two away from terrific pictures like Christmas Holiday, a 1943 psychological
thriller with Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly (seek this one out if you haven’t
seen it), The Spiral Staircase
(1944), The Killers (1946), The Dark Mirror (1945), Criss Cross (1949) and The Crimson Pirate (1952). And when it
comes time for Halloween, I always rely on Hammer. This year I’ve already spent
time in the company of Ingrid Pitt, Madeline Smith, Peter Cushing and The Vampire Lovers (1970); Peter
Cushing, Dennis Price and, of course, Madeleine and Mary Collison as the Twins of Evil (1971); and two of the
very best Hammer productions, both directed by Terence Fisher—Curse of the Werewolf (1961) and the
movie I consider to be the pinnacle of Hammer’s achievements in horror, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969).
All of which, but
particularly Frankenstein Must Be
Destroyed, lead me straight up to the doors of Neil Snowdon’s Electric
Dreamhouse. Neil is an editor and genre expert based in the UK, and Electric
Dreamhouse Press, under the umbrella of PS Publishing, is the new cinema
imprint he’s conjured to focus on genre-oriented writing from all over the
world. This past summer Snowdon kicked off a very exciting project entitled Midnight Movie Monographs, a series of in-depth writings in
short book form, somewhat in the vein of the BFI Classics or Devil's Advocates series,
dedicated to “the less reputable side of the cinephile universe,” the idea
behind which is to bring together genre authors, filmmakers and passionate
critical voices to create a collection of writing intended to illuminate some
of the less-discussed entries in the horror film genre which have somehow
escaped much in-depth critical consideration up to this point.
The first two titles out
of the gate this past year have both been greeted with quite a bit of critical
acclaim themselves—John Llewellyn Probert’s consideration of the Vincent
Price-Diana Rigg classic Theatre of Blood
(1973), and a volume dedicated to Martin
(1977), George A. Romero’s underappreciated twist of vampire psychology,
written by Jez Winship. (Both volumes are now available directly from Electric Dreamhouse.)
And Snowdon has a lot
more in store. Here’s a quick rundown some of the Midnight Movie Monographs
books and authors projected for 2017:
Eyes Without a Face by Michael
Brooke, critic for Sight & Sound
magazine, DVD and Bluray producer;
Martyrs and Slumber Party Massacre by Stacie
Ponder, writer/director/critic/comics artist and author of the popular Final Girl blog;
Carnival of Souls by Stephen
R. Bissette, comics artist and writer (Swamp
Thing, Tyrant) and film critic for Video
Watchdog, Gorezone and Fangoria;
Sinister by Mark Morris, author (Toady, The Black, The Immaculate, The Wolves
Of London, Albion Fay) and screenwriter (Doctor Who);
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death by Lynda E. Rucker, author of The Moon Will Look Strange and columnist
for Black Static magazine;
Black Sunday and The
Karnstein Trilogy by Angela Slatter, World Fantasy Award-winning author
of Sourdough and Other Tales, The
Bitterwood Bible, Of Sorrow And Such, Vigil;
The Tenant by Kevin Jackson, writer, broadcaster,
film maker and author of BFI monographs on Nosferatu,
Withnail & I, and Lawrence of
Arabia;
The Devil Rides Out and Twin
Peaks: Fire Walk with Me by Maura McHugh, writer of prose, comics and
film, including Twisted Fairy Tales
and Witchfinder: Mysteries of Unland;
Freaks by Johnny Mains, author of Plugged into the Mains, and A Little Light Screaming and editor of Dead Funny, Best British Horror and Aickman: A Centenary Celebration;
The Fury by Howard S. Berger and Kevin Marr, film
critics and directors of Original Sins
and the documentary A Life In The Death
Of Joe Meek;
Island of Lost Souls by
Jonathan Rigby, author of English Gothic,
American Gothic, Euro Gothic and consultant on A History of Horror;
Blood on Satan’s Claw by Kimberly Lindbergs, writer and critic at Movie Morlocks and Cinebeats;
Blood on Satan’s Claw by Kimberly Lindbergs, writer and critic at Movie Morlocks and Cinebeats;
Eraserhead by Anton Bitel, film critic, Sight & Sound;
Messiah of Evil by
Maitland McDonagh, film critic and author of Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds, the first book length study of the
films of Dario Argento;
Face of Fire by Stephen
Laws, author of Spectre, The Wyrm, Chasm
and Ferocity;
Phase IV by Neil Mitchell, film critic for Sight & Sound, Total Film and Electric Sheep, and film programmer for
the Australia and New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts;
Manhunter by Philip Simpson (Making Murder: The Fiction of Thomas Harris, Psycho Paths: Tracking The
Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction) and Scott
Bradley (The Book of Lists: Horror, The
Dark).
And I’m excited to announce that I’ll be among those
authors as well. My contribution to the Midnight Movie Monographs series will
be a volume on Frankenstein Must Be
Destroyed, which as I said before is the movie that most fully sums up what
makes a Hammer film great, as well as one of the most seminal influences on a
life (mine) spent appreciating the signature elements of the genre and what a
superlative horror movie can achieve. So perhaps as a warm-up, here’s a look at
a piece I wrote in 2010 on Terence Fisher’s aforementioned masterworks, The Curse of the Werewolf and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, in
anticipation not only of my own upcoming monograph but all those bearing the
Electric Dreamhouse imprint and the expansive vision of editor Neil Snowdon,
and of course Halloween, the rising moon of which is, if you haven’t heard,
just a few hours away…
Director Terence
Fisher began his 21-year run at Hammer Films in 1952 with a film noir
entitled The Last Page,
a.k.a. Man Bait. But in 1957 he kicked off a fruitful 17-year
stretch by doing nothing less than fleshing out the template for the studio’s
greatest financial and artistic successes, which would send them all on an
impressive run of lurid yet stately horror films whose budgets were rarely
betrayed by their production values. Hammer began life in the mid-30’s, the
inspiration of two father-son pairs, James and Enrique Carreras and Will and
Anthony Hinds. They specialized in under-the-radar low-budget fare that touched
on all tones and subject matter, but found their greatest success since the
studio’s inception when they released 1955’s science fiction thriller The
Quatermass X-periment (known in the U.S. as The Creeping
Unknown). In the wake of a successful sequel, Quatermass II (aka Enemy
from Space), Hammer wisely decided to focus more or less solely on horror
and science fiction output. They embarked upon what would ultimately turn out
to be a reinvention of the Universal horror film stable, and their first four
efforts, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Horror of
Dracula (1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
and The Mummy (1959) were directed by Fisher (and all four
starred the venerable team of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee). Fisher would
turn out to be the director whose style and career would become the most
closely synonymous with Hammer horror.
Fisher’s sure directorial hand conveys more confidence through a single pinky than his contemporaries can muster with both fists, and this confidence serves the storytelling trajectory well. The film begins by recounting the misfortune of a beggar who makes the mistake of intruding on the wedding party of a particularly foul and arrogant marquis. The beggar is tossed into a dungeon, where his sanity slowly slips away after years of imprisonment. The only person who has shown the least sympathy or concern for the beggar’s predicament is the buxom deaf-mute daughter of the marquis’s jailer, but her humanity is soon subjected to the most undeserved of horrors. Assaulted by the marquis after a failed rape, he orders her thrown into the cell with the beggar, who has lost all control over his behavior and his appetites. She is soon raped and impregnated by the animalistic prisoner and, after escaping and murdering the marquis, flees to the forest where she spends the next few months foraging for food and hoping to survive her pregnancy in secrecy.
As Movie Morlocks
writer suzidoll notes
in her thoughtful essay on The Curse of the Werewolf, the movie’s
sense of a sprawling, epic narrative is not facilitated some much by splashy
budgetary indulgences, but by the depiction of class strata that is fairly
typical of British productions. “Issues of class are often part of Hammer’s
horror films, either directly in the storyline or subtly through the fates and
misfortunes of the characters,” she writes. This is certainly is the case in Curse
of the Werewolf, where the poor and unfortunate are made to bear the brunt
of the extremities of an aristocracy’s sense of entitlement and sexual rage,
thus unleashing forces of evil that end up ravaging the society at large as a
result. Indeed, Hammer’s own Plague of the Zombies, which was
released five years later, in 1966, nimbly navigates the subject of
class-related exploitation in a way that connects it on a line of social horror
films from Val Lewton (I Walked with a Zombie) to Wes Craven (The
Serpent and the Rainbow).
But in Curse of
the Werewolf those class scenarios are infused with the same kind of
sexual awareness and legacy of symbolism that enlivened Hammer’s take on the
Dracula legend (also at the hands of Fisher). In just the first phase of this
multi-generational tale, the director, working with screenwriter Anthony Hinds,
who himself adapted a novel by Guy Endore, lends a ripe, sexualized foundation
to this take on the legends of lycanthropy which resonate throughout the film.
It is a subtext unfamiliar to the many tales of Larry Talbot’s woes, the ones
spun by Universal Studios, of course, but even the most recent incarnation
directed by Joe Johnston. Even in those films the werewolf’s anguish has always
been entangled with suppressed desire, blood lust and impulses that are at the
very least unacceptable, and often hostile to civilized society.
But here that traditional
subtext, often nearly buried out of sight, is openly discussed, perhaps for the
first time in a major genre film. The themes are rather brilliantly woven into
the very fabric of the sets (red being both the color of passion and, according
to Fisher, the color of fear), the heightened, almost fairy-tale sense of
dislocation—this werewolf tale takes place not on the moors, but in early 19th
century Spain—and the stirrings of desire that get all tangled up with
inexplicable dread. These impulses all find their expression in the impassioned
restraint of Fisher’s directorial temper and Arthur Grant’s gorgeous
cinematography, itself engorged on the lifeblood of the story and that which
is, in the grand Hammer tradition, occasionally spilled or splashed on screen.
The young woman is rescued
by a wealthy don of a much more empathetic temperament, but she soon dies in
childbirth. However her son, the boy who will grow up to be Oliver Reed,
survives and is soon experiencing inexplicable physical compulsions—mysterious
patches of hair, an accidental taste of blood which moves from repulsion to
sweet attraction and soon to a ravenous thirst— a lycanthrope’s pubescent
confusion. He also dreams of running at night and killing like a wolf, and one
morning the don discovers the boy in bed, bloodied, soaked with sweat and
wounded by the steel ball of a hunter’s rifle. A kindly priest, the kind who
often appears in stories like these with a wisdom of the unnatural that always
comes in very handy, suggests to the don that the impulses that torment a man
who may also be a wolf may be held at bay by the knowledge of being loved, but
that the reverse—love’s trampling under the hooves of savage, bestial desire—is
also possible. The don rears the boy successfully in a life of familial care
until he becomes the grown Leon, who soon finds himself at the mercy of lustful
cravings that he doesn’t understand, cravings that have dire consequences for
him and the citizens of his village.
Reed is wonderful in the
movie—his red-trimmed eyes, in full werewolf mode, spilling tears of anger,
frustration and hunger—are seen in terrifying close-up over the movie’s opening
credits, an accurate indication of the painful depths which his performance
will plumb. And he is well served by Fisher’s fascination with those painful
depths. Reed is given room here to create a characterization that collaborates
both with the audience’s sympathies and with our desire to luxuriate in the
rich palette of horror concocted by Fisher and the Hammer artisans, all in
service to their gory vision of a familiar tale. (The movies violence, as I was
pleased to discover upon a recent viewing, still has the power to shock.)
The Curse of the Werewolf is by no means ashamed of
its familiarity, yet the glory of the movie is in its willingness to push not
only the boundaries of the violence, but the very tactile sense of the world it
depicts into ever more heightened realms that never disengage from its
essential emotional undercurrent. The movie never parlays style or shock as
simple ends in themselves. In a conversation with the Horror Dads on the Movie
Morlocks site, I attempted to express why horror moves us, or at least
me. “It is essentially a conservative genre-- the order, once disturbed, must
be restored--” I said, “that can easily accommodate the most radical,
satirical, political and comic of perspectives.” I went on to say that one of
the elements best expressed by a great horror film is “the moan of a creature
who is slave to his/her baser instincts reaching out for a human connection and
destroying, with intent or not, the thing he/she most wants to love.” Though I
wasn’t thinking of any movie specifically when I offered these thoughts, The
Curse of the Werewolf seems perfectly emblematic of these familiar
horror themes executed to near perfection.
By the time he made Frankenstein
Created Woman in 1967, Terence Fisher had revisited the well of the
vampire twice (1960’s highly-regarded The Brides of Dracula, with
Cushing’s Van Helsing battling David Peel’s incarnation of the blood-sucker,
and 1966’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness which brought Lee’s
sophistication back to Bram Stoker’s vampire, this time sans Cushing) and
seemed ready to do something different with the Frankenstein formula. He and
screenwriter Anthony Hinds delivered a brilliant genre-twisting and
gender-bending idea: Frankenstein, still up to his usual existentially inspired
hi-jinks, has a body—that of a beautiful young woman—whose skull ends up
housing the brain of a wrongly executed man. But the brain is loath to cede its
identity, and soon the woman begins a campaign of vengeful murder on those who
caused the young man’s fate. There’s some rather neat (for its time)
consideration of crossed-gender behavior thrown in the mix as well, and the absence
of an actual monster provided exactly the right downbeat note to keep the level
of inspiration in Hammer’s now four-film-old series running high.
Fisher returned for the
fourth time to the continuing saga of Dr. Frankenstein in 1969. But something
about staging the battle of the sexes within a body at war with itself seemed
to have rather unhinged the good doctor. In fact, whereas in previous episodes
it was fairly well understood that Cushing’s Frankenstein, as misguided as his
methods were, as blind as his God complex may have made him, had intentions
that were almost always good, regardless of how much death and destruction were
their result. In Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
(1969), Fisher and scenarists Bert Batt and Anthony Nelson Keys waste absolutely
no time putting whatever remains of Frankenstein’s altruistic tendencies to
their final rest. If it was to be understood that Colin Clive’s obsessions to
bring Karloff’s monster to life were put into perspective by the monster’s
inability to control the impulses his damaged brain was sending to his
stitched-together body, then Clive’s characterization of Frankenstein, even
through the first two sequels, at least retains some measure of sympathy due in
large part to his own empathy for his creation.
This was true of Cushing’s
Frankenstein too, despite the more graphic stylization of the violence
perpetuated by the monster, reflected in the violence with which Cushing's
Frankenstein had pieced together his creation’s visage. But Frankenstein
Must Be Destroyed opens with a memorable sequence that makes audience
identification with the titular surgeon unlikely right from the
start—Frankenstein, wearing a frightening rubber mask that looks like a Captain Company version of
Dustin Hoffman’s old-man makeup in Little Big Man, stalks and
decapitates a colleague with a spray of the brightest Technicolor red, then
threatens to do the same to a wino who stumbles upon his storefront laboratory.
Luckily, the wino ends up only with the victim’s head in his lap—he gets to
keep his own—and it’s not long before Dr. Frankenstein has to dump his current
project and find other, more shadowy digs.
Cushing occupies
Frankenstein here with an actor’s supreme confidence in his own ability to hold
an audience. He knows the direction the character is headed is in one of irredeemable
megalomania and condescension for those less intelligent than he, but he never
winks or otherwise elicits anything resembling a plea for understanding.
Instead, Cushing grabs the character by the throat and steers the ride to hell
through some truly harrowing territory. His icy stare and vaguely regal air of
superiority, mixed with a cunningly choreographed charm that morphs out of his
sharp, angular features whenever the need arises, have rarely been put to
better use than they were here. And few were better, in either timing or
timbre, with the kind of florid speeches, here laced with seething anger and
potential violence that were hallmarks of Hammer film dialogue, than was
Cushing.
Frankenstein eventually
checks in and lays low, under an assumed name, at a boarding house run by Anna
Spengler (Hammer siren Veronica Carlson), where he berates other medical
professionals for their dismissive attitude toward his own experiments
conducted in concert with another like-minded surgical maverick, a Dr. George
Brandt. He soon discovers that Anna’s boyfriend Karl (Simon Ward) is a doctor
at the mental asylum where Brandt, gone crazy before he could reveal to
Frankenstein the secret of successful brain transplantation, is being caged.
Karl is also involved in procuring illegal drugs for Anna’s ailing mother, and
Frankenstein uses that information to blackmail the couple into facilitating,
and taking part in, the continuation of his shrouded surgical experimentation.
It’s soon clear that Frankenstein’s motives go far beyond simple advances of science for the benefit of mankind. This mad doctor truly is drunk on the idea of pursuing success for his own name’s sake, but also in exercising that power in rougher, more salacious and sinister ways. Already acknowledging that murder is but a messy fly on his moral windshield, he also takes time out to assert his dominance over Anna (and Karl) by humiliating her as often as possible and finally, for no reason other than that he can, raping her. (This sequence, now restored to the recent DVD release, was cut from the theatrical prints released in the U.S.) And he eventually forces Karl to help kidnap the dying Dr. Brandt from his cell and transplant Brandt’s brain into yet another body, that of one of the asylum’s directors (Freddie Jones).
Frankenstein Must be
Destroyed was,
of course, notable for the increased level of violence of its tale, an
appeasement to clamoring Hammer fans made possible by the concurrent loosening
of content standards both in the U.K. and in the U.S. at the time. (The MPAA
had only recently adopted its rating system, which tagged FMBD with
an “M”-- suggested for mature audiences—and later re-rated it the perplexing
yet somehow equivalent “GP,” while it garnered an “18” certificate in Britain,
limiting attendance to those over 18 years of age, the equivalent of an “X” in
America.) It was, I’m sure, the first time I’d ever seen a decapitation
(implied) on screen before, followed soon after by a generous display of the
bloody head. (Most horror fans my age probably witnessed their first full-on
separation of head from body courtesy of The Omen in 1976.)
Upon seeing it again as an adult, what it seems most notable for now is as
another piece of evidence in the case for Terence Fisher as perhaps the genre’s
most underrated and under-regarded director. Fisher’s style was lurid as the
subject matter demanded—he took advantage of every rich color splashed onto the
sets by Hammer art director Bernard Robinson and knew exactly how to maximize
the erotic appeal of heaving bosoms traversed by a trickle of blood. But his
hand as a director had a measure of stateliness, which is assuredly not a
backhanded way of suggesting his camera was static or unresponsive.
He knew, as the
well-trained and observant directors of his time all knew, where to place the
camera to emphasize the story and the effect that the actor was going after.
His films are quickly, expertly paced without being over-edited or stuffed full
of tricks meant to distract from the director’s lack of confidence. And Fisher,
given that somewhat classic style, was never one to condescend to his material,
even when, on occasion, it deserved derision. (Frankenstein and the Monster
from Hell was considered an inauspicious way for such an elegant
director to end his career, but you’d never know it from the way he visually
signed the film.) Fisher was unafraid of seeming callous and brutal due of the
behavior of his characters. Yet he more often carried with on the violation of
a cranium by hand drill or surgical saw just under the frame, without plunging
the camera headlong into open cavities and gushing wounds, thus freeing the
imagination to do its worst while the camera kept its sturdy gaze on the
determination of the demented Frankenstein, or on the revulsion of his
reluctant assistants. He combined and balanced directorial economy and
lightning reflexes with the grand, velvety, bloody flourishes that were the
bread and butter of the Hammer film in a way that other directors at the studio
could occasionally approach but never truly match.
Frankenstein Must Be
Destroyed carries
on with the downbeat, nihilistic horrors that were amplified and expanded in Woman,
itself yet another instance, like its predecessor, of a Hammer Frankenstein
film absent the iconographic lumbering monster so often misidentified by its
creator’s name. Freddie Jones, not typically an actor associated with subtlety,
is allowed to paint a portrait of exceptional pain as “the creature,” whose
brain (that of Dr. Brandt) cannot process or accept the reflection of another
man’s body, shaved bald and sporting a ragged stitch to hold his skull cap
tight, in his mirror. And neither can Brandt’s wife, to whom he returns one
night, unable to reveal himself for fear of her inability to understand what he
is telling her about who he is. (He hides behind a silk changing curtain as he
speaks to her, and his pessimistic presumption turns out to be agonizingly
accurate.)
Jones draws us in deep, through his eyes welling with tears, into the tormented state of this doctor, once Frankenstein’s colleague, now a victim of the same arrogance he once perpetuated. This portrait, seething with confusion, rage and newfound empathy for those in his own past whom he subjected to callous experimentation in the name of a greater good, is among the finest in the entirety of the Hammer Films catalogue, a catalogue already not unfamiliar with good actors who choose to rise to the occasion instead of bend down to pat it on the head. It is Brandt’s helpless anger, illuminated by Jones’ heartfelt and committed portrayal, and Fisher’s sensitivity toward the character’s plight, that finally lifts Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, despite its rather clipped finish, above the usual fare and into the realm of the finest treatments and variations of the Frankenstein legend ever filmed.
Jones draws us in deep, through his eyes welling with tears, into the tormented state of this doctor, once Frankenstein’s colleague, now a victim of the same arrogance he once perpetuated. This portrait, seething with confusion, rage and newfound empathy for those in his own past whom he subjected to callous experimentation in the name of a greater good, is among the finest in the entirety of the Hammer Films catalogue, a catalogue already not unfamiliar with good actors who choose to rise to the occasion instead of bend down to pat it on the head. It is Brandt’s helpless anger, illuminated by Jones’ heartfelt and committed portrayal, and Fisher’s sensitivity toward the character’s plight, that finally lifts Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, despite its rather clipped finish, above the usual fare and into the realm of the finest treatments and variations of the Frankenstein legend ever filmed.
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