Stalking the Stalker

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You had to’ve seen this coming.  The Night Stalker introduced how Carl Kolchak, hard-nosed reporter, became a believer in the supernatural.  This highly-rated television film led to a sequel, The Night Strangler, which appeared the following year.  It also did well.  Ditching a third script by Richard Matheson, ABC decided on a series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  The subtitle was probably considered a necessary reminder that the movies had done very well.  It also transferred the stalker epithet onto Kolchak.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  The Night Strangler shifts the action to Seattle where an elixir-of-youth-drinking monster is murdering young women to keep himself alive.  Once again the police and government officials cover up what’s really going on, for fear of losing tourist dollars.  There is a bit of social commentary here.


This movie reminded me of an In Search of… episode on Comte de Saint Germain, who, as a child, I assumed was a Catholic saint.  Saint Germain (just his assumed name) was an alchemist who claimed to be half a millennium old.  He seems to be, guessing from the number of books that treat him as an actual saint, just as popular now as he was in the seventies.  At least among a certain crowd.  And it was in the seventies that this movie was released.  Saint Germain’s enduring popularity all but assures no academic will touch him.  No matter, we have Kolchak to fill in the details.  And Richard Matheson was a smart man.  The Night Strangler does have a few pacing problems, but it certainly is a film worth seeing, even though it exists in that shadowy world of telinema (the combined forms of television and cinema).

Kolchak succeeds by believing in where the facts point, although the conclusions are supernatural.  In fact, watching The Night Stalker I couldn’t help but think of those who claim to have staked the Highgate Vampire.  That’s some strong conviction.  Indeed, the will to believe is more powerful than most people would like to admit.  Our minds contribute to our reality, but we insist that minds = brains, despite our inability to define consciousness.  That’s why I liked shows like In Search of…  As a teenager I couldn’t get enough of it.  I purchased all the accompanying Alan Landsburg books with my hard-earned summer income, skimping, as always, on the school clothes that I had to buy for myself.  Funny, it seems that my mindset hasn’t changed that much since the days of my youth.  Or maybe a sign of maturity is recognizing you were closer to the truth than you realized, back when you started the quest.

Horror History

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Trying to make sense of life has perhaps been my only real vocation.  As I continue to work on horror-themed books, reasonable people ask why I keep doing this.  It’s a question I ask myself.  The other day, while working on one of these projects, I had a realization.  The narrative I’d been playing in my head is that I grew up watching monster movies and then, apart from a few slip-ups, fell off the wagon again after my career malfunction.  That’s largely true but I suddenly remembered that seminary was actually another period of my life when I watched a lot of horror.  Regular readers know that I’m intrigued by the connection between religion and horror, but I’d forgotten how early this started with me.

A friend, nameless here, was a fellow seminarian and a total cinephile.  He and I would watch movies together quite a lot.  As I was recollecting which ones, it suddenly struck me that many of them were horror films.  And it wasn’t just this unnamed friend.  Another anonymous comrade frequently talked me into theatrical horror.  He’d go with his girlfriend (something I lacked at the time) but he liked to chat about the movies with me and often invited me along.  So it was that I was watching horror into the mid-to-late eighties.  I stopped, pretty much cold turkey, when I married.  It seemed that the therapy horror was offering was no longer needed.  Life settled into a happy, if weird existence stretching several years into Nashotah House.  This was the locus of said malfunction.

Losing my only full-time teaching post led directly to watching horror again.  My wife had to take a job out of state.  We crammed ourselves into an apartment after having a four-bedroom house.  Jobs were not coming my way, no matter how low I aimed.  Horror was cheap therapy.  What’s more, it’s remained a hobby ever since.  (Read into that what you will.)  People who know me personally (but who don’t frequent this blog) are often surprised to learn that I watch horror.  I don’t act like someone who does.  At least according to this usual, prejudiced image of the horror fan.  What’s more, the friends who share this fascination are nice people.  I was recently asked to speak about Holy Horror to a senior seminar at Transylvania University (it’s in Kentucky).  The students all seemed to be upstanding, bright young people.  They, however, like horror.  I don’t know their stories, but I’m guessing that they’re probably quite interesting.  They’re just beginning to try to make sense of life.

Digging Again

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It’s one of those movies that I know I’ve watched before—probably on a sleepy Saturday afternoon—but couldn’t believe I had already seen.  While viewing The Mole People it looked completely new, but in retrospect some of it had seemed strangely familiar.  Had I bothered to check my own blog I’d have noted that I watched it a mere fourteen years ago.  Not that I’d have spared myself again.  I felt like watching monsters in rubbery suits.  Still, as I mentioned in my previous blog post on it, the antagonist are the underground Sumerians.  These Sumerians speak English—a fact that isn’t worthy of remark by the scientists—and express surprise that outsiders can understand them.  Assuming them to be gods because of their bright flashlight, this Gilliganesque story contains, perhaps unintended, social commentary.  The mole people are really the good ones and the “slave revolt” at the end saves our protagonists.

For about the first half of the film they refer to “the goddess of Ishtar” before finally apparently realizing Ishtar is the goddess’s name.  The “eye of Ishtar,” which looks suspiciously like a sideways Star Trek Federation logo, represents where the sun shines down on their ancient kingdom.  (They’ve become albinos from living without sunlight.)  The interesting thing here is that the monsters aren’t the scary part of the plot.  The high priest is.  Elinu is suspicious of the upper worlders immediately and it is he who plots their demise.  He’s also quite willing to depose the king, whom he sees as too weak in his foreign policy.  (In reality the interplay between religion and politics, historically, has been a tug-of-war over power.)  He succumbs to his own plans, however, and the viewer is glad to see the priest go the way of all flesh.

Sometimes billed as science fiction, this is more fantasy horror fare.  It’s literally swords and sandals among the the lackluster Sumerians.  The monsters make it horror, but they aren’t evil, although they do kill one of the protagonists.  To their credit these pre-Civil Rights Act Americans realize that the treatment of the eponymous mole people is unfair.  There is, at the same time, no regret expressed that these scientists have brought the five-thousand-year-old Sumerian civilization to an end.  The Mole People is one of those “so bad it’s good” movies.  Its plodding pace doesn’t make it idea for too sleepy an afternoon, but the story is different than a typical monster flick from the era.  And it is biblically based, as my previous post on it noted.  And a lot has happened in the intervening fourteen years.

Who’s Stalking?

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Television is a hungry beast.  Back before the internet it was probably less hungry, but still the desire for content was constant.  A few individuals worked the monster side of the tube, one of them being Dan Curtis.  Dark Shadows was Curtis’ idea, and it was in that context that he began to have an influence over my life.  I wouldn’t have recognized his name in those days, of course—do we ever really recognize those who become part of the arc of life’s direction when we’re kids?  Curtis produced a television movie that I’d never seen, taking on the vampire tale again.  The Night Stalker isn’t a great film—it was produced for television, after all—but it started something.  That something was the weekly series Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

I’ve been watching episodes of Kolchak and realized that I was missing something—the origin story.  As an historian I really like to keep things in order.  Since my research is conducted on my limited free time and limited budget, I still discover things others probably knew long ago.  In any case, I decided to hunt down and watch The Night Stalker.  It introduces, of course, the character of Kolchak.  In a way that seems unnecessary for 1972, it narrates quite a bit of vampire lore.  It even frames some scenes from Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula.  As I watched this period piece for the first time, I realized that the actual night stalker wasn’t originally Kolchak.  In this movie it’s clearly Janos Skorzeny, the vampire.  The movie was based on an (at the time) unpublished novel by Jeff Rice.  And so began a number of cascading things.

I didn’t watch Kolchak as a child.  I do remember other kids talking about it, but it never made its way into our evening television watching.  (My mother was concerned that I had nightmares as a child and didn’t encourage scary things before bed.  Decades on I’m still prone to nightmares, but as I said, arcs get set early on.)  Kolchak is kind of a hapless character, rubbing people the wrong way.  The movie leaves many unanswered questions, but it was good fare for unreflective television monster purposes.  There had been monsters before—I think we all owe a great debt of gratitude to Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone—but Kolchak made the horror element, always laced with comedy, central.  The television movie received the highest ratings of any television movie to that point.  And we all know that such things lead to sequels.  Television is ever hungry.

Leopard Spots

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There’s always a dilemma involved.  Rent or buy?  Libraries face this when deciding on a subscription or perpetual access deal—is this something you’ll need for a long time?  More than once?  So also with movies.  Do you rent, watch, and forget or buy, supposing you’ll need to go back?  This plays out in my head when there’s a movie I want to see in these days of streaming.  The Leopard Man wasn’t a big hit when it came out in 1943.  There wasn’t really much of a taste for horror during the Second World War anyway.  In retrospect, however, it’s one of those films that has appreciated with age.  Apart from its effective use of the Lewton bus, the movie was well written.  It retains ambiguity and suspense throughout.  And if there is a leopard man who shapeshifts, we never see him doing it.  Spoilers follow!

Following on from his better known Cat People the previous year, Jacques Tourneur kept with the large cat theme in this film.  A publicist who (apparently) has no scruples, encourages his client/girlfriend to upstage a fellow performer by taking a leopard into her act.  The stunt backfires, however, when the frightened cat escapes.  Then mauled women are found and a hunt is on for the leopard.  If you’re adept at this kind of set-up you’ll figure out who the killer is—it’s not the leopard, except in the first case.  It’s implied that, rather like Cat People, the religion of the ancients, as Dr. Galbraith points out, might have some effect on modern people.  His dispassionate remarks about serial killers provides a clue, however, to who’s really behind it.

Religion runs like a thread throughout the movie.  The processions intended to alleviate the guilt for the treatment of the Indians, the ancient religion of those who made the museum pieces, and the Catholicism of the locals all play a part in this.  The question of whether Galbraith really becomes a leopard or not remains unanswered, but I sense it’s strongly implied that he does.  He had no intention of murdering the young woman in the cemetery and certainly had no time to premeditate the carrying of leopard hairs and claws to cover his tracks.  This is a man of science caught up in the spell of a forgotten religion.  Or so it seems to me.  In any case, it’s time to dust off this old gem and bring it back to the light.  It’s probably worth buying just to see it again.

No Demons

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There’s a connoisseurship about it.  Making bad films, that is.  It’s a wonder that Night of the Demon—I should specify 1980 as the year—hasn’t really become a cult film of any standing.  You can tell the maker tried hard to shoot a reasonable film, but with a nearly Ed Woodsian level of incompetence.  It lacks Woods’ artistry, however.  For those just getting on the Bigfoot kick in the new millennium, it might help to know that Sasquatch was big in the seventies.  Yes, the first real efforts to sort this thing out came about when the psychedelic seventies were underway.  The documentary The Mysterious Monsters came out in 1976.  The first serious efforts to explain Bigfoot as not just a hoax began.  And James C. Wasson, Jim L. Ball, and Mike Williams took a shot at making a horror film of the hairy guy.

The acting is about the worst you’d care to see, and the script is abysmal.  The effects are anything but special, and the flashback scenes incongruous.  But it does have significance for religion and horror.  It goes like this: a professor and some students go to investigate a series of Sasquatch-related murders.  They’re led to “Crazy Wanda,” who lives alone in a remote cabin.  Wanda, when finally persuaded to talk, reveals that her crazed preacher of a father killed her Bigfoot-hybrid baby.  His followers still perform demonic rituals in the woods, worshipping the Sasquatch.  Wanda had burned her father to death in retaliation for killing her child—she kinda likes Bigfoot, it turns out.  The professor and students, naturally, fall victim to the beast.

Only the professor survives.  He’s assumed to be criminally insane and suspected of murdering his own students.  It’s almost painful to watch a movie where everyone is trying so hard to do it well, but just can’t seem to manage it.  The plot line about the cultists is immediately dropped after an intended rape ritual is interrupted by the professor.  Wanda’s preacher father, who seems to fit into no particular form of Christianity, has no motivation beyond avoiding Hell for himself.  At one point he seemingly admits killing her mother.  There’s even a scene where Bigfoot kills two Girl Scouts.  With all of this going for it, you might think it would’ve picked up a following.  It has some fans, I’m sure, but I’m not certain that it’s well enough known to make it onto lists of worst movies of all time.  More’s the pity since it would absolutely deserve it.

Demons and Gremlins

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Gremlins have an ancient pedigree, whether they know it or not.  Credited with airplane problems during the Second World War, these meddlers in technology had an older cousin in the demon named Titivilus.  Titivilus was a demon said to be responsible for errors in the works of scribes.  Long before the printing press hit Europe, manuscripts were copied by hand, of course.  Anyone who works with Bibles, for example, knows that no ancient manuscript exists without errors.  But scribes copied more than Bibles, and anyone who has tried to copy an entire manuscript knows that errors always creep in.  (When I was a college student I tried to get my local church back home to set up a Bible-copying station so that when hungry parishioners were leaving the service they might stop and copy a verse.  This was to show how errors appeared in biblical texts.  The experiment took place but results were disappointing—full of errors but we didn’t get past the early chapters of Genesis).

However that may be, having a demon to blame for things going wrong proved to be mighty handy.  The tradition lasted well into modern times.  In the days of manual typesetting the young printers’ apprentices were called “printer’s devils.”  Demons were blamed for spilled cases—capital letters were kept in the upper case, and minuscules in the lower case—and other mishaps.  It may be a stretch, but such a demon interfering with humans trying to accomplish something important, led to ideas such as gremlins.  Most of us, I suspect, don’t like to confess that we’re sometimes clumsy or sleepy and make errors.  One of my notebooks is all crinkly because I knocked a nearly full water bottle over onto it while trying to catch a bug in my office.  ’Twas no demon, just haste making waste, as it does.

The idea of someone not human to blame is compelling.  All the more so because sometimes we are the legitimate victims of circumstance.  Life offers many opportunities to wander, unknowingly, into situations that might not turn out so well.  We don’t have minds well equipped to see the entire picture.  Even if we could the universe, we’re told, is infinite.  Who doesn’t make mistakes because of limited knowledge?  And sometimes those mistakes can eat up years of your life.  Doesn’t it seem more likely that a demon or gremlin lurks behind an all-too-human error in a judgmental world?  I’m sure that, for most people, if we knew better we wouldn’t have done it.  So we invent our demons.  We sometimes even give them names, and thus Titivilus was born.

Image credit: artist unknown, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Okay, Look Now

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When you think of Daphne du Maurier’s film adaptations, Alfred Hitchcock probably pops to mind.  He shot Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, and The Birds, based on her works.  One non-Hitchcockian adaptation is Don’t Look Now, by Nicolas Roeg.  I’d made the decision to read the story first—which was a good idea—but it was long enough back that I couldn’t recall many details.  This was also good.  Don’t Look Now was the main release by British Lion, in Britain, with the B movie, The Wicker Man, as its follow-up.  While writing a book about the latter movie I’d wondered why this one was chosen as for lead billing.  It’s certainly more mainstream, and an art film in many ways.  Typically labelled a “thriller,” it’s also called “horror,” causing me to question the relationship between the two.  In any case, the movie.

Since this was released in 1973 I won’t worry about spoilers.  The film is a fairly faithful adaptation of du Maurier’s story as well.  Laura and John Baxter are in Venice, trying to recover from the accidental drowning of their daughter.  John has work there, restoring a church—there’s plenty of religious imagery—and Laura befriends two older women.  They’re sisters and one of them is blind but also psychic.  Heather, the psychic, claims to see their drowned daughter and Laura finds relief and comfort from hearing about it.  John is skeptical, but, Heather claims, he also has psychic abilities.  John begins to think he’s seeing their daughter still alive and she leads him down isolated alleys—this is dangerous because there’s a serial killer on the loose.  John then thinks he sees Laura with the women after she has flown back to England to attend to their son at his boarding school.

Movies, like stories, are open to interpretation.  Mine is that the psychic phenomena in the film are portrayed as real.  I had the same impression from du Maurier’s story.  Much like The Wicker Man, appreciation for Don’t Look Now has grown over the years.  It was fairly well received upon release, but is now considered even better than it was at the time.  Maybe not as essential as some Stephen King movies, it is nevertheless believed to be one of the more important films on the horror palette.  I’d been prompted to watch it by several references I’d recently come across.  Typical for me, however, I took it in the wrong order, having seen The Wicker Man years ago.  Classics back then, it seems, took longer to be recognized.

Not Murphy’s Mansion

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One of the dangers of streaming is that you can be talked into a movie by the fact of its availability.  Curiosity drove me to Disney’s The Haunted Mansion movie and that led to the discovery that there had been a reboot.  I’m drawn to haunted houses but not to theme parks, but well, you wonder how they might’ve thought they could’ve done it better.  The original movie failed to rock the critics, so, as the saying goes, try, try again.  Last year’s Haunted Mansion is over the top.  The story is more complex, with an ensemble cast, and not really funny or scary.  Based on a sad premise—two families with deceased spouses—they’re drawn, with three other New Orleans outsiders, to a, well, haunted mansion.  The main ghost is looking for a soul to harvest but as the two hours wend on, the characters reveal their sadnesses (one doesn’t).  Perhaps the idea is catharsis, but there are too many subplots and too many abrupt shifts of mood.

A movie should know, it seems to me, what it wants to be.  You feel for the sadness and loss of the characters but  I know something about using horror cathartically, and this movie doesn’t do it.  There are jokes and running gags, but they’re not really funny.  There’s religion involved, but it turns out to be fake, with even a faked exorcism.  There are literally 100 ghosts.  And really only one bad guy among them.  There’s drinking to drown sorrows, murders, and even adult humor that is somehow deeply disturbing.  There are a few nods to the original movie but the plot is quite different and it leaves you feeling drained.

With a budget of about $150,000,000, stops were pulled out all over this organ.  It doesn’t, however, have a focus.  In the original film, the Evers family really has a need to reconnect.  The mansion does that for them, through its ghosts.  The reboot implies at the end that two broken families might heal each other and that evil leads to its own punishment.  Still it leaves open the question: what is this movie trying to be?  The more cynical might say it’s only for money (the worldwide gross didn’t reach covering its budget), but I have to think that those who make movies do so for more than just a buck.  Coping with death is a profound human need that begins when a pet or, more seriously, a family member dies.  I’m not sure that Disney is the best authority on the subject.  At least not for those of us who use horror as therapy.

Six-Hundred and Sixty-Six

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I have to confess to never having read a biography of Aleister Crowley.  I’ve known of him since I was a teenager, however, since you can’t read very much about esoteric stuff without running into his name once in a while.  Crowley was famous for starting the religion called Thelema, revitalizing interest in magick (the additional “k” was to distinguish it from stage magic), and for generally being a bad boy.  In fact, he declared himself the “wickedest man on earth” and liked to be called “the Beast” and loved the number 666.  It was the latter point that caught my attention recently.  In pop culture, 666 really only took off after The Omen.  (Movies often dictate, or at least inform, our religion.)  Crowley, who lived much earlier than the film, saw the marketability of 666 and I wondered how it caught his attention.

Aleister Crowley, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

As I recently posted, the end of the world as we know it is a fairly modern construct.  I happened to be reading about Crowley recently and learned that he was raised in the Plymouth Brethren tradition.  (They don’t loudly claim him as a native son, for some reason.)  He is probably the most famous of the Brethren, across all walks of life.  He even earned a place on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  The Plymouth Brethren were massively influenced by John Nelson Darby, the inventor of dispensationalism.  Dispensationalism is the fairly new Christian belief that time can be divided into ages, or “dispensations,” during which God has a plan already mapped out.  He apparently waited for Darby before letting the rest of the world in on this secret.

Things about Crowley then began to make a little more sense.  His choice to name himself after Darby’s preoccupations adds up.  I haven’t read any biographies so this may be old news, well known among scholars of esoterica.  It nevertheless bears pondering because the religion we teach our kids may have unexpected consequences.  Crowley rejected the Brethren (whose moral predilections were not to his liking, especially as a hot-blooded young man) but the religion influenced him nevertheless.  I wonder if the teachings Crowley received as a child encouraged him to become, in his own mind, the opposite.  Crowley wasn’t “the Beast.”  His precepts included “love is the law” (granted, his version of love was a touch earthier than Christians with whom he’d be raised, but still), not a bad start for an ethical system.  Even the wickedest man on earth believed in the power of love, even if his religion introduced him to 666.

Price Drop

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Here’s a public service announcement for your Friday.  If you’ve been wanting to read Holy Horror but found the price too high, McFarland has now lowered the cover price to under $30.  Here’s the link: Holy Horror.  Of my non-academic books, this has been my “best seller.”  Since I’m currently shopping around another book, and since agents aren’t interested (at least not any more), I wondered whether McFarland might look at it.  The editor who handled Holy Horror had left, and the new editor responded to my concern about pricing by telling me that they lower prices after a couple of years.  She noticed, however, that Holy Horror had been overlooked in the price lowering process, so voila!  It’s now affordable.

This model, while not the same as trade publishing’s efforts to get primarily front-list sales, seems to make sense.  Too many publishers raise prices year after year, so if you don’t buy immediately you’ll pay more.  McFarland tends toward a paperback first model.  The first couple of years are aimed at library sales—and they do well at those—then they lower for individual purchase.  All I had to do was ask.  Two years ago I asked Lexington/Fortress Academic if they’d do a paperback of Nightmares with the Bible.  That poor book never had a chance.  The editor said they were considering it.  Instead they did the trick that publishers seem to like: decoupling the ebook price from the hardcover.  So you can buy some expensive electrons instead of holding a real book.  So it goes.  I’ve written a museum piece.

It’s a little too soon to say about The Wicker Man.  My experience has been that university presses, particularly British ones, like to raise prices rather than chasing sales.  If you’re reading this blog you know that I’ll market my books.  I even printed bookmarks for Holy Horror at my own expense.  Maybe it’s time to start distributing them again.  What a difference ten dollars can make!  I’m a book booster.  (You might not have noticed.)  I’m glad that McFarland understands that individuals will buy books, even if they’ve been out for a while.  The standard wisdom among academic publishers is “three years and then you’re done.”  If you’re inclined to help prove that business model wrong, you can now get Holy Horror without having to take out a second mortgage.  That’s cause for hope—any writer has the dream that her or his book will keep on selling.  Sharing this information will, it seems, make it wider known. Please pass it on.

Why Weenie?

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Often I ponder how incredibly influential Frankenstein has been.  Even those who don’t care for horror instantly recognize the creature and what he represents.  (At least partially.)  Tim Burton thought of tying Mary Shelley’s story to a pet dog in Frankenweenie.  This was a black-and-white, live-action short released in 1984.  It wasn’t aired much before being locked in Disney’s famous vault.  It wasn’t really what Disney was known for.  Ironically, then, in 2012 Disney released a feature-length version, also black-and-white.  This one was stop-motion animation, however, inspired by Burton’s Corpse Bride characters, at least to a point.  At its core the story of a bereft boy bringing his dog back to life, the original showed the mayhem introduced by crossing the border between life and death.  Not too different from what Shelley was intimating some century-and-a-half before.

The remake, or reboot, was feature length and had to develop the plot a bit.  Along the way there are numerous nods to other horror films.  Critics have noted that horror is an amazingly self-referential genre.  Comedy horror delights in parody.  So, as a Vincent Price-like science teacher inspires Victor with the concept of reanimation via electricity, the boy decides to resurrect his pet.  Other school children find out about the undead Sparky and decide to make their science fair projects reanimated pets.  Or sea monkeys, in a clever take-off on Gremlins.  Naturally, the other pets lack Sparky’s good will, not raised out of love, but out of a desire to win a competition.  One student’s resurrected turtle becomes a Godzilla-like kaiju, allowing for winks at Jurassic Park.  The cat-bat reminded me, anyway, of Gremlins 2.

Ultimately, the story comes to the same resolution as the original short.  Of course, this isn’t scary horror.  Comedy horror is an odd genre.  It permits darker-themed elements to play against fun and fantasy.  Frankenweenie isn’t really laugh-out-loud material, and if you’ve seen the previous version the story arc is already known.  Still, it’s an effective movie.  Although it made millions at the box office, it wasn’t as many millions as Disney has come to expect.  But it is quintessential Burton.  It also has a moral attached—that even scientists need to pay attention to love and the motivation for learning.  The parents at the PTA meeting are scandalized by what science does, in a bit of real-life parody as well.  So Frankenweenie came across as pretty good to me.  I like monster movies.  It did lack, however, the emotional impact of the original.  Of course, the tale of a boy and his dog is its own kind of archetype, I suppose.

The Movie Maker

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Roger Corman has died.  So passes an era.  I’ve always had an appreciation for the speculative films of the fifties and sixties.  Many of these involved low budgets and content intended to shock.  Or at least excite youngsters.  And Roger Corman was a huge name among directors, producers, and promoters of such schlock.  He entered the realm of horror in 1955 with Day the World Ended.   Attack of the Crab Monsters a couple years later put the focus firmly on monsters.  Producing and directing three or more movies a year, he built a reputation for being cheap and quick, but that didn’t prevent him from creating some good movies.  A film’s producer is the one responsible for overseeing the production.  Often they come up with the ideas of what to film.

Roger Corman, publicity still; public domain via Wikimedia Commons

As the sixties were dawning, Corman produced several films “based on” work by Edgar Allan Poe.  I remember seeing some as a young person and wondering what they had to do with the Poe I’d been reading.  Still, he managed to grace cinema with House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death.  These are good films, despite limitations.  At the same time, Corman was still producing creature features as well, wracking up an impressive list of nearly 400 produced films.  As an established player in cinema he also took on the role of distributor from time to time.  When The Wicker Man was being ignored in Britain, Corman undertook the role of US distributor, likely saving the movie from total obscurity.

Circling back to Day the World Ended, we’ve become accustomed to believe that some kind of divine or human ending is in the offing.  These ideas get embellished over time, as I suggested in my new piece on Horror Homeroom.  Corman knew that this putative end would get the attention, whether or not there was any truth to it.  Perhaps that was the genius of his work—he knew how to attract attention.  And he wasn’t afraid to do so.  The business of cinema is one of attracting viewers.  Telling stories we want to hear.  We remember reading Poe, and even if the movies differ from the stories he penned, they are nevertheless reminders, reminiscent of what we’ve read.  If there are monsters they are somehow perhaps even more effective for not really being believable.  In short, Corman was a showman.  He made a living doing what he loved.  And he influenced many lives along the way.

Downtowns

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I recently wrote about the movie Peeping Tom.  I mentioned a scene, particularly creepy, where a news agent sells a girl a candy bar after selling an older man pornography.  Writing about this reminded me of my own youth.  After we’d moved to Rouseville, the nearest town with shops in western Pennsylvania was Oil City.  It had a reasonable downtown then—a couple of blocks with a Woolworth’s, Thrift Drugs, a movie theater (the lamented, lost Drake), stationary stores, and the like.  By the time I was in fifth grade I’d begun to discover books.  (Ours was not a reading family, being much more of the television crowd.)  Finding books in Oil City was a bit of a challenge.  There wasn’t a bookstore.  The nearest regular bookshop was all the way over in Meadville, and Mom didn’t want to drive that far too often.

I’ve noted before that I bought used books at the Goodwill up in Seneca (where we bought clothes and household items as well).  If you stayed downtown in Oil City, though, you could find books for less than a dollar in a bin at Woolworth’s.  (I still have a few of those cheaply printed and bound “Easy Eye” editions on my shelf.)  There was, however, just a door or two down, a mysterious shop where I’d spied a rotating wire rack of paperbacks.  I was curious and although Mom never forbade us to go in, she certainly didn’t encourage it.  I was a tween ravenous for new reading material.  This shop also sold magazines and tobacco products.  Some of the magazines had their covers obscured, and although on the cusp of puberty, I was really only after books.

One time I went in to give the wire rack a whirl.  I seem to recall that the owner gave a rather wry look when a minor, myopically focused on books, wandered in.  The fare there was not what I was used to.  There was a novel about Bigfoot, I recall.  I thought maybe that would be of interest, but I didn’t buy it.  When I walked out, I had that creepy feeling that seedy places seem to leave palpably on your skin.  I guess it might’ve been the feeling of that innocent little girl wandering into a shop selling nudie pictures to buy a candy bar—probably because it was the closest shop to home.  Such downtowns, and undoubtedly, such stores still exist.  They’ve become rare.  Downtown Oil City is no longer recognizable when I go there.  Now, it seems, there’s nowhere to buy books at all.

TV Zone

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An unenviable task, it must be, to try to sum up The Twilight Zone.  Barry Keith Grant, however, has done an admirable job in this TV Milestones volume.  He addresses in a forthright way one of the questions on my mind quite a bit as of late—what are the borders of genre?  For a creative species such as our own, with imaginations that range far and high, we blend unlikely ingredients.  The Twilight Zone had finished its initial run before I ever watched television, but I was around to catch early reruns.  Their focus on the weird, the unusual, the twist ending, informed my childhood love of the strange.  They also helped shape my imagination.  This little book helps to capture some of that.

I haven’t watched every episode of the series yet.  I’ve been making my way through it slowly since I really don’t have much time for watching, and I tend to give priority to movies.  Still, The Twilight Zone was one of the most influential television programs of all time, as Grant demonstrates.  Although he tries, it may be impossible to determine just why so many people use it as a frame of reference.  Even with my penchant for analyzing, I can’t work out what it was about those disparate, discrete episodes that so captured me.  Perhaps like most influences, it was specific episodes that hit very deep.  That showed new ways of thinking about things.  That opened up worlds of possibilities.

I was exposed to Serling’s stories not only through my own reading, but also through school.  I have no hope of remembering what grade it was in, but in one of my English classes we were assigned “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”  I was probably lost in the haze of puberty and adolescence at the time, but I remember well how that story made me feel.  And the teacher pointing out how people behaved when they were afraid.  Perhaps appropriately, Grant ends his book with a quote from that very episode.  Others, however, stayed with me as well.  Perhaps that’s the thing that’s so remarkable about the Zone—some episodes are not easily forgotten.  We’re accustomed to the flood of anodyne media that dowses us with entertainment of little consequence.  Some Twilight Zone episodes were that way as well.  But when we experience something significant, we tend to remember it and remember it well.  So many episodes did that kind of work on a mind too young to make lasting life decisions.  I guess I’m still waiting for Mr. Serling to step into frame and explain it.