Invisible Again

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Sequels are a fact of life.  Movies, although some of us look to them for profundity, are made for selling.  (I guess my writing for so long with no profit from it has skewed my view a bit.)  Still, The Invisible Man Returns isn’t too bad.  In my mind, there were a set of six canonical Universal monster movies: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  In reality, each of these successful films was followed by a clutch of sequels, filling the thirties and forties—into the fifties—with monster movies.  I never really bothered with the sequels, but some of them are pretty good.  And I still haven’t seen the more recent Invisible Man, which I hear is quite good.

When I was a kid, Vincent Price represented horror like no other single person.  He had developed a persona that was lucrative and that influenced other monster boomers as well.  He was a relative unknown when he was hired for The Invisible Man Returns.  His face only appears in the last minute of the film and his voice had not yet settled into its characteristic menace tone that would make him a genre icon.  Still, the story has a typical plot for the period.  Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe is set to hang for killing his brother—they own a coal mine.  Dr. Frank Griffin, a friend of the family and brother of the original Invisible Man, believes him innocent and makes Radcliffe invisible so that he can escape the gallows.  As we all know, the problem with the invisibility drug—here duocaine rather than monocaine—is that it causes insanity.  Radcliffe discovers the real murderer before going insane, all the while being chased by police.

These “invisible” films demonstrated what special effects could become.  Shot in black-and-white, “black screen” technology was used to make Radcliffe appear headless and handless.  In fact, this movie received an Oscar nomination for the effects.  It’s not a scary film, but it’s a reasonably told story.  And the special effects really were cutting edge for 1940.  Probably somewhat scandalous for the time, Radcliffe has to undress in front of his fiancée at one point, leading the men who discovered her fainted to suppose that seeing a naked, if invisible, man could do it.  There is a subtle humor here.  Other films followed but they veered into the comedy realm.  Until the recent remake.  I guess I’ll need to add that one to my ever-growing list of must-see movies.

Two-Eyed Cyclops

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You can probably tell, if you read me regularly, that I’ve been going through an older movie kick.  A lot of these are easier to find for free on streaming services, so that’s been the path of least resistance.  So it was that I came to watch Doctor Cyclops.  I’d completely forgotten that I’d watched it about fourteen years ago.  In any case, a kind of precursor to The Incredible Shrinking Man, it’s the story of the deliberate shrinking of five people by a mad scientist with an endless supply of radium at hand.  The movie made a splash because of the use of Technicolor in a horror film (with no blood, however).  The story is a touch dull and the shrunken people (three scientists among them) spend most of their down time running around and saying very little.  They do face an alligator, which is kind of fun, and the big hand that holds the pompous Dr. Bulfinch is distinctly unnerving.  The movie received an Oscar nomination for visual effects.

There’s something distinctly enjoyable about these early sci-fi horror films that don’t explain much but nevertheless manage to employ some impressive cinematography.  The use of oversized props and forced perspective make much of this possible, perhaps making up for the simplicity of the tale.  Even by 1940 the “scientist goes mad and must be stopped” narrative was getting old.  The Second World War was underway but nuclear power wasn’t yet harnessed either for bombs or energy.  Interestingly, the source of the mad doctor’s radium is pitchblende, which one of the characters notes, is a source of uranium.  Of course, many movies were to follow where radiation mutated life forms in various ways, including shrinking them.

Coincidentally—it was a rainy Sunday afternoon—I watched the Twilight Zone episode “The Little People” later in the day.  Here was another story about the large oppressing the small.  This one, however, has a stranded astronaut who discovers the little people thinking that he is their god because he has the power to harm them.  The message here is much more profound, even if told with more brevity.  No clear motive is given for Dr. Cyclops’ work beyond his interest in pure science.  By the way, his real name isn’t “Cyclops.”  That refers to his being a giant with one eye—the latter because one of his glasses lenses gets broken.  Don’t worry, the shrunken people learn that the effect is temporary—their brush with radioactivity leaves no lasting harm.  There is, however, a decided danger to desiring to return to a “simpler time,” as Mr. Serling steps in to remind us.

History Lesson

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This blog, which has come to define me in many ways, wasn’t my idea.  A niece started it for me when Neal Stephenson suggested I should have a place for podcasting.  I still have ideas for podcasts, but finding the time to put them together (and a place to host them) has proven quite challenging.  In any case, the title, “Sects and Violence in the Ancient World,” reflected where I was at the time.  I started posting when I was 46, and now I’m over 60.  Things are bound to change a little.  From the start, I wrote about books.  Indeed, for things I’ve read since summer of 2009, I check the blog to find out when.  I also noted significant movies.  In the early days I tried to limit the posts to religion-themed topics since, well, I have three degrees in the field.

As I gradually grew comfortable discussing pop culture (generally horror), I gradually addressed movies and books without a religious bent.  It could be that I didn’t record everything I read or watched here, and that makes things before 2009 kind of a muddle.  While the muddle really began before 2005—my last year at Nashotah House.  That period was a kind of maelstrom of desperation to find a job, teaching classes, pretending to be an editor, making my way in a world unfamiliar to me and certainly unchosen.  Eventually this blog came to focus on horror movies more than religion.  Now, like my life, it’s a jumble of conflicting impulses trying to make sense of the world as an existentialist with a bit of faith.  I’m still aspiring to that mustard seed.

I’m not sure when it was that I began commenting on most movies I watched.  I’ve used movies as therapy since 2005—for some reason horror made me feel better.  Even now, when I want to remember when I saw a movie I check this blog.  Or if I want to know when I read a book.  My wife pointed Goodreads out to me in 2013, and that became another place to post on books, even if they didn’t qualify for “Sects and Violence.”  But that slushy period between 2005 and 2013 was full of books, I know.  In addition to movies, I read incessantly.  If I want to remember when I read what, however, I’ve only got the last decade really covered.  Goodreads says I’ve read about a thousand books since 2013.  For movies, I have no way of knowing how many I’ve seen.  Or where, for the most part.  Maybe I need to start keeping a proper diary.  Maybe one with a lock and a key.

Under Bite

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Religion and horror have long been bedfellows.  And quite companionable ones at that.  I’ve written a longer piece that I’ve not yet managed to wedge into a book about how the earliest Universal monster movies all involve religion in some way.  Maybe some day it will come out into the light.  In the meantime, I submit, for your consideration, The Cult of the Cobra.  This 1955 horror film was one of a series of movies about shapeshifting.  We’ve recently seen The Leopard Man on this blog, and before that Cat People.  Cult of the Cobra, set in amorphous “Asia” to start, involves the invented religion of the Lamians.  A group of US Airmen pay a Lamian to watch a woman transform into a cobra in an “Asian” ritual.  They’re revealed by trying to take a photograph—they’d been warned that if they were discovered the cobra would hunt them down and kill them.

Convinced this is all superstition, despite one of them dying the next night from a cobra bite, they return to New York City and civilian life.  The cobra woman follows them to carry out her mission.  She’s killed, however, before getting the last two.  What’s so interesting here is the discussion of belief that takes place throughout the movie.  Americans can’t believe in some “cult”—it’s clear from the start that anything not western is cult—but none of them show any inclination to church, or crosses, or even references to God or the Bible.  The only religion shown is that of the Lamians.  The cobra woman falls in love with one of the Airmen and tries to explain that she’s coming to doubt something she’s believed all her life.  She’s caught between religious duty and the experience of falling in love.

The movie failed to impress critics and was largely dismissed as a knock-off of Cat People.  There’s too quick a judgment here, however.  One of Universal’s earlier monsters had encountered a non-western religion but became much more famous for it.  The Mummy was based on “ancient Egyptian” religion.  Indeed, the whole story is premised on it.  The Cult of the Cobra, however, engages with the religion.  As jingoistic as it is, it nevertheless tries to represent “the cult” as a religion taken seriously by an exotic group of believers.  “Lamians” seems to have been borrowed from Greek mythology, however, where lamia were demon-like devourers of children.  I write about them in Nightmares with the Bible.  This isn’t a great movie by any stretch, but it shouldn’t be dismissed either.  It’s an important piece of the puzzle of how religion and horror interact in film.

Revisiting Witch Mountain

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Suspension of disbelief is essential for many movies.  When a friend pointed out that Disney had rebooted Witch Mountain, of course I suspended.  Recast as a new millennium-style action sci-fi movie, it really didn’t rock the critics, but there’s a lot going on in it.  Shall we start at the beginning?  The opening credits sympathetically establish the reality of UFOs as alien visitors to Earth.  In other words, we know from the beginning that the kids are aliens, not witches.  And the chasing begins immediately and doesn’t let up.  Not only is the government after the kids, so is a “bounty-hunter”/“terminator” from their home planet.  A body-building cab driver and an ostracized academic (with you there!) work to get the kids back to their ship, which is being held by said government in Witch Mountain.

In a nod to the original an RV is thrown in, and the setting at a Los Vegas UFO convention ads a kind of surreal twist. That’s what was kind of disturbing, in my experience—the blending of “nut job” UFO enthusiasts and the reality aspect prompted by the prologue.  UFOs, like most things in American culture, have become extremely divisive.  With nods to everything from The X-Files to Close Encounters, and many enthusiastic high-fives to Star Wars, there are mixed messages and there’s too much going on.  It’s difficult to process.  The cameo by Whitley Strieber was a nice touch.  Long gone are the locals with shotguns trying to find witches.  Witch Mountain itself is a government facility more secure than Area 51.

The reimagining of the story is signaled by the change of title to Race to Witch Mountain.  So the story seems to have gone off the rails at some points.  I always find movies where people faced with the obvious “supernatural” simply refuse to believe, fascinating.  It is, after all, about belief.  The plot, with its “our planet is dying—yours is too” message, is a bit tricky to decipher.  There are those convinced that we need to abandon Earth to other worlds where we can continue our acquisitiveness unhampered, and those who believe we should repair the damage here.  As I say, everything is divisive.  Overall, the movie seems to say that the system kinda works, so let’s keep with it.  And wreck lots of stuff along the way.  I couldn’t help but notice the borrowed trope from Pirates of the Caribbean, “You’re a good man, Jack.”  It seems Jack is a favored protagonist name.  And strange things like that happen on planet Earth, at least seen through the Disney lens.

Number Six

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Signing a book contract always makes me happy.  There’s a validation to it.  Someone thinks my thoughts are worthwhile.  And now I can reveal what it’s about.  Regular readers likely already have some inkling, due to the number of times I referenced Sleepy Hollow over the past couple of years.  I’ll provide more details closer to the time, but it struck me back when working on Holy Horror that few resources exist for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” despite its status as such a well-known story.  An agent or two agreed with me that the topic was good but they really weren’t sure it was a commercial project.  This despite the fact that Lindsey Beer is slated to write and direct a reboot of the famous 1999 movie.  It seemed that a book on the topic available at the time might sell.

John Quidor, The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

I tried a number of independent publishers that don’t require agents.  I learned that most of them won’t even reply to your emails.  It seems that to get published by any trade publisher you have to be already famous.  Or maybe my idea’s just not good.  Weird.  Finally I found a university press that thought it might be a good fit, and it occurred to me that McFarland, who recently dropped the price on Holy Horror, would be a good press for this kind of thing.  McFarland made an offer first, and yesterday they sent a contract.  Hopefully the book will be out next year.

This is quite a personal project.  The story is one of my early memories—most likely due to the Disney version of the story, and most likely as seen on television.  My treatment is, as in all of my books, idiosyncratic.  I look at things differently than other people do.  And I’ve been looking at Sleepy Hollow for half a century or so, and I’ve read quite a lot about Washington Irving and the Hudson Valley.  I don’t want to say too much since others write more swiftly than I do and some presses speed books along.  For the time being I can enjoy that rare feeling of having a book contract and an editor who’s excited about my project.  I do hope that the next book, number seven, might find a trade publisher.  What’s it about?  Well, I’m working on two at the moment, and it depends which reaches book length first.  And I can’t say anything since someone may scoop me.  So I’ll just bask a little bit before starting another work day.

Camp Tingler

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I don’t remember in which magazine where I saw the still, but I was immediately intrigued.  I didn’t know the movie it was from and in the days before the internet, when you live in a small town, avenues for finding the answer were few.  I just knew it was a photo of a woman in a bathrobe next to a bathtub filled with some opaque fluid (presumably blood), from which a hand was reaching out to her.  Or at her.  I don’t even recall when or how I learned that the scene was from the gimmick-driven William Castle film, The Tingler.  I’d heard of the movie before, but I hadn’t connected the scene with it.  No matter how you slice it, the story of the movie makes no sense.  That doesn’t stop it from being fun.  I’ve seen it before but had to refresh my memory.

I hadn’t recalled, for example, that Dr. Chapin (Vincent Price) uses LSD to try to get scared.  While the dialogue isn’t great, there are many observations on fear and how adults outgrow it.  Chapin wants to find the physical root of fear and drops some acid (apparently the first cinematic depiction of LSD use) to enhance the experience.  Although it’s crucial to the plot, I also didn’t remember that Martha Higgins can’t hear or speak.  Interestingly, she co-owns a silent movie theater and she’s a silent character in a sound movie.  She’s also the only character involved in the two color shots in a black-and-white film.  She remains in grayscale herself in these scenes.  In other words, there is some sophistication here.  And of course, Vincent Price was always classy.

Camp is an aesthetic that I appreciate but, like a tone-deaf person, don’t always recognize.  The Tingler has become a camp classic.  Many people know that Castle had vibrators installed in select theater seats so that some audience members would “tingle” at appropriate places.  This was the “Percepto” advertised with the movie.  Having himself introduce the film as too terrifying—echoing back to Frankenstein in 1931—Castle guaranteed the movie wouldn’t be taken seriously.  There’s nothing scary about this horror film.  Speaking for myself, I spent too much time trying to figure out what happened to poor Mrs. Higgins—yes, her husband’s trying to scare her to death but then she has hallucinations as if Dr. Chapin gave her the LSD instead of taking it himself.  It doesn’t make sense, but it’s fun.  I guess that’s the definition of camp.

Campus Monster

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Universal was the studio that gave America its monsters.  Well, it wasn’t Universal alone, but the initial—almost canonical—line-up of monsters were Universal productions.  As horror grew to be more influenced by science-fiction in the 1950s, Universal kept at the monster-themed movies, cranking out many that I missed and on which I’ve been trying to catch up.  Monster on the Campus is interesting in a number of ways.  Directed by Jack Arnold, of Gilligan’s Island fame (or future fame, since this movie was earlier), it’s a story built around evolution.  Pipe-smoking professor Donald Blake has a coelacanth delivered to his lab.  Unbeknownst to him, the prehistoric fish had been irradiated with gamma rays to preserve it—as well as being shipped on ice.  The dead fish is about to create problems.

A dog laps up some of the blood (it started to thaw) and becomes a vicious evolutionary throwback.  Then Professor Blake cuts himself on a fish tooth and sticks his hand in the contaminated water.  He becomes a murderous caveman, but the effect is only temporary.  A dragonfly eating the fish transforms into a prehistoric insect that the professor kills, but its blood drips, unnoticed, into his pipe.  He changes and murders again.  Finally it dawn upon him that he was responsible for the murders.  In a remote cabin he sets up cameras and injects himself with the radioactive coelacanth plasma and ends up killing a park ranger.  Finally, he injects himself so that following police officers will shoot him to death.  Rather a bleak story.

The film has been read as social commentary since its “rediscovery,” but what caught my attention was the easy acceptance of evolution.  This was the late fifties and the creationist backlash was still pretty strong at the time.  If evolution didn’t occur, the professor (and dog and dragonfly) couldn’t have become their atavistic selves, giving the movie its plot.  The classic Universal monster of the decade was the Gill Man—aka Creature of the Black Lagoon—also an atavistic throwback to an earlier time, but also a divergent branch of evolution.  Creature was also directed by Jack Arnold, but four years earlier.  It began with a quote from Genesis 1, bringing creation and evolution together.  The title Monster on the Campus offers many possibilities for co-ed mayhem, but instead opts for a scientist who gets caught up in the tangle of evolution.  The movie was near the end of Universal’s monster run, but in the sixties horror would change forever.  This was a little fun before things got serious—horror school was about to start.

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.

An Interesting Prize

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If you’re born without it, you get by any way that you can.  Capital, that is.  Those of us who inherit nothing but active minds don’t stand a chance, really.  Without connections or the cash to draw others in, we tend to be scrappy.  And cheap.  This is probably the reason I’m drawn to characters like Ed Wood, and those who started American International Pictures.  I get the sense that Mark Thomas McGee must be an interesting guy.  After all, he met some of his idols when he was young.  Fast and Furious: The Story of American International Pictures is available in a second edition, I know, but I tend to find first editions fresher.  They say what’s really on an author’s mind.  Besides, used books have their own charm.

Although American International Pictures (AIP) was early on known for fast shooting schedules and cheap effects, it eventually started to earn some mainstream respectability before the company being acquired by Filmways.  Along the way they engaged some famous champions of cheap, such as Roger Corman.  A number of films discussed in this book were part of my childhood.  And as someone who’s always had to live cheaply (I just don’t comprehend finance), I found this an extremely hopeful book.  Some of these folks never became famous in the lifetimes, but they left a legacy.  And that’s a worthy goal.  I suspect that for those of us who can’t break into mainstream publishing, blogging is about building a legacy.  What some of us want, however, is to appear in print.

And I mean in print.  The book is an object.  I bought this one used.  I sometimes find interesting things in used books.  The former owner of this one (a McFarland hardcover!) carefully glued postcards of AIP movie posters to the covers and endsheets.  They didn’t put their name in it, but they (in pencil) ticked off the movies, presumably that they’d seen, from the filmography.  This is a person after my own heart.  I tend not to write in most books anymore, realizing that someday someone will probably sell them and, hey, it’s hard enough to make money in the book business.  But this personalization is something you can’t find in an ebook.  No, a book is meant to be held and loved.  This one clearly was.  As publishers chase more and more after electronic and audio books (the latter of which are also electronic) and learning moves from reading to watching, we’re losing something.  They’re called books, and they bear their own meaning.

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.