Fun Homework

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I recently discussed the two Kolchak movies: The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler.  In those posts I noted that I’d not grown up with Kolchak.  My reason for watching them was part of a self-assigned homework project.  You see, I’d begun watching the series online.  I realized backstory was missing, and, despite what literary critics are fond of saying, I like backstory.  After a couple of episodes I decided I needed to see the movies before moving through the rest of the series.  As it turns out, you can do the movies without the series or the series without the movie.  Regardless, I soldiered on through all twenty episodes.  This series was terribly influential for the kinds of things I eventually cottoned onto.  Kolchak was formative for the X-Files and many “monster of the week”-formatted series.  I felt like a poser having never had watched it.  This telinematic experience was good homework.

Originally a television movie produced by Dan Curtis, of Dark Shadows fame, the first film was successful enough (very successful, in fact) to cause a second one.  The second film also performed well, but instead of a planned third, ABC decided on a weekly series instead.  Only twenty episodes were aired and the run was cancelled before all the ordered episodes were filmed, or even scripted.  Still, this small franchise had a solid following and led to a number of other successful franchises in its wake.  The monsters are definitely fun, but Darren McGavin’s Kolchak does tend to get on your nerves after a while.  Even McGavin was reputedly ready to leave the show as things started to get pretty silly near the end—an animated suit of armor, a very cheap humanoid-alligator, and Helen of Troy hardly seemed conventional monsters.  

In fact, the Helen episode (“The Youth Killer”), although it had a solid premise, didn’t convince that Helen was a monster.  She prays to Hecate to steal the youth of “perfect” young people around Chicago and rejuvenates herself as the twenty-somethings age and die in a matter of minutes.  And a Greek cab driver (former Classics teacher) is the one who helps Carl crack the case.  Famous for its quirky humor, this one just seemed to have all engines fail.  Of course, the series lived on as a cult classic and can be found in a variety of media today.  I’m glad to have had this particular homework assignment.  Television had a number of influential shows in the seventies, and it feels like coming home to have caught up on one that I initially missed.  Even with Cathy Lee Crosby and a monster I just couldn’t buy.

Carnival Days

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Carnival of Souls has been receiving renewed attention of late, so I decided to watch it again to see if I’d missed something the first time.  Indeed, I had. Carnival of Souls is one of those low-budget movies that was really never considered worth much until reevaluation started to take place several years after it was released (1962).  As a snapshot of an era, it offers a view of how horror and religion interact.  The story, in case you’re unfamiliar, follows Mary Henry, a young woman who’s a professional organist.  Even here a few things stand out.  She went to college, she relies on no man to support her.  And she views church work, as an organist, to be “just a job.”  This is pretty incredible on its own, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  Her car is nudged off a narrow bridge by a couple of guys out hot-rodding.

From the beginning the viewer is clued in that she drowned, although this isn’t made explicit until the end.  She makes her way to Salt Lake City where she’s been offered a job as an organist in an Episcopal church.  She “sees dead people” and becomes fascinated by an abandoned carnival on the shore of the Great Salt Lake.  The priest at first notes that she plays music to elevate the soul.  Later, however, after the dead man she keeps seeing unnerves her, she plays eerie music on the church organ (during practice) and the priest realizes that she’s not a believer.  He fires her on the spot.  Apart from getting the ethos of the Episcopal Church about right, this in itself is interesting.  The playing of creepy music is enough to lead to the loss of a church job.

John, the guy who won’t stop trying to score with her, wonders at one point if viewing church work as “just a job” doesn’t give her nightmares.  These attitudes, from only about six decades ago, seem terribly remote by today’s standards.  Many clergy have doubts about their faith.  Many don’t really believe what their church actually proclaims.  The movie shows a society that has an almost magical view of the church.  You can probably even take the “almost” out of that last sentence.  While the Bible’s not mentioned or quoted, the idea of a lost soul finding no home in the church is a telling bit of commentary.  Intentional or not.  Carnival of Souls will never be my favorite horror movie, but it has pre-echoes of Night of the Living Dead and a sincerity that invites consideration.  I can see why it’s gained renewed interest.

A Kind of Shine

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Sometimes you just can’t not comment.  A few weeks after Donald Sutherland—known by some of us for his horror roles—passed away, Shelley Duvall has died.  It feels like the passing of an era for horror fans.  I never saw Sutherland in MASH, although I’m sure he made a good Hawkeye.  I did see him in Don’t Look Now, however, and An American Haunting.  Shelley Duvall grasped her claim to fame in The Shining, of course.  I can remember the apprehension that gripped me, after years of everyone telling me how scary it was, when I first saw it.  The Shining has its detractors, of course, but it remains one of my favorites.  That’s in no small measure due to Duvall’s portrayal of Wendy.

Duvall did other things, of course.  Since I tend to fixate on the things I like, I never followed her further career, but I did see her now and again.  She was in Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie.  For those looking forward to The Myth of Sleepy Hollow (I know I am), she’ll appear as the creator of Tall Tales & Legends.  She also created Nightmare Classics, which I have to admit to never having seen.  Although she was involved in other genres, she seemed to have a real interest in horror.  She retired from acting early in the millennium, but came out for one final film, last year.  It was the horror movie The Forest Hills.  Horror gets its hooks into you, I know.  But it keeps coming back to The Shining.  

In part it’s the claustrophobia of three people, only three, in an isolated hotel.  Of course it’s haunted as well, but the isolation premise alone is frightening.  Especially when one of the three (or maybe two) is becoming unhinged.  We live in an era of remakes and it’s possible someone will be foolhardy enough to try to remake Kubrick’s classic.  Even if it were a more faithful adaptation (Stephen King’s book is scary in its own right) it’s difficult to imagine that it could be better.  Part of it probably has to do with how Kubrick’s treatment of Duvall pushed her to the edge.  Fame has its cost.  And I suppose (since I wouldn’t know) that fame in a horror role comes with its own burdens.  Duvall went on to create things of her own.  More’s the pity that they’re not easily found either for streaming or on disc.  And things seem just a little bit quieter now, don’t they?

Book or Movie?

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I’ve read a few of Paul Tremblay’s novels.  He’s a horror writer with literary style—often a tough sell (at least in my experience.)  Horror Movie is a compelling read.  The conceit is that a group of young people decide to film, well, a horror movie.  Things go awry, but not in a funny way.  The story unfolds interlaced with the screenplay and with the overlay of the modern remake in the works.  It’s easy to get lost between the narrative account of what happened in the original shoot and what’s happening in the script.  Tremblay uses this technique very well, blurring the reality and movie aspects in a way that’s got to be intentional.  I particularly like his asides about the redeeming value of monsters.  I won’t say too much about the plot since you may want to read it yourself. It does riff on the “cursed movie” trope.

The truly remarkable thing to my regular readers will be that I finished a new book within a month of publication.  Normally I run a couple to several years behind.  And this novel contains several winks and nods to other horror movies.  It pays to know the canon.  In that sense, it reminds me of the movie Scream, one of the more self-aware horror classics.  (I have had Scream out for watching again for several weeks now, but time has a way of slipping away.)  Tremblay, like Stephen King, taught before becoming established as a horror writer.  Maybe there’s hope for some of yet!  I started writing novels in middle school—perhaps there’s still time.  That seems to be one of the themes of Horror Movie, by the way.  It has many elements of a parable.

I found Tremblay’s first horror novel, A Head Full of Ghosts, about four years after it was published.  Indeed, I was working on Nightmares with the Bible at the time, so a book about possession was appropriate.  Horror Movie is more a monster tale but it’s also about movies and reality.  This is territory I often traverse since, it seems to me, movies are more than mere entertainment.  Good ones are, anyway.  And like some other books I’ve read lately, this one is also a reflection on fame (something I wouldn’t know about).  How it’s not what it’s made out to be.  In other words, if you’re willing, Horror Movie is the kind of novel that will make you think.  I appreciate that Tremblay is giving us thoughtful horror and I’m looking forward to trying to keep up.

Hungry for Choice

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I was recently asked to speak to a senior seminar about Holy Horror (many thanks for the invite!).  One of the questions asked was how/why I chose the movies I did.  The same question applies to Nightmares with the Bible.  The thing is, my avocation is an expensive one, particularly on an editor’s salary.  The number of horror movies is vast and our time on this planet is limited, so one thing any researcher has to do is draw limits.  Otherwise you get a never-ending project (some dissertations go that way).  I had figured, for both books, that I’d seen enough movies to make the point I was trying to make.  Neither book was intended to be “the last word,” or comprehensive, but were attempts to open the conversation.  Since none of my books have earned back nearly what resources I’ve put into them, a line has to be drawn.  Movies are expensive when they get to the bottom of the “outgoes” column.

All of this is to explain why I didn’t include The Unborn in either book.  (It fits into both.)  I was aware of the movie, but I had to decide what I could afford in order to get the books written.  I confess that I wish I’d watched this one sooner.  (Remember, it’s a conversation!)   This movie has so much in it that I may break my self-imposed rule of no double-dipping for blog topics.  Or perhaps I’ll pitch something to Horror Homeroom.  The Unborn is about a dybbuk.  Like The Possession, it features a Jewish exorcism.  Like An American Haunting, a holy book is destroyed.  (The credits include a statement that no actual Torahs were harmed in the making of the film.) Interestingly, the exorcism is a joint effort between a rabbi and an Episcopal priest.  Held in an asylum.  It’s also a story about twins.

The skinny: college-aged Casey is being pursued by a three-generation dybbuk.  Her mother, who died by suicide in an asylum, had been adopted.  Casey is unaware that she was a twin, her brother having died in utero.  She discovers her birth grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, who clues her in to why all the strange things are happening to her.  Her own twin brother was possessed by a dybbuk at Auschwitz.  It is now after Casey, having caused her mother’s suicide.  The plot is pretty sprawling, and the exorcism scene over-the-top, but I’m only scratching the surface here.  There’s so much to unpack that I wish I had a bigger movie-and-book budget.  But then we all have our demons with which to struggle.

Sudden Monoliths

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Okay, so I’ve been captivated by the monoliths.  You know, the ones that even make the New York Times.  These artistic pieces show up, unexpectedly, and unexplainedly, around the world.  The trend began in 2020 in Utah, as far as anybody knows.  These shiny pillars are excellently meme-worthy and are darlings of the internet.  And their history goes back before 2020.  Even before Stanley Kubrick.  You see, most news stories point out that Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—one of the most influential movies ever made—established the idea of monoliths as being alien beacons (a favorite kind of beacon).   People instantly know what a monolith symbolizes.  Or at least they think they do.  But monoliths have so, so much more to offer.

Perhaps the most famous monoliths in the world are found at Stonehenge.  Mysterious and beautiful, this monolithic ring has captured the imagination for generations.  When my wife and I lived in Scotland, we made a point of seeing as many stone circles as we could.  Way up in the Orkney Islands the Ring of Brodgar was probably the most impressive of them, owing to, in large part, its remoteness.  Standing next to these tall monoliths makes you realize how small people are but also what they can achieve when they cooperate.  While the UK may be better known for its monolith circles, even older ones appear elsewhere.  Rujm el-Hiri, for example, in Israel.  Although not a circle, the monolithic pillars at Göbekli Tepe should be rewriting history books.  Why the monolith?

Freudians would point to Tuto Fela in Ethiopia or other phallic architecture, but my mind tends toward Rapa Nui, or Easter Island.  The human being tends to stand taller than wide.  Evolutionary biologists tell us that was to help us see over the tall grass of the savannah.  (And if you doubt grass gets that tall, visit my yard sometime in the summer.)  These monuments seem to symbolize more that the procreative architecture of male human anatomy.  They seem to point to our ability to see over the obstacles in our way.  They seem to say, when people are divided against each other the plains remain barren.  When they decide to work together, Stonehenge emerges.  I don’t know the motivations of these modern artists.  I do admire their ability to put these monoliths into remote locations without leaving evidence of how they did it.  I really appreciate those creatures that stand tall and have a spirit of cooperation, even if others just don’t see the point.

Shifting Gears

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The question’s very basic: do you pay with cash, or by watching commercials.  When it’s the same three commercials the whole way through—for products you’d never buy—just paying the cash may seem the better option.  But it’s too late for that.  It’s the Graveyard Shift.  There’s no doubt  that Stephen King is responsible for the ideas for more horror movies than probably any other single individual.  I’d read his story, “Graveyard Shift,” many years ago.  I was warned, though, that this was one of the least favorite of his adaptations, and that’s a pretty low bar.  Still, it was just a matter of sitting through the same commercials over and over.  And one of them was more entertaining than the movie.  Of course, I don’t really watch for entertainment.  This is a learning opportunity.

Let’s start with the basics: You need at least one sympathetic character.  Okay, you kinda like Jane, because she shows basic humanitarian traits.  And Carmichael.  Then you want a plot that makes some sense—what is Warwick’s motivation?  The writing is particularly bad.  If there’d been a bit more intentional camp, this might’ve made a reasonable horror comedy.  I mean, you’ve already got the empty aluminum cans being fired by slingshot.  As it is, it’s played straight with an evil foreman, rats everywhere, and a giant bat in the basement.  By the end you’re kind of rooting for the bat.  And whose idea was it to use voiceovers of the sub-par dialogue over the closing credits?  Is this so bad that it’s good?  I’m having trouble deciding.

Although set around the fourth of July I wouldn’t call this holiday horror.  Nevertheless, there are some moments of religious imagery that pop out.  The graveyard sinking in the river has a listing statue of Jesus near the start of the film.  And the exterminator—the only real camp in the flick—narrates how in Vietnam they pinned victims down, like Jesus, to feed them to the rats.  The final couple of minutes—well earned, I assure you—have Hall fighting the wicked foreman with the jawbone of an animal (one has to assume an ass), inexplicably among human bones (some still in their coffins).  And his slingshot ultimately killing the giant (bat).  The references are to Samson and David, respectively.  Perhaps this movie’s an indictment of capitalism, since the basement cleanup is on Independence Day.  Or maybe it’s just tired horror tropes on a break.  (Having one of the characters reading Ben in the diner was a nice touch.)  It may become a holiday tradition after all.

A Land Forgotten

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In case anyone’s noticed (which I doubt) that I’ve been discussing a spate of 1950s sci-fi/horror movies, I have a confession to make.  Several years ago I needed to see Tarantula.  (Anyone with similar headspace will know this need.)  The only place it was available at the time was in The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection.  Volumes 1 and 2 were sold together.  I did what I had to do.  Then I forgot I had the set before finishing volume 1.  Who knows what might’ve been going on in my life then?  Rediscovering it has been a budget-saving way to address my fix.  I had never heard of The Land Unknown before, and although it has one of the goofiest T-rexes ever, it is actually a good story.  Of course there are holes in the plot, but it is about the necessity of being humane, even when emotion dictates otherwise.

A helicopter crew on a South Pole expedition makes an emergency landing in a volcano that harbors prehistoric life in a hot spot in Antarctica.  The crew has a female reporter with them—these movies certainly have fifties attitudes about women!  Not having the parts to repair their copter, they try to survive among dinosaurs and an aggressive, giant monitor lizard.  There is another person there, the sole survivor of an earlier expedition, who’s become mostly feral.  The commander of the modern crew demands that they give him the dignity and fair treatment that all people deserve.  There’s a bit of drama around who will get the girl (again, the fifties), with the commander ultimately winning out.  How do our heroes escape this peril?  They’re able to repair the helicopter with parts from the earlier expedition’s crashed vehicle.

With its budget the special effects had to be cheap, but the story has redeeming value.  The message that we mustn’t let isolation drive us to bestiality is still as important as ever.  There are those who watch such movies solely to laugh at the special effects.  Hey, I laughed a bit too, but I’m only human!  There is, however, more to this movie than the dinosaurs, which drew audiences then just as the Jurassic Park franchisedoes now.  There’s even some serious talk about evolution, which was often present in these Universal creature features.  There are some slip-ups on the evolution part, but apparently the monitor lizards were meant to represent stegosauruses—did I mention the budget was tight?  I actually found the movie to be worth seeing for its intrinsic value.  Not bad for a forgotten set purchased mainly for one movie in a time unknown.

More Than Dark Shadows

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The Television Horrors of Dan Curtis is one of those books that makes me feel less alone.  Jeff Thompson is not only a true fan of Curtis’ voluminous quality output, but he knows more about Dark Shadows than might seem possible.  I knew I wanted to read this book as soon as I learned of it.  As I’ve confessed many times before, although Dark Shadows was formative for me, I’m a mere dabbler.  I saw a fair number of the original run on afterschool television, I read the novels, but I never dove in.  I was more of a wader.  Still, this book demonstrates that many people were influenced by Dark Shadows, some that you might not expect.  But the book is about Dan Curtis and his horror work (mostly).

Dan Curtis went on to a kind of fame for his war epics (considered “serious” work), The Winds of War and War and Remembrance.  Although he directed some theatrical movies (all of which I’ve seen), he mostly stuck to work in television.  One of the results of this is that he never attained the level of appreciation of a number of auteurs who focused on Hollywood.  And it’s also clear that Curtis was interested in more than just monsters.  I personally dislike gangster and war movies (although my great-uncle Melvin Purvis was one of his interests).  Curtis found them worth of his considerable talents.  As Thompson makes clear, however, even as his own death was approaching, Curtis knew that, like Washington Irving, his early work would be that for which he was remembered.  That’s because Dark Shadows went where nobody else dared to go, and it’s memorable even today.

I learned a lot from this book.  Enough to know that Curtis was an enigma.  He remains less recognized as a director and producer than many Hollywood personalities that are household names.  Still, if pressed, a number of people even today would recognize some of Curtis’ work, whether or not they associate it with him.  Dark Shadows went through a short television reboot, for instance, and a second reboot attempt before being made into a movie by Tim Burton.  This book, however, made me watch some movies I had only known vaguely before.  And it has inspired me to watch others as well.  Curtis was an incredibly hard worker, and a man with definite opinions.  It’s perhaps a bit surprising that he never really attained the kind of fame that other “content producers” did.  Even his Wikipedia article is brief.  This book helps uncover a large amount of information behind a person who influenced many people without the glamour associated with that level of impact.

Praying for Mantis

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Now this is a Cold War movie.  And I mean “cold.”  The Deadly Mantis is one of those movies that hovers between “so bad it’s good” and just plain “so bad.”  I was kind of rooting for the mantis.  In any case, this was an ambitious movie for the time but it reflects the post-war paranoia in the United States.  It also makes very abundant use of stock footage, much of it military.  You almost expect a recruiting ad at the end.  (It does thank the Ground Observer Corps in the closing credits.)  Okay, so here’s the story.  A volcano in the south Atlantic causes the calving of an enormous Arctic iceberg near the North Pole.   That iceberg contains the frozen body of a 200-foot praying mantis from dinosaur times.  Even earlier.   Said frozen mantis, quite hungry after millions of years, begins attacking Arctic radar bases and flying south.  The Air Force calls in a paleontologist to help identify what they’re looking for.

The mantis is so big that it prefers people for food, although, one might note, a polar bear would’ve been easier prey.  In any case, given the technology limitations of the time, the military has trouble keeping track of the insect as it flies over the most populous part of the country.  They do get the cloudiness of the East Coast about right.  Eventually they shoot it down—actually a fighter jet crashing into it does the job—over Newark and the mortally wounded mantis crawls into the Lincoln Tunnel (called “The Manhattan Tunnel” in the film).  By this point the viewer is saying “just let the poor thing die in peace,” but they pump smoke into the tunnel, presumably to hide wires and other props, and commit a protracted insecticide.  

Now, I’m one of those people who hates to hurt any animal.  The death twitches of an insect are quite troubling, so I try to catch what I can indoors and release them.  I have trouble with the instructions to kill spotted lantern flies—it’s not their fault that they’re here.  The movie shows a bravado regarding the military and a machismo regarding the main female character that hearkens back to why it was so necessary to evolve out of the fifties.  Of course, we learned nothing from The Deadly Mantis and have catapulted back into a new Cold War and an even more robust military.  William Alland, the producer, had a real love of this genre of movie, and for that we have much to be grateful.  But even the big bug genre can produce a real groaner now and then.

Cryptid Caper

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I don’t recall how it got on my fiction reading list—I probably saw it on Goodreads—but I picked it up because it was short.  And surprisingly, multiple copies were in Barnes and Noble.  Since James Daunt bought the chain out it has definitely improved.  In any case, Hunter Shea’s To the Devil, a Cryptid looked like it might be a fun romp, and if it turned out that I didn’t like it, well, it was short.  Ads in the back keyed me in that this was a part of a series of horror novels about cryptids.  Besides, I like to support publishers that aren’t part of the big five.  I’d just finished reading a five-hundred-pager, so something under two was very welcome.  The title seems to riff off the horror flick To the Devil a Daughter.  As much as I try to keep up on my cryptids, I was unfamiliar with the Goat Man.  And I did like it, by the way.

So, the real Goat Man is mostly associated with Maryland, but in Texas, where the novel is set, there is the Lake Worth Monster.  This seems a good fit for the cryptid part (whether intentional or not I don’t know).  A bunch of kids messing around with Satanism decide to sacrifice a goat in the woods where a Goat Man cryptid is said to live.  Something goes wrong and the goat fuses with a guy trying to break up the ceremony and mayhem ensues.  Lots of bodies torn apart in this version of the Lone Star State.  Still, the story is fun.  I’ve been writing cryptid fiction for years, and this may be a targeted demographic, but that doesn’t prevent this from being a good horror novel.  Particularly interesting is the resolution.  I’ll try not to give too many spoilers, but the next paragraph reveals something.

How do you stop a demonic, bulletproof Goat Man?  You call in a priest to do an exorcism.  The truly remarkable part of this is that the priest is treated sympathetically.  None of the characters are religious.  And of the two main young people who survive, you really don’t expect them to be found in church.  The story isn’t intended to be believable, of course.  The Goat Man is an urban legend.  Urban legends are often difficult to tease apart from actual cryptids sometimes.  Cryptids remind us that there’s still more to be discovered in the world.  And I may have just discovered a series of stories that work for a quick fix.

Not Poor

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It’s an amazing era for cinema.  A number of genre-defying films have emerged and some of them are quite striking.  Some months ago I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once.  Some called it horror, but that label didn’t really stick.  It reminded me of Parasite, another movie difficult to classify.  Casting about for something we might both like, my wife and I settled on Poor Things, recommended to me by a fellow horror fan.  Other than being amazed by it, I have no idea how to classify it either.  Again, there are horror elements here but it’s certainly not a horror movie.  A comedy, yes, but a dark one.  It’s a movie that has a feminist message, but one that’s been disputed.    Perhaps a quasi-summary might help.

Bella Baxter is not what she seems.  Cared for by a Frankenstein-like doctor named Godwin, she literally has the brain of an infant in an adult body and is rapidly coming to know the world.  Rescuing her just after she died by suicide, Godwin transplanted her unborn baby’s brain into her revived body to see what would happen.  Himself experimented on mercilessly by his own father, Godwin is a rationalist, eschewing emotional entanglements.  He decides to marry Bella to one of his students but before that can happen an unscrupulous lawyer steals her away only to find he can’t control her.  After gaining experience of the world, and learning life lessons in a brothel, Bella returns home to marry her fiancé and be with Godwin as he dies.  Her cruel former husband reclaims her only to have Bella realize why she’d chosen suicide in the first place.  She returns to Godwin’s home and sets up life on her own terms.

A number of things stand out.  One is Bella’s innocence and utter lack of shame regarding her body.  Emma Stone’s acting here is incredible.  Another is the nods to steampunk sensibilities in a story set in Victorian times.  Perhaps the aspect that most caught my attention was Bella’s use of “God” as her name for Godwin, frequently calling him “my God.”  Her grammatical naivety leads to much of the comedy in the film, but this particular choice is freighted with interpretative possibilities.  Obviously, one’s parents are the models one incorporates into concepts of God.  That has been long recognized.  Another, however, is that Godwin did, in fact, create her to see what she would become.  As Godwin faces his own mortality, Bella notes “God is dying.”  What happens after this is that she becomes her own woman for the first time, not under the control of men.  I’m not sure how to classify Poor Things apart from a movie that may require another watching just to attempt a classification.

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.