Ghoulish

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Frankenstein made Boris Karloff a wanted man.  In horror, that is.  In need of a fix without spending anything, I took Amazon Prime’s offer of The Ghoul.  (You had to pay for Sleepaway Camp III.)  A 1933 black-and-white horror film, it followed two years after Karloff’s signature role.  I hadn’t heard of The Ghoul before, and, it turns out, there’s nothing supernatural about it.  Still, it’s creepy and it has the right atmosphere.  And instead of the mummy Karloff played the year before, he’s now a dying Egyptologist.  Just before he dies, he purchases, with nearly his entire fortune, “the eternal light,” a jewel that will bring him into an Egyptian afterlife.  An Egyptian Sheikh, however, wants the jewel back because he believes in Egyptian religion, just as Karloff’s Professor Morlant does.  An unscrupulous servant steals the jewel once Morlant dies, although the professor warned him that if he tried anything, he (the professor) would rise from his grave and kill him.  The heirs find out that their uncle has died and his shifty lawyer, who wants the jewel for himself, races to the house before they can arrive.  Add in a vicar who believes paganism in Britain is disgraceful, and you have a full house on the night Morlant rises from the dead.

The servant, now believing that his master has indeed arisen, confesses to where he put the jewel, which leads to Morlant stalking the party in the house until he finds it.  The heirs dismiss the vicar, who keeps saying the clash of religions is important.  The Sheikh tries to find Morlant, aware that he has recaptured the jewel.  The heirs go to the tomb to sort out what is going on, and Morlant, cutting an ankh into his chest with a knife, offers the jewel to a statue of Anubis, who takes it.  It turns out “Anubis” is really the “vicar” who was really a thief who’d planned the heist some time before.  The police, whom the heirs called, arrive before the Sheikh, who took the jewel and locked the rest of them in the tomb, can get away.  A bit complicated, I know.

The movie makes heavy use of religion and dialogue about religion for an early horror film.  It ends sadly for Morlant, who dies believing he is entering the eternal light, but, as a scene of the doctor makes clear, Morlant was buried alive because of catalepsy; he never arose from the dead in the first place.  The Sheikh, subdued, England is Christian again, and all is well.  Except for Morlant, the duped professor who believed what he’d studied was true.  The ghoul (the term before zombie caught on) wasn’t real after all.

I’m glad to have happened upon this one.  If I ever get around to writing my book on how horror and religion interact, The Ghoul will surely be among the early films that must be discussed.

Black Bird

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Although we prefer typecasting—it’s so much easier!—Edgar Allan Poe had both depth and width as a writer.  He penned funny as well as scary, love poems and detective stories, even something like a scientific treatise.  One thing I’m sure he didn’t anticipate was his name being suborned for cheap horror movies.  Roger Corman is a Hollywood legend—a good example of a guy making it in the film industry on his own terms.  He paired Vincent Price with a number of Poe titles that had little to do with the actual works of the writer.  One that oddly stayed with me since childhood is The Raven.  This was well before I’d read the poem.  It’s funny how very specific things will stick in your mind.  I remembered the strange hat Price wore.  And I remembered—misremembered, actually—Price using a spinning magical device with sparklers.  Misremembered because that was Peter Lorre’s character, not Price.

That was it.  I didn’t remember that Boris Karloff was also in the film.  I was too young (as was he) to recognize Jack Nicholson as well.  Although I watched The Twilight Zone, I didn’t realize the script was by Richard Matheson.  This film was loaded with talent, but it really was goofy.  I recollected Price was a magician, but I didn’t know this was a rather silly battle to become chief magician.  Lorre’s ad libbed lines were surprisingly funny, even after all these years (I was about one when the film came out).  Surprisingly, the movie did well at the box office, despite its taking a sophomoric approach to perhaps Poe’s most serious poem.  

I’d avoided watching it again for all these years because of that sparkler scene.  I’m not sure why that particular moment wedged itself so firmly in my young brain.  It seemed so not Poe that I couldn’t get back to the movie, apparently.  With Price and Lorre camping it up—Karloff was, by all accounts, most professional as an actor—and Nicholson uncharacteristically timid, the cheap special effects, it’s obvious that viewers enjoyed a good laugh at this one.  It’s not true to Poe, of course.  It’s true to Roger Corman, however, a filmmaker who knew how to deliver cheaply and quickly and still earn some money at it.  I’d last seen The Raven about half a century ago.  I may be tempted to watch it again, after having seen it as an adult, but if I wait too long I’ll need to leave that duty to someone who’s read this and who isn’t afraid of sparklers. 

Black Sabbath

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I used to be afraid of them.  The band Black Sabbath, I mean.  I heard the songs from Paranoid wafting from my older brother’s room (separated from mine by only a curtain) and was secretly intrigued.  But the name of the band—wasn’t that satanic?  To a young Fundamentalist there was much to fear in the world.  More than once I bought Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare only to replace the copy I’d thrown away in evangelical terror.  I recently learned, however, the the band name Black Sabbath was taken from a 1963 horror movie.  And I also learned that the film was, in part, based on a Russian vampire story by Leo Tolstoy’s second cousin Alexei, titled The Family of the Vourdalak.  And that this story was published decades after Tolstoy’s flop, The Vampire.  That novel was inspired, in turn, by John Polidori’s The Vampyre.

Polidori’s work was inspired by a fragment by Lord Byron, which he contributed to the ghost stories putatively told among friends a stormy night in Geneva that also led to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  Connections such as this are immensely satisfying to me.  Although I taught mainly biblical studies, my training was in the history of religions—it just happened to focus on ancient semitic examples.  Finding the history of an idea is one of the great pleasures of life.  But we’ve left Black Sabbath hanging, haven’t we?  The band realized something that Cooper would run with, namely, horror themed songs and metal go naturally together.  Such dark things led evangelicals to condemn the whole enterprise, claiming the band name was satanically inspired.  (Michael Jackson, raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, was famously fond of horror, although Thriller is perhaps the least scary horror-inspired album ever.)

I’d never seen Black Sabbath before, so now I had to watch it.  Of course, there’s nothing satanic about it.  An Italian, French, American collaboration, it’s a set of three stories bound together by Boris Karloff’s narration, and it’s all in Italian.  One story is about a woman double-crossed but saved by an estranged friend.  The second, the one featuring Karloff, is the one based on Alexei Tolstoy’s Russian vampire tale.  The third is about a poor woman who steals from a dead patron and is haunted until the inevitable happens.  Not particularly scary, the film title was the inspiration for the band, not the content.  They were therefore labelled satanic because of a movie that has nothing to do with satanism.  The song “Black Sabbath” was actually inspired by Dennis Wheatley novels, which do, of course, deal with satanism.  The song itself isn’t satanic.  They decided to make songs like horror films in music.  And it all goes back to Lord Byron and the night near Geneva that inspired both Frankenstein and Dracula.

Terror Able

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Saturday afternoons were made for B movies. After a hectic week, nothing soothes like grainy picture quality and poor dialogue. This weekend offered a chance to view The Terror. This 1963 Roger Corman film won its bad marks the honest way – by earning them. Nevertheless with Jack Nicholson playing against Boris Karloff and a plot so convoluted that I had to draw a chart to figure out what I’d just watched, the movie lived up to its grade. Throw in Francis Ford Coppola as an associate producer and it’s party time. Corman’s legendary cheapness and fondness for disproportionate claims of scares that never materialize only add to the charm. After watching the opening sequence one gets the distinct impression that Franklin J. Schaffner had watched this film before setting up the climatic scene of Planet of the Apes.

In keeping with a recent trend on this blog, the plot involved a witch. An old woman from Poland resettles in France to avenge her murdered son. The crone casts a spell transforming a bird into a beautiful young woman. The first words of the spells sent me fumbling for the “rewind” button. “Tetragrammaton, tetragrammaton,” the old woman intones to begin her spell. In a movie fraught with dialogue problems, this might be considered simply a choice of foreign-sounding, mysterious syllables to be uttered for an audience not expected to know that tetragrammaton is the title of the sacred four-letter name of Yahweh. By this point the plot was so convoluted that making God the agent behind a pagan curse seemed almost natural.

The analog with the Bible soon became clear. The Bible holds its sway over many because of its often beautiful rhetoric. Sparing the time to study what the rhetoric might have meant in its original context is an exercise few believers can afford to undertake. Our world has become so full of things that taking time to explore the implications of one’s religion must compete with ever increasing Internet options, thousands of channels of television, and plain, old-fashioned figuring out how to get along. Religion is a luxury item and, as experience tells us, it is best not to look too closely at luxuries – their flaws too readily appear upon detailed inspection. Allowing religion its exotic sounding mumbo-jumbo preserves its mystery and power. And if a witch says a theologically freighted word we can just chalk it up to entertainment. We are too busy to examine what our religions really say. Roger Corman may have unintentionally discovered a real terror in a movie that will keep no one awake at night.