Teaching Horror

Leave a comment

Critics who complain that Aislinn Clarke’s The Devil’s Doorway has nothing new really have no appreciation for parables.  An Irish found-footage film, The Devil’s Doorway is, as it clearly states, a lament over the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland.  I’d never heard of these institutions that existed until less than 30 years ago.  Founded by the Catholic Church, these “asylums” were places where women in trouble were essentially treated as slave labor.  Women, who often have difficulty hiding the results of sexual promiscuity (something men more easily get away with), were put to work in these reformatories.  I don’t know if the conditions were as bad as presented in the movie, but they provide a springboard into a perfectly serviceable horror film.  The horror tropes may be familiar, but that’s true of most horror of these days.

Two priests are sent to a Magdalene Laundry to investigate a reported miracle of a bleeding statue of Mary.  Please pardon my invocation of Alice Cooper here, but “Only Women Bleed” would be appropriate to consider.  Fr. Thomas, older and skeptical, doesn’t believe in miracles while Fr. John, the “techie” (it’s set in 1960) films the proceedings.  The priests uncover layer after layer of hypocrisy and deceit.  The Mother Superior, who shows no deference to the priests, insists that many of the pregnant women that have passed through the asylum were impregnated by clergy.  But there’s more.  As the statues bleed, a young woman, a pregnant virgin, is found kept in a dungeon.  Ghosts of murdered children cavort through the night.  A satanic niche for a black mass is discovered.  And the pregnant virgin is also possessed by a demon.  There’s a lot going on here.

To mistake all of this as “just a horror movie” is to miss the point.  Such is the way with parables.  Clarke, the director, was an unwed mother at 17 who realized that, had this happened a few years earlier, she could well have found herself confined to a Magdalene Laundry.  The movie doesn’t, it seems to me, condemn Catholicism per se.  For example, the two priests documenting the activities seem to be good people.  Fr. Thomas, as it turns out, had been born in this selfsame institution.  Raised as an orphan, he became a priest who, not surprisingly, doesn’t believe in miracles.  He too, was a victim.  Religious horror serves many purposes.  Often the very unfamiliarity of religion itself can drive the fear.  Another purpose, however, is to educate.  The Devil’s Doorway educated me, and I appreciate the parable.

Horror Homework

Leave a comment

If you write about horror movies, you have to do your homework.  Of course, this means time away from house work (the weeds love all this rain and hot weather) and regular work (which can’t be compromised).  Mario Bava has often been cited as one of the influential horror auteurs, but until this year I’d not knowingly watched any of his films.  So, homework.  I saw a list of movies that made an impact, and one of them was Blood and Black Lace.  It’s horror of the giallo subspecies, never my favorite.  But it was free on a commercial streaming service, so, well that homework’s not going to do itself!  This isn’t generally considered Bava’ best work.  Besides, giallo is murder-mystery and I prefer monsters.  Who wouldn’t?

This film, with its lurid colors and stylistic cinematography, does make an impression.  The acting is poor and the script even worse—apparently it didn’t lose anything in translation.  A crooked couple run a fashion salon.  (There will be spoilers, so if you’re sixty years out of date, be warned.)  One of their fashion models is murdered, but when another discovers her diary the body count mounts.  The film lingers over the murders, which, I suppose, is one of the reasons it’s classified as horror.  With the film’s problems, however, at least this far removed, the whole thing begins to look rather silly.  The women have to die because of the first woman’s diary.  The police are singularly ineffectual, not even taking standard kinds of precautions.  Even with a run time of only 88 minutes it felt too long.

Horror in the sixties was still finding its way.  I’ve been watching a number of movies from that era—generally considered a dry spell for American-made horror—and the results have been interesting.  There are some gems tucked in amid the gravel.  What we’ve grown to appreciate in more contemporary horror cinema learned a lot of lessons from these early exemplars.  I could see foreshadowing of Suspiria here.  I’ll need to do more homework to find other direct descendants, though.  Blood and Black Lace suffers from having too few characters you get to know well enough.  The models, who all seem to have some secrets, die off before we get to know them.  Even the criminal pair behind the killings die in the end.  There’s a kind of nihilism to the story, and it’s all done for love of money.  The story could’ve been better, but you have to start somewhere when growing a genre.  And doing homework.

Deep Woods

Leave a comment

The output of female horror directors tends to be thoughtful.  And there are some legitimately terrifying scenes in Lovely, Dark, and Deep.  Nobody, however, has posted a Wikipedia entry on Teresa Sutherland.  At least not yet.  This movie is obviously aware of David Paulides’ work.  It went by a little quickly, but I think one of his books even made it into the film.  Lovely, Dark, and Deep is set in the fictitious Arvores National Park in California.  (Interestingly, the movie was filmed in Portugal.)  Lennon is a newly hired park ranger with what she thinks is a secret.  Her motivation is to search for her sister, who went missing in the park when they were kids.  If you like movies with flashlights in the forest at night, this is your film.  

Lennon discovers  that she’s not the only one with secrets.  Many people have gone missing in the park and the rangers know about it.  Some entity that they can’t identify requires people to be left behind.  There is a quid pro quo relationship involved.  If one of the taken ones is rescued, a substitute must be left.  Lennon learns that her sister was one of those taken, and once taken a person can’t come back.  They live in a nightmare world while their family and friends have to deal with the loss.  Lennon has trouble accepting this arrangement, but there is nothing to be done about it except pretend you don’t know it’s happening.

The movie gets its teeth from the fact that many people do go missing in National Parks.  And, as Paulides suggests, there is no public register kept.  Some who are found are often inexplicably miles from where they went missing, or their bodies are found in areas already thoroughly searched.  This is obviously a great concept for a horror film.  Sutherland, who wrote as well as directed the movie, has the makings of an art horror auteur.  Lovely, Dark, and Deep hasn’t received a lot of attention yet, but I think it deserves to.  Wilderness horror films have so much potential.  Particularly for people who seldom spend any real time in the forest.  Even those of us who have braved the wilds from time to time can find it frightening.  More than that, this is a movie that makes you think.  For anyone who likes to theologize films, it definitely has the theme of sacrifice running through it.  Deep is appropriately part of the title.

Lobo

Leave a comment

Tor Johnson—actually Karl Erik Tore Johansson—became famous but not rich.  Such was the fate of some early horror actors, including Bela Lugosi.  Johnson hung out, however, with the low-budget crowd, making the most of his size to take on a kind of “enforcer” role.  One of his recurring characters was “Lobo.”  Lobo served mad scientists and had very little of his own brain power.  He often had few, or no lines to learn.  Having watched The Beast of Yucca Flats, in which he starred, I decided to see if The Unearthly was any better.  The production values were certainly higher, but this was an earlier film by a different crew.  It’s more like the standard fare you expect for a late fifties horror show.  It features a mad scientist, and Lobo is, of course, the servant.

Dr. Charles Conway believes he has found the way to eternal life.  It’s attained by transplanting a new gland into a human being.  The problem is, it hasn’t worked so far.  Like a true mad scientist, Conway is convinced that it will work, it’s just a matter of try, try again.  And why advertise for willing subjects when you can have a local crooked doctor send you patients with various personality disorders, and no families, so that you can experiment on them?  With slow-moving Lobo as his only security system, Conway carries on until a sting operation catches him red-handed.  There’s really not much to this story.  It doesn’t have the inspired inanity of an Ed Wood production, but then, it hasn’t really grown a cult following.

My reason for watching was Tor Johnson.  Before I was born he’d attained the status of the model of a best-selling Halloween mask, based on his monster roles.  This seems to indicate that his oeuvre was well known, despite the kinds of movies he was in.  A large man who’d aged out of “professional wrestling,” Johnson had many uncredited movie roles before hooking up with Ed Wood.  He was featured in three of Wood’s films, including the infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space.  He’s part of a crowd surrounding the under-funded, independent filmmakers of an intriguing era before modern horror really came into its own.  The Unearthly, where his famous line “Time for go to bed” is spoken, suffers from banality and has become pretty obscure.  I personally wouldn’t have known to look for it had it not been for the fact that Johnson was in it, dragging it into the “must watch” category.  And that it was a freebie.

Opposites?

Leave a comment

Not having the money to subscribe, I limit myself to the daily headlines of Publishers Weekly.  When physically in the office in New York City, it circulated among editors in print form.  I do miss that.  The weekly is a great place to stay informed of what’s going on in the book world.  Interestingly, the headlines—which are often linked together newsletter-style—noted that the annual preview of religion books was on the way.  This was followed by “On the exact opposite side of the publishing spectrum, Orbit has launched its fourth imprint, Run for It, capitalizing on the horror boom.”  So there it was staring me in the face.  Religion and horror are exact opposites.  Now, I can’t expect even experts in publishing to be aware of all the trends, but the religion-horror connection has been alive and growing for a few years now and those of us who publish books in it might dispute the “exact opposite side” designation.

Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash

Horror and religion are closely related.  Many in the religion camp would want to deny that, but those who know horror know that religion quite often wanders in.  More than that, religion often drives the horror.  They’re not so much exact opposites as they are playmates.  Rather like the Bible depicts God being the chum of Leviathan.  (Who is, after all, a perfectly good monster.)  While my own humble efforts are frequently overlooked, the last four books I’ve written explore different aspects of religion and horror.  This includes my forthcoming Sleepy Hollow book.

Even if you’re not a fan of horror movies, if you pay close attention religion is not the opposite of horror.  We have this mental image of religion as a pure and holy thing in and of itself.  We don’t often stop to think that religions are invented by humans.  Yes, they are often in response to what believers see as divine stimuli, but the way that they are conducted is part of our human ingenuity.  They are considered good because of their emphasis on love and positive virtues.  If you watch enough horror you’ll notice that the menace is often a threat to love.  In other words, horror too emphasizes the value of love.  It’s a perception problem that sees horror as the opposite of religion.  Simplistic categories are often necessary to get through life—that’s why we stereotype.  Those of us who like to stop and think through things can gum up the works.  Even a headline in a magazine we like can lead us to wonder about the deeper implications and the biases they perpetuate.

Singing Darkly

Leave a comment

Euro-horror has become one of the more profound sub-genres of film.  I can’t recall who it was that recommended A Dark Song—set in Wales although filmed in Ireland—but it was immediately obvious I was in for a treat.  Dealing with Gnosticism, occult, and demonic manipulation (I wish I had the script!), it takes on the big issues of death, loss, and forgiveness.  The premise begins chillingly enough.  A woman rents an isolated country house for an entire year, paying in advance so there will be no disturbances.  She brings in an accomplished occultist to let her speak to her dead son again.  The two don’t know each other and this ritual will take many months, during which they will not be able to leave the house.  Neither really trusts the other, but Joseph (the occultist) tells Sophia that she must obey everything he says if she wants the ritual to work.  Once they begin they cannot stop until it reaches its conclusion.

Sophia hasn’t revealed the real reason she wants to summon her guardian angel.  She wants revenge on those that used the occult to murder her son.  The truth Sophia kept from Joseph requires them to restart, so he drowns her in the bathtub and then uses CPR to revive her.  As they grow increasingly tense, a fight breaks out where Joseph is accidentally impaled on a kitchen knife.  With only bandages and whiskey to treat the wound, they press on, but Joseph dies leaving the ritual unfinished.  Sophia can’t escape but after being tormented by demons, her guardian angel arrives.  Her request is actually wanting the ability to forgive.

This profound story has many twists along the way, but a scene that I would like to consider is where Joseph tells Sophia “Science describes the least of things… the least of what summat is. Religion, magic… bows to the endless in everything… the mystery.”  The suggestion that science is indeed correct, but limited.  Religion goes beyond science, however, to the world of possibility.  The movie suggests these two worlds intersect.  After Joseph dies Sophia can’t escape that other world until its rules have been met.  And when she does reenter the world of science, what happened in the world of magic has lasting effects on her.  A Dark Song is one of those movies that will haunt you after watching.  The Euro-horror of the last decade or so has been incredibly profound, showing the promise of what horror can be.

Second Peak

3 Comments

It all started with The X-Files.  You see, we hadn’t watched television since about 1988.  Part of that was practical—we couldn’t afford cable and then when we landed at Nashotah House there was no cable service anyway.  Bouncing from job to job after that, when money was tight, we figured cable was a luxury we weren’t used to anyway.  Then came DVDs.  I should also say that my family heard other people talking about certain shows—some of them quite good—but we hadn’t seen them.  Then we decided to watch The X-Files.  This was followed by Lost.  Then the X-Files again.  On my lonesome I watched Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  But people had talked a lot about Twin Peaks.  Curiosity got the best of me.  We decided to see what it was about.

I knew that Chris Carter had cited various inspirations for The X-Files.  Kolchak was a major one, but another was Twin Peaks.  It helps to have watched a David Lynch movie or two before jumping into the deep end here, but the first season (it only lasted two) started out like a regular drama.  Like Northern Exposure, it had quirky characters.  Then after a couple episodes paranormal aspects began to appear.  Things were not what they seemed in Washington.  It turned out to be an evil spirit possessing people in the town.  Laura Palmer’s murder was more or less solved.  Dale Cooper, however, had been trapped in the Black Lodge in the cliff-hanging end of the second season.  We then watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at the point it settled in the sequence.  Like the aforementioned X-Files, a reboot occurred many years later and the DVD set we had included the renewed season.  Things really get weird there.

It turns out that we had indeed missed some good television during those Nashotah House years and later.  Actually, doctoral years and later—Twin Peaks originally aired when we were living in Edinburgh, so we had a legitimate excuse.  Boomers, particularly late boomers, grew up with television.  As an adult (so I’m told) I can see that television had a big influence on my life, even though I stopped watching in my late twenties.  Do I understand all of what happened in Twin Peaks?  Of course not.  Then again I scratched my head after watching Eraserhead too.  The first of David Lynch’s movies I saw was Dune, which, unfortunately, wasn’t that good.  I’ve come to trust him, however, and I suspect that telinema will lead me to watch more of his films.  And we’ll probably be on the lookout for other television we missed, that, in retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have.

Fire Walking

1 Comment

Telinema is a strange place.  (This is my word for television and cinema, since apparently no such term exists.)  My wife and I have been making our way through Twin Peaks.  We missed this when it first aired, being somewhat preoccupied living in Scotland.  As with most telinema involving David Lynch, there’s quite a lot to ponder.  (I’m less familiar with Mark Frost’s oeuvre.)  The show only ran for two seasons, but as often happens with substantial short-run shows like this, it became classic in retrospect.  Lynch had made movies before, and the initial series was like watching a several-hour film.  Then the movie came.  Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me tells the backstory of what had happened before the series began.  Like the X-Files, you kind of need to interlace the movie in with the series.  So we have.

Knowing me, I’ll probably write up a reaction after watching the third season, but I want to reflect a little on telinema.  Visual media have been around at least since cave drawings were first made and their power recognized.  People are captivated by images.  When movies started, they were short and sprinkled in with other entertainments until the idea of a feature-length film developed.  If you were going to spend an hour or more with a movie, there had to be a story.  (Some of those stories, early on, seemed to involve quite a lot of pedestrian activities, of course.)  Then television happened.  Movies could be shown on TV and movies could be made specifically for TV.  Then impressive series, like Twin Peaks, required a theatrical movie to get part of the story across.  They became hybrids.

Lately I’ve been realizing just how much “how a story goes” matters.  We are story-telling creatures.  Our lives are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.  And some of us are obsessed with the true story.  What really happened?  Telinema sometimes makes this difficult.  Dan Curtis, for example, made House of Dark Shadows—a theatrical movie—as a version of what he’d already produced in television land as the daily Dark Shadows.  Since there’s no word doing the work telinema does for me, I’m not quite sure how to search to see what the earlier examples might be.  The point is a compelling story will draw fans.  And being visual creatures we’ll watch if the story interests us.  Sometimes we have to watch across “platforms.”  Get out of the house into a theater to see how the story goes.  Yes, we need a word for this and we need to study just how far we’ll go for a story.

Small Things Grow

2 Comments

I’ve always been fascinated with origins.  I guess I’m a kid who never grew up.  Now that I’ve turned my attention to movies, I sometimes wonder about the origin of the story.  For example, The Little Shop of Horrors.  I first saw the musical movie version of 1986.  It was cute, and employed horror themes like the Rocky Horror Picture Show from the previous decade.  Then, when Roger Corman died, I read that he’d filmed the story back in 1960.  Curiosity compelled me to watch the original.  Like its remakes, it’s comedy horror, or horror comedy.  But beyond that it’s a literal farce.  Roger Corman was a showman, and that means he tried different things to entertain.  One of them was Little Shop.  The idea of the plot you probably know, but I couldn’t remember the ending as I sat down to view it.  After all, it’s not meant to be taken seriously.

I have to say that the music makes it better in the remake.  The endless malapropisms and burlesque humor are funny, but really in the original they are presented as low comedy.  The Jewish humor was early on I feared might be anti-semitic, although not intended that way.  I empathize with Corman.  It took him nine months to find a company to release the film.  Ironically, it attained cult status after being double-billed as the B movie with Black Sunday, which was a quite serious attempt at horror.  Camp has a way of living on in cult status.  Of course, the early bit part for Jack Nicholson didn’t hurt.  It isn’t bad for a bad movie.

The idea of people-eating plants is a reasonable approach for a horror story.  (I’ve used it myself.)  Plants move very slowly, however, which is one reason that the idea’s hard to accept.  Even The Land Unknown had used the idea three years earlier.  But the seed was planted.  The idea of the film lead to an Off-Broadway show, which led to the more famous movie.  Then it reopened off-Broadway and a reboot was planned (but currently seems to be on ice).  Not bad for a movie based on a desire to reuse a set that was scheduled to be torn down, and then shot in two days.  Classic Corman.  The result was a bad film that is still fun to watch all these years later.  I did miss the musical numbers, however.  When you plant seeds, you never know what might grow.

Carnival Days

1 Comment

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

Leave a comment

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?

Hungry for Choice

Leave a comment

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.

Monster of Aging

Leave a comment

Movies with no likable characters, or none with any redeeming personality traits, are difficult to remain awake through.  At least on sleepy weekend afternoons.  The Leech Woman is one such movie.  It was difficult to get past the premise that an aging woman is cause for alarm among the overly entitled male characters.  Dr. Paul Talbot is disgusted by his older wife until he finds credible evidence of a concoction that will cause a person to grow young again.  Wanting her to be his experiment, he takes her to Africa where he witnesses the rejuvenating formula in person.  It requires, however, a murder to be effective.  For her victim, June chooses her husband.  The effects, however, are only temporary so June will need to keep on killing to remain young.  Each time the formula wears off she’s prematurely aged.

When she’s young again, the men around her feel it is their right to claim her, which, in a sense, provides her with a ready pool of victims.  On the other hand, it reflects attitudes beginning to die out as the sixties began.  Many of these movies from the fifties throw in a woman to provide little more than love interest.  Sometimes these women have a profession—reporter is one that shows up occasionally, or perhaps in a military role or as nurse—but mostly they are there to find a husband and become, ideally, a housewife.  Many unrealistic men today still think that should be the case, but few jobs earn enough for the possibility of being a one-income family.  Besides, did anyone ever think to ask the women what they wanted?

Aging isn’t the easiest thing to do.  This movie plays up the stereotype that men become “distinguished” with age while women don’t.  Such unreflective outlooks on aging completely overlook things like aching backs and forgetting things that are typical for just about anyone who makes it past a certain landmark.  In fact, aging is something we all face in common, and our attitudes toward it can make all the difference.  Fortunately since this movie came out, we’ve had many role models showing us that women do retain their worth and dignity as they age, even as men do.  We are an aging population.  One benefit, hopefully, to the passing years is the accumulation of wisdom.  And that applies, no matter gender or sex.  We reach a certain age and we look back and wish we’d known then what we know now.  That takes place with generations, too.  That way we can say Leech Woman is a period piece, but that still doesn’t make it a good horror movie.

Under Bite

Leave a comment

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.

Camp Tingler

Leave a comment

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.