King and the Rest

Leave a comment

Stephen King is an author I admire, although I haven’t read all of his books.  Not even close.  Still, his cultural cachet is high, as it has been pretty much since the seventies when horror literature was first being recognized.  I’ve been fascinated by his outlook on religion, or, in broader terms, the supernatural.  Rebecca Frost approaches things from a different angle, but her Surviving Stephen King: Reactions to the Supernatural in the Works by the Master of Horror is a volume worth pondering.  Quite often, as was the case with Douglas Cowan’s America’s Dark Theologian, I haven’t read all of the books and short stories the author discusses.  Frost gives good summaries, however, which help frame the discussion.  One of the reasons I enjoy King is that he allows the supernatural in, but something I hadn’t really realized until reading this book was that the supernatural is generally a threat.

Now, knowing King as a horror writer, it’s obvious that there has to be a threat, but in what Frost explores, standard Christianity doesn’t always work well against the supernatural.  One of the points I made in my expensively-priced Nightmares with the Bible is that physically fighting a demon crosses ontological lines if demons are spiritual beings.  Frost discusses how quite often “success” in a King story involves destroying the physical aspect of the supernatural threat.  It doesn’t always work permanently, but for the protagonists, at the time, it tends to be sufficient for them to get on with their lives, sans supernatural.  Having studied religion through three degrees, this made me stop and think.  The impetus to start on that career track was the idea that the supernatural tends to be good.  Enter King.

I only started reading King after my doctorate, and I haven’t read as much as true fans, I suppose.  Still, I tend to try to analyze what I read—thus the many posts about books on this blog—and it helps to have the guidance of someone more familiar with his oeuvre than myself.  Reading books like Surviving Stephen King also gives me an idea of which of his books I should pick up, and also which I might safely avoid.  Frost is an able guide, considering the various appropriations, or Christian solutions to the supernatural, in King’s imagination, and whether they work or not.  The ideal reader for Frost has probably read King a bit more widely than me, but I still found this study enlightening.  And it added some novels to my to read list.

Carpenter Ward

Leave a comment

Surveying my streaming service for something free, I found The Ward.  It advertises itself as “John Carpenter’s The Ward,” and Carpenter has proven his mettle more than once.  I found out afterwards that this 2010 film is his last, to date.  Although it has jump startles and scary sequences, it isn’t as frightening as his best work, such as Halloween and The Thing.  The eponymous ward is a psych ward.  A young woman with amnesia is brought to the facility in 1966.  She’s somewhat violent but begins to make friends with the other four girls in the ward.  It won’t be satisfying to discuss this without a major spoiler, but I’ll try to hold off for another paragraph before giving it.  Overall the movie is creepy and atmospheric, but not really a classic.  Movies about mental hospitals have built-in scary material, and The Ward meets expectations there.

Kristen, the girl with amnesia, is resourceful and nearly escapes a few times.  She’s worried because a ghost in the asylum is killing the other girls.  Nobody will believe her, of course, since she’s an inmate.  Now the reveal: the other girls are all projections of Kristen’s personality.  Actually, Kristen’s name is Alice, and she’s been at the asylum for some time, a patient with multiple personality disorder.  The other girls that are killed by the “ghost” are part of a new therapy her doctor uses to try to get Alice back.  The other girls, or personalities, had banded together and “killed” Alice and her “ghost” is now seeking them out and killing them.  In reality, only Alice is there.  While the viewer is rooting for the other girls, they are preventing Alice from being cured.

In some ways this is similar to Split, but that would come six years later.  The horror here is the loss of self-knowledge.  The little backstory that is given shows Alice suffering trauma as a child, forcing the dissociation that leads to her split personalities.  As a horror movie The Ward has the jump scares and eerie atmosphere that often work in the genre.  There are chase scenes and a monster.  The story, however, rides heavily on that final reveal.  It really doesn’t live up to Carpenter’s full potential.  It does, however, take the final girl trope seriously.  It’s not really a surprise that it failed at the box office.  Although Split came later, other such films had been produced earlier.  What this one lacks is Carpenter’s characteristic flair.  Still, there are many other films that deliver less when they stream for free.

Monkey Shines

Leave a comment

While religion isn’t a major part of the story, it appears enough in The Monkey to be noted.  The movie presents probably the most inarticulate priest in cinema, played for laughs.  But then again, there is quite a lot of comedy in among the gore.  It’s difficult to say if the movie would’ve succeeded had it been straight horror.  Based on a Stephen King short story, the plot revolve around a toy ape, actually, a drum-playing chimp that is wound up with a key.  The problem is, when the last drum-stick comes down somebody nearby dies in a bizarre way.  As is the way in such stories, if the “monkey” (I’ll just give in and call it that) is destroyed, which it is from time to time, it keeps coming back.  When purchased by a father for his twin sons, tragedy follows until only one is left standing.  The religion comes at the funerals.

The twin sons, Hal and Bill, the main human focus of the film, hate each other.  This is mainly because Bill, the firstborn, bullies Hal, driving resentment.  They discover the monkey among their absentee father’s effects and when they wind it up they soon end up as orphans.  When it kills their guardian uncle, they put it down a well where it stays quiet for 25 years.  Bill acquires the toy as an adult and harboring resentment, believing Hal killed their mother, he sets the monkey off again in the hopes that it will kill his estranged brother.  A string of bizarre deaths occur, cluing Hal in to the fact that his brother is back at it.  Only one of them survives while the town lies in ruins.  The deaths, although gruesome, are comedic, making them bearable.

The story is dark enough that director Osgood Perkins’ decision to make it comedic appears to have been the only way to make it palatable.  Horror comedy is often difficult to pull off well.  Many such films wind up being simply silly or losing any potential to be frightening.  The Monkey manages to blend fun and fear effectively.  It also continues the long line of horror films that animate toys of various sorts, making all kinds of commentary about childhood.  Of course, this film begins with Bill and Hal’s childhood and has them learning to deal with death at an early age.  At the end even Death on his pale horse has a cameo. Handled differently, it could’ve been quite terrifying.  Especially since the religion in this world is so completely ineffectual.

Not Trembling

Leave a comment

Tremors is one of those monster movies I just plain missed.  Of course, it was released while I was working on my doctorate in Edinburgh, and although we saw some movies we couldn’t afford many.  We certainly didn’t go to any creature features.  I only found out about it because DVD extras on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds had a little debate as to whether that film was a monster movie.  They interviewed Rob Underwood, the director of Tremors, for his opinion.  A short clip was included, so I knew I’d need to see it eventually.  It took a few years, but now I can stake my claim.  Tremors is one of those quasi-funny horror movies, maybe edging into comedy-horror, but not quite.  Although not recalled as an inspiration, the story has some resemblance to Frank Herbert’s Dune.  At least as far as the monsters go.

In the remote Nevada town of Perfection, two handymen, Val and Earl, are ready to leave the population of 14 for bigger things.  But then strange deaths begin to occur.  A local seismologist has been noting unusual readings as locals find a dead creature that appears to be some kind of snake.  They want to go for help but find themselves trapped.  The seismologist and handymen try to unravel the mystery of this creature, which the handymen kill.  She (the seismologist) informs them that there are three more.  Warning their fellow citizens of the danger, the underground creatures begin attacking.  As in Dune, they “hear” people walking and use that information to hunt them.  A couple of survivalists manage to kill one of the sand worms, but the surviving townies know they have to escape to the mountains.

One of the final two monsters is dispatched with a homemade bomb, but I’ll let you watch to figure out how the last one is handled.  The movie starts out with folksy humor and nothing too serious.  When the monsters begin to attack, however, they prove relentless and give some scare to the affair.  Although the film didn’t perform especially well at the box office, it led to a franchise with sequels and a prequel (the origin of the monsters is never explained).  Filmed in bright desert sunlight, the movie isn’t typical of horror.  At the same time, it’s built around monsters, so there’s no doubt that it fits.  It probably won’t scare anyone these days, but it has become part of the repertoire, and it remains good fun on a rainy afternoon.

Q’s and P’s

Leave a comment

I finally had to break down and buy it.  Quatermass and the Pit has been on my “to see” list probably longer than any other single movie.  I managed to stream the first two of this telinema series for free, so I guess it was like getting three movies for the price of one.  Aired in the United States as Five Million Years to Earth, this isn’t the greatest sci-fi-horror movie ever, but it isn’t bad.  The pacing is a bit slow but the story is intriguing.  Rocket scientist Quatermass gets involved in the excavation of what turns out to be a buried rocket ship from Mars.  Surrounding the ship in the five-million-year-old matrix are the remains of apparently intelligent apes.  The scientists discover that the apes were artificially enhanced by insectoid martians that resemble the devil.  It’s pointed out that any time digging has taken place near Hobb’s End, strange phenomena occur.  It’s noted that Hob used to be a nickname for the devil.

This detail leads to a perhaps unexpected connection to religion and horror.  Quatermass and Barbara, a scientist who has the ability to “see” the creatures via collective memory, realize that the hauntings that have taken place around Hobb’s End for centuries may have been the image of demons, or the devil, emanating from the evil of these would-be invaders.  At one point a priest argues that their influence is essentially demonic, but the scientists realize that these modified apes are actually the creatures from which humans evolved.  All the human tampering with the ship eventually frees the spirit of the martian insects, resembling a devil.  The way to destroy it is with iron, relying on folklore which, in this instance, works.

The four Quatermass movies (I don’t plan on seeking out the last) were theatrical reshoots of television serials.  The last movie is essentially the TV series stitched together as a movie.  From at least the seventies on (Quatermass and the Pit was released in 1967) the first and third installments were considered fairly good horror films.  They aren’t always available in the United States, probably due to digital rights management.  It seems ridiculous that in this day and age that companies still restrict access, even to those willing to pay a modest fee, for movies that are essential parts of the canon.  Hammer (all three Quatermass movies are Hammer productions) films are still difficult to access in the United States.  At least, with the willingness to wait half a century, I’ve finally be able to see Quatermass and the Pit.

Dyatlov

Leave a comment

Dyatlov Pass is a name well known to paranormal enthusiasts.  With good reason.  In 1959 a group of nine experienced hikers were killed in the region now named for their leader.  Dying in the wilderness is, I suspect, not that unusual, but the circumstances surrounding these deaths were puzzling.  In the wintery mountains of Russia, some were undressed.  Three died from blunt trauma and six from hypothermia.  One victim had a missing tongue and two had missing eyes.  One least one tent had been cut out of from the inside, and one body had evidence of radiation.  While many theories abound, no satisfactory explanation has ever emerged.  Devil’s Pass is a found-footage horror movie based on this incident.  For horror, it’s low-hanging fruit.  This is a scary episode in history, whether an avalanche or wild animals, or a combination, killed the young people.

Devil’s Pass is set up as a documentary with five Americans following the same route to try to determine what really happened.  The majority of the film is the story of how they arrived at the location, anomalously hours ahead of schedule.  Along the way some kind of creature passed close by and sharp-eyed viewers can see them moving in the background of one shot.  At the place of the 1959 incident, the Russian military starts an avalanche that kills one of the women and breaks one of the men’s legs.  A couple of soldiers come, chasing the three mobile youths into a bunker, and killing the one with the broken leg.  In the tunnels in the mountain, they discover evidence of teleportation experiments—citing specifically the Philadelphia experiment—that leave people monstrous and distorted.

A bit over the top.  Still, the incident itself grows more and more bizarre when it’s examined.  I first learned of the Dyatlov Pass incident many years ago.  It would’ve never occurred to me to make a horror movie about it, but those who did made reference to pretty much all of the strange facts associated with the real incident.  As a horror film it partially works.  The last fifteen minutes or so strain any credulity, but they wrap up in such a way that they make sense of factors planted earlier in the film.  Over all, the movie is intriguing enough to retain viewers’ attention.  It was filmed in Russia, which lends it verisimilitude and it rewards those who like to speculate about paranormal explanations for events that just can’t be explained otherwise. 

Quatermass Again

Leave a comment

Quatermass, as I’ve noted before, is a name I knew from boyhood, but with no frame of reference.  Having watched The Quatermass Xperiment, and still seeking Quatermass and the Pit, I found a freebee of Quatermass 2 on a commercial streaming service.  Hammer films are notoriously difficult to find in the United States, unless you’re willing to pay serious money for them.  In any case, Quatermass 2 is a passible bad movie in the sci-fi-horror genre.  Quatermass is supposed to be a likable character, but for the film versions American “tough guy” Brian Donlevy played Quatermass in the first two movies.  But I need to take a step back.  Quatermass was a BBC television serial.  There were four series, each eventually made into movies.  The first three were reshot and the final one (The Quatermass Conclusion) was cobbled together from the serial rather than being refilmed.

Of this set of movies, The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass and the Pit are considered proper horror.  Brian Donlevy doesn’t garner a ton of sympathy in Quatermass 2.  This is mainly because of poor acting and a small budget.  Reputedly suffering from alcoholism, Donlevy has trouble with his lines and often appears curt and short-tempered (he was replaced in Quatermass and the Pit).  Even so, Quatermass 2 has monsters and some reasonably scary moments.  Here’s the story: alien invaders are taking over a secret government plant preparing for moon colonization.  Quatermass discovers the base and finds that everyone acts odd.  Interestingly, they’ve stolen his plans for the base.  The aliens take over people, body-snatcher style.  Quatermass and an angry mob manage to get into the base where the alien-infected fight them.  Eventually the huge monsters break loose and Quatermass has his own rocket converted to a bomb to destroy the mothership in geosynchronous orbit.  The infected people return to normal.

It’s fairly easy to see why few people comment on Quatermass 2.  I wouldn’t have watched it had I not stumbled across a clip showing some of its horror chops.  I’m glad, in a strange way, that I saw it.  I knew Quatermass was a telinema [link to Fire Walking]  product, but I wasn’t quite sure how the television serial fit together with the movies.  Quatermass 2 was bad enough to make me look it up.  From all my reading about horror movies, Quatermass and the Pit is the scariest of the four.  At least at this historical moment it’s not available on streaming services.  And that, I submit, is why we still need DVDs.  Digital rights management is rather like an alien invader…

Painting Sleepy Hollow

Leave a comment

Not being an art critic, I’m in no place to analyze John Quidor’s The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane.  Having written a book about Sleepy Hollow, however, there are a few things I might point out.  I should begin by noting that this post was spurred by a jigsaw puzzle.  Normally I only work on said puzzles around Christmas time.  Several years ago friends told us about Liberty Puzzles.  They’re made of wood and are heirloom quality.  My wife took the hint and she generally orders one, on behalf of Santa Claus, each year.  We have a few now but since we only do them once a year (and usually only one of them at the time), I had forgotten that we had a Liberty Puzzle of Quidor’s painting.  The original is located in the Smithsonian and I really didn’t discuss it in my book.  The painting is dated 1858, almost forty years after the publication of Irving’s tale, but while Irving was still alive (he died the next year).

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

The painting is correct in displaying a pumpkin that isn’t a jack-o-lantern and it presents one of the obvious difficulties of painting a nighttime scene.  The painting is fairly dark.  One of the benefits of working on a puzzle like this is you look closely at the scene.  My first thought was that it seems odd that the lightest part of the painting is Gunpowder’s rump. Next is the path.  The path draws the viewer’s eye back to Gunpowder and an understated Ichabod Crane.  I realized that the lighting is meant to reflect the moon’s rays, as the orb is just peeking through the clouds at the upper left.  And, of course, Quidor was not painting from real life.  On the right lie some small buildings, including the Old Dutch Church.  The Headless Horseman blends into the dark, which is exactly how Irving describes him in the story.  There’s no bridge, however, at least not yet.  All of this matches the wording of the legend.

Quidor painted mostly scenes from Washington Irving’s works.  Having been born in Tappan, during Irving’s lifetime, that makes sense.  He was also painting before the Disney cartoon came out.  One of the cases I make in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth is that the image most Americans have of the story comes from Disney.  The painting has no sword, and indeed, neither does Irving.  The one dramatic effect Quidor allows is the raising of the pumpkin before the bridge.  That takes place later in the chase.  In a sense this painting is perhaps the most authentic visual interpretation of Irving’s story before it made the transition to celluloid.  It’s puzzling.

Experimenting with Quatermass

1 Comment

Hammer films are coy.  In these days of digital rights management, they’re often difficult to locate in the United States.  Even on streaming services.  I’d known about Quatermass since I was a kid.  I’d heard about Quatermass and the Pit as a pretty scary early science fiction-horror offering.  I’ve still never seen it.  Quatermass was a BBC television character, a kind of mad scientist figure.  The Quatermass Xperiment was the first of a set of four Hammer films based on him.  Also known as The Creeping Unknown, it was cast with an American Quatermass (ironically, it turns out) to appeal to American viewers (who can now seldom access the film).  In any case, one of the streaming services finally acquired rights to the 1955 movie.  The special effects were naturally primitive, but that doesn’t stop this from becoming a scary film.

Watching these early movies is like studying history.  Other films were influenced by The Quatermass Xperiment, most notably Lifeforce.  I couldn’t help but think of Night of the Living Dead as well.  Quatermass, a rogue scientist, sends a rocket into space with three astronauts.  Since this was before we had any kind of conception of how this might actually be done, the idea seems implausible, of course.  The rocket returns with only one of the three crew members, and he’s morphing into something else.  Despite his arrogance, Quatermass realizes he has to cooperate with the police to contain the menace.  Inspector Lomax describes himself as a “Bible man,” unacquainted with science, and Quatermass considers his work superior to that or mere police.  When the hybrid is finally located and destroyed, however, it is in Westminster Abbey.

Although the runtime is just over an hour and some of the acting is quite wooden, this is an affecting story.  The scene where the transforming man encounters the little girl’s tea party bears elements of the pathos of Frankenstein.  Without the budget, science, and even acting resources of modern productions, The Quatermass Xperiment manages to fall squarely into horror with a monster I’d been waiting since childhood to see.  In those days you were at the mercy of your local television offerings.  Now that we have worldwide content on the worldwide web, we still restrict viewing so that the most money can be made from a movie that’s seven decades old, and its cohort.  In any case, this experiment has left me determined to find what Quatermass discovers in the pit.  Once that becomes available on a service I use.

Rabbit Hole Crawl

Leave a comment

Rabbit holes can be fun.  They can also leave you scratching your head.  David Schmoeller directed some third or fourth drawer horror films, among which is Crawlspace.  Having fallen down the Schmoeller rabbit hole, I found it streaming at the cost of frequent commercials.  Hey, that’s how I watched movies as a kid, so why not?  I was drawn to the movie by Klaus Kinski.  He is arresting on camera and directors knew it.  He was also famously difficult to work with.  Schmoeller apparently tried to get Kinski fired from Crawlspace, but without him it would’ve been a nearly complete waste of time.  That’s because Schmoeller’s story (he also wrote it) doesn’t make a ton of sense, even if it introduces some fascinating themes.  So Gunther (Kinski’s character) is a landlord.  He rents rooms in his house to young women that he murders, after spying on them through the eponymous crawl space.

Why does he murder?  Because his father was a literal Nazi and Gunther has tendencies in that direction.  He’s conflicted, though.  A medical doctor, he saved lives.  He also killed.  Caught up with the God-like power of determining life and death, he explores it at the expense of young women.  And their erstwhile lovers.  And occasional visitors.  Kinski pulls off this double life persona, making him believable.  Even so, the story doesn’t have much other depth.  There’s a lot of crawling around HVAC vents and inventing of insidious ways of murdering and tormenting people.  When Gunther finally loses it and puts on make-up and dresses as a Nazi it’s clear that this is the endgame.  I won’t spoil the ending, but I can say there’s a bit of irony there.

I first became aware of Klaus Kinski through his mesmerizing performance in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre.  His is one of the best vampire portrayals in all of cinema, in my opinion.  I wonder at the confidence of someone so difficult to work with and yet who appeared in more than 130 films.  I’ve been fired for doing a good job at least three times.  But then, I’m not a professional actor.  At least two of the directors Kinski worked with (Herzog and Schmoeller) made documentaries about how difficult he was.  There were rumors that both wanted him killed.  And yet he made a living acting.  (He was also married, and divorced, thrice.)  I’ve seen him in a handful of films and he does, in what makes it through to the final cut, command attention.  Without him Crawlspace would simply be a hole in the ground.

Philadelphia Story

Leave a comment

I’m guilty of a little home-state pride when I consider Philadelphia as a seedbed for diverse filmmakers.  Perhaps the most famous is M. Night Shyamalan, but I recently watched Tayarisha Poe’s first feature, Selah and the Spades.  Poe (and Edgar Allan also lived in Philly) is an African-American woman, and like Shyamalan, writes and directs her own movies.  Selah and the Spades came out in 2019, just as we were settling into pandemic life, but it is a gentle kind of dark academia.  A coming of age story set in a fictional Haldwell Boarding School, it features three African-American leads.  The violence is mostly offscreen, but there is a darker story here.  Selah heads the Spades, one of five factions of student-led extracurricular life on the elite campus.  She’s a senior who doesn’t want to face college—she enjoys her power and doesn’t want to appoint a successor.

The factions plan communal pranks, and each has its own specialization.  The Spades supply the alcohol and drugs to the student body.  This involves some violence, as is to be expected.  Selah has a record of ruining her protégés before they can become her successor.  The movie focuses on Selah’s relationship with Paloma, a transfer to the school who seems a promising new leader.  But Selah has difficulty letting go and the drama plays itself out in a student-led prom after the administration cancels the official prom due to the factions’ actions.  There are lingering shots and some art house elements to the film, making it a drama rather than a thriller.  Dark academia encompasses several genres and this is, as I say, a tamer one.

Philadelphia is a city with a generational history for me.  My mother, who was born in New Jersey, lived in Philly for some time as a child.  She found the city a scary place and unwittingly passed that fear onto me.  I’ve been to Philly several times, of course.  My main concern is driving there—the traffic is always intense and I don’t know my way around very well.  It is a diverse city.  While it’s too early to tell if Tayarisha Poe’s work will center around eastern Pennsylvania (I can’t find a summary of her second movie, The Young Wife, that states outright where it is set), it does underscore that the cinematic world is reaping some benefits from the city of sibling-like love.  And such things happen best when diversity is given a place to shine.

Scientific Monsters

Leave a comment

The rule is simple.  If you buy something in the gift shop, you can get into A Nightmare in New Hope for free.  So I naturally gravitated towards the books.  I picked up Meg Hafdahl and Kelly Florence’s The Science of Monsters: The Truth about Zombies, Witches, Werewolves, Vampires, and Other Legendary Creatures.  I noticed that the authors weren’t scientists, so I wasn’t expecting anything hard core.  In fact, I mostly wanted it for fun.  And also, I’m fascinated by anyone who can manage to get published by a trade press, the kind that publish books for under twenty bucks.  (Lest you think that’s a random amount, I’ve been invited to events where I was told $22—the then price of Weathering the Psalms, my least expensive book—was too much for most of the audience.)  The science in this particular book is akin to the science of various ghost hunters—the use of science as a framework, but not really being actual science.

Still, it’s a fun read.  Divided into ten sections of three chapters each, it covers a range of horror movies and asks various questions about aspects of “could it happen?”  Of course, in the sections featuring serial killers, we already know the answer.  Sometimes the authors shift to the “why” question when something obviously does happen in real life.  Now, I bought this book as a horror consumer and I have to say that it made me feel a sense of accomplishment that of the thirty chapters I’d seen all but one of the featured films.  The one I haven’t seen is Cujo, but I’ve read the book.  What I’ve noticed about other horror aficionados is that seldom have we all seen all the same movies.  Since the advent of VHS and watching movies at home, and the various technologies that came after, those of us with an appetite can be starved for choice.

While I wouldn’t turn to this book for any actual science, I did get a few ideas for horror stories from reading it.  One of them I’ve been working on since the chapter on The Tingler.  Both for fiction and non, I often think about publishers and how to break into that below twenty market.  This book is classified, in its BISAC code (the topic on the back of a book that tells you its genre) as science.  The publisher doesn’t publish in pop culture, which is what horror movies are.  There must be a science to getting publishers to buy into a good book idea like this.  Maybe there’s a science to it.

Fear of Puppets

Leave a comment

David Schmoeller is a horror director I discovered only in the last several months.  I watched his first film, Tourist Trap, after having found Netherworld streaming for free.  Perhaps his most famous film is Puppet Master.  Although intended for a theatrical release, it was ultimately shifted to direct to video.  That didn’t stop it from becoming a cult film and from spawning sequels and spin offs.  Like other Schmoeller films, it’s a bit disjointed.  But it’s also fun to watch.  Since this is a film from the eighties, I won’t be too worried about spoilers—fair warning.  So, the puppet master lives in a hotel and brings puppets to life, literally.  He does this using ancient Egyptian magic.  About half a century after his death, four colleagues of Neil Gallagher receive a psychic message from him.  They travel to the hotel only to find he’s dead.

The puppets, released from their hiding place, begin killing the guests.  This is one of the many things never explained.  The puppets don’t appear to be evil, but they are murderous.  Three of the four colleagues become their victims in typical horror fashion.  The last surviving friend, an anthropology professor from Yale, and Gallagher’s widow, discover Neil has brought himself back to life, using the puppet master’s Egyptian magic.  He plans to live forever, but apparently he has to kill his former friends to do so.  As he explains this, and beats the professor and his wife, the puppets realize that he’s a bad man.  They attack and kill Neil when he’s trapped in an old elevator.  The ending reveals that his widow can also reanimate the dead.

Child’s Play had been released the previous year, but the trope of haunted or cursed puppets had been in the horror tradition already for decades.  Dolls and puppets are often residents of the uncanny valley and yet people can’t stop making them.  We often learn to draw by representing our families with crayons.  The fascination of replicating ourselves artistically provides low hanging fruit for horror films.  Fabricated things that look human—and we can add mannikins here—starting to move, or coming to life, scares us.  So much so that even less-than-great movies such as Puppet Master can become their own franchise.  As a horror movie, it isn’t terrible.  It’s also not likely to keep you up at night.  At least one other David Schmoeller film is on my to see list, and I have a fair idea of what to expect.  I watch them duly warned.

X-Rayed

Leave a comment

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the comic book ads for x-ray specs.  That’s the idea behind a Roger Corman film that Stephen King thought one of the scariest he’d seen.  X, subtitled The Man with X-Ray Eyes, came out in 1963.  Not to be confused with the X of the modern trilogy, this X follows a Doctor Xavier who develops a formula that allows him to see inside people so that he can accurately diagnose and cure them.  This formula may affect his sanity, however, and he kills a friend who is trying to take the ability from him.  A wanted man, he finds a carnival barker who exploits his gift as a trick.  It was a bit jarring to see Don Rickles in a horror movie, but stranger things have happened.  In the midst of this exploitation, an old friend finds him and drives him to safety.

Then to Las Vegas, where his sight allows him to win unabated.  When the police are called he steals a car and increasingly sees through the fabric of the universe.  He stumbles into a road-side revival where the preacher encourages him to take Matthew 5 literally and he does so as the congregation chants “pluck it out!”  What makes this final scene so arresting, apart from qualifying it for Holy Sequel, is that before the minister tells him to mutilate himself, the doctor says he sees through the darkness to the eye that “sees us all.”  He sees God.  The minister interprets this as the Devil, confusing the most elemental entities that exist one for the other.

The movie has some lighthearted moments, some even apart from Don Rickles.  When the doctor begins to see through everybody’s clothes, it’s presented in a humorous way.  But for the most part, the film is played straight and it manages to raise some serious issues for those who think through the implications.  Our senses evolved to help us survive.  Accessing abilities beyond that is a catalyst for disaster.  Indeed, Dr. Xavier early on notes that he’s approaching godhood because of this newly won ability.  It also means that an individual might know too much.  It seems that at the end he does.  The movie is remarkable even today in several ways.  Technology has made special effects more believable, but the human side of this story remains unaltered.  A doctor wanting to help patients becomes more of a monster than a man, in some respects.  And perhaps the most remarkable aspect is that this is a serious horror film made by Roger Corman for AIP. Scary even to a young Stephen King.

And Bones

Leave a comment

Often making lists of dark academia movies, The Skulls plays right into that territory.  A secret society, an elite college, and something’s definitely gone wrong.  It’s not a great movie, feeling somewhat contrived, but it fits the mold pretty well.  Things are a little too pat in the film, and the writing isn’t the best.  It’s entertaining, if overblown.  The story begins at an unnamed Yale (actually University of Toronto) with working-class Luke being invited to join the Skulls after an impressive rowing competition victory.  From the first, the Skulls meetings seem to lack gravitas.  Rich and powerful, they are above and beyond the law.  The problem for Luke is that his friends, Will and Chloe, are being edged out of his life.  Will, who writes for the school paper, breaks into the Skulls headquarters but is caught by Caleb, Luke’s “soul mate.”

Will is killed in what follows, and Luke wants to get out but it’s too late. Caleb’s father is the head-honcho for the Skulls and decides to have Luke committed to an asylum when he refuses to cooperate over his friend’s death.  Chloe and the second-in-command of the Skulls, Senator Levritt, rescue Luke and he challenges Caleb to a duel.  I’ll leave it off there so as not to spoil too much.  That gives you a sense of the darkness, in any case.  But the film doesn’t feel that dark.  Yes there is a murder, and there are bad guys, but something I can’t define prevents it from having the tone that you might expect from a grim tale.  As I say, things are a little too pat.  The characters’ emotions are a little too close to the surface.

The movie did well at the box office, but the sequels were released direct to video.  As far as the academia side goes, there are, no doubt, secret societies.  Privilege doesn’t let go once it gets a grip.  But the above-ground “Yale” sees a bit too light and airy.  Maybe more classroom and library scenes might’ve helped.  Likely it would’ve been better had it been based on a novel.  Films that are based on books have a solid development on which to stand and it’s often a matter of figuring out what to omit.  The writer and director had gone to Yale and Harvard, respectively, and wanted to portray what secret society life is like.  But that’s the thing about secret societies—you can’t really know, can you?  It’s a matter of imagination.  And dark academia is where such things fit.