Teaching Horror

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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.

Ride the Ghost

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There’s a book in this, for some enterprising person.  You see, I watched Ghost Rider because I felt I had too.  I’m not familiar with the Marvel comic on which it’s based, but I’d seen many references to it and knew I had to catch up.  That having been said, I don’t think it’s as bad as the critics opine.  First about the movie, and then the book.  Johnny Blaze makes a deal with the Devil (Mephistopheles) to save his father from cancer.  The big M then has his father die in a failed stunt.  (Father and son are motorcycle stunt riders.)  Blaze is compelled to become “the Devil’s bounty hunter.”  He, like the biblical Satan, accuses evil-doers, only with his flaming skull head and super powers, he condemns said evil-doers without being evil himself.  He transforms at night and Mephistopheles wants him to take out his (M’s) son, Blackheart.  He ultimately does, but disses the Devil at the end.

One of the questions I have about metaphysical horror (or action/adventure) is how moviemakers have to make the fight scenes physical.  Shooting a non-corporeal entity with a shotgun, or wrapping said entity with a chain, should do nothing to it.  There’s no physical body to affect.  That’s the difference between movies like this, or Legion, or Constantine, or any number of others, versus The Exorcist and its kin.  The Exorcist portrayed an evil that was real, but non-corporeal.  It took over the body of Regan, yes, but nobody was running around with guns, swords, or chains to try to take the demon down.  I think that basic underlying fact is one that makes such movies falter with critics, if not at the box office (where they tend to do well).  This leads to the book.

One of the main points of Holy Horror is that many people learn their religion from pop culture.  That being the case, someone needs to write a book on how Hell is viewed by the average citizen.  The kind of person who watches movies like Ghost Rider.  Movies that have a definite idea of what Hell might be like.  Most people probably have little idea what a soul in torment might be.  (The rise of mental illness, however, may be changing that balance.)  They imagine physical pain inflicted by nasty weapons that people use on one another.  Someone should look at this idea from the perspective of what religions, such as Christianity, actually teach.  I’ve got my plate pretty full with potential books, but here’s an idea free for the taking, courtesy of Ghost Rider.

Who Recommended?

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A couple of things: one-word titles can be confusing, and I need to start writing down where I get movie recommendations.  Trying to live reasonably on an editor’s salary, I can’t afford purchasing movies all the time, so I stream what’s free, now only when it’s on my list.  That’s how I had the misfortune of watching Shiver (2012).  I’m not sure it was the right movie, but I couldn’t find any others by that title near the top of IMDb and I couldn’t remember where I got the recommendation.  Although it uses many standard horror tropes, this flick veers a little too much into torture porn for my liking.  Also it’s very poorly written and many of the scenes are improbable (to put it mildly).  The police are totally incompetent (how many times can a serial killer’s intended victim be assured she’s safe by police when they can’t even get the perp to prison in good order?), almost to a Keystone degree.

And this isn’t some Hannibal Lector, either.  He’s kind of a psychopath that’s been making a living selling jewelry to his eventual victims.  Of course he’s a sexually frustrated guy who was bullied as a kid.  See, there are some moments of trying to establish some kind of social commentary, but the writing and most of the acting keep getting in the way.  The violence toward women goes unremarked, and that’s probably what most requires comment.  So I’m sitting here scratching my head trying to figure out who, or what, might’ve suggested this movie to me.  Or is there a different Shiver?  Did somebody leave the “s” off the end?  (I’ve already seen that one.)  I really do need to keep better records.

Bad movies come in many varieties.  This one was disturbing from any number of angles.  I don’t tend to watch serial killer movies.  Violence against women bothers me a lot.  Every main character had a bad childhood.  (One of the stories is simply told and then dropped.)  It’s a movie that might helpfully come with trigger warnings.  As I watched I wondered.  I wouldn’t been watching this if someone, or some respected publication, hadn’t recommended it to me.  Who and why?  Since I watch movies on weekend mornings, mostly, a bad one can start the day off on the wrong foot.  Someone, or some source, suggested Shiver.  Or maybe someone forgot a letter.  That’s the problem with one-word titles.

Outside Invisible

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Some of us are fated, it seems, always to be outsiders.  I have no inside knowledge of the film industry.  I barely keep up with the movies I want to see.  Although I write books about horror films, the main players in the field don’t know those books.  It’s like being invisible.  I had hoped to see The Invisible Man some four years ago.  The reboot, I mean.  And having finally caught up, I was impressed.  This is a scary movie that hits all the right buttons.  Most of us, by cultural assimilation, know the bare bones of the story.  A guy has figured out invisibility.  What does he do with this?  Uses it to assert his will over everyone.  In the original, the monocaine made Dr. Jack Griffin insane.  In the remake, an already controlling, self-centered millionaire (Adrian), unknown to anyone but his brother, perfects an invisibility suit.  When his girlfriend (Cecilia) leaves him, he uses it to try to destroy her.

Everyone believes she’s insane.  More than that, criminally insane.  Cecilia knows he was an optics genius and he leaves her subtle clues that he knows where she’s hiding.  He hurts those close to her and they assume Cecilia is causing the harm.  Then it escalates to murder.  Placed in an institution for the criminally insane, she knows Adrian is there with her.  Nobody will believe her, however, since, well, he’s invisible.  This is a movie nearly as harrowing as The Dark Knight.   An unstable genius with unlimited resources and the ultimate alibi forces his abused ex to suffer for ever having loved him.  It’s pretty incredible.  (Has to be seen, I’m tempted to say, to be believed.)

Now, I’m no insider so I didn’t realize that Universal had been attempting to build a Dark Universe franchise based on the original Universal monsters.  I had completely missed that Dracula Untold was the first of the reboots.  I did watch it but fell asleep.  (Hey, I was watching with friends who started it too late for my outsider schedule.)  I never got around to seeing it with my eyes fully open.  Although it made money, it wasn’t, I hear, very good.  Then three years later, The Mummy bombed.  I confess that there’s so many Mummy movies that I’ve lost track of them and I didn’t know this one existed.  Or flopped.  Invisible Man was intended as the third and the movies were to be interlaced into a Dark Universe.  Plans for that franchise have been dropped, but individual movies will continue to be made.  I guess I need to go back to the beginning again.  It only took me a decade to learn this, as is the way with outsiders.

Sleeping and Watching

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The older I get, the more flexible my idea of reality becomes.  I’m starting to notice things that may have been happening for decades, but the reflection of age throws into sharper focus.  I’ve mentioned before that a good night’s sleep casts the day in a different light.  Such nights are sometimes hard to come by and unrelenting capitalism doesn’t offer enough “sick days” to sit out the bad ones.  But it’s not only that.  I watch a lot of movies.  Since I’ve been writing books on movies that only makes sense.  Still, I’ve begun to notice how movies stay with you after the credits roll.  Sometimes they remain the whole day until a night’s reboot comes.  This can also happen with reading, but on a slower, and most likely more profound level.

In high school, reading existentialist plays (sometimes in German), I learned to remind myself that watching a play (or movie) is observing an illusion.  Now I’m beginning to question whether that’s entirely true or not.  What enters our minds becomes part of us.  Think of the vast majority of human lives throughout history.  People living out their lives by farming and/or hunting.  Spending every day on the many tasks it takes to stay alive.  No reading.  No watching.  Their daily lives constructed their reality.  How many of us could grow our own food or build adequate shelter?  And God help us if we need a doctor.  Our lives require many other people to ensure we keep on going.  Most of them people we don’t know.  People whose realities are different than mine.

My career trajectory misfired fairly early on, and my reality has been years of trying to make sense of what happened.  From the first days of hurt and confusion I began to cope by watching movies.  For ninety minutes, at least, I escaped reality.  Or did I?  Was I enhancing reality?  What of my existentialist outlook?  Perhaps I was doing what existentialists do best—creating my own meaning.  So if I get out of the wrong side of bed, and the day feels like it really isn’t welcoming me this time around, I await the reboot.  Or when I have a few moments to sit down and watch a movie, I get up from my chair with an alternative reality surrounding me.  Perhaps I have learned something by sleeping and watching.  Maybe I have learned that reality is more flexible than I’ve been inclined to believe.  Maybe somehow this all does make sense.  Or not.

Horror Homework

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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

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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

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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?

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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.

Yucca

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Yucca Flats isn’t the kind of place you’d like to vacation.  Not only is it highly irradiated by nuclear testing, it’s also a place where police shoot at innocent people.  The only salvation seems to be that they’re terrible shots.  Oh yes, and there’s a Russian scientist transformed into a beast by an atomic bomb blast.  As you can tell, I’ve just been to Yucca Flats.  In movie-land, of course.  The Beast of Yucca Flats, yet another candidate for the worst movie of all time, really worked hard to obtain that title.  The movie did make me curious about Coleman Francis, however.  Like Ed Wood, he tried to make his way in the rather unforgiving movie world with tiny budgets and even less native talent.  The number of scenes where guys had their butts to the camera alone raises all kinds of questions.

The numerous contradictions in such a short movie—less than an hour—and the long scenes that add nothing to the plot are signposts that we’ve entered the twilight zone of B movies.  Famously filmed without sound, the incongruous dialogue later added as voiceovers, adds to the surreal atmosphere.  The movie shares Tor Johnson with Ed Wood.  And also, apparently, a sincerity betrayed by lack of ability.  The cult status of movies like this signal hope for those who try to make their own way in a world enamored of big budgets and large crews.  It would help, though, if Francis had a clear story to tell.  He does seem to have Luddite tendencies, and he condemns violence even as he has a sheriff’s deputy literally “shoot first and ask questions later.” 

The movie has a couple of moments of cinematographic finesse.  The moment when Lois Radcliffe approaches the car, shot from the interior, when Hank lays his arm across the door, made me think something better might be coming.  Tor Johnson wasn’t the most gifted actor, but he always seems to have fun with his roles, being cast as a hulking monster.  It’s too bad he doesn’t have a bit more screen time in this, his last movie part.  He kinda makes me want to hunt down some of his other appearances beyond the Ed Wood films I’ve already seen.  There’s a story here, I expect, that really hasn’t been told.  There’s an entire world—a twilight zone—outside Hollywood where producers with no budgets but a passion for making movies plied their trade.  Their efforts, as paltry as the results may be, suggests there’s more to the movie world than it might seem.

Singing Darkly

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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.