MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #132 The Stepford Wives 1975

THE STEPFORD WIVES 1975

Joanna Eberhart: I won’t be here when you get back, don’t you see? It’s going to happen before then. Don’t ask me to explain it, I just know. There’ll be somebody with my name, and she’ll cook and clean like crazy, but she won’t take pictures, and she won’t be me! She’ll – she’ll, she’ll be like one of those the robots in Disneyland.

The Stepford Wives undoubtedly left a profound impact on popular culture. Its influence and the lasting use of the term Stepford Wife within the American lexicon symbolize the notion of unquestioning conformity.

From the very first sun-splashed frames, Bryan Forbes’s The Stepford Wives (1975) dares you to believe in the dream of suburbia, a vision deliberately polished to an unnerving sheen. Adapted from Ira Levin’s razor-sharp 1972 novel and the screenwriter William Goldman, the film blends satire, science fiction, and horror into a story that remains as psychologically and sociologically disturbing today as it was fifty years ago. With Forbes at the helm, and an ensemble led by Katharine Ross as Joanna Eberhart, Paula Prentiss as the irrepressible Bobbie, and Patrick O’Neal’s chilling Dale Coba, the cast enacts a sinister ballet of control, conformity, and loss of self.

Katharine Ross delivers a powerful portrayal of an independent and individualistic wife who has recently moved to a suburb where the other wives appeared to be excessively perfect and submissive. Bryan Forbes and Ross talked about the look of her humanoid Joanna at the end of the picture, deciding that what would leave the film with the most lasting impact would be to emphasize the part of her that is most human: her eyes. Ross was fitted with custom black contact lenses that made her eyes water but gave her that dark, spiritless look.

“What they really wanted was for them to not look shiny, to look like these black holes,”  reflects Ross. “With my eyes tearing, I don’t think it was possible for them to not look shiny. But it was still kind of spooky, wasn’t it?”

Bryan Forbes is renowned for his diverse and distinguished career as a director, writer, and producer, but one of his most notable achievements is the haunting psychological thriller Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964). This atmospheric film, adapted by Forbes from Mark McShane’s novel, tells the story of Myra Savage (Kim Stanley), an unstable medium who convinces her husband (Richard Attenborough) to kidnap a child so she can “solve” the crime and achieve fame. Forbes’s understated, moody direction and focus on character interplay garnered widespread critical acclaim, earning Kim Stanley an Oscar nomination for Best Actress and cementing the film’s reputation as one of the darkest and finest works of his career. He also directed The L-Shaped Room (1962), with its superb acting, about a Pregnant woman, loneliness, and new beginnings. King Rat (1965): a WWII POW camp survival drama, The Whisperers (1967): about an elderly woman, poverty, and bleak isolation, and Deadfall (1968): about a Jewel heist and double-crosses.

Notable and a key signifier are the fashions designed by Anna Hill Johnstone, meant to evoke satin, silk, and submission, as Bryan Forbes opted for a deliberately modern take on the glamorous, corseted look of Southern belles.

While some descriptions, called the style “modest, prairie, or Victorian-inspired,” the reality on screen is more nuanced: there’s a modern, suburban take on the classic Gainsborough or “picture hat” style, and the Stepford wives’ dresses seem to embrace a form of contemporary old-fashioned femininity.

Post transformation, the wives’ attire at times, features long hems frilly aprons, high necklines, puffed sleeves, and plenty of ruffles, and floral patterns; styles meant to evoke an idealized, submissive domestic femininity, 70s style, rooted in mid-20th-century nostalgia —but a time they are also tailored to expertly display the actresses’ figures, often highlighting their volutptious breasts and bearing their midriffs, and waistline in ways that are markedly meant to please the male gaze.

I referred to their harmonized collective as a ballet, thinking of the end scene in the supermarket, a synchronized ensemble of Stepfordian doppelgängers who swirl together in their new fashions and physical movements reminiscent of a Busby Berkeley musical number. In a bizarre extravaganza of suburban wifery and vacuous bliss, each enhanced beauty performs her part in this choreographed spectacle of empty, newly wired perfection, moving in a fully automated manner up and down the aisles.

You follow Joanna Eberhart, a New York City photographer and modern independent woman, whose husband, Walter (Peter Masterson), persuades her to move from bustling city to the disturbingly perfect suburban town of Stepford, Connecticut.

Early scenes play off the uneasy beauty of sunlit streets, immaculately kept lawns, and the endlessly yet eerily cheerful housewives who greet the new arrival in domestic femininity, homemaker chic, and vacant smiles.

When Joanna moves to town, the Stepford wives greet her with an unsettling demeanor that is uniform and artificial. The women she meets early on, including the “Welcome Wagon” encounter, appear overly focused on domestic chores, with vacant, repetitive behavior that unnerves Joanna and immediately grabs her attention.

Five-time Academy Award nominee cinematographer Owen Roizman’s (known for his gritty style, The French Connection 1971, The Exorcist 1973, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three 1974, Three Days of the Condor 1975, Network 1976) lens suffuses the film with a pastel brightness, the kind that sterilizes rather than comforts. From the get-go, no matter how many times I rewatch this film, it’s easy to become as uneasy as Joanna by the suffocating atmosphere of this suburban paradise. Something is absolutely off-kilter in this white-picket Eden, this cookie-cutter nirvana.

Joanna and the wise-cracking Bobbie Markowe (Paul Prentiss), sporting halter tops and short shorts, are lost amid a flock of Stepford wives adorned in pastel-colored long skirts and wavy ruffles, quickly become best friends, bonding over their shared status as the only wives in Stepford without a perfectly spotless kitchen. Their friendship starts not with a choreographed greeting but over shared skepticism. Bobbie is the only other woman bold enough to question the absurd perfection around them, making their bond the perfect rebellion against Stepford’s polished façade. After witnessing their neighbors’ bizarre behavior and obsession with cleaning, the two women begin to investigate.

The underlying tension is immediate: Bobbie whispers to Joanna poolside, “This place is just a little too perfect.”

Bobbie Markowe: I’m also an ex-Gothamite, who’s been living here in Ajax country for just over a month now, and I’m going crazy. You see doctor, my problem is that given complete freedom of choice, I don’t WANT to squeeze the goddamn Charmin!

When Bobbie Markowe blurts out, “I don’t want to squeeze the goddamn Charmin!” she’s tapping into a cultural zeitgeist that only the 1970s could have spawned. Back then, commercials weren’t just background noise—they were bona fide pop culture events. The Charmin ad, featuring the iconic Mr. Whipple sternly warning shoppers not to squeeze the soft toilet paper (only to sneak a squeeze himself), was a comedic masterpiece and a catchphrase factory. Growing up alongside those quirky, memorable spots, many of us experienced a time when ads entertained as much as they sold, embedding themselves in everyday conversations and collective nostalgia. Revisiting those retro commercials today isn’t just a trip down memory lane—it’s a reminder of an era when advertising had charm, wit, and the power to turn toilet paper into a household punchline!

All the women in Stepford appear eerily ideal and obedient to their husbands. Joanna’s husband quickly joins The Men’s Association, and at some point, she sits for a famous artist, Mazzard (William Prince), who makes very detailed drawings of her, capturing every angle. After that, Claude Axhelm (George Coe) asks her to record a list of vocabulary words.

Joanna –“I don’t know what they do, exactly. They draw our pictures and they tape our voices.”

As Joanna struggles against the town’s “Men’s Association”, on the surface, a friendly club for husbands, but clearly Stepford’s true seat of power, Goldman and Forbes use the mundane to creep up on horror. The camera lingers on scenes that should be cozy, even comedic: the Women’s Club engages in a trivial, overly scripted debate about laundry starch brands, underscoring the Stepford wives’ eerie uniformity and superficial concerns.

The scene devolves into a heated debate about the merits of spray starch—“All I said was, I prefer Easy-On,” one wife chirps, never straying off-script. Joanna and Bobbie, sensing something unnatural, investigate, uncovering that many Stepford wives were once vibrant feminists, their vitality now traded for a robot-like, domesticated, mind-numbing bliss, whose only purpose is to satisfy the men in their lives.

Patrick O’Neal, who plays the arrogant Diz, one of the founding members of the Men’s Association, comes over to Joanna and Walter’s house and quickly follows Joanna into the kitchen. Diz: “I like watching women doing little domestic chores.” Joanna: “You came to the right town.”

Joanna Eberhardt: Why do they call you Diz?
Dale Coba: Because I used to work at Disneyland.
Joanna: No, really.
Dale: That’s really. Don’t you believe me?
Joanna: No.
Dale: Why not?
Joanna: You don’t look like someone who enjoys making other people happy.

You see the transformation character by character: Charmaine (Tina Louise, Gilligan’s Island’s Ginger), tennis-loving and witty, returns from a weekend away as a docile servant.

Joanna Eberhart –If I am wrong, I’m insane… but if I’m right, it’s even worse than if I was wrong.

There is a chilling scene that shows that Charmaine’s husband, Ed (Franklin Cover), is having her beloved tennis court destroyed to make way for a heated swimming pool he wants, symbolizing the erasure of her independence and pleasures as she is transformed into a submissive Stepford wife.

Soon enough, Bobbie falls under the spell of the Stepford wives, transforming into a cheerfully anesthetized housewife who spends hours applying makeup and meticulously cleaning her kitchen.

Bobbie: If you’re going to tell me you don’t like this dress, I’m sticking my head right in the oven.

Now, Joanna’s only ally, Bobbie, is replaced overnight. Joanna is caught in a harrowing scene when she stabs Bobbie with a kitchen knife and discovers, in one of the film’s signature moments, that Bobbie is a robot. In this disturbing climactic sequence, Joanna thrusts a kitchen knife into Bobbie’s stomach to find out if she’ll bleed. Apparently, Katharine Ross found it hard to stab Prentiss, so Forbes did it for her.

Bobbie continues the repetitive gesture of retrieving coffee cups, offering more coffee with an eerie insistence, and even dropping or shattering the cups on the floor. Her actions are unnervingly ritualistic, highlighting the loss of her former personality and humanity. Bobbie does not bleed; she “malfunctions,” as she coldly offers Joanna the coffee with mechanical cheerfulness and uncanny conformity. The dread is all the more profound when it happens in daylight, in pastel kitchens.

Bobbie: after being stabbed] Joanna! How could you do a thing like that? How could you do a thing like that? How could you do a thing like that? When I was just going to give you coffee. When I was just going to give you coffee! When I was just going to give you coffee! I thought we were friends! I thought we were friends! I was just going to give you coffee! I was just going to give you coffee! I thought we were friends… I thought we were friends… I thought we were friends. How could you *do* a thing like that? I thought we were friends.”

“I remember that it was very hard for me, even though they had made this sort of Styrofoam midsection [for Prentiss], It was very hard for me to stab, even something that wasn’t real. So that’s his hand on the knife that you see going in.” – Paula Prentiss comments on the scene.

Shocked by the drastic transformation of her friend, Joanna becomes determined to escape Stepford and leave Walter. However, just as she’s about to make her move, she discovers that her children have vanished.

Isolated from the world and desperate to find them, she runs to Bobbie’s house, and the terrifying truth is revealed. The Men’s Association has been killing the wives and replacing them with subservient humanoids.

Joanna realizes she will be next, so she goes to The Men’s Association to find her missing children. When it’s Joanna’s time to transform into the Stepfordian ideal woman, she gets lost inside a labyrinthine building, and she stumbles onto her humanoid doppelgänger, except her breasts are fuller and her eyes are a cold black void; they are soulless, emotionless, and lacking humanity. In her final moments, Joanna asks Diz the simple reason Why? Diz’s response is equally uncomplicated:

Dialogue from the film is seared into the genre’s lexicon for a reason. In the final act, Joanna pleads:

Dale Coba (talking to Joanna): It’s nothing like you imagine, just a, another stage. Think about it like that, and there’s nothing to it.
Joanna Eberhart: Why?
Dale Coba: Why? Because we can.

These blank spoken lines echo through the film’s finale, where Joanna fights to recover her children from the Men’s Association mansion. The climax is a spiral of suspense as she stumbles upon her own lifeless, marble black-eyed double—her fate sealed as the perfect smile symbolizes the end of her.

Ultimately, the doppelgänger of Joanna approaches with a smile, swiftly overpowering the real Joanna and strangling her with a stocking. Joanna’s murder takes place off-screen, leaving no room for uncertainty.

The final image of the Stepford-ized Joanna pushing her cart mutely through the supermarket silently encapsulates the horror of total erasure.

Forbes’s direction—his “thriller in sunlight,” as he described it—contrasts so sharply with the subject matter that even his casting decisions became points of controversy. William Goldman’s original script envisioned younger, sexy, model-like wives; Forbes, casting his wife Nanette Newman in a key role, chose instead a stylized Victorian housewife aesthetic for every woman in the film, suggesting that conformity is enforced not just in body, but in spirit and style.

The original draft of the screenplay called for the women to wear miniskirts. Supposedly, once director Forbes cast his wife, Nanette Newman as one of the wives, this changed and the women were dressed instead in feminine but modest wardrobe. The remake, of The Stepford Wives in 2004 attempted to correct this design problem.

Before Katharine Ross was cast in the leading role of Joanna Eberhart, Tuesday Weld had originally been set to play the part but passed on it. Other actresses considered include Anne Archer, Jean Seberg, Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, Karen Black, Janet Margolin, Blythe Danner, Geneviève Bujold, Jacqueline Bisset, Elizabeth Montgomery, Olivia Hussey, and Diane Keaton, who nearly took the role. Joanna Cassidy was originally cast in the role of Bobbie by producer Edgar J. Scherick, and actually shot a few scenes, but was abruptly fired and replaced by Paula Prentiss.

Actress Dee Wallace, who was later known for starring in several science-fiction and horror films (E.T. 1982, The Howling 1981, Cujo 1983, and Critters 1986), has one of her earliest roles playing Tina Louise’s character’s maid Nettie.

Casting directors used actresses Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper (Mary Richards and Rhoda Morganstern) as prototypes for the Joanna and Bobbie characters.

The psychological and sociological resonance of The Stepford Wives is unmistakable. It’s a parable, and a warning, about patriarchy’s terror of female agency. Scholars emphasize that the Men’s Association doesn’t just dream of control; its members industrialize it, reducing their wives to customizable objects in an evil inversion of the feminist consciousness-raising process. This is echoed across several scholarly commentaries. For example, Lilly Ann Boruzkowski in Jump Cut discusses how the consciousness-raising meeting in The Stepford Wives is sabotaged, turning what should be a liberating process hollowing it out, replacing genuine collective empowerment with trivial domesticity and enforced conformity, and into a means of reinforcing patriarchal norms.

Contemporary reviews of the film were mixed, and its feminist themes sparked heated debate—feminist icon Betty Friedan called it “a rip-off of the women’s movement” and urged women to boycott, while others, like Gael Greene and Eleanor Perry, defended its sharp critique.

After the movie was released, there was a feminist demonstration against it, decrying it as being sexist. One of the protesters hit director Bryan Forbes over the head with her umbrella. Katharine Ross commented on the incident in the documentary The Stepford Life 2001 about the making of the movie, stating that this was a powerful testimony to how the movie affected the protesters. Friedan didn’t see The Stepford Wives, but she didn’t like it, saying it was anti-woman and anti-human.

Any criticism that The Stepford Wives faced about how the film “hates women” or is fundamentally anti-feminist represents a significant misreading of both the novel’s and film’s intentions. Ira Levin’s story exposes, rather than endorses, the grotesque consequences of viewing women as mere objects to be perfected, controlled, or replaced. Far from celebrating the oppression it depicts, Levin paints a chilling satire that dramatizes the dehumanization and erasure of women under patriarchal pressures, making us all witness just how quietly horrifying it is to have agency, identity, and even your body subsumed by male fantasy.

It’s a modern twist on Invasion of the Body Snatchers—but this time, instead of alien spores creating pod people, it’s a society of men systematically manufacturing a network of enslavement, and a world where women are quietly stripped of autonomy and remade for their own ends. The horror isn’t extraterrestrial; it’s homegrown, and all the more chilling for it.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers was originally written by Jack Finney, whose 1954 novel inspired the classic 1956 film adaptation. Finney’s story of identity erasure by alien invasion finds its eerie, homebound counterpart in the patriarchal machinations at the heart of The Stepford Wives: in place of pods, we have a meticulously engineered system designed by men to replace individuality with obedience, marking a shift from sci-fi paranoia to a keen social commentary on gender and control.

Ira Levin, whose earlier Rosemary’s Baby explored spiritual violations of female autonomy, here pivots to technology: the terror in Stepford is all too rational, a conspiracy so banal, so American, that it unfolds in daylight, behind white picket fences and at garden parties. Sunshine in Stepford isn’t warm; it sterilizes.

Feminist scholars and critics have noted that the true “villains” of Stepford are the men, whose desire for “ideal” wives is presented as both ridiculous and monstrous. It is the men of Stepford who are cold-blooded misogynists and murderers, and the story empathizes fully with Joanna and the women, not their oppressors. Producer/director Bryan Forbes himself insisted, “If anything, it’s anti-men! If the men are really stupid enough to want wives like that, then it’s sad for them.”

The film meticulously critiques, rather than condones, the hunger to dehumanize women into compliant, decorative objects; its horror is a warning about the dangers of perfectionism and conformity, not an invitation to embrace them. In fact, the grotesque exaggeration of female domestic perfection in Stepford serves as a biting reflection of the predicament of women in society.

The film’s horror comes not from monsters or mad scientists, but from the mundane twisted into something terrifying, the idea that perfect and human might be irrevocably at odds. Its misogyny isn’t hidden; it’s the entire plot mechanism, the dread that as women become more independent, society’s reaction can be to revoke their agency entirely, replacing it with an idealized, mute, and subservient substitute. The ending bears a melancholic tone, as nearly every female character meets a grim fate, replaced by mechanical replicas. It’s a very nihilistic and controversial ending, leaving all the replicants masquerading as the dead women of Stepford. The ending elicited strong and deeply divisive reactions from audiences.

Ross expresses her own regrets – “If I had a chance to do it again, I would do the ending differently on my part,” Ross says. “I sort of end up giving up. I don’t fight at the very end, and I think I would fight harder.

By showing the slow, nightmarish transformation of women into mindless automatons, Levin and the film urge us to interrogate rather than accept these images, standing on the right side of feminism by holding a mirror up to society’s most quietly sinister abuses. The most powerful proof is the audience’s horror and empathy for Joanna and Bobbie, making clear that Stepford is a dystopia, not a dream. In this light, Levin’s dark satire affirms the core feminist insight: the most pervasive forms of misogyny are often cloaked in “perfection” and art can empower by making that horror impossible to ignore.

[last lines]
Joanna: Hello, Bobbie.
Bobbie: Oh, hello, Joanna.
Joanna: How are you?
Bobbie: I’m fine. How are you?
Joanna: I’m fine. How are the children?
Bobbie: Fine…

But as the decades have rolled by, The Stepford Wives has only grown in esteem, now considered a canonical horror-sci-fi hybrid. The ‘Stepford wife’ archetype has slipped right into everyday language, shorthand for anyone made decorative and docile by patriarchal demand

Jordan Peele’s social thriller, Get Out 2017, which became one of the most successful debut movies by a director, was directly influenced by The Stepford Wives. Peele has openly acknowledged as much in interviews, citing The Stepford Wives and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby 1968 (both based on books by Ira Levin) as two of his favorite movies.

The Stepford Wives endures not only for its suspense and its now-iconic scenes but also for the existential anxiety it implants in our minds about identity, agency, and the cost of appearances. In the closing moments, the film leaves you not with a scream but a quiet shudder of sadness, with the echo of silence: a parade of flawless mannequins gliding through the supermarket aisles, their humanity erased beneath a veneer of “perfection.”

The film is included among the American Film Institute’s 2001 list of 400 movies nominated for the top 100 Most Heart-Pounding American Movies.

#132 down, 18 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

 

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #130 The Sentinel 1977

THE SENTINEL 1977

Menagerie of the Damned: Friendships Blossom into Bliss… and the Terror of Hell.

For this piece on The Sentinel, I bent the rules a bit and dove deeper into this richly evocative ’70s horror classic.

When it comes to high-style, high-concept horror, Michael Winner’s The Sentinel (1977) stands as one of the most gloriously Gothic, unapologetically weird entries in the satanic-cinema boom of the late 1970s. Winner, already infamous for the brutal vigilante drama Death Wish 1974, here dials into a different kind of urban anxiety, adapting Jeffrey Konvitz’s 1974 novel into a feverish vision of damnation in New York. In Winner’s hands, the film’s Manhattan is shot by cinematographer Richard C. Kratina (Love Story 1970Hair 1979: as co-director of photography, he helped create the vibrant, kinetic look for Milos Forman’s celebrated musical) with a chilly, sinister glide, through an urban canvas looming, all painting the city as both cradle of activity and crucible for the unknowable. The camera cloaks the notable Brooklyn brownstone in a pall of urban eeriness, using cold, angled light and creeping shadows to transform ordinary spaces into sites of mounting supernatural dread. Through his lens, even the sunlit city feels haunted, every corridor, staircase, and window glows with an uneasy beauty, crafting an atmosphere where menace and melancholy seem to exist side by side in every frame.

At the threshold of every great horror story stands a question not merely of fear, but of meaning, of what darkness reveals when it seeps into the familiar cracks of ordinary life. I look at The Sentinel as a horror film that opens its doors with precisely this kind of haunted, contemplative invitation, conjuring a world where the elegant facades and quiet entranceways of a city brownstone conceal mysteries far older than brick and stone. Here, the boundaries between the mundane and the metaphysical are perilously thin; the resonance of New York is muted just enough for you to hear the anxious throb of something uncanny beneath the surface.

When we enter the film, we step into an atmosphere dense with ambiguity and unease, where each shadow seems charged with odd memories and carries the weight of unspeakable secrets. The brownstone breathes these infernal secrets. What greater terror, after all, than to find the gates to Hell nestled within the heart of the everyday, demanding the kind of solitary vigilance that feels less like heroism than existential punishment?

The Sentinel invites us to ponder the price of such knowledge, how being chosen as a guardian against darkness might not be about elevating the soul, but isolating and hollowing it out, leaving it beyond comparison and perpetually at the boundaries between worlds. The film echoes the panic and disbelief that defined 1970s horror cinema’s descent into urban circles of Hell.

Winner’s urban Gothic does more than deliver shocks, though there are plenty of them; it reflects a deep anxiety about our place in the universe, about the lives lived at the edge of community, sanity, and faith. So it could be said that The Sentinel isn’t only a story of supernatural terror, but a meditation on loneliness, duty, and the unending search for meaning when confronted with the void, and the threat of eternal torment. If every building carries a history, then some—like this one—harbor a kind of ancient sorrow, making every window (just as the blind Carradine’s vigil at the window suggests) the eyes to its soul and flickering light, a silent plea for understanding and redemption in a world forever poised between damnation and deliverance.

Liturgies for the Damned: Gil Mellé’s Sonic Gatekeeping: at the Threshhold of Perdition: the Liminal Soundworld of The Sentinel

What really sets the tone for me is Gil Mellé’s score, which seeps through the film like an unquiet spirit, part spectral lullaby, part urban siren song. Having been a fan of his for as long as I can remember, his music weaves a shimmering lattice of sound that perfectly mirrors the brownstone’s haunted facade and Alison Parker’s unraveling mind. Mellé’s music presses in at the edges. He has a particular affinity for unusual timbres and textures,  sometimes electronically, to produce tones that are at once mournful and ominous. Especially muted trumpets, and mellow French horns, and other horn-like voices, not in lush romantic arrangements, but in eerie, fragmented phrases that hang in the air or stab through the ambience with uncanny clarity.

For The Sentinel, Mellé created a soundscape in which brass instruments play a crucial role in setting the film’s unsettling mood. They echo through the brownstone and the cityscape, almost like fanfares from another world. The result is a mood both sacred and profane—a sonic invocation that swells and recedes like the tide between two worlds.

The cast delivers the sort of glorious ensemble only the ’70s could summon. Cristina Raines plays fashion model Alison Parker, whose performance is a blend of fragile resolve and underlying trauma, threading innocence with a raw, haunted intensity, centering the madness. But it’s the supporting gallery of characters that adds a sense of darkness, decadence, color, and slightly intoxicating; the whole vibe is a claret-soaked treat.

Every haunted house needs more than a single specter—it demands a cast of true oddities, and The Sentinel delivers a menagerie both bizarre and oddly magnetic. At the vortex of this strange apartment building is Burgess Meredith’s gleefully devilish Charles Chazen, the kind of neighbor whose first invitation (“Friendships blossom into bliss, Miss Parker!”) lands somewhere between sincere welcome and seductive threat. Chazen pirouettes through the brownstone like a satanic maître d’, orchestrating parties that are as uncanny as the company, spouting lines with twinkling cheer that somehow chill the blood as much as amuse. His presence infects every room with a puckish menace, turning a simple “blossoming friendship” into a prelude for something far darker.

Chazen is, by turns, ingratiating and menacing, flouncing through scenes in ice-cream suits and throwing parties where quips, cats, and the grotesque collide. Meredith’s Chazen is the brownstone’s gleeful corrupter, frosting dread with a cherry of gallows humor. Meredith is one of the film’s most exquisite threads of macabre humor; it is the source of the sly, devilish current pulsing beneath the growing menace. His offbeat charm and mischievously theatrical style punctuate the unease; he prances and preens through the film as the puckish, sprightly cat-lover who treats Alison like his favorite new plaything.

Charles Chazen, a neighbor whose devilish foppery makes him unforgettable. He’s arch, impish, and deeply unsettling; the kind of old man who throws a cat’s birthday party and seems genuinely delighted by all the mischief that would entail. When he speaks, his voice lilts, like music ringing through the building’s shadows.

Witness Mr. Burgess Meredith, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers.

But Meredith is not alone in shaping this brownstone’s macabre ecosystem. The Sentinel unleashes an entire carnival of cracked souls, each rendered in a key of high strangeness and giddy discomfort. So, let’s not forget the other great character actors who populate the film’s universe.

Flanking Meredith is Eli Wallach as the pragmatic, skeptical, and world-weary Detective Gatz, a bewildered police detective. Wallach, bristling with New York cop energy as Gatz, teams up with the ever-watchful Christopher Walken’s Lieutenant Rizzo. Walken has a turn as Wallach’s taciturn, observant partner. Their procedural banter and suspicion add noir edges to the supernatural fog, always a few steps behind the building’s sinister design.

Ava Gardner, old Hollywood glamour personified, a magnetic presence, striking green eyes, and a bold, free-spirited style, plays the elusive Miss Logan, the icy, fashionable real estate agent. Gardner’s Miss Logan glides through the film with eerie poise, peddling apartments and vague reassurances in equal measure.

Then there’s a parade of old Hollywood and character-actor royalty—Martin Balsam plays Professor Ruzinsky, the absent-minded classics professor and eccentric Latin translator. And Sylvia Miles. Miles and Beverly D’Angelo’s unsettling duo, Gerde and Sandra, flutter through scenes with a predatory languor. One coos, the other nearly silent, their presence hovering between comic farce and menacing opacity. Their uncomfortable, wordless seduction of Alison leaves us as off-balance as anyone in the apartment.

Arthur Kennedy shuffles in as the weary, pragmatic priest, offering cryptic counsel with the heavy-lidded wisdom of someone who’s seen too much. And then, orbiting at the peripheries, is Jeff Goldblum, still a few years shy of cult stardom, floating through scenes as a fashion photographer, providing dashes of urban absurdity amid the darkness. Michael Sarrazin, Alison’s love interest, plays a character who exudes a slick and slimy charm that masks a calculating, morally ambiguous nature. His suave demeanor conceals a manipulative edge, making him yet another compellingly unsettling figure, and we can’t forget Deborah Raffin as Alison’s loyal confidante.

Set far above the social whirl of Chazen’s gatherings, John Carradine, cinema’s pope of haunted, hollow-eyed solemnity, plays Father Halliran, the blind, spectral Sentinel presides over the brownstone with quiet gravity. Perched high above the city in a darkened upper floor, Carradine doesn’t utter a word; instead, his performance is rendered almost mythic in his silence and abject watchfulness. Sitting motionless amid shafts of sickly light, his hollow cheeks and perpetually searching gaze confer both pity and terror. He’s less a person than a living scarecrow.

Halliran is both Sentinel and sacrificial guardian—the final protection against the infernal tide and the hellish chaos threatening to spill into the world. Seated in perpetual twilight, his blindness is less a limitation than a sign of having seen more than any human should. He’s woven into the narrative as a sorrowful, solitary watcher, embodying the film’s core dread: the price of confronting hell isn’t survival, but transformation into something barely human, locked forever at the threshold.

It’s a role only Carradine could make both mournful and nightmarish, the decaying priest, eyes forever alight with unseen horrors at the very gates of damnation, a living warning as much as it is a benefiction to Alison Parker about the fate that waits for those chosen to stand against darkness. He becomes one of the tragic souls of The Sentinel, without a single showy speech, though scarcely seen, his quiet watchfulness echoing long after the menagerie from Hell disperses.

The source material springs from Jeffrey Konvitz, who spun the original novel, which was a provocative read back then, especially for a horror enthusiast like myself, when the genre was at its most electrifying. He also contributed to the screenplay. Konvitz is probably best known for writing The Sentinel. He wrote other works, like The Guardian—a follow-up to this story, but nothing he created ever captured the horror world’s imagination like this one involving the diabolical brownstone. Winner’s film remains the definitive adaptation, pressing every pulpy button and then some. Konvitz did write the screenplay for Silent Night, Bloody Night 1972.

Konvitz’s mythos of The Sentinel crafts a chilling system of the film’s universe where a seemingly ordinary Brooklyn brownstone conceals the literal gateway to Hell—its tenants are not just quirky eccentrics, but damned souls or figures trapped in a supernatural order that binds the worlds of the living and the dead. At the core of this mythology is the concept of the “Sentinel,” a chosen individual consigned to serve as the lone guardian at the threshold, whose solemn vigil prevents infernal forces from spilling into the world.

Each Sentinel is chosen not by random fate, but through a hauntingly tragic premise: all previous Sentinels, including Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) and Father Halliran (John Carradine), have attempted suicide. Rather than finding an end, those who survive their own deaths are selected by the secret Catholic order that maintains the gateway. Their failed escape from pain and despair results in a lifelong—and afterlife—duty: to stand as Hell’s gatekeeper. This dark ritual binds personal suffering and salvation into a single, sacrificial act. The new Sentinel is burdened with both penance and power, condemned to an eternal watch alone, blind to the living world but bearing witness to the torments of the damned.

From the outset, The Sentinel announces it won’t settle for subtlety. Winner wastes no time cranking up the dread: textural shots and nighttime creaks crescendo to invasions by Chazen’s menagerie. Burgess Meredith’s Charles Chazen insinuates himself into Alison’s new life, and suddenly her reality begins to unravel; all his lines land with both menace and perverse cheer.

The plot twists with the inevitability of a noose: Alison’s romantic partner, uncuous and urbane attorney Michael (Chris Sarandon), tries to shield her from the mounting terror, but is ensnared by both his own secrets and the building’s supernatural agenda. Key scenes throb with surreal intensity, Alison’s vision of her decomposing zombified father, the absurd “party” thrown by Chazen and his ghoulish crew, and her desperate visits to try and meet the reclusive, blind priest who sits in lonely vigil high above the city. The Sentinels’ cold, white eyes, pale and unblinking, convey an otherworldly vacancy, as if they have gazed too long into the abyss, their lifeless stare radiating a chill that feels both mournful and utterly inhuman.

As the web tightens, Alison uncovers the building’s true purpose: it stands as a literal gateway to Hell, with each Sentinel a doomed soul fated to hold back the tide of the damned for eternity. The confrontation on the top floor, where walls literally crawl with a hellish infestation, a grotesque parade of damned souls, and Winner’s penchant for shock reaches its final moment. Climaxing in a crucible of temptation and ritual, Alison faces the ultimate existential horror. By the bitter end, the cycle is complete: the building stands silent, and a new Sentinel, Allison, now Sister Theresa, is in her place, the city outside none the wiser.

Psychologically, The Sentinel weaves together themes of guilt, despair, and the longing for redemption. The connection between suicide attempts and being chosen as a Sentinel underscores a vision of spiritual purgatory: the tenants’ grief, trauma, and isolation turn them into liminal beings who stand between worlds. The role is both punishment and twisted grace—salvation for the soul who can no longer bear earthly suffering, but only if that soul accepts the ultimate sacrifice of their autonomy. The horror is as much internal as external; the threat is not just of demonic invasion, but of being trapped by one’s own unresolved anguish.

This shadowy mission is overseen by a clandestine secret society within the Catholic Church, depicted in the film as robed priests and ecclesiastical authorities who orchestrate the selection and installation of each new Sentinel. They operate with cold determination, aware of the stakes yet emotionally distant from the suffering they oversee. The society’s rituals are riddled with secrecy and symbolism, hinting at ancient traditions that blur the lines between sanctity and damnation, mercy and imprisonment.

Rather than a straightforward battle of good versus evil, the mythology behind The Sentinel invites us to see the truly hellish as personal: the wounds we bear, the lengths we might go to escape them, and the monastic, desolate duties that sometimes result. The secret society is both protector and jailer, its silence complicit, its doctrines leaving the new Sentinel alone in both penance and power. Every watchful figure in that high, cursed window is a survivor of trying to sabotage the life they’ve been given, now forced to confront not only the demonic, but their own shadow forever.

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

This line, from Canto III of The Divine Comedy, marks the entrance to Hell in Dante’s epic poem and is frequently used in films and literature to evoke a portal to doom or damnation.

The brownstone at 10 Montague Terrace in Brooklyn Heights has become a notable landmark largely due to its prominent role in The Sentinel (1977). Renowned for its striking Neo-Greco architecture and grand, sweeping staircase, the building’s distinctive facade and meticulously preserved interior have cemented its place in horror cinema history, drawing fans eager to see the atmospheric setting.

The film opens in New York City, where beautiful fashion model Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) searches for a new apartment to gain independence and space from her intense boyfriend, lawyer Michael Lerman (Chris Sarandon). With the help of chic realtor Miss Logan (Ava Gardner), Alison selects a sprawling, beautifully situated Brooklyn Heights brownstone. Its rent is suspiciously low, but she’s won over by the charm, despite being told that the only other current resident is a blind priest, Father Halliran (John Carradine), who keeps a vigil in a top-floor window.

From her first night, Alison senses something is off. At night, she is disturbed by unnerving, loud footsteps above her head, even though the apartment above is supposed to be vacant. A chandelier over her bed sways eerily, rhythmically, and spiritedly as if responding to heavy movement. When she reports the noises, the realtor assures her there are no other tenants in the building but the blind priest, but the sounds persist, feeding Alison’s growing sense of unease.

Alison begins meeting the brownstone’s bizarre tenants. She is introduced to Charles Chazen (Meredith), a flamboyant, peculiarly friendly man who seems obsessed with his black-and-white cat Jezebel and his yellow canary Mortimer. He quickly invites her to a strange birthday party for the feline. Among the odd party guests are Gerde and Sandra, a mute and aggressively provocative lesbian couple (Sylvia Miles and Beverly D’Angelo) whose wordless advances leave Alison shocked and unsettled.

The party for Chazin’s beloved cat Jezebel is an impish ruse, a promise of festivity twisted into menace and madness. The invitation arrives with Chazen’s signature flourish: “Friendships blossom into bliss, Miss Parker!” he declares, urging her to join the gathering few could refuse, if only out of curiosity or polite resistance. Alison Parker, barely settled into her new brownstone, is swept into this surreal soiree at the insistence of the irrepressible Charles Chazen, whose puckish, gleaming eyes telegraph both courtly hospitality and impish threat.

Alison is drawn into this surreal celebration featuring dead murderers, a bizarre congregation of damned souls enacting eternal punishment and revelry in one delirious swirl. During the party, the lines between hospitality and threat blur after several subtly off-kilter details. This sequence unfurls like a weird reverie stitched from equal parts Grand Guignol and faded socialite whimsy.

Inside his parlor—cluttered, chintzy, alive with the scent of must and aging velvet—a small crowd assembles around the guest of honor, Jezebel: a black-and-white cat perched wearing a party hat, sits regally at the center of a table dressed for celebration. Her marked elegance is echoed, farcically, by the party centerpiece—a black-and-white cake.

Chazen presides in a dapper ice cream suit, his every gesture punctuated by theatrical delight and a sly turn of phrase. His guests, the infamous Miss Gerde Engstrom (Sylvia Miles), with her heavy, kohl-rimmed eyes and signature leotard, and the enigmatic, silent Sandra (Beverly D’Angelo), wavy blonde, loose, and flowing, softly tousled and falling freely around her shoulders, watch Alison with animal wariness and calculated interest. Others sit alert, each one odder than the last: Gary Allen as the wormy bespectacled Malcolm Stinnett, the Clotkin sisters, and Kate Harrington, playing Mrs. Clark, who croaks, “black and white cat, black and white cake.”

Alison confides in Michael about her neighbors’ bizarre behavior, but when police detectives (Eli Wallach and Christopher Walken) later investigate, they find that none of the tenants she speaks about—and whose photos she identifies—are alive; in fact, they are all notorious murderers who died years ago.

Alison’s own reality continues to unravel. She is stalked by splitting headaches and dizzy spells, and finds old Latin books that no one else seems able to read. Sometimes, she glimpses the world as though in a dream or fugue, unable to distinguish nightmare from waking life. Her previous trauma, her father’s abuse, begins to haunt her in visions. In a particularly visceral and terrifying sequence, her father’s decaying corpse appears like a phantasm, forcing Alison to defend herself by slashing him with a butcher knife. The scene still evokes a shudder in me with all its grotesque physicality, as though the apartment is both haunting her and trapping her in her darkest memories, and her visions becoming more volatile.

The jarring sequence, perhaps one of the defining moments in 1970s horror cinema, begins when, from behind the cracked shadowing doorway, her father materializes, an apparition draped in cold, spectral light, first just a suggestion, a blue-lit wraith emerging silently from the gloom. His form hangs in the air, in an unseeing trance, cast in a cold, unnatural glow, with movements that are rigid, mechanical, and quickening, each step charged with the emptiness of a sleepwalker or specter, limbs skeletal and flesh waning, worn thin by time and vulgar memories. His hollow eyes gloss over her presence, a disquieting echo of the bastard he once was, now crumbling at the edges like ancient stone. His decaying presence, ghoulish yet strangely fragile, hovers in the doorway, unseeing, as if summoned from memory rather than from life, while the blue light washes all humanity from his features, leaving only the hollow echo of a man lost between worlds. It is only when her own tempest breaks free that the spell shatters, lashing out to wake the fading specter from his haunted stupor, she strikes out at him and runs.

Throughout these scenes, Father Halliran, the blind priest, is glimpsed wordlessly sitting in the window above, an ominous, unresolved presence. Alison tries to understand his role by seeking answers at the local cathedral, where she encounters the elusive Monsignor and from Michael, who becomes increasingly obsessed with protecting her.

Michael investigates the brownstone’s mysterious history, uncovering that every previous Sentinel—each a supposed “guardian”- was a suicide survivor, chosen by a secret Catholic order to watch over the gateway between Hell and Earth. Michael’s own past comes under scrutiny, as his involvement in his wife’s murder is revealed, mirroring the building’s legacy of violence and guilt.

As supernatural forces gather strength, within the brownstone, now revealed as the gateway to Hell, Chazen, who’s shed all traces of whimsy and now slips into a more devilish, dangerously sinister tone, orchestrates a nightmarish gathering. It all culminates in the film’s infamous hellscape finale, where a phantasmagoria of physically striking “damned souls” portrayed by real individuals with remarkable appearances fills the screen in a parade of shock and awe. These characters, all wordless, become the living architecture of the film’s horror, transforming the building into a grotesque gallery of the lost, the punished, and the peculiar.

As The Sentinel reaches its feverish climax, Alison Parker is drawn into the brownstone’s ghost-lit upper floors, terror mounting with every step. The air thickens with silent terror as Chazen, in full satanic maestro mode, summons his legions: the room seems to warp and bulge as his minions, those strange, spectral party guests from the cat gathering and beyond, emerge from the shadows and stairwells, shuffling and urgent.

Now lured to the top floor where Father Haliran sits guarding with blank eyes, Chazen and his surreal, nightmarish party guests, damned souls representing the dead murderers who now inhabit the building, reveal themselves to Alison in a scene that erupts into an inferno of horror and madness. Hell’s gate cracks open, and she faces their onslaught.

They are an unforgettable procession: figures both familiar and newly horrifying, some bearing wounds from their past crimes, others twisted with the marks of damnation. Faces once glimpsed at Chazen’s parties now leer with demonic intent, their eyes glittering with a hunger that is neither fully human nor wholly monstrous. The air shudders with their collective presence as they advance, a phantasmagoria of the lost who once murdered, betrayed, or despaired into oblivion, all brought back to serve as Hell’s foot soldiers.

Alison stands alone in Father Halliran’s apartment as the minions close in. They reach for her with clawed hands, mouths slack with anticipation, not simply to harm her, but to drive her to the edge of despair, to force her into the final act that would damn her soul forever. The walls seem to pulse, crawling with the damned as Chazen, his grin wide and voice lilting, orchestrates the onslaught like an unholy master of ceremonies.

The entire sequence is rendered with a surreal, nightmarish vividness: misshapen limbs, scarred bodies, lamentable rising into a hellish choir as the brownstone itself becomes a crucible for Alison’s soul. The minions’ descent is relentless, suffocating, and inescapable, pushing Alison toward the ultimate revelation of the Sentinel’s purpose and her own fate as the next unwilling guardian against eternal darkness.

Chazen seeks to prevent Alison from taking up the mantle of Sentinel, he hands her a knife and whispers to her sweetly like a lovesong or a prayer, or like a dark covenant, its cold weight pressing upon her unwillingness and fear. He tries to seduce her into killing herself. The exchange symbolizes a testing of will, Alison’s fragile grip on reality tightening as Chazen’s sinister intentions loom.

While the spiritual forces, including the presence of the Monsignor and Father Haliran, remain watchers at first, rather than active interveners in that tense instant, until they hand over a cross as Alison resists Hell and endures, fulfilling her unwitting destiny. Michael, now damned for his own sins, tries to stop her but is killed. As Chazen’s sinister scheme unravels, the demonic horde recoils, wailing shadows retreating in a swirling, suffocating vacuum, their twisted forms dissolving into the abyss. On screen, the air seems to convulse and contract as a spectral dissolve sweeps through the room, engulfing the monstrous presences until only silence remains, while Chazen’s furious glare seethes with bitter rage, powerless against his defeat. Alison’s attempt to escape her ultimate path either way is futile; after Monsignor arrives and the cross is passed, she succumbs to her fate.

This sequence captures The Sentinel’s creepy ride from psychological dread to supernatural horror, with an escalating blend of bizarre encounters, unnerving set pieces, and a finale that fuses Catholic mythology with urban paranoia and bleak, cyclical fate.

The final scene returns to the apartment building. Time has passed. Miss Logan, now showing the apartment to a new tenant, passes the top floor, where the blind priest once sat. The camera lingers: Alison Parker, now blind and dressed in her simple nun’s habit, sits vigil in the window, an unmoving presence and the building’s latest eternal guardian.

The film ends with an air of tragic inevitability; the gateway to Hell is held at bay once again, but only at the cost of Alison’s life, eternal soul, and selfhood, as her friends and the world outside remain oblivious to the darkness contained within the quiet brownstone.

The film’s impact was felt squarely in the post-Exorcist, post-Rosemary’s Baby wave of satanic cinema, fitting effortlessly alongside The Omen in its fascination with urban damnation and the breakdown between the physical world and infernal forces. The Sentinel pushes the envelope with its blend of grindhouse sensationalism, savage cinema, transgressive, as much as an old-fashioned Gothic spook show, deploying both prosthetic make-up and the parade of real, physically distinctive actors in Hell’s finale that remains controversial and unforgettable. Dick Smith, known for groundbreaking work on The Exorcist, contributed several memorable effects. While most of the physical deformities on screen are real, some are enhanced or wholly created by Smith’s prosthetic artistry.

And Gil Mellé’s evocative music pours sinister, beautiful dread across the film like spilled red wine over the sacrificial altar.

Critical reaction at the time was mixed, as befits a film so shamelessly baroque: Robert Bookbinder, a noted film scholar, wrote in his 1982 book The Films of the Seventies: “It is undoubtedly one of the most terrifying interludes in seventies cinema.”

While The New York Times hailed its “Chilling, stylish atmosphere, like a demonic fairy tale for adults.” For all the controversy over its parade of grotesques, its lurid jolts, and its freewheeling collage of acting styles, The Sentinel lingers, smoky, nightmarish, and resolutely unclassifiable, a bridge in both narrative and spirit between classic Hollywood Gothic and the unapologetic depravity of late-70s horror.

For those of you who appreciate their demonic cinema with a side of high-art camp, haunted cityscapes, and a who’s who of vintage screen legends, The Sentinel is a delicious descent, with Burgess Meredith, perched midway between Mephistopheles and Catskills emcee, poised at the center, grinning into the abyss.

#130 down, 20 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

 

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #131 The Shining 1980

 

THE SHINING 1980

Exploring the Haunted Psyche of The Shining: Whispers Through the Corridor, Echoes of the Overlook: Madness, Memory, and Menace.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining has endured as a high watermark of psychological horror, fueling decades of analysis and interpretation.

Stephen King disliked Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining 1980 because he felt the film stripped away the emotional heart of his story, particularly the arc and humanity of Jack Torrance, turning him into a one-note maniacal villain rather than a flawed, sympathetic man gradually undone by supernatural forces. King described Kubrick’s film as “a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it,” criticizing it for being visually impressive but emotionally “cold” and lacking the warmth, character depth, and tragedy present in his novel.

The film’s focus pivots not simply on the haunted Overlook Hotel or even the diabolical forces that seem to slither through its labyrinthine corridors, but on the aching, perilous intersection of creative ambition and familial breakdown, anchored by the performances of its central trio, the extraordinary artistry behind the camera, and an ever-palpable sense of ominous melancholy.

Kubrick, notoriously meticulous, co-wrote the screenplay with Diane Johnson, forging from King’s novel a cinematic maze with its own internal rules, riddles, and traps. The director’s unwavering control is immediately evident: from the ominous, soaring opening shots over the Colorado wilderness to the final, frozen tableau, every frame radiates calculation and intent. The Steadicam, then a fresh technological marvel, glides eerily backward and forward through the hotel’s eerie hallways, most memorably as young Danny Torrance pedals his Big Wheel tricycle (which came out in 1969) on echoing carpets and polished floors, a tour de force in immersive, subjective camera work.

Jack Nicholson’s performance as the iconically Faustian Jack Torrance, a soul unraveling in ice and fire, is both histrionic and nuanced. His Jack begins as a troubled but seemingly composed aspiring writer; gradually, his affect twists into the grotesque, his face all angled sneers and bulging, manic eyes. What’s initially played as frustration, “When I’m in here and you hear me typing… you’re breaking my concentration,” evolves into a terrifying threat: “Wendy? Darling. Light of my life. I’m not gonna hurt ya. You didn’t let me finish my sentence. I said, I’m not gonna hurt ya. I’m just going to bash your brains in!”

Jack is a tragic figure—once creative, now broken and consumed by his inner torment and the destructive forces unleashed within him. The film captures both his earthly potential and his catastrophic downfall, blending mythic grandeur with psychological ruin.

Shelley Duvall, as Wendy, delivers a performance fraught with vulnerability and rising terror, her nerves exposed and trembling as she transitions from apologetic peacemaker to desperate survivor. Danny Lloyd, in his only major film role, incarnates childhood innocence tainted by insidious visions, his “shining” a tragic curse, a connection to the hotel’s malevolent past, and the psychic violence swirling within his family.

Shelley Duvall was a singular, magnetic talent celebrated for her unconventional beauty and fearless performances in films like The Shining, 3 Women, and collaborations with Robert Altman. Known for her expressive vulnerability and ability to blend eccentricity with profound empathy, she left a lasting mark on both adult cinema and children’s television with her work on Faerie Tale Theatre, influencing generations with her originality and emotional depth. Duvall passed away peacefully in her sleep at her home in Texas on July 11, 2024, at age 75, due to complications from diabetes, a loss we widely mourned in the film world for her legacy as a true original and a gravitational force on screen.

The plot unfolds deceptively simple: Jack, Wendy, and Danny arrive at the snowbound Overlook Hotel at the onset of winter, tasked as caretakers of its grandeur and secrets. Early on, the hotel’s history is explained; the previous caretaker, Delbert Grady, murdered his wife and daughters before killing himself, a narrative omen that seeps into Jack’s own tenuous sobriety. As the family settles in, Danny’s psychic abilities manifest more vividly: he “shines” with visions of blood, murdered twins. “Come play with us, Danny. Forever… and ever… and ever.”

The sequence with the twin ghostly sisters in The Shining—two little girls — the otherworldly Gradys sisters portrayed by identical twins Lisa and Louise Burns in matching pale innocent blue dresses, splattered with crimson carnage, standing eerily side by side in a dim, aging hotel corridor, is one of cinema’s most iconic and chilling images of supernatural horror. Their pale, almost translucent faces are expressionless yet hauntingly vacant, framed by brown hair that clashes horrifically with the dark, oppressive atmosphere and the blood staining their hems. The film’s muted lighting renders the hallway cold and claustrophobic, with an almost sepia washed-out quality that evokes faded memories or nightmares trapped in time.

The girls’ stillness and synchronized presence create a disturbingly unnatural symmetry, which Kubrick’s camera lingers on with slow, creeping steadiness, adding to the palpable tension that oozes off the screen like the tidal wave of blood that spills out of the hotel’s elevator.

Their demand—“Come play with us, Danny. Forever… and ever… and ever.”—reverberates both like an innocent invitation and a sinister curse, sealing their status as tragic, malevolent spirits who embody the hotel’s cycle of violence. This line, simple but forbidding, captures the ghostly sisters’ eternal entrapment and their desire to ensnare Danny in their deadly fate.

Historically, this scene has become a seminal moment in horror cinema, epitomizing the uncanny, where innocence is corrupted, and childhood becomes a source of terror rather than comfort. The visual contrast of the sweet, vintage dresses drenched in blood alongside the otherworldly stillness of the twins established a lasting template for ghostly apparitions in film and television. Their image haunts popular culture, influencing countless homages, parodies, and scholarly interpretations as a perfect distillation of childhood trauma, supernatural dread, and the uncanny valley where the familiar becomes alien and threatening.

For me, nothing is quite as chilling as dead or demonic children, and the Grady sisters are perhaps the quintessential poster children for that trope in cinema.

The scene’s power rests in its stark, minimalistic imagery combined with the chilling dialogue that distills deep psychological horror into a single, unforgettable moment, making the ghostly twins a lasting symbol of The Shining’s eerie brilliance and its exploration of trapped souls and doomed innocence.

One of the film’s other most memorable foreshadowing devices has to be the word ‘REDRUM’—spelled backward, it’s a simple yet shattering emblem, a haunting little emblem of the story’s creeping horror.

Alongside these, Jack’s creative frustration ripens into madness. His writing consists of the chilling mantra rhythmically drummed out on his typewriter: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

The Overlook’s vast, gleaming spaces cocoon its occupants, isolating them while slowly inserting apparitions into their reality: the spectral bartender Lloyd, the elegant but sinister Grady, and scenes of decadent, ghostly celebration in the hotel’s Gold Room. For Jack, these experiences nudge him from brooding discontent into homicidal rage, as the ghosts flatter, provoke, and ultimately command him to “correct” his family. Danny, in terror, speaks through his imaginary friend Tony, who speaks through his little bent pointer finger, while Wendy struggles to hold her son and her increasingly violent husband together.

Scatman Crothers, who was an actor, musician, and voice artist, broke new ground for Black entertainers in film and television while leaving an indelible impression with his unique presence and expressive style. His character, Dick Hallorann, is intuitive, empathetic, and warm-hearted. He’s the protective head cook and fellow “shiner” who shares a telepathic bond with Danny, makes a desperate rescue mission, but is murdered by the now fully deranged Jack, who stalks Wendy and Danny through endless corridors, culminating in the iconic chase through the snowy hedge maze.

Cinematographer John Alcott’s lens transforms the hotel into a living organism; its symmetry, mirrored surfaces, and looming spaces echo the characters’ psychological fracturing. The set’s opulent art deco and Native American motifs become part of the film’s intellectual machinery, suggesting cycles of violence, repression, and the persistence of historical trauma.

Alcott was behind the camera for other iconic collaborations with Stanley Kubrick, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and especially Barry Lyndon, which actually landed him an Oscar. Beyond Kubrick, Alcott brought his signature style to all sorts of movies, including the teen slasher from the 1980’s Terror Train starring Jamie Lee Curtis, the gritty Fort Apache the Bronx, The Beastmaster, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes 1984, and No Way Out 1987 (which, incidentally, was dedicated to him after he passed away).

The unnerving score, including Wendy Carlos’s electronic “Dies Irae,” serves as a requiem not just for the Torrance family but also for the hotel’s lingering ghosts and, symbolically, America’s buried sins. Kubrick’s approach is famously ambiguous, resisting definitive psychological or supernatural explanations. Essentially, The Shining is a metaphysical and narrative maze.

What haunts the film, what haunts Jack, in particular, is as much internal as external: addiction, suppressed fury, failures as a husband and father, and the lure of destructive cycles. Freud’s idea of the “uncanny” pervades the action, as the familiar—family, home, one’s own face in the mirror, is rendered deeply strange and hostile.

Yet, the performances serve as the film’s central conduit, lending its abstract ideas tangible force, deepening the narrative’s resonance while ensuring its philosophical complexities remain vivid and immediate. What all the cast brings to the role transforms the lofty concepts into lived experience, so the film’s themes never become detached or purely theoretical.

Jack’s descent is both tragic and grotesquely comic; Wendy’s fear is the lens through which we experience the escalating terror; Danny is the medium through which the supernatural operates, but also the symbol of innocence, survival, and the possibility of escape.

Dialogues such as “Heeere’s Johnny!” as Jack furiously axes through the bathroom door, or the Grady twins’ spectral invitation, echo in cultural memory, signifying horror not just as an affect but as an inheritance, psychic, familial, collective consciousness, and historical.

Kubrick’s The Shining finally refuses to resolve itself within any one reading, no matter how many times you revisit it. Is evil an external force, a supernatural inheritance, or a tragic flaw that eats away from within? Does Jack always belong to the hotel, as the inexplicable final photograph suggests? The Shining is not simply a ghost story, but a meditation on the nature of storytelling, madness, and memory.

“The movie is not about ghosts but about madness and the energies it sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them.”
— Roger Ebert, The Shining review, originally published in 1980

“Stanley Kubrick’s cold and frightening The Shining challenges us to decide: Who is the reliable observer? Whose idea of events can we trust? … The result is alternatively baffling and terrifying to the very end.”
— Roger Ebert, The Shining: An Odyssey of Madness, 2023

Like the Overlook’s tableaux, the film endures, a Gothic palace whose secrets are ever open, never fully revealed. The Shining’s resonance lies in its refusal to offer easy answers, freezing us, like Jack in the hedge maze, in the perpetual search for meaning inside its austere, gilded, haunted halls and snowy landscape.

#131 down, 19 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror # 129 Something Wicked This Way Comes 1983 & The Howling 1981

SPOILER ALERT!

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES 1983

Whispers and Wonders at the Carnival’s Edge: A Dark Lullaby of Innocence, Temptation, and Shadows in Bradbury’s Vision:

There are films that flicker dimly in the subconscious, the way half-remembered childhood nightmares do, and then there is the 1983 Disney film Something Wicked This Way Comes —an intoxicating midnight fable that weaves together horror, fantasy, psychological trauma, and melancholy nostalgia until you scarcely know if you’ve woken from the dream. It’s a requiem and a lament, phantasmal and philosophically meditative, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury, one of America’s sorcerers of story. The film is itself a lush, haunted bedtime tale, spun from the fibers of longing, fear, and the secret wish for second chances.

Disney’s move toward darker films began in 1980 with The Watcher in the Woods starring Bette Davis, which opened the door to a new era of supernatural and suspenseful stories aimed at more mature audiences. This shift toward darker themes started under studio head Ron Miller, who wanted to attract older audiences and experiment with more adult-oriented stories. The launch of The Watcher in the Woods symbolized this new direction by blending eerie suspense with supernatural horror, setting the stage for other “dark” Disney films of the 1980s, like Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Black Cauldron.

Bradbury’s original story, part autumn elegy, part meditation on innocence and regret, infuses everything here, from the elfin danger of the wind to the ripe terror of the carousel’s spin. Directed by Jack Clayton, a magician behind the camera with a touch for both the visceral and the spectral (his masterwork The Innocents lingers in every shadow), the film conjures the small town of Green Town, Illinois, just as fall pools in its corners. Leaves shiver in the October air, and something, a circus, a storm, a black-draped promise, arrives on the midnight train bringing with it a liminal foreboding of dark wraiths, midnight lingerers, unique folk, and enchantresses.

Jack Clayton has long been a favorite director of mine for his meticulous, psychologically rich storytelling and his signature blend of haunting atmosphere, literary depth, and that unique, quietly intense exploration of repression, loneliness, and the shadows lurking beneath everyday life. After all, he directed films like Room at the Top (1959), starring Simone Signoret. it was his critically acclaimed feature debut, a social drama based on John Braine’s novel, which gained several Oscar nominations, including Best Director for Clayton. of course there’s, The Innocents (1961): A classic, highly praised horror film adapted from Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, noted for its eerie atmosphere and strong performances. The Pumpkin Eater (1964): starring Ann Bancroft, giving a stellar performance in his psycho-sexual drama featuring a screenplay by Harold Pinter, exploring a troubled marriage.Our Mother’s House (1967): starring Pamela Franklin, A psychological drama about children hiding their mother’s death, and The Great Gatsby (1974): A lavish adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. Included in the impressive list is The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987): A drama starring the great and recently departed Maggie Smith, exploring themes of loneliness and regret.

Cinematographer Stephen H. Burum bathes the world in golden gloom and chilly blue, letting the town’s empty streets and rain-glossed windows sigh with the possibility of both evil and wonder. There’s a fairy-tale tinge to every frame: candy-apple reds, the warm brown of cigar boxes and library shelves, the unreal black of night deeper than pitch. Michael Praetorius’s score, commanded to spectral new heights by iconic composer James Horner, lulls and jangles, equal parts lullaby and funeral dirge, rippling with glockenspiel and ominous brass, a nocturne for lost souls.

But it’s the cast who give the film its beating heart. Jason Robards, with his timeworn face and steadfast sadness, is Charles Halloway, the town librarian whose regrets are as thick as the dust between his book spines. Jonathan Pryce (the acclaimed English actor, most celebrated for his mesmerizing turn as the dream-haunted bureaucrat in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil), with eyes like bottomless wells, arrives as Mr. Dark, ringmaster of the Pandemonium Carnival—a devil in a stovepipe hat, soft-spoken and lethal, offering to trade your soul for your unspoken desires. The boys, Will Halloway (Vidal Peterson) and Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson), are the film’s shivering compass, teetering on the cusp of adolescence, wild with curiosity and dread. Pam Grier glows with deadly mystique as the Dust Witch, her every move casting invisible nets. Her presence at death’s threshold is pure, mesmerizing stillness as she stands with the grace of a midnight apparition, a dark romantic terror, her voice barely a whisper, but her aura as commanding as a velvet shroud, chilling and enchanting all who dare to meet her gaze. She drifts through the shadows like a silent oracle, each gesture commanding fate and fear, her eyes promising both doom and deliverance in a single, spectral glance.

The Dust Witch, with her psychic attacks, brings a kind of eerie, supernatural dread. While Bradbury’s novel portrays the Dust Witch as a blind soothsayer who uses a hot air balloon to mark houses, the film adaptation takes liberties with this detail. The movie restores her sight and amplifies her alluring presence, making her charm a form of magic in itself, eliminating the need to hover over the town in an ominous balloon.

The story unfolds in a swirl of magic and menace: Will and Jim, best friends, sense the town’s ordinary rhythms drum off-beat as lightning splits the sky and a carnival of impossible wonders glides into town.

The Pandemonium Carnival sets up its tents overnight, all green smoke and fever-dream colors. The boys sneak into the shadows, spying on freakish attractions and Mr. Dark’s hands, each branded with moving tattoos of the name of a soul he’s claimed. Soon, the townsfolk are lured by promises: the teacher yearns to relive youth, the barber aches to see exotic places. The carnival offers these gifts with its haunted mirror maze and enchanted carousel, but each comes with a terrifying price.

The carousel’s secret is the most poisonous: it can spin you forwards or backwards through time, remaking you a child or an ancient in a single, shrieking revolution. Jim Nightshade, drawn by heartbreak and the promise of escape from grief, yearns to ride and reunite with his vanished father. Will, by contrast, tries desperately to save his friend Jim, even as the town’s grown-ups fall, one by one, under the spell of Mr. Dark.

The lightning rods in Something Wicked This Way Comes symbolize both a literal and a metaphorical attempt to ward off danger. On the surface, they are meant to protect against the natural threat of storms and lightning, but in the story, they also come to represent humanity’s vain hope of protecting itself from supernatural evil forces that cannot be kept at bay by metal or science alone. They act as a modern-day talisman, highlighting the limits of human understanding and the divide between natural and otherworldly threats.

The boys, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, receive a lightning rod early in the story from Tom Fury, a mysterious traveling lightning-rod salesman. Tom Fury (Royal Dano), who just appears, approaches the boys, predicts that a storm is coming, and warns them that one of their houses is in particular danger. The rods, which are physical objects meant to keep storms at bay, are almost like symbols or lucky charms against all the weirdness and danger that rolls into town. Upon discovering the boys have no money, he gives Jim a lightning rod free of charge, instructing him to install it on his roof immediately or risk death by lightning.

Initially, Jim is fascinated by the danger and uninterested in actually using the rod, seemingly enticed by the thrill of tempting fate, but Will, more cautious and thoughtful, convinces him to put it up, even bringing a ladder and focusing Jim on the need to protect his mother. It’s imperative that Jim keep his mom safe because he is growing up in a single-parent household, and his mother is his only family; she represents his connection to home, comfort, and the security he so deeply fears losing. The story highlights Jim’s vulnerability and the depth of his bond with his mother (Diane Ladd), especially since he longs for his absent father. Protecting her means preserving the one source of stability and love in his life. Diane Ladd brings warmth and quiet strength to Mrs. Nightshade’s character, underscoring why she is vital to Jim and why her safety is so emotionally significant in the story.

Early in the narrative, when the mysterious Tom Fury warns of a coming storm, there’s a real sense of urgency for Jim and Will to install the lightning rod. Together, the boys climb onto the roof of Jim’s house and install this conventional-looking talisman, which is etched with mysterious symbols. It is said to ward off any storm, regardless of its origin. We end up climbing onto the roof together, hammering it in, reading those strange symbols, almost like we’re performing a ritual to keep the darkness out.

Looking back, it’s clear to me that the lightning rod is more than just a tool; it’s our small, naïve way of trying to stand up to forces way bigger and stranger than a simple thunderstorm. It sets the whole story in motion and says a lot about the kind of bravery, and maybe a little fear, that lives in all of us when the unknown comes knocking. That is at the core of Something Wicked This Way Comes: that something dark has come knocking.

Will’s father, Charles Halloway, is deeply haunted by his own age, regrets, and sense of inadequacy as a parent. Standing in the shadow of lost youth and fearing that he’s too old, weak, or cowardly to protect or relate to his son, Charles is tempted by Mr. Dark’s carnival promise: the carousel’s magic can make him young again. Charles Halloway, racked by age and regrets, is tempted by the hope of a second chance to be young, to be the braver father he never was.

Ed, the bartender, played by James Stacy in Something Wicked This Way Comes, is a former local football hero who lost both his arm and leg (in real life, the actor became a double amputee after a motorcycle accident), and he works as the bartender at the corner saloon. Ed deeply longs to relive his glory days as a football star and to have his lost limbs restored—essentially, he wishes for his physical wholeness and youthful strength, and a return to his status as a local hero. The barber’s (Richard Davalos) wish is to escape his mundane life and perhaps experience adventure or exotic places, reflecting a longing for excitement beyond his routine existence. He is ultimately consumed by the carnival and disappears mysteriously, vanishing without a trace from the normal world. He is taken into the carnival’s supernatural realm or transformed into something otherworldly, losing his human identity and existence.

Miss Foley (Mary Grace Canfield), the wistful teacher, weeps as she’s transformed into a terrified child; Miss Foley’s transformation into a terrified child is both literal and symbolic. She longs, like many characters, for youth or a return to a simpler time, but when the carnival’s dark magic takes hold, this wish is twisted. Instead of happily regaining her youth, she is forcibly regressed, turned back into a child, but trapped in fear and vulnerability. This strips her of agency and the dignity of adulthood, leaving her terrified and helpless.

Throughout this fevered progression, carnival parades, dust-shrouded mazes, and surreal confrontations, the film tightens its grip, escalating from eerie spectacle to stark confrontations between hope and despair. Mr. Dark, sensing the boys’ resistance, unleashes Pam Grier’s Dust Witch to hunt them, and there’s a stunning sequence as the boys hide in Charles’s library, hunted by malevolent wind and smoke. Mr. Dark, ever the charming devil, tempts Charles with the youth he so longed for, carving detailed pain on his hand and threatening the boys before vanishing.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is full of unsettling, nightmarish scenes that tap into primal childhood fears, not just the creeping darkness, the sinister carnival, and the uncanny power of temptation. Among the scariest moments is the infamous spider attack scene, which is often cited as one of the film’s most harrowing sequences. In this scene, Jim Nightshade is alone in his bedroom when monstrous spiders overtake him. The sequence unfolds in the dead of night: hundreds of real tarantulas suddenly swarm Jim’s room, pouring down from walls, the ceiling, and even his bed, covering him as he sleeps. Jim awakens to this living nightmare, covered in spiders, clinging to his body, webbing swathing the room, their movement amplified by close-up shots and moody lighting. The sequence is suffocating, drenched in fear and panic, as Jim struggles to free himself.

The spiders represent not just physical danger, but the psychological grip of the carnival’s evil, sent by the Dust Witch on Mr. Dark’s orders, specifically to torment the boys after they witness too much.

The only thing that saves Jim is the lightning rod he and Will installed earlier, serving as a kind of talisman against supernatural attack. The attack underscores the difference between the boys: Jim, reckless and drawn to darkness, faces the horror alone, while Will, cautious and protective, is usually motivated by concern for others.

Other memorably scary scenes include The Hall of Mirrors, which is a surreal, distorted maze that traps and taunts, showing characters their deepest regrets or desires. Mr. Dark’s Confrontations: Mr. Dark’s chilling parade through town, his menacing encounters with Will’s father, and his magical power to physically mark those he hunts. The Carousel’s Curse: The haunting carousel, which can age or revert people in moments, spinning adults into children or the old into youth, always with an evil price.

The finale evokes Grimm at his darkest: a stricken Charles Halloway confronts his nightmares and, in an act of hard-won courage, defeats the carnival’s evil with a weapon unimagined, laughter, love, and the acceptance of age and imperfection. He turns the carousel’s corrupting magic back on Mr. Dark, breaking the spell and freeing the town. The tents collapse, swept away like leaves, and dawn finally splinters the carnival’s darkness.

In the closing moments, Will and Jim teeter on the fence between boyhood and something older. haunted, wiser, grateful for the sunlight breaking the spell, unsure whether this was a ghostly lesson or a very real midnight adventure. The camera lingers on the fallen leaves, the ordinary world reborn, and the promise that even nightmares can be banished by the simplest magic: hope, love, and the bravery to face the dark together.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is a dark lullaby for adults who remember childhood chills, a storybook warning sung in visual poetry and whispered on the autumn wind—a rare gem spun from Bradbury’s brilliant, bittersweet imagination, where fairytales are frightening, and horror always hides just behind the carnival lights.

Roger Ebert praised Something Wicked This Way Comes for capturing not only the mood and tone of Ray Bradbury’s novel but also its style, writing that “Bradbury’s prose is a strange hybrid of craftsmanship and lyricism,” and called it “a horror movie with elegance” that balances heartfelt conversations and an unabashed romanticism amid its evil carnival.

The New York Times highlighted the film’s transformation from an initially “overworked Norman Rockwell note” into “a lively, entertaining tale combining boyishness and grown-up horror in equal measure,” praising director Jack Clayton for bringing tension that transcends the novel’s prose.

THE HOWLING 1981

Digging into every hairy detail of The Howling at The Last Drive-In would be so much fun. And let’s be honest, the only thing crazier than me not sharpening my claws on a good scratching post, ha! would be trying to tame a werewolf.

There’s something oddly exhilarating about how Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981) slinks through the fog of cinematic memory, at once a savage riff on the legacy of Universal’s monster pantheon and a wry send-up of modern anxieties, all under the thrill of the full moon. Set in a world where werewolves stalk the fringes of society and television screens hum with the static of trauma and violence, the film opens with a neon-lit Los Angeles and Dee Wallace’s brilliantly vulnerable Karen White facing down a serial killer in a sleazy porno booth, the air crackling with dread and the sly promise of the “old horror” about to resurface on modern ground.

Dante, ever the film buff, weaves his reverence for the classics directly into the atmosphere. There’s even a scene of Universal’s The Wolf Man flickering on a TV, a nod that runs deeper than homage. The dialogue dances from wit to grit: when John Carradine, the leathery patriarch of The Colony’s monstrous inhabitants, glowers, his presence is both funny and chilling, perfectly pinning the film’s tone between camp and catastrophic nihilism.

John Carradine practically howls his way into The Howling as Erle Kenton, the Colony’s resident silver-haired curmudgeon and proof that sometimes your creepiest neighbor is exactly as weird as he looks.

Erle C. Kenton is Dante’s cheeky way of giving a nod to the good old days of classic horror, and basically tipping his hat to a horror film heavyweight back in the day. Kenton directed classics like Island of Lost Souls 1932,  The Ghost of Frankenstein 1942, House of Frankenstein 1944 and House of Dracula 1945. Carradine’s grumpy old werewolf character Erle C. Kenton was a delightful way of sneaking a little inside joke for horror buffs who know their monster movie history.

Carradine, gaunt as midnight and with a voice like gravel at the bottom of the world, brings Erle to life as a howling relic of a bygone beastly era—part Gothic grandpa, part werewolf doomsayer, with a showmanship that expertly straddles earnest heartbreak and campy bravado.

In the collection of misfits and outsiders that is the Colony, Carradine’s Erle isn’t just another growling face in the crowd; he’s the bleeding heart of old-school lycanthropy, the wolf who can’t get with the times. When most residents are trying to “channel their energies” and avoid attention, Erle yearns for the carnivorous, predatory glory days. He is deeply frustrated with raising cattle for their feed, I mean, where’s the life in that? He’s tired of the boring domestication of werewolves, and he loudly longs for wilder times.

“The humans are our prey. We should feed on them like we’ve always done. Screw all this ‘channel your energies’ crap.”

Erle’s role is both plot catalyst and spectral warning. He isn’t quietly lurking, he’s prowling the group like a lost prophet, lashing out at the meager comforts of “modern” lycanthropy with a melodramatic gusto. His existential dread is as loud as his voice, whether he’s railing against the taming of wild things or threatening to end it all beneath an indifferent moon.

There’s a certain comic pathos to it, too: the old wolf whose best days are behind him but who refuses to go quietly, and refusing to accept tamed modernity, making every group therapy session crackle with the threat of old teeth. Carradine delivers lines with the relish of a man who’s seen one too many full moons and never quite learned subtlety: “You can’t tame what’s meant to be wild, doc. It just ain’t natural.”

With a single glare, a wild-eyed monologue, or the tragic melodrama of a failed suicide attempt, played with a kind of dramatic, somewhat hammy flair fitting his cantankerous, theatrical persona. He almost throws himself into the fire in a bleak but exaggerated gesture, underscoring his deep despair mixed with a grotesque flair for the dramatic. It’s not a subtle or quiet moment, but it’s Carradine all the way. Carradine cements Erle Kenton as the cranky conscience of the pack, at once pitiful, frightening, and somehow grandly ridiculous. He’s not just a monster; he’s the echo of every monster movie you’ve ever loved, delivered with the gravelly, overripe gravitas only John Carradine could muster. The Howling wouldn’t be the same without him skulking at the edges, baying for a life, and a horror tradition that’s slipping into the shadows.

John Carradine “I am a ham!” Part 2

You’ll also see the likes of Slim Pickens’ grizzled sheriff, and blink-and-you-miss-it cameos from legends like Kevin McCarthy, and Roger Corman veteran, Dick Miller as Bookstore owner Walter Paisley.

Bookstore owner (Walter Paisley): “We get ’em all: sun-worshippers, moon-worshippers, Satanists. The Manson family used to hang around and shoplift. Bunch of deadbeats!”

There’s also the presence of British actor (who immortalized the television series –The Avengers as John Steed), Patrick Macnee, as Dr. George Waggner, who pursues a more civilised way for the beasts to dwell among mortals. Dr. Waggner’s psychology is a wild blend of New Age optimism and lycanthropic denial. Waggner believes you can soothe primal urges and monstrous instincts with a weekend at The Colony, group therapy, and a touch of self-actualization. His mission seems to be proving that even werewolves just need to embrace their feelings, but deep down, you get the sense he’d prescribe a motivational poster that reads: Hang in there…and try not to eat anyone!

Dr. George Waggner: “Repression is the father of neurosis, of self-hatred. Now stress results when we fight against our impulses. We’ve all heard people talk about animal magnetism, the natural man, the noble savage, as if we’d lost something valuable in our long evolution into civilized human beings.”

Marsha Quist: “Shut up, Doc! You wouldn’t listen to me, none of you. ‘We can fit in,’ you said. ‘We can live with them.’ You make me sick.”

Yet, as much as The Howling is a boys’ club of B-movie icons, what’s most delightful to me is that the film is unusually generous to its fierce women. Dee Wallace carves out a heroine who is fraught but never hapless, her breaking voice and wide-eyed clarity grounding the wild supernatural proceedings. And Belinda Balaski’s Terry is the kind of best friend you’d beg the screen to rescue: plucky, resourceful, always one ax-blow ahead of the menace, Nancy Drew with blood under her nails!

Terry goes to The Colony after her own sleuthing leads her there, and she risks everything—ultimately losing her life—while trying to protect Karen and expose the terrifying secret at the Colony’s heart. Her arc is widely seen as both heroic and tragic, and Balaski’s energetic, clever portrayal ensures her kick-ass Terry remains a fan favorite among genre enthusiasts like me.

Dee Wallace and Belinda Balaski are bona fide icons of horror whose careers have won them legions of devoted fans, thanks to their charisma, versatility, and uncanny knack for making even the wildest genre premises feel grounded and unforgettable.

I’ve been taken with Belinda Balaski right from the get-go. As the queen of plucky supporting roles, she has been a regular collaborator with director Joe Dante, showing up memorably in Piranha (1978) and later reuniting with Dante in not just The Howling but Gremlins, Matinee, and Gremlins 2: The New Batch. In Piranha, her bold presence helped anchor Dante’s blend of horror and sly humor, and she’s also lit up the screen in cult favorites like The Food of the Gods, Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw, and Till Death. Till Death 1978 marked the film debut of the ever-bewitching Belaski, who effortlessly steals scenes even swathed in a ghostly white shroud.

The film is a shadowy production, directed by Walter Stocker, better known for his infamy starring in They Saved Hitler’s Brain. The story follows Paul, whose bride Anne (Balaski) dies in a crash, but he reunites with her mysteriously in her crypt, leading to a Gothic, supernatural twist. Despite her captivating presence and a memorable theme song, the low-budget film slipped into obscurity, resurfacing only on Pittsburgh’s Chiller Theater in the early 1980s. It’s no wonder she’s so beloved by fans; the sheer range of her horror filmography is a tribute in itself.

Dee Wallace, meanwhile, has more than earned her status as a “scream queen,” headlining an astonishing number of horror milestones. From her gritty breakthrough in The Hills Have Eyes (1977) to this genre-defining werewolf terror to fighting off rabid dogs in Cujo (1983) and starring in the creature feature Critters (1986), she’s etched her name across the spines of countless VHS tapes and now streams. Wallace continued to thrill audiences with chilling performances in The Frighteners, Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007), The Lords of Salem (2012), and yes, her memorable appearance in Ti West’s retro shocker House of the Devil (2009). Her staying power and the affection of horror fans come not just from the number of films but from the passion she brings to every role, whether she’s the beleaguered hero or something more sinister. Just to put it plainly: these women aren’t just scream queens, they’re cornerstone talents whose work keeps the midnight movie crowd screaming for more.

Their dynamic, at once intimate and unpretentious, lends an emotional sincerity that allows The Howling’s more outrageous moments to bite deeper—and I do mean bites, rips, and tears.

Behind the camera, prolific writer John Sayles’ script saturates every frame with cheeky genre in-jokes and sly meta-humor, never letting the suspense veer too far from Dante’s signature wink. Seedy LA streets give way to the moonlit forests and sterile cabins of The Colony, all filmed with a strangely inviting disquiet, thanks to John Hora’s restless cinematography.

Hora’s distinctive style shaped several cult and mainstream favorites of the 1980s and 1990s. He was the director of photography for Dante’s Gremlins (1984), Explorers (1985), Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), and Matinee (1993). His work also includes Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992), the segment “It’s a Good Life” from Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). Every shadow seems surreal, colorfully cartoon-like yet alive, every branch ready to crack. The color palette shudders between urban neon and rustic, fairy-tale gloom, keeping you as unsettled as Karen herself.

TV news reporter Karen White (Wallace) narrowly escapes a terrifying encounter with a ruthless serial killer in a seedy adult bookstore. During this tense scene, Eddie Quist forces Karen to watch a disturbing film of a woman being assaulted while keeping his face hidden from her.

In the booth’s shadow-drenched haze, neon flickers bleed through smoky blackness, pooling on Karen’s face, a chiaroscuro of fear and revelation, where every glimmer slices the darkness like a secret begging not to be seen, it’s just too horrible to imagine. The light is cold and fractured, painting Karen in silhouette in uneasy pulses while the world beyond that claustrophobic space dissolves into pulsing obscurity, trapping her in a trembling prism of electric midnight. When she finally turns around, she sees Eddie’s horrifying transformation into a werewolf. The police then burst in and shoot Eddie, Karen having helped the police to capture Eddie, who is believed to have been killed during the sting. But Karen is traumatized by the experience and suffers from amnesia afterward.

Shaken and seeking a fresh start, Karen and her husband Bill (Christopher Stone) retreat to a remote mountain retreat called The Colony—a rehabilitation institute for those struggling with psychological issues, run by Dr. George Waggner.

Terry Fisher (Belaski), a reporter and Karen White’s close friend and colleague, works at the same TV station as Karen in Los Angeles, and she teams up with another colleague, Chris Halloran (Dennis Dugan), during the early investigations into the serial killer Eddie Quist.

Terry makes her grander entrance in the film after Karen’s traumatic confrontation with Eddie. While Karen heads to The Colony for recovery, Terry remains behind in LA with Chris. Together, Terry and Chris begin researching Eddie Quist, especially after discovering strange sketches of his and the strange fact that Eddie’s body has mysteriously vanished from the morgue. The tenacious and wisecracking Terry’s investigative instincts and resourcefulness lead her on his trail, determined to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding Eddie and the strange events threatening Karen.

Her research soon uncovers links between Eddie and The Colony. Realizing Karen is in danger, Terry travels to The Colony herself, arriving before Chris does. Once there, she continues to dig for answers, combing through records and even finding files about Eddie in Doc Waggner’s office.

Terry’s persistence leads her to some of the most suspenseful moments in the film: she survives an attack by a werewolf in a cabin (fighting back with an axe and managing to sever her assailant’s hand), but when she calls Chris with her discoveries, she is ambushed and killed by Eddie, who reveals himself to her in all is transformative glory.

While at The Colony, Karen meets a cast of peculiar patients and staff, including the gravel-voiced, haunting patriarch, played by Carradine. The retreat promises therapy and renewal, but as Karen begins to unravel its mysteries, she grows suspicious of the eerie rituals, arcane warnings, and the unnerving absence of any real cures.

Tensions rise as Karen witnesses unsettling transformations and nightmarish behavior among the residents. The plot thickens as Karen finally uncovers the Colony’s true nature—a haven for lycanthropes. Beneath the placid mountain setting lurks a primal horror, hinted at first by strange howling heard on the wind and the uncanny agility of some patients. Karen’s fear deepens when Eddie Quist reveals his monstrous secret: he is a werewolf, part of a pack that uses the retreat to hide among humans.

Karen discovers Terry’s body and then encounters Eddie in his monstrous werewolf form. During this chilling scene, Eddie’s transformation is shown in detail as Karen watches fearfully. He speaks to her with a calm, confident smile, while he offers to give her ‘a piece of his mind,’ literally. Then Eddie snarls and completes his full transformation into a wolf right in front of her.

Karen proves she’s got guts and not someone who should be underestimated, with her quick instincts, she doesn’t hesitate, acting fast when it counts, lashes out, turning fear into survival, and hurls corrosive acid at him, and manages to flee.

One by one, the pack of werewolves reveals their terrifying forms in gruesome, pioneering transformation scenes designed by Rob Bottin. Karen’s world spins into chaos as the line between friend and foe collapses. Meanwhile, Bill Neill, who had arrived at The Colony alongside his wife, Karen, battles his own inner demons—his skepticism, the strain of his failing marriage, and the emotional toll of confronting the uncanny horrors lurking at the retreat. Bill is drawn into the terrifying world of the werewolf pack not just as Karen’s husband but as someone who becomes personally entangled in the supernatural menace. He becomes romantically involved with Marsha Quist, one of the more sensual wolf femme-fatales who happens to be Eddie Quist’s sister. Marsha, portrayed by Elisabeth Brooks, is a complex character who embodies a smoldering menace.

Bill is more of a reluctant participant than an action hero like Karen or Terry, plagued by skepticism and personal doubts. He’s caught between loyalty and survival as the nightmare around him unfolds. By the end of The Howling, Bill’s fate is somber yet nuanced. Unlike Karen’s harrowing frontline confrontation, Bill’s story closes on a quieter, more tragic note. After surviving the chaos unleashed by the pack and ensuing violence, Bill is left to grapple with loss and the lingering threat of the werewolf curse that forever shadows his life, though his new mate, Marsha, proves to be a most enticing romantic mistress.

The climax crescendos with an epic battle of wills and survival under a blood-red full moon. Drawing on inner strength, Karen fights to resist the primal curse threatening to consume her. As the climax of The Howling barrels toward its harrowing finish, Karen White finds herself scrambling for survival amid utter chaos at The Colony. With the pack of werewolves revealed in all their monstrous frenzy, Karen’s world narrows to a single, desperate goal: escape.

With most of the Colony trapped inside the barn, the moonlit cabins erupt in madness. Karen fights her way out of the Colony, courage and sheer instinct pushing her onward. Partnered now with Chris Halloran, who arrives in the nick of time wielding silver bullets, Karen races through the flames and snarling chaos that engulf the retreat. Howls, gunshots, and the crackle of burning wood hang in the air as the surviving duo squeezes into a battered car, werewolves clawing at the windows and doors, including her husband Bill.

Glass shatters and bestial faces lunge, but Chris fends off the attackers with his silver ammunition as Karen floors the accelerator. Their frantic drive through the forest takes on a fever-dream quality, brief flashes of fangs and fur illuminated in the headlights as the pair barely escapes the Colony’s grasp.

As Karen and Chris make their harrowing escape from the burning Colony, the film lingers on a haunting, almost surreal shot of the remaining werewolves silhouetted against the flames and night sky, throwing their heads back in unison to howl up at the moon.

The moment has a stylized, almost animated look, achieved with a touch of stop-motion and optical effects, making their anguished howls seem spectral and slightly unreal. It stands out visually from the rest of the film’s practical effects precisely because of its surreal, nearly striking animated quality. This tableau of anguished, howling werewolves is a creative use of models and optical effects by the special effects team, meant to convey the pack as fearsome, yet despairing and strangely pitiable, their wild lament echoing through the night and the flickering shadow as they mourn over Karen’s escape.

The wildness behind them, they plunge into the dark, battered but alive. Karen’s breath comes in ragged, haunted gasps, the mark of her ordeal (and perhaps something more) lingering as they leave the ravaged Colony behind.
This escape is no neat victory: it’s raw, chaotic.

At the climax of The Howling, Karen, having been bitten by her werewolf husband Bill during their escape, bravely returns to the TV studio. In a shocking twist ending, she transforms into a werewolf live on air, allowing the unsuspecting nationwide audience to witness her true nature before she’s mercifully shot by her friend Chris. The film closes on a tense resolution, and Karen has literally been changed by her ordeal.

Throughout The Howling, Joe Dante blends atmospheric horror, cheeky humor, and groundbreaking special effects to deliver a story that’s as much about human fears and desires as it is about werewolves and monster lore. It’s a cult classic that howls with both terror and wit, pulling us into a chillingly familiar yet twisted world.

Rob Bottin’s special make-up effects are where The Howling makes its lasting mark. The transformation—Eddie Quist’s slow, agonizing snout pushing through latex skin, the bubbling swell of muscle under air bladders, was nothing short of revolutionary in 1981. The puppetry and animatronics don’t just turn men into monsters; they make the change excruciating, almost sexual, pointing up the satire in the film’s cultish obsession with primal desire and taboo. Bottin’s vision, reportedly achieved over ten-hour make-up marathons with a willing Robert Picardo, still throbs with grotesque artistry decades later.

Pino Donaggio’s score pulses between lush and lurid, lending the film’s psychosexual undercurrents both grandeur and menace; eerie strings, sudden brass, and the anxious yapping of synths create an atmosphere at once seductive and sinister. Donaggio’s debut as a film composer was his evocative, haunting music, which became a defining element of Nicolas Roeg’s psychological thriller, Don’t Look Now 1973. Pino Donaggio’s score for Don’t Look Now pierces the soul with a haunting beauty that stirs a delicate ache in me, like an exquisite pain that whispers in my ear.

Dante’s wicked humor in The Howling keeps things buoyant: There’s always a sly smile lurking beneath the snarl.

Eddie Quist (pulling a piece of brain from the bullet hole): “You said on the phone that you wanted to get to know me. Well, here I am, Karen. Look at me. I want to give you a piece of my mind. I trusted you, Karen. You can trust me now.”

 

Karen White: “There was howling just a minute ago.”
R. William ‘Bill’ Neill: “It was probably somebody’s stray dog.”
Karen White: “It didn’t sound like any dog I’ve ever heard before.”

 

Dr. George Waggner: “Repression is the father of neurosis, of self-hatred. Now stress results when we fight against our impulses. We’ve all heard people talk about animal magnetism, the natural man, the noble savage, as if we’d lost something valuable in our long evolution into civilized human beings.”

Marsha Quist: “Shut up, Doc! You wouldn’t listen to me, none of you. ‘We can fit in,’ you said. ‘We can live with them.’ You make me sick.”

Upon release, critics recognized the film’s gleeful mash-up of terror and satire. Roger Ebert admired its “gleeful embrace of horror cliches,” others declared it a “knowing tribute to old werewolf movies full of genre references and in-jokes,” with praise for the special effects that defined a new era in grisly transformation.

Even in the face of some narrative wildness, that cocktail of horror, gallows wit, and genre self-awareness left audiences and future filmmakers howling for more.

The Howling endures because it understands the fun and fear at the heart of monster stories: it stares unflinchingly at the beast within, then cracks a knowing joke while the transformation takes hold. In the end, this cult classic leaves you laughing and squirming in the dark, right where all the best werewolf tales begin.

#129 down, 21 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #128 Squirm 1976 / Frogs 1972 & Sssssss 1973

SQUIRM 1976

Getting Under Your Skin: Reliving Squirm—A Worm-Infested Wonder That Creeps, and Captivates: When Schlock Turns to Gold: Celebrating the Crawling Magic of Squirm (1976)

There are certain films that crawl their way under your skin, not because they really nail the sense of cinematic artistry, but because they pulsate with a weird, authentic magic all their own. I would sort of argue that Squirm does possess a certain cinematic artistry. That’s the way it affects me, for all the revisits I pay to this special little horror artifact of the 1970s nature rebels subgenre, it never fails to indulge my longing to drift back into the ’70s, delivering a singular dose of moody nostalgia and conjuring the era’s signature brand of atmospheric horror. Whenever I return to Squirm, it casts that spell, reviving the textures, sounds, and uneasy beauty that defined my favorite decade for its horror vibe. I will be doing a deep dive into the mud with this buried treasure.

Some films bypass logic and burrow their way straight into your cinematic memory. That’s the improbable alchemy of Squirm (1976), a writhing, low-budget horror film that transforms its simple premise into unforgettable drive-in worthy weirdness. Squirm (1976) is one of those slippery masterpieces for me. Brush aside the muttering of the masses, those quick to sling the term “schlocky” with a dismissive wave, and you’ll glimpse beneath the wormy surface a movie that radiates a kind of alchemy: atmospheric, outrageous, and just as memorable as a hundred “respectable” horrors. This tribute marks the start of my deep dive at The Last Drive-In, where the beauty of B-movies is celebrated front and center, and my appreciation for this film will slither forth! Released during the heyday of creature features, Squirm offers a swampy nightmare where rural Georgia becomes a stage for ecological revenge and all manner of burrowing terror.

During its original theatrical run, I experienced Squirm on the big screen, absorbed by its clammy Southern atmosphere and properly unsettled by the film’s shadowy, crawling tension. Even as the premise bordered on absurdity, the movie’s moody tone and relentless creepiness made it impossible to dismiss; even with its intentionally dark humor, it got under my skin both literally and figuratively, leaving me squirming in my seat and taking its horrors all too seriously.

Directed by Jeff Lieberman in his first feature, the movie is steeped in backwoods authenticity and pulses with a gritty eccentricity that far exceeds, with creativity and impact, its dim budget. Lieberman takes a modest set of tools—a freak electrical storm, a sleepy Southern town, and even sleepier characters- and electrifies the soil beneath their feet, literally. The result? Carnivorous worms surge from the ground, ready to turn every patch of mud, moss, and tight spaces into a scene of squirming menace and grotesque dark humor. Lieberman has cited Hitchcock’s film The Birds 1963 as this film’s biggest influence.

From the first queasy moments, where wriggling annelids slither beneath a muddy Southern sky, Squirm announces itself with a sense of place that’s equal parts cozy and sleazy. Writer-director Lieberman transforms rural Georgia into a teeming petri dish for eco-horror mayhem. The plot, inspired by Lieberman’s real-life childhood experience, which left a vivid impression on him, provides the scientific basis and unsettling memory that fueled the concept for Squirm.

The inspiration for the film came from a childhood experiment between director Lieberman and his brother. One evening, the two hooked up a train transformer to wet soil and used the electricity to drive hundreds of worms out of the ground. Young Lieberman noticed that the worms tried to get away from the glare of the flashlight that the boys were using to see by because worms are sensitive to light. It became the scientific basis behind this film, as the worms in Squirm also hate the light. The story of the experiment is retold by the grotesquely goofy character of Roger Grimes.

The plot slinks along this central premise: a freak storm downs power lines, electrifying the earth and unleashing a nightmarish writhing mass of carnivorous worms. Their audible squeals and bear-trap-like teeth are as unnerving as their slithering around and worming their way into the movie!. The resulting invasion isn’t subtle, but why should it be? Lieberman’s camera loves the ooze and clutter, the tangle of moss, the glisten of worm trails on wood and bodies, and the off-kilter angles that make even a queasy dinner scene squirm with unease. And… I’ll never eat another egg cream.

Lieberman is known for infusing fresh twists into established genres, often blending horror with satire, social commentary, or psychological thrills. Other works of Lieberman’s include the very moody Blue Sunshine 1977 the premise: former college students who unwittingly became the victims of a grim case of underground drug distribution gone wrong lose their hair and become psychotic murderers a decade later. This film cemented Lieberman’s reputation for mixing horror with social commentary. Just Before Dawn (1981): A tense backwoods slasher set in Oregon, regarded as a standout of the “wilderness horror” subgenre, and Remote Control (1988): Sci-fi paranoia meets camp as a video store clerk discovers alien brainwashing via videotape, a clever satire of B-movie tropes.

The cinematography, by Joseph Mangine, proves surprisingly artful, favoring melancholy rural tableaux and worm’s-eye perspectives that make the ordinary landscape feel sinister and claustrophobic. For such a modest production: rural landscapes, mossy trees, mosquitoes, grimy diners, and lamp-lit kitchens all ripple with a sense of lurking threat, pulling us into a world that’s as damp and off-kilter as a hazy dream after a thunderstorm. All the shadow-slicked interiors cast the whole town as uneasy, with its sleazy, horny, spaghetti-eating sheriff and hostile townfolk, just a bit rotten at the core.

Mangine also shot Alligator 1980, Alone in the Dark for Alone in the Dark 1982, Mother’s Day 1980, and Neon Maniacs 1986 – he also directed Exterminator 2 1984, and the television series Swamp Thing 1992-93.

At the heart of the story are Geri Sanders (Patricia Pearcy), unflappable in farmgirl denim, and Mick (Don Scardino, who had a prominent part in William Friedkin’s Cruising 1980), the slightly jittery city boyfriend whose arrival kicks off the spiral of chaos. Together, they encounter Roger (R.A. Dow), a local misfit whose heartbreak and dimwittedness only add to his looming sense of stalking dread. Lieberman plays their interactions with just enough cheek, awkward exchanges, and fish-out-of-water humor, and provides a steady pulse of dry wit that counters the soon-to-be-massacre of bloodworms.

What makes Squirm remarkably fun is how it moves: we meet Geri Sanders (Patricia Pearcy), all farmgirl pluck and city skepticism, as she welcomes her nervous, wide-eyed boyfriend Mick (Don Scardino) from New York, who has come to look for the hidden trove of antiques Geri has touted. Fly Creek is a quirky haven for collectors, and she wants to give him a spirited tour.

Their chemistry is sweet and spry, instantly grounding the film’s more outlandish moments in a genuinely likable couple. They’re soon swept up in the creeping disaster, running afoul of the local Sheriff and the lug Roger (R.A. Dow), whose sunburned menace and broken heart (he longs for Geri) lend the story both awkward comedy and slow-building threat. Roger works for his abusive father, who sells bait to the local fishermen. I find myself endlessly mimicking Roger as he drags out the words, “It’s a suuuuppprrriiiise” with all the goofy charm of a slow Sunday afternoon in the South—half excited, half befuddled, and totally endearing in his earnest, dopey way, with a darker Gomer Pyle-esque energy.

Lieberman builds his scenes with a sense of offbeat humor, never letting us forget just how odd and occasionally inept his rural victims are. There’s the slick sheriff who wouldn’t be out of place in In the Heat of the Night, and a matriarch whose drawled warnings seem lifted (with tongue in cheek) from a Southern Gothic ghost story.

Geri and Mick’s curiosity quickly turns into panic as they poke around town, following a trail of unsettling clues that feel straight out of a nightmare laced with dread and decay. Their snooping leads them first to the old antiques dealer’s place, where the old guy’s (what’s left of him) cozy flannel shirt becomes a grim terrarium — flesh and ribs exposed, raw and rotting, a grisly feast that fuels the writhing mess of worms thriving in the carnage, nature’s grotesque handiwork. Not satisfied with just one horror, their investigation wriggles onward to Roger’s father’s worm-truck, a ghastly mobile mausoleum stocked with smashed crates and someone’s skull that turns the family business from already creepy to downright… creepy. Each discovery unearths a deeper layer of living proof that nature’s gone awry. Geri and Mick realize too late that this is no ordinary infestation, but a full-scale invasion from beneath the earth itself.

Incidentally, on the DVD commentary of the film, director Lieberman mentions that the old farmhouse used for the old antique dealer, Mr. Beardsley’s home, during the shoot, is known as one of the most infamous haunted houses in Georgia.

The supporting cast pops with weird energy: a suspicious, disbelieving, Yankee-phobic sheriff, Geri’s mother, whose angst seem half ghost story, half Southern Gothic superstition, and the townsfolk, remarkably good at both underestimating threats and looking shocked when the crawling menace finally burst out from ceilings, floors, walls, plumbing, and every dark corner.

In Squirm (1976), Jean Sullivan plays Geri Sanders’ mother, Naomi Sanders. Sullivan brings a distinctive Southern flavor to the role, reportedly basing her Southern accent on Tennessee Williams to lend authenticity to the character and the film’s rural Georgia setting. I guess that explains her well-dramatised languid Williams-esque angst.

The comic relief in Squirm comes courtesy of Geri’s younger sister, Alma Sanders, played by Fran Higgins. Alma is less a “baby” sister by appearance than by intention; her mannerisms, wardrobe, and efforts to act older than she is are key to her quirky onscreen presence. Alma’s gawky style is a pitch-perfect snapshot of small-town teenage rebellion in the mid-1970s: Towering footwear that, despite her age, announces her eagerness to stand taller and grow up fast, if not always gracefully. Alma’s bold 1970s halter top and platform shoes shout her wish to seem older and cooler than her rural world allows, and though her awkward attempts to ditch the “kid sister” role give her away, her comic energy comes from trying too hard—oversized sunglasses, heavy makeup, and all inspired by every big-sister magazine she’s flipped through at the drug store—as she clumsily inserts herself into her sister’s love life and city boy drama, desperate for her own share of attention.

Cheeky delight yields quickly to horror: thanks to the storm, that unassuming villain who starts it all by animating the soil with untold millions of hungry flesh-eating worms. By the time the first “worm attack” hits flesh, squirming, writhing, and worms oozing through plumbing and window cracks, Lieberman’s special effects (aided by a young Rick Baker) steal the show.

Mick:
“It’s electricity, alright, but it’s making the worms crazy.”

Sheriff (in disbelief):
“This is the damnedest mess I ever seen.”

The horror escalates as the storm knocks out power in Fly Creek, Georgia. Lieberman’s best scenes wriggle with the practical effects of a young Rick Baker: latex faces bulging and rippling underneath with crawling worms. There’s a perverse bravado in the infamous scenes: in the boat during Geri, Mick, and Roger’s outing on the lake, where Roger’s face, pulsing with worms hanging from translucent latex skin, heightens the visceral horror. And leading toward the film’s climax at the bar/diner, jail, and especially the Sanders’ house, become scenes of chaos, as the slimy tide swallows victims, and the iconic loud worm screams as the writhing mass of “extras” becomes the real monster.

As the horror surges to its peak, Roger, now stark raving mad and homicidal as if he has formed one mind with the worms, finds himself overwhelmed by an almost impossible onslaught—the roiling mass of carnivorous bloodsuckers, spilling up the mainfloor stairs toward the second story of the house like a creeping, rising tide of slithering ‘extras.’ The camera lingers on his tortured expression as the slimy, writhing sea engulfs him inch by inch, the flesh on one side of his face already grotesquely consumed, revealing raw, worm-infested wounds. His desperate gasps and screams mingle with the sinister squealing of the worms, whose relentless advance seems unstoppable. The dim, shadowy lighting accentuates the sickening texture of the worms and the gruesome half-devoured state of Roger’s face, making the moment a visceral portrait of nature’s overpowering vengeance. This scene combines practical effects and suspenseful pacing to create a climax that is as repulsive as it is unforgettable and shocking.

The effect is as revolting as it is mesmerizing—proof that handcrafted gore and wild ideas delivered earnestly can sometimes win over slick production. These moments drip with practical, gooey ingenuity.

Dialogue is a riot of regionalisms, underestimation, or matter-of-fact delivery: Roger Grimes: You gonna be da’ worm face now!

The unforgettable exclamation as the horror begins to dawn right from the beginning of the film: Mick at the diner as an unwanted outsider: “There’s a worm in my egg cream!”  Mick gets his lip viciously bitten by one in his glass at the unfriendly town’s local diner.

Sheriff bellowing with maximum incredulity.

Sheriff: [after Mick discovers Roger’s father’s body is not here to show the sheriff] Now, listen, fella. I don’t know what you’re up to, but you sure as hell ain’t gonna pull this bull in Fly Creek. I want you the hell outta this town.
Geri Sanders: But it was right here, Mr. Reston. We both saw it.
Sheriff: Now, Geri, that’s enough. I’d expect this bull from your sister, but not you. Your daddy was real proud of you. If he were alive and saw you now, he’d tan your fanny.
Mick: She didn’t do anything.
Sheriff: Well, I’m gonna let this go ’cause it’s too hot and I’m too busy to book this little city weasel. I’ve got goddamn time to put back together again. [turns to Mick] But if I see you even one more time, you won’t even be able to call the city lawyer… ’cause all the phones are dead.

 

Mick: Look, Sheriff, I know you think I’m a troublemaker.
Sheriff: That’s about the first thing you said that I can buy.

Mick: It was the worms.
Sheriff: Worms?
Geri: They bite! [Geri’s outburst surprises everyone in the Italian restaurant]

Mick: If you’d just come with us, I can show you where it happened.
Sheriff: [impatiently] Now, listen, fella. There’s a lot of spaghetti here. It may take us ten, fifteen minutes to finish it. That’s a bigger head start than you deserve.

The actors dive into their eccentric roles with both swagger and a touch of disbelief—Scardino sells Mick’s city-boy panic with endearing nerdiness, while Pearcy manages to be both level-headed and not above shrieking with convincing horror. R.A. Dow, as the socially clumsy Roger, gives the film its unsettling, almost tragic-comic edge.

All of this slithers along to a jittery, atonal score by Robert Prince, synthy and stringy, alternately evoking nature documentaries and nightmare circus music. The music winds itself into quiet scenes, then crescendos with worm’s-eye-view terror, pushing the atmosphere from camp to genuine unease. It’s not a soundtrack you’ll leave humming, but the song that plays over the ending credits of Squirm (1976), “Shadows,” composed by Robert Prince, stays with you.

Squirm may have wriggled into theaters as an underdog, but its impact wasn’t lost on critics willing to see past the surface. Some reviews called out its “overgrown Saturday matinee” energy while applauding its ingenuity, turning nightcrawlers of the earth into fuel for nightmare and campy climactic set-pieces.

At the time of release, Squirm didn’t exactly set critics wriggling with praise. Vincent Canby, in his review from The New York Times, July 31, 1976, called it “revolting and, in its own wormy fashion, effective,” noting its refusal to apologize for its own excesses. The effects, while crude, are suitably nauseating, proof that a movie’s magic sometimes lies in its ability to thrill and repulse in equal measure.

There’s real magic in how Squirm gets under your skin, both literally and figuratively. What could have been mere schlock instead lives on with a beating heart, awkward, earnest, squishy, and unforgettable. Sometimes a film doesn’t have to be a masterpiece in anyone else’s eyes for it to be pure gold in yours; it just has to wriggle its way into your imagination and refuse to let go. That’s the filmmaking alchemy at the creeping heart of Squirm.

Still, what makes Squirm a masterpiece—yes, I said mastpiece—(Squirm is one of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite films of the 1970s!) is that unique chemistry of awkward sincerity, creature-feature spectacle, and regional weirdness. It’s drive-in DNA pulses with everything that makes “schlock” so lovable: eager performances, a sly wink at terror tropes, and moments of gooey, genuine invention. If you look closely, you’ll see not just the wriggling monsters, but the earnest heart beneath. That’s why I’ll celebrate it at The Last Drive-In—a film that may never burrow onto AFI’s lists, but has nonetheless made itself a home somewhere deep and soft in my cinephile’s soul.

FROGS 1972

Clint Crockett: Well it seems like everyone in our family is hung-up on frogs

Now, from worms to frogs. There’s something irresistibly swampy about Frogs (1972)—a film that, for all its ribbiting absurdity, has managed to hop along in the pop consciousness as both eco-horror oddity and drive-in delicacy. Another 70s horror that I saw on the big screen, (and I love the movie poster of the hand emerging from a giant frog, so much that it’s hanging in my film room). Released at the feverish intersection of early ’70s environmental anxiety and Hollywood’s love for camp spectacle, Frogs takes the “nature strikes back” theme and throws the whole swamp stew at the wall with a menagerie of critters that would make even the boldest naturalist want to scramble back into the canoe.

Jason Crockett: I still believe man is master of the world.
Pickett Smith: Does that mean he can’t live in harmony with the rest of it?

A product of its time, Frogs arrived as Nixon’s EPA was barely out of the swamp and B-movies had developed a taste for social cautionary tales. You can practically smell the pesticide as Pickett Smith (Sam Elliott in pre-mustache, proto-hunky environmentalist mode) photographs pollution along the bayous of the American South. His peaceful drift is cut short by a speedboat collision, courtesy of the riotously dysfunctional privilege-fueled Crockett family, a Southern dynasty gathered for a combined Fourth of July and birthday blowout at the manor of Jason Crockett (Ray Milland), their irascible patriarch.

Ray Milland, once a golden boy of Hollywood and an Oscar winner, delivers a delightfully sour performance here: Jason Crockett is a wheelchair-bound bully barking orders and belligerent barbs whose wealth has made him master only of isolation and poison, not the nature he so haughtily declares war on.

Milland’s transition from celebrated star to practically a genre lifer is almost meta-commentary in itself. His gruff pronouncements carry an acid fatigue, tinged with the awareness that even movie royalty sometimes ends their reign among the dim lights of B horror cinema, outmatched by frogs, snakes, and Spanish moss alike.

Joan Van Ark plays the sympathetic granddaughter Karen, and Adam Roarke plays the roguish Clint. Iris Martindale, played by Holly Irving, has a memorable scene involving her and her flighty net, pursuing butterflies on the estate’s grounds, which leads to her being attacked and ultimately killed by a combination of leeches and a rattlesnake. You might remember Irving playing the character Clara Weidermeyer on All in the Family. In one of the best episodes, Edith Has Jury Duty in Season 1, and Archie is Worried About His Job.

Amongst the rest of the parade of family members and staff, some future appetizers are Judy Pace as Bella Garrington, Lynn Borden as Jenny Crocket (Clint’s wife), Lance Taylor Sr. plays the long-suffering butler Charles, Mae Mercer plays Maybelle, and David Gilliam plays Michael Martindale.

What’s delicious here is the stew of archetypes: the haughty matriarch, the greedy heirs arguing over inheritances, the flighty fiancées, and the help who see the signs before anyone else. Yet it should have been a sly nod to Hollywood’s own shifting currents, the “Hag Cinema” of the era—once the dominion of stars like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford chewing the Gothic wallpaper, Ray Milland was taking up the mantle, and instead of ‘psycho-biddy’ you could call this ‘psycho-codger’ cinema. Milland was leading the way alongside Glenn Ford and Joseph Cotton, who were in a slew of these movies. I’ll talk about the hypocrisy in my upcoming feature, From Glamour to Trauma: Deconstructing Hag Cinema.

Jason Crockett: Karen… and everyone else… this conversation has ended!
Pickett Smith: No, it hasn’t, Mr. Crockett. Look, with Grover and Kenneth dead, I don’t know what’s going on around here… or if it is happening anywhere else… but we are a bunch of damn fools not to face the fact that we are in a hell of a lot of trouble! And we’re gonna have to get together to fight it!
Bella Garrington: Keep talking Mr. Pickett, ’cause you are the only man around here who’s saying anything!
Pickett Smith: First of all, we’re gonna have to try to find Iris, Stuart and Michael. But to be very honest with you… I don’t think we will. Not alive anyway. But whether we find them or not, we’ve got to get off this damn island! All of us, now! We’ll take the power boat. If we have to, we’ll tow the canoe.
Jason Crockett: And leave this house empty and deserted… on the Fourth of July?
Pickett Smith: I don’t really think there’s gonna be anybody around here to worry about today. Maybe if you didn’t notice, but there hasn’t been one boat out on that lake all day!
Clint Crockett: Do you think this is happening everywhere, Mr. Smith?
Pickett Smith: Well if it is, I think we’d stand a better chance if we all get out of here together.
Jason Crockett: Well, I forbid it! I control these people, not you!
Bella Garrington: Nobody controls me, Mr. Crockett! Now I’m asking for your permission to get off this island, by myself or with anyone else, I just want to go!

The plot unfolds in a fever of escalating animal attacks, choreographed not with logical precision but with the dream-logic of a nature documentary on the fritz. Pickett, after investigating the estate’s poisoned grounds, begins to realize the frogs aren’t the only mutinous species—snakes, moss, tarantulas, alligators, birds, and even butterflies join the assault. The reason? Jason Crockett’s legacy of dumping chemicals and declaring dominion over the wilderness has kicked off an ecological reckoning, a “revolt of nature” that plays like a vaguely sinister Dr.Seuss tale for the exploitation circuit, with all the childlike horror/sci-fi surrealism. Seuss’s stories famously feature imaginative, exaggerated creatures, a certain stylized rhythmic progression, and always possess a moral undercurrent, often cloaked in whimsical language and colorful chaos. Frogs choreographs its “nature gone wrong” premise with a parade of animal antagonists, each taking turns to rebel and cause mayhem in increasingly inventive vignettes.

Pickett Smith: You see that? As soon as I went after them, they scattered.
Jason Crickett: And very intelligently too. The frogs are thinking now, the snails are planning strategy, they have brains as good as ours — is that your point?

The island’s telephones go dead, boats drift away, and one by one, the Crockett clan is pared down in inventive, animal-driven sequences: a greenhouse becomes a gas chamber, Spanish moss becomes a noose, and beady-eyed, croaking interlopers invade the mansion’s stately interiors.

Director George McCowan conjures an atmosphere that’s both humidly convincing and endearingly awkward, long, near-silent stretches are broken only by the drone of insects or the croak of frogs, while the Florida location (the real-life Wesley Mansion at Eden Gardens State Park) gives the whole production a sun-bleached, moss-draped texture that’s as much a character as any of the cast. Shots linger on amphibians and reptiles just a beat too long, heightening the uncanny vibe and making you almost root for the critters. Well, at least I do.

Of course, underlying the schlock is a melancholy theme that lands harder than most expected, the cost of corporate greed and human arrogance. Jason Crockett is the capitalist king laid low by the very environment he sought to domesticate, his empire literally croaked by the creatures he called pests. The film makes no secret of its moral: polluted waters, discarded bottle caps, debris, and chemical canisters aren’t simply set dressing; they are nature’s receipts, and the frogs and their pals are here to collect.

The final moments are a darkly comic slow burn: til the final nihilistic ending, where Jason alone, surrounded by an army of leaping splodging frogs as the lights flicker out, the phone lines are still dead, and the sound of croaks drowning out patriotic music. The last man standing isn’t rescued by wealth or status; nature’s persistence outnumbers him.

Frogs may have been dismissed as ludicrous on release, but it persists, warts and all, as an artifact of a time when America’s environmental guilt and horror film exuberance joined forces in the swamp. At its heart, the film is pure drive-in poetry: half satirical, half sincere, and fully alive to the possibility that nature, tired of being trashed and mere background, might one damp Fourth of July hop up and seize the scene.

Sssssss 1973

There’s an unmistakable hiss of 1970s horror running through Sssssss (1973), a dare-you-to-say-it title that’s become synonymous with the era’s body horror and mad science obsession. Directed by Bernard L. Kowalski—veteran of genre fare from Attack of the Giant Leeches 1958 and Night of the Blood Beast (1959), to Made-for-TV movies like Black Noon 1971, Terror in the Sky 1971 and Women in Chains 1972), to primetime TV hits, including several episodes of Columbo.

All the venomous snakes featured were authentic and the cast actually did have to interact with them for filming. Only in the shot where Strother Martin grabs the king cobra’s head during the show was a puppet snake used.

Sssssss features a cast led by Strother Martin, renowned for his unforgettable line deliveries and a face that seemed born for both ridicule and menace. Martin carved out a legendary niche as one of Hollywood’s most distinctive character actors. He often specialized in roles that were a touch slimy and more than a bit odd, and always left an indelible impression.

Strother Martin carved out a memorable career playing a wide range of unforgettable characters, from the menacing prison warden in Cool Hand Luke—where his iconic line “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” still echoes through cinema history—to the eccentric Bolivian mine boss Percy Garris in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He matched wits with John Wayne as the shrewd Colonel Stonehill in True Grit, and brought raw brutality as the depraved bounty hunter Coffer in The Wild Bunch, whether he was the sneering sidekick Floyd in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Martin’s nervy presence and offbeat charisma gave life and spark to every supporting part he took on.

One role that stands out to me is The Brotherhood of Satan (1971), an eerie folk-horror gem I’ve written about for this series, where Martin stars as a seemingly kindly small-town doctor who turns out to be the sinister leader of a Satanic cult terrorizing a desert community. Strother Martin fully embraces the bizarre, malevolent maestro in a film loaded with surreal imagery and a genuinely weird, unsettling vibe, and arch villainy. Another film I absolutely love is the underrated Walter Hill action drama Hard Times (1975), where Martin plays  Poe, a loyal but eccentric “cut man” for Charles Bronson’s underground fighter, a role balancing gentle humor and beaten-down wisdom.

You might say Strother Martin was Hollywood’s patron saint of the peculiar—forever slithering around the fringes of respectability with a sly grin, a twang of insincerity, and a knack for playing characters who were as slippery as they were eccentric. Whether scheming, sniveling, or simply unsettling, his legacy shines brightest in those perfectly creepy, off-kilter roles where charm and shadiness meet with the same discerning eye.

Dirk Benedict (Lieutenant Starbuck in the original Battlestar Galactica film and television series (1978–1979)) plays lab assistant David Blake, and Heather Menzies, who played Maggie McKeown in Joe Dante’s horror satire Piranha (1978), plays Martin’s daughter Kristina.

The film slithers with both old-school creature feature charm and a creeping sense of perverse tragedy. At the center of this slithering tale is Dr. Carl Stoner, a herpetologist whose snake-centric research keeps him all but exiled in his dusty laboratory, nestled somewhere between a scientific institution and a low-rent roadside attraction. With the help of his daughter, Kristina, Stoner sells venom and puts on shows with his most prized venomous specimens, the king cobras. When his previous assistant mysteriously vanishes, Stoner hires a bright, trusting college student named David Blake, presenting him with the promise of practical research and a few “harmless” inoculations against venom. The reality is much darker and far more awe-inspiring in its audacity.

What David mistakes for anti-venom treatments are in fact the first steps in Dr. Stoner’s deranged notion of progress. Convinced that humanity is doomed and that snakes will inherit the earth, Stoner is quietly experimenting to transform men into serpents.

Dr. Carl Stoner: [Speaking to Harry the snake] You’re asking me questions, Harry, and I hear you. A scientist cannot afford the indulgence of guilt. And after all, if God doesn’t want me to continue, means of my disposal are always at his command.

 

Dr. Carl Stoner: I think I could turn to live with animals. They are so placid, so self contained. I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition; They do not lay awake in the dark and weep for their sins; They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one is dissatisfied; not one is demented with the mania of owning things; not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago; not one is respectable, or unhappy over the whole earth. Walt Whitman, Harry. A great man.

The early effects creep in insidiously: David’s skin peels, his temperature drops, and strange, scaly patches begin to appear. As his body changes, of course, a budding romance develops between David and Kristina, adding a bittersweet undercurrent to his metamorphosis. At first, Kristina is blissfully naïve, her devotion to her father and to David blinding her to the grotesque fate at hand.

Meanwhile, the cracks in Dr. Stoner’s sanity widen; he reacts with icy calm when a colleague, Dr. Daniels (Richard B. Shull), brings him bad news about his research grant. Suspicious, Daniels snoops around, only to become lunch for one of Stoner’s larger specimens after catching sight of David’s horrific state. This escalation underlines the doctor’s slide from maddened genius, which in these flicks almost always leads to an outright murderer.

The film’s most ghastly, unforgettable set piece comes as Kristina, chasing down rumors at the local carnival, stumbles upon a sideshow attraction: a limbless “snake-man” who’s been caged and put on display. To her horror, Kristina realizes this is none other than Stoner’s missing assistant, another failed subject of his experiments, doomed to live out his days as a living twist on the mythical chimaera. Terrified, she races home to find David nearly unrecognizable, locked in the final phase of transformation. By now, Stoner’s mania has reached its highest point; he declares his experiments a success and, in a moment of twisted triumph, allows a king cobra to bite him. The venom is fatal; he dies surrounded by his reptilian charges.

The chaos doesn’t end there; the authorities, growing suspicious, arrive just as Kristina discovers her father’s body. The last, tragic tableau is almost too much: David, now fully a king cobra, encounters a mongoose meant for lab tests. Their deadly struggle is interrupted only by Kristina’s anguished cry, a poignant (and, for 1970s horror, surprisingly open-ended) finish that leaves terror and heartbreak coiled side by side.

Universal released the film as a double feature with The Boy Who Cried Werewolf in 1973, making the program one of the studio’s last double bills.

Sssssss endures as a curio at the intersection of drive-in horror and cautionary horror/science fiction. With a cast honoring Martin’s classic slow-burn menace, Benedict’s commitment to transformation, and Menzies’ innocence, plus pioneering make-up effects from John Chambers, the film is both a camp time capsule and a surprisingly sophisticated nightmare fable. Its greatest horror is not the snakes, nor even the grotesque spectacle of mutation, but the chilling conviction of a man who wants to remake the world, and doesn’t much care who pays the price for his slithering, warped dream.

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MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #127 Spider Baby 1967


SPIDER BABY 1967

Spider Baby (1967): The Maddest Story Ever Told—A Lyrical Descent into Gothic Whimsy and Horror

Spider Baby (1967), or as it’s affectionately subtitled, The Maddest Story Ever Told, is a fiendishly playful cult oddity perched at the edge of 1960s horror, a black-and-white film that spins its grotesque tale like a modern Gothic bedtime story for adults, humming with black humor and genuine pathos. Directed by Jack Hill, whose later legacy would bend toward exploitation classics like Foxy Brown 1974, Coffy 1973featuring Pam Grier’s star quality and Switchblade Sisters 1975, The Big Doll House, and The Big Bird Cage, this debut feature sets Hill’s distinct tone: campy yet clever, bold in its choices, and always attentive to strange, subversive textures and comic rythyms in both his character study and distinctive settings.

Jack Hill’s hand is unmistakable through every warped, lilting frame. Before he gave the world blaxploitation heroines and switchblade-wielding delinquents, he conjured Spider Baby practically guerrilla-style, having written, edited, and directed it on a shoestring budget across twelve sweltering days in Los Angeles. Hill’s affection for both the golden age of Universal horror and low-budget ingenuity is everywhere onscreen. Though its plot, a tale of inbred siblings regressing to a primal state, their crumbling manor beset by greedy relatives, could have easily shambled on like a tired B-movie, Hill infuses everything with lyrical weirdness, Gothic melancholy, and an impish sense of how horror can mirror the absurdity of family, society, and civilization itself. All this makes me feel a fierce affection for this quirky adult fairytale with all its gleefully twisted whimsy that collides with the film’s shadowy charm. I can’t help but light up from within my own quirky little soul. The delightful darkness sends currents of pure, irrepressible joy humming through me, as if each mischievous moment were designed to spark some secret, unending grin I can never suppress. It never gets old. Spider Baby is an irreverent gem!

The heart and haunted soul of the film is Lon Chaney Jr. as Bruno, the grave but gentle chauffeur and caretaker, whose craggy face and sad, soft voice seem to carry all the ghosts and regrets of 20th-century horror.

Lon Chaney Jr., a legendary figure among the Universal Monsters for his role as the tragic Lawrence Talbot, finds in Bruno a part as tragic and complex as any poor full moon beset hero. He’s the loyal guardian, sworn to shield the last Merrye children from a world that would destroy them, but also heartbreakingly helpless as his good intentions slip toward violence. His performance, at times teary-eyed with both fear and tenderness, grounds the movie’s carnival of madness: “Children! You’ve got to promise me—no more games tonight.” In one of his many quietly devastating moments, Bruno confesses, “I made a promise. A promise I swore to keep, no matter what,” and “Just because something isn’t good doesn’t mean it’s bad.”

Opposite him are the three Merrye siblings, especially dear to me is Beverly Washburn’s Elizabeth, who dances between innocence and menace with bracing precision. Washburn, known for her earlier role in Old Yeller, gives Elizabeth a child’s logic running wild through a fraught, feral world. Her eyes flash with both glee and cunning, inviting us to wonder where childish play ends and malice begins. Washburn’s performance embodies the film’s central tension: the disquieting overlap of the deeply familiar and the utterly alien, the way that inside every family lies the capacity for love, cruelty, and something far weirder lurking just beneath the surface.

The Merrye family’s darkest secret lurks beneath the house–in the basement, a group of deranged, degenerated relatives is kept hidden from the world. These secluded family members have regressed to a near-feral state, sustaining themselves through cannibalism. Their presence is marked only by guttural sounds and unsettling glimpses, a grim reminder that the family’s madness runs generations deep and has literally been locked away, left to feed on itself. The basement dwellers are the ultimate embodiment of the Merrye curse: primal appetites, cut off from civilization, haunting the estate both in body and legend.

Elizabeth Merrye in Spider Baby takes on a sort of self-appointed, strict role within the decaying household. She’s often seen enforcing rules, policing the rest of the clan, and acting like the family’s harshest arbiter, balancing childlike innocence with a surprisingly severe and unforgiving streak.

Her distinctive hairstyle: she wears pigtails. These pigtails, often tied with simple ribbons, frame her expressive face and further highlight the odd mixture of girlishness and responsibility she brings to the dysfunctional Merrye household. Her attire is typically modest and old-fashioned, echoing a bygone era, blouses with Peter Pan collars, demure skirts, and often a faintly prim demeanor in how she carries herself. This classic, almost vintage look accentuates the timeless, fairy-tale-gone-wrong atmosphere of the film. The pigtails, in particular, make her seem more youthful and outwardly harmless, which sharply contrasts with the stern and judgmental role masked in that sardonic cherubic grin, she takes on within her crumbling family, making her presence both disarming and quietly commanding.

Beverly Washburn: Reel Tears – Real Laughter! Part 1

Beverly Washburn: Reel Tears – Real Laughter! Part 2

Jill Banner as Virginia, the so-called “Spider Baby,” spins her eerie games with giggling seriousness, luring and “stinging” her victims with a pair of kitchen knives.

I caught a big fat bug right in my spider web and now the spider gets to give the bug a big sting. Sting! Sting! Sting! Sting! Sting!

Banner presents a haunting yet mischievous appearance that perfectly complements her unsettling role. She often wears her hair in soft, loose waves framing her face, which contrasts with the film’s darker themes. Her look is deceptively innocent, embodying a childlike vulnerability mixed with a sly, eerie smile that hints at her character’s dangerous unpredictability.

Sid Haig’s Ralph, the wordless brother who leers and lurches through the film’s corridors, lends a physical unpredictability bordering on the uncanny. Haig’s character, Ralph, in Spider Baby is a deliciously wild force of nature, a mostly silent, unsettling presence whose facial expressions and movements deliver more laughs and chills than any line of dialogue could. With his ragged clothes and a mischievous gleam in his eyes, Ralph looks like a cross between a feral hairless primate and a mischievous ghost haunting the decaying Merrye estate. Haig’s performance is equal parts silent clown and eerie predator, as he shuffles through the house or scuttles down dumbwaiter shafts, lending him a spider-like eeriness that perfectly matches the film’s macabre whimsy.

His physicality, part grotesque, part childlike, makes him feel both terrifying and oddly endearing, like a misunderstood creature playing a horrifying, off-kilter game of hide and seek. Sid Haig himself once described how he studied primates at the zoo and kids on playgrounds to create Ralph’s uncanny mix of animalistic playfulness and terrifying unpredictability. Watching Ralph is like witnessing chaos in slow motion, where every twitch and leer carries the promise of unexpected mayhem, but somehow it’s impossible not to be amused by his gleeful oddness. He’s the film’s perfectly unhinged embodiment of that quirky, grim humor, equal parts menace and comic relief spiraling through the house’s shadowy halls. Ralph skulks and lurks, a wiry, baldfaced miscreant with the restless energy of a wild child popping up out of the dumbwaiter like a creepy jack-in-the-box who’s had way too much time to perfect his creepy timing.

The fashions handled by Joan Keller Stern, credited as the costume designer, was responsible for crafting the film’s memorable blend of decayed vintage looks and character-driven fashions. Her work contributed significantly to the movie’s unique atmosphere, with each character’s outfit ranging from Elizabeth’s pigtails and old-fashioned dresses to Emily Howe’s polished, urbane attire, serving to underscore the clash between innocence, menace, and outsider status in the Merrye estate.

One of the little character flourishes that I adore about the fashion sense behind Spider Baby is how Ralph famously wears a tight, old-fashioned velvet outfit reminiscent of a little lord Fauntleroy outfit, which is clearly too small and ill-fitting for him. Ralph struts into the room sporting his velvet get-up like a Gothic toddler who’s outgrown everything except his wild streak. He’s a hulking adult squeezed into a costume fit for a 19th-century pageant dropout. The sleeves threaten to burst at any moment, buttons straining like they’re holding back an existential crisis, while his developed limbs stick out in all directions, making him look like a sinister marionette dressed by someone with a very warped sense of fashion. Add in the perpetual look of gleeful mayhem on his face, and you’ve got the undeniable child-king of the Merrye madhouse—part deranged heir, part overgrown baby-man, and all unforgettable.

Notorious for her turn as the scheming Annabelle in House on Haunted Hill, Carol Ohmart trades supernatural scheming for old-money exasperation in this film, and she’s a treat to watch in both. In Spider Baby, Ohmart plays Emily Howe, the uptight and self-important distant cousin who arrives at the crumbling Merrye estate and has grand ideas about inheriting what’s left of the family fortune. She’s all sharp elbows, frostbitten manners, and city-slicker impatience, bristling at the weirdness around her before she even steps through the door.

Ohmart’s look is carefully crafted to embody the polished, controlled sensibility of Emily, who is thrust into the chaotic decay of the Merrye family estate. Her wardrobe and styling reflect mid-century upper-class propriety: tailored dresses, precise hairdos, and subtle, impeccably applied makeup, all of which signify her outsider status and her attempts to impose order on the household’s unraveling madness. This visual presentation contrasts sharply with the film’s pervasive atmosphere of rot and disorder, underlining Emily’s role as the pragmatic, no-nonsense foil to the grotesque and unpredictable Merrye siblings. Ohmart’s appearance functions as a quiet but telling symbol of societal norms and rationality standing at odds with the film’s eccentric, practically surreal family world, holding a mirror up to the tension between civilization and degeneration that runs through the narrative.

But the specter of old horror and old Hollywood is always present in Chaney’s weathered eyes, urging us to look past cliché and see the sadness behind the mask.

Into the Web: Unraveling the Oddities and Nightmares of the House of Merrye:

The film opens with a deviously cheerful song, sung by Lon Chaney Jr. himself, over a parade of cartoon horrors (“This cannibal orgy is strange to behold, in the maddest story ever told!”). Setting the tone: Addams Family-style whimsy collides with genuinely unsettling violence. Almost immediately, Jack Hill’s camera (through the lens of cinematographer Alfred Taylor) turns the Smith Estate’s real-life decay into a menacing fairy tale: sharp beams of sunlight filtered by makeshift reflectors in powerless rooms, shadowy corridors yawning with the threat of what’s unseen, austere compositions that hold on a smile just long enough for it to turn sinister.

Prolific character actor Mantan Moreland, known for his extensive work in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, often cast in comic relief roles but beloved for his sharp timing and expressive face, shows up on the scene.

In Spider Baby, Moreland’s character, the postman, innocently arrives at the Merrye estate to deliver a letter. His visit takes a gruesome turn when Virginia lures him into the house as part of her disturbingly playful “spider” game. As the unsuspecting postman is caught in her web, Virginia attacks him and, with chilling childlike detachment, cuts off his ear with a knife and proceeds to stab him to death. This shocking scene in black and white still packs a wallop. Done with a twisted sense of playfulness, it gives us one of the early glimpses into the violent, unpredictable world of the Merrye family.

Scene by scene, the film unfolds with hypnotic oddity. Virginia’s game with the visiting deliveryman, luring him into a fake web before dispatching him, casts the children’s madness as both play and predatory. Bruno’s nervous attempts to coach the girls in etiquette for their visiting cousins is both funny and pathetic: “Elizabeth, Virginia, remember to be nice tonight. We must have no…unpleasantness.” The would-be heirs, Peter and Emily Howe, and their oily lawyer Schlocker, who sports a disquieting, irreverent Hitler mustache, plus his ever-watchful secretary Ann, played by Mary Mitchel, snake their way into the Merrye house. Descending as a mismatched party of outsiders all at once into the heart of the Merryes’ peculiar world, power shifts and facades crumble. The Merrye sisters trade off between childlike hospitality (“Would you like to play Spider?”) and sudden violence, the tension always charged with the knowledge that in this house, innocence is as perilous as guilt.

The black humor is relentless but never merely sarcastic; it blooms from the grotesque absurdities Hill weaves into every encounter. When the family’s secrets, rotted corpses, festering wounds, and a “pit” in the basement housing far-gone relatives are finally exposed, all pretense vanishes and the narrative tumbles inexorably toward destruction. Elizabeth’s eerie calm as she leads Ann to her doom, or Virginia’s singsong approach to killing “Be still now, spider will sting you.”, are as chilling as they are darkly funny. The violence, mostly implied but acutely felt, stands as both primal acting-out and a childish test of boundaries that were never set.

The quirkiness of Spider Baby is its heartbeat: the way its horrors are rendered almost sweet, familial, and fairy tale-like, shimmering on the edge of grotesque parody but never quite lapsing into full camp. Each character is drawn with affection and a touch of sadness; even the monstrous seems to long for normalcy, for understanding. That’s all that Bruno ever aspired to with his charges.

Lines of dialogue stick in your mind, echoed like half-remembered nursery rhymes: Bruno says, “We’re not evil! We’re just different.”

When Ralph turns his unblinking, feral attention on Emily, his fixation mounts with unsettling speed. Emily’s carefully maintained composure quickly gives way to panic, especially as she realizes just how out of place and out of her depth she truly is in the Merrye household. As Ralph, childlike and unnerving in his too-small velvet getup, starts to pursue her through the shadowy corridors, the atmosphere shifts dramatically from brittle civility to nightmarish cat-and-mouse. The camera lingers on her mad dash, turning her flight into a portrait of unraveling dignity: her hair disheveled, breath ragged, fleeing through twisting stairways and dark rooms as shadows snarl on the walls. This sequence isn’t just exploitative; it symbolizes her breakdown as she’s forced to shed her urban armor and face the chaos on the Merrye family’s terms.

Emily flees the decaying Merrye estate, darting through its shadowed corridors and ultimately winding up outside on the overgrown grounds. Dressed only in her black lace bra and slip, Emily’s flight becomes a desperate, disoriented escape from the madness closing in around her. The contrast between her elegant black lace, the crumbling environment, her delicate attire, and the wild, untamed exterior underscores her vulnerability, loss of control, and the house’s predatory energy.

Once Emily is out in the open, away from the house’s grim interior, Ralph finally catches her; it’s a moment chillingly intimated rather than overtly shown, where the film suggests he ravages her. This violent climax offscreen leaves us with a sense of horror amplified by what is left to the imagination, while also marking Emily’s complete descent from order and civility into the chaotic, brutal world the Merryes inhabit. The sequence remains a dark, haunting testament to the film’s blending of unsettling menace and irony.

By the time Emily is chased and cornered, her descent into madness is palpable; her screams echo, her elegance swapped for raw terror. It’s a moment that mixes horror, dark humor, and a kind of Gothic spectacle that defines Spider Baby’s strange magic.

As the chaos at the Merrye estate reaches its peak, Schlocker, the hapless, mustachioed scoundrel, finds himself poking around where he shouldn’t, drawn down into the basement’s shadowy depths. There, amid the dank gloom and echoes of madness, he’s suddenly seized by the cannibalistic relatives lurking in the darkness.

Elizabeth and Virginia descend the stairs, finally revealing the madness and violence behind the child’s play. As the sisters head downward into the bowls of the house’s hell in the film’s haunting climax, cinematographer Alfred Taylor frames their silhouette in stark, high-contrast black and white, the light from the basement doorway casting them as motionless shadows poised on the threshold between innocence and menace. The image is saturated with deep shadows and sharp edges, capturing the sisters’ otherworldly composure while the pitchfork glints ominously in their grasp. Taylor’s strategic use of light and darkness heightens the suspense, turning the scene into a Gothic tableau where the sisters emerge from shadow, outlined with a ghostly clarity that transforms their descent into a chilling, unforgettable moment of visual storytelling. The expression on Beverly Washburn’s face is sublime as her features flicker with ghostlit menace, a spectral radiance playing across her face, where sublime dread and uncanny beauty converge in a single, unearthly glow.

“This has gone well beyond the boundaries of prudence and good taste.” – Schlocker

The scene is tense and claustrophobic; Schlocker’s disbelief turns to terror as hands claw from the pitch-black to drag him offscreen, his cries echoing while the lurking shapes descend on him. He meets his end as another victim of the family’s oldest, hungriest secret, and silence falls, broken only by the distant, hollow sounds of feasting.

Peter Howe played with a genial optimism by Quinn K. Redeker, the distant relative of the Merrye family, who arrives at the estate along with his sister Emily and the others, has been intent on claiming the family property and guardianship of the afflicted Merrye children. But unlike the plagued siblings, Peter is unaffected by Merrye Syndrome and acts as a more grounded, rational presence amidst the chaos. Throughout the film, he navigates the growing dangers of the Merrye household, eventually escaping Virginia’s deadly “spider” game and rescuing Ann from Ralph’s grasp.

Bruno’s desperate decision, with dynamite in hand, Virginia and Elizabeth’s deadly games lead to the estate’s fiery destruction, an ending that feels like both a knowing wink and a sharp wound as the “maddest story ever told” burns away to reveal the traces of the true tragedy both literally, as their ancestral home is reduced to ashes, and symbolically, as the painful legacy of the family with all its madness, isolation, and ruin consumes them, despite the film’s darkly playful tone and black humor.

In the end, after the Merrye estate is destroyed in the explosion set by Bruno to prevent further tragedy, Peter inherits the Merrye family fortune and caretaking responsibilities. He marries Ann and even writes a book on Merrye Syndrome, representing a hopeful, untainted continuation of the family line. However, the closing scene, where their young daughter is fascinated by a spider, leaves a haunting suggestion that the family legacy, and perhaps the syndrome, may still linger. Peter never quite grasps the danger, nor the sadness that clings to the history of his family’s legacy. Even the final image, Peter and Ann’s child, years later, enraptured by that spider, suggests that the stories that haunt us rarely ever end.

Spider Baby never enjoyed the mainstream recognition it deserved on first release, but its reverberations across the genre are unmistakable and have now attained a beloved cult status like no other. Its mix of rural decay, familial dysfunction, dark satire, and violent whimsy foreshadowed the likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and countless “hillbilly horror” films that would follow. It stands unique: both a love letter to, and a sly upending of, the horror tradition. In its jittery, black-and-white gloom, its adult fairy-tale logic and singular cast, especially the draw of Chaney and Washburn, Hill created a cult artifact that unsettles and enchants, spinning its strange web for anyone curious enough to heed its song.

#127 down, 23 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

 

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #126 Scanners 1981

SCANNERS 1981

Whenever I return to Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981), I can’t help but feel like I’m plunging headlong into a hallucinatory waking night terror—a film that fuses body horror, science fiction, and psychological thriller into something both mesmerizing and deeply unsettling. For me, it’s not just a volatile movie about psychic battles or exploding heads (though it has those in unforgettable measure); it’s a fiercely intelligent exploration into themes of power, identity, and control, all refracted through Cronenberg’s signature, clinical surrealism and preoccupation with body horror. Watching it, I get the sense I’m witnessing a turning point, not just for Cronenberg himself as he leans fully into his own distinctive vision, but for the entire landscape of horror cinema. There’s a rare charge to Scanners that makes each viewing feel freshly strange and relevant.

Scanners spins a wild tale about a crew of renegade “scanners”, humans with mind-bending psychic abilities, pulling together to grab power and rewrite the rules. But their plans hit a serious snag: one lone, untainted scanner isn’t about to let their world-domination plot go unchecked.

For me, at its very heart, the world of Scanners is this electrifying portrayal of the raw, violent potential locked inside psychic powers, centering on a rare breed of individuals; a “mutant class” who share extraordinary abilities, can invade minds, and unleash devastating telekinetic fury. They are an elite and current-haunted cabal who can get inside your head, twist your thoughts, and let loose psychic destruction with staggering force.

Oh, that memorably, explosive scene—the one where a character’s head literally blows apart like an overfilled balloon that pops in all its gory detail, still shocks me every time I see it, a moment so viscerally graphic in spectacle, it’s become a landmark not just for its horror effects, but it remains a defining moment in horror cinema, one we still all recognize as the dawn into daylight of modern horror.

That poor guy’s head blowing a gasket, going all fireworks and meat confetti, literally blowing his brains out!, Though thrilling for us, it only crystallizes the film’s brutal meditation on how fragile our control over ourselves really is, and how close we all are to unraveling under unseen pressures.

Scanner’s shocking, mind-blowing moment transcends mere gratuitous provocation; it also functions as a deliberate catalyst that shines a light on the film’s deeper meanings.

The story unfolds around Cameron Vale (a deer in the headlights, Stephen Lack), a drifter burdened by mysterious voices in his head. His discovery and induction into a clandestine corporate world is the start of his profound odyssey of self-discovery and survival. Cameron learns that he is one of the “scanners,” the secret society of people born with extraordinary telepathic and telekinetic powers, a biological mutation possibly induced by a since-abandoned drug program.

The film’s conflict is propelled by Cameron’s pursuit to stop Darryl Revok (played by the eternally imposing Michael Ironside), a rogue scanner with a messianic vision to wage war against conformity and control, a battle that rolls forward like a gritty road trip or a high-stakes psychic chess match, embodying a mythic clash evocative of archetypal rivalries, like brothers Cain and Abel, where inherited power fractures into opposition and bad blood.

Cronenberg’s direction layers the futuristic premise with allegorical weight, subtly addressing the fears and anxieties of the early 1980s, a period rife with Cold War tensions, burgeoning corporate surveillance, the explosive rise of new technology, and shifting cultural identities that were set aflame during the Regan era. Beneath the pulpy surface, Scanners reflects a meditation on the alienation of individuals gifted or cursed, however you look at it, with powers beyond social norms, their bodies battlegrounds where psychic wounds inflict physical devastation.

These themes resonated with Cronenberg’s evolving fascination with the body’s vulnerability and the thin boundary separating self from other, sanity from madness.

Stephen Lack as Cameron Vale brings a haunting detachment to the role of a man struggling to master an overwhelming gift, while Michael Ironside’s Darryl Revok is a charismatic yet terrifying antagonist whose zealotry and cruelty escalate the tension with magnetic intensity.

Included in the cast are two other notable actors worth paying tribute to. When I watch Scanners, I always find myself drawn in by the grounding presence of Jennifer O’Neill and Patrick McGoohan. O’Neill, as Kim Obrist, brings a steadying warmth and quiet grace that makes the chaos around her feel more human and immediate. I can’t help but empathize with her as the psychic turbulence ramps up. I recently met the underappreciated actress at Chiller Theater, and was so taken with her kindness, grace, and gentility—a woman who is still as breathtakingly beautiful as she ever was. And then there’s McGoohan as Dr. Paul Ruth, whose enigmatic sharpness and pained intensity give the whole story its moral and intellectual spine. For me, their performances don’t just drive the plot; they tend to pull me deeper into the emotional twists and ethical gray areas at the heart of the film, making the stakes feel personal and strangely intimate than the more unearthly, wooden, or sharply eccentric performances by the darkly twinned fated rivals.

Tara Aquino writes in her article for Mental Floss in 2016 – It’s no surprise that Cronenberg allegedly called Scanners his most frustrating film to make. In addition to delays in filming, the script wasn’t even completed when production commenced. “Not only was Scanners not rehearsed, but it wasn’t written,” Lack told Film Comment. “David was coming in with pink, blue, and yellow pages for the day for the version of the script that we were doing, and he was working on it right there. As a result I had to deal with the dialogue in such a way that I was not reacting to things, because the information hadn’t been given to my character in the linear progression of the story. If you chop it up and look at it, 50 percent of my dialogue is not an assertion of anything but rather a question: ‘You called me a Scanner, what does that mean?’ ‘You’re part of an organization, who are you?’ Everything is a freaking question!”

The corporation in Scanners is ConSec, a shady security conglomerate that seeks to control scanners as weapons for its own agenda. Rather than uniting the scanners, ConSec aims to harness and exploit them, seeing their psychic talents as assets in a burgeoning war for corporate dominance and security.

The other scanners are caught in the crossfire, with some manipulated by ConSec, others recruited or coerced into the militant rebellion led by the hostile antagonist Revok, and a few struggling to survive in secret or find their own path.

Jennifer O’Neill’s character, Kim, is a key scanner who becomes Cameron Vale’s ally. She helps him navigate the dangers and moral complexity of their world while resisting corporate and revolutionary manipulation. McGoohan, as Dr. Paul Ruth, serves as ConSec’s expert on scanners, acting as Vale’s sage. He plays a crucial role in connecting him to the scientific and conspiratorial elements that help the plot unfold.

For me, what intensifies the film’s core horror is the sense that invisible disturbances beneath the self can erupt without warning, turning internal fractures into seismic, unmissable events. But, beyond the spectacle lies a thoughtful exploration of autonomy versus manipulation. Cameron’s journey is a liminal one, caught between these forces while wrestling with his own fractured identity. It reflects a broader human struggle with power, responsibility, paranoia, and the desire for connection, all while under the spell and in the silent orbit of isolation.

What never fails to give me a jolt is how Scanners feels ahead of its time in capturing that deep, existential fear of losing control, not just of what we do, but of our own minds and bodies. It’s a fear that’s only grown sharper with the rise of constant surveillance and the profoundly tricky ethical questions technology throws at us today. The film taps into this increasing anxiety so well, making you feel that fragile line between self-possession, bioethical uncertainty, and being overwhelmed by forces beyond your grasp.

The telepathic invasions, mind control, and bodily destruction become metaphors not only for personal disintegration but also for societal paranoia, where boundaries between self and state, mind and machine, belonging and other, and trust and betrayal blur.

Scanner’s pacing feels deliberate and carefully measured as it slowly pulls you in with a steady build-up, then hits you over the exploding head with sudden bursts of explosive violence that ignite the synapses, balanced by quieter moments filled with creeping psychological unease. It’s this rhythm of tension and release that keeps the atmosphere charged and really draws you deep into the unsettling world Cronenberg creates for us.

Early scenes introduce Cameron’s alienation and vulnerability, followed by his induction and training sequences that evoke a disquieting rite of passage. The escalating psychic confrontations lead up to a climactic showdown that mixes cerebral strategy with visceral horror. The finale’s ambiguity—where identities merge and control slips away—leaves us truly unsettled, inviting interpretation about the costs of power and the fragility of selfhood.

According to Michael Ironside, who played Darryl Revok, he and Stephen Lack filmed a less exciting version of the ending. “With one ending, we had this psycho-battle between my brother and I and it didn’t work, we shot it right up until Christmas and sent the script to [special effects wizard] Dick Smith in New York and asked him what he could come up with in terms of cutting edge makeup,” Ironside, “You know, something that would give us a more memorable battle and a different ending. Dick then came up with the idea of the exploding heads and that was a very collaborative thing.” -Mental Floss Tara Aquino 2016

Visually, Scanners is, of course, notable for its pioneering special effects, choreographed with bone-chilling precision. These symbolize the ultimate loss of control, the mind’s destructive power given form in visceral flesh.

Cronenberg’s body horror and the use of his special effects team’s sophisticated prosthetics mark Scanners as a highlight of practical effects innovation in the early 1980s, helping establish the director’s reputation as a master of visceral cinematic storytelling.

When the scanners tap into their powers, their faces transform into a network of dark veins that snake across their skin, pulsing with unseen energy. Their eyes turn ghostly white, as if smoke itself is burning behind them, signaling the fierce and dangerous force building within.

The special effects for Scanners (1981) were primarily crafted by Gary Zeller, who played a crucial role in bringing to life the film’s groundbreaking and visceral visual moments. Zeller was responsible for supervising the effects that gave Scanners its unforgettable impact, including the iconic exploding head scene. His work on Scanners joins an impressive résumé that includes his work on Dawn of the Dead (1978), showcasing his skill in creating memorable effects under demanding conditions.

In addition to Zeller’s contributions, makeup effects legend Dick Smith, renowned for his work on Linda Blair giving her that poster girl look for demonic possession and the skincare routine that looks like “hell” in The Exorcist, provided prosthetics for the film’s climactic scenes, including the exploding head effects. Smith did an incredible job using his signature artistry in translating Cronenberg’s intense, often harrowing vision, breathing life into a physical reality, and creating something tangible on screen. Finally, special effects artist Chris Walas, who later worked on Cronenberg’s The Fly and Naked Lunch, also contributed to the exploding head sequence, pushing the boundaries of practical effects at the time.

Film historians and critics alike lauded their work in Scanners for its creativity, technical brilliance, and integral role in conveying the film’s dark meditation on control and violence. The visual magic they brought to the table became a defining metaphor for the destructive potential of psychic power.

But the illusionary visuals do more than jar; they unravel the fragile seams of the mind, spilling inner chaos into the open, exposing the psychic fault lines beneath us, rupturing the surface, forcing hidden tremors to crack open and flow into the visible world.

The special effects physically externalize psychic and psychological breaking points, emphasizing one of the film’s primary horrors: the invasion of the self by external forces, whether conscious influence, pharmaceutical, or corporate. The shadowy corporation ConSec embodies the cold mechanics of control, seeking to weaponize scanners, while Revok represents anarchic rebellion, fighting to overturn a system that would suppress their existence.

In the Criterion Collection’s documentary The Scanners Way (2014), the special effects team discussed how the exploding head scene was achieved through ingenious practical methods, including shooting a gelatin-encased plaster skull filled with unconventional materials like leftover burgers. As someone who loves a good hamburger, I have to admit: seeing one sacrificed for the greater cause of cinematic head explosions feels both deliciously wrong and kind of inspiring. They also used latex scraps, blasted with a shotgun to create the convincingly explosive effect.

Critics such as Roger Ebert and sources like The Criterion Collection have noted that the special effects elevate Scanners beyond typical genre fare: “Every special effect is an idea,” emphasizing how the effects serve the film’s intellectual and thematic ambitions.

Scholar and film critic Kristin Thompson praised the ingenuity and craftsmanship, remarking that the effects contribute to “a visceral sense of psychic rupture and bodily invasion,” seamlessly integrating with Cronenberg’s exploration of mind and body.

The unsettling soundscape and Tony DeBenedictis’s synthesizer-tinged score amplify the claustrophobic, paranoid atmosphere, blending seamlessly with Mark Irwin’s dark, clinical cinematography that renders both urban and interior spaces as arenas of psychological conflict. Irwin also worked with Cronenberg on The Brood (1979), Videodrome (1983) The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly (1986).

Ultimately, Cronenberg’s Scanners transcends its B-movie aesthetics to become a penetrating study of being at the crossroads of identity, control, and the body-mind connection, using science fiction and horror as a way to hold up a mirror to reflect and explore profound psychological and social anxieties.

Scanner’s legacy has lasted this long not only because of its groundbreaking effects but also because of its acute commentary on the perilous balance between human autonomy and the invasive forces, internal and external, that seek to dismantle it.

#126 down, 24 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #125 Sisters 1972

Through Splintered Glass, Darkly: Voyeuristic Shadows, Mirror Twins, the Dance of Identity, Haunted Gazes, and Watching the Obsessive Psyche Unravel in Sisters:

As dusk falls at the drive-in, I can already feel that unique buzz—the anticipation of watching Sisters unfurl on the big outdoor screen or the big screen in my living room.

This is yet another film I’ll be delving deep into, drawn by its blend of Hitchcockian suspense and De Palma’s feverish visual style. What makes this film so darkly compelling to me is how it intertwines the voyeuristic scrutiny that runs through De Palma’s suspenseful narrative, fractured identities, and psychosexual tension and disquiet, sinking us into a relentless atmosphere where every frame teeters between paranoia and revelation.

For me, Sisters isn’t just another suspense thriller; it’s a hypnotic plunge into unsettling obsession, psychological horror, identity, and twisted sibling bonds that have gripped me since my first viewing.

“You know, there are so few people that I have any feeling for. Not just men, you know. Ever since my sister left. We have had such a close bond.” – Danielle Breton

What keeps me coming back is how De Palma masterfully turns the act of watching and psychological unraveling into a disorienting trip, making every split-screen and nervous glance feel intensely personal. Watching the fractured lives of Kidder’s character play out, I can’t help but get sucked into the relentless tension, each revelation and reversal echoing the messy, unresolved questions that make the film impossible to shake off.

Inside De Palma’s reel, obsessions bloom in shadows: A sister cleaved from a sister—one longing, one ebbing, two sisters’ souls stitched with binding that aches and cuts underneath the knife point intimacy.

Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1972) is a master class in suspense, a film that wears its Hitchcockian worship with sly confidence but also pulses with De Palma’s emerging, unmistakable identity.

The surface tricks—split-screens, voyeuristic camera moves, the shrill glory of Bernard Herrmann’s score, immediately evoke the great suspense maestro, but as the narrative coils into psychological horror and social satire, Sisters becomes its own strange animal: a tale of madness, violence, and the unnerving bond of twins, shot through the psyhco- sexual ambiguity and pulpy humor.

De Palma, at this early juncture in his career, was evolving from a director of brash comedies into the architect of stylish thrillers; Sisters marks the first time he plunges totally into the genre. The film’s mood is bleak, jittery, and darkly comic; even the opening credits (with their clinical photographs of embryos and twins) set an uneasy, off-kilter tone. The influence of Hitchcock is overt, especially in the split-screen sequences, voyeuristic motifs, and the air of wrongness that permeates every frame, but De Palma’s signature emerges in the audacious visual flourishes, narrative reversals, and a willingness to let violence erupt with a startling sense of the grotesque.

The acting is anchored by Margot Kidder in a bravura performance as Danielle Breton, a French Canadian model, charming and mysterious but haunted, shimmering between vulnerability and danger. Kidder doubles as Dominique, her psychically tethered twin, capturing the duality with unnerving conviction. Jennifer Salt embodies Grace Collier, a feisty, idealistic reporter whose career aspirations and tenacity draw her into the film’s web of murder and gaslighting; Salt gives Grace both grit and relatability. William Finley is profoundly creepy as Emil Breton, Danielle’s ex-husband and the story’s ambiguous puppet-master, at once menacing and pathetic. Charles Durning’s private investigator, Larch, supplies a bit of world-weary comic relief. The casting, so precisely etched, serves to ground the film’s often feverish style.

Cinematographer Gregory Sandor crafts Sisters with a raw Big Apple grit—shot in New York and Staten Island, the milieu transmits the shabbiness and chaos of early-1970s urban life. The film’s visual inventiveness is relentless: De Palma utilizes split-screens to heighten tension (showing, for example, the cleanup of a crime on one side while police, on the other, bumble through their investigation), and executes long, fluid tracking shots that both echo Hitchcock’s Rope and push the viewer into the maze of deception. Herrmann’s score is its own character, shrieking and brooding with similar aesthetic precision and nuance, a worthy descendant of his work on Psycho and Vertigo.

Psycho-sexual implications slither through every narrative turn. The film is less interested in Freudian diagnoses than in the spectacle of desire and repression splitting along gendered, bodily, and psychic lines. The conjoined twins’ forced separation, Danielle’s oscillation between sexual activity and trauma, Emil’s proprietary control, and Grace’s struggles as a woman in a man’s world all entwine in a dizzying exploration of identity, repression, and violence.

The murder scenes themselves derive a queasy charge from their positioning: groin-stabbings literalize castration anxiety, while the entangled twins interrogate the boundaries of self, sexuality, and madness. Voyeurism is everywhere, from the opening game show (involving hidden cameras and pranks) to Grace’s obsessive surveillance, and even the audience itself is implicated as a spectator of questionable morality.

The plot is a delicious labyrinth, moving with icy precision from set-piece to set-piece. It begins with advertising exec Philip Woode (Lisle Wilson) winning a meal for two on a hidden camera show, where he meets Danielle, the alluring French Canadian model.

“I don’t know what to do, so I just stand there and, uh, I feel very stupid and about, uh, then I said to the photographer—I said something so terrible you can’t even put it in the French movie. But, he deserved that, you know. He’s a—how you say that word? He’s a—he’s a son of a bastard.”?— Danielle Breton

“Son of a bitch.”— Phillip Woode

“Yes, he was that too. Son of a bitch. But I’m not, you know—I’m not like you Americans’ women’s liberation. I don’t, uh, I don’t spend my life to hate the men. I don’t like that. But this man, he have deserve what I tell him.”— Danielle Breton

After dinner, Danielle, nervy and radiant, invites Philip back to her Staten Island apartment; her ex-husband Emil’s jealous intrusion outside is managed by trickery, and Philip and Danielle sleep together. In the morning, Danielle, disturbed and agitated, tells Philip it’s her birthday and that her twin, Dominique, has arrived. Philip runs errands for her: getting her medication (her supply of mysterious red pills is dwindling) and a birthday cake. Meanwhile, ominous hints of Dominique’s bitterness flare up during Danielle’s phone calls to Emil.

Upon Philip’s return, he is savagely stabbed by Dominique, it seems, in a fit of psychotic rage. His desperate attempt to scrawl “help” in his own blood on the window is witnessed by Grace, the tenacious journalist who lives across the courtyard. Grace phones the police; Emil arrives and, with grotesque calm, helps Danielle hide the body in the sofa bed before the authorities arrive. Grace, frustrated by the police’s dismissiveness and coded racism, vows to investigate the murder herself, convinced Danielle is guilty.

“I saw a murder, and I’m going to prove it.” Grace Collier

Grace’s personal investigation quickens: she hires Larch, a private detective, and uncovers a medical file on the Blanchion Twins, conjoined twin girls separated only recently. Dominique, she learns, supposedly died in the operation. Grace trails Danielle and Emil to a bleak mental hospital, running into a sequence of surreal, increasingly nightmarish complications.

At the hospital, Emil manipulates the staff into believing Grace is a delusional new patient named Margaret; she is sedated and left vulnerable. He then drugs Grace and Danielle, plunging Grace into a black-and-white dream-like hallucinatory state. Under Emil’s influence and drugs, she relives elements of Danielle and Dominique’s traumatic past, in which she dreams herself into the role of Dominique, haunted by memories of meshed identity, psychic invasion, and sexual betrayal.

The truth, as revealed in this fever dream, is bleak: Danielle and Dominique, orphaned and conjoined, were separated by Emil, but not before Dominique, jealous, marginalized, and traumatized, lashed out violently, stabbing Danielle in the stomach when Danielle became pregnant by Emil.

The trauma left Danielle barren; Dominique died in the surgery, but lives on as a split personality that emerges at moments of sexual intimacy and stress, producing catastrophic violence.

As tension peaks, Emil attempts to summon “Dominique” from Danielle through sexual manipulation, but is himself murdered, slashed to death in a grisly inversion of the earlier crime’s violence. Emil subjects Grace to hypnotic suggestion, feeding her a false narrative and having her repeat that there was never a murder in Danielle’s apartment.

Grace ultimately awakens, still under the effects of this hypnosis, witnessing Danielle mourning over Emil’s dead body. Danielle/Dominique kills Emil after he pushes her to split into her violent “Dominique” persona.

When questioned by Detective Kelly, Grace, still under Emil’s hypnotic programming, robotically recites the false story that Emil implanted, denying there was ever a murder or that she witnessed anything important.

She is left confused and silenced, unable to tell her story or expose the truth. Grace, drugged and powerless, is left babbling Emil’s scripted denials to police, effectively silenced, robbed of agency, her story discounted, and her memory broken.

Meanwhile, the investigation trails off with Larch following the sofa-bed (with Philip’s body hidden inside) to a rural train station, a bleak final punchline emblematic of the film’s bitter humor and skepticism about authority and truth.

Sisters ends on a note of dark ambiguity worthy of its Hitchcockian heritage. The monstrous, split self remains unpunished; the moral order is not restored; and the final shots leave us awash in doubt, perverse empathy, and suspicion of everything that calls itself “normal.” De Palma’s film is as much a meditation on the impossibility of knowing the other as it is a stylish shocker — a dazzling, disturbing portrait of violence, madness, and the mutilated ties that bind.

#125 down, 25 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #124 Silent Night, Bloody Night 1972 & Don’t Look in the Basement 1973

SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT 1972

Morbidly Beautiful: The Haunting Elegance of Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972)

Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972) seeps into the consciousness like a winter shadow-haunted dream, an obscure, undervalued atmospheric relic of early 1970s American horror cinema whose reputation has slowly grown as more cinephiles discover its Gothic dread, morbidly perverse and strange, almost mournful beauty. Under the direction of Theodore Gershuny, a filmmaker known for his cult work, such as Sugar Cookies 1973, leaned into chilly atmospheres and stifling interiors, the film draws every ounce of menace from its frigid setting.

Gershuny’s directorial touch is imbued with a desire to craft an unsettling aesthetic, using the wintery locales and the imposing, brooding Butler mansion to full effect. The film’s visual language, bathed in moody, sepia-hued flashbacks and tense night scenes, builds a sense of dread and claustrophobia that envelops us in the mystery and horror festering beneath the surface of the quaint New England town.

The narrative orbits around the imposing Butler mansion, somewhere between mausoleum and fortress, where stone-cold tragedy lingers not so much in the deserted grand rooms as in smoke-stained memories and shadows that stretch far into the town’s soul.

The story weaves a Gothic tale of inheritance, madness, and buried sins. At its center, the Butler mansion, once a private home turned into a mental asylum, was shadowed by a horrifying legacy of incest, betrayal, and murder. The narrative unfolds over two decades, revealing a family tragedy intertwined with the dark underbelly of the town itself.

Gershuny’s directorial vision feels at once highly personal and decidedly avant-garde. It was shaped in no small part by his relationship with Mary Woronov, the film’s leading lady and cult icon, who was more than professional—they were married during production, a personal dynamic that infuses the film’s performances and atmosphere with an intimacy and rawness rare for the genre at the time.

There’s also the presence of Warhol Factory regulars, whose faces flicker in flashback like half-remembered ghosts pressing at the celluloid’s edge. Woronov brings a piercing, quietly troubled gravity to Diane Adams, grounding the film even as it edges into surreal territory. Alongside her, though briefly, Patrick O’Neal gives John Carter a cynical polish, while James Patterson, tragically nearing the end of his life, plays Jeffrey Butler as an intense but hollow man, his performance haunted by real illness.

John Carradine also appears in a unique role as Charlie Towman, a mute newspaper publisher who communicates only by ringing a bell, adding an extra surreal, almost ghostly layer to the story. The almost spectral Carradine is another weird resonance to this flickering collection of players that includes countercultural faces.

Part of the cast itself carries the weight of New York’s offbeat theatre and Warhol’s underground, with the likes of Ondine and Candy Darling appearing in the climactic asylum flashback. These fevered sepia sequences are colored with the crackle of spectral, camp-infused, queer glamour and decay as the inmates and party guests overlay a touch of surrealism onto the narrative. This inclusion of queer and countercultural figures, atypical for the era’s horror films, adds a richly textured subtext to the film’s depiction of madness and societal exclusion. The flashback sequence blurs fiction and the era’s avant-garde experiment, mingling with the film’s haunted house plot with a social undercurrent seldom found in typical holiday slashers.

Silent Night, Bloody Night springs from a script by Jeffrey Konvitz and Ira Teller, two literate outsiders threading familial trauma and civic conspiracy into the familiar shape of small-town American horror.

The film starts out on fire- literally- as Wilfred Butler (Phillip Bruns)  is seen running from his imposing mansion consumed by flames. Decades later, his estranged grandson Jeffrey inherits the estate, insisting on selling it off, which brings in a slick city lawyer, John Carter, and his assistant Ingrid. The local town council is eager to buy the supposedly haunted place for a steal, but as night falls and John and Ingrid decide to spend the night in the house, things go completely off the rails. They’re brutally murdered in their bed by an unseen killer, plunging the town into panic just as Christmas is about to begin.

As the tensions among the players mount and Christmas approaches in Silent Night, Bloody Night, it becomes chillingly clear that someone deadly and unhinged is moving within the shadows of the old Butler mansion and stalking the town itself, waiting to butcher the guilty. The film masterfully escalates its sense of menace, using the cold New England backdrop and the mansion’s decaying corridors to heighten the atmosphere of dread. Under the cover of night and false assurances of safety, four key townspeople, pillars of the community who had long hoped to see the estate sold and its secrets buried, are each lured back to the house. There, cut off from help and each other, they are picked off in shocking, brutal fashion by the unseen killer. The mounting body count isn’t just grisly window-dressing; it underscores how the town’s genteel facade is corrupt to the core, collapsing under the weight of long-repressed family trauma and violence as Christmas, normally a celebration of warmth and unity, becomes the stage for reckoning and bloodshed.

The cold open—Christmas Eve, 1950, sees the mansion’s patriarch Wilfred Butler consumed by mysterious fire, a tragedy left to fester for two decades until, twenty years later, on another Christmas Eve, city lawyer John Carter and his lover Ingrid (Astrid Heeren) arrive to finalize the property’s sale to the town council. The council is eager to buy the property cheaply, and John and Ingrid attempt to stay the night at the Butler mansion despite warnings.

But as Christmas approaches, an unmistakable sense of menace creeps through the old mansion and the town itself—a deadly, unbalanced presence haunting both its shadowy halls and quiet streets. One by one, four prominent townsfolk, drawn by their own secrets or summoned by something darker, find themselves lured back to the house. There, in a grim inversion of holiday cheer, they meet violent and untimely ends, each murder peeling back another layer of the town’s genteel facade and exposing the rot that’s been festering beneath for decades.

Suddenly, violence erupts. A stalking shadow brutally kills John and Ingrid with an axe during their intimate moment. What begins as cautious negotiation between Carter and the town council unspools with an axe murder as their reward: a maniac stalks the old house, ringing terror into the heart of this supposedly pious town. Right afterward, the killer rings the sheriff’s office, luring authorities into a deadly trap where several of the town council, including the sheriff and switchboard operator Tess, fall victim.

With John and Ingrid hacked to pieces, leaving bloody remnants on the bed they just made love in, the film folds in on itself: the local authorities, shot with almost documentary meanness, are drawn in by these phone calls placed by the killer, who taunts the town assuming the lacerating identity of “Marianne.”

Jeffrey Butler, Wilfred’s estranged grandson, arrives mysteriously in town on the same night. He clashes with townsfolk and forms an uneasy alliance with Diane Adams (Waronov), the mayor’s daughter, who becomes determined to unravel the mansion’s dark legacy.

One by one, figures of minor civic authority are lured to brutal ends. The air is electric with suspicion as Jeffrey Butler returns, stirring up anxieties old and new, and pairing off with Diane, as reluctant investigators into the house’s grisly history.

Through her research in the local newspaper archives and scribbled notes, piecing together clues, Diane uncovers a haunting narrative of the Butler family’s dark past: Wilfred’s daughter Marianne was raped by her father, resulting in Jeffrey’s birth. Marianne was institutionalized in the mansion when it operated as a mental hospital, where she and other inmates suffered under the supposed care of the doctors until Wilfred’s violent breakdown as he let loose the inmates that led to a massacre decades earlier.

The film’s centerpiece is its chilling flashback portrayed in sepia tones, showing the asylum inmates silently surrounding and murdering the doctors, an eerie sequence loaded with the spectral presence of Warhol superstars as patients and party guests. This breakout scene embodies the film’s blend of psychological horror, social critique, and surreal theatricality.

Some of the gruesome murders along the way: On his way to investigate the mansion, Sheriff Bill Mason stops by Wilfred Butler’s disturbed grave. There, the killer ambushes him and beats him to death with a shovel, leaving his body at the cemetery.

Tess is lured to the mansion by an eerie, whispering phone call. Venturing nervously through dark halls, she’s bludgeoned to death inside the foyer—smacked with a candlestick by the unseen killer. In the hush of midnight, Tess, the town’s nosy and ever-present switchboard operator, is drawn from her post by a voice on the line. A voice so quiet, so breathy, ”Tess,” it seems to curl around her name like a cold finger.

Guided by this whisper, she steps through halls half-lit and trembling with shadow, the kind of silence that amplifies her every uncertain footstep. The darkness ahead feels thick as oil. She pauses; you can tell her instincts are warning her to turn back, but the voice beckons, more insistent, until the door sighs open. Once again, the voice whispers “Tess” and swallows her whole. Inside, a figure awaits with violence wound tight as a spring. Then the weapon flashes, catching her in the vulnerable hush, and all that’s left is the dreadful stillness.

Throughout Carradine’s presence in the film, the bell of Charlie Towman clangs in the darkness, a funeral chime in a town bound by secrets and new traumas born of old wounds. After having his hands severed by the killer, Towman blindly stumbles into the roadway, only to be struck and killed by Jeffrey’s car, a tragic end for a character already robbed of the ability to communicate except for his anxious, blasted bell.

On the desolate stretch of winter road, Charlie Towman’s fate is even more unsparing. Deprived of a voice, the old man, now deprived of his hands, mangled and desperate, stumbles into the bleak headlights of Jeffrey’s car. He is a silent, staggering warning, blood slicking the asphalt as he flails, helpless, trying to signal what his words never could. The night air is shattered by the dull impact of metal and bone as Jeffrey’s car cannot halt in time, striking Towman down. Even in death, he is mute, a grim effigy contorted, the world indifferent to his final, unheard alarms.

Through the winding halls of newspaper archives and candlelit bedrooms, Diane teases out the ugly secret at the story’s core: Wilfred had committed his daughter to the house-turned-asylum and his incestuous assault on his daughter Marianne, This gave way to the birth of their child, Jeffrey, under the stigma of this violence, and the repurposing of the grand home into a this madhouse. The flashback, rendered in grainy, near-silent sepia, dreams up a shadowplay of inmates, played in part by Ondine, Candy Darling, and Susan Rothenberg, rising in mute revolt, axes and pitchforks descending on the doctors, and corruption blooming in the cruelty and rot of psychiatric “treatment.”

In Silent Night, Bloody Night, the chilling truth behind Butler’s quest for revenge lands like a hammer blow: the town council members, so desperate to buy the old mansion, were never just concerned citizens; they were survivors of the asylum massacre, once inmates themselves, who quietly embedded within the community after the bloodshed which took Marianne’s life. Butler’s vengeance isn’t simply personal; it’s a reckoning with those who escaped the massacre by assimilating, who wore respectable masks while the scars of cruelty festered beneath.

As the story’s layers peel away, it is revealed that decades earlier, the doctors at the mansion-turned-asylum presided over a regime of cruelty, neglect, and indulgence, their callousness exposed in a searing voiceover from Butler on the night everything unraveled:

“Oh I knew that they would gorge themselves into a stupor that afternoon… it was their celebration; I expected no less. Since they had come into my house, they had acted as if they owned it—they had behaved like poor relations, half guilty but finally unable to control their appetites… after dinner, they danced and drank as they usually did.”

All this suffocating chaos leads to a rebellion—an eruption of violence that is both horrifying and deeply cathartic. The patients, driven beyond endurance, rise against their oppressors in a sequence shrouded in these macabre, deathly amber sepia tones and haunted silence, with the caretakers’ complacency and gluttony ultimately sealing their fate. The mansion’s time as a mental institution saw more cruelty, with the staff partying and indulging while the inmates, neglected and abused, finally revolt in a bloody uprising, a sequence as nightmarish as it is tragic.

That night of “celebration” was nothing less than a grotesque feast held by those meant to heal, indifferent to the pain coiled in every shadowed corridor above them. Butler’s drive is shaped by the realization that true cruelty sometimes wears the face of authority, and that after the massacre, those who suffered and survived, the inmates, became the town’s trusted elders, their pasts meticulously erased. His vendetta, then, is aimed not just at individuals who killed Marianne during the massacre, but at the seamless cruelty that hid itself in plain sight, demanding overdue justice for all the suffering wrought behind closed doors.

Gershuny’s camera turns these sepia interludes into haunted tableaux, hovering between Grand Guignol and melancholy pageant. The menace is all the sharper because it seems to drift in from forgotten nightmares rather than calculated shock.

The house creaks and shudders with every footstep, and the film’s cinematography, shot largely on location in Oyster Bay, Long Island (one town over from my old neighborhood where I grew up), Silent Night, Bloody Night employs a cold, wintry New England setting that complements the film’s chilling tone. The cinematography makes skilled use of the stark, imposing architecture of Long Island’s Beekman estate, casting long shadows and trapping characters in the labyrinthine house’s oppressive interiors. Some fans take issue with the night scenes, sometimes criticized for the grainy darkness due to transfer quality, but I think it reinforces the film’s oppressive mood, while POV shots of the killer prefigure techniques used in later slasher films.

All this amplifies the architecture’s suffocating lines and drafts of candlelight, while night scenes blur faces and fixtures into phantoms, as if the mansion itself were alive with unspeakable memories. Which it is. When the horror crescendos in the present, violence erupts almost matter-of-factly: Diane, piecing together the truth as guns are drawn and axes lifted, she is our way into the final truth as the intergenerational rot finally demands its price. As everything falls apart and the old family secrets finally explode into violence, we see it all unfold through Diane’s eyes. Wilfred Butler is still alive, faking his own death, orchestrating the murders.

As the climax unfolds, summoned to the mansion, the mayor arrives armed with a rifle, ready for confrontation. In the chaos that follows, both he and Jeffrey Butler open fire on each other and are killed in the shootout.

Jeffrey had arrived at the house with Diane ready to confront the mansion’s lingering evil. Wilfred Butler, thought long dead, reveals himself as the hidden killer, a wraith of vengeance holding the town to account for sins it would rather bury. His motives rooted in revenge against those who wronged his family and in the twisted legacy of his dark past. A violent confrontation ends with the deaths of Jeffrey and the mayor, but Diane, the sole survivor, shell-shocked by resolute,  manages to shoot Wilfred, seemingly ending the curse. The film closes months later with Diane walking through the desolate woods, watching heavy machinery crush the house’s ruins, symbolically burying the house’s horrors—its ghosts, at least for now, entombed beneath the rubble and ruin and the frozen ground. It’s the kind of ending that’s more mournful than triumphant, really: you get the sense that knocking the house down can’t quite erase the legacy of what happened there.

The writing, both script and on screen, spares nothing in describing the grotesque and the intimate: incest, madness, massacre, every taboo is put to use not for lurid thrills, but to illuminate the shadow America casts over its own myth of family and progress.

Silent Night, Bloody Night is a winter nightmare draped in snow and shadow, where the cold stillness is pierced by the screams of history’s ghosts. The mansion stands as both sanctuary and prison, a monument to sins too grotesque to name directly but impossible to erase. The film’s deliberate pacing, frequent use of silence, and nuanced performances cast an elegiac spell, weaving dread through the quiet holiday backdrop.

Silent Night, Bloody Night is a pauper’s painting suggestive of cruel beauty and not extravagance, a minimalist thriftstore-classic masterpiece; proof that true artistry isn’t measured by lavishness, but by what’s achieved with less. The film lingers with me not only for its slasher credentials (with several proto-Halloween moves in its POV shots and phone-call bait that took place in Bob Clark’s Black Christmas two years later), but also because it bathes its tale in funereal poetry. The snow isn’t cleansing; it’s a shroud. Every performance comes tinged with the knowledge of lives spent in other shadows, Warhol’s Factory, and underground theatre. Gershuny, with Woronov and Warhol’s avatars by his side, conjures a vision of horror that feels inherited, inescapable, soaked deep into brick and bone. For those who stumble upon it, this is a Christmas ghost story whose chill endures, I know it does for me, as a half-forgotten hymn to the monstrous intimacy of family and the complicity of towns that prefer their skeletons remain undisturbed beneath the snow.

DON’T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT 1973

I still remember the first time I watched Don’t Look in the Basement—there was something almost disarming about its raw, unpolished simplicity.

You know, what struck me about the film is that it’s refreshingly unpretentious. The film isn’t trying to deliver some deep philosophical or psychological message about mental illness, or make a sweeping statement about society’s failures, the way Robert Rossen did with Lilith 1966 which, trust me, artistic films like Rossen’s are essential because they challenge our perspectives, often hold a mirror to society, capturing truths and complexities.

But here, it skips the intellectual projecting altogether and doesn’t dress itself up as some art-house critique of institutionalized cruelty. There’s no clinical analysis or haunting metaphor—just a raw, unsettling story that gets under your skin because of its straightforward, stripped-down approach. It’s not concerned with probing the depths of the human psyche or putting a spotlight on the brutality of asylums; it simply lets the madness and creepiness play out for what they are.

When a film presents madness as a fever —something intangible, circular, and elusive- it blurs the boundaries between reality and delusion. In movies like Don’t Look in the Basement, madness isn’t examined clinically or explained rationally; instead, it becomes an atmosphere, a kind of waking nightmare, a dream within a dream, where logic spirals, time warps, and truth slips out of reach. We’re left with an experience where every scene feels uncertain, as though you’re drifting through another person’s hallucination.

The film envisions madness not as a diagnosis but as a suffocating fog. Every moment dissolves into the next, and the grip on reality never quite returns. It feels less like a descent into insanity and more like circling endlessly in a haunted mind, unable to wake.

Watching it, you’re caught not just in the characters’ unraveling but in the swirl of your own uncertainty, as if the film itself is dreaming you. This madness is an immersive, destabilizing experience, one in which cinema becomes the perfect medium for conjuring delirium and dread, which, honestly, for me, makes it all the more disturbing. As they say, “The inmates are running the asylum.”

The film doesn’t feature an elaborate set. In fact, its bare-bones style seems to strip everything down to the essentials, leaving you exposed to its unsettling atmosphere. There is a plainness to the setting and acting that, instead of dulling the horror, it feels all the more creepy, like you’ve stumbled across some lost, real footage of things best forgotten. That lack of gloss only sharpens the film’s disturbing edge, turning what could have been forgettable into something truly memorable. The film is a reminder that sometimes, simplicity is what makes horror burrow deepest.

Don’t Look in the Basement (1973), also known under titles like The Forgotten and Death Ward #13, is a stripped-down, minimalist horror film whose very limitations shape its chilling atmosphere. Directed by S. F. Brownrigg and shot on what looks to be a ‘busted shoestring’ budget—reportedly under $100,000—the movie foregoes spectacle for a sense of raw, almost documentary realism. The action takes place almost entirely within the decaying walls and weed-strangled grounds of Stephens Sanitarium, a remote, rural asylum whose air of emptiness is matched only by the unpredictability simmering among its unhinged inmates.

Harriett, a woman deeply traumatized by the loss of her child, is obsessively attached to a baby doll she believes is her own baby. Her need to mother the doll and her paranoia about others wanting to take it drives her to extreme, even violent action. Sam, often referred to as the “man-child,” is a large, lobotomized patient with childlike innocence. He’s gentle and simple, with a touching affection for popsicles and a toy boat. Despite his childlike demeanor, he reacts strongly when frightened or manipulated, especially by the more domineering patients. Judge Oliver W. Cameron, once a magistrate, is gripped by guilt and paranoia, obsessively fixated on his past hypocrisies and speaking in courtroom jargon. His delusions have him perpetually “passing judgment,” often adding to the chaos when tempers flare in the sanitarium. Sergeant Jaffee, a traumatized military veteran, is trapped in the trauma of war and suffers from paranoia, PTSD, and flashbacks. The Sergeant regularly barks commands and scans for imaginary enemies, believing he’s still responsible for lost men in combat.

Allyson King is a schizophrenic nymphomaniac whose heartbreak and abandonment by a past lover left her emotionally unmoored. She craves male attention, often becoming inappropriate, desperate, and erratic in her interactions. Elderly woman, Mrs. Callingham, is prone to hallucinations and poetic ramblings. She confuses flowers with her children and frequently recites lines from literature. Her gentle madness stands in contrast to the violence of others, though she also suffers greatly during the story. Danny, the juvenile prankster of the group, is impulsive and mischievous, often playing tricks and exhibiting childish behavior that disrupts the fragile order in the asylum. Jennifer is emotionally dependent and vulnerable. Jennifer is easily manipulated and desperately seeks approval and affection, especially from figures of authority.

Each one of them embodies a singular facet of instability or trauma: grief, infantilization, guilt, sexual obsession, war trauma, or dependency. Their interactions are a mixture of co-dependency, suspicion, and occasional moments of unsettling camaraderie. Each one is a living representation of the madhouse’s unpredictable, disordered reality.

The film opens with the sudden, violent death of Dr. Stephens, the institution’s idealistic founder, whose belief was to treat patients by allowing them to freely enact their subconscious needs. This experiment in permissive therapy quickly turns to tragedy: Dr. Stephens is murdered in an axe accident by one of his patients during therapy, and on the same day, the retiring head nurse is also gruesomely killed by another patient convinced her doll has been stolen.

With Dr. Stephens gone, authority falls to the coolly enigmatic Geraldine Masters (Annabelle Weenick, credited as Anne MacAdams), who seems to maintain order but is soon revealed to harbor dark secrets of her own.

Into this fraught atmosphere arrives Nurse Charlotte Beale (Rosie Holotik), the film’s unwitting heroine. Hired before Dr. Stephens’ murder, she is greeted by odd routines and a gallery of disturbed residents: the childlike Sam (Bill McGhee), the sexually troubled Allyson, the shell-shocked ex-sergeant, Judge, the deranged former magistrate, and the others whose tics and terrors are left disturbingly unchecked. With the phone lines cut and help a distant fantasy, Charlotte’s early optimism erodes in the face of growing chaos. Murders escalate, paranoia rises, and the fragile sense of order within the sanitarium slips into open anarchy. As secrets unravel, it’s revealed that Masters herself is not a staff member but a patient, left to play doctor in a warped mimicry of authority.

What makes Don’t Look in the Basement so striking is not just the lo-fi veneer but the way its grainy, raw cinematography amplifies the claustrophobia and instability.

The camera, much like a home movie, often sits at odd angles or lingers uncomfortably close, soaking up every scuffed wall and shadowed corridor, adding to the sense that nothing is staged, a quality that can feel unsettling and at other times, almost accidental. There’s no musical excess or elaborate effects; violence arrives in sudden, sometimes awkward bursts. The dialogue is screamy, the performances are unpolished, everything is slightly askew, and it is all the more disturbing for it. The cast, largely unknown, is headlined by Bill McGhee, Rosie Holotik, Annabelle Weenick, and Gene Ross, each playing their madness big, but mainly without the safety net of camp or self-awareness.

The film’s ending is as bleakly unmoored as its look: after a slow spiral of betrayal and murder, Charlotte discovers too late the real hierarchy in the asylum, and even her desperate attempt at escape is tinged with ambiguity, leaving moral and literal closure as bare as the empty rooms themselves.

Don’t Look in the Basement is a distinctive offering in the flood of ‘Don’t’ horror movie titles that littered drive-ins and video store shelves: Don’t Go in the House, Don’t Open the Door, Don’t Answer the Phone and more.

But where many of its brethren chase shocks with higher polish or flamboyant violence, this film leans into its lack of gloss, making the griminess, the grimness, and isolation part of the horror. This is horror short of excess, where madness and brutality play out with the casualness of a nightmare half-remembered over bad hospital lighting and hollowed-out rooms.

For all its shortcomings, Don’t Look in the Basement endures as a cult artifact, the sort of deeply regional, micro-budget effort whose roughness is not just part of its charm, but a vital component of its unease. Its threadbare aesthetic, amateur cast, and documentary-style rawness elevate its small-scale suspense into something uniquely stark and memorable for me. Myself… I’ve never liked to go into the basement.

#124 down, 26 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #123 Shock Waves 1977

SHOCK WAVES 1977

Shock Waves (1977) is one of the most distinctively atmospheric horror films of the late 1970s, which left a lasting impression on me in no small part due to its quiet, sun-bleached nightmarish fugue that blends the folklore of “Nazi zombies” with the slow-dawning dread of being isolated in a place with no escape and an impending threat of the undead variety. Written and directed by Ken Wiederhorn (Eyes of the Stranger 1981, Return of the Living Dead II 1988) in his feature debut, the film’s low-budget ingenuity and eerie, aquatic visuals have definitely secured its reputation as a cult favorite among us fans of horror, especially for those singular, offbeat gems the horror cinema of the 1970s conjured.

Incidentally, Alan Ormsby is credited for special makeup design on Shock Waves. He had already built a reputation in cult horror with his work on films such as Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Deathdream, and the biopic horror film based on Ed Gein, Deranged. Ormsby’s contributions in makeup and effects were influential within the genre, and he later went on to work as a horror writer and director, though not as an art director.

The film opens on a strange note: Rose, played by Brooke Adams (before her later fame in The Dead Zone in 1983 and a decade later in the 1993 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers), is discovered drifting alone in a small rowboat, traumatized and unable to account for the events that led her to such desolation. From here, we’re led back in time to witness a group of hapless tourists traveling aboard a dilapidated boat captained by the grizzled, world-weary Ben Morris (John Carradine), a brief scene-chewing presence who sets the film’s tone with his weary pronouncements and doomful air.

John Carradine-I am a ham! Part 1

John Carradine “I am a ham!” Part 2

The journey takes a sinister turn when the boat is battered by a mysterious collision near an abandoned, rusting freighter. As the navigation system and engine fail amid a surreal orange haze on the water, the group, including Rose; Norman (Jack Davidson), a cantankerous skeptic; Keith (Luke Halpin), a young novice sailor; Chuck (Fred Buch), and Beverly (D.J. Sidney), awakens one morning to find the captain vanished and their vessel slowly sinking.

Forced to abandon ship, the survivors row to a nearby, overgrown island dominated by the skeletal hulk of the wrecked ship. Investigating their surroundings, the group stumbles upon an eerie, deserted hotel, only to find it inhabited by a reclusive old man (Peter Cushing, in a role of chilling restraint and the charisma of a Gestapo executioner) who eventually reveals himself as a former SS commander. Cushing’s haunted, hollow-eyed performance brings to Shock Waves a sense of decaying aristocracy. In stark contrast to his usual British eloquence and gentility, Cushing’s portrayal of a Nazi officer is a jarring departure marked by cold severity and a chilling absence of humanity.

With gradual, dread-soaked pacing, the survivors come to realize that the island harbors something far worse: a squad of aquatic Nazi zombies—“Death Corps” soldiers, bred by the Third Reich to be unstoppable, amphibious weapons, now risen from the ocean’s depths. Wiederhorn’s direction wrings tension from long, silent shots, figures moving, almost unnoticed, beneath the waterline; the oppressive, tropical brightness only making the horror more disorienting.

The zombie’s dark goggles are more than mere costumes; they are portals of absence, blank and unreflective, turning each Nazi corpse into a faceless sentinel adrift between worlds. The black lenses swallow every trace of humanity, erasing eyes and with them, the possibility of reason, like any good zombie. Moving in eerie procession beneath sunlit water and among the bleached palms, these goggles create a chilling contradiction. The power of Shock Waves is these faceless terrors gliding through the radiant day, with their unknowable gaze. The effect is hypnotic and deeply unsettling, as if every soldier were a living war wound, their personality stripped away, nothing left but purpose and void, haunting the film’s sunlit landscape like a procession of silent, searching death.

Their emergence one by one from the dim ocean floor is no aimless shamble but a chilling pageant. Each undead figure rises in unison, forming a procession whose unnatural order only deepens the sense of dread. The Nazi zombies ascend in eerie, deliberate silence, each figure slowly rising as if summoned from another realm. This procession along the seabed traces a grotesque choreography, their movements uncanny and synchronized, turning the underwater world into a stage for a weird, hypnotic spectral ballet. The measured, dreamlike quality of their march in their storm trooper boots magnifies their otherworldliness, making every step both hauntingly graceful and deeply unnerving as they advance through the sunlit water, phantoms in a dance that belongs to neither life nor death. It’s one of those creepy effects in 70s horror that have made this horror film so memorable for me.

As they glide along the seabed in unwavering formation, their synchronized march becomes an eerie ritual that transforms the watery depths into an impressionist painting of pure terror. This disciplined advance strips them of any lingering humanity, turning their collective movement into the true engine of horror: a relentless, silent parade that suggests not only death, but a purpose and will that refuses to rest.

Captain Ben Morris is found dead underwater. After the boat runs aground, the survivors later discover his body floating beneath the water as they approach the shore in a dinghy. This moment is noted explicitly in production details, which mention that the underwater discovery of Carradine’s character was deliberately filmed and included in the movie’s final cut.

The body count unfolds in sequences of mounting suspense. Dobbs, the ship’s hard-drinking cook, is the first to get it, cornered in the water and meeting his end in a cluster of sea urchins.

The group’s desperate attempts to barricade themselves inside the crumbling hotel don’t provide them with much safety, and as the Nazi dead close in on them, there’s a sense of real claustrophobic panic. Of course, infighting erupts, accidents blind Beverly, and the zombies begin their inexorable assault. But the threat isn’t one of gore, the slow ballet of death, and their uncanny procession summons the fear in us.

The scenes play out with a sickly, slow inevitability, victims silently dragged into pools, streams, and aquariums, drowned by the goggle-clad revenants. The cinematography, with its 16mm graininess and sun-bleached exteriors (shot in the waters and swampland of rural Florida), crafts a unique, dreamlike tension; even daylight feels uncanny and unsafe, and underwater sequences of zombies marching in formation remain the key aspect of the film that haunts you.

The climax finds Rose and Keith (Halpin) among the last standing, attempting to escape in a glass-bottomed tourist dinghy. But the Death Corps numbers are relentless. As the boat finally drifts to safety, Keith is pulled off and dragged into the ocean while Rose witnesses the spectral visage of his corpse pressed against the glass, a ghastly inversion of the vacation goer’s sightseeing experience. The film’s coda is crushing in its melancholy: Rose is rescued but utterly broken, her sanity shattered as she endlessly repeats nonsensical phrases in her hospital bed, a damning memorial to the movie’s ambiguous, unshakable horror.

First, Jaws 1975 ruined the ocean for me—now every trip to the beach has me scanning for goggle-wearing storm troopers goose-stepping through the surf. At this point, I can’t go ankle-deep without expecting a chorus line of undead in jackboots lurking under the waves.

The electronic score by Richard Einhorn, who crafted one of the earliest fully electronic horror scores using analog synthesizers, amplifies the film’s surreal, aquatic mood. Wiederhorn’s resourceful use of his limited resources, distributing screen time between veteran stars in the film’s two halves, embracing long takes, and focusing on unsettling visuals, has earned Shock Waves continued admiration for its atmosphere and ingenuity.

Not since The Frozen Dead 1966, a wonderfully ludicrous British horror offering, starring Dana Andrews as a deranged scientist determined to revive frozen Nazi officers, resulting in a houseful of brain-dead zombies, a telepathic severed head, and even a wall of animated arms, has the subject of undead Nazis surfaced. It’s an early and surreal take on the Nazi zombie mythos.

While some might find the premise of Shock Waves outlandish on its surface, the deeper horror of the film comes from its refusal to sanitize or humanize its villains. By resurrecting Nazi soldiers as emotionless, relentless undead, the film draws on the very real inhumanity of Nazi ideology, using the zombie metaphor to make their inescapable evil literal. This chilling fusion blurs historical brutality with supernatural terror, making the movie all the more disturbing, not because it’s ludicrous, but because it invokes a horror that feels both impossibly monstrous and at the same time uncomfortably real. The result is a haunting film that doesn’t just play with pulp tropes but amplifies the terror by reminding us how frightening, true, and dehumanized evil can be when brought back to life on screen.

Ultimately, Shock Waves remains a distinctively eerie shocker for many of us: at once somber, sunlit, and morbidly aquatic, its nightmare imagery of Nazi zombies rising spectrally from warm ocean waters is what resonates, and is truly haunting.

#123 down, 27 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!