Postcards From Shadowland No.2
Category: Classic Horror
A Trailer a day keeps the Boogeyman away! The Haunted Palace (1963) & Die Monster Die (1965)
It’s 1865 in Lovecraft’s mythical town of Arkham. Charles Dexter Ward (Vincent Price) arrives at the small village to visit the house he inherited from his ancestor who died there 100 years ago.
In 1765, the inhabitants of the Gothic New England town are suspicious of the strange goings-on up in the grand ‘palace’ that overlooks the village. They suspect its inhabitant, Joseph Curwen, of being a warlock! What is the ghastly secret behind the mysterious afflictions of the town’s people, and the curse the Curwen name seems to hold over the place…what utter horrors lye in wait for this descendent of Joseph Curwen!
Released by American International Pictures, utilizing that rich Pathécolor director Roger Corman was becoming known for using lavish color to paint the movie frames in his Gothic adaptations of Poe. While they used Edgar Allan Poe’s name in touting this film it actually springs from H.P Lovecraft’s novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, with a screenplay by Charles Beaumont. The title is merely borrowed from a poem by Poe.
Starring the inimitable Vincent Price as the cursed ancestor, with Lon Chaney Jr. as caretaker Simon Orne, and Debra Paget as Charle’s wife Ann. Also appearing are Elisha Cook Jr. and Bruno VeSota.
“What was the terrifying thing in the PIT that wanted women?”
It’s Monday… Let’s show some more H.P. Lovecraftian  Love!!!!!!
DIE MONSTER DIE 1965
“Can you face the ULTIMATE in DIABOLISM!…can you face PURE TERROR!”
Boris Karloff is Nahum Witley a wheelchair-bound scientist who has uncovered a meteorite that emits radioactive rays which turn plants into mutants in his greenhouse. Freda Jackson plays Letitia Witley, Nahum’s wife who like the monstrous plants, becomes contaminated by the deadly glowing cosmic rays!
The wooden Nick Adams, plays Stephen Reinhart the customary combative fiancé to daughter Susan Witley (Suzan Farmer). Also co-starring Terence de Marney as Merwyn and Patrick Magee as Dr. Henderson. Directed by Daniel Haller who also directed The Dunwich Horror 1970.
Written for the screen by Jerry Sohl  and based on Lovecraft’s The Colour of Outer Space
I’ll just go crawl away now friends! Yours truly-MonsterGirl!
Postcards From Shadowland No.1
That’s it for now from the shadows-MonsterGirl
From The Vault: Flesh & Fantasy (1943)
FLESH AND FANTASY 1943
Released by Universal in 1943 Flesh and Fantasy is by brilliant director Julien Duvivier, and co-produced by Charles Boyer, and still remains an obscure forgotten horror gem.
Fatalistic, philosophical, Impressionistic, and hauntingly romantic, it dabbles in destiny and the dynamism of fate’s meddling hand in our lives. Are we all free souls, or is life predetermined for us? Part social commentary with an edge of ironic charm, utilizing elements of the supernatural to drive the narrative.
The three episodes star Robert Cummings and Betty Field, Edward G. Robinson and Thomas Mitchell, & Charles Boyer, and Barbara Stanwyck. Robinson and Stanwyck are two of my favorite actors!
The film revolves around 3 vignettes, the first written by Eliis St. Joseph, the second adapted from Oscar Wilde, and the third written by László Vadnay.
Turning out a collection of eerie stories told by Gentlemen at their club. The stories are framed by Robert Benchley as Doakes and David Hoffman as Davis.
The first stars Betty Field as Henrietta a dowdy woman who comes upon a mysterious mask during Mardis Gras and then goes to a party festooned with regalia, turbulence, and a romantic game of cat-and-mouse with the handsome Michael (Robert Cummings) A beautifully tragic tale of loneliness and the essence of what beauty is. The use of masks creates a nightmarish landscape of human disconnection.
The second vignette is an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s, Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime, which stars Edward G. Robinson as Marshall Tyler, a lawyer who is told by a Fortune Teller Septimus Podgers (Thomas Mitchell) that he is going to kill someone. Also at the affair is Dame May Whitty as Lady Pamela Hardwick and C. Aubrey Smith as the Dean of Norwalk.
Playing out the obsessive victim, Tyler devolves ever increasingly into a world of malefic paranoia in that way that Robinson is so good at. He spirals into madness as he is surrounded by reflections and warning shadows, and an impending dread, that creates a sense of the film being a Horror/Noir hybrid. The use of shadow does invoke a bit of Jacques Tourneur’s style as well.
In the third installment, Charles Boyer plays an acrobat in the circus named Paul Gaspar, who has a premonition of fatal consequences surrounding his high-wire act. Gaspar has a dream one night before his performance that he falls to his death, and so he decides to take a cruise, where he meets the woman from his dream, Joan Stanley played by Barbara Stanwyck, who was the one person he could still hear screaming as he plunges to his death! This episode concludes the film with a dreamy and grim set of atmospherics.
Flesh and Fantasy predate by two years another wonderfully suspenseful ensemble of ghostly stories, Dead of Night 1945 starring Michael Redgrave in the iconic short tale of the ventriloquist and his frightening dummy sidekick!
There are thousands of wonderful obscurities in my collection, this is just one of them!
See it for yourself-MonsterGirl
From The Vault: The Man in Half Moon Street (1945)
“I’ll share your madness because there’s grandeur in it. And I have faith – and love.”
THE MAN IN HALF MOON STREET (1945)
Nils Asther (Night Monster 1942, Bluebeard 1944) plays Dr. Julian Karell a 120-year-old scientist who has found a way to prolong life. Julian falls madly in love with Eve Brandon (Helen Walker Nightmare Alley 1947, Call Northside 777 1948) Unfortunately he needs new glands in order to survive, and not head toward decrepitude and die!
Written by the great Barré Lyndon and directed by Ralph Murphy. Hammer and Terence Fisher offered us a remake in 1959 The Man Who Could Cheat Death starring Anton Diffring, Hazel Court, and Christopher Lee! Man in Half Moon Street includes a dramatic score by the wonderful composer Miklós Rózsa!
Dr. Kurt van Bruecken: “We are not scientists anymore. We are murderers.”
There are oodles and oodles of fantastic films in my collection, this is just one of them!
MonsterGirl forever young at heart!
A Trailer a day keeps the Boogeyman away! The Terminal Man (1974)
THE TERMINAL MAN (1974)
Hoping to cure his violent seizures, a man agrees to a series of experimental microcomputers inserted into his brain but inadvertently discovers that violence now triggers a pleasurable response!
Written by science thriller great Michael Crichton and starring George Segal as the organically violent Harry Benson with Joan Hackett as Dr. Janet Ross. Also starring Richard Dysart, Donald Moffat, and Jill Clayburgh.
“Harry Benson is a brilliant computer scientist. For three minutes a day, he is violently homicidal.”
Terminally Yours, MonsterGirl!
MonsterGirl & Meleva the Gypsy!
MonsterGirl is on the go! I’ll be back in a few weeks folks! Stay tuned…
I’m about to leave the beautiful coast of Maine and settle in for a while in Caldwell NJ! So MonsterGirl is on the move again, but not silent for long.I’ll be blogging and recording my music soon enough! But while this journey isn’t Wanderlust on my part, it certainly sort of brings out the true gypsy blood in me!!!!
So here’s to Maria Ouspenskaya as Meleva! I don’t have the earrings, but oy do I have the Babooshkas on hand. So hang in there, and I’ll be posting more in the next few weeks, once I get settled into my new digs.
PS: It’s an 110 year old Victorian and I swear it’s haunted!!!! It’ll make for some inspiring posts, I bet!
Maria Ouspenskaya plays Meleva the Gypsy in George Waggner’s 1941 Universal Horror Classic The Wolf Man 1941
Written by the prolific Curt Siodmak and starring Lon Chaney Jr. as the ill- fated Lawrence Talbot the Wolfman, Claude Raines as Sir John Talbot Sr and Bela Lugosi as Bela the gypsy! Also starring Evelyn Ankers.
Here’s a to howling successful move to N.J friends!-Joey (MonsterGirl)
Obscure Scream Gem: Strangler of The Swamp (1946) “Oh, this swamp breeds more rumors than mosquitos.”
Old legends – strange tales – never die in the lonely swamp land. Villages and hamlets lie remote and almost forgotten. Small ferryboats glide between the shores, and the ferryman is a very important person. Day and night he is at the command of his passengers. On his little barge ride the good and the evil; the friendly and the hostile; the superstitious and the enlightened; the living and – sometimes – the dead.
Directed by Frank Wisbar from his own story, also co-written for the screen by Leo J. McCarthy. Make-up by Bud Westmore. Also co-starring Effie Laird as Martina Sanders, Nolan Leary as Pete Jeffers, Frank Conlan as Joseph Hart, Therese Lyon and Virginia Farmer.
This is a hauntingly beautiful re-make of director Frank Wisbar’s own 1936 German film Faehrmann Maria a retelling of the legend of Death and The Maiden. Which started Sybille Schmitz, the memorable victim of Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931).
It’s an effectively creepy story from the Poverty Row Film Company PRC who brought us The Devil Bat and The Flying Serpent. While this is a low budget B movie, it is quite effective to watch as the ghost of Douglas seems to dissolve in and out of the darkness.
There is an essence of the slow and dreamlike stylization that is similar to Dreyer’s work, at work here in Strangler of The Swamp. The setting is a lonely backwoods swamplands where the villagers live under a terrible curse left by a wrongly accused man hung for a crime he did not commit.
Three women from the village including Martina Sanders glide down the bayou on the ferryboat with Joseph Hart, evoking a mythical quality as if used as augury like that of The Furies designating Joseph’s ill fated path for his sins of false witness and murder.
MonsterGirl’s Fiend of The Day! The Thing That Couldn’t Die (1958)
The Thing That Couldn’t Die 1958–
The Live Severed Head of Gideon Drew!
Directed by Will Cowen and Starring Carolyn Kearney (Molly Bancroft in Doktor Markeson episode of Thriller) as Jessica Burns a young girl with psychic abilities who like a dowser
uncovers the ancient chest containing the severed head of Gideon Drew ( Robin Hughes) which has been buried for centuries on her aunt’s ranch. Once released from his entombment…
Gideon’s head wreaks havoc trying to be reunited with his evil body, as he used to be a 16th century devil worshiper who was beheaded by Sir Francis Drake!
“Greed had made them unearth an evil that was centuries old!”
“The grave can’t hold it …nothing human can stop it!”
Keep Your Chin Up!- MonsterGirl
A trailer a day keeps the Boogeyman away The Omega Man (1971)
THE OMEGA MAN 1971
Charlton Heston plays Army doctor Robert Neville, a lone man living in post apocalyptic solitary urban confinement amidst a burned out Los Angeles, Foraging for supplies by day, and fending off a siege of mutated vampiric survivors by night.
Neville crusades to hold onto his humanity while struggling to create a cure for the plague that wiped out most of the human race.The film is pure 70s driven cautionary tale with a fantastic cast and some great nail biting scenes. One of my favorites from the decade!
Based on the novel ‘I Am Legend’ by Richard Matheson and directed by Boris Sagal (The man responsible for Rod Serling’s (TV series Pilot)"“ Night Gallery (1969) (segment “The Cemetery”) a favorite piece of television horror for me!
Anthony Zerbe plays Matthias the cult leader of the plague ridden remnants of civilization, who’s fanatical quest to conquer Neville and make him one of them is chilling.
The film also stars the wonderful Rosalind Cash as Lisa, Neville’s potential ‘Eve’ in the new garden of Eden he desperately tries to create, if he can perfect the anti-dote to the plague in time! Neville is framed as a Jesus figure at the end of the film.
Matheson’s story had been screened in the 1964 starring Vincent Price as Dr. Robert Morgan. The Last Man on Earth  is powerfully evocative and unnerving, and holds up as a great bit of visual story telling even today.
“Pray for the last man alive. Because he’s not alone.”
Happy Trailers-MonsterGirl