Great little snippet of Joan talking about the film What Ever Happened To Baby Jane 1962 Classic Grand Guignol Cinema.
Baby Jane Movie Trailer
MonsterGirl
Category: Gothic Horror
Val Lewton’s “I Walked With A Zombie” (1943) Elements of Jane Eyre, Colonialism and The Synergy of Sound
Val Lewton’s Masterpiece on a low budget for RKO. Directed by Jacques Tourneur and story by Curt Siodmak
Jo Gabriel’s “Sway” appears on my album The Amber Sessions
I will be doing a major feature on the work of Val Lewton in the coming months, his masterworks in shadow are some of the most evocative films ever screened.
MonsterGirl (JoGabriel)
Boris Karloff’s Thriller: The Premature Burial (1961) Jo Gabriel’s How The Devil Falls In Love
Season 2, Episode 3: The Premature Burial
Starring Sidney Blackmer as Edward Stapleton and Patricia Medina as Victorine also starring Boris himself as Dr. Thorne and Scott Marlowe as Julian Directed by Douglas Heyes and adapted from Edgar Allan Poe. Script by William D. Gordon.
Original Air Date"”2 October 1961
Jo Gabriel’s How The Devil Falls In Love appears my album Fools and Orphans
featuring the incredible performance by cellist Matt Turner
The song How The Devil Falls In Love is dedicated to my beloved Lady Cat Angeline who passed away tragically too soon from this earth. I cannot breath without you here.
MonsterGirl (JoGabriel)
Boris Karloff’s Thriller: God Grante That She Lye Stille 1961″Until my body is restored to me”
Boris Karloff’s Thriller Season 2, Episode 5: God Grante That She Lye Stille
Original Air Date"”23 October 1961
Directed by Hershel Daugherty and starring Sarah Marshall
JO GABRIEL’S “GOD GRANT SHE LYE STILL” appears on my album Fools and Orphans
Featuring the incredible performance by cellist Matt Turner
MonsterGirl (JoGabriel)
Saturday Film Score: “Sweet Charlotte” by Jo Gabriel * Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte
“Sweet Charlotte” by Jo Gabriel from my Gothic Neo-Classical album The Last Drive In
Tribute to the great Bette Davis! and her performance in the Grande Gothic Cinema piece by director Robert Aldrich
The Film Score Freak recognizes: Firefly by Jo Gabriel * Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without A Face) 1960
Firefly by Jo Gabriel from my album Fools and Orphans & Eyes Without a Face (1960) directed by Georges Franju
This is my song Firefly which appears on my album Fools & Orphans, featuring the upright bass of Mark Urness, originally recorded at Coney Island Studios in Madison Wisconsin by Wendy Schneider. My tribute to a hauntingly beautiful horror story!
Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Robert Aldrich’s Hag Cinema Part 5 conclusion: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 “Ruined finery…that’s all I have left”
Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Robert Aldrich’s Hag Cinema Part 4: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 “You’re my favorite living mystery” “Have you ever solved me?”
“From Belle to Outcast: Blood, Blame, and the Burden of Womanhood
Aging, Scandal, and the Specter of the ‘Hystericized Woman’ in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte”
Miriam is back on screen, she’s looking around as if searching for something. The tinkling flutters of incorporeal music still tipping back and forth. We are suspended in some kind of time frame ourselves. Captive. Again, as in Baby Jane? We, as spectators, are being held within the constructs of the visual narrative as much as the characters themselves. Aldrich uses his shadows to constrict our visual movement. So much of the plot is drenched in the mysterious cloaking of shadow that it obliterates our senses. The shadows formulate the environment to feel obstructive.
Once again, the blackest bar of shadow cuts across Miriam’s figure, casting an ominous 2nd Miriam luring behind herself. Throughout Charlotte, the camera/shadows have aggressively dissected the woman’s bodies in various parts. In advertising, there has been criticism aimed at Ads depicting women’s body parts being cut off as if to dehumanize them. I don’t think Aldrich’s intention was to dehumanize these female characters, but rather to show the fracturing of their ambivalent personalities.
The Manifest meaning behind the shadows could be as simple as framing these female characters in mystery, the ultimate question is one of the Latent meanings, in which we might as spectators come to understand the characters’ principal personalities and the underlying motivating forces that drive them.
And I’d like to think that the camera lens didn’t develop a bit of Acrotomophilia, the amputee fetish that sadly some people suffer from. Still, I found that it is something worth noting to observe how these shadows frame the female body in both films.
Even the plant seems to cut across Miriam’s torso.
Miriam knocks on Charlotte’s door. There is a quick jump cut; Charlotte is on the other side of the door. Miriam knocks once more and then walks away. She shuts the lights out and throws us into yet even more darkness than before. She walks over to the silky lace-covered windows. The dog is still barking outside near the graveyard.
A flute flutters the scales in an almost Middle Eastern mixed Phrygian mode, an exotic, mysterious motif, as Miriam peers through the curtains yet looks back behind her. She turns away and walks back into the room.
We hear a creaking door. It’s the large Armour as the door swings open to show that Miriam’s sequined dress has been slashed. With the use of an inner monologue we hear Miriam say, “My dress, somebody’s slashed my dress.” She stares at it. Again we see her in profile. the little pipe flutterings play again as she walks toward the shredded dress. Slowly ever so slowly build the tension.
The fluttering is now almost childlike. Is this to represent that a regressive childish acting out is responsible for this destructive behavior? Miriam’s head is in complete shadow, surrounded by the shiny sequins, dangling like torn fish gills and silk. She begins to handle the ruined fabric, the music still with us. The strings come in strident. Finally, we see Miriam in full face. She looks contained but shocked at the same time. Continue reading “Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Robert Aldrich’s Hag Cinema Part 4: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 “You’re my favorite living mystery” “Have you ever solved me?””
Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Aldrich’s Hag Cinema: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 Part 3 “Murder starts in the heart and it’s first weapon is a vicious tongue”
READ PART 2 HERE:
HUSH…HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (1964) – Continued
Charlotte is sipping her coffee and hears a car pull up. She’s holding her shotgun. She sets the china cup down and starts to get up, moving toward the door. We hear a small bird chirping, then the police vehicle comes up the drive, encircled by glorious oak trees. Charlotte closes the door and runs to the great hall, calling “Velma!” Velma comes to the top of the banister, looking through the wooden slats down at Charlotte. She hangs over the edge, “What?” in a long, drawn-out suspension of the word.
Velma is unpretentious and could be perceived as a crude woman. She’s like an unmade bed or someone who looks like she just rolled out of one, and she doesn’t throw away her words. She is strong, sensible, and reliable. Velma, disheveled, unkempt by the years of working as a caretaker to her Miss Charlotte, is misleadingly simple, yet she is sturdy and obviously faithful to her mistress. Continue reading “Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Aldrich’s Hag Cinema: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 Part 3 “Murder starts in the heart and it’s first weapon is a vicious tongue””
MonsterGirl’s Sunday Nite Surreal: Black Sunday/La Mashera del Demonio 1960
BLACK SUNDAY/LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIO
Directed by Mario Bava & starring the immortal otherworldly – Barbara Steele!
This timeless Gothic masterpiece is also known as The Demon’s Mask, Revenge of the Vampire, and House of Fright. It is the Maestro Bava’s first film as a solo director, since first working as a cameraman with another auteur of the dark Riccardo Freda, Bava co-directed I Vampiri (1956)
With the presence of the enchanting & luscious beauty of Steele– the film becomes a romantic exercise in the Gothic style of European horror. Her eyes alone could mesmerize an audience with an effervescence that few possess with their gaze.
Bava also controlled the prowling camera style and Nedo Azzini’s sets are emblematic of the netherworld the story is steeped in.
Like a malefic allegory shown with gruesome keenness, Black Sunday is loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s The Vij.
Barbara Steele manifests two characters the mirror image of each other–Princess Asa Vajda is tortured and burned as a witch. This is how the film opens with a ferocity that propels the film to a whole other level of classical horror. It is the stuff that dark fairy tales are made of… and nightmares.
The iconic spiked Devil Mask that is pounded into Asa’s face for the crime of adultery, or what was considered to be an act of ‘witchery’ Women’s wiles have always been considered powerful, tempting, and dangerous to men.
The local Inquisitor calling Asa a witch, and condemning her to such a brutal death bears ironing for he is Asa’s own brother. Once Asa returns to claim her revenge she vampirizes Katia in order to rejuvenate her life force.
It is now 200 years later, and Katia Vajda the descendent of the persecuted Princess Asa, is the spitting image of the beautiful ‘witch.’ Asa and her lover Javuto (Arturo Dominici) rise up from the tomb, cobwebs, scorpions, and spiders to wreak revenge on the legacy of the Vajda family curse.
One of the most memorable scenes in horror film history is the resurrection of Javuto from the crumbling ground, the smoky dark clouds surround his devil-masked rotting visage underneath–as he claws his way out of his grave and lurches off into the ghostly night.
The special effects, masks, faces, matte painting, etc. were done by Bava himself with his brother Eugenio Bava. The face of Asa which bears the marks of the spike holes from the devil mask adds a chilling effect to the film. It also creates the image of the monstrous feminine that strives to conquer and drain the life of those she’s fixated on. The two characters that Steele plays are contradictory figures, one virginal and innocent, the other bloodthirsty and evil. Asa was unholy because of her sexual desires.
Black Sunday’s expressive influence and its grand sense of classical horror are rooted in the idea that a woman’s sexuality cannot be destroyed, and will always inevitably return by its own primacy enduring the scars of the violence inflicted upon her. That which the world order, particularly religious zealotry and patriarchal law attempt to oppress come back twofold just to shake up the order of things.
The ultimate threat appears as the merger of the two Vajda’s women Asa & Katia… the virgin and the whore. Bava continued to make films where men desperately tried to destroy the lure of women’s desire and their desirability…
STARE INTO THESE EYES… discover deep within them the unspeakable terrifying secret of BLACK SUNDAY… it will paralyze you with fright!
BRIDES OF HORROR – Scream Queens of the 1960s! – Part 4: The Dark Goddess-This Dark Mirror