The Creature with the Atom Brain released in 1955 was directed by Edward L. Cahn with a script by Curt Siomak it’s the story of a nefarious plot involving reanimated, radioactive zombies controlled by a criminal mastermind.
An ex-Nazi mad scientist uses radio-controlled atomic-powered zombies in his quest to help an exiled American gangster return to power. A huge mug with superhuman strength Karl ‘Killer’ Davis and a metal dome riveted to the top of his head climbs inside the back of a gambling spot and breaks the back of the mob boss. Then he goes on a rampage destroying buildings and railways.
Dr. Chet Walker (Richard Denning) who is a doctor working for the police is called in to investigate the murder. Walker discovers that the Hulk is atomic-powered. Soon he learns that an exiled mobster Frank Buchanan (Michael Granger) has returned to the States and is working with an ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Wilhelm Steigg (Gregory Gaye) to create radio-controlled atomic zombies who will carry out his plot of revenge against those responsible for betraying him. Steigg removes the tops of corpse’s skulls, removes parts of their brains, and replaces it with as Bill Warren refers to it a “glittering sponge.” Once resurrected from the dead, these atomic-powered zombies exact their revenge by breaking their enemies’ backs.
Several years ago, the notorious gangster Frank Buchanan, portrayed by Michael Granger, found himself forced into exile to his native Italy, orchestrated by a coalition of law enforcement agencies and rival criminal organizations who had chosen to betray Buchanan. During his time in Europe, a clandestine assembly led by Buchanan himself approached the enigmatic scientist Dr. Wilhelm Steigg, played by Gregory Gaye, with a sinister plan.
The brilliant Steigg has unlocked a groundbreaking secret— a way to reanimate an army of dead bodies through the power of atomic energy. He has successfully developed a technique for reviving the dead and exerting control over their actions through spoken commands.
Buchanan generously supplied the resources necessary for Steigg to assemble an army of radioactive zombies, reanimated corpses who possess enhanced strength and resilience infused with atomic energy coursing through their bodies. Utilizing Steigg’s innovative experiments, driven by cutting-edge atomic technology, Buchanan and his malevolent cohort aimed to unleash their vengeance upon those who had crossed their paths.
As the authorities become aware of the bizarre crimes committed by the radioactive zombies, a determined police detective, Police Capt. Dave Harris (S. John Launer) takes on the case. Richard Denning plays Dr. Chet Walker involved in the investigation into the mysterious and deadly creatures. With the help of Dr. Walker and his assistant, Joyce (Angela Stevens), the trio embarks on a mission to uncover the identity of the mastermind behind the undead army and eventually deploy radiation-detecting devices such as Geiger counters to identify the origin of this sinister scheme. The Creature with the Atom Brain explores themes of scientific ethics, the consequences of tampering with the forces of nature, and the dangers of unchecked power. For its day – the scenes with the method of killing by the dead assassins – are told through shadows on the wall, revealing their victim’s back being broken. It is surprisingly brutal.
Caltiki The Immortal Monster 1959
WILL THE FIRST LIFE ON EARTH BE THE LAST TERROR OF MAN?
Caltiki, the Immortal Monster is a 1959 Italian-American science fiction horror film directed by Riccardo Freda (as Robert Hampton) and an uncredited Mario Bava who also was the cinematographer on the film and added the noir-like eerie chiaroscuro and striking and savage and gruesome visual effects, expertly supervised by Bava, which is why it’s known for its eerie and suspenseful atmosphere. The cast includes John Merivale, Didi Perego (as Didi Sullivan), Gerard Herter, Danila Rocca, and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart.
In 1956, Ricardo Freda and Mario Bava joined forces to create “I Vampiri,”marking the revival of Italian-produced horror cinema after a hiatus of more than three decades. It did have a good reception but was released in the U.S. until 1963 and still, it was hacked to pieces under the title The Devil’s Commandment
So in 1959, they got together again at took a stab at another horror/sci-fi hybrid called Caltiki, the Immortal Monsterwith most of the cast adopting Anglicized pseudonyms.
Deep within the Mexican jungle, a group of archaeologists under the leadership of Dr. Fielding (portrayed by John Merivale) meticulously explore the ancient Mayan ruins looking for a priceless collection of Maryan gold artifacts. However, this invaluable treasure lies submerged at the lake’s depths within a cave. Inside, they discover a pool of mysterious and deadly water safeguarded by a ravenous, gelatinous creature known as Caltiki, revered by the Mayans as a god. They unexpectedly encounter an amorphous blob-like monstrosity that sends shockwaves through their expedition. When one of Fielding’s greedy colleagues (Daniele Vargas) tries to get his hands on the sacred plunder, he is devoured alive by the oozing blob and left as a steamy pile of skeletal muck.
Fielding discovers the creature is a grotesque, amorphous mass of cells that can absorb and grow from any organic material it comes into contact with. It is revealed that this creature, known as Caltiki, was once a Mayan deity and has been dormant for centuries.
Afterward, the monstrous glop goes on a violent rampage, inflicting pain on Max (Gerard Herter), a fellow member of the expedition, who is left with a skeletal arm and hand. Before meeting its ultimate demise in a blazing inferno, amid the chaos, Fielding skillfully manages to safeguard precious samples of Caltiki, preserving the fragments for scientific examination. Fielding makes a chilling discovery: the creature had been resurrected centuries ago when a comet made a close pass by Earth. Now, purely by happenstance, that very same comet is set to return in just a matter of days, posing a looming threat of reviving the blob monster once more.
In the midst of their investigation, the celestial event looms on the horizon: and the comet is poised to make a close approach to Earth. Remarkably, this comet mirrors the same cosmic visitor that brushed near our planet during the enigmatic collapse of the Mayan civilization.
Meanwhile, Max becomes unhinged and goes on a murder spree killing a nurse and escaping from the hospital, while Caltiki comes to life and runs amok along the countryside. The team faces a race against time to contain and destroy Caltiki before it consumes all life in its path. They also try to uncover the secrets of its origin and its connection to Mayan civilization.
Caltiki includes several genuinely jarring scenes, in particular, Herter’s intensity as the crazed Max, drawing inspiration from Richard Wordsworth’s memorable portrayal in a similar capacity as Victor Carroon in “Quatermass Xperiment,” Fielding’s urgent moments unfold as he races to rescue his wife and daughter from the advancing monstrosity that relentlessly breaches every landscape and interior setting.
Bava considered Caltikithe Immortal Monster to embody the spirit of (READ KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES:1955 HERE) The Quartermass Xperiment 1955, but it’s got a bit of (READ KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES:1956 HERE)X the Unknown 1956 thrown in.
Curse of the Fly 1965
Curse of the Flyis a 1965 British science fiction horror film and the third installment in the “Fly” film series that began with its blockbuster hit in 1958. This film reunites director Don Sharp with a screenplay by Harry Spalding (they worked on Witchcrafttogether in 1964) and takes a different approach compared to the previous films, as it is the Fly movie without the fly!
A generation following the events portrayed in The Fly in 1958 Henri Delambre, portrayed by Brian Donlevy, becomes consumed by the relentless pursuit of perfecting his father’s experimental matter-transportation device that he runs in a remote research facility within his estate in Canada. His two grown sons, Martin (George Baker) and Albert (Michael Graham), who yearn to get on with their lives still actively participate in the research, although they do not share Henri’s fanatical dedication to the transporter project. The transporter has successfully bilocated people and objects from Quebec to London and back, but not without a frightening aftermath, including deformed human subjects, ‘mistakes’ locked away at the Delambres’ Canadian manorhouse.
Henri is enraged when he learns that Martin has married a mysterious young woman named Patricia (Carole Gray) who in the opening of the film has managed to escape from an institution. Soon the police come looking for Patricia at the Delambre estate, which forces them to hide any evidence of their secret research lab. Ultimately, Henri’s obsession leads to tragic results.
Spalding’s clever screenplay seamlessly weaves together the exploration of advanced scientific discovery and the plight of ill-fated lovers, capturing the essence of romantic tragedy that resonated so effectively in the original Fly 1958.
Countess Dracula 1971
Directed by Peter Sasdy, Countess Dracula is a 1971 British horror film starring Ingrid Pitt in the lead role. The film is loosely based on the real-life story of Countess Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman notorious for her alleged crimes of torturing and murdering hundreds of young women and bathing in their blood. The film co-stars Nigel Green as Captain Dobi, Maurice Denham as Master Fabio, Sandor Elès as Imre Toth, Niki Arrighi, Patience Collier as Julie, and Leslie Ann-Down as Ilona.
Set in 17th-century medieval Hungary, the story revolves around the aristocratic vampire Countess Elisabeth Nádasdy, an aging noblewoman who rules with an iron fist, aided by her lover, Captain Dobi. She discovers a dark secret bathing in the blood of young girls restores her youth when she accidentally comes into contact with the blood of a young virgin, she realizes that it has a rejuvenating effect on her appearance.
Obsessed with maintaining her youth and beauty, Elisabeth embarks on a gruesome killing spree, using her position and power to abduct young women and drain them of their blood. She coerces Dobi into abducting potential victims. Under the guise of her own daughter, the Countess engages in romantic dalliances with a younger man, much to Dobi’s chagrin. As the disappearances sow increasing fear in the local community, the Countess learns that only the blood of a virgin can resurrect her youthful beauty. As her crimes escalate, suspicions grow within the castle, and her daughter Ilona becomes increasingly concerned about her mother’s erratic behavior.
Ingrid Pitt delivers a captivating and chilling performance as Countess Elisabeth, portraying her transformation from an aging woman into a seductive, bloodthirsty monster. Countess Dracula is known for its blend of historical horror and Gothic atmosphere, offering a unique take on the vampire mythos by drawing inspiration from real historical events.
Chosen Survivors 1974
Chosen Survivors is a 1974 science fiction horror film that combines elements of suspense, survival, and post-apocalyptic drama directed by Sutton Roley and stars READ My Dillman TRIBUTE HERE Bradford Dillman (Fear No Evil 1969, Revenge! 1971, Escape From the Planet of the Apes 1971, The Mephisto Waltz 1971, TV movie The Resurrection of Zachary Taylor 1971, TV movie The Eyes of Charles Sands 1972, TV movie Moon of the Wolf 1972, Deliver Us from Evil 1973, A Black Ribbon for Deborah 1974 Giallo, The Dark Secrets of Harvest Home 1978mini-series, The Swarm 1978, and the cult classic Piranha 1978), and actors who are no strangers to horror & sci-fi -such as Diana Muldaur, Alex Cord (The Dead are Alive 1972), Jackie Cooper, Richard Jaekel (The Green Slime 1968, Day of the Animals 1977, The Dark 1979), Barbara Babcock, Gwen Mitchell and Lincoln Kilpatrick (Soylent Green 1973, The Omega Man 1971).
A group of select people abruptly find themselves yanked out of their homes and airlifted via helicopter to a state-of-the-art underground bomb shelter, buried deep beneath the desert’s surface at a depth of one-third of a mile. There, they are confronted with the grim reality of a nuclear apocalypse unfolding above ground and the unsettling revelation that a computer has chosen them as the survivors tasked with preserving the human race in this subterranean haven. The shelter is meticulously engineered to sustain their existence underground for an extended duration, but an unforeseen menace emerges: a massive colony of bloodthirsty vampire bats breaches their defenses, launching a relentless onslaught that claims the lives of the humans one by one.
The story unfolds against the backdrop of the Cold War era, as tensions between superpowers escalate, and the threat of nuclear war looms large. In response, the U.S. government selects a group of 11 people, including scientists, military personnel, and other specialists, to take part in a top-secret experiment. They are chosen to survive a potential nuclear holocaust by living in a well-fortified underground bunker designed to sustain life for an extended period.
As the selected survivors enter the underground facility, they must adapt to their new isolated existence and the challenges it presents. Tensions rise, and personal conflicts emerge among the diverse group. However, their already stressful situation takes a terrifying turn when they discover that they are not alone in the bunker. Unbeknownst to them, a colony of bat-like creatures has also taken refuge there, posing a deadly threat to their survival.
Chosen Survivorsexplores themes of human nature under extreme circumstances, the consequences of government secrecy and experimentation, and the terror of being trapped in an enclosed space with an unknown and lethal enemy. The film blends science fiction and horror elements to create a suspenseful and claustrophobic narrative.
Children of the Corn 1984
Children of the Cornis a 1984 horror film adapted from Stephen King’s short story of the same name. The film is set in the rural town of Gatlin, Nebraska, and revolves around a group of children who have formed a deadly cult worshiping a malevolent entity known as “He Who Walks Behind the Rows.”
The story begins with a young couple, Burt and Vicki (Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton), who are traveling through rural Nebraska. They stumble upon Gatlin, a seemingly deserted town. Unbeknownst to them, the town’s adult population has been brutally murdered by the children under the influence of an overzealous young preacher named Isaac and his nasty ginger-haired enforcer, Malachai (Courtney Gains). The children believe that sacrificing adults to “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” will ensure a bountiful harvest.
Burt and Vicky soon become targets of the cult, and they must navigate a terrifying ordeal to survive. Along the way, they encounter a young boy named Job, who has doubts about the cult’s beliefs, and the three of them attempt to uncover the truth behind the sinister force that has overtaken Gatlin.
As the story unfolds, it becomes a chilling exploration of religious fanaticism, the corrupting influence of power, and the primal fear of children turning against adults.
Children of the Corn is celebrated for its unsettling ambiance and the chilling spectacle of a seemingly picturesque town under the dominion of malevolent little monsters who are more menacing than the Lovecraftian Deity that lurks behind the bucolic rows of corn.
The Children 1980
Shot at the same time as the iconic slasher Friday the 13th and sharing some of the same behind-the-scenes creative minds, director Max Kalmanowicz’s The Children emerges as a bizarrely low-light theatrical drive-in horror classic in the ‘scary little kids‘ subgenre.
Complementing the spine-tingling narrative is an eerie score by Harry Manfredini known for his work on Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th.
Ravenback’s children (not unlike the mindless dead in Romero’s landmark Night of the Living Dead) are in the grip of something terrifyingly unnatural. When their school bus travels through an odd cloud of yellow smoke, the innocent little ones undergo a horrifying – ghastly metamorphosis into bloodthirsty zombies.
The film takes a deeply nihilistic and chilling swerve as it introduces a group of children who, after passing through this toxic fog, appear outwardly innocent but possess blackened fingernails and a horrifying ability to melt the flesh of anyone they touch. The Children‘s dark subtext by using seemingly angelic children who are the epitome of a promising future, takes on a bleak tone, as these once harmless yet outré -creepy kids destroy even those they once loved.
The story begins with the origins of the toxic fog, where Sheriff Gil Rogers sets out to uncover the mystery surrounding the abandoned school bus on the side of the road. As he discovers more dead bodies, it is revealed that it is in fact the children who are killing the townspeople. This is at the core of the film’s fundamental subliminal ‘shock’ warning- that we cannot always have faith in the façade of innocence. Sometimes it can disguise a horror from within.
As unsuspecting parents and townsfolk fall victim to their deadly touch, the local police force embarks on a frantic search for the missing children, at first oblivious to their deadly embrace, they must face an even more horrific reality. The parents must kill their own children in an extremely repulsive way.
Director Max Kalmanowicz and cinematographer Barry Abrams (who also worked on Friday the 13th) work their magic when it comes to the night sequences and the atmosphere of dread and the queasy pangs in the gut whenever those sinister little faces appear in the black night and raise up their hands in a wantful embrace, eerie calling out for their mothers. It’s truly a disturbing visually bad dream.
The Childrenchallenges horror conventions by making it imperative that the children be destroyed. The manner of their death is even more gruesome than their black-nailed phantasmagoria. What’s hauntingly effective is the final slaughter underscored by the ethereal screams that creep up and revisit your mind decades after your first viewing. It’s just that authentically creepy.
This is your EverLovin’ Joey sayin’ C you at the snack bar, and remember D is the dangerous letter in the next installment of trailers to keep the Boogeyman away!
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) Directed by Jack Arnold adapted by Richard Matheson and starring Grant WilliamsFive Million Years to Earth (1967) Directed by Roy Ward Baker, written by Nigel Kneale starring Barbara Shelley and Andrew KeirThe Manster (1959) Directed by George P. Breakston starring Peter Dyneley, Jane Hylton and Tetsu NakamuraThe Twilight People (1972) Directed by Eddie RomeroBluebeard (1972) Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Starring Richard Burton, Raquel Welch, Virna Lisi, Natalie Delon, Agostina Belli, Karen Schubert, Sybil Danning, Joey Heatherton and Marilù Tolo The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) Directed by Robert Florey with a screenplay by Curt Siodmak. Starring Robert Alda, Peter Lorre, Andrea King and J. Carrol NaishCarnival of Souls (1962) Directed by Herk Harvey starring Candace HilligossThe Beast with Five Fingers (1946) Directed by Robert Florey Starring Robert Alda, Peter Lorre, Andrea King and J. Carrol NaishBedlam (1946) Directed by Mark Robson Starring Boris Karloff, Anna Lee, Ian Wolfe,Billy House, Richard Fraser, Glen Vernon and Elizabeth Russell. Produced by Val LewtonDracula (1931) Directed by Tod Browning adapted from the novel by Bram Stoker-Starring Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye, Frances Dade and Edward Van SloaneBlood and Roses (1960) Directed by Roger Vadim. Adapted from the novel by Sheridan Le Fanu- Starring Mel Ferrer, Elsa Martinelli, Annette StroybergBlack Sunday (1960) La maschera del demonio-Directed by Mario Bava Starring Barbara Steele, John Richardson and Andrea ChecciThe Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) Directed by William Dieterle Starring Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara and Cedric Hardwicke adapted from the novel by Victor HugoWar of the Colossal Beast (1958) Directed by Bert I. Gordon Starring Sally Fraser and Roger PaceIt Conquered the World (1956) Directed by Roger Corman- Starring Beverly Garland, Peter Graves Lee Van Cleef and The Cucumber MonsterCurse of the Faceless Man (1958) Directed by Edward L. Cahn–Starring Richard Anderson, Elaine Edwards, Adele Mara and Luis Van RootenThe Old Dark House 1932 directed by James Whale-Gloria Stuart and Boris KarloffDead of Night (1945) Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer.–Starring Michael Redgrave, Mervyn Johns, Roland Culver, Googie Withers, Mary Merrall, Sally Ann Howes, Frederick Valk, Anthony BairdDie! Die! My Darling! (1965) directed by Silvio Narizzano with a screenplay by Richard Matheson adapted from a novel by Anne Blaisdell–Starring Tallulah Bankhead, Stephanie Powers, Peter Vaughan, Donald Sutherland and Yootha JoyceThe Tenant (1976) Directed by Roman Polanski–Starring Roman Polanski, Isabelle Adjani, Melvyn Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, Bernard Fresson, Lila Kedrova, Claude Dauphin and Shelley WintersHouse of Horrors (1946) Directed by Jean Yarborough starring “The Creeper” Rondo Hatton, Martin Kosleck and Virginia Gray Spirits of the Dead (Italy/France 1968) aka Histoires extraordinaires Segment: “William Wilson” Directed by Louis Malle Shown from left: Brigitte Bardot, Alain DelonDr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) Directed by Freddie Francis–Screenplay by Milton Subotsky–Starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Neil McCallum, Ursula Howells, Peter Madden, Katy Wild, Alan Freeman, Ann Bell, Phoebe Nichols, Bernard Lee, Jeremy KempDoctor X (1932) Directed by Michael Curtiz-Starring Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Lee Tracy, Preston Foster, John Wray, Harry BeresfordFrankenstein (1910) Produced by Thomas Edison Directed by J. Searle DawleyHorror Hotel aka The City of the Dead (1960) Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey Starring Christopher Lee, Patricia Jessel, Dennis Lotis, Tom Naylor and Betta St. John. From a story by Milton SubotskyHouse of Frankenstein (1944) Directed by Erle C. Kenton from a story by Curt Siodmak. Starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr. J.Carrol Naish, John Carradine, Anne Gwynne, Peter Coe, Lionel Atwill and George ZuccoIsland of Lost Souls (1932) Directed by Erle C. Kenton Starring Charles Laughton, Bela Lugosi, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams and Kathleen Burke based on a story by H.G.WellsIsle of the Dead (1945) directed by Mark Robson written by Ardel Wray-Starring Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer, Katherine Emery, Helene Thimig, Alan Napier, Jason Robards Sr.Carl Theodor Dreyer Leaves from Satan’s Book (1921) starring Helge NissenDiabolique (1955) Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot adapted by Pierre Boileau Starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot and Paul MeurisseThe Wolf Man (1941) Directed by George Waggner Starring Lon Chaney Jr. Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Patric Knowles, Bela Lugosi, Maria Ouspenskaya, Evelyn Ankers and Fay Helm original screenplay by Curt SiodmakNight Must Fall (1937) Directed by Richard Thorpe Shown from left: Robert Montgomery, Dame May WhittyPhantom of the Opera (1925) Directed by Rupert Julian and Lon Chaney. Starring Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin story by Gaston LerouxStrangler of the Swamp (1946) directed by Frank Wisbar-starring Rosemary La Planche, Robert Barrat with an original story by Leo J. McCarthyNosferatu (1922) directed by F.W.Murnau Starring Max SchreckThe Abominable Snowman (1957) Directed by Val Guest starring Forrest Tucker, Peter Cushing and Maureen Connell written by Nigel KnealeThe Bat Whispers (1930) Directed by Roland West-starring Chance Ward, Richard Tucker, Wilson Benge, DeWitt Jennings, Una Merkel Grace Hamptom, and Chester MorrisThe Curse of the Cat People (1944) directed by Gunther von Fritsch- Starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph, Ann Carter, and Elizabeth Russell. Screenplay by DeWitt BodeenMighty Joe Young (1949) Directed by Ernest B. SchoedsackYoung Frankenstein (1974) Directed by Mel Brooks Starring Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr, Kenneth Mars and Liam Dunn.The Devil Bat (1940) directed by Jean Yarborough Starring Bela LugosiThe Fly (1958) directed by Kurt Neumann screenplay by James Clavell, Starring David Hedison, Patricia Owens and Vincent PriceThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) directed by Tobe Hooper. Starring Marilyn Burns, Edwin Neal, Allen Danziger and Gunnar Hansen as LeatherfaceThe Undead (1957) Directed by Roger Corman written by Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna Starring Pamela Duncan, Richard Garland, Allison Hayes, Val Dufour, Bruno VeSota, Mel Welles, Dorothy Neumann and Billy BartyThe Witches (1966) directed by Cyril Frankel Written by Nigel Kneale Starring Joan Fontaine, Kay Walsh and Alec McCowenThe Uninvited (1944) directed by Lewis Allen Starring Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey, Donald Crisp, Cornelia Otis Skinner and Gail RussellTHE NIGHT CALLER [BR 1965] aka BLOOD BEAST FROM OUTER SPACE MAURICE DENHAM, JOHN SAXON, JOHN CARSON Date: 1965Poltergeist (1982) directed by Tobe Hooper written by Steven Spielberg. Starring JoBeth Williams, Beatrice Straight, Craig T. Nelson, Dominique Dunne Heather O’Rourke
Aired December 11, 1973, as an ABC Movie of the Week.
“Beware the seal of Kah-ub-set, for he who dares to remove it will open the gates of Hell.”
The Cat Creature was directed by horror film icon Curtis Harrington— Night Tide (1961), Queen of Blood (1966), Games (1967), How Awful About Allan (1970) tv movie, What’s the Matter with Helen (1971), Whoever Slew Auntie Roo (1972), The Killing Kind (1973), Killer Bees (1974) tv movie, The Dead Don’t Die (1975) tv movie also directed by Curtis Harrington, Ruby (1977), Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell (1978) tv movie.
The Cat Creaturewas scripted by Robert Bloch based on a story by producers Douglas S. Cramer, Wilfred Lloyd Baumes, and writer Bloch himself.
From Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood written by Curtis Harrington -talks about how different television executives’ mindsets for telefilms are than major motion picture executives.
Director/writer Curtis Harrington master at ‘horror of personality’
“I found out just how different on a television movie called The Cat Creature. The script was written by Robert Bloch, based on an old story he’d published in Weird Tales. In fact, he was one of the horror writers I had discovered in the pages of Weird Tales during my teen years in Beaumont. It was a nice pulpy story about a girl who is the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian cat goddess. In casting the actress to play the modern incarnation of this beautiful goddess, I got my first nasty taste of TV executive thinking. I discovered that this new set of black suits was always very involved in the casting of leading roles in the network TV drama. Unlike movie executives whose primary interest was ‘box office appeal’ they were concerned with something they called TVQ” This meant the ratings the stars other television appearances had received. The connection between a star’s suitability for a role meant absolutely nothing, and this was the case of The Cat Creature… […] I recalled that Egyptian women supposedly used henna to dye their black hair red, so we put a dark red wig on Meredith Baxter, and she agreed to darken her eyes with green contact lenses… […] Bloch had written an important supporting role, the proprietor of a magic shop, for a man. I suggested that he rewrite the role for a woman and that we try to get Gale Sondergaard for the part. Sondergaard was an actress I remembered vividly from my childhood. She had been memorable as the sinister Oriental [sic] woman in The Letter and in the title role of The Spider Woman, a Basil Rathbone/Sherlock Holmes adventure in 1937…
“I had wanted the proprietress of the occult shop to be played as a lesbian to lend a bit of spice to the show. But Standards and Practices , the office of the network devoted to removing any element to a script that might offend Mrs. Grundy, sent a memo after that there must be ‘NO SUGGESTION WHATSOEVER THAT THIS CHARACTER IS A LESBIAN.’ However, my natural propensity toward subversion was given its due when Douglas Cramer allowed me to add a dwarf hooker to a scene in a cheap hotel where Stuart Whitman as the detective interview John Carradine, who plays the hotel clerk. The dwarf lady of the evening is shown seated on the counter in the hotel lobby. Swinging her short legs and batting her eyelashes, she says to Stuart, “How’s tricks, baby!” This was left in, and Cramer was very pleased when the incident was singled out for comment in a New York Times review of the show. It wasn’t the sort of thing they were used to seeing in the bland medium of television.”
“I bring you a warning. Every one of you listening to my voice. Tell the world… Tell this to everybody wherever they are. Watch the Skies! Everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!–
It’s that time of year once again when Movies Silently, Silver Screenings & One Upon a Screen host a momentous event…. The Classic Movie History Project Blogathon 2016 which will begin August 5th -10th, 2016.
This event always promises to be an epic endeavor as there are so many interesting themes and subjects to cover. I am excited to be participating once again with these fabulous hosts who make it possible for all of us to contribute to a wealth of classic film history goodies to devour. Now listen folks, don’t get frightened off! You cast of exciting unknown readers… This has become a real project for me, a work in progress that will unfold over the next several weeks. For the purpose of The Classic Movie History Project Blogathon 2016, I offer an overview that will be a lead in for the entire decade of 1950s science fiction cinema conquering it year by year in separate articles. As I started delving into this project, it began to grow larger and larger as if Jack Arnold and Bert I. Gordon themselves compelled me to GO BIG!
In order to review an entire genre of such an influential decade and do the treatment it so rightly deserves, I realized that I needed to spread it out as a series. Re-visiting these beloved movies that inspired my childhood with wonder and sometimes tapped into my own authentic fears, I fell in love all over again. And though I tend to gravitate towards the classical Gothic horrors that are steeped in mythology, the supernatural and the uncanny, I can’t help but feel my mind expanding by the iconic themes that emerged from 1950s science fiction! So I’ll be publishing each year as individual posts or chapters from 1952 on… over the next several weeks or so instead of all at once. Talking about all the films I mentioned here and so many more films & things to come!
It’s a collection–a decade of the sci-fi genre, sub-genres and it’s hybrids– some eternally satisfying because of their remarkable ability to continuously shine a light on fascinating & mesmerizing fantasy stories. Well-written and adapted as visual narratives and surreal stories by beloved visionaries who set out to reach inward and outward through all of us dreamers and thinkers.
There are also those lovable Sci-fi films that are charming and wonderfully kitsch. And some… are just downright so, so, soooo awful their… awesome!
That’s what makes so many of these diverging films cut through the cross-sections to become cinematic jewels & memorable cult favorites!
There are many films that I’ll cover more in-depth, some are the more highly polished masterpieces that have lingered for decades with us as adult children who grew up watching them on a rainy afternoon on televisions with knobs that only had 9 channels, and if you were lucky you didn’t snap the knob off every 6 months! Growing up in New York I had Chiller Theater, on local channel 11 or Creature Featureson Channel 5, and Fright Nighton Channel 9. That’s how I fell in love, and got my fill of the treasures of films & television anthology series that were lurking out there destined to leave long-lasting impressions on so many of us!
Chiller Theater
Fright Night WOR
Or back in the day, you went to the Drive-In theater to explore in the back seat of your pop’s Chevy Impala double feature, and it was an invigorating and entertaining experience and you didn’t even have to get out of your pajamas.
You could spend all day in a musty theater festooned with captivating promotional lobby cards and colorful posters. Too bad, I wasn’t of the age to witness William Castle’s ballyhoo he strategically placed at certain theaters for that interactive live experience, EMERGO, PERCEPTO! You could take in a bunch of the latest scary films, sometimes double & triple features while sitting on sticky red velvet seats that smelled like hot buttered popcorn and week old spilled Pepsi. A box of Milk Duds in hand and the faint whiff of air conditioner freon at your back. You’d enter the movie theater in the bright light of a sunny Saturday afternoon only to exit into the dark of night, tired and filled with wonder, awe, and okay maybe looking over your shoulder a few times. Some films were big-budget productions, that contained serious acting by studio contract players, terrific writing that blended deep thoughts and simple escapism pulled from some of the best science fiction, fantasy & horror literature, and adapted screenplays, scares, and witty dialogue and cinematography that still captivates us to this day.
Well… sure some were B movies that have now sustained that Cult film charm and cheesiness, and some… are just downright pitiful, laughable guilty pleasures… and a bunch even came with really neat 3D glasses!
SOME ICONIC GEMS FOR THE AGES THAT I’LL BE COVERING!
THEM! (1954)*INVADERS FROM MARS (1953) *DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951)*FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) *THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951)*EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956) *THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) *INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) *WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953) * CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON(1954) * IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953)* IT, THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958) *EARTH VS THE SPIDER (1958) *THE CRAWLING EYE (1958) *THE GIANT BEHEMOTH (1959) *IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955) *TARANTULA (1955) *FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958) *THE MONOLITH MONSTERS (1957)*THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957) * THE ANGRY RED PLANET (1959)*KRONOS (1957)* THE CREEPING UNKNOWN (1956)*X-THE UNKNOWN (1956
I’LL ALSO BE TALKING ABOUT SOME GUILTY PLEASURES!
Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957).
Paul Birch is the alien vampire Paul Johnson in Roger Corman’s Not of This Earth 1957.
It’s also important to mention some of the ubiquitous actors who graced both the great & guilty pleasure flicks, you’ll be seeing a lot of in the following chapters likeJohn Carradine * Ed Nelson *Allison Hayes *Paul Birch *John Agar *Hugh Marlowe*Peter Graves *Richard Denning *Richard Carlson *Faith Domergue *Mara Corday *Les Tremayne *Marie Windsor *Morris Ankrum * Arthur Franz *Kenneth Tobey* John Hoyt * Whit Bissell and of course Beverly (kicks-ass!) Garland!
One thing is for certain, each film is relevant and all have a place in the 50s decade of Sci-fi / Horror & Fantasy!
So come back and read a little at a time and get some thrills even while you’re sitting under the hair dryer… Do people still do that today? I need to get out more…
This 1955 hair dryer is just begging to be a space-age helmet!
As early as 1920 there was the German expressionist film dealing with the arrival of a menacing alien visitor from the planet Algol giving actor Emil Jannings a machine that awards him unlimited powers. ALGOL aka POWER 1920 directed by Hans Werckmeister —
“That which you believe becomes your world.” –Richard Matheson from ‘What Dreams May Come’
Science Fiction emerged out of the “Age of Reason” literature and reflected a merging of myth and historical fact. Stories filled with an imagination that had no boundaries. While Science Fiction is a literary movement that can be a separate study all its own, storytellers who grasped the concepts of science fiction who questioned the endless possibilities, and the far-reaching machinations of brilliant minds, this project is focused on the history of 1950s science fiction cinematic and all it reveals. Science Fiction cinema flirted blatantly with ideas and images of a world that reached beyond the known and contemplated aloud, fantastic stories as early as the silent era. Consider Robert Louis Stevenson’sStrange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, re-envisioned time and time again.
John Barrymorelifts the dark conflicting tale of the inward monsters off the pages of Stevenson’s book. Barrymore so fluently moved through the silent stage, revealing that we all just might be harboring in our subconscious hidden dark and primal desires. Unleashed by a concoction, a seduction of science creates a fiend! Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1920)
There were a few early visions of fantasy, magic & Science Fiction films from all around the world- At 3:25 akaThe Crazy Ray (1924) Directed by Rene Clair-a scientist invents a ray that makes people fall asleep where they stand! In the German film Master of the World (1934) (Der Herr der Welt) where a German scientist wants to create an army of Robots to do the dangerous work of laborers so when he is told it’s too risky he goes mad and it’s too late the machine has a mind of its own. It features really cool electronic chambers and more!
And Transatlantic Tunnel (1935)Scientists construct a tunnel under the ocean stars Richard Dix, Leslie Banks, and C. Aubrey Smith.
Metropolis 1927 the dystopian masterpiece by director Fritz Lang was the beginning of the fascination with exploring the fantastic and our unbounded imaginations on film, it’s remarkable set design, imagery, and narrative sparked the Science Fiction genre in a big way— spanning a decade upon decade, in particular, revived in the 1950s!
The first influential science fiction film by Fritz Lang created a dystopian society in Metropolis in 1927. Its influence has maintained its powerful thrust for decades. An inspiration for Ridley Scott’s neo-noir sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner (1982)
“Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him”-H.G.Wells
Charles Laughtonis superb as H.G. Wells‘ Dr. Moreau a sociopathic sadist/scientist with a god complex whose profane experiments on animals and humans tortures them in the ‘house of pain’ trying to create a hybrid race he can hold sway over on his private island hell! Science has never been more evil! Island of Lost Souls (1932)
Then there was the 1936 adaptation of H.G. Wells’Things To Come (1936)directed by William Cameron Menziesand starring Raymond Massey as Oswald Cabal, Ralph Richardson as The Boss, Margaretta Scott as Roxanna/Rowena and Cedric Hardwicke as Theotocopulos.
“What is this progress? Progress is not living. It should only be the preparation for living.”
Flash Gordonand similar serials provided superheroes for generations of young people in the 30s & 40s, planting the seeds for the future that would give us the Star Wars legacy.
Audiences between the World Wars preferred horrors of a Gothic nature– James Whale’s Frankenstein 1931 & Bride of Frankenstein 1935, as they helped exercise demons conjured up from the 19th & early 20th centuries.
The electrical secrets of heaven, the lighting, the elaborate sets designed by genius Kenneth Strickfaden with his lights throbbing gizmos flashing and zapping, the creepy atmosphere of murky tones. The consummate Universal monster movie with iconic scenes introducing a new face, Boris Karloff who would become the great father of terror stories …
What’s on that slab? “It’s Alive, It’s Alive!…”those monumental words that remain ingrained in our consciousness. Colin Clivebecomes hysterical as he has creates life from death, but that life would become a whole new ethical, moral, and imposing dilemma for Dr.Frankenstein. A horror film with strong science fiction/fantasy tropes. And the laboratory as gorgeous set pieces would become a staple of the science fiction realm.
The 1950s Science Fiction genre took root with its profound contribution to our collective consciousness AS a genre its vision & breadth possessed quintessential & ever-lasting sociological and psychological metaphors, iconic tropes, and striking imagery.
The splitting of the atom, ushering in the atomic age, and the collective anxiety most definitely was the catalyst for many of the movie fantasy stories known as the 1950s Sci-Fi film.
“But no matter what else it might be, what makes a science fiction film science fiction is the fact that it is, in some sense, about science—and not only science but futuristic science. By that I mean that science fiction movies deal with scientific possibilities and technologies that do not exist yet but that might exist someday. Science fiction is the realm of the not-yet.”— “Cult Science Fiction Films” by Welch Everman
Ridley Scott – (Alien 1979, Blade Runner 1982) “When you come to the second World War You’ve got a very specific enemy. You know what that enemy is, It’s there for all the wrong reasons and it should be prevented…. Then you got the next phase which is The Cold War again which is to do with paranoia . But I think real, it’s real. Movies started to dip into that.”
“The Splitting of the atom…. forces that can only be explained to us by these guys in white coats… All of a sudden the guys in white coats became these simultaneously kind of rock stars and the most evil thing you could imagine.”
In a scene from The Atomic City 1952– The mother’s child sitting at the kitchen table with his breakfast “If I grow up do you know what I’m gonna do?” The mother turns to him, leaving her scrambled eggs on the stove, and corrects him nervously, “It’s when you grow up, not if…”
The Atomic City 1952 trailer
Duck & Cover 1951 classic propaganda film
From the short instructional film Duck and Cover “But no matter where they go or what they do they always try to remember what to do if the atom bomb explodes right then!” (the kids suddenly fall into the brick wall. The narrator says ) It’s a bomb DUCK & COVER!
James Cameron – “All of our fate as human beings, our destiny seems bound up in our technology and our technology is frightening. It’s Terrifying!”
Steven Spielberg- “So there was a great deal of anxiety in the air. It was not just fear of being beaten up by the local bully. But the fear was being NUKED!… But we almost pushed a button on each other during The Cuban Missile Crisis…… I was absolutely prepared for Armageddon and these movies from the 1950s and early 60s played on those fears. And these movies were all metaphors for those fears. ”
George Lucas- “I would say that there was a certain amount of anxiety about that I mean I grew up right in the very heat of that. DUCK & COVER drills all the time… We were always hearing about the fall out shelter. About the end of the world, issues that were always going on about how many bombs were being built. The Cold War was always in the media.”
1950s Sci-Fi films represented a conservatism or ‘reactionary wing’ that seems consumed by a motive to emphasize the values of 1950s America post-WWII, in the midst of a McCarthy era witch hunt that prevailed fueling our fears that seeped into many of the Sci-Fi narratives on screen and in literature. Reflecting the growing internal struggles within American society and the developing mistrust about Soviet aggression and anyone and anything perceived as subversive.
“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?”
Some films that reflected the paranoia of the period were well regaled by a Hollywood studio system that was itself at the center of the controversial House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) targeting screenwriters and actors as ‘communist sympathizers’ and no one could be trusted. -Just like Invaders from Mars 1953, Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956,X the Unknown 1956, The Incredible Shrinking Man 1957, and I Married a Monster From Outer Space 1958.
In 1947, in Roswell New Mexico the military reported that they have a UFO in their possession. The phenomena of sightings of UFOs would continue throughout the 1950s, though agencies were fully prepared to explain away the reports. Yet the public had a hunger for and fascination with the possibility of extra-terrestrials.
As Phil Hardy’s insightful take on the genre, all this manifested in a way that the Science Fiction films of the 1950s ‘supplanted horror as the genre that dealt with fear and paranoia.” The films expressed a very realistic look at science within the atomic age, and shed the shadows and expressionism of the earlier Gothic horrors and while not all scientific fact, tried to embrace a world of possibility.
The Flying Saucer 1950 begins the momentum for the decade of Science Fiction cinema’s love affair with unidentified objects and begins to round the edges of space crafts from other worlds that aren’t our American sharp and phallus-shaped rockets!
DESTINATION MOON 1950 was featured in COLOR BY TECHNICOLOR. Being hailed the 2001, Space Odysseyof its time, it attempts to portray a realistic trip to the moon. Phil Hardy calls Destination Moon 1950 ‘a sober celebration of man’s imminent conquest of space that dominated the decade.’
Destination Moon did attempt to accurately portray a trip to the moon given the technology and knowledge that was stuck in 1950.
Then we shot past the moon in the cinema and went straight to the red planet with Flight to Mars 1951!
Themes and metaphors that emerged from anxiety about the atom bomb, radiation fallout, the advent of modernity, the space race and the wanderlust to conquer outer space, interplanetary warfare, military vs. science hubris, science meddling with nature, fear of science and technology,invasion anxiety, continued fear of otherness, deviant (in terms of counter-culture not exclusively moral judgment) subversion and xenophobic nightmares.
Sometimes we were even married to a monster from outer space and didn’t even notice much of a difference except for the lack of small talk! Here’s Tom Tryon and Gloria Talbott in I Married a Monster from Outer Space 1958.
Director Howard Hawk and screenplay by Charles Lederer, created a striking science fiction masterpiece of film noir ambiance with its chilling back lit set pieces-The Thing From Another World 1951, adapted from John W. Campbell’s story ‘Who Goes There?’, other films that followed the path of paranoia — Invaders from Mars 1953, War of the Worlds 1953, It Came from Outer Space 1953, It Conquered the World 1956 & Invasion of the body snatchers 1956.
There were also science fiction films that rang the warning bell about cosmic calamity and catastrophic world coming to an end, annihilation fantasies like When Worlds Collide 1951.
War of the Worlds 1953 and When Worlds Collide 1951 had as Phil Hardy states, ‘religious dimensions’ that accused us of bringing about catastrophic punishment because of our misdeeds and transgressions.
H.G. Well’s view of Martianinvaders created for the public consciousness the idea of destructive beings from another world. It was a great reflexive move for those science fiction films to portray aliens that were sympathetic, yet non-humanoid in appearance. Most Sci-Fi films show aliens as menacing, not only destructive but dangerous because they also wanted to keep us as captives, zap our resources and colonize our planet, sometimes even take our women, oh god no unhand Faith Domergueyou pants-wearing Mutant!
“Is that a fireball or something?”
Hollywood saw a trend later on in the 50s with Destination Moon 1950 when they came upon a story written by Harry Bates called The Return of the Master this became Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still 1951which has remained one of the best regarded science fiction films of all time. This is one of the rare occasions when the alien Klaatu played beautifully like an intricate clock by the chiseled face, tranquil speaking Michael Rennie is benevolent, bringing with him a sincere and dire warning about earth people’s course and the future of their citizenship if they don’t relent about the proliferation of atomic weapons. There were several well-intended alien visitors who were met with hostilities as with, Klaatu (Michael Rennie ) in Day the Earth Stood Still 1951, and The Man From Planet X 1951.
Many films, even the low-budget excursions dealt with our primal fears of alienation, estrangement & loss of identity i.e.,(communism at its core, the ramifications of otherness) nothing hits home more than Invaders from Mars 1953, and the quintessential loss of self and individualism in Don Siegels’Invasion of the Body Snatchers!
“They would change into people who hate you!”
Steven Spielberg talks about the impact of Invaders from Mars 1953, “It certainly touched a nerve among all the young kids like myself who saw that movie at a very young age. That you would come home and that you would not recognize your mom and dad they would have changed into people who hate you!”
I can attest to the persuasion these films could have over the burgeoning imagination of a child, especially one like me who felt very much like an outsider as a kid. One night, as sure as my name is MonsterGirl, I went home, looked at my parents, decided they had been switched by aliens, and ran out of the house, walking around the block for at least an hour before I convinced myself that I was being ridiculous. Or was I? These themes did have a not-so-subtle impact on a young impressionable mind who could easily question the world around them. Who could you trust? Would believe you me anyway?
There is the outsider narrative, diminishing human forms as in Bert I. Gordon’s Attack of the Puppet People 1958 where obsessed and lonely puppet maker John Hoyt loses his marbles. Although mad-bad science has shrunk down people before the 1950s in The Devil Doll 1936and in the hands of crazed Albert Dekker in Dr. Cyclops 1940.
There is the quintessential existential crisis, the beautifully thought-provoking film by director Jack Arnold starring the eternally transcending man Grant Williams in, The Incredible Shrinking Man 1957.
And of course, there is the matter of GIGANTISM!
Giant insects, sea creatures, and people who ran around half-crazed and scantily dressed were a by-product of the atomic age!
George Lucas —“Out of that fear came I think a lot of the monsters which you mess around with stuff and you’re gonna unleash this unknown monster!… it’s making tangible the unknown… A lot of that has to do with the mystery of this silent death that comes along with it that nobody knows exactly what it is or where it came from or can’t see it, can’t touch it. Well, let’s make it easier to deal with by making it a giant monster.”
Some films show the ascension from violence & hyper-masculinity, Women as professionals & bold heroines who didn’t shrink as hysterical victims. Female-dominated civilizations (Cat- Women of the Moon 1953, Queen of Outer Space 1958, Missile to the Moon 1958, Fire Maidens from Outer Space 1956, that threatened to maniacally seduce & subsume male voyagers, dressed by 5th Avenue are outré chic. Wanton warriors & nubile space maidens who often never saw the male species before or wanted to destroy them altogether!
A tagline reads “SEE-Astounding she-beasts of Venus!”
In Queen of Outer Space 1958, the masked disfigured Queen Yilana (Zsa Zsa Gabor) imprisons the men who crash land on her planet, intending to annihilate the earth with her beta disintegrator, though her beautiful subjects revolt in the name of love.
Mark Hamill –“We sometimes imagined other planets as paradises…. with girls!!! they looked more like Hollywood starlets than space aliens, anyway, they were eager to please. They danced their music their leotards were so Moderne! like Greenwich Village in outer space.” referring to Cat-Women of the Moon 1953.
“May we serve you, earth men?”
“You’re the first man I’ve ever seen!” Carol Brewster as Alpha is mesmerized.
There’s nothing worse than a space Queen–The Lido (K.T. Stevens ) and one of her maidens in distress…
Mark Hamill narrates the wonderful documentary written and directed by Richard Schickel Watch the Skies! Sci-Fi, the 1950s and Us presented by Turner Classic Movies also remind us that “50s science fiction may have shot at the stars but the dialogue often remained earth bound tied up with the battle of the sexes.” Many prevailing sub-texts were also love stories, and soap operas involving relationships between men and women. They would create love stories in space!
Project Moonbase 1953 Donna Martell as Colonel Briteis (bright eyes?).
Cameron Mitchell plays Steve Abbott in Flight to Mars 1953, who tells Marguerite Chapman as Alita a fellow scientist/astronaut, “I think you’re a prize package and very feminine.”
There is always time for romance in outer space!
There were menaces from without, menaces from within. The ordinary world transformed into the monstrous. There were warnings from benevolent aliens and aggressive attacks by aliens who wanted to colonize our planet.
Indie filmmakers introduce teenagers as both heroes & monsters. Many films were horror/sci-fi hybridizations. And by the end of the decade, we have left a legacy of impressive productions that remain timeless masterpieces, the cult grade- B Sci-Fi picture with their indelible charm and kitsch emblems, and the true stinkers that are so bad there too good not to appreciate. Sublime, thrilling, provocative & yes campy!
There were collections of stylized works by Jack Arnold, Bert I. Gordon, Edward L. Cahn, and one indie auteur who showed us how to make a memorable movie on a shoestring budget and also launched many a career, the inimitable and grand Roger Corman. And of course those guys at American International Pictures (AIP)
Within the 50s decade shedding the Gothic themes of the 30s & 40s, the poetic shadow plays of Val Lewton, and 1950s Sci-Fi films had a pre-occupation with the modern world and mostly all the central menaces were transformed into non-human threats that we not only couldn’t empathize with but were revolted against as dangerous, vicious, insidious and potentially nihilistic in vision, they were seen as only a threat to our humanity and ultimately would lead to our destruction.
Within Sci-Fi, there are so many films that are complex hybridizations of horror/science fiction /fantasy and have become too insurmountable to dissect or decipher all the nuances between the various free-floating genres. Writer critic historian Robin Wood in his Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan.—wagers that “the horror film’s radical potential lies in the fact that ‘the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses’ Jancovich states that the monster “must therefore be seen as a profoundly ambiguous figure which challenges social norms and so reveals society’s repressive monstrosity.”
This theme is attached to McCarthyism that showed up as coded narratives in the more highly produced Sci-Fi films- “the myth of Communism as total dehumanization—accounts for the prevalence of this kind of monster in that period” -Mark Jancovich -Rational Fears- American Horror in the 1950s.
20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) Ray Harryhausen’s Ymir from Venus.
It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) Ray Harryhausen’s The Kraken
Cinematographers who brought these visual narratives & landscapes to life- just to name a few!
Clifford Stine (It Came from Outer Space 1953, This Island Earth 1955, Imitation of Life 1959, Spartacus 1960) Sidney Hickox(Them! 1954, The Big Sleep 1946, Dark Passage 1947, White Heat 1949), John F. Seitz(Invaders from Mars 1953, Sullivan’s Travel’s 1941m Double Indemnity 1944, Sunset Boulevard 1950), Russell Harlan ( The Thing from Another World 1951, Red River 1948, Witness for the Prosecution 1959 To Kill a Mockingbird 1962) George Barnes(War of the Worlds 1953, Rebecca 1940, Spellbound 1945) Leo Tover(The Day the Earth Stood Still 1951, Hold Back the Dawn 1941, The Snake Pit 1948, The Woman on the Beach 1947, The Heiress 1949, Journey to the Center of the Earth 1959) Ellsworth Fredericks(Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956, Hold Back the Night 1956, The Stripper 1963, Mister Buddwing 1966).
And just as key to the atmosphere and attitude of the films were the musical contributions which defined that certain feel of chills and excitement, screwball antics and off-beat percussion that filled up your head with pulsing visions of laser beams and other-worldly noises that ran up your spine like a finely coiled wire resonating the confluent sounds of the cosmos! Geesh that was a mouthful!
There were composers who masterfully underscored some of the BEST films and even the worst!, Dimitri Tiomkin * Bronislau Kaper * Bernard Herrmann *Hans J. Salter and Henry Mancini to name a few.
Instrumentalist Clara Rockmore mastered the Theremin which had a cosmic, universal vibe that was, well out of this world!
The Theremin is an electronic musical instrument created by Russian inventor, Léon Theremin controlled by the performing thereminist who makes the dulcet eerie tones by manipulating the two metal antennas that respond to the hand movements which influence the oscillations or frequency with one hand and effecting the volume with the other hand.
Popular were the films that dealt with the hubris of science that ultimately manifested monsters. There were even pants monsters, yes! pants monsters…! The burning sun turned him into a hideous fiend, but he still had time to put on those Haggars casual men’s trousers!
THE HIDEOUS SUN DEMON, Robert Clarke (in doorway), Patricia Manning (second from right), 1959
There was a running sentiment —the notion of us against them, and even at times when not working together to fight a common enemy- you’d see the military vs science… And sometimes, though almost always male hero driven, there emerged some anti-damsels, all-powerful women who broke the cliched mold of the helpless hysterical female and arose as smart, intellectual (a socially constructed gendered male quality), mindful, and fearlessly driven woman with guts and composure even if it was to hold off from laughing at Paul Blaisdell inside that cucumber monster from Venus.
Roger Corman’s It Conquered the World (1956) The Venusian Cucumber.
Just look at Julie Adams as Kay Lawrence in Creature from the Black Lagoon 1954, and Joan Weldon as Dr. Patricia Medford in Them! 1954, Beverly Garland as Dr. Andrea Romar in Curucu, Beast of the Amazon 1956 & and her gutsy Clair Anderson in It Conquered the World 1956, Tina Carver as Dr. Terry Mason in From Hell It Came 1957and Faith Domergue as Dr. Ruth Adams in This Island Earth 1955 & Prof. Lesley Joyce in It Came from Beneath the Sea 1955, and Lola Albright as Cathy Barrett in The Monolith Monsters 1957.
Some sci-fi films were visually surreal landscapes or existential masterpieces such as William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders From Mars 1953 or Ib Melchior’s The Angry Red Planet 1959 and Jack Arnold’s magnificent adaptation of Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man 1957.
The Angry Red Planet (1959) The Rat Bat Spider puppet monster!
Grant Williams sails into the radioactive mist in The Incredible Shrinking Man 1957.
Invaders from Mars (1953) Jimmy Hunt awakens to a UFO crashing into the sand dunes.
“To sleep perchance to dream”-Hamlet-William Shakespeare
This dream-scape is a visual masterpiece, with the appearance of the sublimely brilliant Finnish painter Hugo Simberg, ( I happen to get permission from The National Museum of Finland to use Simberg’s ‘At The Crossroads’ as the cover of my album Fools & Orphans) thanks to the art design by visionary William Cameron Menzies!
A scene from Invaders from Mars (1953)
It is absolutely true about one thing— that it’s wholly complex to begin dissecting what makes a film solely and definitively Science Fiction and what constitutes it being a hybridization of horror & fantasy. There are way too many that fall right on the gray line that either exists in the middle or transects both themes at once.
Vincent Price can’t get that pesky Tingler off his arm in William Castle’s terrific horror/sci-fi extravaganza equipped with buzzing chairs-The Tingler (1959).
For example, I am covering William Castle’s The Tingler 1959, because, while the central terror surrounds a monstrous ‘horror movie themed monster’ a creeping fiend that lives inside us all and grips our spines the moment we are in abject fear, it is discovered by scientific and medical research. One could say the film is also a crime drama. There are too many nuances and parameters that intersect. James Whale’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein 1931is called a Monster movie by Universal and by fans of all generations. But it falls into the deep well of hybridization as so much of it focuses on the very philosophical questions around scientific hubris, the creation of human life, and the question of god, ownership of one’s identity, and what is monstrous.
“A lot of science fiction films are also horror films in which monsters are spawned by scientific experiments, but not all horror films are science fiction, because science fiction does not deal in the supernatural. Science fiction takes place in the realm of the not-yet; supernatural horror films operate in the realm of the impossible.”— “Cult Science Fiction Films” by Welch Everman
The enormous influence that Science Fiction cinema had long-lasting effects on the advent of television. Just look at Rod Serling’sFantasy/Sci-Fi anthology series which aired on CBS from 1959-1964. The show came in at the end of the decade. Stories that were infused with the themes of the 50s and set the tone for future decades to come. The Twilight Zone was groundbreaking and thought-provoking, dealing with issues of war, class, and race, it was a socially conscious program that constantly tried to remind us of our humanity. The decade of 1950s Science Fiction also bled into the mindfulness of my favorite early 60s science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits.
The Zanti Misfits-one of the many fabulous Outer Limits monsters!
—There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, and make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to – The Orwellian Control Voice from The Outer Limits anthology television series aired from 1963-1965.
Mark Jancovich writes “Again and again, the threats which distinguish 1950s horror do not come from the past or even from the actions of a lone individual , but are associated with the processes of social development and modernization. In this period, it is the process of rationalization which is the threat, and in this way horror texts were at least as concerned with developments within American society as they were with threats from without… Here rationalization is understood as the process through which scientific – technical rationality is applied to the management of social, economic and cultural life…
… this new system of organization was seen by many as inherently totalitarian system which both created conformity and repressed dissent.”
Vincent Price fights off zombies from a plague that wiped out most of the human race in Richard Matheson’s adapted screenplay from his story I Am Legen- The Last Man on Earth (1964)
The outsider narratives– were illustrated as contrasting and conflicting to accepted norms, we see this with Richard Matheson’s writing (I Am Legend which became Vincent Price’sagonizing journey as The Last Man on Earth 1964, and later The Omega Man 1971 and Jack Arnold’s films involving “the reoccurring preoccupation with alienation, isolation and estrangement” -Jancovich- seen in Creature From the Black Lagoon 1954 and The Incredible Shrinking Man 1957.
Grant Williams’s protagonist Scott Carey becomes engulfed in a glittery mist of atomic dust particles in The Incredible Shrinking Man 1957 the film exudes anxiety about his diminishing masculinity by not only losing his literal size and his physical height but he loses his maleness as a husband and as a regular man. This estrangement becomes a journey of his eternal soul and its place in the vast unknown other world.
Grant Williams is feeling ‘literally’ like such a small man.
There would be films that embrace the dystopia narratives, and curiosity with technical advancements like robots!
These Science Fiction/Fantasy films have left a deep and abiding impression on so many of us. Whether you grew up actually seeing them for the very first time, or becoming a new fan who is excited to embrace the heart and soul of a genre that made you think beyond what if? Either way, Science Fiction is an exploration of our imaginations, both glorious and often terrifying but it’s a genre that is here to stay, and the 1950s in particular truly rang the alarm bell that is still reverberating today!
Added to the mix in many of these film favorites was the essential mechanism of ‘not being believed’added to the fear and paranoia of the moment!
The Face of Paranoia
Invasion Anxiety!
FEAR OF THE ATOMIC BOMB! The Atomic City 1952 trailer.
I see you with my million eyes!
Hey, big fella got a light!
The theremin ‘the dulcet tones’ that wavered throughout sci-fi and beyond!
‘The modern world.’
It’s intermission time! Head out to the snack bar for some 50s refreshments!
Directed by Irving Picheland producer George Pal along with a screenplay by Robert Heinlein took a very documentary approach to the narrative and the landscapes. The film stars John Archeras Jim Barnes, Warner Anderson as Dr. Charles Cargraves, with Tom Powers and Dick Wesson. The film was a critical success and revived the Sci-Fi genre.
Destination Moon 1950 was an attempt to show a serious technical side to space travel. based on what science actually knew at the time. Actually it was in response to a spread that ran in Collier’s Magazine of series of paintings done by artist Chesley Bonastell of gleaming space craft.
Steven Spielberg had said of the picture, “DESTINATION MOON is a scientific attempt to create suspense based on no bad guys no villains and no aliens.
Similar to almost Apollo 13(1995) or Marooned 1969)
George Lucas says “At the time it was a very provocative idea because nobody had ever seen anyone go to the moon.”
Though it’s been called the precursor to 2001 Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick never admitted to having seen the movie. Which is highly possible, and given his genius we’ll take his word for it.
In the midst of the Cold War, the film reflects America’s desire to conquer, and according to the generals in Destination Moon, the moon would be the ideal location for a strategic military base of operations. And thus the race for America to get there first. There’s also a conflict seen as there were those who would embrace the new technologies and those who saw the impending modernity as a threat or a ‘bad thing’.
Pichel and Pal wanted to situate this film farther away from the fantastical science fiction ‘soap opera’ serials of the 1930s. Physicists and astronomers were consulted in order to stay true to the realistic view Heinlein, Pichel, and Pal desired as their vision of the future. They also used striking paintings by Chesley Bonestell to imagine the gorgeous lunar landscapes along with designer Ernest Fegte who create the realistic cratered look of the Moon.
The film features the first lunar landing that was envisioned as realistic and not melodramatic or surreal. The crew led by actor John Archer manage to land on the Moon but they run out of fuel, and they seem doomed to be stranded. They lose all the excess weight in order to get the ship space worthy again, but till they are over the weight limit. In a noble act of courage and sacrifice Dick Wesson (Tom Powers) figures that he can remove his cumbersome pressure suit and re-enter the ship a lighter and better man in order to save the rest of the crew…
Dr. Charles Cargraves:You can’t buck public opinion; I’ve tried. Have you seen this? [Newspaper headline:MASS MEETING PROTESTS RADIOACTIVE ROCKET] General Thayer:That isn’t public opinion – it’s a job of propaganda! Jim Barnes: You’re almighty right it is. Manufactured and organized – with money and brains. Somebody’s out to get us.
Directed by Mikel Conrad, stars Mikel Conrad as Mike Trent, Pat Garrison as Vee Langley, Hantz von Teuffen as Hans, Lester Sharpeas Col. Marikoff Roy Engel as Dr. Carl Lawton and Denver Pile as Turner! Because we feared the Russians in the early 1950s much of the paranoia around UFO sightings was connected to those pesky Reds! When CIA secret agent Mike Trent tracks a flying saucer to Alaska he finds out that it is a ship built by scientist Dr. Carl Lawton who hopes to sell it to the Americans!
Pat Garrison and Mikel Conrad-50s cool!
Col. Marikoff: Mr. Trent, you’re giving us a great deal of trouble. Why didn’t you stay in New York with your drunken friends of the night club?
Prehistoric Women would find a resurgence in the 60s! Here’s British actress Martine Beswick in the 1966 movie with the same title!
Prehistoric Women (1950) Directed by Gregg C. Tallas Shown from left: Jo Carroll Dennison, Joan Shawlee, Laurette Luez, Kerry Vaughn, Mara Lynn (bending over), Judy Landon
Directed by Gregg C. Tallas, (Siren of Atlantas 1949) offers an adventure sci-fi fantasy film. Prehistoric Women stars Laurette Luez as Tigri, Allan Nixon as (Mesa of Lost Women 1953, Pickup 1951) Engor, Joan Shawlee as Lotee, Judy Landon as Eras, Mary Lynn as Arva, Jo Carroll Dennison as Nika, Kerry Vaughn as Tulie, Tony Devlin as Rulg, James Summers as Adh, Jeanne Sorelas Tana, and Janet Scott as Wise Old Lady.
As Bill Warren puts it in his wonderful series Keep Watching the Skies published by the awesome McFarland Press-Prehistoric Women “Were this picture not so naive, it would seem more sleazy than it does. It’s not good in any way, but has a certain daffy charm because of its unsophisticated unbelievability.”
The Commentator: “And Engor called it Firee, which was his word for Fire.”
The film is narrated documentary style because the cast are primitives who are Amazonian cave-women and had little to no dialogue, it just adds to the laughable style and god-awful Cinecolor production. I’d like to know how they got a turkey vulture to wear a mask poor thing, the film is so blurring it’s hard to tell what the hell is flying up in the prehistoric blue sky… scourge of the skiesindeed! Still, prehistoric films, though considered mostly adventure stories seem to be included in books on the Sci-Fi genre. Though it could also easily be branded as a very cheap sexist exploitation romp!
Look it’s a flying dragon the scourge of the skies!
Bill Warren cites a review from the Monthly Film Bulletin: “They assert feminine superiority ruthlessly, setting their captives to hard labour, clubbing them intermittently and cutting off their escape… {Engor-} (the intelligent troglodyte who invents fire) uses a flaming torch to destroy a giant winged dragon (a disguised turkey vulture they must have tortured off set by putting fake ears and beak on it) that threatens their encampment {and}the girls are stunned with fear and admiration and surrender unconditionally.”
Tigri and her clan hate men but realize that they are sort of needed for some things, so they capture a bunch of fellas and try to force them to become their mates. But when Engor, escapes and discovers fire gets re-captured and not only slays the “flying dragon the scourge of the skies” but uses the fire to fight off the ugly brute who threatens their lives Tigri has a change of heart and all is right with the primitive world again. The women start running around panicked and screaming hysterically and the men are once again in charge… it’s ludicrous.
This giant is a real 9-foot giant… named Guadi in the film is Johann Petursson The Viking Giant was the Tallest Man From Iceland and traveled with Ringling Bros. Circus!
The Commentator: “Strangely enough, the swan dive was invented before the swan.“
GASP AT THE DARING COURAGE… AS THEY THUNDER BETWEEN PLANETS ON A RUNAWAY ROCKET!
Directed by science fiction story aficionado Kurt Neumann ( Secret of the Blue Room 1933, Half a Sinner 1934, Island of Lost Men 1939, a slew of Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan pictures, She Devil 1957, the outstanding Kronos 1957, and The Fly 1958 ) Rocketship X-M stars Lloyd Bridges as Col. Floyd Graham, Osa Massen as Dr. Lisa Van Horn, John Emory as Dr. Karl Eckstrom, Noah Beery Jr. as Maj. William Corrigan, Hugh O’ Brian as Harry Chamberlain, Morris Ankrum as Dr. Ralph Fleming, and Sherry Morland as the Martian girl.
Cinematographer Karl Struss (Sunrise 1927, The Great Dictator, 1940, Limelight 1952, The Fly 1958) and art direction by Theobold Holsopple create at times a sublime and beautifully desolate landscape using matte paintings, and miniatures among the technical effects. For all the scenes on Mars, the film is tinted a pinkish sepia tone (filmed partly in The Mojave desert). Struss lenses a landscape that is eerie and atmospheric.
Rocketship X-M was a B picture designed to beat DESTINATION MOON in the movie theaters, and even with its grim ending, it actually did better at the box office. Director James Cameron called it an ‘Anodyne answer to Destination Moon 1950.’ It was a cautionary tale about how we will not be able to control this new technology. It’s a warning about too much hubris surrounding this powerful technology that sometimes ‘precedes a tragic fall’-Mark Hamill.
The crew finds the remnants of a Martian Civilization that was destroyed by its own technology much like the revelation in Ridley Scott’s Alien 1979.
The film though with its bleak message is quite a surprisingly interesting science fiction tale about a trip to the moon, by way of Mars that is interesting because of its earnestness and visual style. And to be honest a lot more interesting and its characters more full of life than with its predecessor in 1950 Destination Moon.
Rocketship XM Staffing Lloyd Bridges, Osa Massen, John Emery, Noah Berry Jr. You heard this year’s Oscar Winner for Best Actor credit his father for his acting career. Well, here he is folks. Third from the left: Lloyd Bridges.
German director Neumann came to Hollywood in 1925 and became best known for his work on The Fly. (1958) Rocketship X-M is a sober and beautifully filmed piece of science fiction realism blended with romance and crisis. Like Destination Moon, it features the first manned rocket ship to the Moon that winds up knocked off course and winding up on Mars, stranded on the bleak landscape where the crew led by Dr. Karl Eckstrom stumble upon a dome-shaped structure and an odd metallic mask. They deduce from all the radioactivity that there must have been a superior race of intelligent beings who had once inhabited the planet but fell victim to some kind of atomic catastrophe, leaving only a few mutant savages to forage the bones of the now desolate planet.
These crazy-looking bald Martians sort of remind me of Pluto in The Hills Have Eyes 1977.
The crew is eventually besieged by the remains of that once thriving Martian race, which in a shocking reveal shows Sherry Moreland the Martian girl to have a lifeless stare as she is blind. The Martian troglodyte attackers kill Dr.Eckstrom and Maj. Corrigan, wounding Chamberlain. Col. Floyd Graham and Dr. Lisa Van Horn make it back to the ship but don’t have enough fuel to get back home. In a very intense and poignant scene as the two hold each other and embrace their inevitable fate with a transcendent fatalistic sense of hope, much like Grant Williams at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man, the lovers watch through the view Finder as they plunge toward Earth to their deaths, in a darker film ending– as they crash. Rocketship X-M seems to have brought the warning not to earth in the form of Klaatu the benevolent but has placed us on a hostile planet much like Planet of the Apes that gravely warns us that our future could very well wind up the same way if we pursue atomic weapons.
Lloyd Bridges holds Osa Massen It ends badly for everyone. As they look out the porthole “It’s only seconds now, try not to be afraid” She clings to him-Suddenly she is not afraid anymore. She feels like something is lifting them up and holding them right before they crash…
Osa Massen sees her tragic end as a new beginning she sheds her fears and finds a courageous way to embrace their impending death. It’s a rather poetic scene when they hold each other and look out at the viewfinder and watch as life rapidly escapes them. It’s a very dark ending.
Doomed to crash and burn Floyd and Lisa cannot control the technology. There is a conflict with the machines and mechanisms we build that can either annihilate us or set us free to explore and thrive.
‘Their last desperate hope is for transcendence”
ROCKETSHIP X-M — Director John Cameron calls it a ‘dualistic dance’ with technology -referring to the end being so nihilistic potentially– then the head of the program says they’ll start construction tomorrow.
Already on Earth, they are planning another mission called Rocketship X-M2!
PROGRESS MARCHES ON-“No gentlemen the X-M was not a failure tomorrow we start on the construction of the X-M2”
Floyd: I’ve been wondering, how did a girl like you get mixed up in a thing like this in the first place.
Dr. Lisa Van Horn: I suppose you think that women should only cook and sew and bear children.
Nobody does still waters run deep kind of tough more than George Raft.
In Roy Del Ruth’s (The Maltese Falcon 1931 with Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez, Du Barry Was a Lady 1943, yes tis true The Alligator People 1959, Why Must I Die? 1960) Noir morality play Red Light, Raft plays Shipping boss Johnny Torno, who catches Nick Cherney (Raymond Burr in one of his most sinister roles) embezzling funds. Torno gets Cherney a term in San Quentin with just enough time to build a psychotic grudge.
Arthur Franz who’s not being attacked by a giant dragonfly or turning into a pants monster in Monster on the Campus 1958.
Arthur Franz as Jess tells his big brother Johnny in his last dying words that he’ll find the answer to his death in the hotel bible
But instead of planning to kill Torno, he decides to hit him where it will hurt more, he pays fellow inmate Rocky who’s getting out in a few days (Harry Morgan in one of the most menacing roles I’ve seen him play, he deserves a place at the bad boy table with Dan Duryea and Frank Lovejoy) to kill Torno’s younger brother, war hero, and chaplain brother Jesse played by Arthur Franz.
Driven mad by the mystery of who shot his beloved baby brother down in a hotel room, Torno goes on a quest to find the bible where the name of Jesse’s killer is written. The cinematography and shadowy framework by cinematographer Bert Glennon ( The Red House 1947, House of Wax 1953) is tense and chilling, and all the performances are stellar. Including Gene Lockhart who plays co-owner of the 24 hours a day shipping company. The film also co-stars Virginia Mayo as Carla North who Torno enlists to help him track down his brother’s killer. There are some of the most brutal and uniquely violent moments in the film which is tempered by the question of vengeance and faith.
Arthur Shields as Father Redmond. He was a wonderfully complicated anti-hero in Daughter of Dr. Jekyll 1957Virginia Mayo as Carla wants to help George who exudes the ‘tormented man’, but he is too driven by revenge for having lost the only thing he truly loved… his kid brother Jess.
I couldn’t help but love Warni’s shared wisdom when he tells Torno who’s drinking himself into an angry stupor to let Jesse’s death go and move on with his life.
Gene Lockhart as Warni Hazard tells Johnny Torno (George Raft)- “My old man used to say liquor doesn’t drown your troubles… just teaches them how to swim.”
Gene Lockhart as Warni Hazard “My old man used to say liquor doesn’t drown your troubles… just teaches them how to swim.”
The Seven Minutes1971 is based on a novel by Irving Wallace. Directed by provocateur Russ Meyer(Lorna 1964), Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! & Mudhoney(1965) with a screenplay by Richard Warren Lewis and an uncredited Manny Diez. This film comes on the heels of his hit at FOX with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls 1970. (Dolls with a screenplay by Roger Ebert) Meyer and Fred Mandl (Checkmate, The Munsters, The Twilight Zone, The Fugitive) create a great visual romp with the cinematography. The opening titles roll over the first almost seven minutes of the film as we hear the ticking of a clock…
With a very unusual cast of character actors starring Wayne Maunder as Mike Barrett, and Marianne McAndrew (Hello Dolly 1969, The Bat People 1974) as Maggie Russell. Philip Carey (I’ve always been amazed at how much he reminds me of Charlton Heston) as District Attorney Elmo Duncan.
Phillip Carey has always reminded me of Charlton Heston in stature and mannerism- a great underrated character actor…
the ubiquitous John Carradine. I could watch him in anything… he tickles me…the beautiful Yvonne de Carlo here as Constance Cumberland movie actress.love love love that Yvonne de Carlo- a kindly beauty (I met her on the set of Laugh-In at the Westbury Music Fair in the 70s while taping the show live… She was an absolute gem, warm-hearted and filled with tangible grace.)
Music byStu Phillips(Quincy M.E.) with Lionel Newman supervising. BB King sings Seven Minutes.
‘The Seven Minutes’ refers to an artistically erotic banned book published thirty-five years ago in Paris, that essentially opens up the floodgates for the public discourse about pornography, censorship, violence against women, and the dual standards during a time when morality was ambiguous. You know, just like today.
Argo Book Stores clerk played by Robert Maloney… arrested for knowingly selling smut… convenient scapegoat for the cause.Charles Drake plays vice cop Kellogg entrapping the poor Mr. Fremont book seller for being a clerk where an allegedly filthy book is being sold.
A bookstore clerk is indicted for selling obscene material which leads to a court trial. There is also the question as to whether this licentious book actually led to the rape of a young girl. The film is part trial based as the defense lawyers try to hunt down any clues that would prove the author of the book was not a smut merchant but trying to express an artistic viewpoint that can not be silenced by censorship.
Wayne Maundy as Michael Barrett’s defense attorney for bookseller Fremont
The author and the mystery surrounding their identity are key to the plot. Meyers does a high-spirited job of developing this narrative with engrossing scenes that portray a society of zealots and self-serving neophytes in turmoil with themselves. All amidst a groovy 70s palate that’s nostalgic and filled with a colorful verisimilitude.
The film opens with some great 70s devil may care by composer Stu Phillips. At first, we see a beauty chasing her dog passed a small storefront. The story reveals that the vice bureau is staking out the ARGUS bookstore, as Sgt Kellogg (Charles Drake) walks in with his cigarette box tape recorder ready to entrap the clerk for selling smut. He asks the young bookseller for something ‘brand new -unusual, ‘something you wouldn’t find in an ordinary library.’The clerk (Robert Maloney) just tells him to look around, the jackets tell the story pretty well.
Kellogg casually asks for one particular book on display The Seven Minutes by JJ Jadway and the bookseller repeats the title ‘Oh yeah” Kellogg remarks, “That’s a pretty sexy cover ain’t it?” As Kellogg ogles the pretty blonde talking to the young clerk who tells him she’ll see him later.
Sargent Kellogg (Charles Drake) “You read it?” Clerk -“The new addition at least… the first one was banned thirty-five years ago.” Kellogg-“How come it was banned?” Clerk– “Cause it was considered obscene” Kellogg- “Do you think the book’s obscene?” Clerk– “Why don’t you buy the book and find out for yourself.” “How much is it?” ” $7.30 with the tax.”
“Wrap it up… You the manager around here?” Clerk-“Yeah, the day manager.” Kellogg-“Who do I bring it back to if I don’t like it” The clerk answers– “Fremont, Ben Fremont.”Kellogg waves.
Kellogg’s partner is tape-recording the conversation from the car. “Took you long enough.”“Literary conversations take a little doing, we better start comparing, same jacket same title, same publisher, same publishing date, and copyright… Let’s pay Mr. Fremont another visit.”
They arrest him for knowingly selling obscene matter which is a misdemeanor in the state of California. And this starts the ball rolling in this film. As the powers that be, seek out district attorney Duncan who feels that The Seven Minutes would be found obscene if taken to court.
Mike and Faye Osborne are bed pals. She’s the spoiled daughter of an influential father.Cars the way they used to look… oh those were the days.never had one of these… but I know people who did! cool…70s memorabilia. Even the brown striped sheets.
the hair and the groovy chick appear later on at a funky club but I couldn’t resist putting her in the visual time capsule with the Volkswagon bug and the phone and Selleck…teehee.Mr Selleck don’t you look fine! He plays the publisher’s son Phil Sanford of Sanford Publishing.
Check out that cherry Volkswagon and Corvette, check out that cool 70s phallus phone, Check out that really young Tom Selleck as the publishing guy… who calls hot shot attorney Michael Barrett (a very cool Wayne Maunder) who is representing the publisher Phil Sanford (Tom Selleck) who’s in a panic about the book clerk Fremont going to jail for selling one of Sanford House’s books.
The tower of self-righteousness Elmo Duncan the D.A. (Phillip Carey) wants to be propelled into the Senatorial seat in California. The powers that be who want him to become Senator conspire to exploit this contrived issue of corruption & decency so Duncan has a powerful platform to run on. This elite cabal wants to build a state-wide case in which Elmo Duncan can fight the ‘Smut Merchants.’
Defense Attorney Mike Barrett tries to appeal to district attorney Duncan.District Attorney Duncan looms large as the figure of ethical fortitude.the secret cabal setting up the scenario for Duncan to influence public opinion and win the election. Stanely Adams, Olan Soule & Jay C. Flippen
They have a political agenda to stamp all youthful violence incited by salacious material in reading matter and films, and so this cause has become the lynchpin with which they hope to win an election, making ‘The Seven Minutes’ the subject of their campaign.
Meanwhile, a violent rape takes place involving the son Jerry (John Sarno) of a wealthy advertising tycoon Frank Griffith (Lyle Bettger) who owns a copy of The Seven Minutes and was present at the time of the assault committed by his psychotic friend, the one who actually commits the brutal rape.
The rape scene is handled with quick cuts interwoven with Wolf Man Jack doing his thing on the air. It’s all very frenetic as the soundtrack “love train” is sung by Don Reed.
The prevailing secret surrounding pathetic Jerry Griffith (John Sarno) is that he’s been emasculated by his domineering father and now can’t get it up, so he’s impotent sexually and in helping Sheri Moore (Yvonne D’Angers) while she’s being attacked by his violent friend.
Jerry takes the blame for the rape and refuses to talk about it, thereby implicating himself as an impotent sissy and allowing the lynch mob and voyeurs to assert that Jerry would not have committed such an act if The Seven Minutes hadn’t been available to him. Duncan is now convinced that a clean boy wouldn’t have done the crime if it weren’t for the availability of the dirty book.
this is Shawn ‘baby doll’ Devereaux -well it sure ain’t Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan’s vision of Carroll Baker is it…
These hypocritical old cronies have young girls of their own on the side, watching pornography while salivating at the mouth. Yerkes has a girlfriend he calls ‘baby doll’ who dances provocatively for these guys. She’s got ample boobs (It is a Russ Meyer film after all) hanging out of her 70’s style yellow hot pants. Amidst the interesting subject matter Shawn ‘Baby Doll’ Devereaux gyrates and inserts herself into the frame to show us the hypocrisy of these old farts who condemn others for their own personal agenda all the while being the worst kind of purveyors of sinful behavior.
the wealthy Frank Griffith that wants all this smut taken out of the reach of impressionable teens like his son. What’s carefully framed by Meyers playing in the background is a porn film that the men have been reviewing and enjoying way too much-we witness the HYPOCRISY.
Russ Meyer had his own dealings with censorship so the subject is probably of very personal substance for him. He does a fantastic job of pointing out the duality of persuasions. And he builds the story really well here. Showing the belligerence by equal sides of the coin toward a moral center and a society ripping at the shreds of personal freedom to express, create and destroy.
Whether you’re an avid Russ Meyers fan or just think you might like to venture into the complex questions the film evokes, presented in that real 70s style The Last Drive In weeps for most days, it’s a film worth watching, even just to spot the few character actors that pop up on the screen like baby doll’s and Faye Osborne’s (Yvonne & Edy) eh hems… well you know… the cleavage shot!
What appears on the surface as a controversy surrounding a banned book that contains alleged salacious material-The defense evokes some good examples of Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Capricorn’ or, D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, etc.
What manifests is an interesting commentary on censorship, masculinity, and the spurious connection between perceived immoral content and violence in society.
Manhood and masculinity is a texture that is not necessarily used as the theme in the story, but let me tell you it is all-pervasive with images of Duncan heaving his heavyweights as he sweats and works out in front of Mike, spouting his holier-than-thou rhetoric. It was almost masturbatory.
He gave Michael that “politician’s holier than thou number” Duncan was hostile while he pumped weights in front of the intellectual Mike Barrett. Dueling of masculinity and the question of causality with pornography and violence against women.
Duncan talks to a church official about ‘freedom’ Duncan– “We only want to penalize those who would corrupt it.”
Duncan and his reprehensible comrades belong to a group called Strength Through Decency.
The acronym STD... was this intentional? Probably. It’s hilarious as these types of organizations do spread like a social disease. They’re against lust, motorcycles, homosexuals, and lesbians. All the factors that made the 70s so dangerous of course. Those lustful lesbians on motorcycles riding down 5th Avenue in NYC wreaking havoc with our delicate morality. Why I’m surprised we all survived it…
So as much as the words “smut merchants’ are bandied around, and the question of censorship takes priority in full view, the underlying sub-context is the posturing of masculinity and the double standard of sexism & classism and who gets to play and who must obey.
Marianne McAndrews is fabulous as Maggie Griffith. I really dig those orange orbs… truly the light fixtures I mean…
I won’t get into the story behind the mystery or the trial, the story behind Jerry’s impotence, the elitism, or the ultimate reveal about the author of The Seven Minutes. The media frenzy that occurs feeds on the sensationalism of the situation who condemn the book but want to hear about the details of rape victim Sherri’s violation.
Is The Seven Minutes a beautiful novel about a woman’s awakening or really filthy trash? You’ll have to find out… but I’ll say that Russ Meyer’sThe Seven Minutes is a great addition to the socially conscious sexually charged films of the late 60s & 70s like Roger Vadim’s Pretty Maids All In a Row, and Robert Thom’s Angel, Angel Down We Go 1969…
From Dreams of Darkness-Fantasy and the films of Val Lewton by J.P. Telotte: “{The audience} will populate the darkness with more horrors than all the horror writers in Hollywood could think of… if you make the screen dark enough, the mind’s eye will read anything into it you want. We’re great ones for dark patches.” –Val Lewton
Jane Randolph as Alice Moore in Val Lewton’s Cat People 1942 directed by Jacques Tourneur.A scene from Bedlam (1946) directed by Mark Robson.
During the 1940s Val Lewton and his ‘Lewton Unit’ used the essential vision of fantastic darkness to recreate a very unique style of horror/fantasy genre, one which challenged Hollywood’s notion of the tangible monsters Universal studios had been manufacturing. Lewton, while working at RKO Studios, produced an exquisite, remarkable and limited collection of films that came face to face with a ‘nightworld.’ Lewton used our most deepest darkest psychological and innate fears that dwell within the lattice of shadows of our dreams and secret wish-fulfillment.
“Our formula is simple. A love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual violence. Fade out” -Val Lewton
Lewton worked at MGM between 1926 and 1932 and then served eight years under David Selznick. He had published nine novels and a number of short stories. In addition he produced regular radio show versions of MGM films. He also had ties in the industry as his aunt was the the very influential silent actress Alla Nazimova.
the great stage and silent screen actress Alla Nazimova-Val Lewton’s very influential aunt…
But Lewton had left his mark with Selznick and in 1940 rival company RKO was interested in hiring him..It was actually Selznick who negotiated Lewton’s contract.
“My task is to initiate a programme of horror pictures to be made at the comparatively low cost of 125,000 each. Which should compete successfully with Universal horror films. Which cost anywhere from 300,000 to a million dollars. I feel I can do this quite easily and the Universal people spend a lot of money on their horror product. But not much on brains or imagination.”-Val Lewton
Lewton put together a team of collaborators with whom he would work closely. He chose Mark Robson to edit. Robert Wise and Lewton worked together on Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. DeWitt Bodeen had worked with him during his time with David O’ Selznick was to write the first screenplay for Cat People. His old friend Jacques Tourneur whom he became friends with while working on A Tale of Two Cities. was brought on board to direct. He chose Nicholas Musuraca as his director of photography and Roy Webb to compose the musical scores. They all worked on countless RKO films. It was Lewton’s intention to create quality pictures though he was constrained by a low budget. Jacques Tourneur had said that Lewton was an idealist who had his head up in the clouds and would come up with impossible ideas. However for Tourneur, his feet were planted firmly on the ground, yet somehow they complemented each other perfectly, Tourneur claims it was a very happy time in his life, and that Lewton’s gift to him was the filmic poetry that he was able to carry with him forever.
Jacques Tourneur is perhaps one of my favorite directors, with his use of shadow and all together dreamy lens of the world, he’s responsible for one of THE best classic horror films Curse of the Demon & film noir tour de force Out of the Past.
Jacques Tourneur directs Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past 1947.Jacques Tourneur’s moody horror with Niall MacGinnis and cat Curse of the Demon 1957.Part of the Lewton Unit- image from the documentary The Man in the Shadows from top left Roy Webb composer, Val Lewton, Nicholas Musuraca Cinematographer, Mark Robson editing/directing, DeWitt Bodeen writing, and Robert Wise-director.
“Horror is created in the mind of the spectator. It’s necessary to suggest things. In all my films you never saw what caused the horror. I saw people screaming in the theater when there was a young girl in a swimming pool, but you never saw the black leopard. The lights blaze up at the end. And there’s Simone Simon. Something has definitely happened. -Jacques Tourneur
Jacques Tourneur looking over the film sketches.Jacques Tourneur on location for Berlin Express 1948.
“Lewton gave us something quite different than what’s known as Hollywood craftsmanship you can say that he presented us with a parallel world in which everything feels both real and a little unreal-familiar but strange. The characters and the viewer slip into a mysterious, troubling gray zone. Where real life and dream life come face to face. And where beauty and destruction merge. Lewton and Tourneur really created a new kind of cinematic beauty”-from The Man in the Shadows Val Lewton documentary
the golden boy from Bedlam
Learning from his last employer Selznick he made sure to supervise absolutely every aspect of the film’s production, from casting, set design, costumes, direction, and editing. He even rewrote every script himself without taking credit or under a pseudonym. In this way he developed his own visual style of storytelling, having prepared each detail before shooting.
“My feelings are generated, however by more than my gratitude for that first opportunity. They come from the warm and highly stimulating creative experience I had working with Val. He taught me so much about directing and filmmaking in general…Val Lewton was one of that fairly rare species, a truly creative producer. As such, he was able to achieve an outstanding reputation for the high quality, unusual and interesting “B” pictures he produced at RKO Studios starting in the early 1940s” – Robert Wise, March 1994
Robert Wise behind the cameraRobert Wise, Mark Robson & Val Lewton
“I remember him staying up until all hours of the night working on screenplays. He enjoyed having his hand in the writing. I used to that that he went out of his way to pick inept writers so that he’d have to redo their work. He used to write on a Royal typewriter;he used only two fingers but he was very fast. He’d talk out the different parts as he wrote them and, since my bed was just on the other side of the wall, I’d fall asleep listening.”–Nina Lewton Druckman from the Reality of Terror by Joel Siegel
Michael Rennie and Gort in Robert Wise’s Sci-Fi masterpiece The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)Robert Wise’s boxing noir The Set-Up 1949
Lewton drove himself very hard trying to achieve something beautiful of quality. He and his team were given a very small budget, a cast of veritable unknowns, and evocative titles that were sensationalist and lurid in nature and did not truly represent an accurate account of the narrative. There were no gruesome fiends nor even evidence of malevolent forces at work in his ordinary everyday environments. Yet RKO’s studio head Charles Koerner dictated such titles as Cat People 1942, Curse of the Cat People 1944, Bedlam 1946, Isle of the Dead 1946, The Body Snatcher 1945, I Walked With A Zombie, The Ghost Ship and The Leopard Man in 1943 and The Seventh Victim.
“If you want to get out now, Lewton told Bodeen, I won’t hold it against you”
The sensationalistic titles lead viewers to expect corporeal horrors, grotesquely, and accustomed chills. As critic Manny Farber points out that while Lewton got nicknamed the “sultan of shudders” or the “Chillmaster” they were missing the point entirely. Lewton’s films were purposefully inhabited by the average, the bland, and the pedestrian all, so as to populate his world with normal characters. People you’d see on the streets, or doing menial jobs. And amidst this population of ‘normal’ stirred interesting pulp stories that were unorthodox, otherworldly, and often grim. Themes like zoanthropy. a derangement in which someone believes they are an animal as in Cat People or the pervasive fear of the Vorvolakas, an undead creature in Greek folklore that drinks its victim’s blood in Isle of the Dead. Even when dealing with dreadful English asylums and the sacrilege of body snatching.
Boris Karloff and Val Lewton on the set of Bedlam
By the way… Bedlam 1946 is perhaps my favorite of the Lewton series. I’ll be doing a follow-up to this piece with the aim of covering the magnificent piece of filmic art that is Bedlam. I’ll also include the remaining films I love, Isle of the Dead, The Body Snatcher, and his first Cat People.
Films with subversive themes like zoanthropy. a derangement in which a person believes himself to be an animal as in Cat People or the pervasive fear of the Vorvolakas is an undead creature in Greek folklore that drinks its victim’s blood in Isle of the Dead.
Billy House as Lord Mortimer in Bedlam.The marvelous Ian Wolfe in Bedlam.Skelton Knaggs as the mute Finn in The Ghost Ship Kate Drain Lawson as Señora Delgado in The Leopard Man.Edith Barrett and Richard Dix in The Ghost Ship.Anna Lee in Bedlam.Helene Thimig in Isle of the Dead.Julia Dean and old Mrs. Farren in The Curse of the Cat People.
These characters seem to transcend their positions in the background and add layers of depth and a quiet simplicity or realism that made the storytelling more rich. They possessed a certain unique expressiveness that at times eclipsed the lead actors.
RKO known for its capacity to release films that were of the fantastic and original, initially hired Lewton to organize and run their ‘B’-Film unit. RKO had a reputation for ingenuity and artistic innovation, paying careful attention to the shaping of the narratives. What he endowed them with was his deep understanding of the subtle patterns and symbols that lie within our dreams, psyche, and fantasy world. Lewton satisfied the audience’s desire for horror yet what he delivered was swathed in a strange and poetically beautiful style.
At his disposal, he had some of the best writers who knew how to tap into this process. Writers like DeWitt Bodeen, Donald Henderson Clarke, Curt Siodmak, and Ardel Wrayart directorAlbert D’Agostino (Notorious 1946, Out of the Past 1947, The Thing from Another World 1951) cinematographerNicholas Musuraca & J. Roy Hunt (Crossfire 1947, Might Joe Young 1949) and directors Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past 1947, Curse of the Demon 1957), Mark Robsonand Robert Wise all contributed and helped shape the vision that became the Lewton film.
Nicholas Musuraca and Jacques Tourneur.
And while Val Lewton didn’t direct any of the eleven films he produced for RKO, (in two cases only taking screen credit for his contributions as a writer), it’s rather irrelevant in terms of authorship -as collaboratively infused with the talent of vision these films possess a distinct frame of reference that lead you into the fantasy realm or genre with an artistic unorthodoxy like no other. Director Jacques Tourneur directed the first three Lewton films produced by the Lewton Unit. He gave Lewton the soubriquet “The Dreamer.”
Joel Siegel from his 1973 book Val Lewton tells us, “His production unit would make only horror movies with budgets limited to $150,000 per picture. The films were to be ‘programmers’ slated for placement on double features in less than key theaters, with a running time not to exceed 75 minutes. {Production Chief Charles Koerner’s office was to dictate the titles of these films, based upon a system of market pre-testing.”
Mark Robson and Val Lewton
Lewton hid much of the story in his shadow-plays and this allowed his crew to work the landscape by creating symbolism, key sounds (natural ordinary sounds become ominous premonitions and are fatalistic in tone), haunting textures, abstract shadow, and a sense of dark absences. Within the more focused frames of the films are incidental point-of-view shots that fill in the spaces with a rich texture of realism within the fable-like quality, relying on shadow and suggestion to deliver the desired effect.
Lewton himself would usually write a rough draft, an idea adapted from a property to be filmed. Then using his grand ability to visualize a formula, manipulate the structures of conventionality so that he could compose a landscape and narrative that would best articulate his observations. Tourneur emphasized Lewton’s“structure, construction, progression of high points, low points” in the narrative. Director Mark Robson suggested that Lewton had already ‘thought everything out’ in such detail so as not to miss a thing. Jessie Ponitz,Lewton’s secretary relates, “The last draft was always his.”
Lewton at his typewriter
Lewton’s brilliance and vision are partly due to his understanding of how psychoanalytic symbolism, myth, dreams, and archetypes influence our intimate fear of what lies invisible to the eye. The Lewton Unit embraced the collective nightmares of the human experience, bringing our dream work into the cold light of daily life bound to the material world. He presents us with irrational unseen forces, in particular those that lurk in our subconsciousness or dream world. His films transport his protagonists by contrasting them from the open, sense of security from daylight- immersing them into the dark regions of shadows, and the black patches of uncertainty. They do not confront conventional monsters, vampires, ghouls, and malevolent spirits of the classic Universal plots- but actually come face to face with their own internal nightmares. A mechanism that emerges from the shadows of the mind. We see these images of fantasy and it triggers our most basic and personal need to belong to that which is created, however disturbing those visions are, these fantasy/horror films possess an enigmatic kind of darkness. His characters never ran away from the darkness and dread that was so pervasive they actually ran head-on into it, in order to demystify it and lead themselves & us to understand it a little better.
PSYCHE OR SOUL- THE LEGACY OF THE FANTASTICAL
Jean Brooks as the mysterious Jacqueline in Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim
Lewton and his associates understood the principles of fantasy, and utilized them in the complex visual structures they created in their series of films. In writing about Lewton’s use of fantasy, J.P. Telotte informs us that these films “are not mere horror stories or exercises in terror, yet ‘redeem’ or reunite us with a repressed side of the human experience.” And this is what makes Lewton’s fantastical work so unique.
As in his book America in the Dark, Thomson implies that unlike the films that consist of vampires, werewolves, and other alien presences “The Fantasy genre {…} draw fundamentally on a realm of darkness and psychic imagery for it’s existence. Such films typically evoke a dreamlike environment or nightworld in which, as if it were our own sleep, we can pleasurably and profitably immerse ourselves. {…} I wish to call attention to their ability to reveal how we also might come ‘to life with the dark’ finding an important, even life enhancing meaning in the fantastic’s dream realm. {…}”
The Body Snatcher 1945.a Palladist from The Seventh Victim
Lewton’s fantasy reworks our perspective to let us ‘see’ the dark spaces even within the light. As Todorov writes in The Fantastic 1975, fantasy evokes an ‘indirect vision’ that allows us to see what is usually not visible in the ordinary world. Lewton uses this ‘indirect vision’ to transgress and transcend normal perception. Lewton’s works suggest a disparity between the expected and reality. From this disparity, the greatest threats come from the most ordinary occurrences, objects, and the commonplace. He populates his films with figures of authority who interpret their world incorrectly, harshly or inharmonious. The sudden revelation of the ordinary frightens and disorients the viewer in unexpected ways, forcing them to be more reflexive, to show the menace in the everyday. As Carl Jung believed, fantasy precedes our normal sense of reality- “The psyche creates reality everyday. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy.”
Drawing on the psychologist James Hillmanwho specialized in archetypes, Lewton’s films evoke a dream-like nightmarish world in contrast to the realm of truth. The style of these films are often lensed as seductive and mysterious journeys, where the audience can escape the ordinary for a while. They seduce us by taking a path which follows our hidden desires within the psyche.
This is the proper aim at fantasy, as James Hillman explains; it should challenge our normal “literal perspective, its identity with material life,” since that perspective is usually “stuck in coagulations of physical realities. This perspective of reality needs to break down and fall apart, to be skinned live and sensitized, or blackened by melancholic frustration.”
Isle of the Dead 1946
This fantasy forces us to look at our own limitations of vision, and how difficult it is to describe the structure of something that has no’ structure’ It’s easy for the grey areas of fantasy to ‘lapse’ into absence and dissolve from a narrative field of a nightworld/dreamscape using the device of voice-over narrative or subjective camera. Lewton’s images make us ask are we seeing what’s really there, or are we merely informed by the dark spaces both inside the film and tapping into our individual and collective psyches. As Telotte cites Rosemary Jackson–
“Objects are not readily appropriated through the look; things slide away from the powerful eye/I which seeks to possess them, thus becoming distorted, disintegrated, partial and lapsing into invisibility.”
Val Lewtonhad a special insight and grasp of formulas and mythic structures so that he could envision within the complex narratives, the presence of the most significant archetypal patterns. Lewton said “If you make the screen dark enough, the mind’s eye will read anything into it you want! We’re great ones for dark patches.” What those ‘dark patches’ suggest is something innate in all of us, a dark region within the ‘self’ that gets lost, or hidden away, or even denied as we go about our daily lives doing ordinary things in the guise of normalcy.
DARK PATCHES AND THE ABSENCE OF KNOWING
In a Lewton film there is a sense of ‘Lack’ as an absence in the lives and environments seems to be at the core substance of these films. This play of absence and presence operates as a structural principle in Lewton’s films. For the benefit of this post I will point particularly to I Walked With a Zombie,The Leopard Man and The Seventh Victim, the prior both directed by the great Jacques Tourneur. In his two films that ‘lack’ translates into a disturbing landscape of openness in the narrative style.
The everyday, whether it be modern urban city streets, islands in the Caribbean or the nineteenth century, there is an attentive eye for detail that weaves a texture of daily life that the Lewton unit worked so hard to achieve. Be it the costumes, the architecture and the general look of the place during it’s particular time period. So much research went into developing the landscape of reality with a distinct verisimilitude. By looking at books, paintings and photographs they would try to capture the perfect light and shadow of the piece.
Although I won’t be covering Bedlam in this piece, the film is a perfect example of how The ‘Lewton Unit’ employed this research approach prior to filming. Several shot compositions were based on WilliamHogarth’s illustrations. Much emphasis was placed on ‘context’ as Lewton characters can so evidently be characterized by their station in life or occupations living in the seemingly natural world that is commonplace. Writer DeWitt Bodeen notes that Lewton “always insisted that all his characters have special occupations or professions and be shown working their jobs.”
Lewton’s films are populated with a texture of normalcy, people living in a visibly conspicuous and commonplace field of reality so that when the presence of the mysterious, and irrationality poke through it shatters the veil of normalcy and settles down to become abnormal and disturbing for the protagonist and us the viewer. These characters must journey through a field that is rife with coded messages, where they are not believed by the people around them.
Telotte explains, “What results is a subtle dialectic between ‘substance and lack’, presence and absence, replacing that of the more traditional horror films, where in the ‘self’ as the audience’s surrogate, is opposed by a threatening otherness in the shape of a monster or murderous apparition. The tension is no less. Though it’s source is different it is more disturbingly lodged in the individual and the way in which he perceives and conceives of his world.”
Like the protagonists, we are laid bare with our vulnerability to the abnormal. The threat comes as an external challenge to our lives, exposing our human weakness and fears and forces us to see life in an unsettling way. Everything falls out of harmony that which is usually so ordinary. And the sense of ‘otherness’ fills the screen and taps into our own psyche as the formidable shadows move about with an anima. The dark patches set themselves outward as props, while strange sounds and eerie low key lighting color the screen’s canvas as dark and mysterious.
Psychoanalyst Hillmanrefers to a ‘vesperal’motion that leads us into the darker regions of the self and the human psyche with its ‘fantasizing impulse.’ Lewton’sCurse of the Cat People(you can read an earlier feature I did on this film-click on the link) is a more conventional initiation story focusing on the nature of innocence and ‘otherness’ and how it often challenges our rational perspectives of the world because it evokes the ‘unknowing.’
All of Lewton’s films are structured with a careful eye on the sequential narrative. Val Letwon referred to scenes heightened by shadows as signifier of something foreboding he called them “horror spots.” These “horror spots’ were carefully spaced throughout his films in sequential scenes, as if each frame were its own visual narrative. Many potent moments though brief partly due to the limited time constraints yet remain with you forever.
These scenes were preceded by scenes of an alternating tone designated to bring relief to the audience, utilizing some form of imagery that could be very beautiful or lyrical. Joel Siegel talks about this approach as “fragmented, mosaic-like structure” of the films, with their dependence on a “series of tiny, precise vignettes which do not so much tell the story as sketch in its borders and possibilities. For film historian Robin Wood in his “Return to the Repressed,” Lewton’s series of films is distinct for their “often illogicalpoetic structure.”
Early Lewton films display a narrative style which recalls Jean-Paul Sartre’s prescription for fantasy storytelling: “In order to achieve the fantastic, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to portray extraordinary things. The strangest event will enter into the order of the universe if it is alone in a world governed by laws.”
Lewton films do not simply strip the world of the laws which Sartre describes, as many horror films do, rather they manipulate the context within which even the most commonplace actions are perceived. In I Walked With a Zombie, the players are often viewed through a veil of elaborate shadows cast by wooden lattice, brush and thicket, Very sensual images and very flowing. The eye for detail… every frame is so well thought out. And while we as spectators have truly seen nothing tangible, there is that ‘lack’ reinforced by structural repetition. Drawing us in depends on our ability to fantasize and tap into the deep-rooted fears that we unconsciously embrace. This portrayal of Lewton’s mysterious yet mundane environment becomes utterly frightening. Lewton explained how this process reveals the viewer’s participation in that which he sees, establishing that given these kinds of visual narratives man himself “will populate the darkness with more horrors than all the horror writers in Hollywood could think of.”
Robin Wood’s The American Nightmare chapter of Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan.–
“It is built on elaborate set of apparently clear cut structural oppositions : Canada-West Indies, white-black, light–darkness, life-death, science-black magic, Christianity -Voodoo, conscious -unconscious, , etc–and it proceeds systematically to blur all of them. JEssica is both living and dead.; Mrs. Rand mixes medicine, Christianity and voodoo, the figurehead is both St. Sebastian and a black slave, the black-white opposition is poetically undercut in a complex patterning of dresses and voodoo patches; the motivation of all the characters is called into question; the messenger-zombie Carrefour can’t be kept out of the white domain.”
Lewton’s work absolutely inspired and trained Robert Wise to scare the hell out us with his adaption of Shirley Jackson’sThe Haunting in 1963, when in reality we never see a malevolent presence. Wise’s use of absence and presence, sequential stages of darkness and shadow, odd angles, and the process of what we ‘don’t see’ became one of the greatest ghost stories on film and I would dare to say one of the best films ever made. Wise learned this film philosophy from his time working as part of the Lewton Unit, whose contribution to film rippled outward for decades.
Julie Harris climbs the menacing spiral staircase in Robert Wise’s masterpiece of Gothic ghost storytelling The Haunting 1963
“Lewton’s most accomplished manoeuvre was making the audience think much more about his material than it warranted. Some of his devices were the usual ones of hiding information… he hid much more of his story than any other filmmaker and forced his crew to create drama almost abstractly with symbolic sounds, textures and the like which made the audience hyper-conscious of sensitive craftsmanship… He imperiled his characters in situations that didn’t call for outsized melodrama and permitted the use of journalistic camera. {…}Je would use a spray-shot technique that usually consisted of oozing suggestive shadows across a wall, or watching the heroines’ terror on a lonely walk {…} The shorthand allowed Lewton to ditch the laughable aspect of improbable events and give the remaining bits of material the strange authenticity of a daguerreotype.” –Manny Farber criticquoted from 1951 in Jeremy Dyson’s book Bright Darkness
There is an overall unsettling revelatory pattern to each of the Lewton narratives. While I’m only covering the 4 contributions Lewton made during the year 1943, all of his 9 fantasy/horror films isolate the commonplace through the story, the patterns, the symbolism of innocence, and the rigidity of authority. In his films our roots in proven reason and sanity are given a different value. This contrasting shadowplay create the ultimate texture and environment of fantasy/horror.
I thought it appropriate to offer you this peek into Roger Corman’s slant on H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”,using an Edgar Allan Poe title…Starring Vincent Price and… screenplay by Charles Beaumont!
Co-staring our very special man of the month Lon Chaney Jr. as Simon Orne.
“Carrying on a family tradition of masterful motion picture horror!”
Photo courtesy of Wrong Side of the Art Lon Chaney Jr with Vincent Price in The Haunted Palace 1963
“Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.” – Ambrose Bierce
“Religious superstition consists in the belief that the sacrifices, often of human lives, made to the imaginary being are essential, and that men may and should be brought to that state of mind by all methods, not excluding violence.”- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
“300 years old! Human blood keeps them alive forever.”
“Horror Hotel, next to the graveyard”
Remake of City of the Dead due out sometime in 2013?
Horror Hotel (US) or The City of the Dead (British) (1960) is directed by John Llewellyn Moxeywho eventually emigrated to America and became in my opinion one of THE best directors of fantasy, horror, and suspense films made for television. (The House That Would Not Die 1970, The Night Stalker 1972, A Taste of Evil 1971, Home For the Holidays 1972, The Strange and Deadly Occurrence 1974, Where Have All The People Gone 1974, Conspiracy of Terror 1975 once again about a secret cult of devil worshipers this time in the suburbs of California, Nightmare in Badham County 1976, Killjoy 1981 and Desire, The Vampire 1982 not to mention contributing to numerous outstanding television series, and other films too many to list here.)
Darren McGavin as Kolchak The Night Stalker produced by Dan Curtis and directed by the great John Llewellyn Moxey
With a screenplay by George Baxt(The Shadow of the Cat 1961, Strangler’s Web 1965, Vampire Circus 1972 (uncredited) and his really awful mess, Horror of Snape Island 1972) he was also the scenarist on Sidney Hayer’sCircus of Horrors (1959)Baxt went on to do another witchcraft themed film co-scripted with prolific writers Richard Matheson’s (The Legend of Hell House 1973, Trilogy of Terror 1975) and Charles Beaumont’s (The Intruder 1962, Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red Death 1965) The other screenplay was based on Fritz Leiber’s 1943 novel Conjure Wife, which turned into yet another film directed by Sidney Hayer, and was an equally moody and unnerving piece in the trope of black magic-themed films entitled Night of the Eagle or it’s alternative title best known as Burn Witch Burn (1961).
Horror Hotel or City of the Dead is also a story co-scripted by Milton Subotsky an American émigré who relocated to England and eventually took over as the head founder of Amicus the only true rival to Hammer Studios Gothic series of films at the time. Horror Hotel was the first film made by the company then called Vulcan Productions. Subotsky was also the uncredited producer of the film. Released in the States with the title Horror Hotel the film used the inane catchphrase “Just Ring For Doom Service” which is unfortunate as it downplays the truly profound artistic quality of the film’s visual narrative. The film also marks the first appearance of Christopher Lee in the Satanic Cinema genre. Then Lee appeared in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour‘s quite interesting occult-themed sequence rather than Hitch’s usual mystery methodology, an episode entitled, The Sign of Satan(released May 8, 1964, from Season 2 episode 27) where Christopher Lee plays the mysterious foreign actor Karl Jorla in an episode that also dealt with devil worship.
THE BLACK CAT (1934) U.S. (Universal) runs 65 minutes B&W, was the studio’s highest grossing picture in 1934. The film was also ranked #68 on Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movies. Directed byEdgar G. Ulmerand written for thescreen by Ulmer andPeter Ruric.
Also titled: House of Doom; The Vanishing Body (the alternative British title was used in it’s re-release in 1953 as a double bill with The Missing Head an alternative title for the “Inner Sanctum’s” offering Strange Confession.
Tod Browning’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi.Boris Karloff in Jame’s Whales Frankenstein 1931.
With the success that Universal Studios garnered from Tod Browning’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’sDracula in 1931 starring Hungarian-born actor Bela Lugosi, and the equally sensational popularity of Mary Shelley’s adapted Frankenstein1931 directed by James Whale starring Boris Karloff, it would seem only natural for the studio to harness the cult popularity of these two stars, creating horror vehicles to pair them together in. This is the first collaboration between Boris and Bela. Also, both stars were equally billed in terms of their leading roles. In Lew Landers The Raven 1935, Lugosi dominated as Dr. Richard Vollin and in Lambert Hillyer’sThe Invisible Ray 1936, the emphasis was more on Karloff’s complex character Dr. Janos Rukh. The Black Cat was a huge success for Universal and opened up the floodgates for seven more films featuring the collaboration of Karloff and Lugosi;Gift of Gab (1934), The Raven (1935), The Invisible Ray (1936), Son of Frankenstein (1939), Black Friday (1940), and You’ll Find Out (1940).
Although The Black Cat 1934 claims in its opening credits that the film is ‘suggested’ by Edgar Allan Poe’sstory from 1843 the film bares no resemblance to his short story, nor did Poe ever pen a single word about Satanism in all his volumes of the curiously macabre. The film does evoke the spirit of Poe’s fixation with morbid beauty, the preservation or perseverance of love after death, the suggestive ambiance, the conflation of beauty and death, and the unconscious dread of the uncanny. The architectural lines seem to also evoke the nihilistic sensibilities of Jean-PaulSartre‘s ‘No Exit’ or a Kafka-esque fantasy of entrapment, with a mood set forth of futility and hopelessness. It also represents a cultural aesthetic that was emblematic of WW1.
Ulmer’s The Black Cat is melancholy poetry that articulates its substance within a half-light dream world. There are overcast clouds of menace, with modern Gothic gloom and impenetrable dark spaces. A wasteland of lost hope, it is a land of the dead.
Karloff is driven by his profane lust and twisted faith and Bela is a ghost of a man n a deadly excursion into a vengeful rage.
“Don’t pretend, Hjalmar. There was nothing spiritual in your eyes when you looked at that girl.”-Werdegast
‘the beast’ or the wickedest man in the world Aleister Crowley
Karloff’s character Poelzig is actually based on the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. Ulmer and Ruric were inspired by an odd news story circulating in the world press shortly before the making of the film. Stranger than fiction, it seems a naive young couple who were visiting a remote home of a magician, became entangled in the occult rituals involving an unfortunate animal sacrifice, a victimized black cat named Mischette. The magician was Aleister Crowley, and the isolated location was his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily. The press got wind of this when Crowley accused one of his writer friends Nina Hamnett of libel in a London Court. Hamnett had mentioned Crowley in her 1932 autobiographyLaughing Torso.
The passage that incited Crowley’s vengeful wrath was Hamnett’s description of his days at the Abbey of Thelema “He was supposed to practice Black Magic there, and one day a baby was said to have disappeared mysteriously, There was also a goat there. This all pointed to Black Magic, so people said, and the inhabitants of the village were frightened of him.” Crowley became known in the public’s perception as ‘the wickedest man in the world.” It was from this story that the seed of sensationalism gave rise to the idea for The Black Cat whichemerged as a tale of savagery and horror for Ulmer.
So, in actuality, the title has nothing to do with Poe’s short story at all, as it merely alludes to Dr.Vitus Werdegast’s (Lugosi) all-consuming fear and dread of cats. A more faithful adaption would be The Living Dead (1934) directed by Thomas Bentley, and Tales of Terror (1962). The Black Cat (1941) starring Basil Rathbone was more of an old dark house mystery.
Roger Corman directs Peter Lorre in Tales of Terror 1962.
This mysterious and decadent tale was directed by Austrian-born Auteur Edgar G.Ulmer who was part of the vast succession of émigrés of high-art who came to America, Ulmer passed away in 1972.
It is one of the darkest films of the 30s. The Black Cat is an effusive, atmospheric, and brutal masterpiece of decadent horror among some of Ulmer’s other interesting contributions (People on Sunday 1930, Bluebeard 1944,film noir classicDetour 1945,and the wonderfully lyrical science fiction fantasyThe Man From Planet X 1951).
Influenced by the German Expressionist movement, the film lays out a sinister territory, strange and foreboding, unsavory and dangerous, clandestine and provocative. Ulmer worked for Fritz Lang in the early days living in Germany involved in films including Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). He also worked with F.W. Murnau on Sunrise (1927) Ulmer also worked with Max Reinhardt, and Ernst Lubitsch in the 20s, and Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnermann, and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, who was responsible for Metropolis’ miniature sky-scapes and vast edifices.
On the set of The Black Cat.Boris and Bela on the set of Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat.
The Black Cat is considered to be Ulmer’s best film, though his career did start to maneuver its way down into poverty row’s fabulous cinematic gutter toiling in low-budget features, after beginning an affair with a script girl named Shirley Castle Alexander who was married at the time to one of Carl Laemmle’s favorite nephews. At the time Laemmle was head of Universal Studios, and so Ulmer was essentially blackballed by the mogul from Hollywood. Another factor might have been Ulmer’s unwillingness to sacrifice aesthetic sensibilities over commercial profits.
Ulmer and Shirley got married and wound up moving to New York City spending many of his years working on low-budget films. He began this part of his career by making bargain-basement westerns under the pseudonym John Warner directing a series of cheap ethnic-market movies incorporating groups like Ukrainian, Yiddish, and African Americans before he moved on to the more stylish low-budget thrillers.
By the 1940s Ulmer wound up back in Hollywood but had already resigned himself to making poverty row productions. All of which I find thoroughly enjoyable, such as his Bluebeard (1944) starring the ubiquitous John Carradine, Strange Illusion (1945), and film noir cult classic Detour (1945) starring Tom Neal and Ann Savage whose battered and desolate characters actually fit the noir cannon with an authentic realism despite the anemic budget. I also love The Strange Woman (1946) and another great film noir Ruthless (1948) with Zachary Scott. Ulmer still remained a very productive director with PRC, even if it was one of Hollywood’s bastard children. Studio head Leon Fromkess never gave Ulmer enough money to fund his pictures, Ulmer wanted to produce high-art films and first-class effects as his origin had come from a place where he was such a ”visual artist as well as a filmmaker. The one good by-product of the deal was that it gave him creative license to run with whatever vision he had for a working project of his.
