Category: Ubiquity

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #100 The Man Who Turned to Stone 1957

THE MAN WHO TURNED TO STONE 1957

The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957) is the kind of B-movie that seems to have crawled straight out of a late-night TV marathon, dripping with the sort of earnest absurdity only the 1950s could conjure. Directed by László Kardos—a journeyman of Hollywood’s lower rungs whose credits span everything from musicals to monster flicks—the film is a delightfully creaky relic, equal parts horror, sci-fi, and accidental camp.

The premise is as gloriously goofy as the title promises: a group of immortal 18th-century scientists, led by the stone-faced Dr. Murdock (played with a granite glare by Victor Jory), have been siphoning the life force from young women at a reform school to stave off their own transformation into literal stone statues.

The supporting cast is a roll call of B-movie regulars, with William Hudson and Charlotte Austin gamely navigating a plot that lurches between mad science and melodrama, their performances as earnest as serious as a lunch lady guarding the Jell-O. There’s Ann Doran as Mrs. Ford, Paul Cavanagh as Cooper, Tina Carver as Big Marge Collins, George Lynn as Dr. Freneau, Barbara Wilson as Anna Sherman, and Pierre Watkin as the Coroner Griffin. Jean Willes as Tracy. Willes had a prolific career in both film and television, often playing brassy, tough, or alluring characters. Some of her most notable roles and appearances include: Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956 as Nurse Sally Withers and Oceans Eleven 1960.

Cinematographer Benjamin H. Kline whose work was prominent in low-budget films, westerns and serials (The Man They Could Not Hang 1939, film noir Detour 1945, Zombies of Mora Tau 1957, The Giant Claw 1957), bathes the film in the shadowy, utilitarian black-and-white that was the bread and butter of Columbia’s B-unit, giving the reform school’s corridors a vaguely haunted, institutional chill. However, the real chills come from the stiff line readings and the villain’s petrified expressions.

Every frame seems to beg for a fog machine and a theremin, and the special effects—mostly actors holding very still while painted gray—are less terrifying transformations and more community theater statue contest gone wrong.

The imposing, stone-faced brute in The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957) is played by Friedrich von Ledebur (credited as Frederick Ledebur in the film), who portrays the character named Eric. Eric is a hulking, nearly mindless enforcer whose menacing presence and granite-like demeanor stalk the helpless girls at the reformatory.

Carol Adams is a staff social worker at the La Salle Detention Home for Girls. New to her position, she quickly becomes concerned by the suspiciously high number of otherwise healthy young inmates who died of heart attacks.

When one of the girls, Tracy, voices her suspicions about the home’s death rate, Carol takes her seriously and begins to investigate, despite warnings from the administration to stop snooping around. Carol reviews the institution’s death records, questions official explanations, and challenges the coroner’s findings, especially when a supposed suicide seems suspicious.

Facing pressure from the home’s management, Carol is nearly replaced, but Dr. Jess Rogers (William Hudson who starred in The She-Creature 1956, The Amazing Colossal Man as the lecherous louse Harry Archer, the beleaguered husband in this cult classic about Allison Hayes who grows to gigantic proportions in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman 1958), a newly assigned psychiatrist, believes her and asks her to stay on and assist with the investigation. Together, Carol and Dr. Rogers uncover the truth: the medical staff, led by Dr. Murdock, are centuries-old scientists using the girls’ life force to prolong their own lives, and Carol’s persistence is crucial in exposing their crimes and saving future victims from the petrifying clutches of these 200-year-old vampiric fossils.

The film has a parade of monster movie staples, each one begging for a wisecrack. There’s the life-draining machine, infamous rejeivenation devise – a sizable, industrial-looking steel bathtub— the young women from the detention home are sedated and placed into the tub, where the rejuvenation procedure takes place. The process involves not just the tub but also an array of pseudo-scientific equipment. It is absurd in its simplicity, including electrical headbands, blood transfusions, and wiring and dials, which are attached to facilitate the transfer of their “life force.” It all looks like something the prop department threw together after a trip to the local hardware store. The inevitable showdown in the basement laboratory, where the villains’ plot crumbles faster than their own craggy skin and pounding hearts trapped in their hardening bodies; their petrification the final nail in their stone coffins. Meanwhile, in the end, the reform school girls race out of the prison with wide-eyed panic as the bizarre events unfold around them, with science goes mad.

The dialogue is peppered with the kind of earnest warnings and pseudo-scientific jargon that makes you want to shout back at the screen. Yet for all its campiness and cheese, The Man Who Turned to Stone has a certain rock-solid charm. It’s a film that takes its own nonsense seriously, and in doing so, becomes a time capsule of mid-century anxieties—fear of aging, distrust of authority, and the ever-present threat of being turned into a garden ornament by a group of mad doctors on a mission.

Watching it is like stumbling on a forgotten relic in the attic: a little dusty, a little silly, but oddly endearing in its sincerity. In the end, Kardos’s film stands as a monument (pun fully intended) to the era’s B-movie spirit—a place where the monsters are men in pancake makeup, the science is pure baloney, and the only thing harder than the villain’s heart is his jawline.

#100 down, 50 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #94 THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG 1927/ THE LODGER 1944 & HANGOVER SQUARE 1945

Echoes in the Fog: The Lodger Legend and Its Shadows from Hitchcock to Hangover Square

THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG 1927

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) stands as a watershed moment in both his career and the evolution of the suspense thriller. Though it was his third feature, Hitchcock himself would later call it his “first true film,” and it’s easy to see why: here, the director’s signature obsessions—wrongly accused men, dangerous allure, and the shadow of violence—emerge fully formed, set against a fog-choked London that feels both timeless and distinctly modern.

Drawing from Marie Belloc Lowndes’s 1913 novel and its stage adaptation, the film takes its inspiration from the Jack the Ripper murders, but is less interested in true crime in reality it is more about the feverish paranoia that settles over a city when evil seems to be lurking just out of sight, prowling the streets.

The story itself is deceptively simple: a serial killer known as “The Avenger” is targeting blonde women, sending London into a state of panic. Right in the middle of all this, the mysterious lodger—played by Ivor Novello—shows up and rents a room from the Buntings just as the murders edge closer to home.

Novello is both magnetic and ambiguous; his haunted eyes and secretive ways make him suspicious and yet strangely fascinating, especially to the Buntings’ daughter Daisy (June Tripp).

As Daisy’s policeman boyfriend Joe (Malcolm Keen) gets more jealous and the Buntings’ suspicions grow, the film really tightens the noose of doubt around their lodger, leading to a dramatic sequence of accusation, pursuit, and mob justice before the truth finally comes to light.

Hitchcock’s direction, deeply influenced by the German Expressionist cinema he encountered in Berlin, is on full display. Working with cinematographer Gaetano di Ventimiglia, he floods the film with mist, shadow, and oblique camera angles, creating a visual world where fear and uncertainty seep into every frame.

The film’s look is both expressionist and modern: glass floors allow us to see the lodger’s anxious pacing from below, staircases become vertiginous chasms, and the fog itself seems to swallow up the city. The rhythm of the editing—dynamic, almost musical—heightens the sense of unease, while the absence of spoken dialogue only sharpens Hitchcock’s focus on pure visual storytelling.

The cast brings a strange, almost theatrical intensity to the film. Marie Ault and Arthur Chesney are quietly compelling as the Buntings, their growing fear for Daisy palpable in every gesture. June Tripp’s Daisy is luminous and vulnerable, while Malcolm Keen’s Joe simmers with suspicion. But it’s Novello who dominates, his performance walking a tightrope between innocence and menace. Hitchcock’s own cameo—his first—comes early, a sly touch that would become a trademark. Historically, The Lodger arrived at a moment when British cinema was searching for its own voice, and Hitchcock’s film was immediately recognized as a leap forward. Critics hailed its technical innovation and atmospheric power, and it quickly established Hitchcock as a director of rare vision.

The film’s themes—media-fueled hysteria, the dangers of mob justice, the ambiguity of guilt—feel as relevant today as they did nearly a century ago. What lingers most, though, is the film’s atmosphere: a city shrouded in fog, where every footstep echoes with dread, and where the line between hunter and hunted is never quite clear. The Lodger is not just a story of murder, but of suspicion, desire, and the perilous search for truth in the haunting, murky shadows.

THE LODGER 1944

John Brahm’s 1944 adaptation of The Lodger stands out as one of the most atmospheric and psychologically charged takes on the Jack the Ripper legend, setting the tone for the era’s horror cinema. Drawing once again from Lowndes’s 1913 novel, the film drops us right into a foggy, gaslit London where fear and suspicion seem to hang heavy in the air.

At the center are the Bontings, a respectable couple who are struggling to make ends meet. So they decide to rent a room to the enigmatic Mr. Slade—played by Laird Cregar—a brooding man whose unsettling habits and haunted look, which bears the mark of something dark and dangerous, quickly disturb the household.

Slade, played with mesmerizing intensity by Laird Cregar, is a figure both pitiable and terrifying, his every movement weighted with obsession and barely contained madness.

As the city reels from a series of brutal murders targeting actresses, Slade becomes fixated on the Bontings’ niece Kitty Langley (Merle Oberon), a luminous music-hall performer.

Laird Cregar was a remarkably gifted American actor whose brief career left a lasting impression on classic Hollywood cinema. Known for his commanding presence and expressive performances, Cregar excelled in roles that demanded both menace and vulnerability, bringing a unique depth to villains and tortured souls alike. He rose to prominence with standout performances in films such as I Wake Up Screaming (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), and,  notably, this role as the haunted Mr. Slade in The Lodger, followed by his performance as the tragic composer George Harvey Bone in Hangover Square (1945).

Cregar’s acting was marked by a rare ability to convey complex inner turmoil—his characters often seemed caught between longing and darkness, their emotional conflict visible in every gesture and expression.

Offscreen, Laird Cregar’s life was just as complicated. He was ambitious but also very aware of how his imposing size shaped the roles he was offered, struggling with Hollywood’s expectations of their leading men. This drove him to try a risky crash diet in hopes of landing more romantic parts. Sadly, this decision contributed to his early death at only 31. Privately, his sexuality was something only close friends and colleagues knew about, and his relationships—including a notable romance with actor David Bacon—were often the subject of both gossip and tragedy.

Despite his short life, Laird Cregar’s career was filled with highlights: he was celebrated for his villainous roles, brought unexpected sympathy to his darkest characters, and was praised by contemporaries for his stage work as well as his films. His performances in The Lodger and Hangover Square remain iconic, showcasing a talent that could evoke both fear and pity, and leaving a legacy as one of Hollywood’s most memorable and enigmatic actors.

As Mr. Slade, Cregar’s performance dominates the film, imbuing Slade with a tragic depth. His physical presence—imposing yet oddly vulnerable—makes him an unforgettable figure, whose yes are constantly shifting, moving between longing and menace, as if he’s always caught between wanting and warning at the same time.

The supporting cast brings their own vivid energy: Merle Oberon’s Kitty is both glamorous and sympathetic, while George Sanders, as the suave Inspector Warwick, brings a dry wit and dogged determination to the hunt for the killer. Wonderful character actors, Cedric Hardwicke and Sara Allgood, as the Bontings, ground the film with their blend of domestic warmth and deepening apprehension, their household slowly unraveling under the weight of suspicion.

What really stands out to me about The Lodger is how visually it leans into a moody, noir-inflected style. Lucien Ballard’s cinematography bathes everything in deep shadows and swirling fog, clearly inspired by German Expressionism. The result is a world that feels at once claustrophobic and strangely dreamlike.

Every frame seems alive with narrow alleyways, rain-slicked streets, and dark, shadowy interiors, conjuring a London that feels like it’s on the verge of hysteria.

The camera lingers on faces, hands, and fleeting, telling glances that say more than words, adding to the tension and uncertainty that drive the story forward.

And Hugo Friedhofer’s score? It quietly threads the film with a subtle but undeniable force that adds to the sense of doom, giving The Lodger its lingering, haunted melancholy that hangs over every scene.

Brahm tightly holds the reins—there’s this careful balance between those quiet, psychologically uneasy moments and sudden bursts of violence and panic. Compared to Hitchcock’s silent version, which focused more on suspicion and the threat of mob justice, this film seems to delve deeper into the psychology of its characters, especially Salde, whose twisted motivations are revealed in chilling detail. The story deviates from the novel and its earlier adaptations, but it manages to add a sense of unpredictability and dread. The Lodger isn’t so much a whodunit as it is about consuming shadows of fear and obsession.

The Lodger was released at a time when Hollywood was dealing with all the anxieties that come with war and the lingering shadows of the past. Brahm, a German émigré, brought a distinctly European sensibility to the film, blending that polished Hollywood studio gloss with the moody, intense vibe of 1930s Expressionism. The end result is a film that somehow feels both timeless and completely of its moment—a suspenseful, unsettling meditation on evil, desire, and the darkness that can hide behind even the most respectable facades.

In the end, The Lodger is less a straightforward thriller than a feverish portrait of a city—and a mind—unraveling. With its unforgettable performances, haunting visuals, and lingering sense of unease, it remains a high point of 1940s horror.

There is a memorable line in the 1944 film The Lodger that touches on the paradox of love and hate. Laird Cregar’s character, Mr. Slade, utters:

“To hate a thing and love it too, and to love it so much that you hate it.”

This line is delivered during one of Slade’s intense, confessional moments, revealing the tortured duality at the heart of his character. Slade is speaking to Kitty, who has become both his obsession and his undoing. The quote sums up the film’s central tension—Slade’s simultaneous attraction to and resentment of women, especially those who remind him of his tragic past. It’s a moment that not only deepens our understanding of Slade’s psychological torment but also highlights the film’s exploration of the thin, often blurred line between love and hate.

This duality drives the suspense and emotional complexity of The Lodger, leaving us unsettled by the realization that the two emotions can coexist so fiercely within a single soul and Cregar is masterful at bringing to life the aching duality of a soul at war with itself, embodying both longing and menace with a grace that makes his torment feel hauntingly real. His performance shimmers with the tension of a man forever caught between shadow and light, desire and dread, each emotion reflected in his face like a secret he can never quite escape.

HANGOVER SQUARE 1945

Cregar reignites his role as a tormented soul. Once again, John Brahm returns with Hangover Square (1945), a feverish, noir-soaked descent into madness, obsession, and the perilous intersection of art and violence. Set in Edwardian London, the film follows George Harvey Bone, a gifted composer played with haunting vulnerability and intensity by Laird Cregar. Bone’s life is a study in contrasts: outwardly gentle and unassuming, inwardly tormented by blackouts triggered by discordant sounds—episodes that leave him with no memory and, as we soon learns, a trail of violence in his wake.

The film opens with a jolt: Bone, in a fugue state, murders a shop owner and sets the scene ablaze, then stumbles home, bloodied and bewildered, unable to recall his actions. This pattern of lost time and chilling gloom becomes the film’s pulse as Bone seeks help from Dr. Allan Middleton (George Sanders), a renowned police surgeon and psychological consultant at Scotland Yard.

After committing the murder during one of his amnesiac episodes, George seeks help for his troubling blackouts. He confides in Barbara Chapman, played by Faye Marlowe, who is the supportive and caring daughter of Sir Henry Chapman, a well-known conductor and George Harvey Bone’s mentor, who takes him to see Dr. Middleton.

At the heart of Bone’s unraveling is his infatuation with Netta Longdon, a cunning and ambitious music hall singer brought to life by Linda Darnell. Netta’s beauty and charm mask a ruthless opportunism; she manipulates Bone’s affections, using his talent to advance her own career while stringing him along with false promises.

Cregar’s Bone is desperate, yearning, and increasingly unstable, while Darnell’s Netta is dazzling and cold, her self-interest sharpening every exchange. Faye Marlowe’s Barbara Chapman, the compassionate daughter of Bone’s mentor, offers a gentler counterpoint, her concern for Bone underscoring the tragedy of a man pulled between light and darkness.

Visually, Hangover Square is a vivid illustration of a noir/thriller atmosphere. Cinematographer Joseph LaShelle (Fallen Angel 1945, Road House 1948, Where the Sidewalk Ends 1950, Marty 1955, The Apartment 1960, How the West Was Won 1962) bathes the film in inky shadows and soft, gaslit haze, creating a world that feels both lush and claustrophobic. Brahm’s direction is dynamic and inventive—overhead shots, Dutch angles, and low perspectives lend a sense of instability and tension, mirroring Bone’s fractured psyche. The film’s most striking set pieces—particularly the Guy Fawkes bonfire scene, with masked revelers encircling a towering blaze—are both grandly theatrical and chillingly intimate, the camera swooping and gliding as Bone’s fate closes in around him.

Bernard Herrmann’s score is also integral to the film’s impact, his original piano concerto serving as both a narrative centerpiece and a psychological battleground. The music swells and recedes with Bone’s moods, the climactic concert sequence a brilliant flourish of sound and image: as flames consume the concert hall, Bone plays on, lost in his own creation, the boundaries between art, madness, and destruction dissolving in the inferno.

Hangover Square is rooted in the mood of its time. It starts with Patrick Hamilton’s 1941 novel, but is transformed into a kind of Gothic melodrama that’s full of the era’s anxieties. The Edwardian setting comes alive with all the rich period details—those sumptuous costumes, busy pubs, and clouds of smoke swirling through every scene. But what really sets the film apart is its noir edge, that constant sense of dread and inevitability running underneath it all that defines its style. Cregar’s performance, tragically his last truly, becomes the beating heart of the film. He embodies the duality of a man gifted and doomed. His torment is visible in every gesture, every look, and every move he makes.

In the end, Hangover Square is a story of a soul at war with itself, of love curdled into obsession, and of genius consumed by its own fire.

#94 Down, 56 to go! Your EverLovin Joey formally & affectionately known as MosnterGirl!

 

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #93 Let’s Scare Jessica to Death 1971

LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH 1971

Beneath Still Waters: Dream Logic and Dread in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death:

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, directed by John Hancock (who also directed the acclaimed baseball drama Bang the Drum Slowly 1973, which helped launch Robert De Niro’s career). In his remarkable debut, the film drifts between waking and nightmare, with its painterly images and whispered anxieties that linger. The narrative is elliptical, with threads left unresolved and characters’ motives remaining opaque, but this only deepens the film’s hypnotic power.

At its center is Zohra Lampert’s Jessica, a woman recently released from an institution, whose fragile hope for renewal is as delicate as the sunlight that dapples the Connecticut countryside where the film was shot. Jessica, her husband Duncan (Barton Heyman), and their friend Woody (Kevin O’Connor) arrive at a remote, timeworn farmhouse in a hearse marked with a peace symbol—an emblem of post-hippie dreams now faded and ghostly.

Duncan, keeps a large upright string instrument with him throughout the film—specifically, an upright bass (also known as a double bass or string bass). This instrument is so large that its case is often mistaken for a coffin, a visual motif that adds to the film’s atmosphere of unease and mortality. In fact, the group travels in a black hearse, partly because it’s the only vehicle big enough to transport Duncan’s bass, further blurring the line between the practical and the morbid.

Duncan is a professional musician who has left his position as an upright bassist with the New York Philharmonic in order to move to the countryside with Jessica in pursuit of her recovery. The bass’s presence in their farmhouse isn’t just a piece of his old life—it’s a subtle reminder of everything he’s left behind. The case itself, with its unmistakably striking visual throughout the film and its coffin shape, quietly hints at the weight of the past and ever-present specter of death that always seems to hang over the story. In one of the film’s most unsettling moments, the case is even used to conceal a corpse, cementing its eerie, morbid resonance within the narrative.

From the very beginning, the trio’s attempt at a fresh start is overshadowed by Jessica’s quiet inner monologue, which sets an uneasy tone. Delivered in a hushed, acutely intimate voiceover, it blurs the line between where her troubled thoughts end and the world around her begins.

The film’s sound design, punctuated by Orville Stoeber’s eerie score and the ambient noises of wind, water, and whispers, draws us into Jessica’s uncertain reality, where every creak and sigh might be a symptom or an actual haunting.

The story unfolds with a folkloric simplicity: Jessica, Duncan, and Woody discover a mysterious young woman, Emily (Mariclare Costello), squatting in their new home. Emily’s presence is both inviting and unsettling, welcoming and strangely off-putting, and her enigmatic charm quickly draws both men in. Jessica can’t shake the uneasy feeling that something isn’t quite right.

Later, while sorting through the dust-laden attic, Jessica uncovers an old, sepia photograph—a haunting image of the red-haired woman in a white wedding dress, whose features mirror Emily’s exactly, the past and present collapsing in a single, uncanny gaze that sets her on edge.

The nearby town is populated almost exclusively by hostile, bandaged old men, and the absence of women adds to the sense of something fundamentally wrong.

The film is filled with dreamlike, disorienting moments, and Jessica’s sense of reality is often hazy. The townspeople with scars are mostly seen in daylight, behaving coldly and suspiciously toward Jessica and her husband, along with Woody. It is implied that these locals are under the influence of vampirism. The scars Jessica notices as she interacts with them, and their strange presence, add to her growing paranoia and the film’s eerie atmosphere. Much of the horror and tension in the film comes from Jessica’s internal experience—her voiceovers, visions, and the way ordinary scenes take on a nightmarish quality.

As Jessica tries to settle in—making tombstone rubbings, exploring their orchard, and seeking solace in the landscape—she is haunted by visions of a spectral girl in white (Gretchen Corbett) and the persistent feeling that she is being watched and threatened. The farmhouse itself, with its peeling wallpaper and sunlit decay, becomes a character in its own right. Every shadow and reflection only amplifies Jessica’s sense of dread.

Hancock’s direction, along with Robert M. Baldwin’s cinematography, gives the film a dreamy, painterly, almost impressionistic quality. The way the camera hangs on shots of water, trees, or faces—especially when Jessica’s alone—often frames her isolation, her vulnerability, making the beautiful world around her both gorgeous and yet indifferent.

The film’s palette is soft and naturalistic, but the mood does not evoke comfort. Everything plays out with this strange, dreamlike logic—Jessica glimpses figures under the water, hears voices that may or may not be real. Are they just in her head? And she shrinks in fear from the locals’ cryptic warnings. The ambiguity is deliberate — Hancock, clearly inspired by stories like Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, creates a world where the supernatural is never fully confirmed, leaving us to question whether Jessica’s fears are rooted in reality or her own unraveling mind.

Jessica’s unease sharpens into disorienting panic as she moves through the small, insular town, gradually noticing the unsettling similarity etched onto every man’s face and neck—a strange, livid scar that seems to mark them all. The realization of this shared sigil, this brotherhood of scars, creeps over Jessica in slow, chilling waves; each encounter with one of the townsfolk brings another glimpse of that same jagged line, puckered and pale against their skin, as if they all share in some secret wound. What is its origin? We are left to wonder. The men’s wary stares and guarded silences only deepen the sense of isolation closing in around her, leaving Jessica with the inescapable feeling that she has stumbled into a place marked by a silent, collective curse.

As Jessica lies in bed, paralyzed by fear and the oppressive silence of the old house, the grave rubbings she has pinned to the walls begin to stir. One by one, the delicate sheets flutter and lift, as if caught by an invisible breeze or the exhalation of some unseen presence. The papers billow outward, filling the dim room with a soft, unsettling rustle, while Jessica, wide-eyed and trembling, senses the weight of the house’s secrets pressing in from every shadow.

There are key scenes that linger in my memory: Jessica’s first sight of the ethereal girl in white beckoning her by the lake, the group’s awkward dinner with Emily, the whispered warnings and sudden violence that erupt as the story spirals toward its conclusion and the film’s climax set against the backdrop of the misty lake and the encroaching darkness, is both terrifying and tragic, as Jessica’s grip on sanity slips away and the boundaries between folklore and psychosis dissolve entirely.

One of the film’s most mesmerizing moments—and perhaps its most arresting—unfolds when, in the pale hush of a quiet afternoon, Jessica and the red-haired Emily, who is like a ghostly mermaid, drift together in the still, glassy water. Everything feels calm, almost suspended, until suddenly the world seems to hold its breath as a spectral figure, chalk- white in the tattered remnants of a wedding dress, emerges silently from the depths. There’s something haunting about her face – a mix of longing, sorrow, and menace – as she glides toward Jessica with her arms reaching out, desperate for an embrace. Water beads up on her translucent skin as she floats toward Jessica, the fabric of her gown billows around her like ectoplasm. In a heartbeat, the scene turns nightmarish—the apparition seizes Jessica, dragging her beneath the surface, cold hands closing around her in a suffocating grip. The lake, moments before a place of fragile peace, becomes eerily silent like one of the weathered headstones Jessica traces with her paper and charcoal. There, the lake seems to have swallowed up old tragedies; the town seems to keep guarded. Gasping for breath and trembling with terror, Jessica breaks free from the phantom Emily’s grip beneath the water and scrambles to the shore, stumbling away from the lake’s haunted embrace.

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is less a conventional horror film than a psychological folk tale, steeped in the anxieties of its era but timeless in its evocation of fear and isolation. Its moodiness is palpable—every frame seems to tremble with uncertainty, every face hides secrets, and every sound carries the possibility of menace. Lampert’s performance is the film’s fragile heart, her vulnerability and yearning drawing us into Jessica’s world until we, too, are unsure what is real. The film’s haunting visuals and surreal soundscape, and ambiguous narrative make it a singular work—a ghost story, a vampire tale, and a meditation on madness, all woven together intricately bound and as delicate and unsettling as Jessica herself.

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971) & The Night God Screamed (1971)-Leave Your Faith, Fear and Sanity at the Water’s Edge. Part I

#93 Down, 57 to go! Your EverLovin Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #92 LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE (Let Sleeping Corpses Lie) 1974 & TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD 1972

Jorge Grau’s The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974), also known as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, and Amando de Ossorio’s Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972) stand as two of the most distinctive European horror films of the early 1970s, each leaving a unique mark on the evolving zombie subgenre. Both films, though sharing the undead as their central threat, diverge sharply in tone, style, and thematic focus, reflecting their directors’ sensibilities and the cinematic currents of their time.

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, directed by Grau and starring Ray Lovelock as George and Cristina Galbó as Edna, opens with a collision—literal and metaphorical—between countercultural youth and a suspicious, conservative establishment. After Edna accidentally damages George’s motorcycle while reversing her car at a petrol station, he insists on her giving him a ride to the Lake District, where he was heading. These two strangers are forced to travel together through the English countryside, their journey soon intersecting with a series of bizarre and grisly murders.

The catalyst for the horror is an experimental agricultural machine emitting ultrasonic radiation, allegedly to kill insects but inadvertently reanimating the dead. As the narrative unfolds, George and Edna become entangled in a web of suspicion, with Arthur Kennedy’s Inspector embodying the era’s institutional mistrust and willful ignorance, more interested in scapegoating the living than confronting the supernatural truth.

Spanish filmmaker Jorge Grau also directed Ceremonia sangrienta (1973), also known as Legend of Blood Castle or The Female Butcher, which delves into the legend of Countess Bathory. Showcasing his versatility across drama and social commentary, Grau also directed the crime thriller Violent Blood Bath (1974) starring Fernando Rey and Marisa Mell.

Grau’s film is notable for its slow-burn structure, beginning as a murder mystery before gradually revealing its zombie threat. The cinematography, marked by bleak rural landscapes and overcast skies, lends the film a grounded, almost documentary realism that heightens the shock when violence erupts into a gruesome and disturbing explosion of carnage.

In the early moments of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, Edna is alone because she has gotten out of the car to ask for directions to her sister’s house. George is elsewhere, having left Edna to continue on foot after their earlier encounter at the petrol station. A hush falls over the misty countryside as Edna finds herself alone by the riverbank, the world around her is eerily quiet except for the sound of the lapping of water and the distant call of birds breaking the silence.

Then out of the tangled undergrowth, a figure emerges—gaunt, mud-streaked, and impossibly pale, its movements slow and ponderous, eyes empty and lifeless, glazed with the blankness of death. And there’s something unmistakably menacing about the way it lumbers forward with a heavy, unnatural gait, arms reaching out as if drawn to her living presence. Edna, paralyzed by disbelief, watches as the dead man draws nearer – his clothes soaked and breath rasping in the cold morning air—draws closer. With every dragging step he takes, the tension coils tighter, until instinct seizes her and she flees the scene, stumbling through the tall grass, her heart pounding. 

Behind her, the nightmare in pursuit moves relentlessly and silently, a grim warning of the terror that is only beginning to unfold. This scene perfectly captures the film’s blend of dread and melancholy; the rural landscape is forever tainted by the shuffling presence of the undead. 

Another moment that marks the film with building dread: Trapped inside a stone crypt surrounded by zombies. After following noises to a crypt, George and Edna discover an empty casket and a murdered man. They are then locked inside, where they encounter the zombified vagrant who proceeds to bring other corpses to life. The situation escalates as the newly awakened zombies surround them, forcing George and Edna to escape through a hole into a freshly dug grave. The tension continues as the zombies pursue them into the church, leading to a desperate barricade and harrowing confrontation.

The hospital scene in The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is a crescendo of horror and chaos, suffused with dread and visceral violence. As the experimental radiation triggers a new wave of reanimation, the hospital’s morgue becomes ground zero for the undead uprising. Bodies that were moments before silent and cold now lurch from refrigerated caskets, their pallid flesh bearing the marks of autopsy incisions and death’s indignities. The sterile corridors are soon awash with panic as the zombies descend upon the living. In a particularly gruesome moment, a small squad of undead attacks a hospital receptionist, first strangling her, then tearing into her flesh with feral intensity, rending skin and muscle, and ripping out organs with a grotesque, clinical brutality.

The carnage spreads rapidly: Dr. Duffield (Vicente Vega) is killed, and Katie (Jeannine Mestre), already shattered by trauma, is murdered and reanimated, turning on her own sister Edna in a nightmarish reversal. The hospital, once a place of healing, is transformed into a claustrophobic slaughterhouse, its fluorescent-lit halls echoing with screams and the relentless shuffle of the dead.

Too late to save her, George’s desperate arrival, the horrifying sight of Edna is shocking —her features now cold and lifeless. She has been killed by the zombies, and she is among those who have fallen victim to the undead.

The sequence culminates in a fiery confrontation, as he sets the walking dead ablaze in a last-ditch effort to stem the tide, but the devastation is total—flames and blood marking the end of hope within those walls.

Following these events, George is shot and killed by the Inspector, who still refuses to believe in the existence of zombies. The film concludes with the Inspector returning to his hotel room, only to be set upon and killed by a now-zombified George.

The zombies themselves are memorable for their restraint—shambling, deliberate, and eerily silent, they feel less like supernatural monsters and more like a grim byproduct of environmental meddling and bureaucratic hubris.

The film’s memorable moments are Edna’s first attack by a river-dampened corpse, the tense siege in the church where the undead corner Edna and George, and the climactic hospital massacre, where the full consequences of the government’s experiment are unleashed. The film’s ending, with George killed by the Inspector only to return as a zombie and exact revenge, closes the narrative loop with a bitter sense of institutional failure.

The impact of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue lies in its fusion of ecological anxiety, social critique, and visceral horror. While it draws inspiration from Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, it distinguishes itself with its focus on systemic collapse and the dangers of scientific overreach. Its practical effects, rural setting, and unflinching violence helped cement its reputation as a cult classic and a standout in the European zombie canon.

In contrast, Tombs of the Blind Dead, directed by Amando de Ossorio and starring Lone Fleming as Betty, César Burner as Roger, and María Elena Arpón as Virginia, weaves a haunting, almost folkloric tale rooted in Spanish history and legend.

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972) is set in motion when Betty (Lone Fleming), her old friend Virginia (María Elena Arpón), and Roger (César Burner) reunite for a countryside holiday. During a tense train journey, Virginia, jealous of the rekindled connection between Betty and Roger, impulsively jumps from the moving train and wanders into the ruins of the medieval town of Berzano- a cursed medieval town. There, she decides to spend the night, unknowingly awakening the cursed Knights Templar—blind, undead revenants whose eyes were pecked out after their execution for black magic and human sacrifice centuries earlier. They rise nightly to hunt the living, guided only by sound. The Templars awaken from their tombs and kill Virginia.

The next day, Betty and Roger, alarmed by Virginia’s disappearance, retrace her steps and become entangled in the legend of the Blind Dead. After Virginia’s brutal death, her friends’ investigation leads them back to Berzano, where they, along with a smuggler, Pedro (José Thelman), and his girlfriend, Maria Silva, search. As night falls, the Knights slaughter most of the group, forcing Betty to flee.

In the harrowing climax, Betty manages to escape the cursed village and scramble onto a passing train, desperate for safety, only to find that the relentless Templars are not far behind – they follow her, boarding the train and unleashing a brutal massacre upon the passengers. It all unfolds into a chilling tableau of nihilistic devastation.

By the time the train pulls into the next station, all that’s left is the grim aftermath of the Templars’ rampage. This unforgettable sequence is widely regarded as one of the film’s most unforgettable and disturbing moments, ending with onlookers recoiling in horror at the grisly spectacle within, bringing the true horror of the Blind Dead into stark relief.

Tombs of the Blind Dead is distinguished by its atmosphere and visual style. Ossorio’s use of slow motion, fog-drenched ruins, and the skeletal, robed knights on horseback creates a dreamlike, hypnotic mood.

The cinematography emphasizes empty vistas and ghostly silence, making the Templars’ attacks all the more surreal and terrifying. The film’s violence is less explicit than its Italian contemporaries, relying instead on suggestion and the uncanny presence of the Blind Dead. Some of the most memorable moments in Tombs of the Blind Dead are the chilling resurrection of the Knights, their eerie, silent hunts, and, of course, the infamous train massacre—a sequence that’s become a landmark in European horror.

The film gives us a twisted backstory for the Order of Templar Knights, painting them as the 11th-century Crusaders. Having returned from the East with forbidden knowledge, they were fanatical, heretical, and bloodthirsty. They broke away from the church and got caught up in dark occult rituals to gain immortality. 

In flashbacks, we see them sacrificing a bound young woman in a gruesome blood rite, slashing her throat and drinking her blood in their quest for eternal life. It’s this act that transforms them into the terrifying, undead revenants who rise from their graves each night to hunt the living. After the villagers rebelled against their depravity, the Templars were executed, and birds pecked out their eyes as their bodies hung from the gallows, leaving them blind in death but still guided by the sounds of their victims.

Tombs of the Blind Dead inaugurated a new subgenre of Spanish horror, spawning three sequels and influencing countless filmmakers with its blend of Gothic horror, folklore, and social commentary.

Though products of their time, both films remain relevant for their subversive takes on authority, history, and the undead. Where The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue channels 1970s anxieties about science and social order through a lens of grim realism, Tombs of the Blind Dead evokes the enduring power of myth and the horror of history repeating itself.

Together, they showcase just how creative and varied European horror cinema was in the early 1970s, each offering a distinct vision of the apocalypse. The undead’s relentless presence on screen remains just as unsettling with their ability to fascinate us as ever, showing no signs of ceasing their ravenous pursuit on the cinematic stage any time soon.

#92 Down, 58 to go! Your EverLovin Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #91 Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural 1974

LEMORA: A CHILD’S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 1974

Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural 1974 is a nightmarish reverie pressed onto celluloid, a Gothic hymn sung from the wild, swampy margins of American horror cinema. Directed and written by Richard Blackburn (he co-wrote the acclaimed black comedy Eating Raoul 1982 however, Lemora remains his only feature film as director), who also steps into the role of the Reverend, the film is a strange and beautiful anomaly—an indie production shot on the outskirts of Pomona, California, but set in a shadow-haunted South during Prohibition, where the boundaries between innocence and corruption dissolve like mist at dawn. Lemora unfurls like a dark, whimsical dream—an adult fairytale spun from nightmare and moonlight, where innocence is both enchanted and endangered. Each shadowed corridor and haunted lullaby beckons us to move deeper into a phantasmagoria of longing and unearthly solemnity, weaving a spell that is as beguiling as it is unsettling.

At the story’s trembling heart is Lila Lee, played with ethereal fragility by Cheryl Smith. Lila is a “singing angel,” a 13-year-old church girl whose voice fills the pews and whose beauty is both her shield and her curse. Orphaned by violence—her gangster father, Alvin Lee (William Whitton), has vanished after a bloody act—Lila is raised by the Reverend, a man of conflicted virtue whose paternal care is shadowed by unspoken longing.

When a letter arrives from the mysterious Lemora (Lesley Gilb, billed as Lesley Taplin), summoning Lila to the dying bedside of her father in the remote town of Astaroth (a name that H.P. Lovecraft could have conjured from his fevered imagination), the girl’s journey begins—a pilgrimage that is also a descent, a fairy tale road spiraling into nightmare.

Cheryl Lynn “Rainbeaux” Smith was a luminous presence in 1970s cult and exploitation cinema, her screen persona a blend of innocence and melancholy that seemed to radiate both vulnerability and quiet strength. Born in Los Angeles in 1955, Smith was raised by a vaudeville dancer mother and a brick mason father, growing up just off the Sunset Strip—a setting that would shape her bohemian spirit and early immersion in the world of music and film. She left high school to pursue acting, making her debut in the award-winning short The Birth of Aphrodite before landing her first major role as the haunted Lila Lee in Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural, where her ethereal beauty and genuine fragility became the film’s emotional core.

Smith’s career blossomed quickly. She became a fixture of B-movies and cult classics, starring in films like Caged Heat (1974), The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Massacre at Central High (1976), and Laserblast (1978).

She also appeared in more mainstream fare, including Farewell, My Lovely (1975), and had a memorable turn as Cinderella in Michael Pataki’s 1977 adaptation. Her performances often carried an “enchanting quality of disconsolate beauty,” making her riveting to watch even in the most offbeat or low-budget productions.

Smith was also a musician, playing drums for several bands and briefly associating with the legendary girl group The Runaways. Her bohemian lifestyle and the Sunset Strip’s counterculture scene earned her the nickname “Rainbeaux,” a moniker she embraced throughout her career.

Tragically, Smith’s promising trajectory was derailed by heroin addiction in the late 1970s. Substance abuse led to legal troubles, time in prison, and declining health. Despite her struggles, she continued to work sporadically in film and music, contributing to soundtracks and even designing tattoos for fellow inmates during her incarcerations. Smith died in Los Angeles in 2002 at the age of 47. The cause of death was complications from hepatitis brought on by years of drug use. Her legacy endures in the cult film community, where her performances—especially in Lemora—are remembered for their haunting sincerity and the bittersweet aura of a talent lost too soon.

Byrd Holland’s makeup artistry in Lemora conjures a world where the flesh itself seems haunted. Faces are powdered to a deathly pallor, eyes ringed with shadows that whisper of sleepless centuries, and every wrinkle or wound is rendered with an almost painterly care. The vampires’ visages are both grotesque and mournful, their skin waxen and otherworldly, as if lit from within by the cold glow of the grave. Holland’s work transforms the cast into spectral figures adrift in a waking nightmare, each face a mask of beauty corrupted and innocence undone. Holland also worked on the cult film The Baby 1973 starring Hollywood’s earthy sex symbol Ruth Roman.

The film’s opening movements are bathed in the golden light of lost innocence, but as Lila boards a bus to Astaroth, the palette shifts: colors become bruised, shadows lengthen, and the world grows strange. The bus ride itself is a passage through a liminal realm, the driver (Hy Pyke) a cackling ferryman, the landscape outside dissolving into a twilight netherworld and spectral wasteland, that is the nocturnal swamp. When the bus is attacked by feral vampires—ghouls more beast than human—Lila is thrust into a world ruled by hunger and decay, rescued only by the enigmatic Lemora, whose beauty is as chilling as it is alluring.

Lemora’s domain is a surreal Gothic tableau: a crumbling mansion and stone cottage, inhabited by pallid, sickly children and the crone-like Solange (Maxine Ballantyne). Mirrors are absent, meat is served raw, and the air vibrates with the cries of unseen things. The cinematography by Robert Caramico is lush and impressionistic, draping every frame in velvet shadow and moonlit blue, while Dan Neufeld’s score—a tapestry of eerie flutes, claviers, and music box melodies—turns the soundtrack into a haunted lullaby.

Key scenes unfold with the logic of a nightmare: In the flickering gloom of the stone cottage, Lila finds herself locked away and cornered by Solange, the ancient crone whose presence is as chilling as the grave. With a cracked, sing-song voice, Solange circles the frightened girl, her gnarled fingers clutching a bowl of food, her eyes gleaming with a mad, knowing light. She mistakes Lila for another lost soul, Mary Jo, and begins to croon a twisted nursery rhyme—Old Lady All Skin and Bones—each verse a macabre lullaby that seems to summon the shadows closer. The air thickens with dread as Solange’s singsong taunt echoes off the stone, her movements weaving a spell of terror around Lila, who is left trembling in the center of this spectral nursery, haunted by the specter of all the children who have vanished before her.

Lila’s escape from her prison, crawling under the house like Alice into Wonderland’s underbelly; her first glimpse of Lemora feeding on a child, framed through a window as if peering into the forbidden; the macabre waltz in which Lemora twirls Lila among her “adopted” children, a dizzying dance of seduction and surrender. All these moments deepen the brooding magic of the film’s spell.

The film’s most indelible image may be the two factions of vampires at war: Lemora’s pale, aristocratic brood and the degenerate, animalistic ghouls who prowl the woods—a metaphor for the duality of desire and decay that pulses through the film’s veins.

As Lila uncovers the truth—and finally comes face to face with her father, who is a monster, Lemora the queen of vampires, and she herself the coveted prize in an ancient ceremony—the film becomes an allegory of lost innocence and the seductive pull of forbidden knowledge. The Reverend’s pursuit of Lila, his own faith tested and found wanting, ends in a final, chilling reversal: Lila, transformed, welcomes him with a kiss that is both sacrament and damnation, her fangs gleaming as he succumbs to his desires.

The performances are as stylized as the visuals: Smith’s Lila is a study in tremulous purity, her wide eyes reflecting both terror and awakening curiosity; Lesley Gilb’s Lemora is a statuesque, enigmatic predator, her affection for Lila tinged with both maternal tenderness and predatory hunger. Blackburn’s Reverend is a portrait of conflicted piety, his sermons echoing with the hypocrisy and repression that the film quietly skewers.

Lemora is a film of moods and metaphors, a southern Gothic fable that moves with the languor of a dream and the inevitability of a curse. Its low budget is transmuted by creativity into atmosphere: fog coils through the woods, shadows pool in corners, and the night is alive with the croak of frogs and the wail of the “old ones.” The look of the film is lush yet decayed, every frame a painting where innocence is stalked by corruption, and every sound a whisper from the dark.

To watch Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural is to wander through a labyrinth of childhood fears and adult desires, to be seduced by the promise of immortality and undone by the loss of innocence. It is a film that lingers, like a half-remembered nightmare or a hymn sung in a minor key—a cult classic whose beauty is inseparable from its dread, and whose tale of transformation is as old as the lurking shadows themselves.

Lemora: a Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973) & Dream No Evil (1970) Journeys of: The Innocent/Absent Father Archetype & Curse of the Lamia or “Please don’t tresspass on my nightmare!”

#91 Down, 59 to go! Your EverLovin Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #90 The Legend of Hell House 1973

THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE 1973

SPOILER ALERT!

The Legend of Hell House 1973 is yet another film that beckons for a deeper plunge at The Last Drive-In—a haunted corridor I’m eager to wander, lantern in hand, to retrace every oppressive shadow and secrets it hides. There’s a richness here that calls for more than a passing glance; I want to let its mysteries breathe, and let its ghosts speak in the flickering devouring darkness. It’s the film’s spectral hush—the way these particualr actors and Hough’s immersive direction moves through oppressive rooms thick with velvet gloom, and the cinematography bathes every moment in a dreamy, saturated, colorful, and sometimes even garish visual unease—that lures me back, hungry to unravel the secrets woven into its moody, unmistakably ’70s echo of fear. It’s just a film that I love to revisit with the unflagging enthusiasm of a devoted acolyte sneaking back for just one more midnight sermon at the altar of classic horror.

John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973) is a tour de force of chilling precision in Gothic atmosphere and psychological dread, a film that lingers in the mind like a cold draft through a shuttered corridor. Adapted by Richard Matheson from his own novel, the story assembles a quartet of investigators—physicist Dr. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill), his wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt), spiritualist Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), and the deeply guarded medium Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall)—and sets them loose inside the notorious Belasco House, a mansion whose history is steeped in sadism, debauchery, and unexplained death. The house, once home to the monstrous Emeric Belasco (Michael Gough), looms over the English countryside, its Edwardian grandeur cloaked in perpetual mist and shadow, thanks to the evocative, prolific cinematography of Alan Hume (The Avenger’s tv series, The Kiss of the Vampire 1963, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors 1965, The Watcher in the Woods 1980, Eye of the Needle 1981, For Your Eyes Only 1981, A View to a Kill 1985), Hough’s direction resists cheap shocks, instead letting the lighting, art direction, and the house itself do the heavy lifting—rooms recede into darkness, fog seeps through the grounds, and every antique surface seems to hum with the residue of the past. The art direction for The Legend of Hell House was handled by Robert Jones, who is credited as the set designer, and Kenneth McCallum Tait served as the assistant art director.

Richard Matheson’s work is a bridge between the ordinary and the uncanny, fusing everyday American life with the pulse of supernatural dread. With a style marked by clarity and emotional directness, Matheson transformed the landscape of horror and science fiction, bringing the genre out of Gothic castles and into the suburbs, where existential fears and the supernatural could thrive side by side. His novels—like I Am Legend adapted to the screen as The Last Man on Earth 1964 starring Vincent Price and The Omega Man 1971, Hell House, and The Shrinking Man—and his iconic scripts for The Twilight Zone are celebrated for their psychological depth, philosophical themes, and the way they probe the boundaries of reality and identity. Matheson’s influence is felt in the work of countless writers and filmmakers, his stories lingering like a chill in the air, reminding us that the extraordinary is never far from the surface of the everyday.

The film’s atmosphere is intensified by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson’s electronic score, which pulses and flickers like ghostly static, and by the cinema verité touches that lend the proceedings a sense of clinical documentary realism, as if we are witnessing a real-time experiment in terror.

The investigators arrive a week before Christmas, hired by a dying millionaire to prove or disprove the existence of life after death. Barrett, the skeptic, brings with him a machine designed to purge the house of its psychic energy, while Florence is convinced that the spirits are intelligent survivors, desperate for release. Fischer, the only survivor of a previous investigation, keeps his psychic defenses up, warning that the house is only dangerous to those who “poke around.”

From the outset, the house with a legacy of historic debauchery asserts itself. Ann is plagued by erotic visions, manipulated by the house’s unseen forces until she is driven to a humiliating trance. Florence, determined to free what she believes is the tormented soul of Belasco’s son, is repeatedly assailed, including being scratched by a possessed cat. When the black cat attacks, it is not an animal but a living curse, a dart of shadow flung from the house’s festering heart. From the scratches, Florence’s blood blooms on her skin, a crimson signature from the house that will not let her go. As spectral forces assault Florence, she is ultimately seduced and possessed by the entity itself.

Barrett’s rationalism is tested as he is battered by invisible hands. He is caught off guard – while he is physically attacked by poltergeist phenomena—objects flying, doors slamming, and other manifestations—he consistently rationalizes these as the result of “unfocused electromagnetic energy” rather than conscious spirits.

The machine he builds hums with hope, a fragile bulwark against the tide of the inexplicable, but the house mocks him, bending science until it snaps. When he fails, it is as if the house itself has reached out, flexing its invisible muscles in a final, contemptuous embrace. Ultimately, the group’s alliances fray under the strain of constant psychic assault. The house’s evil is not just spectral, but psychological, worming its way into the insecurities and desires of its guests.

Each room in Belasco House is a wound that never healed, its corridors whispering with the ghosts of laughter curdled into screams. The investigators cross the threshold not as guests but as offerings, swallowed by velvet shadows that seem to pulse with the memory of old sins. The air itself is thick—perfumed with the musk of centuries-old secrets, as if the walls have absorbed every act of cruelty and excess, and now exhale them in slow, poisonous breaths.

Florence’s séance is a ritual dance on a fault line, her voice trembling as she reaches for the dead. The table quivers, the candles burn unevenly, sputtering, and something ancient stirs—an invisible hand brushing the nape of her neck, a chill that seeps into the marrow. During the séance, Florence, a spiritual medium, enters a trance state as the group attempts to contact the spirits haunting the house. In this heightened moment, a visible, gauzy substance, otherworldly and almost hypnotic—ectoplasm—begins to emerge from her fingers and mouth, bathed in light, swirling and coalescing in the dim candlelight. The air in the room seems to thicken as the ectoplasm takes on a life of its own, snaking outward in vaporous tendrils that shimmer and pulse with an uncanny energy. The substance appears almost alive, wavering between the material and the ethereal, as if the boundary between the living and the dead is being breached before our eyes. The lighting in the séance scene is distinctly red, casting the entire room—and the ectoplasm—in a harsh, almost infernal, hellish glow.

Film historians and critics have noted the impact of this sequence within the haunted house genre. The scene is frequently cited as a highlight, not just for its technical execution but for how it embodies the film’s central conflict between science and spiritualism. It grounds the supernatural in a quasi-scientific context. While earlier films like The Haunting (1963) masterfully evoked the unseen, The Legend of Hell House pushed the genre forward by visualizing the supernatural in a way that was both tactile and chilling. The séance and its ectoplasmic spectacle are a groundbreaking moment, bridging the gap between the subtlety of psychological horror and the more explicit, physical hauntings that we would see in later films.

Ann’s descent is more insidious—a fever dream of desire and shame. The house seduces her with phantoms, stroking her loneliness until she is raw and exposed. Mirrors become portals, reflecting not her face but the house’s hungry gaze, and she is left gasping, uncertain whether the touch she feels is her own longing or the house’s spectral caress.

Key scenes unfold with mounting intensity: Florence’s discovery of a skeleton walled up in the house, her desperate funeral for the supposed spirit, the brutal attack in the chapel where a crucifix falls and crushes her, and her dying message scrawled in blood—a clue to the house’s secret.

Florence’s final moments are a tableau of martyrdom: her body flung by unseen forces, her blood scrawling a desperate message on the chapel floor. The crucifix that crushes her is both weapon and warning, a symbol of faith twisted by the house’s appetite for suffering. Her death is not an ending but a punctuation mark in the house’s endless litany of pain.

Barrett, convinced his machine can cleanse the house, activates it with apparent success, only to be killed in a sudden resurgence of supernatural violence. It falls to Fischer, finally dropping his psychic guard, to confront the true source of the haunting. In the film’s climax, he taunts Belasco’s spirit, exposing the legend as a grotesque fraud: the “Roaring Giant” was a small, stunted man who used prosthetic legs and a lead-lined room to create an illusion of power and invulnerability. The revelation is both grotesque and pitiable, a final unmasking that brings the house’s reign of terror to an end.

And in the end, Fischer stands alone, his psychic defenses stripped away, facing the house’s true master. The revelation of Belasco’s grotesque secret is the final unmasking—a monstrous ego shrunken by its own excess, the architect of Hell House revealed as a pathetic wraith clinging to the ruins of his own legend. The house sighs, its torments spent, and the silence that follows is not peace but exhaustion—a haunted lullaby echoing through halls forever stained by the revels of the damned.

The Curious Charisma of Roddy McDowall: A Life in Art and Film

In The Legend of Hell House, every key scene is a shiver in the spine of the house itself, each moment a ripple in the black pool of its history. Terror creeps not as a sudden storm, but as a slow, rising flood—drowning reason, desire, and faith alike in the cold, unblinking gaze of the supernatural.

The cast is uniformly excellent: McDowall’s Fischer is a study in haunted reserve, Franklin’s Florence is both passionate and tragic, and Revill’s Barrett is all brittle confidence until the house breaks him. Hunnicutt’s Ann, caught between desire and dread, grounds the film’s more outlandish moments with real emotional stakes. Hough’s steady hand ensures that the supernatural is always rooted in character, and that the house itself—its fog, its shadows, its oppressive silence—is as much a player as any living soul.

The Legend of Hell House endures as one of the great haunted house films, its impact felt in the way it fuses the Gothic tradition with modern anxieties about science, sexuality, and belief. Its atmosphere is thick and unrelenting, its scares earned through suggestion and slow-building dread rather than spectacle. The film leaves us with the sense that some houses rot and remember.

#90 Down, 60 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #89 Kwaidan 1964

KWAIDAN 1964

Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964) is a cinematic spell, a ghostly symphony of shadows and color painted from Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese folk tales. Kwaidan is an anthology of four unrelated stories, each a self-contained descent into the uncanny.

It is not a film that startles so much as it entrances, its four stories unfolding with the slow inevitability of a dream—each segment a meditation on beauty, terror, and the spectral boundaries between the living and the dead.

Kobayashi, (The Human Condition Trilogy (No Greater Love [1959], Road to Eternity [1959], A Soldier’s Prayer [1961])—an epic, nearly ten-hour antiwar saga that stands as one of the most significant achievements in world cinema, Harakiri (Seppuku, 1962)—a powerful critique of the samurai code and feudal hypocrisy, widely regarded as one of the greatest samurai films ever made) is known for his unflinching social dramas, his body of work marked by its moral seriousness, visual rigor, and deep humanism, often critiquing authority and exploring the resilience of the individual against oppressive systems -here turns his eye to the supernatural, marshaling a team of master craftspeople: screenwriter Yoko Mizuki, cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima, composer Toru Takemitsu, and a cast including Rentar Mikuni, Tatsuya Nakadai, and Takashi Shimura. The result is a film that is both painterly and theatrical, its visuals saturated with bold, expressionistic color, its sets vast and stylized, more like haunted paintings than real spaces. Every frame is composed with the precision of a woodblock print, every sound—whether the eerie silence or the atonal clang of Takemitsu’s score—designed to unsettle and seduce.

Four Ghostly Tales:

The Black Hair: A poor samurai, seeking fortune, abandons his devoted wife for a wealthier marriage. Years later, wracked with regret, he returns to find his first wife unchanged, her love undimmed. But as night falls, the samurai discovers he has embraced not the living, but a vengeful specter—her long, black hair becomes a shroud of retribution, and he is consumed by the consequences of his betrayal.

The Woman of the Snow: Lost in a blizzard, the woodcutter Minokichi encounters a ghostly snow woman who spares his life on one condition: he must never speak of her. He marries, raises a family, but years later, confesses the secret to his wife, who reveals herself as the snow spirit. Heartbroken, she leaves him alive for the sake of their children, vanishing into the winter night and leaving Minokichi in a spotlight of tragic solitude.

Hoichi the Earless: The film’s most elaborate tale opens with a dazzling, silent reenactment of the naval battle of Dan-no-ura, the sea stained red with the blood of the defeated Heike clan. Blind musician Hoichi is summoned nightly by ghosts to perform his biwa – a traditional Japanese lute- for the restless dead. The ghosts, appearing as noble samurai, bring him to the cemetery where he unknowingly performs for the restless dead of the Heike clan, who perished in the battle.

To save him, priests cover his body with sacred sutras, Buddhist scripture (specifically, the Heart Sutra) written directly onto Hoichi’s skin with ink as a protective measure against vengeful spirits. But they forget his ears—when the spirits come, they tear his ears from his head, leaving him alive but forever marked. Hoichi’s suffering brings him fame, and he becomes the legendary musician, “Hoichi the Earless.”

In a Cup of Tea: The brief, enigmatic final story follows a samurai’s attendant haunted by a face glimpsed in his teacup. The tale ends abruptly, unresolved, with the narrator musing that some stories remain unfinished—perhaps by design, perhaps by death’s interruption- leaving us adrift in existential uncertainty.

The film’s haunting vibe from the opening ink swirling in water—a metaphor for stories taking shape—Kwaidan is a film obsessed with the act of storytelling itself. The battle in “Hoichi the Earless” is a visual and sonic marvel: a ghostly chorus, a sea of painted faces, and the mournful strum of the biwa. The moment Hoichi sits, his body covered in sacred script except for his ears, is one of horror cinema’s most indelible images. In “The Black Hair,” the samurai’s return to his ruined home becomes a descent into a haunted memory, the past literally and figuratively consuming him. “The Woman of the Snow” floats between warmth and chill, love and doom, its snowbound forests rendered in eerie, unnatural blues.

Takemitsu’s score and sound design are as crucial as the visuals—silence stretches, punctuated by the snap of bamboo, the crack of ice, or the ghostly echo of a biwa, creating a sense of ma, the Japanese aesthetics, that refers to the concept of “negative space,” “gap,” or “pause” those haunted spaces between sounds.

Kwaidan is less a horror film than a ritual, a cinematic noh play where every gesture is deliberate and every shadow meaningful. Its influence echoes through Japanese horror and beyond, in the expressive colors of Bava and Argento, the spectral girls of J-horror, and even the stylized costuming of Star Wars. The film’s deliberate pacing and painterly compositions demand patience, but reward it with images and moods that linger like a half-remembered nightmare.

In the end, Kwaidan is a meditation on memory, regret, and the stories we tell to keep the dead close—or to keep them at bay. It is a ghost story told with exquisite beauty and a chill that seeps into the soul.

#89 Down, 61 to go! Your EverLovin Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #88 The Killer Inside Me 1976

THE KILLER INSIDE ME 1976

STEPHEN KING once said of the novelist Jim Thompson: “He was crazy. He went running into the American subconscious with a blowtorch in one hand and a pistol in the other, screaming his goddamn head off. No one else came close.”

There’s a slow, simmering menace that seeps through every frame of Burt Kennedy’s The Killer Inside Me (1976), an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s notorious 1952 novel. Set against the dusty, sun-bleached backdrop of a small Texas town, the film unspools like a searing confession, drawing us into the mind of Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford—a man whose polite smile and soft-spoken charm mask a churning abyss of violence and madness. Stacy Keach inhabits Lou with a chilling subtlety, his performance a study in contradictions: gentle, almost affable on the surface, but with eyes that flicker with something cold and unreachable. Keach’s Lou is both Keach’s wry narration track, which acts as the unreliable witness, inviting us to see the world through his fractured lens, much like the first-person narration in Jim Thompson’s novel.

Burt Kennedy (The Rounders 1965, Welcome to Hard Times 1967, Support Your Local Sheriff! 1969), a director more often associated with westerns, brings a laconic, washed-out and weathered sensibility to the film, letting the oppressive heat and slow rhythms of small-town life lull you into a false sense of security. The screenplay, adapted by Edward Mann and Robert Chamblee, closely follows Thompson’s original story, retaining the novel’s bleak, first-person perspective and its refusal to offer easy answers or moral clarity. The cinematography by Gerald Hirschfeld (Goodbye, Columbus 1969, Last Summer 1969, Diary of a Mad Housewife 1970, Young Frankenstein 1974) is unhurried and unflashy, capturing the flat, open spaces and the claustrophobic interiors with the same aesthetic nuance. There’s a sense of inevitability to the way the camera lingers on faces, hands, and the slow drip of sweat down a glass—everyday details that become charged with menace and thick with unease.

The story unfolds as Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford, haunted by visions of his abusive childhood at the hands of his mother (played by Julie Adams), is tasked with running Joyce Lakeland (Susan Tyrrell), a local prostitute played by Susan Tyrrell with a raw, wounded sensuality, out of town. Joyce becomes central to the film’s web of blackmail and violence.

What begins as a routine fix for Lou to take care of quickly spirals into a sadomasochistic affair, with Joyce awakening something dark and uncontrollable in Lou. Their scenes together are charged with a dangerous intimacy—Tyrrell’s Joyce is both complicit and terrified, drawn to Lou’s darkness even as she senses its destructive power. The violence that erupts between them is shocking in its suddenness, rendered with a matter-of-fact brutality that refuses to let us look away.

As Lou’s carefully constructed mask begins to crack, the bodies start to pile up: Joyce is beaten to death in a scene that is as pitiless as it is clinical.

Elmer Conway, played by Don Stroud, is the hot-headed and impulsive son of powerful mining magnate Chester Conway (Keenan Wynn). As a prominent figure in the small Montana town, Elmer is entangled in the town’s political and social tensions, particularly those involving labor disputes at his father’s mine, and is romantically involved with Joyce. Elmer’s character embodies the town’s simmering tensions and serves as both a victim of Lou’s sociopathic machinations and a catalyst for the film’s spiral into violence. Don Stroud brings a raw, volatile energy to the role, making Elmer a memorable figure in the film’s grim, neo-noir landscape.

The situation escalates when Joyce and Elmer are drawn into Lou Ford’s deadly schemes. When Joyce is badly beaten (by Lou Ford, though Elmer is initially blamed), Elmer’s emotional volatility is on display—he is protective, jealous, and quick to anger.  Lou manipulates both of them, and during a critical scene, Elmer arrives at Joyce’s house, only to be murdered by Lou, who then attempts to stage the scene as a lovers’ quarrel gone wrong.

Suspicion falls on Johnnie Pappas (Stephen Powers), who is found with marked money that Lou had given him after taking it off of Elmer. Lou is allowed to visit Johnnie in his cell, where he murders him and makes it look like a suicide, further cementing the devious frame-up.

John Dehner plays Sheriff Bob Maples, Lou’s boss and the head lawman in town. Amy Stanton, Lou’s fiancée, is played by Tisha Sterling with a heartbreaking vulnerability, who becomes both a victim and an unwitting accomplice. The investigation that follows is a slow, inexorable tightening of the noose,

Keenan Wynn, with his gruff manner, plays Chester Conway. Chester, a powerful local businessman and Elmer Conway’s father, also falls victim to Lou’s homicidal binge.

The supporting cast—Charles McGraw — plays the steely Howard Hendricks, the county attorney (sometimes referred to as the district attorney) who also becomes increasingly suspicious of Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford as the murders mount. As an investigator and legal authority, Hendricks is dogged and methodical, representing the force of law and reason closing in on Lou’s carefully maintained facade, realizing that something is deeply wrong with Lou Ford, even as the rest of the small Montana town is slow to believe it. McGraw’s character serves as one of Lou’s primary antagonists, persistently probing the inconsistencies and evidence surrounding the violent events in the town, circling ever closer to the truth.

John Carradine-I am a ham! Part 1

John Carradine’s brief appearance in The Killer Inside Me (1976) is a dark wrong-way turn into macabre eccentricity. As psychiatrist Dr. Jason Smith arrives at Lou Ford’s home under the mundane pretense of wanting to buy the house, the encounter quickly turns unsettling.

Carradine’s character, gaunt and scholarly, is met by Lou, lounging in his robe, exuding an eerie calm, who begins to challenge Smith’s psychiatric expertise, citing medical texts and discussing mental illness, citing medical texts with a chilling, almost clinical detachment.

The scene is marked by Lou’s unsettling display of psychological knowledge and control. He assures Dr. Smith that his schizophrenia is under control, but this is offered unprompted, as Smith has not asked about Lou’s mental state.

The encounter is less a confession and more a demonstration of Lou’s manipulative intelligence and his awareness of how he is perceived. Lou uses the conversation to expose his own knowledge and to subtly let Dr. Smith know that he sees through the doctor’s intentions and perhaps even his identity. The scene is laced with dark humor and unease, revealing Lou’s unraveling persona and growing instability, a moment where the mask of normalcy slips just enough to expose the madness underneath, leaving Dr. Smith—and us—unnerved by the polite menace that hangs in the air.

After a few minutes in Lou Ford’s unnervingly casual presence, the lanky Carradine’s Dr. Smith decides he’s had enough psychological chess for one day. With the speed and discretion of a man who’s just realized he’s wandered into the lion’s den, he makes his excuses and beats a hasty retreat—practically leaving a cartoon puff of dust in the doorway as he escapes Lou’s polite but menacing hospitality.

All these characters populate the town with a sense of lived-in authenticity, each performance adding another layer to the film’s oppressive atmosphere.

Key scenes linger in the mind: Lou’s chillingly calm narration as he commits acts of unspeakable violence; the suffocating tension of the police interrogation; the surreal, almost dreamlike quality of the film’s final moments, as Lou’s world collapses in on itself. Throughout, the film maintains a tone of sunlit horror—violence and madness unfolding not in the shadows, but in the bright, pitiless glare of the Montana sun. The score by Andrew Belling is spare and haunting, underscoring the film’s sense of fatalism and doom.

The murder of Amy Stanton, played by the pixie-like Tisha Sterling, is the film’s most brutally sorrowful moment—a scene where horror and heartbreak bleed together beneath the surface calm. Lou Ford, with his mask of gentle affection still in place, invites Amy to elope, promising her a future just out of reach. The room is thick with longing and the hush of midnight hope, but beneath it all, a terrible inevitability pulses. As Amy lets down her guard, trusting the man she loves, Lou’s violence erupts with chilling suddenness. The blows fall with a mechanical cruelty, each one shattering not just flesh but the fragile dream Amy clings to. Sterling’s performance is devastating: her eyes wide with confusion and betrayal, her body curling in on itself, she becomes the embodiment of innocence destroyed by the very person she trusted most. The scene is almost unbearable in its intimacy—a murder not of passion, but of cold, methodical despair, leaving us with the ache of a soul extinguished in silence.

The Killer Inside Me is a film that refuses easy catharsis. It is a journey into the heart of darkness, not as spectacle, but as a quiet, relentless unraveling. Kennedy’s direction, Keach’s mesmerizing performance, and Thompson’s nihilistic vision combine to create a work that is both deeply unsettling and strangely hypnotic—a portrait of evil that is all the more chilling for its calm, measured surface. In the end, it is the ordinariness of Lou Ford, the banality of his evil, that unsettles me most about the film.

from an article – The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw: The Killer Inside Me remake in 2010 —

Casey Affleck grins like a death’s head with the flesh reattached in this noir thriller from British director Michael Winterbottom, which is sickeningly violent but undoubtedly well made. It has been widely condemned for the scenes in which women are brutally assaulted, and for many, this film will be just hardcore misogynist hate-porn with a fancy wrapper, and those who admire it, or tolerate it…

The Killer Inside Me is a particular distillation of male hate, as practised by repulsive and inadequate individuals who have been encouraged to see themselves as essentially decent by virtue of the trappings of authority in which they have wrapped themselves. And Winterbottom is tearing off the mask; like Michael Haneke, he is confronting the audience with the reality of sexual violence and abusive power relations between the sexes that cinema so often glamorises. Here, the movie is saying, here is the denied reality behind every seamy cop show, every sexed-up horror flick, every picturesque Jack the Ripper tourist attraction, every swooning film studies seminar on the Psycho shower scene. Here. This is what we are actually talking about.

#88 Down, 62 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

 

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #87 Kill, Baby, Kill 1966 & Lisa and the Devil 1973


KILL, BABY, KILL 1966

Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill (1966) is a feverish, color-saturated reverie—one of the purest distillations of Gothic horror ever committed to film, and a testament to Bava’s singular vision as both director and visual architect. Set in a remote, fog-drenched Carpathian village at the turn of the 20th century, the story follows Dr. Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi Stuart), summoned to perform an autopsy on a young woman who has died under mysterious, violent circumstances. He is joined by the luminous Erika Blanc as Monica, a medical student haunted by her own ties to the village, and Fabienne Dali as Ruth, the enigmatic witch whose rituals seem to offer the only line of defense against the supernatural plague gripping the townsfolk.

Bava, who began his career as a cinematographer, suffuses every frame with a painter’s eye for color and composition. The film’s visual language is a delirium of hallucinatory hues—emerald greens, bruised purples, and candlelit golds swirl through the crumbling corridors of Villa Graps, where the ghost of Melissa, a flaxen-haired child in white, presides over the living and the dead alike. The cinematography, credited to Antonio Rinaldi (Planet of the Vampire 1965, Danger: Diabolik 1968, Four Dolls for an August Moon 1970) is both lush and uncanny, with Bava himself orchestrating much of the camera work: snap-zooms heighten the shocks, while slow, gliding movements turn the village and its haunted mansion into a waking nightmare.

The motif of the evil child—Melissa Graps, played with chilling stillness by Valerio Valeri (actually a young male actor)—anchors the film’s most iconic sequences. Her presence is often heralded by the sight and sound of a white ball bouncing through the gloom, a symbol of innocence curdled into menace. Bava reveals her in fragments: a pale hand pressed to a window, the flash of white stockings on a staircase, the impassive face framed by golden hair and fixed, glassy eyes. The white ball becomes a harbinger of doom, preceding suicides and spectral visitations, and Melissa’s appearances are woven into the film’s dream logic—sometimes she is glimpsed as a doll among other broken toys, sometimes as a vision in a labyrinth of mirrors and doors, always blurring the line between reality and nightmare.

The screenplay, credited to Bava, Romano Migliorini, and Roberto Natale, is spare and elliptical, allowing the film’s atmosphere to do much of the storytelling. The plot spirals around the curse laid by the grief-maddened Baroness Graps (Giovanna Galletti), whose daughter Melissa was trampled to death by villagers and now returns as a vengeful spirit, driving the guilty to madness and self-destruction. Dr. Eswai and Monica, drawn ever deeper into the villa’s secrets, must confront not only the ghost but the buried guilt and superstition that have poisoned the village for generations.

Key moments linger in the mind like fragments of a visionary haze: Monica’s nightmare in which she is menaced by a chilling, innocent-looking doll. When she awakens, she finds the exact same doll has materialized at her bedside; Eswai’s surreal chase through the endless, looping corridors of Villa Graps, culminating in a confrontation with his own doppelgänger; repeatedly entering what appears to be the same space, as the chase escalates, Eswai begins to see himself—literally encountering the doppelgänger, who stares back at him and laughs maniacally before vanishing. This moment is widely recognized as one of the film’s most unsettling and dreamlike set pieces, heightening the sense of supernatural dread and disorientation.  Another chilling scene is the haunting death of Nadienne (Micaela Esdra), the innkeeper’s daughter. After being visited at her window by the ghostly Melissa, she is compelled into a trance-like state. Under Melissa’s supernatural influence, she impales herself on a candelabra.

All these moments, combined with the intensity of the villagers’ desperate rituals and the witch Ruth’s futile attempts to shield the innocent from Melissa’s wrath, illustrate how Bava’s mastery lies in his ability to render these set pieces with both baroque beauty and suffocating dread, each scene a tableau of terror and melancholy.

The cast inhabit their roles with conviction and a sense of tragic inevitability. Giacomo Rossi Stuart’s Eswai is both rational and haunted, Erika Blanc’s Monica is luminous and vulnerable, and Fabienne Dali’s Ruth exudes a dark, earthy wisdom. Valerio Valeri’s Melissa, with her fixed stare and spectral grace, is one of horror cinema’s most indelible phantoms.

In the “Toby Dammit” segment of Spirits of the Dead, director Federico Fellini drew direct inspiration from Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill—specifically, the motif of the ghostly child with a white ball and an unsettling, angelic appearance. “Toby Dammit” features notable visual parallels that are clearly influenced by Bava’s imagery.

Kill, Baby, Kill stands as a haunting meditation on the sins of the past and the inescapable grip of the supernatural. Bava’s use of color and camera is not merely decorative, but essential to the film’s spell—each frame is a painting, each shadow a whisper from the other side. The result is a film that feels less like a story told than a nightmare remembered, echoing through the corridors of Gothic cinema and inspiring generations of filmmakers to come.

LISA AND THE DEVIL 1973

Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil (1973) is a haunting labyrinth of memory, identity, and the supernatural—a film where every corridor seems to spiral into another dream, and every mannequin’s glassy gaze hints at secrets too terrible to name.

Bava, both director and co-writer, orchestrates this puzzle of delirium with the meticulous eye of a master painter, saturating each frame with lush, decaying color and sinister ambiance that feels baroque, ancient, and uncanny. The cinematography by Cecilio Paniagua is sumptuous and surreal: emerald greens and candlelit golds flicker across the villa’s crumbling walls, while shadows pool in corners like spilled ink, threatening to swallow the unwary.

Elke Sommer’s Lisa is a figure of innocence and confusion, a tourist adrift in Toledo who stumbles into a world ruled by Telly Savalas’s Leandro—a devilish butler whose lollipop-twirling nonchalance belies the cosmic malice at play. The cast is a gallery of grotesques and tragic figures: Alida Valli as the blind, imperious countess living in seclusion; Alessio Orano as Maximilian, whose longing and violence are two sides of the same coin; Sylva Koscina and Eduardo Fajardo as the doomed Lehars. Each performance is heightened, dreamlike, as if the actors themselves are caught in Bava’s web of fate.

While sightseeing in Toledo, Lisa becomes separated from her tour group and is drawn to a mysterious villa, where she is taken in by a strange aristocratic family and their enigmatic butler, Leandro. As night falls, Lisa finds herself trapped in a labyrinth of murder, doppelgängers, and supernatural events, with the line between the living and the dead growing ever more blurred. Ultimately, she discovers that she is ensnared in a nightmarish cycle orchestrated by Leandro, who may be the Devil himself.

Lisa and the Devil weaves its horror with a sly, sardonic wit, finding moments of darkly comic absurdity even amid the macabre. Bava’s world is one where death is both grotesque and faintly ridiculous, and the Devil himself presides with a lollipop and a wink, turning terror into a wry game of manners and mortality.

With a devilish shrug and the casual air of a man rearranging deck chairs, Savalas’s Leandro sizes up the stubborn corpse and its uncooperative feet. When the dearly departed proves a tad too tall for the box, Leandro simply snaps the feet with a crisp efficiency, turning a macabre puzzle into a grotesque bit of slapstick, as if he were packing away last season’s mannequins rather than the newly deceased. In his hands, even the indignities of death are met with a wry, lollipop-twirling nonchalance.

The film’s key motif—the mannequin, or dummy—serves as a chilling metaphor for the characters’ loss of agency and identity. Bava fills the villa with these lifeless doubles, blurring the line between the living and the dead, the real and the artificial. In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, Lisa discovers a room crowded with dummies, their faces frozen in rictus grins, echoing the fate that awaits her. The narrative itself coils and doubles back, as Lisa is mistaken for Elena, a long-dead lover, and the boundaries between past and present, reality and nightmare, dissolve entirely.

While Lisa and the Devil does not feature the bouncing white ball motif of Kill, Baby, Kill, it shares that film’s fascination with the uncanny childlike and the power of repetition—here, it is the mannequins and the music box, their mechanical movements echoing the characters’ doomed cycles. With contributions from Bava, Alfredo Leone, and others, the screenplay is elliptical and fragmentary, inviting us to lose ourselves in the film’s shifting logic.
Bava’s direction is both playful and cruel, guiding Lisa—and the audience—through a series of surreal tableaux: a dinner party with the dead, a flight on a plane piloted by the Devil himself, a final transformation as Lisa becomes a mannequin, her humanity stripped away. The film’s ending is a masterstroke of existential horror, suggesting that Lisa’s ordeal is both a punishment and a release, a descent into the self where all masks are finally removed.

Lisa and the Devil stands as one of Bava’s most personal and enigmatic works, a film that seduces with beauty even as it chills with its vision of damnation. It is a surreal fugue rendered in velvet and shadow, a dance of the living and the dead orchestrated by a director at the height of his powers.

#87 Down, 63 to go! Your EverLovin Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #85 The Invisible Man 1933

THE INVISIBLE MAN 1933

“Now You See Him, Now You Don’t: A Symphony of Madness Unwrapped

“An invisible man can rule the world. No one will see him come, no one will see him go. He can hear every secret. He can rob, and wreck, and kill!”

James Whale’s The Invisible Man is a film that exists in the liminal space between genius and insanity, a story where the unseen becomes the unbearable, and laughter curdles into screams. Adapted from H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel, the film transforms its source material into a kaleidoscope of dark humor, existential dread, and technical wizardry, anchored by Claude Rains’ disembodied voice—a performance so electrifying it haunts the film like a ghost in the machine.

Wells’ tale of a scientist undone by his own ambition is reimagined here as a pre-Code carnival of chaos. Dr. Jack Griffin (Rains), a chemist who has rendered himself invisible through a drug called monocane, stumbles into the village of Iping swathed in bandages and dark glasses, his very presence a disruption to the pastoral order. The novel’s philosophical musings on power and isolation are distilled into a lean, vicious narrative, where Griffin’s invisibility becomes a metaphor for the unchecked id—a force as seductive and destructive as fire.

Rains, in his first major Hollywood role, delivers a tour de force of vocal acting. His Griffin is a man unmoored, his voice oscillating between silken menace and giddy hysteria. Though his face is hidden until the final moments, Rains imbues every chuckle, every snarl, with a manic grandeur. When he declares, “We’ll begin with a reign of terror. A few murders here and there. Murders of great men, murders of little men—just to show we make no distinction,” the line thrums with the thrill of a man drunk on his own godhood. It’s a performance that prefigures the rise of the antihero, a villain who is as magnetic as he is monstrous. This line is delivered during Griffin’s chilling monologue, perfectly capturing his descent into megalomania and the film’s blend of black humor and horror.

Whale, ever the provocateur, laces the horror with biting wit. The film’s black humor blooms in the absurdity of Griffin’s antics: trousers dancing without legs, a bicycle pedaled by empty air, a policeman’s helmet bobbing jauntily down the road. These moments are played for laughs, but they blossom into terror as Griffin’s pranks escalate into mass murder. The derailment of a train—a scene rendered through miniatures and matte paintings—is a masterstroke of offscreen horror, the camera lingering on the aftermath: twisted metal, distant screams, and a headline coldly noting “100 Killed.” Whale’s direction quivers with the rhythm of a nightmare, where the ridiculous and the horrific are two sides of the same coin.

The hilarious, legendary character actress Una O’Connor portrays Jenny Hall, the shrill and perpetually flustered mistress of The Lion’s Head Inn. O’Connor’s performance is a wonderful study in comic timing and exaggerated reaction—her shrieks, wide-eyed glares, and frantic energy provide much of the film’s comic relief amidst the chaos and terror unleashed by the invisible Griffin. Whether she’s berating her husband, gasping at Griffin’s bizarre behavior, or unleashing her signature, ear-piercing scream, O’Connor’s Jenny Hall is unforgettable—her blend of fright and farce perfectly embodying James Whale’s unique mix of camp horror and dark humor.

Cinematographer John J. Mescall (The Black Cat 1934, Dark Waters 1944) bathes the film in a stark, expressionist aesthetic. The village of Iping is all thatched roofs and cobblestone streets, its coziness shattered by the intrusion of the uncanny. Shadows loom like sentinels, and the snow-covered finale—a visual echo of Griffin’s moral blankness—is shot with a clinical chill. But the film’s true magic lies in the groundbreaking effects by John P. Fulton. Using double exposures, wirework, and meticulous matte painting, Fulton makes the impossible tangible: bandages unwrap to reveal nothing, shirts button themselves, and footprints appear in fresh snow. The pièce de résistance is Griffin’s gradual reappearance at the film’s end, his body materializing from skeleton to flesh, a memento mori etched in light and shadow.

Key scenes pulse with a perverse energy. Griffin’s unveiling at the Lion’s Head Inn—where he tears off his bandages to reveal a void—is a moment of pure cinematic alchemy, the villagers’ screams echoing our own shock. And the death of Dr. Kemp (William Harrigan), hurled off a cliff in a runaway car, is a symphony of suspense, the camera lingering on the empty driver’s seat as the vehicle plummets.

The film’s legacy is etched in its contradictions: a horror story laced with humor, a technical marvel that revels in simplicity, a monster who is both pitiable and exhilarating. Whale and Rains craft a parable of hubris that feels eerily prescient, a warning of the dangers lurking in the pursuit of transcendence. As Griffin dies, his body coalescing into visibility, he whispers, “I meddled in things that man must leave alone.” It’s a line that lingers, a shiver in the dark—a reminder that some boundaries exist for a reason.

The Invisible Man is more than a landmark of horror; it is a fever dream of the Machine Age, a film where science and madness waltz to the tune of Rains’ maniacal laughter. To watch it is to stare into the void—and find the void staring back, bandaged, bespectacled, and utterly, deliciously mad.

#85 Down, 65 to go! Your EverLovin’Joey formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!