By BRAD WEISMANN
An autobiography in film;
some personal milestones and revelations, for better and/or worse, in relation
to movies I’ve seen.
"Horror means something revolting. Anybody can show you a pailful of innards. But the object of the roles I played is not to turn your stomach -- but merely to make your hair stand on end."
– Boris Karloff
– Boris Karloff
I’m so lucky. My horror comes
in black and white.
“The Exorcist” opened on Dec. 26, 1973, and turned me off
horror for a long, long time. I couldn’t handle it. But up until that moment,
horror had me firmly in its grip.
I am lucky in many ways when it comes to film. I was born right in
the middle of the great Maerican foreign-film influx and rise of the art house; I saw all the work of the vastly creative and independent mavericks of the Silver Age
of American cinema as it came out; I even caught the tail end of the dying road-show epic cycle. Thanks
again to the always-on television in our home, and our parents’ lack of
curiosity about what we were watching and how much (see Formative Features Part II), we got to grow up fast. A seemingly endless stream of old movies flowed,
from morning ‘til what became known as the signoff -- when the stream of electronic entertainment would actually stop for a few hours.
The experience of horror as entertainment began for me in 2nd
grade, when I grabbed Ray Bradbury’s “’S’ is for Space” off the school library
shelf, because I vainly found my name on a book cover . . . and because it had a groovy
illustration of a schematic astronaut falling into the heart of a galaxy on its
cover.
After that, it was straight on into the endless mystery and horror story
collections issued under Hitchcock’s name, and a standing appointment with “The
Twilight Zone,” “The Outer Limits,” “One Step Beyond,” “Thriller,” and “Alfred
Hitchcock Presents.”
There were other mainsprings for me. One was the monthly
copy of Forrest J. Ackerman’s enthusiastic, profusely illustrated, and badly
edited “Famous Monsters of Filmland” we would run down to the drugstore for
every month.
Another was the broadcasts of John Dunning, whose old-time radio
shows across a spectrum of local stations taught me my power to scare the crap
out of myself by suggestion only, listening in the self-imposed dark avidly to
“The Inner Sanctum,” “Suspense,” “Escape,” “The Mysterious Traveler,” “The
Whistler,” “Lights Out,” “The Hermit’s Cave,” “Murder at Midnight,” “The
Strange Dr. Weird,” “Quiet Please,” “The Witch’s Tale,” “The Sealed Book,” “Nightmare,”
“Macabre,” “Dark Fantasy,” The Hall of Fantasy,” “Beyond Darkness,” “The Weird
Circle,” and so on – a cornucopia of fright that whetted my appetite.
And the most vital was “Creature Features” on Denver’s
KWGN-TV, Channel 2. Every Saturday night, we would swaddle ourselves,
snack-surrounded, on the basement floor in front of the clunky old cabinet
television with the channel knob, pre-remote, that clicked heavily and with
painful stiffness from station to station. Dipping potato chips in grape soda
(try it) we would feast on “The Wolf Man,” “The Man They Could Not Hang,” “The
Mummy’s Tomb” . . .
The content and format of “Creature Features” was derived
from its parent station, the regional powerhouse WGN in Chicago. This was
simply one title applied to what is commonly referred to today as the “Shock
Theater” package, 52 Universal films (one for each week) distributed by Screen
Gems, a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures for TV broadcast in October of 1957.
This magical package of Golden Age horror was seen by an entire generation in
more than 100 cities across the country. One year later, Son of Shock added 20
more essential films to the mix.
On Channel 2, it was punctuated by the regular and lengthy
thrumming of local commercials (Sunrise Housing, Lloyd’s Furs). Sometimes they
gave us something else as a chaser – we also had access to RKO and AIP horror films,
some of Hammer catalog, some of the Toho and Daiei kaiju features, and a
healthy side dish of pretty much all the nuclear-monster and
invasion-from-outer-space-premised films from the 1950s and ‘80s.
Unlike many other local stations, we had no horror host or
hostess. After several years, we picked up the super-lo-fi WGN intro, set to
Henry Mancini’s theme from “Experiment in Terror,” voiced by a slowed-down voiceover from WGN's Marty
McNeeley:
I loved the life-unaffirming atmosphere of the horror film.
Even if virtue triumphed, there was an unstated but pervasive sense that this
was but one successful battle of many. Even after the wise-cracking reporter
chases the spooks away, something’s . . . still . . . around. In an age when we
were all supposed to be happy, and love everyone, and look on the bright side,
it was such a relief to dwell with the basement perspective that things were
not that great, actually, and you could be in danger, and you might be suffering
from a curse, or be a monster. That would explain a lot. It seemed to me that the
Northern European vibe of bitterness, resignation, and an atavistic acceptance
of weirdness in everyday life crept into these films.
In reality, a close inspection of the early horror film mise
en scene shows that gloom and stylized backgrounds are not only more brooding,
but a lot cheaper and faster to light and shoot, always a plus in the studio
system. They would soon figure out that the same plot would suffice, over and
over again, as well.
And, as so many older people always seem to claim, it was
different back then. There were severe restrictions on what could be shown or
discussed, even in such a debased genre as horror. While the restrictions
blocked many perspectives and innovations, it also forced people to think
creatively, to give rise to forbidden topics in viewers’ minds without stating
them directly, and to terrify through suggestion and implication. You have
complete freedom now, but no matching completeness of merit.
Then there was the extreme emotion. In an emotionally
repressed family in an emotionally repressed town in the middle of an
emotionally repressed continent, how welcome to get all toasty in front of the
roaring flame of melodramatic howls, leers, diatribes, assaults, screams,
momentary pauses for somber, eloquent regret, then back to the mayhem. All the
most flamboyantly eccentric performers would get their time on screen, including
Tod Browning’s Freaks and Rondo Hatton.
And the protagonists were usually played by well-spoken
Englishmen. Since there has never been a strong tradition of classical acting
in America, and we can barely summon the attention to parse Shakespeare every now
and again, I sometimes think that in place of Olivier, Richardson, and Gielgud,
we had Karloff, Rathbone, Price, Raines, Atwill, Daniell, Gray, Gough, Lee, Cushing.
Vincent Price once said, "I don't play monsters. I play men besieged by fate and out for revenge." He keys into the elevated, tragic element in horror, as the others referenced above were able to do. (It is instructive to see that, during and after playing the makeup-slathered creatures that made his reputation, Karloff largely portrayed mad scientists out for revenge, in movies such as "The Invisible Ray," "The Man Who Changed His Mind," "The Man They Cold Not Hang," "Black Friday," and "Before I Hang.") The rrrrippingly precise and upscale diction of these performers could elevate the most heinous old wheeze -- about not delving into what God did not intend us to, or how the others at the academy/hospital/university were the ones that were insane, and soon all would find out the truth, all of them -- into sublime and profound poetry. Horror was classy.
Vincent Price once said, "I don't play monsters. I play men besieged by fate and out for revenge." He keys into the elevated, tragic element in horror, as the others referenced above were able to do. (It is instructive to see that, during and after playing the makeup-slathered creatures that made his reputation, Karloff largely portrayed mad scientists out for revenge, in movies such as "The Invisible Ray," "The Man Who Changed His Mind," "The Man They Cold Not Hang," "Black Friday," and "Before I Hang.") The rrrrippingly precise and upscale diction of these performers could elevate the most heinous old wheeze -- about not delving into what God did not intend us to, or how the others at the academy/hospital/university were the ones that were insane, and soon all would find out the truth, all of them -- into sublime and profound poetry. Horror was classy.
Most important was this bizarre world’s impertinent belief
in itself. The bulk of the Universal horror films were shot on their “Little
Europe” backlot standing set; you can recognize the surroundings easily from
film to film – and in the Basil Rathbone-Sherlock Holmes series from the same
time as well. These vaguely Eastern European, superstitious, kinda ign’rent,
dirndl- and lederhosen-clad, beer-swilling, pipe-smoking, folk-dancing
potential victims are cheery as hell, and don’t seem to remember much from one film
to the next. Somehow they just aren’t up to MOVING THE HELL AWAY FROM WHERE ALL
THE MONSTERS ARE. But believable and lovable, they shoulder on.
All films of the fantastic require an especially spirited
suspension of disbelief, and it all starts with the performers. With a
seriousness of manner found at a toddler’s tea party, the monsters, mad
scientists, unbelievers, police officers, butlers, doctors, sidekicks, couples
in distress, gypsies, servants, peasants, hunters, and hermits all believe implicitly
in everything that crops up along the way. There is no shadow of questioning of
any revelation, theory, proposition, or reasoning throughout the entire series,
from starring role to smallest walk-on. Gradually, the primary roles were
smoothed into archetypes, then hammered into clichés.
In the final analysis, it’s this playful gravity that makes
this work so compelling. The ludicrousness of the stories, the cheapness of the
settings, the unconvincing special effects, could all ironically enhance the
experience, its very provisional qualities unhinging. In my essay on the 1936 film adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s “She,” I discussed the possibility of an
inverse proportion between scenic believability and the power of a fantasy
narrative – as though the tawdry elements of dime-store productions contained “ the tattered, inconsistent, and unfinished constructs
of the sleeping mind.”
How else could I still be so
dialed in to such hokey, haunting moments. The corpses suspended in vitrines in “The Black Cat,” while Karloff
intones, “Are we not both the living dead?”;
his gropes toward sunlight in “Frankenstein”;the agony of Larry Talbot;
Carl Denham yelling, “Scream, Ann, scream for your life!”;
Dr. Moreau dragged into the House of Pain;
Beverly Garland fighting alien creatures . . .
Horror programming sometimes spread through the rest of the TV schedule. The early Hammer horror films, in grisly, shocking color, filled the
screen. Likewise, the Corman Poes enthroned Vincent Price in the pantheon. And
the random gems: “The Amazing Colossal Man,” “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” “The
Monolith Monsters,” “Crack in the World,” “The Tingler.” Even “The Incredible
2-Headed Transplant.” Even “Reptilicus.”
The welcome mat was always out. Until “The
Exorcist.”
I am completely and utterly squeamish and so missed the horror-film developments of the last 40 years, until my sheer lack of knowledge led me to
knuckle down and bone up on the more recent, distasteful material. The age of
body horror opened, and broadened and deepened, cutting a swift channel to the
mainstream. Herschell Gordon Lewis, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, George Romero, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, Stuart Gordon, Clive Barker, Shinya Tsukamoto, Brian Yuzna, early Peter Jackson, Frank Henenlotter. The trio of Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci, and the giallo genre in
general, were all lost to me for decades until I could push past the gore and
nightmare of distortion, of lack of control, implicit in body horror. This transgressive
impulse has lodged in the splatter film, the deathless-killer cycles, in
torture porn. I am just not hip enough.
“I am Poe, he thought. I am all that is left of Edgar Allan Poe, and I am all that is left of Ambrose Bierce and all that is left of a man named Lovecraft. I am a gray night bat with sharp teeth, and I am a square black monolith monster. I am Osiris and Bal and Set. I am the Necronomicon, the Book of the Dead. I am the house of Usher, falling into flame. I am the Red Death. I am the man mortared into the catacomb with a cask of Amontillado . . . I am a coffin lid, a sheet with eyes, a foot-step on a black stairwell. I am Dunsany and Machen and I am the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I am the Monkey’s Paw and I am the Phantom Rickshaw. I am the Cat and the Canary, The Gorilla, the Bat. I am the ghost of Hamlet’s father on the castle wall.”
– Ray Bradbury, “Pillar of Fire”
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