Saturday, October 31, 2015

FOR HALLOWEEN: ORPHAN



Halloween doesn’t have to be over once the last trick-or-treater has crept back into the shadows of the night. You may still be possessed by the spirit of the holiday and in desperate need of some real scares. In an effort to address that need and help you find a choice that goes beyond the usual iconography of the season, I’ve picked three titles that may not immediately jump to mind when it comes to autumn-tinged chills and terror. They are not self-consciously seasonal choices, like John Carpenter’s Halloween or Michael Dougherty’s 2007 anthology Trick ‘R Treat, both excellent choices for cinematic fear on the pumpkin circuit. Two of them rely more on mood, creeping dread, an insinuating style and, dare I say, even a poetic approach to storytelling than the usual Samhain-appropriate fare. And one has an inexplicably bad reputation in the halls of conventional wisdom, accused of being repellent and tastelessly disturbing when it is in fact repellent, pointedly disturbing and entirely, rousingly effective in the shock and scare department, complete with a third-act twist that, if it hasn’t somehow already been spoiled for you, you will likely never guess. So when you’re ready, unpack the leftover trick-or-treat candy, get under the blanket and get ready. One of these—perhaps all three—will be just ticket to freeze your blood one last time before the more benign portion of our holiday season begins. You have been warned.

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Horror movies are a great ticket during the summer months (and when the summer heat extends well into fall, as it customarily does here in Los Angeles), because a really good screamer, like Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell, can give you the kind of deep-seated chills that go way beyond the cooling of the skin provided by central air. And bless your soon-to-be-rotted soul if you can get your claws on one that happens to be set in a wintry environment, thus inviting the visual component to conspire with the narrative to bring your body temperature down to grave-worthy levels. Movies like The Brood (1979), The Dead Zone (1983)-- David Cronenberg does seem to have a way with the desolate chill of winter-- The Thing (versions 1951 and 1982), the climax of Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), one particularly icy moment involving Lew Ayres from Damien: Omen II (1978), Let the Right One In (2008) and Matt Reeves’ stunningly good remake Let Me In (2010), which trades the Swedish frost for a New Mexico variety, and last but certainly not least 2008’s woefully underappreciated The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008)—these are all excellent examples of how to use a frozen landscape to accentuate and inform a sense of dread and fear.

Some of you may also remember an ABC Movie of the Week entitled A Cold Night’s Death, directed by Jerrold Freeman and starring Robert Culp and Eli Wallach as two scientists air-lifted to a remote Arctic research station who find the facility strangely abandoned, a group of research monkeys in a near-frozen state, and lots of indicators that something has not gone according to plan. This TV-movie occupies a special place in the hearts of many of my generation’s movie genre thrill-seekers, and it’s been famously difficult to find, showing up for the occasional late-night showing when local stations still actually still ran late-show movie programming, but rarely screened since infomercials became the all-nighter’s TV anesthesia of choice. (It’s now available all over YouTube.)


Feel free to add Jaume Collet-Serra’s spectacularly unnerving Orphan (2009) to that short list of superb wintry horror tales. Set in Connecticut during the blustery snowbound months, the movie knows how to exploit that frosty climate—a couple of its more harrowing outdoor set pieces are enhanced by the sense of fear created by the landscape feeling different, less hospitable, less inhabitable, more dangerous. As in those other movies, Orphan cannily externalizes the sense of things not being quite under control by plunging us into this environment so often associated with seasonal joy and familial closeness, where unexpected cracks in the ice can form under our feet, or vehicles can go sailing off slick roads into horrible peril, or toward unaware victims.

But the chill in the air surrounding Orphan is only nominally due to its frozen setting. The movie, by means psychological and cinematic, means to put a freeze on your nerves, and that it pretty handily does is a credit to an exceedingly clever script by David Leslie Johnson and Collet-Serra’s prodigious talent for throwing the audience’s expectations askew. He does perhaps rely on loud noises and the old "who’s standing behind the refrigerator/medicine cabinet door" trick a bit too much, but so much else about this tale of parental entitlement and fear is so skillfully rendered and low-down effective that I was more than willing to forgive the director this relatively venial sins.

The opening sequence of Orphan will be a very telling indicator of whether you can deal with the shocks the movie has in store. A beatific and pregnant young woman named Kate (Vera Farmiga) is being wheeled into the hospital, her loving husband John (Peter Sarsgaard) by her side, presumably toward the maternity ward where her dreams of becoming a mother are about to come true. The camera hugs the beaming Kate in close-up as a nurse pushes her along, when suddenly we see a look of distress disrupt her glowing face, slowly turning her visage away from joy into a mask of confusion and agony. Kate is obviously in increasingly sharp pain, and yet the nurse never changes the deliberate pace of the wheelchair, never acknowledges the state of her patient except to offer, in a most ghostly, noncommittal tone, “We’re so sorry for your loss, dear.” Loss?


Collet-Serra then gives us the first of many sudden shifts in perspective to come, as we see the nurse and patient inching across the wide-screen frame from the point of view of a detached observer from high above, leaving a trail of blood from the abruption occurring inside the woman’s uterine canal along the hospital’s incongruous white shag carpeting. Soon, Kate is strapped to a hospital bed and surrounded with masked surgeons and medical personnel who coolly, callously inform her that she has lost her baby and that an emergency C-section is about to begin. Her screams of denial and horror are met with the happy glance of her husband, himself done up in surgical gown and mask, who continues to aim his video camera at her despite the obviously horrific turn their blissful moment has taken. And he never stops shooting, not even when the nurse pulls a dead, blood-soaked fetus from Kate’s womb and sets it on her chest, a ghastly hello and goodbye rolled into one traumatic moment. At which point Kate screams and wakes up…

Speaking personally, as a father who has witnessed something as horrific, if not as garishly so, as what happens to Kate in her morbidly enhanced nightmare remembrance of profound loss, I had to fight the urge to bolt from the theater during this opening sequence. And had Collet-Serra continued to operate in this weirdly dissociative style of De Palma-tinged surgical theater of horror, who knows how much I could have/would have taken? Fortunately, the director gives us this peek into Kate’s tortured psyche as a way of grounding her psychologically and filling out Farmiga’s choices in playing the character in a way that a simple back story—and everyone here has a back story laced with tragedy—would not do nearly so completely. The movie is not, as one might reasonably expect from the prologue, a grisly freak show, but instead a portrait of how tragedy can unravel even the most perfect-seeming of families and make them vulnerable to outside forces that will personify and exploit the interpersonal instability and mistrust that already exists.


During her waking hours Kate, a musician with an alcohol problem who spends her days as a housewife after losing her teaching job at Yale, really is reeling from the stillbirth of a child. She and John, an architect who presumably designed their dazzling postmodern hillside home, channel the reaction to their trauma into a strong desire to adopt. The desperate zeal to patch this hole in their life with an older “sister” to join their two biological children, Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) and Max (a deaf five-year-old played by the remarkable Aryana Engineer), leads them to an orphanage with a none-too-strict policy on background checks. It’s here where they meet Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman in a shockingly good debut performance), a preternaturally self-possessed nine-year-old Russian girl who dazzles the couple with her artistic ability, her sweet nature, and the pained perspective of the lost child she projects with apparent sincerity, which plays directly into the couple’s savior fantasies of providing for a child in need.


Of course, Esther soon reveals a malevolent side. She orchestrates a playground accident that seriously injures a schoolyard enemy. She puts a bird out of its misery with a rock after Daniel wounds it and cannot bring himself to finish the job. She subtly threatens and emotionally blackmails little Max into assisting her in a series of increasing devilish deeds, at one point pulling a revolver on the guileless child. (“Want to play?” she coolly inquires, removing all but one bullet, spinning the chamber and pointing it at Max’s head. “Perhaps later.”) Something about Esther’s artistic abilities— her mastery of Tchaikovsky on the piano, her increasingly elaborate paintings— also suggests that someone has not provided the whole story on this cinematic descendant of evil little Patty McCormick, and the ones most skillfully holding back on the big picture are the cast and director of Orphan. Truly, if Ms. McCormick was The Bad Seed, there is increasingly little doubt that Esther is the worst.

If it seems I have spent too much time detailing the roots of the horror Collet-Serra and company have concocted, it’s because to reveal much more would be in violation of the pact this movie makes with its audience to peel back ever-escalating levels of disturbing, psychologically believable behavior by means of a surprising level of horror filmmaking craft. (Stay away from any review that wants to talk about the plot in any kind of detail.) Collet-Serra’s previous horror outing, the Dark Castle productions remake of House of Wax, was a decent effort, marred by a slew of obnoxious stock characters who seemed much more pleasant smothered under molten paraffin. As enjoyable as it was for us, it was apparently a waste of time for him, so much more accomplished is his work here. As I said before, Collet-Serra tends to overdo a certain variety of stock horror movie shocks, but he just as often adds an extra touch—an unexpected camera angle, a beat or two longer for us to twist in the wind before the anticipated jolt arrives with not quite the timing we expected—that enriches the sense of our being guided by someone who has a true knack for harvesting gooseflesh.


It also helps that Orphan features probably the best cast, top to bottom, of any horror movie in recent memory, from familiar faces to rosy-cheeked children who we’ve never seen before. Farmiga, an actress who I frequently find annoying, uses her reputation for portraying ineffectual authority figures (see The Departed) to throw us off the trail of what she has charted out for this character. She plumbs the depths of despair, all right, but there’s an unexpected strength, an exhilarating anger that surfaces in Kate which makes her resistance of Esther, and their ultimate conflict, fraught with multiple, creepy levels of resonance. She also expresses fear and horror extremely well, adding strange physical ticks and vocal hiccups to her flailing about that communicate the character’s disorientation and desperation with frightening, if ironic, assurance.

Sarsgaard has a more thankless role, the disbelieving spouse who is so eager to give Esther the benefit of the doubt, against all reason it sometimes seems, that he ends up in the Compromised Position of All Compromised Positions. Even so, he retains a measure of sympathy because he seems genuinely conflicted between his duty to believe his wife and his duty as an adopted father. As mentioned earlier, Bennett and particularly Engineer are excellent child actors asked to go well beyond what one might think someone so young could make believable, and they achieve their goals with brilliance. There’s even room for quality character actors like CCH Pounder as an ill-fated orphanage nun and Margo Martindale as Kate’s far-too-even-keeled therapist.


But the real praise belongs to Isabelle Fuhrman, who will, whatever else her career holds in store, forever be Esther, a child who harbors depths of foulness far deeper than we will, thanks to the clever screenplay and Fuhrman’s prepossessed facility as an actress, ever be able to accurately guess. Speaking in a light Russian accent that turns from sing-song to deathly hollow in a twitch, Fuhrman delivers the goods, drawing us in with misplaced sympathy even when we know we’re one step ahead of the hapless family in the story. The movie invites speculation throughout about Esther’s origins, her motivation, but as it becomes clearer and clearer that Collet-Serra and Johnson have something up their sleeves that is far worse than what we’ve allowed ourselves to imagine, Fuhrman rises to the occasion with a fury and a camp (as well as vamp) haughtiness that places the movie in the vicinity of one of Brian De Palma’s great sick jokes.

Late in the game, when her face grows sallow and sunken and she embarks on the final stages of an inevitable course of execution, the audience realizes, with great shock and giddy satisfaction, that we weren’t as ahead of the game as we thought. Fuhrman, so young and talented, drives home the movie’s final conceit like a stake in the audience’s collective heart, with the pitch-black glee of an instant icon of horror. All the way home from the theater, it seemed every bus kiosk was lit with her terrifying visage from the movie’s advertising campaign. But it wouldn’t have done any good to close my eyes. Esther is one for profound nightmares. So is Orphan.


(Orphan is available from Amazon streaming and on Warner Home Video Blu-ray and DVD.) 

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FOR HALLOWEEN: EYES WITHOUT A FACE



Halloween doesn’t have to be over once the last trick-or-treater has crept back into the shadows of the night. You may still be possessed by the spirit of the holiday and in desperate need of some real scares. In an effort to address that need and help you find a choice that goes beyond the usual iconography of the season, I’ve picked three titles that may not immediately jump to mind when it comes to autumn-tinged chills and terror. They are not self-consciously seasonal choices, like John Carpenter’s Halloween or Michael Dougherty’s 2007 anthology Trick ‘R Treat, both excellent choices for cinematic fear on the pumpkin circuit. Two of them rely more on mood, creeping dread, an insinuating style and, dare I say, even a poetic approach to storytelling than the usual Samhain-appropriate fare. And one has an inexplicably bad reputation in the halls of conventional wisdom, accused of being repellent and tastelessly disturbing when it is in fact repellent, pointedly disturbing and entirely, rousingly effective in the shock and scare department, complete with a third-act twist that, if it hasn’t somehow already been spoiled for you, you will likely never guess. So when you’re ready, unpack the leftover trick-or-treat candy, get under the blanket and get ready. One of these—perhaps all three—will be just ticket to freeze your blood one last time before the more benign portion of our holiday season begins. You have been warned.

********************************************

A night flight through a darkened wood opens Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960) with a heightened pulse—a woman races down a deserted highway eyeing her rearview mirror, fearful of the intent of cars approaching from behind but also keeping an eye on the passenger in the back seat. Soon the passenger, hidden in a too-big trench coat and hat, slumps forward, and the movie begins its steep descent into the interior of a twisted morality well worthy of being cloaked in a dark forest of secrets.
A French-Italian coproduction released in Europe in 1960 (the same year Psycho was released) but not seen in the U.S. until two years later, Eyes Without a Face plays like a Grand Guignol fairy tale with imagery that, unlike the unforgiving slashes and sharp angles of Hitchcock’s landmark, seeps into the viewer’s subconscious with poetic assurance and smears the boundaries of our sympathies at the same time.

In an isolated mansion somewhere in that darkened wood a surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) familiar with past glories has instigated an escalating series of skin graft experiments in a desperate attempt to restore the face of his young daughter (Edith Scob), horribly disfigured in a car accident. The surgeon kidnaps young Parisian girls to use as unwilling epidermal donors with the help of his devoted assistant (Alida Valli), a former patient whose own successful facial reconstruction has blinded her to her savior’s madness.
Given the elusive, seductive strangeness of the movie’s surrealist mise-en-scène, 21st century viewers might be surprised at the film’s notorious centerpiece, a shockingly clinical surgical scene in which Franju’s camera barely glances away from the horrific procedure being performed, and then only to scan the landscape of moral conflict glistening like cold sweat across the faces of the doctor and his helper.
But perhaps even more unsettling and ultimately frightening is the degree to which Franju allows us access not only to sympathy for the victims, but also for the daughter, whose dawning realization of what her father is doing might be as devastating as her own disfigurement, and even for the surgeon and his assistant, their genial manner and misguided, sincere love for the girl incapable of coexisting with their heinous deeds.

The movie is a masterpiece of raised goose flesh. Even during the film’s most ostensibly placid moments, Franju burrows under our skin with image and sound— over unadorned tracking shots of the girl moving aimlessly through the empty halls of the house a faint, insistent, inexplicable barking can be heard, soon revealed as coming from the basement of the house, where the doctor’s very first victims are still penned.
If Eyes Without a Face ends on a note of release best suited for a fairy tale it is a grim tale indeed, tainted by blood, destroyed loyalties and the prospect of a bleak future of isolation, as if a masked, faceless sleeping beauty had escaped the evil queen and made her way into the woods to find only suffocating darkness where magic should reside.


(Eyes Without a Face is available in a restored and incomparably gorgeous Blu-ray edition from the Criterion Collection.)

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FOR HALLOWEEN: BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO



Halloween doesn’t have to be over once the last trick-or-treater has crept back into the shadows of the night. You may still be possessed by the spirit of the holiday and in desperate need of some real scares. In an effort to address that need and help you find a choice that goes beyond the usual iconography of the season, I’ve picked three titles that may not immediately jump to mind when it comes to autumn-tinged chills and terror. They are not self-consciously seasonal choices, like John Carpenter’s Halloween or Michael Dougherty’s 2007 anthology Trick ‘R Treat, both excellent choices for cinematic fear on the pumpkin circuit. Two of them rely more on mood, creeping dread, an insinuating style and, dare I say, even a poetic approach to storytelling than the usual Samhain-appropriate fare. And one has an inexplicably bad reputation in the halls of conventional wisdom, accused of being repellent and tastelessly disturbing when it is in fact repellent, pointedly disturbing and entirely, rousingly effective in the shock and scare department, complete with a third-act twist that, if it hasn’t somehow already been spoiled for you, you will likely never guess. So when you’re ready, unpack the leftover trick-or-treat candy, get under the blanket and get ready. One of these—perhaps all three—will be just ticket to freeze your blood one last time before the more benign portion of our holiday season begins. You have been warned.

******************************************


 “I just need to scream, that’s all.” So says a beleaguered actress looping her lines in a low-rent Italian studio where the soundtrack of a sexually violent giallo film, Il Vortice Equestre (The Equestrian Vortex), is being finalized under the guidance of the film’s abrasive producer and its pretentious, deceptively avuncular director. Also working behind the soundproof glass is Gilderoy (the marvelous Toby Jones), a sound engineer imported from Britain whose résumé is more closely associated with inoffensive nature documentaries than with the sort of ghoulish undertaking on which he now finds himself at work.

Gilderoy, a naturally recessive man ideally fitted to the anonymity of postproduction, is at first perplexed at having even been chosen to work on a film bearing a title he soon discovers has nothing to do with horses gamboling in pastoral settings. But that puzzlement soon gives way to an escalating tension between Gilderoy’s passionless, professional, purely mechanical need to just get on with the job and his increasingly apparent psychological defenselessness against the exploitative evidence of the horrors depicted in the film.

In its surface form, the strange, hypnotizing Berberian Sound Studio has a hushed formality that insinuates itself underneath your skin in search of a frisson of psychological fear, a method far removed from the violent visual cacophony of the typical giallo. Yet it is absolutely suffused with fetishistic  close-ups— of 1976-vintage sound and film equipment—and hallucinatory aural landscapes, innocent sounds created from mundane Foley sessions which cannot be separated from associations with the grisly imagery they are meant to enhance, that are the hallmark of vintage Italian horror. 


Writer-director Peter Strickland (The Duke of Burgundy) seals Gilderoy, and us, inside the studio, surrounded by sounds we cannot reconcile with sights that are denied us-- the clever faux opening title sequence for Il Vortice Equestre  is the only footage we ever actually see-- and the free-floating dread and disorientation Gilderoy begins to experience eventually becomes our own. Even the letters Gilderoy receives from his mother back in England, filled with benign accounts of bird-watching and the unmistakable longing for her son—Gilderoy’s only lifeline to a world he recognizes— begin to take on awful shadings as the engineer’s grasp on reality becomes ever more tenuous. 

Viewers will be reminded of Argento, certainly (those close-ups of tape machines scream Deep Red), but through the constant layering of ghastly shrieks and perverse sound effects  the spirit of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out and the search for the perfect scream are imaginatively invoked here as well. Strickland constructs a convincing case for sound as a dominant, almost subliminal force in our experience of the movies, all while entertainingly deconstructing the very process by which that sound is assembled, dissolving the audience’s complicity into magnetic particles of horror which begin tightening around and threatening to absorb Gilderoy. But unlike in Blow Out, that perfect scream which somehow synthesizes frivolous art with inescapable humanity proves elusive. Within the walls of the Berberian Sound Studio there are only fading echoes, the blinding light of the projector bulb washing out everything in its throw, reels of tape spinning out of focus, and the final click of a switch signaling escape into the dark.

(Berberian Sound Studio is available on DVD and Blu-ray and is now streaming on Netflix.)

Friday, October 30, 2015

TALES FROM A LIFE LIVED WITH MONSTERS



If you scroll down this page, you'll find currently posted, in honor of Halloween week, what I think are two very special treats (and possibly tricks). The first is a very challenging frame grab quiz in which readers are asked to guess the titles of 31 movies based on eerie images that may or may not be so easy to identify. The other is a special edition of the traditional interview-type quiz I occasionally come up devoted entirely to the harrowing and delightful world of horror. It features the usual batch of questions for which there are no wrong answers, only your answers, which makes it much more fun to fill out and especially to read. As usual, it’s taking me a while to get around to submitting my own answers to the quiz, but in the creeping shadow of the approaching holiday I thought I’d take a shot at answering one here:
 
At what moment did you realize you were a horror fan? (Or what caused you to realize you weren’t?)

Well, it should be apparent by now that the second half of this poser is not applicable. It really does feel as though I’ve been a fan of monster movies and the horror genre for as far as my increasingly feeble memory stretches back. I don’t know if here was a specific moment or not, but when I think back on the possible origins of my interest I think there are probably two factors that converged that really helped to seal the deal for me, as they probably did for many my age. (A tail-end baby-boomer, I was born in 1960.)

 
My mom bought me my very first copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland when I was probably around seven years old. Famous Monsters was a publication any good horror fan of a certain age (and hopefully much younger) recognizes as an essential and seminal influence on the sensibility on an entire generation’s love for the horror genre. It certainly was that for me. Edited by one Forrest J. Ackerman (pictured above), a science-fiction and horror enthusiast of the first order (he coined the term “sci-fi,” for crying out loud), FM, as my pals and I came to refer to it, was a real gateway drug into understanding and appreciating the enduring landmarks as well as the endless marginalia scattered throughout the history of the horror genre.

Within its pages I first learned of and became fascinated by men with strange names like Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, monsters like Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, the Wolf Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and of course all the nightmares they would inspire. But I think the thing that I probably most responded to, the thing that kept me coming back, is that Ackerman and his writers knew how to appeal to that hungry interest that can be cultivated in kids without ever seeming to have talked down to that audience. The copy of a typical article, and especially the captions accompanying the treasure trove of stills each new issue offered, were often groan-inducing but also endearing, almost like a new language devised just for the readership of Famous Monsters, which Ackerman would always remind us was published in Horrorwood, Karloffornia. Yet there was serious love for the subject infused into every sentence, a whole world of monsters and mayhem just waiting to be revealed.

(For more on Famous Monsters of Filmland and Forrest J. Ackerman, I refer you to pieces I posted on SLIFR in honor of Ackerman's 90th birthday in 2006 and the day back in 1998 when I did a pilgrimage to the Ackermansion itself.)
 
And because of the interest sparked by Mr. Ackerman’s mag, I was perfectly primed at the elementary school age for the arrival of Dark Shadows. No messing around on the playground for me after class left out-- every afternoon I would race home in order to make it home in time to see the latest installment in Dan Curtis’ groundbreaking horror-themed soap opera. I’d heard murmurings about it at school and began watching just as Barnabas Collins, my generation’s very own vampire hero, was being introduced to spice up the show’s viscous gothic atmosphere (to say nothing of the sagging ratings that viscous atmosphere was inspiring). The combination of a daily infusion of daytime horror, consumed in the brightly lit living room of my house in Citrus Heights, California, and all the background knowledge and infectious enthusiasm I was eagerly absorbing through the pages of Famous Monsters every month cemented the foundation of an everlasting love for all things monster in this boy’s life.

When my parents moved us from Citrus Heights, California back to Oregon and my hometown of Lakeview, Oregon when I was about eight years old, I was allowed to go to the movies much more frequently than I ever was when we lived in the big, bad suburbs of Sacramento. And among all the other treats my hometown theater offered, I was lucky enough to see many memorable horror movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s, usually featured as one-night-only engagements to mark Friday the 13th, New Year’s Eve and, of course, Halloween. These were the movie nights I waited for, the movie nights I lived for, and considering I wasn’t living in an urban center but instead in a little cow town in Southern Oregon, I was extremely lucky to be able to see great, gruesome, 100% fun stuff like The Devil’s Own, The Green Slime, Rasputin the Mad Monk, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, The House That Screamed, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, The Dunwich Horror and countless others amongst other screaming kids like myself on the big screen. (The scary one-mile walk home down darkened streets after one of these shows was a scary treat all its own.)

My excitement whenever my friends and I got to see one of these shows, which were sometimes double features even, could barely be contained. I remember one night, during a showing of The Return of Count Yorga, being so caught up in the thrill of seeing Robert Quarry lunging down a hallway in slow motion toward his intended victim that I turned to yell at the kids behind me—“Did you see that?! Did you see that?!”—and ended up missing most of the juicy stuff that happened when he made it to the end of the hall. And one Friday the 13th screening of The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck was made particularly memorable when a bat that had apparently found a sleeping spot high in the rafters behind the screen decided to take a mid-movie buzz through the auditorium. The closest thing to a riot my hometown ever saw ensued. (Or at least that’s the way this panicked kid remembers it.)


But the all-time best Halloween night horror show at my hometown theater happened when the 1972 Amicus production of Tales from the Crypt came to town. This was a special engagement which was highly anticipated, at least by me-- I’d been seeing the ads for the movie in the Portland Oregonian for quite a while, and that screaming skull with the eyeball inserted in an otherwise cleaned-out socket sold me on the movie from my very first glimpse. The rowdy house was packed for a night of horror, and the madness of the crowd made hearing the movie sometimes difficult, but I was so excited that I tried not to care-- I was seeing Tales from the Crypt! The din had started long before the opening curtain parted, and it continued to increase, relentlessly, seemingly without regard to what was happening on screen. (As I think back on it, I often wonder if I was the only one in the house that night who actually cared what was going on in the movie itself.)

And finally, when some sort of projectile flew out of the crowd and landed very close to the screen, the owner of the theater had had enough. I noticed him as he marched slowly, deliberately, to the front of the theater, while the movie and the lunatics in this particular asylum continued to squirm and shout and laugh and scream. Suddenly the lights came up, the movie stopped and everyone went silent. The theater owner wordlessly surveyed the crowd from the front of the screen, just a few rows away from where my carcass was parked. “What I have before me, on the floor of the auditorium,” he intoned ominously, as if taking his fearsome cue from Sir Ralph Richardson's Cryptkeeper himself, “is a fresh egg.” Someone had apparently smuggled some fowl projectiles, perhaps intended to be chucked at someone’s house or car later, into the theater, and in the wild fervor of the moment that someone had let one fly. The theater owner berated the audience for their behavior and threatened to shut the screening down entirely, with no refunds, if decorum wasn’t restored immediately. He even yelled out at one poor bastard who was still cutting up during this frightening speech—“You! In the balcony! I know it was you who threw it!” Even though I wasn’t causing trouble myself, I was terrified. (I could only laugh about it later). But I was also secretly glad because, goddamn it, I couldn’t hear the movie, and the last thing I would have wanted was for the owners of the theater to suddenly decide that it wasn’t worth the trouble and pull the plug on these horror holiday special shows, which I considered a major perk and a significant antidote to the doldrums of citizenship in my hometown.


There was one added extra bonus to the night, however. The movie was nearing its end, the audience now sufficiently calmed and, I imagine, sated with fear, inspired both by the movie and by the Man. One of the ushers, a hoity-toity high school girl a few years older than most of us who could be heard throughout the movie making fun of the movie when she passed by with her flashlight, was making her last rounds. On screen the Cryptkeeper had already hurled the movie’s stars down into the pit to hell, but hardly satisfied with the evening’s haul of souls, he proceeded to intone to the now-empty chamber in which he sat, “Who will be next?” Then a brief pause. At that moment the usher, imagining herself to be the pinnacle of wit, replied for all the house to hear, “Me!” And before she could peel off a snarky laugh, Richardson turned to the camera (and, of course, to the usher) and uttered with actorly relish, “Perhaps you?!” The usher actually screamed and ran out to the lobby, providing the greatest non-rehearsed interactive ending to a horror movie I’ve ever been witness to. And for those of us who always lived under a cloud of constant condescension from people who thought horror movies were stupid, bad for you or otherwise beneath contempt, it was an especially satisfying end to a very raucous and memorable night.



You probably (hopefully!) have stories like these of your own, if you’re my age. And though they’re unlikely to capture that same frisson of chills and discovery the Halloween show of or youth held for budding monster fans, if you keep your eyes and ears open there are still plenty of great Halloween-themed horror shows programmed annually in theaters which could possibly inspire you to get off your couch on this annual night of fright. Here in Los Angeles alone you can catch these treats (no tricks) this coming weekend: the annual All-Night Horror Show at the New Beverly Cinema, a 12-hour marathon made up of six rare feature films along with an assortment of trailers, cartoons and shorts, all of which remain a delicious secret until they are unveiled on screen; Geto Boy rapper Bushwick Bill providing a running rap commentary over his favorite horror flick, the original 1988 Chucky classic Child’s Play, at the Cinefamily; and Sara Karloff, daughter of Boris, introducing a double bill of The Bride of Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein at the newly reopened Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills. All that is just tonight.

Back at the Cinefamily you can see William Castle's The Tingler, complete with the seat-buzzing Percepto gimmick, screening twice on Halloween afternoon, and then on Halloween night the New Beverly has a great night of black-and-white horror featuring Curse of the Demon, Carnival of Souls  and, at midnight, Night of the Living Dead.


And speaking of Sara Karloff, she and Bela Lugosi Jr., son of the great Bela Lugosi, were on hand for a showing of the relatively underappreciated Son of Frankenstein (1939) last night at the splendiferous Alex Theater in downtown Glendale which I was grateful to be able to attend. The event was hosted by current Famous Monsters of Filmland editor David Weiner and sponsored by the Alex Film Society, and a better (egg-free) preparation for Halloween it could not have been. Karloff and Lugosi were clearly honored and excited to be promoting the legacy of their famous parents, even if one felt they might have been rehashing the same stories from countless similar appearances, and they lent the evening a suitable gravitas to go along with the spirited fun.
 
The movie itself is far more entertaining than its reputation as a mere sequel would suggest. Karloff may have been tiring of appearing as the Monster by this point, but it doesn’t show in his performance. This great actor remains committed in Son of Frankenstein to the pathos of his creation while perhaps keeping more attuned to the Monster’s rage the third time around, as well as to a sense of gallows humor—the moment when he considers tossing the unbearable moppet Donnie Dunagan into a roiling pit of sulfur, before sadly deciding against it, is truly delicious.
 
And Lugosi turns in what might be his best performance here as the wronged, but still clearly psychotic Igor, his neck having been broken in a botched attempt by enraged villagers to hang him and whose impulse toward vengeance spurs the Monster’s worst behavior. His contemptuous hearing before the council that once attempted to execute him is a masterful bit of comic/tragic acting, and it’s a shame he never really got the chance to shine like this on the screen again during the remainder of his career.

Meanwhile, Basil Rathbone and four-star character actor Lionel Atwill as, respectively, the conflicted son of the Monster’s creator and the local police inspector who suspects new foul play at Castle Frankenstein, carry the dramatic proceedings right up to the edge of parody without ever tipping over. A friend of mine recently described their richly pleasurable performances here as “plummy,” and I can’t possibly top that description. It is enormous fun watching this movie, which provided the basic template for the plot and many of the comedic touchstones of Young Frankenstein (1974), and realizing how closely Kenneth Mars’ hilarious performance as the village inspector in Mel Brooks’ movie is related to what Lionel Atwill does here, right down to the darts jammed into the gendarme’s wooden arm during a tense standoff between the inspector and the not-quite-mad doctor.

Son of Frankenstein was a joy to watch unfold on the magnificent Alex screen last night, in the presence of friends and my oldest daughter, who loves the monster classics just like her dad. It was a Halloween show to live on with my memories of the great ones of my youth, though thankfully less raucous, and hopefully it’s one that she’ll remember with fondness in the same way I remember those Halloween nights at my local show house. So to return to the original question, that’s how I realized that I’m a horror fan, and why the genre and its rich history continues to mean so much to me. Here’s hoping if it means the same to you that you’ll find your way to a monster classic and a suitably terrifying Halloween night this year too.

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Wednesday, October 28, 2015

THE 2015 SLIFR HALLOWEEN HORROR SCREEN GRAB QUIZ



Halloweek is here again, and the preparations around this blog, as well as my other haunt, Fear of the Velvet Curtain over at Trailers from Hell, are well under way. I’m trying to fashion some good scare-themed viewing opportunities for myself and the kids this year to go along with running around the neighborhood and threatening the neighbors in exchange for candy, and what with the big night happening on a  Saturday this week we might just be able to work some of my nefarious couch-oriented plans into the schedule. I wanted to take Emma for the great New Beverly Halloween night triple feature of Curse of the Demon, Carnival of Souls and Night of the Living Dead, which happens to be the very first movie I ever saw at the New Beverly way back in 1982, but she’s got her heart set on handing out treats at the front door this year. What can I say? Some annual traditions are more powerful than others.

Speaking of which, we have our own annual tradition around here which we shall now get to without further ado. The SLIFR Halloween Horror Screen Grab Quiz is back and, if this year’s brew is not better than ever (it might be!), then it’s certainly at least as challenging as these quizzes ever have been. Behold this year’s pumpkin patch crop of 31 judiciously farmed screen grabs from the history of the horror genre—all you have to do is tell me, or your best friends, or your way-too-patient spouse, or anyone else you can harangue into listening, from what film each frame cometh. Some are certainly easier than others to parse, especially if you’re well-versed in the cinema of fear. But there are a couple of shots that follow which may prove even more challenging to all but those who have slaked their thirst for the red corpuscles found coursing through the furthest reaches of the world of famous and not-so-famous monsters.

You can brag about your tally of correct guesses in the comments column below if you so choose, but in the interest of keeping the contest as fresh as a day-old anatomy lab corpse, please don’t give away any answers. You can send your complete list of guesses to this address: powser2@earthlink.net. I’ll let you know who claws their way out of the grave with the most answers next week.

So let’s test the quality of the parts from which you have been stitched. Let the horror games begin. (And remember, you can click on each image for a bigger, better look...)

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