The Morbid Imagination

Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986) attempts to recount events from the summer of 1816 in Geneva, when Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Mary Shelley shared ghost stories on stormy nights and subsequently challenged each other to write their own chilling tales. To say that Gothic misses the mark is being kind, but for director Ken Russell taking liberties with the facts is usually only a starting point.

Gothic gets many details right initially but after the first half hour it degenerates into a typical, over-the-top Ken Russell mish-mosh of visual excess, incoherence, and kinky sex. And after all that, the movie ends with a short, out of place narration that points out that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a result of her summer reading spooky tales with Lord Byron. It’s almost as if the producers watched the rough cut, realized that it made no sense at all and felt obligated to provide the audience with some clue as to why what they just endured mattered.

The greatest crime committed by Gothic is what the movie does to the memory of Mary Shelley. Poor John Polodori gets completely screwed as well, but at least he was a hack writer. Mary Shelly, on the other hand, wrote one of the enduring masterpieces of English literature…when she was only 19.

I just finished reading Miranda Seymour’s excellent biography, Mary Shelley, and was struck by how different the real Mary Shelley was from her popular portrait as the mild mannered wife living in the shadow of her brilliant husband. In truth, Mary was better educated than either her college dropout husband, Cambridge frat boy Byron, or Doctor John Polidori, and she was known for being an intimidating figure in intellectual conversation.

Contrary to popular legend and Mary‘s own later mythmaking, Frankenstein did not arise as the result of a dream Mary experienced following a stormy night of reading ghost stories in Switzerland. There was indeed a challenge between Mary, Shelley, Byron, and John Polidori to each write their own horror tale, but Frankenstein was assembled from a patchwork of Mary’s literary influences, existing story fragments, scientific discussions held throughout that summer, and bits of history and geography picked in their recent travels. This included a visit two years earlier to the vicinity of the Castle Frankenstein, where alchemist Conrad Dippel had supposedly attempt to reanimate the dead.

Gothic, however, gives all the credit for the inspiration of Frankenstein to ranting conversations between a bed-hopping Byron and an opium maddened Shelley, leaving Mary as little more than a weepy spectator.

From its initial publication in 1818, Frankenstein was an important and influential book. Although Frankenstein was published anonymously with a small print run that was mainly distributed amongst English literary circles it quickly gained notice for Mary. Most of its readers knew Mary and were aware that she was supposed to be the author, although some thought that Shelley had either written it himself or had a heavy hand in its development. This unfortunate mis-perception continued throughout Mary’s life and long past it, especially as Shelley’s fame grew posthumously.

Frankenstein is a tremendous literary accomplishment and it is all Mary’s. At the time, Shelley was an obscure figure, known more for his scandalous life than his poetry and Mary was famed from birth as the daughter of two towering figures of English intellectual circles.  This was the sort of greatness expected of her by her father’s friends, but sexism and her own later dedication to the memory of her beloved Shelley helped to rob Mary of her proper due.

So, to clarify: Mary Shelley, brilliant; Ken Russell, self-indulgent hack. And poor Polidori was not ugly or gay and in fact was quite handsome.

In my last post, I made the case that Roman Polanksi’s Repulsion (1965) merited consideration as one of the greatest horror movies of all time. What other films should be on that list?

How about the film that inspired Repulsion, along with dozens of other movies in the early 1960s? Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) was a box office smash and a cultural milestone. It didn’t invent the psycho killer movie (that might have been Hitchcock’s own film The Lodger) but it cemented it as a distinct genre and laid down some of the rules. (Killer driven by childhood trauma, hidden identity, shower scenes, etc…) It’s fair to say that, without Psycho, there would have been no Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), or Repulsion.

What makes Psycho such a great horror film? I think that it is the collision of the seamy, everyday small evils of flawed humans with murderous, inhumanly insane evil. It’s not that Marion Crane deserves her awful fate but that her own very human weaknesses and desires lands her in a place where real evil awaits. Psycho gets us to identify with Marion, feel ashamed for sharing voyeuristicthrills with her killer, experience horror at the final revelation, all at the same time. Brilliant.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is also a psycho killer film, but one turned inside out. While following the pursuit of one killer we meet one that is ten times worse, but safely incarcerated. Instead of a familiar, linear string of spectacular murders, we are drawn in to the interplay between the insecure young FBI agent and the deadly, brilliant Hannibal Lecter. In fact, only three people die during the course of the movie, one of them the killer Jamie Gumb at the hands of Agent Starling.

What makes The Silence of the Lambs a great horror movie? For me, it is the slow buildup of the character of Hannibal Lecter. We hear all kinds of anecdotes about how terrible and dangerous he is, but his scenes with Agent Starling render him almost likable. Then he escapes and in the course of doing so, confirms every fear that he is not only dangerous but utterly inhuman and evil. He is the bogeyman, and the lamer, lesser bogeyman is brought to justice but he escapes.

My final runner-up for greatest horror movie is Freaks (1932). Directed by Tod Browning, Freaks remains the most unexpected mainstream film release ever. In the successful horror movie cycle that began a year early with Browning’s Dracula, Freaks was greenlit without much apprehension. Imagine the shock that studio executives experienced when Browning delivered a film where physically repellent mutants were the sympathetic figures and “normal” humans were the monsters.

What makes Freaks a great horror movie? It’s the fact that after making us comfortable with the freaks, Browning turns things around in the last act and makes them figures of horror wrenched up from our ids. The final effect is disorienting, leaving us questioning the nature of humanity.

I have narrowed the list of what I consider the greatest horror movies down to these four and my final choice based on the fact that I consider all of them perfect films that could not have been improved in any way. There are other films like Frankenstein (1931), Night of the Living Dead (1968), or Peeping Tom (1960) which are great horror films, but which in some way or another just miss the cut.

Also, what these five movies all share is that they render alienness and inhumanity in ways that burrow deep into our subconcious and make the threat they pose more than just existential. We might not only die, these films say, but we may die at the hands of something that comes out of the darkness in our own souls and minds. 

Next post: The Greatest Horror Movie Ever.

I won’t go so far as to call Paul Morrissey’s Blood for Dracula (1974) high art, but it is a more effective and serious vampire movie than most of the high profile vampire movies of the last fifty years.

It may seem a stretch to label a movie featuring over the top acting, in- your-face comical gore effects, and soft core sex serious, but Blood for Dracula has something that movies like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Horror of Dracula (1958) and Twilight (2008) all lack:  subtext. Additionally, Blood for Dracula deconstructs the sexy vampire stereotype and returns to its creepy, undead origins.

Did you hate Twilight? Blood for Dracula is the anti-Twilight.

Blood for Dracula was filmed as an improvised afterthought when the 3D camp extravaganza Flesh for Frankenstein was finished under budget and ahead of schedule. Dracula exceeds Frankenstein in every aspect including outrageousness and camp.

Udo Kier’s Dracula is a whiny, effete aristocrat who pukes up gallons of blood every time he drinks the blood of non virgins. Driven from Transylvania by the lack of local virgins, he selects Italy for his new feeding ground, based on the theory that the influence of the Catholic church will keep the Italian girls pure. Unfortunately, he settles in with a noble family whose daughters are being plowed regularly by misplaced Brooklyn mook Joe Dallesandro. It seems likely that the producers of the movie recruited the actresses playing the daughters from the nearest disco by promising them mountains of coke.

Blood for Dracula was not made in 3D, but it hardly matters. The last fifteen minutes is a crazed, blood spurting orgy of wonderful dementia, on top of a movie rich in laugh lines. Along the way, Morrissey manages to deconstruct the glamorous, sexy vampire into a wretched, pitiful creep reduced to licking hymeneal blood off the floor. You can also credibly view the movie as a commentary on the parasitic nature of aristocracy.

It’s sad that a movie made on the spur of the moment and intended for distribution as a midnight movie took more time to reflect on the implications and possibilities of the vampire myth than numerous big-budgeted movies made since then.

Besides, I’ll take Udo Kier over Keanu Reeves any day…

In my last post I referred to Son of Frankenstein (1939) as the “last great Universal Horror movie.” I wrote that assuming someone might say: “But what about The Wolfman?” (I didn’t assume anyone would retort: “But what about “The Son of Dracula?”)

The Wolfman (1941) is a fine film, one that created an icon of horror that has been copied numerous times since. But it is not a great film. I think its impact was due mainly to Jack Pierce’s make up and John Fulton’s lap dissolve transformation scenes.

Beginning with Son of Frankenstein, which launched a new cycle of monster movies, Universal assigned studio functionaries to their monster films, like George Waggner, Curt Siodmak, or Roy William Neill. Contrast this with the impressive list of artists involved in 1930s Horror: James Whale, Robert Florey, Edgar G. Ulmer, Karl Freund, or Tod Browning. In the 1930s, Horror Films were “A” list productions, in the 1940s they were “B” movies churned out for a quick buck along with Sherlock Holmes or Abbott and Costello films. While pre-WW2 films of this cycle, like The Wolfman or The Mummy’s Hand (1940), were clearly better budgeted and crafted than the sequels and team-up films that followed, all of these movies were a step or two down from the sophisticated fare of the previous decade.

That doesn’t mean they weren’t fun or enjoyable, but it’s stretching it to try and hold them up favorably to the ground-breaking, sometimes truly chilling masterpieces that created a whole genre.

Here are few things, however, I loved about the 1940s Universal Horror Movies:

• The opening scene in Frankenstein vs. The Wolfman (1943) where grave robbers break into Larry Talbot’s crypt and unleash the Wolfman. Genuinely creepy.
• Lon Chaney, Jr.’s Kharis
• Evelyn Ankers, Ilona Massey, and Elena Verdugo. Universal made sure it included a hot actress in nearly every film, and either glammed them up with striking gowns or draped them in negligees. A special nod to Virginia Christine, who was exotic and sexy in The Mummy’s Curse (1944) and many years later went on to fame as “Mrs. Olsen” of Folger’s Coffee.

The last of the great Universal monster films, Son of Frankenstein (1939) has a lot going for it. It features a great cast: Basil Rathbone in his prime as Dr. Frankenstein, Lionel Atwill memorable as the one-armed Inspector Krogh, Bela Lugosi as the crippled Igor, and of course, Karloff in his last performance as the Monster. The script features a number of great lines (“Only his mother was the lightening!”) and sharp exchanges between Atwill and Rathbone (Much of the original script was discarded and it appears a great deal of the film was improvised as shooting progressed).

But what elevates the third film in the series above what followed in the 1940s and even what had passed before is the emphasis placed on set design, photography, and atmosphere.

Helmed by director Rowland V. Lee, Son of Frankenstein features eye-popping set design/art direction by Jack Otterson and shadow-rich photography by George Robinson. The film ranks as one of the finest Hollywood derivations of German expressionism. A sense of unreality permeates the proceedings, thanks to out-sized doors, furniture and stairways broken into forced perspective, and layers of sharp angled shadows. 

While Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) were no slouches in art direction and photography, in those films they served mainly to support the story and acting. In Son of Frankenstein, they nearly  overwhelm the film. This appears to have been a deliberate choice made by Lee, who supposedly was aiming to  create a fairy tale horror film, one rooted in Grimm’s and other Germanic primal folklore. Or it’s possible that since the film was created to capitalize on the box office success of the re-release of the original, that Lee was merely trying to create a film that served up as much sensation as the censors of the time would allow. At a time when cleavage was banned and gruesome shock was unknown, spooky corridors and suggestive shadows were as much horror as the public was allowed.

Son of Frankenstein

Son of Frankenstein

Son of Frankenstein