Time was short last night and I needed to select a film quickly and with a brief running time so I went for Universal’s sequel to their hit film Dracula, Dracula’s Daughter.

Dracula’s Daughter opens where Dracula ended, Van Helsing in the ruins of Carfax Abbey having just finished driving a stake through the vampire’s heart when the scene is discovered by a pair of patrolling bobbies. Reinfield is dead on the floor with a broken neck – undoubtedly played by a fake Shemp – and Van Helsing confesses to the destroying Dracula. London is not so forward thinking as to accept the ‘he was a vampire’ defense and the good doctor is arrested for murder.

Van Helsin calls on an old student, Dr Garth to help him prove the truth. However before things can get really rolling Dracula’s corpse is stolen from police custody by a mysterious woman who cremates the remains while her man servant watches with a cynical expression.

The woman is the titular character, and like her father she is a vampire but she is an unwilling one and hopes to find a way out of her life of darkness, blood, and death. Soon there is another spate of blood draining deaths and the police are forced to accept that Van Helsing may not be as insane as his defense.

As a sequel this is a very odd duck. There is no trace of the original characters save for the already mentioned Van Helsing. Dracula makes no appearance and the story while continuing on from the previous events is truly its own beast. Dracula’s daughter is presented in an interesting and conflicting manner. She is like an addict, trapped by a need she cannot deny but one that also repulses here. She has her mostly faithful manservant Sandor but his loyalty comes from the promise of an eternal life and when Dr. Garth becomes the center of her attention Sandor’s loylaty is tested.

This is a short film, just over seventy minutes in running time, and very light on the mayhem. The production code had come into effect by 1936 and between the code and Universal’s owner still hesitant nature toward the gruesome this movie is very sparse of the horrific elements. For example we still are not shown a vampire climbing out of their casket, such an image was deemed too macabre by Carl Laemmle. Surprisingly though some subversive elements survive in the subtext including a fairly strong hint that Dracula’s daughter either likes the ladies or enjoys both sides of the street.

This is not a film you have to see, but I don;t regret seeing it twice in ten years or having it included in my DVD set.

Well, this did not go according to plan. The week before last I had seen an advert for a double feature of The Omen and its sequel Omen II. Now I own a Blu-ray of The Omen (not the sequel which is a seriously flawed film) but I have never seen it on the big screen. Last night I couldn’t find the showing I had read about. Bummed at my boned headed mistake – whatever it was – I informed my sweetie-wife that I would be home on Wednesday night and watched The Omen on Blu-ray.

This morning Facebook reminded me of the showing but since I don’t feel like watching it twice the same week so I’ll watch something on Wednesday.

The Omen is part of a cycle of Devil/Satanic films from the 70s. This particular subgenre of horror had quite a surge in popularity after the smashing success of The Exorcist and pretty much the subgenre didn’t run out of steam until the flood of slasher films in the late 70’s and early 80s.

Sturgeon’s law applies equally well to the devil movies with most being forgettable fair that merely grabbed tropes and clichés in an attempt to leap on the bandwagon, but the two that do stand out are worthy films, The Exorcist and The Omen.

The Exorcist stands on firmer theological grounds but The Omen, directed by Richard Donner who also gave us Superman: The Motion Picture, Ladyhawke, and Lethal Weapon, took what might have been a tired and overly violent movie and made a tight, taunt film that moves on character and the corrupting power of secrets.

The film is about the Thorne family, Robert Thorne a successful politician and close personal friend to the president, Katherine (Kathy) Thrones his supportive and loving wife, and their ‘son’ Damien.

The quotes are there for a reason, Kathy Thorne, while Robert was ambassador to Italy, gave birth to their first son but Robert is informed that the child died immediately. The priest at the hospital offered Robert a chance to turn the tragedy into something better. There was another baby whose mother died in childbirth, perhaps the Ambassador can take this child as his own? His wife need not know. Thorne unable to give his wife the devastating news chooses the lie and they present the baby to Kathy as her own. Everything that follows in the story is a direct consequence of Thorne’s action and his lies to support it.

Years later death stalks the Thornes, mysterious suicides, fantastically bizarre accidents, and the strange ravings of a dying priest propel the Ambassador on a quest to unravel the truth of what he agreed to that fateful morning of June 6 at 6 am.

This film was remade in 2006 but it performed poorly and when I tried to watch it on Blu-ray I stopped the movie before it finished. The truth of the matter is while the script is decent what elevated the original is the director and a superb cast. Gregory Peck as Ambassador Thorne brings considerable gravitas to the production creating an atmosphere making it is easier to believe the fantastic elements. Lee Remick takes a role that really has very little on the page and imbues it with an inner life that enhances the audience identification her tragic character. Rounding out the cast are fantastic character actors such as David Warner, Leo McKern, Billie Whitelaw, and Patrick Troughton.

This is a movie well worth seeing.

Last night I turned to psychological horror with 1941s The Body Snatcher, the first film directed by Robert Wise. This is not to confused the 1956 SF/Horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a classic that has been remade too many time. This movie is based on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson and it features Boris Karloff giving in my opinion his best screen performance.

Set in Edinburgh 1831, just before the Anatomy Acts stopped the scourge of grave-robbing to feed the needs of medical school, the story is about an idealistic you g medical student, Donald Fettes as he learns about the dark secrets of his mentor Doctor MacFarland and the mysterious, dangerous cab-man John Gray that supplies the school with corpses for its anatomy courses. The horror here lies in the evil that people do for their petty and selfish motives. Gray is propelled by more than mere money but rather a sense of humiliation and a thirst for dominance drives his evil and cruel actions. MacFarland is trapped by his own cowardice and in the end becomes as evil as Gray in his own futile search for freedom from a stained and scandalous history with the cab-man. There is a charming and optimistic sub-plot involving a young girl who was confined by a carriage accident to a wheel chair illuminating that not everything associated with brutal medical schools of the time is doomed to failure.

Clocking in at just an hour and eighteen minutes The Body Snatcher illustrates that a film can be packed with character, story, and theme without suffering from a bloated running time. Karloff as Gray gives a charming and evil performance as a man who can smile sweetly just as he murders you. He gives the character a real sense of life and depth. Gray is monstrous but he is not a monster; he is far too human for such simplistic explanations.

I bought this film about twenty years ago at a shop where I paid something like $8 for a used laserdisc. Having never seen the movie it was a gamble but one that paid off by giving me one of favorite films. It is available on DVD as a double feature with I Walked with a Zombie, another Val Lewton production, these films are part of RKO’s attempt at horror which produced the original Cat People, but I cannot recommend I walked with a Zombie thought it is a small price to pay to own such an film as The Body Snatcher.

Last night I turned the Young People in Peril (YPIP) subgenre for my horror selection. Now this subgenre has been with us for quite a while, really taking off in 1979 with Halloween, launching this and the slasher subgenres as the dominate horror form for decades. Only the Zombie and ‘Found Footage’ subgenres have really challenged the primacy if this format.

2012 saw the release of The Cabin in the Woods, a film that both respected and subverted the YPIP format. Co-written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, minds that collective have brought to the big and small screens such properties as Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Cloverfield, The Martian, and Daredevil The Cabin in the Woods reflects their sense of humor and horror.

On one level the film displays all the classic tropes of the subgenre. Five college students leave for an weekend at a distant and isolated cabin deep within the forest. They comprise the classic character types found in the films, the athlete, the scholar, the whore, the jester, and the good girl. After ignoring warning signs that things are not what they appear they accidentally awaken an evil force that methodically and remorselessly hunts them down for savage brutal murder.

As you can see this is a  well worn story line and just from that bit it would be difficult to say exactly which film I watched. It might have been Cabin Fever, or the original Evil Dead or any number of YPIP franchises. Two things make this movie stand out from the others.

First; the young people are real characters with real personalities they defy the broad strokes of their position in the plot. The Athlete is smart and well read, the relationships between the characters display true friendship and depth of emotion, making the later brutal scenes that much more horrifying.

The second element I can not truly discuss without delving into serious spoiler territory. These elements are presented from the very first scene of the movie and when the threads combine it can be read in several different ways. Drew Goddard has said that his father worked in nuclear weapons manufacturing and that part of what he wanted to explore as a theme was the stress and lives of people who are tasked with a job that truly horrific and utterly necessary.

The script has the trademarked Joss Whedon sense of humor and with his deft skill he plays that humor in the front part of the story, because once the horror starts there is little room for jokes and japes. This is what many people who try to combine comedy and horror fail to understand. You can have both, but having them in the same scenes rarely works.

The Cabin in the Woods is a brutal, bloody, and horrifying story expertly crafted and executed. I had the good fortune of seeing it in the theaters and it is one of my favorites.

So I have watched a ghost story, a monster movie, and for this third in the series of indeterminate length I selected a giant monster flick. Of course the giant monster films divide into two broad categories: giant beasts & insects and Kaiju, started by the classic film Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Tarantula is part of that American tradition started by the movie Them! of giant animals, usually insects, terrorizing the north American southwest.

Generally I do not consider the giant bug movies to be actual horror films. Horror is a deeply personal emotion and to convey it in a story you generally need deeply drawn and identifiable characters, while  giant bug movies are more about spectacle and disaster. However I recognize that I am in a lone minority with this opinion and so monster films or all types will be open to the film series.

Tarantula, perhaps best immortalized by Richard O’Brien with the lyric “… Leo G. Carroll was over a barrel when Tarantula took to the hills...,”is not really the best of the big bug movies, though it is far from being the worst. The story is very simply, a pair of scientists working to prevent world-hunger by developing an artificial nutrient, accidentally create a giant tarantula that takes to the deserts of Arizona. In truth there isn’t a lot of giant spider in this movie. Most of the film concerns the local doctor, played by John Agar, trying to sniff out what the scientists are hiding when one turns up mysteriously dead and deformed. The super-sized spider only appears in the last act and when the authorities call in the military it is dispatched rather quickly. (Though you have to wonder what that town smells like after they burn the thing to death with Napalm. Suitable for all your pest control needs.)

The film is competently directed by Jack Arnold, who brought us the first two Creature from the Black Lagoon movies and a little know feature that has always had a fond spot in my heart simply due to it most unusual giant monster – The Monolith Monsters. Arnold brings in a few actors from his previous films, the afore mentioned John Agar, along with his second screen appearance in a genre film, albeit with his face covered by a fighter pilot’s oxygen mask, Clint Eastwood. The effects are credible and hold up decently considering budget and time. The biggest strike against this movie is the script. The protagonist does very little protagging and because of that the narrative has terribly weak momentum. Overall I can’t really recommend this movie except to complete your knowledge of classic films of this type from the 50s.

From Japan on one side of the globe to the United Kingdom on the other the second film in the Halloween festival comes to us from Hammer Studios, the people who made stars of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee while pioneering the bloodshed and bosoms style of horror films.

Short on both bloodshed and bosoms and written by Nigel Kneale, the man who also created the Quatermass stories, The Abominable Snowman follows an expedition to the Himalayan peaks as a small band of men search for proof of the Yeti’s existence. What might have been just another ‘chased by the monster’ story is instead in Kneale’s capable hands turned into a thoughtful character piece that explores some mighty big themes, including man’s place in the world. There are plenty of wonderful character moments in this film. The lhama’s careful verbal bombs as he sabotages the expedition without revealing the true depth of his own knowledge, the open conflict between Rollason a scientist and ‘Friend’ (we never learn if that was his true name) a con man looking reclaim his tarnished image, and other members of the expedition slowly snapping under the stress all come together very nicely.

The cast performs quite well, particularly Peter Cushing as the scientist John Rollason who is driven by the quest for knowledge and Forrest Tucker, best known to baby boomers as a comedic actor from television shows such as F Troop, turns in a very credible performance as Tom Friend, a man with too many secrets. The Abominable Snowman starts with the premise that the Yeti is a dying species, an evolutionary dead end but by the end  the story has turned that cliché on its head.

The film does suffer from the period in which it was produced. The staged mountain tops are clearly dressed sound stages and match up poorly with the location shooting from high in the European Alps. Being the 1950s the film also suffers from ‘yellow-face’ casting where European actors play Asian roles leaving only bit parts to be played by actors that match the ethnicity of their characters.

A lesser-known production of mighty Hammer Studios, my sweetie-wife obtained a copy of the film for me a few Christmases ago from an on-demand service. (Or it may have been for our anniversary which occurs the same week. And if you think a movie is a poor anniversary gift you don’t know me. Movies are ALWAYS a good gift.)

If older films with a more sedate pacing are you speed, this one is certainly worth a look.

This year as Halloween approaches I have decided to bing on horror films, Most if not all of these will be older films from my personal collection though there may one or two from a streaming service.

Horror films have been a part of my life as long as I can remember. When I was a wee boy my older brothers would go to the drive-in on the weekend and promise our parents that they would select something suitable for my impressionable mind and we often ended up watching horror films. The only fiction books I owned as a child were ghost stories so horror and ghosts in particular have always been a part of my experiences.

In 2002 the film The Ring was released, an American remake of a 1998 Japanese film Ringu. I saw The Ring on videotape – how very ironic – loved it and when I moved over to DVD obtained a copy in that medium. Some years later through Amazon I purchased a DVD set of the original films, Ringu and its sequels.

Ringu is based on a Japanese novel of the same title but the film and its sequels diverge significantly from the source material.

The plot of Ringu is fairly straight forward; a cursed videotape summons a ghost who kills people seven days after they watch the tape. A female news reporter discovers the story, views the tape and scrambles to unravel the mystery before the ghost arrives and claims her.

This movie has all the classic elements of a ghost story, the mystery, the unjust death, the focus of atmospherics over ‘kills’ to propel the horror. It is one of my favorite horror films. If you have seen The Ring you’ll know most of the beats that occur in Ringu but there are story elements that were not translated to the American version and these make watching Ringu a different experience than watching the Ring. The DVD has no dubbed English language so if you watch it you will do it via sub-titles. (Not a hindrance for me. I generally prefer sub-titling over dubbing.)

The sequels and prequels are uneven and perhaps are best approached as films in their own right and not directly tied to Ringu. That said, I would heartily recommend Ringu to anyone who like creepy horror fiction over splatter kills.