Category Archives: Horror

Streaming Review: Lake of the Dead (1958)

Despite what the title might lead you the think the 1958 Norwegian horror film Lake of the Dead contains zero zombies or undead.

Instead, it is the story of six adults friends, none of them remotely close to being a teenager, who vacation at a remote cabin that boasts a horrific and ghostly legend. Fairly quickly it is suggested that the ghost of the peg-legged murder may be possessing the vacationers and the clock is ticking for the group to solve the mystery of the lake as the dangers grows.

I wish I could say that I liked Lake of the Dead, but while it did not tempt me to switch it off nor did it fully engage me. The story is told entirely in flashback so on one level there are at least a set of character the audience is aware are going to survive their experience. I do appreciate the approach that had different character holding vastly different theories concerning the existence of the supernatural. However, a trained psychiatrist simply pronouncing the fact of telepathy as something as routine as antibiotics grated me in an entirely wrong manner. That said this film undoubtedly works for some and is competently crafted.

Lake of the Dead is currently streaming in Shudder.

Streaming Review: Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster

I recently ignited a spirited discussion on the questions was the original novel Frankenstein science-fiction or not. A number of people argues the process of using electricity to vivify the creature as a principal aspect of the science in this fiction. But that image, the grand storm, the massive bolts of lightning, the sparking machinery, all originate with the 1931 film Frankenstein and if any visual image leaps into your head of the creature, particularly if that image is hulking, brutish, and mute then the person leaping to your mind is Boris Karloff.

This week I watched a fantastic documentary on the life of Karloff, Boris Karloff: The Man Behind The Monster and while I knew some of the story there was a great deal about this extremely talented actor I never knew. For example, due to the racism of the times he hid and never discussed his ethnicity and what I had assumed was a ‘Hollywood tan’ George Hamilton was actually his South Asian (Indian) heritage.

Remember almost exclusively in popular culture as Frankenstein’s monster, a part he gave pathos and empathy to that lives on nearly a century later, Karloff’s best work came in other films. Personally I have not seen a finer performance by him than as the murderous cabman in The Body Snatcher, (1945) where he is not only frightening but also disarmingly charming. However, The documentary also gave me new films to seek out and watch with the amazingly versatile man such as Lured starring Lucile Ball searching for a killer in London, or The Black Room where Karloff plays noble brothers with one decidedly evil.

The film covers his life, its hard knocks, and that somehow this man remained giving, gracious, and inspiring throughout the turbulent turmoils. For fans of good documentaries, classic horror, and above all Karloff, this is a must see.

Boris Karloff: The Man Behind The Monster is currently streaming on Shudder.

One Third of The Unholy Trinity: Blood on Satan’s Claw

In the realm of cinematic folk horror three films are enshrined as ‘the unholy trinity’, The Wicker Man, The Witchfinder General, and The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Of the films only The Wicker Man has a contemporary (at the time of production) setting with the other two set in historical times.The Witchfinder General is set during the English civil war and while no magical or supernatural events takes place it is a film with characters obsessed with witchcraft. The movie I watched this past Sunday night The Blood on Satan’s Claw takes place in the early 1800’s when the enlightenment, for the educated, has dispelled superstition but unlike The Witchfinder General, here the supernatural is real and evil stalks the land.

Originally conceived as an anthology film The Blood on Satan’s Claw kicks off with a country lad discovering inhuman remains in a field he was tilling. The educated judge visiting the isolated village dismisses any talk of demons as superstition leaving the villagers to face the growing threat alone. The children of the village fall under the thrall of some unseen influence bringing death and terror to the adults and children resistant to the unholy call.

While lacking in the gory effects made popular in the 80s cycle of horror films and not quite up to the standard of psychologically themed horror films, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, though not a massive hit in its time, has come to be seen as one of the founding films, along with the others in the unholy trinity, of the genre folk horror. What makes this movie effect as a horror film is that apparent randomness of the violence and misfortune that befalls various villagers. There is no ‘transgress and die’ pattern at work nor are the people targeted a direct danger to the growing evil. Terrible fates fall upon characters without reason leaving an existential dread in the air that anyone at any time is a potential victim.

Perhaps slow by today’s standards The Blood on Satan’s Claw is still worth a watch and is currently streaming on Shudder.

Tilbury: an Update and recommendation

On Friday Jan 28th I posted my review and comments on the 1985 made for television Icelandic Folk horror movie Tilbury and in that essay, I commented that the film apparently took an antisemitic turn in its final act.

I am pleased, very pleased, to report that such an interpretation is at odds with the director’s intention and the Menorahs visible in the setting of the films climax were ultimately just an element of set decoration that carried the potential for misinterpretation and not confirmation of a character’s earlier accusations. The film’s reached out to me to discuss this matter and I’m happy to revisit my thoughts on this interesting piece of folk horror. (I also want to note that my Sweetie-wife strongly disagreed with my initial interpretation.)

Tilbury with its folklore that is unfamiliar to most people beyond Iceland and its strange nightmare logic sequences is not the sort of cinema that everyone enjoys but that we need more of, off beat and willing to be something more than a machete wielding masked madman. So please check out this unique piece of cinema currently streaming on Shudder.

Icelandic Folk Horror: Tilbury

Made for Icelandic television in 1987 Tilbury is a short, just 53-minute, folk horror set during the British occupation of Iceland in 1940.

Audun is young man from rural Iceland. When he is sent near Reykjavik to part of the labor force building up defenses for the occupying British forces, he’s asked by the village priest to check in on a young woman, the priest’s daughter, who traveled there earlier and who has now fallen out of contact.

Out of place and naive Audun eventually finds the young woman but begins to suspect that a British officer she’s having an affair with may in fact be an imp from Icelandic folklore. As Audun investigates his experiences become more and more nightmarish.

Despite the limitations of television and budget Tilbury has much to offer; Lynchian dream logic sequences, amusing portrayals of British and American stereotypes by Icelandic performers, and a different vibe of folk horror.

The follow bit of text I am striking through. Please see my follow-up post but essentially it was wrong and I regret the error.

That said it must be noted that halfway through the run time the piece takes an ugly anti-Semitic turn that is truly baffling and utterly unnecessary to story or plot. At first these viewpoints can be dismissed as a character’s bigotry but the movie’s climatic sequence present imagery that invalidates such an interpretation.

~~With such an ugly turn I cannot recommend anyone support what otherwise might have been an interesting discovery.~~

Tilbury is currently streaming on Shudder.

A Phantom Fidelity: Frankenstein Monster’s Creation

It is difficult to count the number of times Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein has been adapted in some form or another to motion pictures, but the count is in the scores. Some have attempted to hew closely to the novel as in Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley’ Frankensteinwhile other are so disregarding of the text that creature is made into a kaiju fighting other oversized monsters in the Japanese wilderness.

What nearly all these adaptations have in common is a visually dynamic creation process where the creature is brought to life. The method varies wildly, in the first film adaptation from Edison’s company the creature is born in fire and in the aforementioned 1994 film the processed is wet and liquid much like a fetus growing in a womb. However, the most famous and most used process is lightning during a fantastic storm as inspired by the pre-code 1931 James Whale film Frankenstein. (Ironically it is not electricity that provides life the creature in this film but the undiscovered ‘Great Ray’ beyond ultraviolet that is the source of life, but the movie fixed in the popular imagination the idea of electrification into life.) This production also created another recurring fixture in future adaptations, the twisted assistant, here named Fritz, who later and indelibly became Igor.

What makes these phantom fidelities is that the novel spends an amazingly little amount of time or text on the creation itself. One paragraph, 98 words out 75,000 depict the creature creation.

” It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.“

And yet I think it would be very difficult to persuade a production company to fund a new adaptation of Frankenstein without a climatic creation scene present. And Igor has become so accepted as cannon that in the 2004 film Van Helsing when asked why he tortures the creature Igor responds, “It’s what I do.” His existence not only as assistant but as tormentor is so fixed it no longer needs any form of explanation. The mad scientist, the sadistic assistant, and the grand act of creation seem foundational to the story and none of it existed in the original text. Perhaps the person who casts the longest shadow in the universal myth, second only to Shelley herself, is James Whale.

A Strange Cinematic Love: Planet of the Vampires

When I was about 12 or 13 on the local late-night horror show I saw a movie that left a deep and lasting impression Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires.

PoV is a science-fiction horror that may have very well influenced Dan O’Bannon when he conceived of his classic scrip Alien. Adapted from a short story “A night of 21 Hours” (in Italy with the more apt title Terror in Space) the movie is an Italian/Spanish co-production with an international cast fronted by American actor Barry Sullivan. Two space craft, the Galliot and the Argos arrive at an unexplored world following a signal that may be of intelligent origin. Attempting to land the Argos nearly crashes and after a brief fugue state where the crew try to murder each other bare-handed they begin a search for the missing Galliot. Strange occurrences and lights plague the Argos’ crew, and they find that the perpetually fog shrouded planet harbors a lethal secret.

Planet of the Vampires lacked a decent budget and quite ironically vampires. The lethal secret of the planet has nothing at all to do with undead corpses feeding upon the blood of the living which is why the Italian title is so much more fitting. However even with a limited budget Bava, who was a master of in-camera special effects, produced a colorful, visually striking, and engaging piece of cinema. Sullivan is reported to have said that while on set everything looked sparse and cheap, and he was later stunned by how it appeared on screen. The film has only a couple of optical effects with everything else, including the ship’s telescreen communications before performed live in set and captured in camera. The cast deals with the multilingual nature of the international production well enough with only a few scenes where it was clear that the various cast did not under the lines being spoken by each other. (This sort of production was common in Italy at the time where English, French, Spanish, and Italian speakers would deliver their lines in their own languages with dubbing for various markets smoothing over the final product.)

Two elements of the story fixed in my mind over the decades. One, the ending which when seen becomes very obvious as to why it sticks and the other a very prosaic scene where Sullivan’s commander comments that their last-minute landing turned from a crash into an Academy perfect one. An observation that isn’t special but lodged deep into my memory.

Planet of the Vampires is not great cinema but it is fun and quite stylish.

The Artistry of Endings

A brief and pleasant interaction with professor and author Tananarive Due on Twitter yesterday has me thinking about endings of stories, both prose and film, and art that is required to land on the right one for the tale.

Our interaction had centered on Jordan Peele’s fantastic directorial debut with his horror film Get Out. Peele’s original vision had a much darker ending in mind for Chris, one that was a more likely outcome given the circumstances but when tested audiences rebelled against. A new ending, the one the film was released with was crafted, and the movie was a hit. A similar sequence happened around Emerald Fennell’s 2020 revenger film Promising Young Woman where a less probable victory of sorts is added to the film’s end over a more downbeat conclusion. Again the film is praised and while Promising Young Woman did not see the sort of box office magic Get Outproduced it is a very well respected and an amazing piece of art.

The wrong lesson to take away from these examples if that your story should avoid bitter or tragic endings.

1968’s Night of the Living Dead is famous for its bleak and uncompromising ending. (Spoilers ahead) Ben, the sole survivor of the characters besieged in the farmhouse, at the film’s end cautiously climbs out of the basement as roving bands of deputized citizens clear the area of the walking dead. Seen only at a glimpse through a window one mistakes him for a ghoul and shoots Ben dead.

One could easily imagine an alternate version where the vigilantes rescues Ben rather than kill him and I believed that if that had been released instead the film would be mostly forgotten. It is that futility that is at the heart of the movie and without that final punch the piece loses much of its power.

Invasion of the Body Snatcher played it both ways. The original 1956 film had the framing story with it implicitly hopeful ending added after audience screenings and the 1978 remake took a darker tone with no hope for humanity’s future.

Knowing the right ending for a story is pure art. There are no formulas, charts, graphs, or calculations that can determine correct tone and it is often the critical alchemy that elevates or dooms a piece.

The Three Genres of My Life

On the first day of this year, 2022, I posted a ranking of the twenty films I watched in theaters during 2021.

What I found interesting looking at the listing is that the top three films, Dune, Nightmare Alley, and Last Night in Soho line up perfectly with my three favorite genres, Science-Fiction, Film Noir, and horror.

Of the three two have been favorite genres of mine since childhood. I cannot remember a time when I did not watch SF or horror movies. Bouncing around my head are fragments of films, most likely Hammer Horrors in full bloody color, from early childhood.

Film Noir I only discovered as an adult with my first introduction coming through Sid Foreman’s Introduction to Cinematography course at San Diego City College with my first viewing of The Maltese Falcon. Though honestly my true love of noir films didn’t really take off until Double Indemnity which remains in my mind a platonic ideal for the genre.

There were examples of the other genres in that listing, with superheroes movies sort of filling in for Science-Fiction but sadly nothing else that really nailed film noir like Nightmare Alley. There were other horrors, the strange and unique Lamb and the more conventional but still quite entertaining Last Night in Soho. I am simply pleased that each of my beloved genres scored in the top three slots for the year.

My 2021 In Cinema Experience

Below are the twenty films I watched in theaters during 2021. ( Missed counted in yesterday’s post) From January thru April I stayed home due to the pandemic but once I had both shots of my vaccinations and felt more comfortable about brief outing in public I returned to my beloved theaters.

The order if this list is a combination of my subjective opinion on quality, how much I enjoyed watching the features, and how often I thought about them long after leaving the theater. I can honestly say I do not regret seeing any of the film, no matter their placement, in an actual theater.

1 Dune