Historian of Horror: Monogram Horror Movies 1940-1941

 

Moving along down Poverty Row, we find Monogram Pictures. Founded in the early 1930s specifically to make and distribute low-budget pictures, Monogram’s early output was heavy on mysteries, some with a Scooby-Doo twist. No real supernatural or outright horrific content, but with names like The Phantom Broadcast (1933, murder during a radio show); The Sphinx (also 1933, with horror stalwart Lionel Atwill); House of Mystery (1934); and Haunted House (1940), you’d think they were horror movies. You’d be mistaken, but not by much.

Monogram also had distribution deals with British producers, so they were able to offer the American public pictures like The Human Monster (1939, AKA The Dark Eyes of London) and Chamber of Horrors (1940 AKA The Door with Seven Locks), both based on novels by Edgar Wallace, who had been instrumental in the creation of a certain giant ape. Wallace deserves a long look in this space one of these days, so we’ll discuss those films at that time.

Monogram’s first actual horror film was a typical mad-scientist-doing-good-by-being-bad effort, the sort of role Boris Karloff had let himself get typecast in during this period. The Ape (1940) has him donning a gorilla skin to harvest spinal fluid from unwilling donors in order to find a cure for polio. Should have just waited for Dr. Salk and Dr. Sabin to work their wonders.

Although Bela Lugosi was the star of the abovementioned British film The Human Monster, it doesn’t count as one of the legendary Monogram Nine, a nonet of horror flicks he made at the studio during the following few years, due to it being an import. Invisible Ghost from 1941 is the first of that set. Lugosi is a doctor who is triggered to fall into a homicidal trance whenever he sees his ‘late’ wife wandering the grounds. Sounds like some marriage counseling might be in order.

King of the Zombies (1941) is an oddity, a Grade Z horror flick that actually got some attention from the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dick Purcell, who three years later would become the first Marvel Cinematic Universe hero when he put on the tights and cowl for Republic Picture’s Captain America serial, gets stranded on a remote island with his African-American valet, played by Mantan Moreland in the cringe-worthy style typical of the period, and a fellow passenger played by John Archer, who would later lend his voice to The Shadow on the radio. They take refuge in the home of a mad doctor who is attempting to use voodoo to wrest American military secrets from a captured admiral. A ruckus ensues, and everything turns out just as expected.

Except for one thing. The score for King of the Zombies was nominated for an Oscar. I cannot think of a single other Grade Z horror movie of the period nominated for any award, in any category. There was Fredric March’s Best Actor co-win with Wallace Beery (The Champ) for Paramount’s 1931 production of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and that film’s nominations for Best Adaptation Writing and Best Cinematography, and a few others for similarly classy pictures, but nothing for anything else down on Poverty Row.

I just took a listen and I’m honestly not sure why it was nominated, unless it was just to round out the slate of nominees. It was up against some seriously stiff competition, including Best Picture winner How Green Was My Valley, the actual Best Picture (of all time) Citizen Kane, Gary Cooper biopic Sergeant York and MGM’s remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde starring Spencer Tracy. The Academy Award did go to a horror movie, RKO’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, but again, that was an A-Picture, not the bottom-of-the-barrel spookiness coming out of Monogram. Still, it is a curiosity of the genre, and one worthy of being noted.

I should point out that Mr. Purcell’s performance as Captain America had nothing to do with the character portrayed in more recent films, other than the costume. Instead of fighting against the Nazis in Europe as an American soldier, he is a ‘fighting district attorney’ going up against The Scarab, a standard Republic villain of their chapterplays. Without his shield, which is a bit of a disappointment. It does feature Frankenstein and Dracula alumnus Edward Van Sloan in a small role, as well as the skipper of the ship in King Kong and Song of Kong, Frank Reicher. It’s fun, but don’t expect it to tie into the Infinity War in any respect.    

 Come back around in a fortnight to look at the black and white comics magazines from Warren’s most successful competitor, Skywald Publications. You’ll be glad you did. Until then, I bid you to always, in every circumstance, be afraid…

            Be very afraid.

Nightmare Fuel Ep. 232: The Black Schuck

Hello Addicts,

They say that a dog is man’s best friend. They are cute, cuddly, protective, and sometimes scary. The latter description fits the topic of this week’s Nightmare Fuel: The Black Shuck.

There is a black shaggy dog that is a long time native of East Anglia in the British Isles, with legends from as far back as the 12th Century. It ranges in size from simply a larger dog to one the size of a calf. Some say it has a single glowing red eye in the middle of its head, some with a pair of glowing red eyes. It has been referred to as a hell hound, a devil dog, and even an omen of death. Legends say it is a killer, with some scant tales of the dog being friendly.

One of the more famous stories of The Black Shuck, or Old Shuck as he’s sometimes called, is from 1577. It happened at the Holy Trinity Church in Blythburgh during a terrible thunderstorm. It entered the church with a clap of thunder, stalked past the congregation in attendance to attack a man and a boy. The devil dog then caused the church steeple to collapse through the roof before exiting. To this day, there is a mark on the church’s north door, they say, came from Old Shuck.

The tale of The Black Shuck shows itself in all manners of storytelling over the centuries. Incarnations of the beast appear in the worlds of Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes, movies, video games, and been a focus in music. There was even an ancient spirit form in the television series ‘Teen Wolf’ that called itself Shuck. It’s amazing how strong of an influence this devil dog holds after almost a thousand years.

So, the next time you’re out on the British coast or countryside, watch for a shape darker than the night or eyes burning brighter than coal embers. It might be a dog or a big cat with a bright eye-shine. Then again, you just might be in the presence of The Black Shuck.

Until next time, Addicts,

D.J.

P.S. — If you like this, check out my previous post about The Mothman.

Historian of Horror: OTR – Abbott & Costello 19480505 Bela Lugosi’s Haunted House

Gettin’ Spooky on the Airwaves

 

As you may recall, the last time I wrote one of these missives about Old Time Radio, I made a passing reference to The Abbott and Costello Show. Comedy buffs are no doubt familiar with their classic “Who’s on First” routine, which you should definitely check out on YouTube. It’s hilarious.

Long-time horror fans will likely know them best as the protagonists of a series of horror-comedies beginning with Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, which was released on June 15, 1948. It co-starred Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Wolf Man, Glenn Strange as Frankenstein’s Monster, a brief cameo at the end by Vincent Price as the Invisible Man, and Bela Lugosi starring as Dracula for the second and last time in a major motion picture. It also virtually saved Universal Pictures from bankruptcy, which had been a serious concern for more than a decade.

One of the functions of programs like The Abbott & Costello Show was to slip in the occasional publicity bit for the theatrical releases of their associated studios, so on May 5th, 1948, the boys ventured via radio into the haunted house of none other than Bela Lugosi.

Lugosi had mentioned in some of the publicity material assembled for his 1935 movie Murder By Television that he didn’t much care for radio, and indeed he never was a major player in the medium. Not on the scale that Karloff, Price, Basil Rathbone, or Lorre were, certainly, although it is estimated that he did appear as a guest on roughly two hundred broadcasts. But he never went so far as to host his own anthology series or take on a regular recurring role, as other horror icons did.

Despite his expressed disdain for the medium, Lugosi was always willing to participate in publicity for his pictures. And so it was that two months before Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein debuted, he invited America’s most popular comedy duo, and the rest of America, into his haunted house.

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello have taken on the task of overseeing law enforcement in Encino, California. Bud’s wife stops by the sheriff’s office to be insulted by Lou, her primary function on the show, and to report on weird noises and arcane activities in the house next door. That domicile’s resident ghoul, Bela Lugosi, stops by to be interrogated. It’s never specified why, except that it was in the script. Bud and Lou determine that Lugosi’s house must be searched at midnight. Why? Yep, it’s in the script.

Lugosi doesn’t object, other than to make numerous pun-laden threats and confess to various murders. The boys find several deceased residents, including the prerequisite beautiful female vampire for Lou to flirt with. She puts the bite on him and gives him her hand to kiss. Which he finds disconcerting when she leaves it behind after she departs.

The upcoming movie is never mentioned by name, but vague foreshadowing is as good a form of publicity as any, and fans of Bud and Lou likely knew something was in the works.

Abbott and Costello had initially teamed up in Vaudeville in 1935, and began appearing as guests on the radio three years later. They got their own program as a summer replacement for Fred Allen’s show in 1940, and went full-time in 1942. The boys took their act to television for two seasons from 1952 to 1954, and ‘met’ several other monsters in Universal pictures, including the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the Mummy.

His one picture with Bud and Lou staved off the slow descent of Lugosi’s film career for a moment, but it was pretty much downhill after that. He did return to stage as Dracula, and made several television appearances, including a Suspense! adaptation of “A Cask of Amontillado”. While shooting some stock footage for the Ed Wood movie Plan 9 from Outer Space in 1956, he died of a heart attack.

It was also a cardiac arrest that took Lou Costello away in 1959. Bud Abbott, whom Groucho Marx called the greatest straight man who ever lived, succumbed to cancer in 1974.

But their films and television shows, and their delightfully chaotic radio program, survive on the internet. Do check them out on YouTube, the Internet Archive, and elsewhere. You’ll be glad you did.

Friend Bela returns in our next action-packed episode, when we’ll take a gander at the first batch of horror movies made by the Poverty Row outfit, Monogram Pictures. Not a real classic in the bunch, but some Grade Z fun, including the first of Lugosi’s run for the studio known as the Monogram Nine, along with the worst movie ever nominated for an Academy Award. See you in two weeks. Until then, don’t forget to be afraid…

Be very afraid.            

Nightmare Fuel Ep. 231: The Leyak

Hello Addicts,

If I said the word ‘vampire’ you would probably think of human looking ones with arms and legs. There is one out there that has none of those, but can still move about and gorge itself on blood. For this week’s Nightmare Fuel, we look at the leyak.

In Bali legend, a leyak is a black magic using human with cannibalistic behavior. By day, they look like you or I, but at night, their heads, complete with fangs and unusually long tongues, leave the body carrying their heart, lungs, and liver with it. This terrifying being floats through the air hunting for pregnant women. Their preferred meal is an infant, or it’s blood, but they are also said to haunt graveyards where they feast on corpses. Much like their more famous cousins, these vampires can change into other animals, including pigs.

A Rangda, also called a ‘queen of leyak’, not only controls these horrendous creatures but also has a hand in creating them. These women are the widow-witches who play an important part in their village’s rituals. They can control not only the leyak, but demons as well. It is her mask that is kept in the village’s temples of the dead until a ceremony requires them to parade it around. Their power and status are the only protections from the families of those turned into leyaks, but not from the spirits themselves.

Be wary if you see a floating head with dangling entrails for it may find the taste of your blood quite satisfying. And if you’re dying to watch a movie about the leyak, then check out ‘Mystics in Bali’ from 1981.

Until next time, Addicts,

D.J.

Historian of Horror: Music – Total Eclipse of the Heart

 

B-B-B-Bonnie and the Vamps

 

            We took a family Christmas cruise to the Bahamas this past December with too many small children and too few adults — bad idea. Lots of seasickness and intestinal distress ensued, as well as accommodations for the grandchildren that it would be generous to describe as rudimentary. We found a general lack of organization and urgency in the dining rooms, and unreasonable restrictions in the recreational areas. We usually have good experiences on cruises, but this one was a horror tale of its own.

On the plus side, I did get to spend some quality time with my new favorite bartender in Nassau and saw a show on the ship that reminded me that I needed to turn my laser focus on what has now become the subject of this post. It was an over-the-top production of power ballads from the 70s and 80s, with bright lights, exaggerated dance routines, ridiculous costumes and some pretty good singing. Fun! And one of the songs performed…

            Don’t want to get ahead of myself. How about we throw this puppy into reverse and start from the beginning?

            Sometime back in the dark and abyss of time that was the 1970s, record producer Jim Steinman was working on a musical based on the classic German Expressionist silent film, Nosferatu. I assume you’ve heard of it. One song he wrote for it before turning his attention to making records with Meat Loaf was called “Vampire in Love”. It went into inventory and was sort of forgotten.

            Fast forward to the early 80s, when Welsh songstress Bonnie Tyler saw Meat Loaf on TV and decided that it was that guy’s producer whom she wanted to bring her next album to fruition. She met with Steinman, and during their initial negotiations he recalled that vampire song he wrote for the lost musical.

            Thinking her raspy voice, the result of an operation to remove some vocal cord nodules in the 70s, was perfect for the piece, he pitched “Vampire in Love” to her. She jumped on it like a loose ball in the end zone, and musical history was made. Steinman tweaked it a bit, changed the title, and put it on Tyler’s fifth album, Faster Than the Speed of Night.

            The album was released in April of 1983 in the United Kingdom, and in September of that year in America. It went to No. 1 on the charts immediately on both sides of the Big Pond, as did the single based on Steinman’s vampire love song, which became Billboard’s Number Six song of the year.

I have to confess that, having never learned about this context, I had no idea until a year or so ago that Tyler’s big hit, which was now called Total Eclipse of the Heart, had that vampire connection. But, come on. “Forever’s gonna start tonight”? All those references to shadows and night and love in the dark? How could it be about anything other than the living dead?

Steinman did eventually include a version of the song in a musical, retitling it “Totale Finsternis” (“Total Darkness” in English). His 1997 stage production Tanz der Vampire was based on Dance of the Vampires, a 1967 Roman Polansky movie known as The Fearless Vampire Killers in the United States. A Berlin performance from 2011 is on YouTube, in German with English subtitles. I recommend it highly. A better-quality print of a 2010 performance from Antwerp, Belgium is also on YouTube, but there are no subtitles. Alas, my Flemish is about as bad as my German, but it’s worth a look.

Tanz der Vampire has rarely to my knowledge been staged in America, mostly being mounted in Europe. But who knows? Maybe we’ll all get lucky and it will be performed in an opera house close by one of these days… or nights.

And depending on how you feel about Roman Polansky, you might want to check out the aforementioned film he directed, which co-starred his wife Sharon Tate two years before she was so horribly slaughtered by the Manson Family. The movie is a comedy, but knowing what was going to happen on August 9, 1969, overshadows the humor with a layer of melancholy. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Next time, we’re going to consider why one of the most distinctive voices in American film history did so little work on the radio and highlight what might be his most important effort in that medium. Why not step into my parlor in a couple of weeks to learn who I’m referring to, and which legendary duo comes to call on him in his very own haunted house? I look forward to your visit.

Until then, ye connoisseurs of creepiness, I bid you all to be afraid…

Be very afraid.

 

 

 

           

           

 

 

           

 

Historian of Horror: Republic Horror Movies 1935-1945

 

            As I related last year, Republic Pictures was primarily founded to make serials and westerns. Sixty-six chapterplays were made by the studio, from Darkest Africa in 1936 to 1955’s King of the Carnival. I’ve seen better than half of them, and a lot of the westerns, and they’re consistently enjoyable. Not at all deep, but lots of fun, with vim and vigor and plenty of action and suspense.

            I wish I could say the same of the studio’s horror output.

            By the way, I won’t be covering any of the serials in this missive. As noted previously, a few do have genre-adjacent aspects, but horror was never really the point.

            Released in the first year of Republic’s existence, 1935’s The Crime of Dr. Crespi starred Erich von Stroheim and Dwight Frye, both of whom should have known better. Loosely based on “The Premature Burial” by Edgar Allan Poe, it does not redound to the credit of anyone involved. My recommendation is to skip ahead a few decades and instead enjoy the 1962 Roger Corman film starring Ray Milland. You’ll thank me the longest day of your life.

Apparently having learned their lesson, Republic waited nine years to produce the infinitely better 1944 offering, The Lady and the Monster, also starring Erich von Stroheim, albeit in much improved form, and Richard Arlen, whose horror film pedigree includes The Island of Lost Souls from 1932. Alas, it is saddled with the presence of the unfortunate Vera Hruba Ralston, generally considered the worst actress ever imported to the United States from Czechoslovakia. Despite her desperate but doomed attempt to impersonate a thespian, this adaptation of Curt Siodmak’s 1942 novel, Donovan’s Brain, is the best I’ve seen. Future first lady Nancy Davis Reagan is not much better than poor Vera Hruba in the 1953 version, but that one isn’t totally without merit. It’s just not as good, in my humble opinion, as the first adaptation of the tale of the preserved brain of a wealthy and power-hungry man who exerts undue influence upon the mad scientist who put it into a jar and hooked it up to a variety of electronic doohickeys. A third version, made in Germany in 1962 under the title of The Brain, introduces an element of revenge not in the original story. As Dr. Samuel Johnson once said of a play he was being paid to review, it’s worth seeing but not worth going to see.

Arlen returned in the next year’s The Phantom Speaks, in which an executed killer’s spirit possesses his doctor. I’m beginning to detect a trend, here. The medico, against his will, proceeds to eliminate anyone and everyone who assisted in sending the murderer to the electric chair. It does not end well for him, which is really too bad. But there it is.

Republic had two more offerings in 1945. The Vampire’s Ghost was loosely based on “The Vampyre” by John Polidori, about which more later on in the upcoming podcast season. Relocated from England and Greece to somewhere in Africa, John Abbott stars as a nightclub owner whose clientele and employees occasionally suffer from terminal exsanguination.

Finally, The Woman Who Came Back foreshadows the 1962 cult classic Carnival of Souls in that the heroine is the only survivor of a bus crash, in this case as it is returning her to her hometown. She is the last descendant of an ancestor who had burned accused witches back in the bad old days, something that never actually occurred in America. An old woman claiming to be the revenant of one of his victims haunts the young lady, who apparently never herself personally burned anyone at the stake, but the nature of vengeance is not often to be reasonable. A curse involving the possession of the nearest available female by the spirit of the witch’s apparition frightens the local populace into attacking the poor girl before the truth is finally revealed.

What was this obsession with possession out there in Studio City? One does wonder.

Republic only produced a handful of other horror films over the next dozen years or so, which we’ll take a look at next time the studio’s slot on the lazy susan of horror topics comes around. No diamonds, in the rough or otherwise, but there are a couple of semi-precious stones in the mix.

Stay tuned!

            When next we descend together into the catacombs below for another tale from the history of the horrific, we’ll hear a yarn about the biggest hit ever on the Billboard charts that was about vampirism. Something few listeners even suspected for several decades. Come along for that little trip into the realm of moldy oldies, won’t you? Until then, I bid you, effendis of eeriness, to be afraid…

            Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror: In Memoriam

In Memoriam

 

            It’s been a good while since I’ve done one of these. I had intended to only offer a single obituary on a single subject, but since my last missive to the populace, that mean ol’ Grim Reaper has managed to absquatulate with a couple more of the significant contributors to Our Genre. Ergo, this tripart offering. I hope y’all approve.

 

            In a letter to Robert Hooke in 1675, Sir Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” And so it is with David J. Skal of Ohio.

I can’t swear to it, but I believe I first became aware of him from a documentary included in one of the Universal Monster DVDs, those sets with all the Frankenstein or Mummy or Dracula pictures from the 1930s and 1940s that Walmart drags out of the back room every year in the weeks leading up to Halloween. The insights and information he presented in his calm, measured tones and sardonically dry wit were never to be taken as mere trivia.

It was only later that I learned Skal had written numerous essays and reviews for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other magazines, as well as no fewer than seven scholarly works on a variety of monstrous topics, beginning with Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen in 1990. He also penned a biography of Bram Stoker, in addition to three novels and a batch of short stories, and edited an anthology of vampire tales. A full list is available on his page at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

I have since then tracked down and devoured a fair amount of his oeuvre, which has on more than one occasion provided various tidbits and factoids which I have included in my endeavors on your behalf. Don’t thank me. Thank him.

In fact, it was, in large part, his yeoman labors in articulating the history of Our Genre that inspired me to take on the mantle of your very own personal historian of horror. Whether that redounds to his credit or to his blame I leave to others to decide, but in my estimation, Skal was one of the giants, and therefore he deserves respect, regardless.

On January 1, 2024, the car in which he and his partner, Robert Postawko, were riding was struck by another vehicle. Postawko lingered for several weeks before succumbing to his injuries. David J. Skal died at the scene at the much too young age of 71.

Thanks for letting me stand on your shoulders, Mr. Skal.

 

If I recall correctly, the first book published by Arkham House that I ever acquired, from the long-gone and much-lamented Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville, was the short story collection The Caller of the Black by the prolific author, Brian Lumley. Born in County Durham, England in 1937, he spent some years as a military policeman before retiring from the British Army to become a full-time writer. He was known for his many Cthulhu Mythos stories, a fair number of which featured his own character Titus Crow. He also scribed a handful of tales set in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. Lumley’s heroes were more likely to fight back against the eldritch horrors they faced than the standard mythos characters, who typically resorted to fainting as their default reaction.

Lumley began his long-running Necroscope series in 1986, featuring Harry Keogh, who had the unique ability to hold friendly chats with deceased persons. Harry and others spent eighteen novels contending against a strain of vampire Lumley called Wamphyri.

Lumley received Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the Horror Writers Association and the World Fantasy Convention. He died on the second of January, at 86.

 

Argentine artist Jose Delbo drew myriad comic books during his more than sixty year career, which began in his native land when he was only sixteen and continued well into the 21st Century. After fleeing the political unrest in Argentina, he fetched up in the United States and began producing stories included in Gold Key’s horror titles The Twilight Zone, Ripley’s Believe it or Not! and Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery; Charlton’s Ghostly Tales and The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves; and The Spectre, House of Secrets, House of Mystery and The Witching Hour for DC. The Grand Comics Database lists nearly a thousand credited pieces for him. He passed away on the fifth of February of this year. He was 90. Not a bad run.

 

 

Next time, we’ll take a look at the first decade of horror output from Republic Pictures, a name you might recognize from my Rampaging Robots column of last year. Until then, I bid you to be afraid…

Be very afraid.

 

Historian of Horror: Comics-Atlas/Seaboard

The Anti-Marvel

            Pulp magazine publisher Martin Goodman graduated to comic books in 1939. He sold off the company that had grown up to be Marvel Comics in 1968, and retired four years later. In 1974, apparently missing his old job, he founded Seaboard Periodicals, with the intent of setting it up as a serious competitor to his old operation, as well as to DC Comics and magazine format publishers like Warren. He called his new venture Atlas Comics, which was Marvel’s name in the 1950s. He hired Larry Lieber, brother of Marvel editor-in-chief Stan Lee and both writer and artist for that publisher, to edit his new black-and-white line. Goodman’s notion was to give Lieber a chance to shine out from under the overwhelming personality and presence of his brother. He hired former Warren workhorse Jeff Rovin to edit the color comics, in each case switching his new editors from the field in which they had demonstrated some proficiency into areas of profound inexperience. That ought to have been an indicator that all was not going to go well. And it didn’t.

            Not that the new set of Atlas Comics was below industry standards. On the contrary, Goodman paid top rates and attracted top talent. The problem is he had bottom distribution and sales, and was soon hemorrhaging cash. The line folded in less than a year, with no more than four issues of any title seeing print.

            In that short span, however, Atlas put out some pretty good scary stuff. In addition to the usual costumed character titles, war comics, westerns, sword-&-sorcery tales and the like, the color line featured several supernatural or semi-monstrous super-heroes (The Grim Ghost, Morlock, The Brute, Demon Hunter, Frank Thorne’s “Son of Dracula” in Fright, Pat Boyette’s “Tarantula” in Weird Suspense), an anthology title (Tales of Evil), and the science-fictiony Planet of Vampires, with some very nice Pat Broderick interior art and the legendary Neal Adams gracing the cover of the second of the three issues.

There was also a pair of black-and-white magazines, each running two issues – a Vampirella rip-off called Devilina, and an anthology title, Weird Tales of the Macabre. Both featured some exceptional artwork, and were of comparable quality with their peers on the newsstands – when they could get access to said venues. Which was, as I stated above, problematic. I found the color titles regularly, but never got my hands on the black-and-white magazines. There are scans online, but to this day I’ve never seen a physical copy of either.

            Rovin’s tenure was brief. Lieber took over as editor of the entire line before the end, but that end came all too soon. None of the scary titles went past three issues, only a few of the others going the full four. The first titles showed up in February of 1975, the final ones in September, freeing me to spend what cash I scrounged from odd jobs and turning coke bottles in for a few pennies apiece on Marvel and DC comic books, Doc Savage and Conan paperbacks, and the occasional pack of bubblegum cards. My copies vanished in the Great Comic Book Sell-Off of 1989, along with a full box of the original 1950s Atlas Comics I’d begun accumulating once I got steady work in real jobs, a fairly impressive batch of ECs, about a quarter of the run of Hillman’s Airboy (featuring the Heap – remember him?), a near complete run of Batman back to 1958, and at least one comic book from every year beginning in 1937.

            All of which goes to demonstrate that nothing lasts forever. Certainly not the little publisher that couldn’t, Atlas/Seaboard. And that’s too bad. It was a worthy if misguided effort.

            Martin Goodman passed away in 1992 at the age of 84. In 2010, his grandson Jason attempted to revive the Atlas line with minimal success. The Grim Ghost was one of the revived characters, the only one from the scary titles. He appeared in the three issues of Atlas United and seven under his own banner, but that was over in little more than a year. 

            Larry Lieber is now 92, and long retired. Jeff Rovin is still kicking around the genre. In 1998 he published a very enjoyable sort-of-sequel to Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein called Return of the Wolf Man. A second pastiche of the old Universal monsters was proposed that would feature the Bride of Frankenstein, but that apparently never materialized.

            Oh, well.

            Next time, I will expound upon the life and career of the late and lamented David J. Skal, whose passing I am noting in my last missive to the populace. He was one of the giants upon whose shoulders your Historian of Horror has stood. Until then, I bid you to be afraid…

            Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror: The Magic Sword (1962)

Middle Aged Crazy

 

            Medieval Horror is the theme this month, and boy-oh-boy have I got a movie for you! It’s one I watched a dozen times in my mis-spent youth, a tale of dashing knights and lovely maidens, with a dragon and an ogre and a hag and an evil magician, replete with special effects of surpassing cheesiness and dialogue more than corny enough to satisfy the most discriminating devotee of early 1960s B-Movies…

            The Magic Sword!

            Directed by the legendary Bert I. Gordon and released in January of 1962 by United Artists, it wasn’t the first sword-&-sorcery film — that would be Fritz Lang’s 1924 two-parter, Die Niebelungen — but it’s the first live-action American film with armored knights, an ogre, sorcerers both good and bad, and a dragon. And, yes, even a magic sword!

            An aspiring knight named George (Gary Lockwood, the first astronaut for whom HAL wouldn’t open the pod bay doors in 2001: A Space Odyssey), son of a ditsy sorceress named Sybil (Estelle Winwood) falls in love remotely with Princess Helene (Anne Helm). Her Royal Highness has in turn caught the nefarious attentions of Sir Branton (Liam Sullivan), who conspires with evil sorcerer Lodac (former Sherlock Holmes and horror movie regular Basil Rathbone) to convince the king to give Helene to him as his bride so he can take over the kingdom. George tricks his mother into revealing her stash of magical goodies, including sword and shield and six miniature knights from various countries that become full-sized warriors upon command. George leads his tiny army into combat against Branton and Lodac, gradually losing them to the various dangers along the way.

            After George slays an ogre with his magic sword, the French knight stops to dally with a pretty young thang played by Maila Nurmi. Remember I mentioned her last time? She was one of the first television horror hosts in the mid-1950s under the moniker of Vampira. Maila also appeared as the undead wife of Bela Lugosi’s character in Plan 9 from Outer Space. In The Magic Sword, she turns into a hag while giving Sir Dennis a nearly fatal hickey. Rude.

            George runs out of assistant knights about the time Lodac strips his magical items of their power. Inconveniently, this is just as he finds himself obliged to rescue Helene from Lodac’s pet fire-breathing dragon. Sybil reverses Lodac’s spell just in time, before turning in a panther and putting the bite on the villain. George is finally knighted, his companions are revived, he marries the princess and all’s well that ends well. As it should be.

            A few months later, the similarly themed Jack the Giant Killer was released, also by United Artists, based on a Cornish fairy tale. It starred Seventh Voyage of Sinbad alumni Kerwin Matthews and Torin Thatcher as the hero and villain, respectively. Featuring stop-motion animation by a very young Jim Danforth, this is a darker, more monster-filled picture than The Magic Sword. Not sure it’s any better, but it ain’t bad.

            There was an earlier movie also called The Magic Sword — at least that’s the title in English. In Serbian, it was called Čudotvorni mač and was a 1950 Yugoslavian production based on Serbian folktales. Armored knights, an evil wizard, a magic sword — familiar territory, indeed.

            All three movies, by the way, are on YouTube.

            If you recall my column on horror in comic strips from way back in March of 2021, you might remember that I mentioned Prince Valiant, Hal Foster’s classic Arthurian Era saga of knights and vikings and the occasional dragon. There have been two live-action film adaptations of Val’s adventures, the first in 1954 starring Robert Wagner, Janet Leigh and James Mason, with no supernatural elements that I recall, and one from 1997 with a fairly significant cast including Janna Lumley as sorceress Morgana la Fey. Neither one is on YouTube, as far as I can tell.

I do want to give a hearty Dark Ages shout out to the 1967 Russian film, Viy. A young seminarian on his way home for the holidays wanders into the domain of the title character, a deceased witch, whose wake he is forced to preside over. A darn fine movie, and one you can find on YouTube.

 

I’d like to request, if I may, a brief moment of silence, please, in memory of the preeminent horror historian of our time, a man in whose shadow I shall always remain. David J. Skal passed away January 1, 2024 at 71. More on him later.

 

            In our next action-packed episode, we delve into the Sour Grapes Archive to examine a short-lived comics publisher created to outshine one of the Big Two. If only. Join me then, won’t you?

            Until that time, kindly do remember to be afraid…

            Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror: Columbia Horror Movies 1933-1943

Columbia Horror Movies 1933-1943

 

            In 1918, Harry Cohn, his brother Jack, and Joe Brandt founded CBC Film Sales Corporation. In 1924, they renamed it Columbia Pictures. The studio started out as a very minor concern in the grand scheme of things Hollywoodish, but grew into one of the second tier major studios within the next decade.

            Bela Lugosi was a bit player in Columbia’s first horror effort in 1933, Night of Terror. A mad scientist not played by Bela invents a formula to prevent death by drowning or suffocation. Several cast members meet their maker by other means, however.

In 1934, Columbia matriculated into a more elevated status when the Frank Capra directed It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, swept the top Oscars, the only film to do so until 1975 when One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest achieved the same success.

The same year, the second ever zombie picture, Black Moon, starred silent movie he-man Jack Holt and the recent object of King Kong’s affections, Fay Wray. A very atmospheric little picture, quite effective, but rather marred by the prevailing racial attitudes of its time. Worth seeing, but with the caveat that it can be uncomfortable to modern audiences. It’s on YouTube.

The Black Room from 1935 starred Boris Karloff in a gruesome tale of sibling rivalry. An evil nobleman even worse than the baron from my column on Gilbert & Sullivan’s Ruddigore last year takes advantage of his resemblance to his nicer brother to engage in a variety of naughty acts.

I’m somewhat less enamored of the Three Stooges than I was when I was a child, but 1939’s We Want Our Mummy is still reasonably enjoyable. It is available on YouTube for anyone still a fan. The lads travel to Cairo to rescue a kidnapped professor and bring the mummy of King Rootin-Tootin back to the States despite various villains, including one fake mummy, interfering.

Karloff returns with a cluster of not too dissimilar roles in which his experiments develop the bad habit of not going as planned. In 1939’s The Man They Could Not Hang, he invents a mechanical heart that can restore the recently deceased to life. His scheme to avenge himself on those who sent him to the gallows goes awry, because of course it does. The title was somewhat misleading, as he was indeed hanged before being restored to life.

Oh, well.

The next year’s Before I Hang has him condemned for euthanasia after failing to perfect his anti-aging formula. Ol’ Boris is given the opportunity to test his serum in the prison in which he is to be executed, with dire results when he makes the basic error of obtaining an essential ingredient from an inmate who enjoys giving neck rubs – with a silk stocking.

And in the same year’s The Man with Nine Lives, Karloff’s experiments in preserving life through cryogenics lead to him being trapped in his own ice box for ten years. Once released, he has to recreate his formula, with unpleasant consequences for several of his guinea pigs.

In 1941 Karloff played a scientist whose wife dies in an automobile accident in The Devil Commands. He redirects his research into contacting the dead after falling under the spell of a phony medium. Nothing goes according to plan.

Going a little out of sequence here to pursue this theme of Karloff as everyone’s favorite mad scientist. The 1942 horror-comedy The Boogie Man Will Get You has him conspiring with Peter Lorre to create super-soldiers for the war effort. Hmmm… that sounds a bit familiar… For once, things don’t go as horrendously wrong as usual, a welcome relief to everyone involved, no doubt.

            We did briefly skip over Lorre’s 1941 picture, The Face Behind the Mask, but you shouldn’t. An innocent immigrant is horribly disfigured in a fire and turns to crime when no one will hire him. The love of a good woman redeems him, as you can see when you check this film out on YouTube. Highly recommended.

We finish up with our first picture from 1943, The Crime Doctor’s Strangest Case. The second of a ten-movie series based on the 1940-1947 radio program, it starred Warner Baxter as Dr. Robert Ordway, a crime-busting psychiatrist who in a former life had been a crook himself. He investigates strange goings-on around a pair of suspicious characters who sleep in coffins. Are they vampires? Watch the movie on YouTube to find out.

            Next time, our theme is Medieval horrors. We’ll take a look at a classic film from 1962 that featured none other than Maila Nurmi in a bit part. Who, you might ask? Return to this space in a mere fourteen days to find out.

Until then, I bid you to be afraid…

            Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror: Oh, Hell, Dolly!

Oh, Hell, Dolly!
We have a theme this month, bestowed upon us by our glorious leaders here at
HorrorAddicts.net! January is the month for dolls, dummies, and related items, so off we go, back into
some familiar territory.

You might recall that in my previous missive, I referenced an episode of Night Gallery, Rod Serling’s post-Twilight Zone television show. It was while I was doing the research for that column that the directive came down from on high to steer our efforts towards the month’s theme, if possible. Now, I have to admit that, as I tend to plot out a tentative schedule for each year in advance, and had in fact already done so for 2024, I don’t always find myself capable of accommodating such requests. I was, however, able to shuffle a few things around in the rotation, especially since on my way to looking up “The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes”, I noticed that the fifth episode of Night Gallery’s first season contained a segment entitled, “The Doll”.

Gotta love serendipity.

Based on a story by Algernon Blackwood, “The Doll” stars distinguished and magnificently mustachioed British actor John Williams as a retired Victorian-era colonial officer who returns to England from India to find his niece embracing a doll with a very disturbing visage that she claims talks to her. It was sent to her by an old enemy of the Colonel played by perpetual movie and television villain Henry Silva as revenge for his misdeeds. The Colonel is soon locked in mortal combat with the monstrous toy, and eventually loses. But he is ultimately able to extract his own vengeance.

John Williams (1903-1983) had previously appeared as William Shakespeare on The Twilight Zone, in the eighteenth episode of the fourth season, in a tale called “The Bard”, and in the eighteenth episode of the first season of the Boris Karloff hosted series, Thriller, in “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”, a Robert Bloch yarn that deserves its own post one of these days.

In his long career, Henry Silva (1926-2022) appeared on both of Alfred Hitchcock’s television series, as well as The Outer Limits and the Night Gallery follow up show, The Sixth Sense. His final performance was in the better than terrific 1999 neo-noir film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.

The other segments in the episode starred comedian Phyllis Diller as the ghost of the nagging wife of original Gomez Addams John Astin in “Pamela’s Voice”; and “Lone Survivor”, with Torin Thatcher
as the captain of the doomed ocean liner, The Lusitania. Thatcher was the sorcerous villain in the 1958 Ray Harryhausen classic, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. The titular survivor was played by John Colicos, who appeared in virtually every fantasy, horror and science fiction television program of the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, including playing the main bad guy, Count Baltar, in the original Battlestar Galactica show in 1978 and 1979. He also portrayed a corrupt cop in the best horror movie of 1980. No, not The Shining. I’m talking about The Changeling. Stephen King agrees with me. He told me so in 1983.

The Twilight Zone had its own malicious moppet in the sixth episode of season five, “Living Doll”, which aired on November 1, 1963. No relation to the 1964-1965 sitcom My Living Doll, which featured the stupefyin’ Julie Newmar as Rhoda the Robot. “Living Doll”, written by Charles Beaumont, starred Telly Savalas, future Ernst Stavro Blofeld and lollipop-addicted TV detective Kojak, as the father contending in vain against his daughter’s plaything, Talking Tina. And boy, does that doll talk! Such things she says!

Tsk, tsk.

Serling did seem to have an affinity for our theme, as the thirty-third episode of the third season of The Twilight Zone featured Cliff Robertson as a ventriloquist not altogether in control of his dummy. One of several variations on the similar story from the first great anthology film, Dead of Night, from 1945. Robertson went on to win a best-actor Oscar for Charly, based on the Daniel Keyes story (later novel) Flowers for Algernon. He also starred in the 1979 spookfest, Dominique.

That’s all I have to say about dolls, or dummies, for now. Next time, we get back into our film studio survey with a look at Columbia Pictures’ horror output from 1933 to 1943.

While we await that fearfully anticipated eventuality, I want to take a moment to honor the memory of Japanese actor and stuntman, Kenpachiro Satsuma (1947-2023), who donned various rubber suits in a dozen or so Godzilla movies from 1971 to 1995, usually as the Big G himself. He passed away December 16th.

And so, until we come together again to celebrate all that is frightening, I bid all you aficionados of
awfulness to be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror: Margaret St. Clair

Maggie May – Or May Not

A few months more than twenty years ago, I gave in to a whim and accepted a position as senior
mystery editor for a print periodical called Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine. This turned out to be
a bad idea, as I also began a day job for the Tennessee Department of Vocational Rehabilitation at the
same time, but it was a fun gig for a while.
One of my duties was vetting stories submitted to Futures, meaning that before disseminating the
myriad submissions to my editorial staff, I would make sure that the yarns sent in were suitable for
publication. One that was not suitable was very familiar. In fact, it was virtually identical to a show I had
seen on television not long before, on a program I have mentioned previously in this space.
“The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes” was the first segment of the second season opening
broadcast of Rod Serling’s classic television program Night Gallery. It originally aired on September 15,
1971, and had been shown on some cable channel I happened to be watching a few days before the
story submission in question showed up in my email inbox.
So, the story I received seemed mighty familiar, as its plot was identical to “The Boy Who
Predicted Earthquakes”, with the lead character and a few details changed. I did a little research and
found that the original tale was written by Margaret St. Clair and published in the Canadian magazine
Maclean’s in 1950. It has since been anthologized several times, including on one of the
Alfred Hitchcock paperbacks published by Dell in the 1960s.
Margaret St. Clair was born in Kansas in 1911. She started publishing her roughly 130 short
stories in the mystery, science fiction, fantasy and horror pulp magazines in 1946, as well as scribing
eight novels. Her stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction appeared under her
pseudonym of Idris Seabright.
St. Clair and her husband, Eric, chose to forgo the joys of parenthood in order to travel widely,
including to nudist colonies. They converted to Wicca in 1966. Eric became known for writing over one
hundred children’s books about bears, while working a variety of interesting jobs. Margaret passed away
in 1995, a few years after Eric. Although she was well regarded during her lifetime as a pioneer of women
science fiction writers, she is woefully neglected today. Which is just wrong.
The story involved a young lad named Herbie Bittman who, as noted in the title, possessed the
psychic ability to predict near future events. He got his own television time to disseminate his
expectations of tomorrow, but one day refused to make his usual prognostication until pressured to admit
that mankind would undergo a significant change in condition, hinting that it would be for the better.
Herbie was portrayed by Clint Howard, the brother of former Opie and current film director Ron
Howard, on Night Gallery. Their father, Rance Howard, had a bit part as a cameraman. Clint was best
known at the time for starring in the TV series Gentle Ben, about a family’s pet bear, and for playing the
cosmic brat Balok who gets tricked by Captain Kirk in the classic Star Trek episode,
“The Corbomite Maneuver”.
The other segments in the episode were “Miss Lovecraft Sent Me”, in which one-time Lolita Sue
Lyons suspects the baby in her care is more than meets the eye; “The Hand of Borgus Weems”, in which
George Maharis asked for the removal of the specified appendage for being possessed; and “The
Phantom of What Opera?” in which Leslie Nielsen finds that not only monsters wear masks.
So, when I received the story for Futures, and recognized it in nearly all particulars apart from the
main character and a couple of other changes, I was obliged to decline it. I communicated my reason for
rejection to the plagiarist as gently as possible, to which he did not respond with any discernible sign of
good grace.
Oh, well. Saved my boss ten bucks, which is what we paid for stories in those days. Needless to
say, he never submitted again, at least during my tenure. What happened after my three quarterly issues
as senior mystery editor, deponent sayeth not.
Next time, it is my intent to expound further on one of the topics in this offering and take a look at
a different Night Gallery episode, one suited to the theme for the month of January suggested by the
powers that be here at HorrorAddicts.net. Kindly deign to join me here in a mere fourteen days, won’t
you? I’ll be sad if you don’t, and nobody wants that. Until then, my most valued votariants of villainy, I bid
you to be afraid.
Be very afraid.  

Historian of Horror: Oh, Magoo, You’ve Done it Again!

 

            Back in the days when it was considered acceptable to make fun of people with disabilities, an animation production studio called UPA created a short, bald, near-sighted cartoon character named J. Quincy Magoo. Mr. Magoo was voiced by Jim Backus, better known as the millionaire on Gilligan’s Island. Premiering in a theatrical cartoon in 1949, he went on to a career on television, including in a series of adaptations of famous works of literature under the title of The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo (1964-1965). The twentieth episode of which cast him as Dr. Frankenstein. Unlike in the movie and TV cartoons, Magoo’s visual acuity challenges did not impact his performances as much in this latter venue.

            Prior to that series, Magoo tested the literary waters in what was the very first animated musical Christmas special made for television. Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol originally aired on December 18, 1962. I don’t remember if I saw it then. I was only four years old, and my memory of that time is a tad spotty. I do know I saw it in one of the next couple of years, and for many Christmas seasons to follow. As have my children. Watching it was a holiday tradition for decades, and I still return to it every so often.

            I have previously stated my very firm belief that the 1951 film of the Dickens tale starring Alistair Sim is far and away the best one, but that Mr. Magoo’s is my favorite. I am still of this opinion. One cannot always avoid clinging to the joys of childhood, as hard as one might try. Not that I try very hard, as some may have noticed.          

            The story was severely truncated in order to fit it into the one hour running time (with commercials) and to accommodate the songs, but the bare bones are there. It zips along briskly and includes the most important parts. There is one mention of Scrooge/Magoo maybe needing glasses, when he sees the face of his late partner Marley superimposed over his door knocker, but otherwise his visual impairment is not addressed.

            The copy I have has the Ghost of Christmas Present arriving before the Ghost of Christmases Past, but I honestly don’t recall if it has always been shown that way. No matter. Scrooge is reformed, the Cratchit family has their best Christmas to date, and Tiny Tim grows up strong and healthy thanks to the largesse of Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge.

            No mention is made of the theory I developed some twenty years ago that Timothy Cratchit turned out to be Jack the Ripper in his later life, but neither does any other version include that peculiarly personal opinion. So be it. I am content to be a lone visionary on the subject.

            I do hope some streaming service or television network deigns to present Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol this holiday season, so that the denizens of this space may watch it without being obliged to navigate that verdammte Youtube paywall. Failing that, perhaps your local library might have a copy of the DVD in its collection. Would that it were so, for one simply cannot have too many ghosts for Christmas. Or too much Magoo.

 

            Our lagniappe for this most festive time of year is an appropriately spooky version of what was originally a Ukrainian piece written in 1914 by Mykola Leontovych. The tune once known as Shchedryk has become associated in the English-speaking world with Christmas, but this version is not your daddy’s Carol of the Bells. Hope you like it.

 

            A new year is rapidly approaching, one during which it is to be desired that all of our beloved Horror Addicts are filled to satiation with good news and spooky delights. I have already readied a slate of topics to tantalize the taste buds of the most devilish devotee of horrors and frights. I will continue my look at the horror output of the various Hollywood studios, in addition to the usual array of posts on old time radio, comic books, music, art, books, television, and magazines. I hope the populace approves of my choices.

            As for next time, I pray thee to return to this little corner of the internet in a fortnight for a look at one of the neglected heroines of horror literature, Margaret St. Clair, and the tale of how I put a plagiarist in his place thanks to one of her stories and its adaptation to a television series that ought to already be familiar to my legion of faithful followers. Ahem. If that doesn’t pique y’all’s anticipatory interest, I cannot imagine what would. Until then, oh my gourmands of gruesomeness, I bid you as I always do to be afraid.

            Be very afraid.

           

Historian of Horror: I Can Hear it Comin’ in the Air Tonight… Oh, Lorre…

 

 

            Back in the early days of mass electronic media, a weekly series on television or radio, at least in America, racked up roughly thirty-nine episodes every season from Labor Day to Memorial Day. Not twelve. Not six. Not three. Are you listening, BBC? Thirty-nine weeks out of every fifty-two was all new content. New comedy. New variety. New adventures. New horrors. Thirty-nine corpses on Perry Mason; thirty-nine clients exonerated in riveting courtroom dramas. Thirty-nine diseases cured by Ben Casey. Thirty-nine villains defeated by James West, Napoleon Solo, or Batman.

            Which left as many as thirteen weeks during which the gap in the programming schedule by the show being on summer hiatus had to be filled. From the 1960s until the turn of the millennium, that was usually accomplished by what were called “summer reruns”. Before then, and sometimes after, there was this thing called the “summer replacement”.

            The Abbott and Costello Show was a popular program on radio from 1940 to 1949, and then it switched to television. Bud and Lou took off the usual thirteen weeks in 1947, during which their summer replacement was a creepy little item called Mystery in the Air, starring Peter Lorre. Whom I have mentioned recently. The program adapted classic stories during its brief run, eight of which have survived. John Dunning, in his massive and exhaustive book On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, gives a starting date of 7/3/47, but no story titles from July are known as those episodes no longer seem to exist.

             The earliest surviving broadcast is “The Marvelous Barastro” (aired 8/7/47), based on a 1926 tale by Ben Hecht originally entitled “The Shadow”. An itinerant Russian prestidigitator embarks on a murderous revenge scheme.

The rest of the schedule is as follows:

            8/14/47 “The Lodger”, from the novel by Marie Belloc-Lowndes, inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders. The same story was used for the audition show, which is what pilot episodes were called on radio, for Suspense!, and was adapted twice more on that program and once on The CBS Radio Mystery Theater in 1974. It was also filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1927 and by 20th Century Fox in 1944.

            8/21/47 “The Horla”, Guy de Maupassant’s yarn in which a man is driven mad by an unseen vampiric creature. Also broadcast on Inner Sanctum and The Weird Circle. Vincent Price starred in the 1963 film adaptation, Diary of a Madman.

            8/28/47 “Beyond Good and Evil”. Ben Hecht strikes again. A crook confesses to a priest he believes to be paralyzed. Oops. Originally aired on Suspense! in 1945, and redone there in 1947. 

9/4/47 “The Mask of Medusa”, by Nelson Bond. A man wanders into the wrong wax museum. Raymond Burr starred in a television adaptation in 1951.

            9/11/47 “The Queen of Spades”, one of many adaptations of the Alexandr Pushkin story of ghostly revenge at the card table. As far as I can tell, it’s the spectral short story more adapted into other media than any other. Only Charles Dickens’ short novel A Christmas Carol has appeared more times, including one that will be showcased in our next edition.

            9/18/47 “The Black Cat”. You know this one. Edgar Allan Poe’s homage to ailurophobia. This classic tale was adapted for radio at least one more time, on The CBS Radio Mystery Theater, also in 1974.

            9/25/47 “Crime and Punishment”. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s examination of a killer’s guilty conscience. Was adapted on radio again in 1977, when NPR’s Earplay presented it as a three parter. Lorre had starred in a 1935 film version, co-starring Edward Arnold.

            Lorre’s high-octane performances drove the show. His unique voice and intense delivery made him a popular guest star all up and down the radio dial, and mark Mystery in the Air as a true classic of the medium. Co-star Peggy Webber reported that in one episode, Lorre became so overwrought by his own performance he threw his script into the air and was obliged to improvise until the pages could be re-collated at the commercial break. Too bad his audience didn’t have the chance to see that.

            Lorre wasn’t afforded the opportunity to host another series until 1953, when Nightmare premiered. It just lasted one season, and only a handful of the fifty-three broadcasts have survived. A shame, really, but a common issue for fans and collectors of old time radio programs. Wait until you hear about the myriad missing episodes of I Love a Mystery. That tale will break your heart, if you have one.

            And so, until next time, I bid all of you frantic fiends to be afraid.

            Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror: Images-Virgil Finley

They Call Me MISTER Finlay!

My high school librarian decided in 1975 or so to liquidate her son’s collection of science fiction books and magazines from the 1950s. I wound up with, among other things, a stack of issues of Fantastic Stories, a digest-sized periodical that frequently featured illustrations by the legendary pulp magazine artist Virgil Finlay. I do believe I have mentioned him before.

The first issue of Weird Tales I was ever able to get my claws on was from May, 1939. I paid ten bucks at auction a few years later during one of the many SF cons I attended in those days. The issue featured the first part of Robert E. Howard’s fantasy novel, Almuric, with the cover inspired by the story painted by none other than – you guessed it – Virgil Finlay.

I knew of him and his work before all that from the handful of speculative fiction histories I’d found in our local library, as well as the first of several collections of his illustrations published about that time, but I suspect he’s not nearly as well-known in these latter days as he should be. And that’s a shame.

Finlay was born on July 23, 1914 in Rochester, New York. He discovered the pulp magazines in high school, just as he was refining his artistic talents, as well as his skill at writing poetry. He sent off a batch of pictures to Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, in 1935. Wright decided that Finlay’s delicate work was indeed quite suitable for his publication, in that the pulp printing press Wright used wouldn’t muddy them up too much, and so it was regularly published on the covers and within the pages of “The Unique Magazine” through the rest of its initial run, which ended in 1954.

Once he was established, Finlay’s work was widely used throughout the genre, and beyond. He was almost immediately recognized as one of the preeminent science fiction, fantasy and horror illustrators of his day. In addition to Famous Fantastic Mysteries, as referenced in the link above, Finlay’s work appeared on and in the genre magazines Super Science Stories, Galaxy, Amazing, Fantastic Universe and Planet Stories, the general fiction pulp Argosy, the Sunday newspaper supplement The American Weekly, and the H.P. Lovecraft memorial issue of Amateur Correspondent. He won the very first Hugo Award for interior artwork in 1953, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.

Posthumously, alas. Finlay died of cancer on January 18, 1971, at the much too young age of 56.

Renowned for his use of stippling and other techniques, as well as his exquisite pen-and-ink linework and ability to adapt his pictures around the blocks of text he was often obliged to navigate, Finlay’s style was ideal for the pulps. He also did frequent book illustrations, particularly on works by A. Merritt, for a variety of small hardback genre book publishers like Winston, World Publishing and Fell’s Science Fiction Library. He provided the cover for Arkham House’s Lovecraft collection, The Outsider and Others, in 1939. He only did a few comic books, which probably limited his appeal to the first generation of nostalgic fandom as pulp collecting was less of a thing in the first few decades following his passing than comic collecting was.

Whereas Frank Frazetta and others solidified their well-deserved fame by producing covers for mass-market paperbacks, Finlay concentrated more on small-printrun hard-back publishers and genre magazines. Had he lived as long as the others, I suspect that would have changed, but as it is we only have a handful of paperback covers from him. And that, too, is a shame.

There is the American release of the first album from the English proto-heavy metal band Uriah Heep that uses Finlay’s “Black Butterfly” illustration for its cover. That’s something, I suppose, but there should be more. His work is just too grand to have been so neglected for so long.

The Internet Archive does have a nice selection of magazines containing Finlay’s work. There is also a small collection at Project Gutenberg. You should take a look at some of those issues. You’ll thank me the longest day of your life.

Our lagniappe this time is the fourth piece from Belorussian composer Alexander Litvinovsky’s suite, Tales of the Magic Tree. “Spider Knows His Craft” is a creepy bit of wonderfulness somewhat reminiscent of Bernard Hermann’s opening theme from Psycho. Enjoy!

Next time, we’ll be taking a little trip into the theater of the mind to give a listen to a short run series from the golden age of old time radio, starring one of horror cinema’s most distinctive voices. Join me then, won’t you? Until then, ye diabolical demoniacs, I bid you as always to be afraid…

Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror: United Artists Horror Movies 1921-1939

United Artists Horror Movies 1921-1939

In 1918, it came to the attention of the three most popular movie stars and the greatest film director of the age that the studios were conspiring to exert more control over their talent pool than Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith found tolerable. So, they banded together to form United Artists in early 1919.

As this was in the days before such a thing as the American Horror Film existed, there was no production of spooky titles at UA for several years. They did import the 1921 French film, J‘Accuse, directed by Abel Gance, which depicted the horrors of the Great War complete with a visitation from the spectres of those slain in battle, but it was 1926 before anything even remotely resembling a horror film emerged from the new studio.

The Bat, starring Mary Pickford’s brother, Jack, was based on a 1920 old dark house Broadway play by mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, which was itself based on her 1908 novel, The Circular Staircase. The same story was remade by the studio in sound in 1930 as The Bat Whispers, starring future B–movie Boston Blackie portrayer, Chester Morris. Vincent Price and Agnes Morehead co-starred in a 1959 remake from Allied Artists. No relation.

Very spooky, true, but short on the supernatural content. Not so with the 1932 Bela Lugiosi vehicle, White Zombie. The very first zombie movie had the recent Dracula star as “Murder” LeGendre, a plantation owner in Haiti who solved his labor shortage issues by the simple expedient of turning random locals and a few select enemies into zombies via voodoo potions and his own hypnotic control. The real villain of this particular episode in Legendre’s career is the incel who comes to him to get the object of his affections zombified so as to wrest her from the bonds of matrimony to someone else. Of course, nothing works out as planned.

In 1936, Robert Donat was the title character in a delightfully spooky rom-com, The Ghost Goes West. He played a Scottish nobleman who was more interested in romancing various local wenches than supporting Bonny Prince Charlie on the battlefield, and was therefore cursed to wander the crumbling halls of his ancestral home in spectral form, until an American tycoon disassembles the castle and ships it back to his native land. Ghostly hilarity ensues.

Love from a Stranger  (1937), based on the Agatha Christie short story, “Philomel Cottage”, is, like The Bat, really more of a mystery than a horror tale, but the menacing presence of Basil Rathbone and the direction of Rowland V. Lee elevate it to a more frightening level than one expects from The Queen of Crime. Lee went on to direct Rathbone again, along with Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lionel Atwill, in Universal’s Son of Frankenstein two years later. Released in the United States under the title A Night of Terror, it features Joan Hickson in a supporting role. She spent 1984 to 1992 playing Christie’s Miss Marple in a twelve episode series for the BBC, and is generally considered the definitive portrayer of the Sleuth of St. Mary Mead.

In 1937, independent producer Hall Roach had a hit with his adaptation of Thorne Smith’s 1926 novel, Topper, in which a stuffy banker is haunted by the ghosts of Cary Grant and Constance Bennett. The next year, United Artists distributed the sequel, Topper Takes a Trip, from the 1932 novel of the same name. Cary Grant sat out this one, but it’s still a treat. A second sequel also distributed by United Artists, 1941’s Topper Returns, left Constance Bennett behind in favor of Joan Blondell. A 1953-1955 television series starring Leo G. Carroll is available on YouTube.

Emily Brontë’s gothic novel Wuthering Heights has been filmed numerous times, and even adapted as an opera by Bernard Hermann. The best version, as far as I and many others are concerned, was United Artist’s 1939 effort starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. The Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography by Gregg Toland lends an eerie sense of implacable doom to the proceedings. While the screenplay only resembles the novel in its broadest strokes, the film is one of the many examples that cement 1939 as the best year ever for movies.

Fellow Tennessean and object of my prepubescent lust Lara Parker passed away on October 12, 2023 at the age of 84. She was Angelique, the witch who turned Barnabas Collins into a vampire in the 1960s soap opera, Dark Shadows. I am inconsolable.

When next we meet, we’ll take a loving look at the work of one of the greatest of the pulp magazine illustrators, Virgil Finlay. I hope you’ll join me. Until then, of course, I bid you to be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror: Get Your Shrieks on Route 66

Get Your Shrieks on Route 66

Some younger members of the populace might have gotten the impression that your humble but antiquated correspondent predates pretty much everything, but such is not the case. There actually were television programs that aired before I was aware of the genre. One such chronicled the peripatetic meanderings of a couple of bachelors cruising up and down America’s Highway, the legendary Route 66.

For almost sixty years, from 1926 to 1985, it stretched from Chicago to Santa Monica, and was the primary road west for thousands of Americans fleeing the Dust Bowl or just desperate for California sunshine. If you’ve seen the Pixar movie Cars, you know what happened. America’s Highway was made obsolete, if not replaced entirely, by the interstate system.

Oh, well.

For four of those years, from 1960 to 1964, Tod Stiles (played by Martin Milner) sought adventure on the way, alongside Buz Murdoch (George Maharis) for nearly three seasons, and then Lincoln Chase (Jeff Corbett) for the show’s final year after Maharis contracted hepatitis.

In the sixth episode of the third season, which aired on October 26, 1962, Tod and Buz take on a job as Guest Liaisons at a hotel just outside of Chicago. Buz grabs up the chance to amuse, entertain, and what today would be called sexually harass a convention of pretty young secretaries, leaving Tod to see to the needs of a trio of mysterious gentlemen.

Tod was not pleased, but his was the better gig, as it turned out.

The three guests in Tod’s care arrive under aliases, which are barely needed as none of the employees are old enough to recognize Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr. The horror icons of days gone by have convened to bemoan their obsolescence in the spooky pictures of the time, despite the fact that Karloff and Lorre were still getting a fair amount of work from Roger Corman and other film-makers, while Chaney was staying pretty busy on television. In fact, Chaney had appeared in a season two episode of Route 66, and would be in an additional one in the fourth season.

Lorre, Karloff and Chaney devise a plan to test their residual ability to frighten the public by lurking around the hotel in the guises of their former monstrous selves. Karloff puts on the flat-top and heavy boots of the Frankenstein Monster, while Chaney goes full lycanthrope in Wolf Man make-up. Lorre adopts a top hat and opera cape and slinks around as a sort of Jack the Ripper type character.

Meanwhile, Buz has cut a pony from the stenographic herd and is circling his prey while the other secretaries faint dead away every time one of the legendary boogeymen comes into view.

Tod has a grand old time procuring coffins and costumes and all the other gear the Terrifying Trio require. Buz, alas, discovers his chosen one is in love with her boss, who turns out to be in love with her. Their mutual shyness drops away when he shows up and snatches the young lovely right out of Buz’s claws. He whisks her away, leaving the ramblin’ Romeo without a date.

My heart bleeds.

The secretaries are led by Martita Hunt, another actor with a distinguished if less lengthy horror pedigree. She had played the vampire’s mother in Hammer’s Brides of Dracula two years earlier, among other roles. Silent-era leading man Conrad Nagel, who had appeared with Lon Chaney, Sr. in 1927’s London After Midnight, played the hotel manager. And the young boy in the opening scene was none other than Ron Chaney, the Wolf Man’s grandson.

Spooky!

It’s all very silly and not altogether politically correct, but it’s a fun episode, worth spending an hour of spare time consuming, if only to witness the final performances of Karloff and Chaney in their most iconic roles. Sort of.

Lorre would make a couple more horror pictures for Roger Corman, The Raven and The Comedy of Terrors (both with Karloff), before passing away from a heart attack in 1964. Karloff went on to appear in numerous movies, television shows and commercials before his own death on Groundhog’s Day of 1969. Chaney’s later films included The Haunted Palace, marginally a Poe picture but actually based on H. P. Lovecraft’s short novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, as well as Witchcraft, Spider Baby and Dracula vs Frankenstein. He died of throat cancer in 1973.

Next time, we’ll be going down to the projection room in the dungeon for a look at the horror movies disseminated by United Artists from 1921 to 1939. I hope you’ll join me. It’ll be a screamingly good time. Until then, my darlings of the demonic, I bid you as always to be sure to be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Ep. 230 Nightmare Fuel: The Candy Lady

Hello Addicts,

It’s that time of year again, when children (and some adults) go out in costume for a scary good time and all the candy they can get. I told you about the man who killed Halloween in a prior Nightmare Fuel. I found another legend about someone who used the desire for sweets for much scarier reasons. This week’s Nightmare Fuel looks at Clara Crane, The Candy Lady of Terrel, TX.

Clara and her husband, Leonard, were a simple farming couple in Terrel, TX, who had a daughter, Marcella, in 1888. Five years later, their daughter died in a farming accident caused by Leonard drinking while working. Clara was furious with her husband, but waited two years to enact her revenge. In 1895, she gave her husband homemade caramels, his favorite sweet. This batch had an extra ingredient — poison. The Crane’s neighbor saw Clara acting all out of sorts, so the sheriff was called. She was later convicted of first degree murder and sent to the North Texas Lunatic Asylum, where she remained until her release in 1899 because of overcrowding. People believed she returned to the family farm after that.

The legend part of the story begins in 1903, when some children in Terrel began receiving wrapped candy on their windowsills. Notes accompanied the sweets at first said, “From the Candy Lady”, but soon after that changed to asking the kids to come outside and play with her. Children started disappearing before one child told their parents about the delivered confections. The adults in town thought of Clara and conducted multiple unsuccessful searches of the Crane farm. During this time, another farmer was working in his field when he came across some candy wrappers on the ground. When he opened them, he found small rotten teeth. They believed them to come from the missing children, and panic gripped the little town.

The local sheriff made it his personal mission to find the monster taking and hurting the town’s children. His investigation not only proved fruitless, but it cost him his life as well. He vanished one day and turned up dead in a ditch with a fork stabbed in each eye. The killer’s signature was the candy stuffed in the dead police officer’s pockets. Then, just as quickly as the vanishings started, they stopped. It remains an unsolved case to this day.

As with most urban legends, the story continues on well into the paranormal realm. It’s believed that the ghost of the Candy Lady still tempts children with candy on their windowsills. Those who take it risk having their teeth pulled out, forks jammed into their eyes, or to vanish forever. Be careful this Halloween season.

Until next time, Addicts,

D.J.

Historian of Horror: RKO Horror Movies 1929-1939

RKO Horror Movies 1929-1939

As the motion picture industry segued from silent to sound, David Sarnoff of the Radio Corporation of America needed theaters in which to display his new sound apparatus for films, RCA Photophone, and a distributor to spread the films he planned to make across the country. The Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain of movie houses satisfied the first need; future presidential father Joseph P. Kennedy’s Film Booking Offices of America supplied the second. Under the title Radio-Keith-Orpheum, RKO was born in 1929. Two years later, Kennedy contributed his ownership of the Pathé studio to the mix, providing a place in which to make said pictures.

During its first decade of existence, RKO relied on the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for survival, with the monstrous assistance of the overwhelmingly successful King Kong in 1933. Prior to the advent of Kong, RKO produced the first of two adaptations of Seven Keys to Baldpate, a title you might recall from a previous entry. That first one, in 1929, starred silent western star Richard Dix, who during the 1940s starred in a series of films based on the creepy radio show, The Whistler, for Columbia. The second, released in 1935, featured Gene Raymond, who went on to a very long career in American television.

In 1932, RKO produced The Phantom of Crestwood, in which a blackmail scheme goes horrifically wrong, and Thirteen Women, starring Myrna Loy as a murderess who uses her supernatural powers to avenge having been ostracized at school. The latter was also the only film appearance of Peg Entwistle, who committed suicide by jumping off of the Hollywood Sign not long afterward.

The big film of that year, as far as horror fans are concerned, was the Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack adaptation of Richard Connell’s 1924 short story, The Most Dangerous Game. Why, you might ask? Because it was the practice run for King Kong. Cooper and Schoedsack took all the special effects tricks they learned while making it, handed them off to the brilliant animator Willis O’Brien, and set him to work bringing Kong and his dinosaur friends to life. They also found their leading lady, Fay Wray. Leslie Banks played the Russian exile who found sport in hunting humans on his private island.

Kong was very much the proverbial 8000-pound gorilla, the biggest horror film of 1933, and for many years to come. It scored a financial success that was unmatched until Gone with the Wind six years later, and set the standard for special effects for decades. The familiar story zips along at a well-considered pace, leaving the viewer continually enthralled and never bored. Can’t say the same for the remakes, alas.

The gigantic wall that separated the Skull Islanders from the threats posed by the island’s other, gargantuan inhabitants was destroyed, by the way, during the burning of Atlanta scene in GWtW, a cinematic crime that truly was the greatest horror of them all.

A sequel, Son of Kong, was rushed into production and out to a less-than-enthusiastic public by the end of 1933. It’s not a bad picture, at all, but Junior just isn’t a patch on the Old Man.

A lost version of W.W. Jacobs’ short story, The Monkey’s Paw, rounded out the year.

Cooper and Schoedsack tried to recapture the old magic with a 1935 adaptation of the 1886 H. Rider Haggard supernatural adventure novel, She, the first sound version after at least five silents. It starred future western super-star Randolph Scott, and future California Congresswoman Helen Gahagan. Alas, moving the setting from Darkest Africa to Coldest Alaska didn’t impress audiences. A properly-located Hammer version made thirty years later might or might not be a better adaptation, depending on who you ask. I rank them about equal.

The 1984 version with Sandahl Bergman is best forgotten. Let’s just pretend it was never made.

In 1936, RKO began a twenty-year span of distributing cartoons and feature films by the Walt Disney studio, beginning with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Which will be covered in a future installment.

The last great RKO horror film of the decade was the 1939 adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring the redoubtable Charles Laughton and the stunning Irish redhead, Maureen O’Hara. The supporting cast included Cedric Hardwicke (1942’s The Ghost of Frankenstein) and Fritz Leiber, father of the great horror-fantasy-science-fiction writer, Fritz Leiber, Jr. Leiber père also appeared as Franz Liszt in Universal’s 1943 color remake of The Phantom of the Opera.

When next we gather together, we’ll take a look at the last hurrah of three giants of horror in a 1962 television show about a pair of bachelors tooling along America’s Highway in a Chevy Corvette.

Until then, be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror: Ghost Riders in the Sky

Yippee-Ki-Yay, Monster-Hunters!

In late 1980, my then-fiancée and I went to the Exit-In in Nashville to see John Prine. The retro-western music trio Riders in the Sky, comprised of Ranger Doug on guitar, Woody Paul on fiddle and Too Slim on double bass, opened. A most excellent evening of first-rate music, indeed, including the Riders’ performance of the classic song from which their name was derived.

Good stuff.

“Ghost Riders in the Sky”, sometimes just referred to as “Riders in the Sky” or “A Cowboy’s Lament” or some combination thereof, was composed in 1948 by cowboy songsmith Stan Jones. It was covered within a year by Burl Ives, Vaughn Monroe, Bing Crosby, Gene Autry and Peggy Lee, and in the subsequent decades by damn near everybody from Johnny Cash to the Blues Brothers. It even showed up in the soundtrack of the 2007 Marvel movie, Ghost Rider. I have better than a hundred different versions in my collection, and am feeling a bit dubious as to whether or not I’ve managed to hoover up the whole lot.

It’s a spooky story set to a driving beat about an old cowhand who witnesses a ghostly herd of cattle being driven across the sky by spectral cowpokes, concluding with a warning for the old-timer to change his ways lest he join the cattle drive through the clouds for all eternity.

There has always been a spookiness about the old west, one that has inspired creative minds for most of a century and a half. An empty landscape dotted with ghost towns and abandoned mines is ripe fodder for scriveners of monstrous stories. Such literary luminaries as Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, Mark Twain and many others set ghostly tales in the haunted spaces on the far side of the Missouri River. Hell, I’ve even written a few myself.

Texas pulp-meister Robert E. Howard set several of his horror yarns in the Old West, “The Horror from the Mound” being the best one. Originally published in the May, 1932 issue of Weird Tales, it was adapted into comics form by writer Gardner F. Fox and artist Frank Brunner under the title “The Monster from the Mound” in Marvel’s Chamber of Chills #2, dated January, 1973.

In the 1950s, my fellow Tennessean Lon Williams wrote a series of at least thirty-two weird western tales featuring Deputy Marshal Lee Winters for the pulp magazine, Real Western Stories. Wildside Press has collected twenty-five of them into The Lon Williams Weird Western Megapack. Well worth a small investment.

The 1958 weird western flick, Curse of the Undead, was one of the myriad horror pictures I caught after school on The Big Show on the local CBS station. Eric Fleming, later co-star (with Clint Eastwood) of the classic western television show, Rawhide, deals with a vampire played by perennial 50s villain Michael Pate. Not exactly a classic of the form, but the climax was fairly inventive. Eastwood’s own contribution to the sub-genre, The Beguiled from 1971, is considerably better. Eastwood recovers from wounds received in the Civil War among the denizens of a remote girl’s school. No one’s motives are even remotely pure, and mayhem ensues.

El Grito de la Muerte (The Last Coffin) was a 1959 weird western made in Mexico, incorporating elements of the legend of la Llorona, about which I wrote way back near the beginning of this odyssey.

I wrote this past January about the one truly ghostly episode of my favorite western show from my mis-spent youth, The Wild Wild West, but the whole series is replete enough with weirdness to satisfy the most discriminating palate.

And then there are a pair of truly awful pictures from 1966 that one should approach with care. Billy the Kid vs Dracula stars the redoubtable John Carradine in his least impressive performance as the Count, while Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter has even less to recommend it. For completists only.

As with every other horror sub-genre, the weird western has blossomed in the past few decades, on film, on television, and in literature. Some guy named Stephen King even got into the action, or so I hear. Check ‘em out, buckaroos. They’ll be good fer what ails ya.

Our lagniappe for this edition is the very creepy video for Laura Gibson’s song, “La Grange”, from her 2012 album of the same name. I hope you enjoy it.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the horror films made by R-K-O Studios from 1925 to 1939, with at least a passing glance at a certain tall, dark and hairy monarch of his own demesne. I hope you’ll join me in a fortnight for that. Until such time as we gather together in this place again, I bid you, as I always do, to be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Ep. 228 Nightmare Fuel: The Denver Spider Man

Hello Addicts,

Imagine you are home alone, but you don’t feel you are. You’ve noticed little things moved from the last place you left them, but don’t remember moving them. You hear strange sounds in other parts of the house, but find nothing when you investigate. Is your home haunted? Perhaps, or you may have an unknown guest living in your home. We look at one such case in this week’s Nightmare Fuel — The Denver Spider Man.

It’s October 17, 1941, and Philip Peters is home alone when he discovers a tall, gaunt, and disheveled looking man taking food from his icebox. The retired railroad worker fought the intruder, but died when the other man bludgeons him with a cast-iron stove shaker. The neighbors called the police after discovering his body, but the assailant was nowhere to be found.

Mr. Peters’ wife, Helen, had been recuperating at the hospital from a broken hip when her husband died. When she returned home, a friend of hers moved in with her to help her with the house and further recovery. In the months that followed, food disappeared, things moved around, and strange sounds continued, forcing Mrs. Peters to move in with her son. Since they didn’t find a cause for all of that to happen, everyone thought the house haunted.

Even vacant, neighbors still experienced strange sounds and odors coming from the house. When the police were called in, they never found the source of these strange occurrences. At least, not until two officers staking out the home saw a man inside the house. A search of the house turned up nothing until they heard a sound coming from the upstairs. When they checked a closet, they saw a pair of legs scoot through a small hole leading to the attic and pulled him back down.

When the officers took the strange man to the police station, he identified himself as Theodore Coneys and confessed to killing Philip Peters. After the murder, he took up residence up in the cramped space of the attic he tried to escape into. One officer said of the conditions up there, “A man would have to be a spider to stand it long up there.” It was this statement that got the newspapers calling him ‘The Denver Spider Man’.

So, the next time you hear something go bump in the night, or you find your keys in a different spot than you left them, check your house and any crawl spaces. Perhaps it’s just ghosts playing with you, or maybe it’s an unknown house guest.

Until next time, Addicts.

D.J.

Historian of Horror: Warner Brothers Horror Movies 1928-1946

Warner Brothers Horror Movies 1928-1946

Warner Brothers is best known today as the home of Superman, Batman and Bugs Bunny, but in its earliest days it was the home of gangsters and gun molls. Even as movie tough-guys James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart were shooting up the backlot in pictures like Public Enemy, Little Caesar and Angels With Dirty Faces, the studio was making history by filming horrors in color, the first studio to do so.

The four Warner brothers, Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack, began making movies in Los Angeles as early as 1918, but the studio wasn’t incorporated until 1923. In 1928, they made The Haunted House, the first of a couple of short spooky pictures starring doomed star Thelma Todd. Seven Footprints to Satan, based on a novel by A. Merritt, followed the next year. There were a pair of lost films, 1928’s The Terror and The Gorilla in 1930, and then things got really interesting.

There had been several silent versions of George du Maurier’s novel Trilby, beginning in 1914. A German version from 1927 starring future Oscar winner Emil Jannings popped up briefly on YouTube a few years back, but disappeared before I could grab it.

Oh, well.

It and a couple of others were released under the title Svengali, named for the villain of the piece. There have been a few in the sound era, beginning with John Barrymore’s performance in the 1931 version of Svengali. Marian Marsh and Donald Crisp (The Uninvited, 1944) co-starred.

Warner Brothers made history in 1927 by releasing the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer. In 1932, Doctor X became the first American horror movie in color. King Kong’s favorite blonde, Fay Wray, co-starred. Doctor X involved the creation of synthetic flesh, with which a mad scientist disguised himself whilst committing anti-social acts.

Star Lionel Atwill returned in Mystery of the Wax Museum the following year, also in color. Vincent Price was in the 1953 3-D remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum, titled House of Wax, a rare occasion of a remake rising above its source material. Not that Mystery of the Wax Museum isn’t excellent. Both are worth seeing.

For some strange reason, Warner Brothers seems uninterested in releasing 1934’s          Return of the Terror in any format. Mary Astor and Lyle Talbot starred in this Old Dark House film set in an English country estate converted into an inn. The Library of Congress has preserved it, so next time you’re in Washington, stop by and give it a look.

The second genre-related Thelma Todd short, The Tin Man, came out in 1935, the year she was brutally and mysteriously murdered. This and the other one mentioned above were entries in a lengthy set of short subjects Todd made at Warner. Her sidekick during the run of the series was Patsy Kelly, who went on to a long career in movies, culminating in a role in the 1968 Roman Polanski film, Rosemary’s Baby.

The Return of Doctor X (1939) has no relation to the 1932 classic. One of Warner’s resident tough guys, Humphrey Bogart, was punished for being uppity by being inserted into the monster role in this subpar potboiler. Worth seeing, but in the words of Dr. Samuel Johnson, not worth going to see.

The 1940s started out with a trio of fairly nondescript B pictures, The Smiling Ghost (1941), The Hidden Hand (1942) and The Mysterious Doctor (1943). The big entry for 1944 was the marvelous classic horror-comedy, Arsenic and Old Lace, about which I have already waxed rhapsodic.

Warner’s final horror film until House of Wax was The Beast With Five Fingers (1946). Based on the William Fryar Harvey short story, it features Robert Alda in the lead. Horror stalwarts Peter Lorre and J. Carroll Naish contend, alongside the star, against the severed hand of a vengeful murder victim.

The 1950s were a much more productive decade for Warner Brothers, but that will have to wait a while to be examined under the dark light down in my dungeon laboratory of historical research. Next time we meet, we’ll be taking a listen to the most covered ghost story in song ever released, beginning in the late 1940s when it was recorded by none other than Stan Jones and His Death Valley Rangers. I hope you’ll join me in a fortnight for a rip-roaring, rootin’ tootin’ good time. Yippee-Ki-Yay, monster-hunters!

To tide you over until that eventuality, I have une lagniappe from an undeservedly obscure British band, The Ghost. Their 1970 album, When You’re Dead – One Second, is one of those classics more folks should know. I hope you enjoy it.

And so, until we encounter one another again in this space, I bid you, as always, to be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Ep. 227 Nightmare Fuel: The Deadly Tomato

Hello Addicts,

One of the most common fruits you’ll find on a dinner table is the tomato. Whether it’s in a salad, on a sandwich, turned into salsa, or as a sauce on your favorite pasta or pizza, you’ll find this versatile fruit. Did you know, however, that this wasn’t always the case? This week’s Nightmare Fuel looks at what Europeans called the ‘poison apple’, the tomato.

Tomatoes are a fruit and a member of the nightshade family. We know nightshades as famously deadly plants, well renowned for their poisonous traits. The tomato and eggplant, both members of the nightshade family, are safe to eat despite the popular belief that all nightshades are poisonous. The fear of the tomato came about in the late 1700s in Europe and lasted for almost two-hundred years.

Back in the day, European aristocrats grew to fear the tomato when many grew sick and died after eating them. What they eventually discovered was that the tomato wasn’t the source of the poison, but the pewter plates they ate off of were. These plates often contained high amounts of lead, and the acid from the tomato juice caused it to leach out, thus poisoning the aristocrat.

Another factor that fed into this hysteria was a parasite called a tomato worm. It measured three to five inches and had a horn protruding from its tail. People feared this little worm because they believed it to be as poisonous as a rattlesnake. Merely touching it or eating the fruit it touched was enough to kill you painfully. This, of course, got proven incorrect.

Despite the stories and misunderstood history, the tomato is one of the most popular foods grown and used today. The next time you take a bite of a ‘poison apple’, think about how much braver you are today than the aristocrats of yore.

Until next time, Addicts.

D.J.

Historian of Horror: Books-Lafcadio Hearn

So, the Dog Ate Your Homework?

I hope not, although the assignment I gave out last edition is hardly one that Fido could wrap his teeth around. I fully understand if even a mere handful of my faithful followers were able to locate and relish the film I requested you watch, but I do hope some could.

Kwaidan, from a word that means “ghost story“, was based on a set of tales by Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), whose biography reads like a Dickensian nightmare culminating in a rise to prominence worthy of Horatio Alger. Hearn was born on the Greek island of Lefkada, from which his name derives. After his father relocated the family to Dublin, both of Hearn’s parents abandoned him, leaving him in the care of a wealthy great-aunt. He later fetched up in Cincinnati, Ohio and was deviously deprived of his expected inheritance, leaving him destitute in an unknown land.

Hearn found work as a journalist, but lost that job when he married an African-American woman in defiance of the state’s anti-miscegenation law. He did well at a rival newspaper, but soon found his way down to New Orleans when his marriage fell apart.

Having already translated the works of French author Théophile Gautier into English, Hearn found work translating foreign newspaper articles for a New Orleans paper, as well as reporting on Creole culture and cuisine, French opera, and local voodoo customs. He contributed similar articles to national magazines, including Harper’s, which sent him to the West Indies as a foreign correspondent.

A couple of years later, Hearn was sent to Japan, where he settled in very nicely. He married a Japanese woman and became a citizen before collecting Japanese folk tales, in particular ghost stories, and writing new ones, four of which were filmed in 1964 and released under the title of – you guessed it… Kwaidan!

I bet every single one of you saw that coming.

The tetralogy of tales in Kwaidan is as follows:

“The Black Hair” was adapted from two stories in Hearn’s 1900 story collection, Shadowings. A swordsman abandons his poor wife to marry into money. He grows dissatisfied with his new life and returns to his former home. He finds his ex-wife unchanged, her long lustrous hair still black and lovely. They spend the evening reminiscing over old times, but he awakens to find her rotted corpse beside him. He runs away, rapidly aging, until her long black hair catches up to him and… Uh-oh.

“The Woman of the Snow” and “Hoichi the Earless” were taken from Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, published in 1903. In the first tale, a pair of woodcutters encounter a ghostly female creature known as a yuki–onna. She kills one, but spares the other on the condition he never tells anyone of their meeting. Later on, he meets and marries a beautiful woman to whom he eventually tells too much, with unfortunate consequences.

Hoichi is a blind musician, summoned by a spectral Samurai to play for a mighty lord. Bad things happen to him, but so do some good things. So, there it is.

“In a Cup of Tea” came from Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs, from 1902. A writer, awaiting his publisher, tells the tale of a nobleman’s attendant who sees a strange man’s face in his cup of tea. He is later visited by a trio of ghosts, with whom he duels to an ambiguous climax. When the publisher finally arrives, he’s in for a shock.

As I noted last time, Kwaidan is a gorgeous movie and well worth taking the time to wallow in its sumptuousness. It was a Toho film directed by Masaki Kobayashi, with none of the cheesiness of the same studio’s contemporary Godzilla pictures.

Other films have been inspired by Hearn’s yarns, including a couple based on his “Snow Woman” story. In addition, his works have been adapted to television, the stage, radio, video games and Mangas. Pretty good for a lad who started out by being shipped off to a foreign country without any resources, huh?

Many of Hearn’s works – both fiction and non-fiction, as well as his news reports – are available online, and more are popping up as time marches on. His entry at the Gutenberg Project is a good place to start, as are the Internet Archive and The Online Books Page. I recommend acquiring a few and browsing through them at your leisure.

In our next encounter, we shall continue our ramble through the American studio system with a loving look at the horror films of Warner Brothers from 1928 to 1939. It wasn’t all Bugs Bunny and gangsters in those days, as we shall see.

So, until then, oh ye gourmands of gore, I bid you to be afraid.

Be very afraid.

From The Vault: Historian of Horror / This Property is Condemned

Previous posted on 7/02/2022

DC Comics seemed to have an affinity for naming comic books after spooky houses. Other publishers had Vaults (…of Horror, … of Evil) or Chambers (… of Chills, … of Darkness), but the House that Superman Built would settle for nothing less than entire structures for their ghosts to live in.

To be fair, St. John did have a House of Terror. But that was a 1953 one-shot that reprinted older horror tales in 3-D format, and one house a neighborhood doth not make.

DC, on the other hand, had an entire subdivision of eerie edifices. Apart from the domiciles, I referenced in an earlier column, there was a House of Mystery, a House of Secrets, and a Ghost Castle, not to mention Secrets of Haunted House. They also had a Doorway to Nightmare, for readers not yet ready to commit to full home ownership.

House of Mystery was first, debuting as a typical horror comic of its day at the end of 1951. That was a few years before the institution of the Comics Code, so the occasional werewolf or vampire was allowed in its first thirty-five issues. Not that there were many, given that DC was less inclined to such sensationalism than other publishers. Even before the Code, the DC horror titles were rather tame. House of Mystery ran for 321 issues until October 1983, although it spent a few years showcasing superhero features (“Martian Manhunter” and “Dial H for Hero”) rather than spooks and specters. It did feature a vampire series in its later years after the Comics Code was revised to allow such beings.

House of Secrets was more faithful to its horror roots for its run from 1956 to 1978, with a three-year gap from 1966 to 1969. It was not consistently an anthology title, playing host to a few continuing characters, but not superheroic ones like its sister magazine. Eclipso wasn’t really a hero, super or otherwise, and did have a supernatural origin that was revealed years later. His adventures occupied twenty issues of the title, mostly drawn by Alex Toth or Jack Sparling. Mark Merlin, usually illustrated by Mort Meskin, was an occult detective who appeared regularly for six years before being shuffled into an alternate dimension and replaced by Prince Ra-Man, AKA Mind Master. Both features ended with the hiatus.

When the title returned with issue #81, it was all horror, all the time, and the house was virtually a character in the comic book. A similar transformation had occurred over at House of Mystery about the same time. That house was provided with a caretaker by the name of Cain, who introduced the stories, none of which had continuing characters or superheroes.

The new House of Secrets was watched over by Cain’s nebbish brother, Abel, who had an imaginary friend named Goldie. The house frequently tried to rid itself of him by having the resident suits of armor drop their weapons on him, or floors collapse, or other such inconveniences. Covers were frequently by Neal Adams, one of the most talented and influential artists in the industry, during the early years of this incarnation. One exception was issue #92, painted by Bernie Wrightson. It introduced the muck monster, Swamp Thing. I’ve mentioned that one before, so we need not dwell on it here.

Other frequent artists included Bill Draut, Alex Toth, George Tuska, and Jack Sparling, all of whom possessed distinctive styles. As the years passed, the art became rather derivative and bland, as did the stories. I pretty much lost track of the title by mid-decade. Too many more interesting things were happening in comics in the 1970s, some of which I will address in this space in the future.

Cain and Abel did appear together in other venues. They co-hosted the humor title, Plop! and occasionally dropped in on the trio of witches who hosted The Witching Hour comic book. Eventually, House of Secrets and The Witching Hour were absorbed into another magazine, The Unexpected, and the era of DC horror comics began petering out. 

But not permanently. In 1996, House of Secrets was revived for a two-year run under DC’s Vertigo imprint. The house was a mobile venue for judgment upon mortal sinners, who were tried for their evil ways by a jury of ghosts. No Cain, no Abel. That incarnation lasted twenty-five issues and a couple of specials, and that was it for the House of Secrets.

Oh, well. All things must pass.

Let’s meet again in fourteen days to have a listen to the first great movie score, composed for one of the first great horror films of the sound era. It’s sure to be a fun time of truly gargantuan dimensions. Until then, devourers of the demonic…

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Ep. 226 Nightmare Fuel: Myrtles Plantation

Hello Addicts,

For someone to be malevolent, you picture them doing something truly bad. With maids, stealing small trinkets or spreading gossip about their co-workers or employers wouldn’t rise to that level. Heinous crimes involving bodily harm and murder, however, do. This week’s Nightmare Fuel, we look at the legend of Chloe of Myrtles Plantation fame.

Myrtles Plantation is an antebellum style home in St. Francisville, LA, and was the home to the Woodruff family and their slaves. Chloe was one such slave, who worked in the home as a well-regarded maid for the family. Chloe was listening at the keyhole while Clark Woodruff, the patriarch of the family, was discussing business with other men. She got discovered eavesdropping and punished by having one of her ears cut off, but remained a maid in the house. One day, she baked a cake for the family with an extra ingredient — a substantial amount of poisonous oleander leaf extract. According to the legend, Clark’s wife Sara and their daughters ate the tainted cake, became sick, and died. Chloe’s plan was to be the hero by nursing Sara and her daughters back to health, but was killed by her fellow slaves instead. Some say her death was because of how much they loved the little girls, while others believe it was to keep from being punished for harboring her.

There are variations on this legend. Some versions of the story tell of how Clark enticed Chloe to be his mistress. When their relationship got discovered, she lost her ear and that the poisoning was her taking revenge and meeting the same fate.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any proof of a slave named Chloe being at the plantation or that the Woodruff tragedy occurred. That, however, does not explain the sightings of Chloe in the plantation home. People claim to see the spirit of a woman matching her description, complete with a green turban, roaming the home. Is there some truth to her legend being kept hidden, or is this a case of a tulpa, or thought form, coming to be from enough people thinking about her and her story? Perhaps someday we can find out.

Until next time, Addicts.

D.J.

Historian of Horror: The Monster Times

The Time Has Come, the Monster said…

A long time ago when the world was new, a magazine appeared on the newsstands of America. It was called Rolling Stone, and it had a format unseen by most readers up until that time, and rarely since. A format, in fact, that is a bit difficult to describe.

Imagine, if you will, you’re standing in line at the supermarket staring at a tabloid newspaper the dimensions of, say, The National Enquirer. You let your eyes roam, almost against your will, over the ridiculous claims about cultural and political personalities slathered over the eleven-by-fourteen-inch surface. Now, let’s say that, instead of the cover you normally see, the thing is folded over and the cover is actually on the bottom half of what you’d normally consider the magazine’s back page, turned ninety degrees and facing outward. Once you bought it, you’d open it up and read it as if it hadn’t been folded over.

Clear as mud? That was what Rolling Stone looked like in 1967. As have a few other periodicals. Two were small press titles devoted to the reprinting of newspaper comic strips, The Menomonee Falls Gazette and The Menomonee Falls Guardian. We’re not here to discuss them.

No, the one we need to consider was called The Monster Times, and for fifty-one glorious issues, it was a significant rival to the leader in the field of horror magazines, Famous Monsters of Filmland. About which I have written before.

Beginning on January 26, 1972, The Monster Times was biweekly for its first fourteen issues, monthly thereafter until 1975, and then bimonthly for its final year. Like Famous Monsters and other similar magazines, it included articles on current and classic horror, fantasy and science-fiction in film and on television, as well as in books and comics. The first issue contained articles on the silent films Nosferatu and Der Golem, on the 1933 King Kong and the Buck Rogers comic strip, and the 1936 SF film, Things to Come. It also featured a centerfold poster and a two-page comic adaptation of Nosferatu, both illustrated by Bernie Wrightson. A lot packed into a scant thirty-two pages.

And so it went for another forty-seven regular issues, until July, 1976. Along the way, there were three special issues, the first two being Star Trek oriented, while the third had brief articles on various horror films and ten posters similar to the centerfolds in the bi-weekly, monthly and bi-monthly editions. And that was it.

The Monster Times was printed on newspaper-quality newsprint, with a slightly better quality cover. The printing quality was barely better than a newspaper’s, which probably limited its appeal, but within its pages this adolescent horror fan found wonders to be savored despite the flimsiness of its construction for those four all-too-brief years. Regardless, it outlived other Famous Monsters clones like Marvel’s unimaginatively titled Monsters of the Movies (nine issues) or Atlas/Seaboard’s equally blandly named Movie Monsters, which ran for only four issues, neither of which suffered from the strange format The Monster Times was saddled with.

Rolling Stone gave up on the format and opened up to full tabloid size in the mid-1970s. The Menomonee Falls Gazette and Guardian gave up the ghost by 1978. It seems that the buying public was not yet, and might never be ready to unfold their periodicals before reading. So be it. Their loss, frankly, as some pretty good stuff was inside those awkwardly bent covers.

In a 1973 poll, the readers of The Monster Times determined that the most popular monster of all time was none other than Godzilla. In honor of that result, our lagniappe for this edition is a little ditty by a Canadian comedy-musical trio: Godzilla by The Arrogant Worms

I hope the populace finds it as amusing as I do. What that will say about us, I leave to future historians to parse out.

I was recently provided by an online acquaintance with a large store of the fictional and non-fictional works of the Irish-Greek-Japanese journalist, writer and translator Lafcadio Hearn. When next we gather together in this space, I will be expounding upon his life and career as a celebration of this gift. In preparation for that eventuality, I have a provisional assignment for the populace. Horror Homework, you might say, if you are able to access the material. I highly recommend the 1964 Japanese anthology film, Kwaidan. It is not only spooky as all get out, it is one of the most beautifully mounted cinematic productions I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing. Bask in its loveliness and the accompanying frissons it provides for the viewer. You’ll thank me the longest day of your life.

And so, fellow fiends, I bid you, as always, to be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror: Buster’s Ghost

This Game is Gonna Be the Death of Me!

Back in the mid-1990s, I ran into an Englishman in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia who asked me to explain baseball to him. I pointed out it was very similar to his own country’s game of rounders, which he rather snootily pointed out was a girl’s game. I responded that yes, that was true, in much the same way as soccer was in the United States.

Well, it kind of was, at the time.

Not my proudest moment, both for the quick and less-than-amicable termination of what had promised to be a pleasant conversion, but also for the misguided misogyny with which my riposte was laden. I do apologize for that. I was younger and muc less evolved in those days. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

I had not given that other kind of football much thought since then, at least until recently, when I, along with what seems like most of the world, went absolutely gaga over a delightful television show called Ted Lasso. You may have seen it. The title character is an American college football coach who is hired by a foundering English soccer team to lead them to glory. This takes him no less than three seasons, as he knows nothing about soccer. The series concluded in the most perfect way imaginable, leading the writer in me to be satisfied that it ended just as it should have, but the fan in me desperately wanting more.

Is there any higher praise than that for an artistic endeavor? I think not.

At the end of my second binge of the program, I started wondering if there weren’t some way to bring a bit of Ted Lasso to these hallowed pages. And sure enough, there is. I know I just did a comics-themed post last month, but I’ve never done one about an English comic book. So, let’s all cross the Big Pond to take a look at Roy of the Rovers, a long running title all about what most of the world means when it says the word ‘football’.

Doesn’t mean they’re right.

Specifically, I would like to draw the populace’s attention to a back-up feature in the title. “Buster’s Ghost” ran in the final fifty-five weekly issues, beginning with the February 29, 1992 edition, as well as in the 1994 Annual, usually at or near the end of the book. It told the tale of the late great soccer player, Buster Madden, who returned from the afterlife to ferret out who engineered the car accident that killed him four years earlier, and in the process to turn his hapless but talented cousin, Nigel Foster, into a player as great as he himself was. To accomplish these disparate goals, Buster stoops so low as to possess Nigel, among other tactics. The Blackpool Raiders do enjoy greater success due to Buster’s interference, which leaves Nigel feeling a bit like a cheater. As well, since no one else can see the spectral footballer Nigel’s teammates all think he’s crazy when he talks to the spirit, which is even more disconcerting.

Once Buster’s killers are caught, more ghosts start popping up, causing additional problems for poor Nigel and starting storylines that weren’t resolved before Roy of the Rovers was canceled, and “Buster’s Ghost” along with it, including one in which the new manager of the team can see the ghosts. All the ghosts. Alas, nothing ever came of it.

Oh, well.

By the way, Buster resembles nothing so much as Griffin Dunne’s character from An American Werewolf in London about halfway through his decomposition process. Nigel resembles a Nebraska farm boy in the wrong kind of football uniform. I’ve been to the United Kingdom a couple of times, and don’t recall ever seeing anyone with a flat-top haircut. Maybe I just hung out with the wrong crowd, in the wrong decade.

The regular series episodes ran two-and-a-half pages each, with a six-page story in the annual. This is typical of English comics, which doesn’t provide for much rapid story development. There were other features in the magazine, none of which had any supernatural elements. Roy of the Rovers ended its 851-issue run on March 20, 1993.

Adios, Roy. Vaya con Dios, Buster. So long, Nigel.

At least Ted Lasso wrapped up all its various plots and subplots. Hmph.

I have yet another comics-related obituary to share. John Romita, Sr., the primary artist on The Amazing Spider-Man for a number of years, died on June 12 at 93. In his long career, he illustrated every genre imaginable, including quite a few horror tales for Atlas Comics, the company that grew up to become Marvel. Of which you might have heard.

Until next time, I bid you to be afraid…

Be very afraid.

From the Vault: Republic Robots Running Rampant!

From the Vault: On 08/27/22 by Mark Orr

In 1935, Herbert J. Yates ran a small film processing laboratory in Hollywood. He’d been processing movies for the major studios for several years, but when they all decided to take care of that chore in-house, Yates needed to diversify in order to keep afloat in the midst of the Great Depression. He managed to acquire six small Poverty Row studios, and combined them into one mini-major studio he called Republic Pictures.

One of the six, Mascot Pictures, provided Yates with three things that make this little foray into the history of celluloid mechanical horrors possible: experience in producing movie serials going back into the silent era; the former Mack Sennett studio; and the recent discovery of singing cowboy Gene Autry.

Serials, or cliffhangers for those of you who remember Annie Wilkes talking about them in Misery (“He didn’t get out of the cock-a-doodie car!”), were cheaply made adventure films broken up into ten to fifteen chapters intended to be shown on successive Saturday afternoons for the kiddie crowd, mostly. Mom would drop her brood off at the local cinema with a dime for admission and another for snacks, and they’d be entertained by a couple of B-movies, cartoons, assorted short subjects, and a serial chapter long enough for the materfamilias to run her errands. Good clean fun, with plenty of violence but no sex.

Yates’s first venture into serial making made use of his new film star, as well as the well-appointed studio he’d inherited from Sennett. Before Autry went on to become the biggest western star in the world (yes, bigger than John Wayne for his most active years), and long before he owned the Los Angeles Angels baseball team, he starred in one chapterplay for the new studio, The Phantom Empire (1935). Starting off from his day job as a radio performer, Autry discovered an underground kingdom under his ranch. Murania was a technologically advanced civilization that made extensive use of robots. Hence, the title of this installment. Gene managed to escape Murania and save Radio Ranch from the bad guys who were after his radium mine, all in twelve chapters. 

Autry soon switched over to making B-Westerns and was known as the “King of the Cowboys” until going off to fight in World War II. After the war, Autry finished out his contract with Republic, then transferred to Columbia for the remainder of his movie and television career. He passed away in 1998, at the age of 91.

A year after Autry triumphed over the Muranians, former stuntman and future Terror from Beyond Space Ray “Crash” Corrigan found similar adventures in Atlantis in another twelve-chapter serial, Undersea Kingdom. Future Wolf Man Lon Chaney, Jr. played one of the main villain’s henchmen. Once again, the villains had robots to assist them in their nefarious schemes. 

Republic let a few years go by before throwing another mechanized marvel at the Saturday afternoon audience. One of the best serials ever, Mysterious Doctor Satan, is rumored to have been intended as the first Superman chapterplay, but if so negotiations with DC Comics fell through. Instead, a generic hero called Copperhead took on the title villain and his mechanical monster. When the fifteen chapters were spliced together a few years later into feature length, the resulting version was called Dr. Satan’s Robot. That’s how I first saw it on our local television station’s afternoon movie, The Big Show, in the Summer of 1973. 

Republic got out of the mechanical monster business after that, although their robots were later recycled for serials at Columbia and Universal. Almost immediately, they made the first two serials based on comic book characters, Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941) and Spy Smasher (1942), before ceding that source to Columbia, who managed to make two Superman cliffhangers near the end of the decade. Television killed off the serials by 1956, and Republic shut down production in 1958.

Speaking of Columbia, they featured their own version of a robot terror in 1945’s The Monster and the Ape, with the aforementioned Ray Corrigan in a gorilla suit helping to steal the mechanical marvel from its inventor. From hero to monkey in the short span of nine years – quelle horreur!

Universal made one significant contribution to the pantheon of serialized mechanical monsters in 1939. Bela Lugosi starred in The Phantom Creeps, in which he created what had to be the creepiest robot ever filmed. It was so memorable that DC Comics even adapted it in Movie Comics #6. The Phantom Creeps was one of several serials Lugosi starred in, but the only one featuring a robot. Pity, he demonstrated quite a knack for constructing them.

And so, all who are intrigued by the inhuman, until we meet again…

Be afraid…

Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror : 20th Century Fox Horror Films 1924-1942

And lo, so it was in 1935 when 20th Century Films, founded two years earlier by cinematic impresarios Joseph Schenk and Darryl F. Zanuck, acquired the foundering Fox Film Corporation, itself initiated in 1915, and created the third most important of the Big Eight film studios of the Golden Age of Hollywood. 

Guess what they called it?

Fox had made a couple of genre pictures prior to the merger, 1924’s Dante’s Inferno in which Ralph Lewis winds up suffering torments in Hell for being an awful landlord, and the lost 1929 film, The Ghost Talks, starring the lovely and wondrously-named Helen Twelvetrees.

After the merger, the genre-related movies coming from the studio tended towards suspense and mystery rather than all-out horror. Still, the chilling effectiveness of the screenwriters and directors and casts and crews put the following films well into the horror category, at least peripherally.

Let’s get a touchy subject out of the way first – two of the genre-related pictures in this period were Charlie Chan mysteries, which featured an unfortunately stereotyped Chinese-American detective. He was based on a character created by Earl Derr Biggers in a series of novels serialized in the slick magazine The Saturday Evening Post during the 1920s. Despite being the smartest guy in any room he stood in, Charlie’s pidgin English makes him problematic for modern audiences, as well as not being played by Asian actors during the main run of his forty-plus movie career. We do need to consider a couple of series entries that have definite horror aspects, however. 

Charlie Chan at the Opera (1937) stars Swedish actor Warner Oland as Charlie, a role he took on after playing the also-not-at-all-Scandinavian villain Fu Manchu in several early sound pictures for Paramount. Boris Karloff guest-stars as an operatic baritone maddened by grief who escapes a lunatic asylum to wreak vengeance on those whom he believed ruined his life. Because that’s what crazed opera singers do, apparently.

After Oland died the next year, Missouri native Sidney Toler took over the part until his own passing in 1947, including in the very spooky Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum (1940). Charlie is recruited to recreate a recent murder he solved for a radio program broadcast from the titular wax museum, not knowing the killer was in the building and out for revenge.

The year 1939 is considered by many to be the best ever for movies. Our examples from that year both prove and disprove that theory. I’ve already discussed the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, a good film, but there was also the slapstick trio the Ritz Brothers in a less-than-fully-intellectual farce called The Gorilla. Not a good film.

Oh, well.

The final year of our review period saw three genre pictures released by 20th Century Fox in 1942. Linda Darnell was much too old to play the title character’s teenage wife Virginia Clemm in The Loves of Edgar Allen Poe, but she was so gorgeous I completely forgive whoever cast her. Shepperd Strudwick played Poe, and the cast included Harry Morgan (Colonel Potter on the M*A*S*H television show) and Morris Ankrum (1953’s Invaders from Mars and 1956’s Earth vs the Flying Saucers).

Dr. Renault’s Secret, based on Gaston Leroux’s 1911 novel Balaoo, has character actor J. Carroll Naish (1944’s House of Frankenstein) as an apish aide to a mad doctor out for revenge, as what mad doctor is not? It was the remake of a lost 1927 film, The Wizard, and bears some passing resemblance to H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, as well as Barry Pain’s 1897 novel, The Octave of Claudius, filmed in 1922 as A Blind Bargain and starring Lon Chaney in a double role. Another lost film, alas. Shepperd Strudwick was in this one, too, as the hero, while the mad doctor was played by horror stalwart George Zucco (1942’sThe Mummy’s Tomb and 1943’s The Mad Ghoul, both for Universal, among many, many others).

Lastly, we have an actual, no-two-ways-about-it, real-life honest-to-badness horror picture to talk about. The Undying Monster was the first werewolf movie of the sound era not made by Universal. A little seen legendary monster prowls around in the fog, slaughtering the members of a cursed family. Lightweight leading man James Ellison (1943’s I Walked With a Zombie) is the rather anemic hero, while future movie tough guy Charles McGraw plays against type in his film debut as a horse groom. Bramwell Fletcher (1932’s The Old Dark House) has a significant role.

See how everything in horror is related? Isn’t that just too cool?

Yes. Yes, it is.

So, ye connoisseurs of cinematic creepiness, until we meet again I bid you to be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Ep. 223 Nightmare Fuel: Sirens

Hello Addicts,

The term siren has a long and rich history of legends and lore, especially with sailors. In most of the stories, they are a harbinger of doom or doom themselves. For this week’s Nightmare Fuel, I thought we might look at some legends of the siren.

If you ask a group of people what a siren is, they will probably say that it is a device warning of coming danger. The next most popular definition is a mermaid, which is only partially true and location dependent. In some tales, the siren’s voice is so beautiful, it will make any man who hears it drop what they were doing to follow them. When they find the creature, it is the most beautiful creature they’ve ever seen. It doesn’t matter that half or more of her is fish bodied; they draw the men in. Unlike with mermaids, when the poor soul gets close enough, the siren strikes. Sometimes, they sink their dagger-like teeth into their flesh. In other stories, these creatures drown their prey before consuming them. Sometimes, those who hear the siren’s song will give up everything and follow it into the sea, where they drown of their own accord.

Not all stories depict sirens as creatures of the sea. While the stories usually agree on the mesmerizing singing voices, some myths, legends, and art depict them with bodies of birds and the head or faces of women. Their descriptions are more akin to those of harpies, with similar appetites. 

Epic poems like ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer name a group of sirens without giving a description. Their songs cause the men to steer their ships into sharp rocks. Odysseus has his crew fill their ears with wax but has them lash him to the mast so he can hear the siren songs. In Russian lore, hearing the song caused you to forget everything on earth to follow them until your death. Some very rare instances have the siren song foretelling good news, but there are some tales that do claim that. The lesson here is that you may want to see who the singer of that beautiful tune before getting too close right away. It may be a trap.

Until next time, Addicts.

D.J.

Ep. 222 Nightmare Fuel: The Hellfire Club

 

Hello Addicts,

When you think of Satanic Societies, groups like the Church of Satan and various other cults come to mind. There was a period in the 1980s referred to as the Satanic Panic, where people were seeing Satanists as the cause of every bad thing to happen. It spanned from music to movies to the strange teenagers down the street. There was a time, however, when people of position and power gathered for Satanic and hedonistic rituals. This week, we look at one such group for Nightmare Fuel — The Hellfire Club.

The first official group to call itself as The Hellfire Club was started in 1718 in London by Duke Philip Wharton, a prominent politician also known for being a drunkard, a rioter, a rake, and an infidel. Theirs was a group founded upon mocking the religion of the time than to actual Satan worship, referring to themselves as devils, and listing The Devil as the club’s president. While the names of the members largely remained secret, they included men and women, a rarity for the day. Whatever they could do to shock people, they did. The Club ended when King George I passed a bill banning immorality. It may have been the end of this incarnation, but others popped up at different locations in later years, most under different names.

The most well-known version of the Hellfire Club started on Walpurgis Nacht in 1752 by Sir Francis Dashwood. The purpose behind it mirrored those of the original Hellfire Club, to mock religion and shock people. They conducted mock religious ceremonies and pagan rituals, referred to prostitutes in attendance as ‘Nuns’, drank a lot, and behaved in every hedonistic manner possible. At the height of this version of the Club, they met at least twice a month at Medmenham Abbey before moving to a series of tunnels and caves nearby. These later became known as the Hellfire Caves.

Other groups spouted up across Britain, Scotland, and Ireland over the years. Most followed the intent and antics of the previous Hellfire Club incarnations, but some were rumored to actually go the full Satanic worship route. Nowadays, the Hellfire Club has become a thing of legend, featured in comic books, television, and movies. The Hellfire Caves also live on as a tourist stop said to be haunted by the members who partied there hundreds of years ago. Check them out if you get a chance.

Until next time, Addicts.

D.J.

Historian of Horror : Paramount Horror Films of the Silent Era

Paramount Pictures was the second most powerful and prestigious studio of the Golden Age of Hollywood, ranking between M-G-M and 20th Century-Fox in the Big Eight. It was founded in 1912 as the Famous Players Film Company by Adolph Zukor, making it the second-oldest American film company, after Universal. A 1916 merger with Jesse Lasky’s Feature Play Company and a film distributor from Utah resulted in the eventual name change to Paramount, after the distribution company. The early acquisition of soon-to-be-legendary director Cecil B. DeMille and numerous major stars ensured Paramounts’ premiere position at the beginning of the studio age and beyond, continuing to the present day. They even have their own TV network!

As is common with films from the silent era, many of the studio’s early movies are lost. Two versions of the Paul Dickey play, The Ghost Breaker, from 1914 and 1922, have vanished. The story was refilmed in 1940 as The Ghost Breakers, starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard, with an additional remake in 1953 under the title Scared Stiff, featuring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. That first lost silent version starred H.B. Warner (1933’s Supernatural, 1948’s It’s a Wonderful Life); the second, Wallace Reid.

Also lost are Witchcraft (1916), The Ghost House (1917, with Jack Pickford), The Haunted Bedroom (1919), The Dark Mirror (1920), The Ghost in the Garret (1921, with Dorothy Gish), and the second of many adaptations of the George M. Cohan play based on the novel by Earl Derr Biggers, Seven Keys to Baldpate (1925). The first, from 1917, starred Cohan himself and is still extant. The most recent version, 1983’s House of the Long Shadows, was the only film in which horror legends John Carradine, Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee all appeared together.

The other surviving silent horror films made by Paramount are Peer Gynt (1915), based on the Henryk Ibsen play; The Bottle Imp (1917), based on the Robert Louis Stevenson short story and starring the first Asian movie star in Hollywood, Sessue Hayakawa (nominated for a best-supporting actor Oscar in 1957 for The Bridge on the River Kwai); The Sorrows of Satan (1926), starring Adolphe Menjou; and the tenth film version (at least) of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), starring John Barrymore. 

There have been a few more of those since.

The Great Profile, as Barrymore was called in his day, was born in 1882 and drank himself to death in 1942, at the age of sixty. Before he set out to do that, he was considered one of the foremost stage and screen actors in America. Despite his fame, he never won an Oscar, although his brother Lionel and sister Ethel both did. Nor has his granddaughter Drew, of whom you might have heard.

Fredric March won the first Oscar ever awarded for playing a monster in the 1931 version of Jekyll & Hyde, but there were no Academy Awards in 1920. Regardless, it’s an excellent film with a stellar performance from all involved, including Louis Wollheim of the 1930 classic, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Nita Naldi, playing her usual characterization of an exotic vamp, in this case, an Italian dancer. 

In reality, the former Mary Nonna Dooley was as Irish as Blarney Castle. Hollywood magic, indeed. She was cast after Barrymore spotted her dancing in the chorus at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. She went on to be the favored co-star of silent film mega-star Rudolph Valentino, beginning with the huge bullfighting hit, Blood and Sand. Her popularity never made the transition to talkies. She died in 1961, at the age of sixty-six.

The story is a fairly straightforward if somewhat bowdlerized adaptation of the 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson novella, or rather of the 1887 play by Thomas Russell Sullivan. The more sensationalistic aspects were diluted a mite, to appease the delicate sensibilities of the cinema patrons of the time. Bless their hearts. Imagine how their pearls would be clutched in the coming decade as the movies of the Jazz Age descended into devilish decadence, resulting in the implementation of the Production Code in the early 1930s.

More on that later. As it stands, Barrymore’s makeup as Hyde is plenty startling and began the tradition of Hyde growing uglier with each transformation. A tad over the top, but that’s forgivable, I think. Check it out and see if you agree.

The other Big Eight studios, by the way, were Warner Brothers, RKO Pictures, United Artists, and Columbia. Their horror output will be examined in future entries in this series of blog posts, along with a few independents as well as the low-rent studios housed down on Poverty Row. Stay Tuned!

And so, as always, my spectral stalwarts of silent shudders, be afraid…

Be very afraid.

Ep. 221 NIGHTMARE FUEL: Belle Gunnes

Hello Addicts,

When someone thinks of a serial killer, you’ll think of people such as Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, or David Berkowitz. We consider female serial killers a relative rarity by today’s standards. This may be due to general differences in aggressiveness, or being better at hiding it, thus allowing them to fly under the radar. This week’s Nightmare Fuel looks at a female serial killer who flew under the radar for years and whose crimes make for a great horror movie premise, Belle Gunness.

Belle Gunness, whose original name was Brynhild Paulsdatter Storseth, was born in Selbu, Norway, in 1859. She moved to America in 1881 and changed her name to Belle before settling in Chicago, IL, where she met her first husband, Mads Sorenson. They had four children together, but lost two in their infancy to acute colitis. They also adopted a ten-year-old girl, whom they named Jennie. In 1900, Mads died of what one doctor thought was strychnine poisoning on the same day two of his life insurance policies overlapped. While this may sound suspicious, the family’s doctor concluded that it was simple heart failure, and she never got charged. Shortly after collecting the insurance money from her husband’s death, Belle moved to a farm she purchased in La Porte, IN. This would be the site of her dastardly deeds.

In 1902, Belle married Peter Gunnes, a butcher from Norway she knew previously . Within a week of the ceremony, his infant daughter died of uncertain causes. By the end of the year, Belle would be a widow for a second time when she said that a sausage grinding machine toppled off a top shelf onto Peter’s head. Suspicions followed, but nothing ever stuck.

Belle eventually placed an advertisement in the lovelorn column of large Midwestern newspapers seeking the joining of fortunes. In correspondence with those who answered the ad, she promised romance if they brought money or items of value. Instead of a relationship, she killed a confirmed fourteen people, although people believe the victim number may be over forty. The murderess then buried the bodies or fed them to the farm’s hogs if she was tired.

On April 28, 1908, a fire broke out in the Gunnes home. The police found the charred remains of her three children and an adult woman inside. The woman’s body was first identified as Belle, even though it was missing the head and the body dimensions didn’t match her five foot nine inch, two hundred pound frame. Many believed she staged the scene so she could escape, which was later supported by sightings of her nationwide in the decades that followed.

The story of Belle Gunness is a tragic mystery that remains unsolved today. It is also one that seems made for Hollywood, like ‘Psycho’, ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, and the Hannibal Lecter movies. You never know if or when her story may come to a theater or bookshelf near you.

Until next time, Addicts.

D.J.

Historian of Horror : The Boos in the Hall

I’m not normally a big fan of recent sitcoms, recent being since The Big Bang Theory shut down, but there are two I currently enjoy: Young Spencer (because how could I not love an ensemble cast in which the hottest actress is older than I am?), and Ghosts, a 2021 series in which a young couple inherits an old house full of spirits she can see but he can’t, with the intention of turning the ancient mausoleum into a Bed & Breakfast. 

In case you haven’t taken the opportunity to watch it, the spooks involved range from the entire history of the house and the land around it. They include Thorfinn, a Viking; Sas, a Native American; Isaac, a formerly-closeted Continental Army officer who has a ghostly redcoat boyfriend; Hetty, the Gilded Age lady of the house; Alberta, a Jazz Age blues diva; Flower, a spaced out hippy chick who expired from trying to hug a bear; various victims of a cholera epidemic, who keep the furnace in operation; Trevor, a Wolf-of-Wall-Streeter with no pants; and Pete, a scoutmaster with an arrow through his neck. The young couple initiate their plans for the house over the objections of the long-term residents, resulting in a variety of paranormal shenanigans.  

Those of you willing to admit to having watched it might not know that Ghosts, like several other television programs of various vintages, is the Americanization of a British version that began in 2019. Same basic set-up, with an older house because everything is older in England, and victims of the plague, rather than cholera. Some of the ghosts back in Old Blighty are reflected in their later, Colonial counterparts, but not all. Instead of a Viking, for example, they have a caveman, although a Viking would be just as appropriate. The Victorian mistress of the manor was murdered by her husband by being chucked out a window, a demise she is spiritually obliged to recreate loudly at three in the morning, to the consternation of the household. A simple resetting of her alarm clock resolves that issue, which is not necessary in the States as Hettie would never do anything so gauche as to launch herself onto the lawn. And the military man in denial is a World War II-era officer in His Majesty’s armed services. There’s also an excessively melancholy Regency poet who moons over the still-living new owner who is one of several who have no real analog to the other side of the Big Pond. 

Much of the cast of the BBC version of Ghosts, by the way, was previously seen in the gruesomely delightful series Horrible Histories, including their own depantsed financier. I recommend seeking out skits from that program on YouTube and gorging yourself on them. I’m particularly fond of the episode about Boudicca. 

For those of you among the populace who have experienced the pleasures of watching both of these shows, you might not realize that they were inspired by an even earlier BBC series on a similar theme, which ran from 1976 to 1978. The Ghosts of Motley Hall kept the 20th Century at bay for nineteen episodes and a Christmas special over those three short seasons. 

The Hall’s inhabitants included Bodkin, an Elizabethan jester; Fanny, an 18th Century fop, Matt, a Georgian stableboy; Sir George Uproar, an incompetent Victorian-era general; Old Gory, a 15th Century knight who only appears every five years to parade about whilst carrying the head he lost in battle; and the White Lady, who’s been in residence so long she can’t remember how she died. Unlike in the later incarnations, the spirits rarely interact with the living, although the White Lady does occasionally appear to Mr. Gudgin, the caretaker, but only long enough to scare him halfway out of his wits.

Sir George was played by Freddie Jones, one of those splendid English character actors whose horror pedigree is rather impressive. He appeared in several Hammer horror films, as well as the 1974 Harry Nilsson-Ringo Starr horror spoof, Son of Dracula, the 1980s The Elephant Man, and the original 1984 version of Stephen King’s Firestarter. 

The plots generally involved convincing developers and other prospective buyers to leave them and the Hall alone, something the ghosts in the later shows might have benefited from. Had that been the case, however, the proceedings would be less amusing.

Next time, we take a look at the silent movie output of Paramount Pictures. In the meantime, let’s enjoy a little ditty by the late great King of Calypso, Harry Belafonte, who carries us on wings of song to that most festive of funerary events, the Zombie Jamboree. Harry passed away on April 25, at the age of 96.

So, until we meet again, be afraid…

Be very afraid.

Nightmare Fuel: Water Babies

Hello Addicts,

Previously, I shared the legend of the Black-Eyed Children. As the name implies, they are children with completely black eyes who tempt people into letting them enter their homes or other enclosed areas. These are not the only children who use their innocence to lure people to their potential doom. For this week’s Nightmare Fuel, we look at the legend of the Water Babies.

Imagine that you are walking along the shoreline of a lake when you hear a baby or young child’s cries. As with most people, the first instinct is to find the child and see if it is in trouble. When you find them, you want to pick them up and soothe them. When you do, they drag you into the water where you either drown or never seen again. This is but one example of the water babies’ legend.

Water babies come from Native American folklore. Usually described as water spirits or the ghosts of drowned babies, they can appear as a beautiful human child, a merperson, or a reptilian. Their ability to mimic a baby’s cry is used to lure unsuspecting people to their doom, although some believe it is an omen of death like that of an Irish banshee. They will leave you be if you show them respect and make an offering, but most say it is safer to avoid the water babies altogether.

While this is a legend which serves as more of a precautionary tale, there are still reports of water babies in Lake Tahoe and The Great Salt Lake, among other places. The next time you are at a lake and hear a baby’s cries, approach with caution. You never know whether they are a real human child or a water baby luring you to your doom. Attempt to rescue them if you can, but do so cautiously in case they are just luring you into a trap.

Until next time, Addicts.

D.J.

Historian of Horror : No One’s Perfect

No One’s Perfect

It was the early 1970s in Nashville. My family lived in a 1927 Tudor Revival-style house in the Green Hills area, an easy bicycle ride away from the brand new local public library. I was a frequent patron.

One book I clearly remember checking out more than once was a collection of classic horror short stories that had been adapted into films. The Ghouls was edited by a gentleman whose ability to track down obscure and wonderful spooky tales proved to be a regular delight for the next few decades, until his passing in 2007 at the age of sixty-seven.

Peter Haining was born in Enfield, Middlesex, England, in 1940. He edited over a hundred horror anthologies from 1965 through the year of his passing and also wrote dozens of non-fiction books on horror, fantasy, science fiction, mysteries, classic films, and other popular culture topics, including five about Doctor Who. And some that he probably ought not have. 

As is not unusual with Haining’s anthologies, The Ghouls contains well-known yarns by major genre writers, mixed with obscurities. Haining had a knack for ferreting out just the right tales from all manner of unexpected quarters and from authors most folks would never think to associate with horror or hadn’t heard of at all. It was that knack that kept me picking up his anthologies whenever I came across one, and that led me to step in the bucket a few years back when I praised Haining’s scholarship in view of a few folks who knew better and were quick to disabuse me of my misapprehension. 

I’m sure the populace will be relieved to learn that Your Friendly Neighborhood Historian of Horror is not infallible, and even more so to know that he is willing to own up to it. I must confess that during the last three decades of the 20th Century, other interests – college, girls, cars, girls; jobs that paid just enough to put gas in my car so I could drive to and from college and go out with girls; getting married, attending to the myriad needs of a series of short humans who appeared at more-or-less regular intervals, all stuff like that there – diverted my attention long enough for Haining to put out not one, but two books on Sweeney Todd that are not held in the esteem one would have wished. These works purported to ‘prove’ that the Demon Barber of Fleet Street was a real person who murdered numerous gentlemen around 1800, rather than the product of the imagination of one or more writers of penny dreadfuls in 19th Century England. The rationale for his assertion was based on evidence that it would be generous to call flimsy, leading to my favorite anthologist being put on display for everyone in the world except apparently, me to see as nowhere near as competent a historian as he was a compiler of spooky yarns.

I’m assuming everyone present has a passing familiarity with the Demon Barber, who slit his customers’ throats before handing them off to Mrs. Lovett to be baked into meat pies. Created in a novel entitled The String of Pearls, which was serialized in eighteen parts in 1846-1847 for a magazine called The People’s Periodical and Family Library, Sweeney Tood became a cultural sensation. His story was adapted to the stage almost immediately and was expanded to ninety-two chapters in 1848. Numerous adaptations in various media have been produced ever since, including the 2007 film version of Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 theatrical musical, starring Johnny Depp and directed by Tim Burton. The book has been variously attributed to James Malcolm Rymer and/or Thomas Peckett Prest, among others. Rymer and Prest are also credited separately or in concert with writing Varney the Vampire.

Haining claimed that he used his skills as a former journalist to track down sources that supposedly supported his thesis, that Todd was real, Mrs. Lovett was real, and the places where their crimes occurred could be identified. The trouble was, no legitimate historian has ever been able to verify any of the sources he cited, or that Sweeney Todd was anything but a fictional boogeyman.

Haining’s shoddy scholarship has cast doubt on the veracity of his other non-fiction works, including books on the French fictional detective Maigret and the English folk-legend Spring-Heeled Jack. This is all a shame, really, when his contributions to the collecting and preservation of short horror stories should be what he is remembered for. Maybe that will be the case, in time. 

When next we gather together in this place, we shall turn our attention to the spectral antecedents of a currently popular American television sitcom. Until then, my dear patrons of panic-filled putrescence, I bid you, as always, to be afraid…

Be very afraid.

Nightmare Fuel: The nicaraguan Vampire vines

Hello Addicts,

There are countless numbers of plants in the world, with many still being discovered and identified. Among those are carnivorous plants, such as Venus flytraps and pitcher plants, but those normally trap insects, small arthropods, and small lizards. A question humankind has pondered over the centuries is whether there are plants who eat people. This week’s Nightmare Fuel looks at one such rumored plant, the Nicaraguan Vampire Vine.

In fiction, when someone thinks of a man-eating plant, one of the first things that may come to mind is the Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors. An article appearing in the September 15, 1891, edition of Lucifer, a London magazine published by famed mystic Helena Blavatsky, told the story of one person’s run in with the vine. A naturalist named Leroy Dunstan said that he was hunting for botanical and entomological specimens in a Nicaraguan swamp when he heard his dog crying out in pain. When he found his pet, it had become ensnared in a network of fine rope-like roots and fibers. The branches resembled those of a weeping willow, but with a dark sticky substance oozing from pores. He tried freeing his dog with a knife, but found the vine trying to grab him as well. His flesh became red and blistered where the vine touched him, while it left dog’s body covered in blood and pucker marks. The canine staggered from weakness and exhaustion but survived. The natives of the area referred to the plant as Devil’s Snare and shared stories of other people not lucky enough to have escaped its deadly grip. Mr. Dunstan tried to bring back one root of the plant, but it died on his return voyage, giving off a smell so foul that he needed to get rid of it.

While there are not many articles about this plant in the time since, it does not mean that there may not be such a plant. There is a vine regarded as a vampire, the Dodder vine. Although it doesn’t drink blood like the Nicaraguan vine, it sucks the nutrients from plants it ensnares, making it a nuisance to farms.

The vampire vine also lives on in fictional worlds. It is a staple in many a role-playing games and stories. Fans of Harry Potter may also recognize the similarities between the Devil’s Snare in the story and the one presented here. This plant will continue to thrive in the minds of all who love peril filled adventures.

Until next time, Addicts.

D.J.

Historian of Horror : In Which the Sins of the Fathers are Perforce Visited Upon the Son(s)

heartily encourage the populace to seek out and enjoy the 1999 feature film, Topsy-Turvy, which depicts most delightfully the creation of the Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera, The Mikado. Which is not, itself, in any way horror-related, but which does allow me to steer the conversation in the direction of the famed Victorian-era impresarios’ next production, Ruddigore; or, The Witch’s Curse.

Which is. 

Horror-related, that is.

A little context is required. In those days, a decade prior to the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the popular exemplar of the suave noble vampire was Lord Ruthven, the title character of Dr. John Polidori’s 1821 story, The Vampyre. Conceived during the same Swiss idyll during which Mary Shelley came up with Frankenstein, it was initially assumed to be by the much more famous Lord Byron and therefore became a sensation. A number of stage adaptations ensued, including Heinrich Marschner’s 1828 German opera, Der Vampyr. Librettist W.S. Gilbert very loosely based Ruddigore’s protagonist on Polidori’s character, and since he rather obviously called him Sir Ruthven (pronounced Rivven) Murgatroyd, audiences in 1887 no doubt spotted the connection right away.

Historically, the Ruthvens were a Scottish family, Lords of Parliament, which in the Scottish system of nobility was equivalent to an English baron. That is, they were the lowest level of nobility. Sir Ruthven, by contrast, is a baronet, the highest level of commoner in the English feudal system. Essentially, a hereditary knight. A fine distinction, indeed, and not a particularly important one for our purposes here today.

Ruthven is the scion of a family cursed generations before by a witch his ancestor, the First Baronet, was in the process of burning at the stake. Those Murgatroyds in possession of the title are obliged to commit a crime every day or else perish in horrible and agonizing ways. Ruthven had absquatulated years before to avoid the curse, leaving his younger brother Despard, the “Bad Baronet”, to take on the title and, therefore, to deal with the consequences. Which Sir Despard has done with rather more enthusiasm than was called for. Ruthven, meanwhile, has been living locally under the guise of Robin Oakapple, a farmer.

The opera opens with a bevy of professional bridesmaids bemoaning the fact that the eligible young lady to whom they have pledged their services, Rose Maybud, has proven loath to commit to matrimony, leaving them at loose ends. After overcoming a complication straight out of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Rose and Robin are betrothed. Unfortunately, the dastardly Sir Despard discovers his brother’s subterfuge by the end of the first act, forcing him to accept his duty as reluctant villain.

The newly-minted Sir Ruthven proves to be exceptionally incompetent in his new role, so much so that the ghosts of his villainous ancestors arise to remonstrate with him. By a trick of semantics, Sir Ruthven is able to circumvent the curse. He marries Rose, Despard is absolved of his myriad sins, various couples are reunited, the complications are resolved tidily, and all’s well that ends well. 

The Mikado had no sooner opened in March of 1885 than Gilbert began cannibalizing some earlier works into the next opera’s plot, cobbling it together from various works, his own and Polidori’s, as one does. Composer Sir Arthur Sullivan put off setting it to music until the next year, as he was engaged in other projects. Once he got to it in November of 1886, it went quickly and the opera opened at the Savoy Theatre the following January. It did fairly well, although nothing like the raging success of The Mikado. Gilbert and Sullivan produced four more operas for a total of fourteen before dissolving the partnership and parting ways with some rancor. They resolved their differences before Sullivan’s death in 1900. Gilbert survived until 1911 when he drowned while trying to rescue a young lady he was teaching to swim.

Ruddigore is not one of the more frequently mounted of the Savoy Operas, but there are several performances available on YouTube, including an animated version as well as a 1982 televised production starring the redoubtable Vincent Price as Despard. Alas, that last one is broken up into forty-eight short pieces, which is at the very least annoying.

Do give it a try. Even if Victorian comic opera doesn’t turn out to be your cup of hemlock, you ought to treat yourself by taking a look at the above-mentioned Topsy-Turvy. It stars Jim Broadbent, of Hot Fuzz, and the always entertaining Timothy Spall, currently appearing on Netflix as the superintendent of West Point in The Pale Blue Eye. You’ll thank me the longest day of your life.

Until next time, gourmands of the ghastly, be afraid…

Be very afraid.

Ep 218 Nightmare Fuel: Anton LaVey

Hello Addicts,

When we think of macabre musicians, many come to mind, such as Valentine Wolfe, Marilyn Manson, and Alice Cooper. Some even transcend their musical role into something more, like Rob Zombie’s dive into movie making. One individual had the distinction of becoming an author, actor, and the creator of a religious movement. For this week’s Nightmare Fuel, we peek at the music styling of the ‘evilest man in the world’, Anton LaVey.

Anton LaVey was born Howard LaVey on April 11, 1930, in Chicago, IL. He was an occultist, a paranormal researcher, and best known as the founder of the Church of Satan. Over his lifetime, he authored such works as ‘The Satanic Bible’, ‘The Satanic Rituals’, and “The Devil’s Notebook’, amongst other works. He has acted in movies such as ‘The Devil’s Rain’, ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother’, and ‘Iconoclast’.

As a child, Anton enjoyed playing musical instruments, with piano and the accordion being his favorites. His initial musical performances were for a Baptist church and high school band before dropping out of school to join the circus at sixteen. Later, he played the calliope for carnivals and the organ for tent revivals. He remarked about seeing some who attended the Sunday morning revivals the night before at the bawdy carnival shows. Later in life, he released four albums, beginning with ‘The Satanic Mass’ LP in 1968. His other musical works include ‘Strange Music’, ‘Satan Takes a Holiday’, and ‘The Devil Speaks (& Plays)’. His musical tastes, however, did not include rock or metal music, even if they contained ‘Satanic’ lyrics.

Although he sometimes embellished his life, Anton LaVey still influences music, literature, movies, and television.

Until next time, Addicts.

D.J.

Historian of Horror : The Lives and Death of Blackie LaGoon

It sometimes seems that I have always been haunted by a certain tall, green, scaly gent. I cannot recall a time when he was not a fixture in my life, as a model kit, or the subject of an article in an issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, or as Herman Munster’s piscatory Uncle Gilbert, or as the title character of the 1954 Universal horror film, Creature from the Black Lagoon. In fact, if you go to the staff page at HorrorAddicts.net and take a close look at my bio picture, you’ll see a little plastic statue of Blackie LaGoon himself on the left of the photo, next to the 25th-anniversary issue of Weird Tales I so thoughtfully turned so it can be seen and admired. I’ve had that little guy since, oh, about the time I first saw the movie on The Big Show, the afternoon movie on Channel 5 in Nashville in those days.

Specifically, Wednesday, February 15, 1967. As usual, I’d rushed home from school in time to watch Dark Shadows, then chased that bloody aperitif down with an hour and a half of underwater action involving a party of SCUBA-diving scientists trapped in an Amazonian backwater by a being from ages past, a missing link between man and fish. 

Twelve days later, The Big Show featured the second sequel, The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), and on March 9, the first sequel from 1955, Revenge of the Creature. No, I can’t tell you why they were shown out of sequence. Such were the vagaries of television programming back then.

I can tell you that the first two films were made in 3-D, which was big stuff in 1954. I’ve seen Creature as God and director Jack Arnold intended it to be seen twice, and it is a doozy. It’s good flat, but in 3-D Creature will rattle your back teeth from all the water-logged frissons. 

I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing Revenge in its natural state. The Creature is captured and brought to a Florida Sea World-like public attraction, from which he predictably escapes with extensive mayhem ensuing. Clint Eastwood has a tiny role, his first on film, as a woefully incompetent laboratory assistant. He did a bit better later on, as you might have heard. The star was former Mr. Shirley Temple John Agar, whose roles never did appreciably improve after this. C’est la vie.

The Creature Walks Among Us has the aquatic haunter of our dreams severely injured by fire while being recaptured in the Everglades. His outer scales burn off, allowing him to move further along the evolutionary timeline toward a more human condition, including the activation of a previously dormant set of lungs. Despite being deprived of his ability to breathe underwater, the Creature cannot resist the urge to return to the sea. The homely but quite mad scientist, played by Jeff Morrow, cannot resist the urge to be unwontedly jealous of his pretty young blonde wife. It does not end well for either Creature or scientist. The pretty young wife goes off with the ridiculously handsome and thoroughly rational Rex Reason, a much better choice all around, once Blackie has dispatched her ugly wackadoo husband. Reason and Morrow co-starred in This Island Earth the year before, with about the same result, albeit on a distant planet. 

As one might suspect, the casts of all three pictures have since shuffled off this mortal coil, most recently the underwater stunt doubles for Julie Adams, the heroine of the first movie, and for the big guy himself. Ginger Stanley, who also performed underwater stunts in Revenge, left this world on January 19 of this year. Ricou Browning, who swam around in the green suit and Milicent Patrick designed mask in all three films, died on February 27. His passing marked the end of an era, as he was the last surviving player to have performed as one of the legendary Universal monsters.

Or was he? Maybe, or maybe not. It’s a fine point, but June Lockhart is still with us at the ripe old age of 97. Best known as mama bear space lady Maureen Robinson on the original Lost in Space television series from 1965 to 1968, she starred in a minor Universal effort in 1946 called She-Wolf of London. Was she really a lycanthropic femme fatale, or was this another Scooby-Doo-style cop-out? Either way, She-Wolf was not a main sequence Universal horror film, so let’s agree to just let Ricou be the last of a noble breed, shall we?

Next time, we hop into the Way-Back Machine for a trip to Victorian London’s Savoy Theatre. Until then, minions of the monstrous and the macabre, I bid you to be afraid…

Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror : Gone to Texas

 

Warning! NSFW images ahead! Click on the links below at your own discretion!

Thanksgiving of 1969 was memorable, not for turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce, but for a two-day drive out, a wedding, and a two-day drive back home to Nashville.

On Thursday, November 27, we piled into my mother’s 1967 Ford LTD, a great lumbering land-barge of a car more than adequate to convey two adults and four children ranging in age from one (my sister, Amy) to eleven (myself) across half of Tennessee, all of Arkansas, a sliver of Oklahoma just to say we’d been there, and most of Texas to Plainview, where my dad’s youngest brother Allen was due to marry one Jeannie Mallow of that region. Being of sound mind, they declined to procreate and were happily married until Allen passed away last May at the age of eighty-one. I still talk to Jeannie as often as I can, for she is a delight to converse with regarding the various topics of the day, upon which we enjoy much common ground.

Somewhere along the route, a stop was made during which I was allowed to purchase for the grand sum of thirty-five cents some reading material; to wit, the first issue of a magazine entitled Web of Horror, which attempted unsuccessfully to challenge the primacy of Warren’s Creepy and Eerie. It was published by Major Magazines, home of the second-rate Mad imitation, Cracked. Despite containing some lovely work by soon-to-be-legendary illustrators, it only lasted three issues. Which is a shame.

It was the cover painting that grabbed my attention – a barbarian shielding a barely clad young lady from spectral tentacles. I had recently discovered a Conan the Barbarian paperback in the library, so my appetite for Sword & Sorcery was already whetted. The artist was new to me, but within a few years works by Jeffrey Jones would be hard to avoid.

It was only after Jones passed away in 2011 that I learned she had transitioned to female in 1998, and taken on the middle name of Catherine. I’d wandered away from some of my various fandoms and hadn’t kept au courant. I’m still trying to catch up.

Jones never was a major contributor to four-color comic books, but did considerable work for the black-&-white magazines of Warren Publications and Skywald. The bulk of her efforts over the next decade consisted of over 150 paperback book and genre magazine cover paintings. She performed said duty for Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser collections, for instance, and was a frequent cover and interior illustrator for Fantastic Stories, during those years when Ted White was editing the best fantasy magazine available on the newsstands. 

Jones had a one-page strip in the Funny Pages section of National Lampoon for several years. “Idyl” appeared alongside Gahan Wilson’s “Nuts” and Vaughn Bode’s “Cheech Wizard”, among other features. She did a gruesome little two-part story in the fourth and fifth issues of The Monster Times called “A Gnawing Obsession” in 1972, and had a solo showcase in the single issue of the underground comic, Spasm, published by Last Gasp the next year.

Later in the 1970s, she did covers for Zebra Books’ series of Robert E. Howard fantasy and adventure tales, including one for The Lost Valley of Iskander, which had interior illustrations by Michael W. Kaluta. My copy was autographed by both artists before I acquired it. Thanks to whichever previous owner arranged that.

Kaluta was one of the other artists Jones shared a workspace with, along with Bernie Wrightson and Barry Windsor-Smith. They called themselves The Studio, and over the next decade the collective produced some remarkably imaginative illustrations for any medium willing to meet their price. A piece on The Studio in the May, 1980 issue of Heavy Metal featured art by Jones and her compadres. She was thereafter a semi-regular for the next seven years, contributing a frequently appearing one-page strip similar to “Idyll” called “I’m Age”.

Jones gradually turned to fine art, and was called “the greatest living painter” by Frank Frazetta – high praise indeed. She passed away at the age of 67 from emphysema and heart disease. 

In 2012, a documentary on her life and works was produced. Better Things: The Life and Choices of Jeffery Catherine Jones is very much worth tracking down and watching. There are also several videos on YouTube about her, as well as The Studio. I endorse them all.

————————————————————————————————————————————

In our next edition, we’ll be taking a look at the eight issue run of The Arkham Sampler, the preview magazine disseminated by legendary genre publisher Arkham House in 1948 and 1949. Join me in this space then, won’t you? Until that time comes to pass, ye wraiths of the weird, be afraid…

Be very afraid. 

Historian of Horror : The House that Sheena Built

Fiction House was one of many comic book publishers that started out printing pulp magazines. Founded in 1921, it had a string of niche publications that paid bottom-of-the-barrel wages for bottom-of-the-barrel stories. Specializing in adventure genres like war and western yarns, Fiction House was notorious for peddling low-quality writing on low-quality paper. Only one of their pulp titles has turned out to enjoy any significant reprinting, unlike almost all other pulp houses. 

They fared much better in four colors. Jumbo Comics #1 came along in 1938, introducing the wildly successful female Tarzan, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Most of her adventures were fairly standard jungle fare, but she did go up against the occasional vampire or mummy along the way. Alone among Fiction House’s many featured characters, Sheena enjoyed translation into other media. Statuesque blonde Irish McCalla played her in a 26-episode syndicated television series beginning in 1955, and Tanya Roberts starred in a 1984 feature film. There have since been other adaptations, along with periodic comic book revivals and various pop culture references. 

A Jungle Stories pulp inspired by Sheena appeared in 1939. The fairly well-received (and fairly often-reprinted) Planet Stories soon followed, and related comic books ensued. By the time the United States entered World War II, most of the pulps had matching anthology comics, each series featuring numerous characters in their own separate and unconnected tales.

As other publishers did during the Golden Age of Comics, there were supernatural and/or horror features in most of the titles. During its first year, Jumbo ran a rather bizarrely truncated adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, succeeded by a long series known variously as Weird Stories of the Supernatural and Stuart Taylor. Issue #42 began a run of Ghost Gallery stories, starring occult detective Drew Murdoch, that lasted for the remaining 125 issues of the title’s lifespan. Aviation title Wings Comics had The Ghost Squadron, whose members were, yes, spectral revenants who continued to prosecute the war effort despite the inconvenience of being deceased. Jungle Comics featured Fantomah, a blonde jungle goddess whose face turned into a skull whenever she was obliged to remonstrate with white hunters who misbehaved in her territory, as well as the adventures of Tabu, Wizard of the Jungle.

General adventure title Rangers Comics had a couple of features of interest. The  Werewolf Hunter was one Professor Broussard, who with his assistant Danny O’Shea encountered more lycanthropes than ought to seem reasonable over thirty-four issues, beginning with #8. They were succeeded in the line-up by ghost detective Dr. Drew (no relation to the above-mentioned Drew Murdoch), Stalker of the Unknown. Will Eisner assistant Jerry Grandinetti illustrated The Secret Files of Dr. Drew for fourteen issues. 

Eisner’s best known creation, syndicated hero The Spirit, had a five issue run of newspaper reprints in his own series from 1952 to 1954. He’ll get a more involved treatment in this space at some point. Stay tuned!

The stories themselves were generally six to eight pages, usually by anonymous creators, invariably self-contained. Fiction House was never big on continuity.

The publisher had two horror-specific titles aside from their main run of anthology comics. The first four issues of Ghost Comics reprinted their various spooky features beginning in 1951, with new tales virtually taking over in the fifth. The final, eleventh issue reverted to mostly reprints. All new content dominated the two issues of Monster, with only one Dr. Drew reprint in the first. 

As with so many of the smaller comic book publishers, Fiction House fell victim to the juvenile delinquency fallacy promulgated by Dr. Fredric Wertham and others, and closed down by 1955. Apart from the periodic recurrence of interest in Sheena, and occasional reprints from Planet Stories in science-fiction anthologies, Fiction House left little residual impact on the general culture. Which is a shame, but there it is.

 

Our lagniappe for this edition is a brief memorial to Lisa Loring, the original Wednesday Addams from the 1960s Addams Family sitcom, who passed away on January 28 from the effects of a stroke. She was less than a month away from her sixty-fifth birthday, and a little over six months older than I. May she rest in peace. 

My childhood is slowly being eroded by the sands of time, along with any latent delusions in regards to my own immortality. And so, as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying, it goes.

 

When next we gather together, we shall examine the career of legendary genre illustrator Jeffrey Catherine Jones. Our argosy begins with a trip to West Texas over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1969. Join me here in two weeks, won’t you, for that journey?

Until then, as always, oh ye valiants of vile villainies, be afraid…

Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror : MGM Horror Films of the 1920s

 

During Hollywood’s Golden Age from the 1920s to the early 1950s, the film studios were ranked according to power, profitability, and prestige. The most important of The Big Eight was Metro-Goldwyn-Myer, born of a 1924 merger of the three smaller companies that comprise its name. Home to “More Stars Than There Are in the Heavens”, M-G-M has been a money-making media giant for almost a century, and its first star was none other than the Man of a Thousand Faces, Lon Chaney.

Chaney was coming off a long relationship with Universal Studios, where he had starred as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and Erik in The Phantom of the Opera (1925). One might think he would jump right into another horror picture at the most influential studio in town. One would be wrong. The very first M-G-M movie ever made had him playing a clown in He Who Gets Slapped (1924), although the picture wasn’t the first released by the new studio. Fear not, fretful fiends, for Chaney was soon showing off his horror chops at his new stomping grounds.

Chaney made five genre or genre-peripheral films at M-G-M in the 1920s. The Monster (1925) is a rather silly thing with Chaney as a mad scientist in an insane asylum. His next picture, The Unholy Three (1925) is a genuine classic, with Chaney in drag as the leader of a gang of crooks. He also starred in the 1930 remake, the only talkie he appeared in prior to his untimely death that year at the age of forty-seven.

London After Midnight (1927) is the elusive Holy Grail of all lost horror films, the last known surviving copy having been destroyed in a fire in 1967. Chaney played a dual role, a detective and a supposed vampire. It was remade in 1935 as Mark of the Vampire, starring Bela Lugosi.

In the same year, Chaney co-starred with a very young Joan Crawford in The Unknown, as a loony circus performer who goes to extraordinary lengths to get the girl. Utterly disarming. 

And finally, he played an embittered cripple who takes extreme revenge in West of Zanzibar (1928). It was remade to rather good effect in 1932 as Kongo, starring Walter Huston, grandfather of Angelica Huston.

The Mystic (1925) starred Aileen Pringle as a larcenous psychic. German super-star Paul Wegener (1913’s Der Student von Prague and 1914’s Der Golem, along with a couple of sequels of the latter film) was recruited by director Rex Ingram for The Magician in 1926. Wegener was engaged in the anti-social behavior of siphoning the blood of maidens for experiments in creating life. Not generally considered the polite thing to do to young ladies. 

Lillian Gish found herself trapped all alone in a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere in The Wind (1928), losing the last handful of her remaining marbles after killing a man who had demonstrated less-than-noble intentions. It had a happy ending, so one might be forgiven for not thinking of it as a horror picture, but there are some pretty horrific scenes in what is a widely-acknowledged masterpiece of cinematic art, directed by the first great Swedish filmmaker, Victor Sjöström.

The comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy contributed a short subject the same year, Habeas Corpus, in which the boys agreed to rob a grave for a mad scientist’s experiments. Laurel and Hardy were famous for a cheerful incompetence at whatever task they undertook, including one that involved the macabre craftsmanship of an undertaker. 

Lionel Barrymore played Captain Nemo in 1929’s The Mysterious Island, based on the Jules Verne novel. Barrymore also directed The Unholy Night, in which Ernest Torrence and Roland Young (Topper, 1937) solve a series of murders in a spooky old house. Boris Karloff has a bit part.

The final MGM horror film of the 1920s was a remake of a lost 1919 film of the same name. The Thirteenth Chair was itself remade in 1937. Bela Lugosi played a detective ferreting out a killer during a seance. The lovely Leila Hyams (Freaks and Island of Lost Souls, both from 1932) co-starred. Directed by Todd Browning (Dracula, 1931, and Freaks) on the cusp of the transition to sound, it was released in both silent and sound versions.

 

We have une lagnappe this time, a video equating Leoncavallo’s opera verismo from 1892, Pagliacci, with Hitchcock’s Psycho and the Giallo films of Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Watch to the end if you’re not familiar with the opera. You’ll likely recognize its most famous aria, “Vesti la Giubba”.

Next time movies come up in the rotation, we’ll be looking at the silent horror films of Paramount Pictures. Until then, oh ye fanatics of filmic frissons, be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror : A Haunted House in The Wild Wild West

A week or so before my birthday several years ago, my wife called me up and asked if I preferred The Wild Wild West or Gunsmoke. A strange request, I thought at the time, since we had not recently discussed any western television programs from the 1960s, but I answered honestly that The Wild Wild West was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid, I still liked it, and my family rarely watched Gunsmoke back in the day because there was probably something on another channel that my dad liked better. Ergo, I never developed any particular fondness for the latter program. I certainly did for the former.

Imagine my very pleasant surprise upon opening my gift on the 25th of that month to find within the festive wrapping paper a DVD set of all four seasons of The Wild Wild West. I binged it right away, and still return to it on occasion. To this day, I find it the most re-watchable of the shows I loved as a child. 

And the populace rises up in unison to issue a resounding, “So what? It’s a western. We’re here to celebrate all things horror. Wrong genre, doofus!”

Ah, but it’s not so far away on the genre spectrum as one might think. To begin with, The Wild Wild West was the progenitor of all things steampunk. Coming as it did in the midst of the secret agent craze, sparked by James Bond and fueled by myriad secondary spies of all shapes and sizes and colors, outfitting a pair of 1870s Secret Service agents with gadgets secreted within cowboy boots and gun belts and hat bands was a natural. While the various gewgaws and thingamajigs dashing hero James West (Robert Conrad) and his not-quite-as-dashing but dazzlingly brilliant sidekick Artemus Gordon (Ross Martin) used in their never-ending war on the foes of the United States during the Grant administration were theoretically possible for the period, there were also frequent excursions into the realm of science-fictional fantasies. And at least one episode that could be considered to be horror.

So it was that, a few days ago, I popped the pertinent disc into the player and reviewed with great pleasure the 12th episode of the second season, “The Night of the Man-Eating House”.

All 104 episodes had titles that started with “The Night…”, by the way. In case you were wondering.

The mission James and Artie were tasked with in that broadcast of December 2, 1966, required them to return an escaped prisoner, played by Hurd Hatfield (star of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1945), to jail. They were accompanied by a sheriff played by William Talman, best known as District Attorney Hamilton Burger on the Perry Mason TV show. The prisoner, Liston Lawrence Day, had spent thirty years in solitary confinement for treason. He broke away from his captors and found his way to his former home, a plantation house so thoroughly infused with the spirit of his late mother that injury to the structure caused her to cry out in pain. She held the good guys hostage and tried to kill them so as to enable her son to escape. Meanwhile, Day was somehow restored to his youthful appearance and vigor. Thus rejuvenated, he conspired with the ghostly mansion to bedevil our heroes. 

A most unusual episode, in several ways. As far as I can recall, it’s the only one with a supernatural element. It’s one of the few, if not the only one without a lovely young miss in a feathered bonnet and a hoop skirt for James West to suck face with in between fistfights. And it is the least violent episode I think I ever saw, as there was no one for our fearless hero to punch but one old/young man. The violence that permeated the program’s entire history inevitably attracted the attention of a variety of parents’ groups resolved to force the networks to tone down the bloodletting and fisticuffs, which eventually resulted in the show’s demise.

It all came to an end on April 11, 1969, without any additional expeditions into the outré. There were two subsequent television movies before Martin suffered a fatal heart attack while playing tennis in 1981, and a 1999 feature film that was not well-received, for very good reason. Conrad passed away in 2020, and that was it for The Wild Wild West.

But for just one night, one singular evening when I was eight years old, the best adventure-espionage-western-science-fiction program of its time was also a horror show. And that is still pretty darn groovy, even sixty-six years later.

So as always, true believers in televised terrors, I bid you to be afraid.

Be very afraid.

 

Historian of Horror: Hide the WD-40!

When you have a medium reliant entirely on sound, which sonic effects are used has an impact that sometimes transcends all the other elements. Three radio shows spanning fifty years of that medium’s history were notable for sharing the same sound.

Radio impresario Himan Brown told the tale, years after the fact, of an ominously creaking door in the basement of a radio studio he once worked in, which inspired him to use that noise during the opening and closing of a program he created in 1941, and another one three decades later.

The Inner Sanctum Mysteries was loosely associated with a similarly-named series of mystery novels published by Simon & Schuster. It premiered on the NBC Blue Network on January 7, 1941, switched to CBS in September 1943, moved to the Blue Network’s successor, ABC, in 1950 for one year, then popped up briefly in 1952, again on CBS. That sort of network perambulation wasn’t uncommon back then.

By the way, NBC’s Red Network is the one that continues on today. Blue was sold off after World War II to become ABC because the Federal Communications Commission didn’t approve of two parallel networks from one company. My, how times have changed.

Anyhow, Inner Sanctum introduced the notion of the humorous host, Raymond, whose descendants include the Tales from the Crypt’s Crypt Keeper and his ilk. Radio show hosts had previously played it mostly straight and generally did subsequently. Neither The Mysterious Traveler nor The Whistler joked around quite like Raymond, whose full name was Raymond Edward Johnson. He drawled a snarky introduction, made some bad puns, insulted the sponsors, then let the murder and mayhem fly over the airwaves. Regular guest stars in those early years included movie boogymen Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre. 

Raymond left in 1945, replaced by Paul McGrath. The stories became campier, and the big-name guest stars more infrequently heard, but the program limped on for another six years, plus three months. There was one year of a television version on NBC during the 1953-1954 season, running thirty-nine episodes. In addition, there was a six-film series starring Lon Chaney made by Universal Studios in the mid-1940s, and a 1948 feature film, neither of which were associated with the radio show. Their inspiration came from the novel series. 

The age of Old Time Radio in the United States ended in 1962, but in 1973, Himan Brown decided the medium deserved another chance. The CBS Radio Mystery Theater ran in syndication from January 6, 1974, to December 31, 1982, five and sometimes six nights a week for 1399 original episodes. It was hosted by E.G. Marshall, whom some may remember as the entomophobic businessman in the final segment of the first Creepshow, in 1982. The program featured original stories, as well as adaptations of classic tales, including “The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allen Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson, and Marie Belloc Lowndes’ novel that was loosely based on Jack the Ripper,  The Lodger. The show starred popular television actors, but none who were big names at the time. Sarah Jessica Parker did have an early credit in “The Child Cat’s Paw”, aired on May 17, 1977, and John Lithgow starred in “The Deserter” on February 6, 1980, but few others of the featured guests would be familiar to most folks these days. Alas. Their loss.

Except for a brief revival of reruns in 1998, the creaking door finally closed for the last time. However, there was one more manifestation of its rusty hinges on the air during the years between Himan Brown’s bookend programs, in a far off land where radio didn’t die out quite so soon as it did in America.

Television wasn’t permitted in the Republic of South Africa until the mid-1970s, so audiences there had no other recourse but to be entertained by radio. So it was that, in 1964, the squeaky old portal was revived by Springbok Radio for at least forty-two episodes aired over the next year or so. Information on the exact number and their broadcast dates has thus far eluded scholars of the medium, but those forty-two episodes of The Creaking Door have been making the rounds among collectors for years, and are not at all bad. Definitely worth a listen.

Many thanks to John Dunning’s hefty tome, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, as well as Jim Harmon’s classic book, The Great Radio Heroes, for the information presented here. I hope to provide many more fascinating facts regarding our favorite genre in the coming year and wish for each of the populace a happy, prosperous, and delightfully frightening 2023. As always, my Merry Miscreants…

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror : The Best Scrooge

Too often we confuse ‘best’ with ‘favorite’. And vice versa. I contend frequently with folks on social media who insist that their favorite movie (or song or book) is the best ever, despite the probability that they’ve never experienced any of the recognized classics that routinely top the lists compiled by prestigious bodies such as the American Film Institute, and therefore have no reasonable basis for comparison. I mean, really. The Shawshank Redemption is a very good film, true, but is it actually better than Citizen Kane? Lawrence of Arabia? Tokyo Story? Le Grande Illusion?

Pardon me while I laugh myself into a terminal case of hiccups. 

Likewise, everyone seems to have their own personal favorite film version of Charles Dickens’ classic novella, A Christmas Carol. Okay, so Muppets are all very nice, and musicals, as well, and certainly Mr. Magoo’s interpretation of Ebenezer Scrooge cannot be discounted. Legitimate favorites, all, but let’s be serious about this. None are THE best. 

A Christmas Carol is first and foremost a ghost story; a horror tale that, properly presented, chills the blood as much as it warms the cockles of the heart. It is also a commentary on the depraved heartlessness of unrestrained capitalism, and it is the combination of all these aspects that makes the version starring Alastair Sim far and away the best interpretation ever captured on celluloid.

I will fight you on this.

I have to admit that the 1962 telefilm, Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, is my personal favorite and has been since I was a small child, but no, it is not the best. The acme, the absolute pinnacle of cinematic scroogismus, is the 1951 British film, Scrooge. 

Firstly, it’s in glorious black & white. I know we have entire generations suffering under the delusion that movies must be in color, but color is the enemy of filmcraft in so many ways. There is no special effect so overused as color. 

You simply cannot create the required deep shadows and existential angst needed to tell this story perfectly without high contrast blacks and whites. With them, Scrooge drips with nigh unto film noir levels of expressionism. I’ve never seen a color version that truly brought out the painful darkness of Scrooge’s soul, and this interpretation does it better than any other black & white version. It benefits greatly from being made in the midst of the Age of Noir, drawing heavily upon the stylistic and thematic tropes of that genre. Until the moment of Scrooge’s redemption, just as is the case of George Bailey in that other great holiday film noir, It’s a Wonderful Life, the object of the narrative is a lost and desperate man, sunken into a despair that is palpable. The tragedy here is that it is of his own making and that he knows it.

Sim shows this better than any other actor. His wonderfully expressive eyes and staccato yet graceful physical reactions show that the Scrooge he was at the beginning of that Christmas Eve wasn’t gratuitously mean or cruel. He was a deeply wounded man, disappointed in the turns he felt compelled to take along his pathway to wealth. Sim’s Scrooge isn’t a villain. He’s a victim of his own designs. Sim plays that so much better than any other movie Scrooge. And I’ve seen damn near all of them.

The kicker for me is the scene at the end of the Spirit of Christmas Present’s time when he opens his robes and shows the twin children of hopelessness, both society’s and Scrooge’s:

“This boy is Ignorance, this girl is Want,” he tells the nearly repentant miser. “Beware them both, but most of all, beware this boy!”

“But have they no refuge, no resource?” Scrooge asks.

The Spirit throws Scrooge’s words from early in the story back at him: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”

Bam! With that, he accuses Scrooge, and us, of depraved indifference to the suffering of our fellow beings. Following that indictment, the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come seals the deal, and Ebenezer Scrooge awakens on Christmas Day fully “Woke”. 

There. I said, and I meant it. 

The supporting cast is also excellent, with Michael Hordern smarmily excellent as Marley. Mervyn Johns as Cratchett, Hermoine Baddeley as his good wife, and Ernest Thesiger as the undertaker are all outstanding, as is the rest of the stellar cast.

Scrooge is available on YouTube year-round, and will no doubt be shown on Turner Classics and other movie channels, or streaming all over the bandwidth, during the Christmas season. I urge the populace to indulge in its pleasures, and its agonies, wherever possible. You’ll thank me the longest day of your life.

Until we meet again, my Yuletide Yetis, as always, be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror : Dead? and Buried

I have mentioned before that my wife and I enjoy traveling, both here at home and abroad. Our favorite American destination is the lovely, and very haunted, Savannah, Georgia. The time has come to share yet another of the many delights of that fabled city by the sea.

On our last excursion thence, we took a tour of Bonaventure Cemetery. Among the notables buried there is American song-writer par excellence Johnny Mercer and poet Conrad Aiken, whose childhood home is one of the most haunted in Savannah due to his father having murdered his mother and then killing himself when poor Conrad was just a lad. His daughter Joan wrote a number of ghost stories and supernatural novels, but as she spent her life in the United Kingdom, her estate preferred that she be buried on the other side of the Big Pond when she passed at the age of seventy-nine in 2004.

Oh, well. I guess another trip to Old Blighty is called for.

Well-heeled Savannahns have enjoyed eternal rest in Bonaventure since 1846, including 

one Charles F. Mills, whose tomb has all the bells and whistles. Literally. 

When Mills died in 1876, he had a grave alarm installed in case he needed to alert passers-by that he’d been buried alive. It is still in working condition, but Mills has yet to avail himself of its continued functionality.

We have spent time in the places of interment of other folks than the denizens of Savannah. During our 30th Anniversary tour of Eastern Europe in 2011, we arrived on an unprepossessing street in the lovely and very musical capital of Austria, Vienna. On our left was the house in which Ludwig van Beethoven gave his first public performance. On our right, the Cistercian monastery that was home to the final resting place of the Hapsburgs, the ruling family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the early 17th Century until the collapse of the empire following the end of the First World War, die Kaisergruft.

The Imperial Crypt is filled with row upon row of elaborately decorated sarcophagi, each containing the remains of some royal or other. The most spectacular one houses Empress Maria Therese, mother of Marie Antoinette, and her husband. Unlike her daughter, she died with her head still attached.The final member of the imperial family born prior to the dissolution of the empire who was still alive during our time in Vienna passed away a few months later and was interred in the final available resting place within the Kaisergruft. Resquiat in Pace. 

For my wife’s sixtieth birthday celebration in 2017, we took a cruise around the Baltic Sea, from Copenhagen to St. Petersburg, with stops along the way in Helsinki, Finland; Tallinn, Estonia; Stockholm, Sweden; and a variety of historical and culturally significant places in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in northern Germany. On her actual birthday, we found ourselves being escorted around the region of Rostok, Germany by a gentleman who goes by the moniker of Taxi Harry, and if you are ever in those environs, I hope you are fortunate enough to find yourselves in his vehicle. He was even kind enough to compliment me on my very limited German.

One place he showed us was the Doberaner Münster (Doberan Abbey) in Bad Doberan. It was a Cistercian monastery for hundreds of years, and came fully equipped with a charnel house behind it into which the monks were placed upon their demise. No home should be without a bone silo in the backyard. I’m seriously considering installing one sometime in the next few years. Whatever will the neighbors think!

Just this past September, we traveled through Scotland and Ireland, including stops at the Culloden Battlefield, Loch Ness, the Robert Burns birthplace, The Giant’s Causeway, the Cliffs of Moher, the Guinness Brewery, and many other sites of interest. Our most recent visit to the eternal homes of the dead was on the Emerald Island at the burial place of the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. Yeats is interred in the churchyard of St. Columba’s Church in Drumcliffe, County Sligo, in the shadow of Ben Bulben, where he wanted to be lain.

Is my Irish showing a bit too much there? So be it, for ‘tis Irish I am, and Irish I evermore shall be. Erin go bragh, O’Donnell Abu and cead mile failte!

I must note as our lagniappe for this edition the passing of comic book artist Vic Carrabotta, 93 years old, on November 22. He illustrated numerous horror stories for Marvel Comics’ predecessor, Atlas Comics, in the 1950s, including a story in the first issue of Journey into Mystery. R.I.P.

Until next time, my dear effendi of ectoplasm, I bid you all to be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror : Magus of the Magazines

I feel fairly certain that everyone reading this has at least heard of Charles Dickens (1812-1870). The demographics of those present incline me to suspect that his 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, is known amongst the populace if nothing else he wrote is. As if that wasn’t enough, he was also a magazine editor.

In 1836, Richard Bentley asked Dickens to edit his new magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany. Dickens left the post after three years due to a disagreement with his publisher. Along the way, he serialized his second novel, Oliver Twist, and published several ghost stories by Thomas Ingoldsby, a nom de plume for the English clergyman Richard Harris Barham. The Ingoldsby Legends as they became known were quite popular, later being collected in several volumes. The periodical continued on without Dickens, lasting until 1868. All six volumes from his stint are available in the Internet Archives. Wikipedia reports that the magazine published several stories by Edgar Allan Poe, but I can find no trace of them in those first six volumes. Perhaps Dickens’ successor as editor acquired them.

Shortly thereafter, Dickens lasted a mere ten weeks as editor of the progressive newspaper, London’s Daily News, before a disagreement with one of the co-owners put an end to that gig. In 1850, he began his own magazine, Household Words, which ran for nine years until Dickens had a dispute with his publishers. 

Are we starting to detect a pattern here?

Charlotte Brontë biographer and occasional ghost story writer Elizabeth Gaskell was a frequent contributor to Household Words. Her short gothic ghost story, “The Poor Clare”, for example, was serialized over three issues in 1856. Wilkie Collins also appeared often, although his early gothic work tended towards happier endings than our preferred genre requires.

Both authors were even more regularly seen in Dickens’ subsequent magazine, All the Year Round, which debuted even before the last issue of Household Words went to press. They each contributed a chapter to the round-robin story, The Haunted House, in the Christmas, 1859 issue. Collins’s gothic novel The Woman in White and seminal mystery book The Moonstone also ran in All the Year Round, as did the five stories that were combined into Gaskell’s collection, Lois the Witch (1861), along with half-a-dozen tales by Carmilla author J. Sheridan le Fanu. Dickens himself contributed A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.

Dickens’ tenure on All the Year Round ended with his death in 1870, but his son, Charles Dickens, Jr., continued editing the magazine until at least 1888. His involvement with the issues published from 1889 to 1895 is unclear, but the title definitely ended in that latter year. 

Like the bulk of Dickens’ work, the various periodicals he edited were tilted towards the social issues that concerned him, with a sprinkling of ghost yarns and gothic tales mixed in. A more careful examination of each volume would be necessary to root out all the spooky tales, as so many were published anonymously. I have provided links to the relevant sites within the Internet Archives, but if a better source is desired, I have recently obtained high quality PDF scans of both Household Words and All the Year Round that were made from well-preserved bound copies found in a medical school library in London in the not-too-distant past. I plan to spend as much time as is available to me in combing through the indices for each magazine to find whatever scary tales might be lurking. By available time, I mean the precious few moments afforded me by my constantly demanding children who seem to assume that my current condition of being retired allows them to make myriad demands on me and my time, given that I am not obliged to spend those precious hours at anything as mundane as a job. 

In other words, don’t hold your breath. Not if I’m doing it on my own, anyhow.

Any volunteers?

 

Our lagniappe this time out is one of those great old tunes I learned by careful repeated listening to the Dr. Demento Show back in the mid-1970s on WKDF-FM in Nashville, leaning in towards the muted radio on a Sunday night so my parents wouldn’t hear what degenerate Satanic music I dared to pollute their God-fearing home with on the Lord’s Day. If there is any song that should be the national anthem of Horror Addicts, or indeed any horror fan organization, my vote is for this one – Rose and the Arrangement’s 1974 classic, “The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati”. Some of my younger readers may need to look up a couple of references, but overall I feel the piece speaks for itself. No disrespect intended towards the Queen City. 

As always, my fellow gourmands of the Grand-Guignol…

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Historian of Horror : Sutch a Bother

I have previously admitted in this space to there being at least one area of popular culture in which I enjoy no expertise, that being heavy metal music. Following an enlightening conversation with our very own Ro Merrill (all praise and laudation be unto her name), I have been granted the gift of a brief introduction, albeit not necessarily an indoctrination, into the mysteries of the several genres that comprise such endeavors. I’ve been listening to a fair amount, not only of the form as currently practiced but to its forebears and influences. Along the way, it occurred to me that there was at least one performer whose active period began prior to anything recognizable as heavy metal who has not of late received his due attention. 

And so, I went digging into my nearly half-a-terabyte of genre related music and found the subject of our Essai du jour, the English musician and failed parliamentarian, founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, Screaming Lord Sutch.

Before Arthur Brown, before Iggy Pop, before Ozzie Osborne, before Alice Cooper, decades before any of the growling, snarling death metal performers of recent years, there was Sutch. Born David Edward Sutch in 1940, he took on the stage name as above, with the title amended thereunto of 3rd Earl of Harrow. You will find no sutch (sic) listing in Burke’s Peerage. The first part of his nom de scène was inspired by the 1950s novelty performer, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. The second was made up out of whole cloth.

His 1963 novelty song “Jack the Ripper” is the prototype for a great many of the tropes common to heavy metal, and made a sufficient splash in his home country that a short documentary was made about him and his band, The Savages, which concluded with a full version of the song including the simulated disembowelment of a mannikin.

Sutch’s tune, by the way, bears no relation to the surf guitar standard composed by Link Wray that same year. In case anyone was wondering. “Jack the Ripper” a la Sutch bears a more than passing similarity, structurally and musically, to the Hollywood Argyles’ 1960 hit, Alley Oop, based on the American comic strip. Thematically, however… 

Yeah. Not a thing like it.

The putative 3rd Earl of Harrow ran for Parliament nearly forty times, with what can be charitably characterized as limited success. He did garner more votes on occasion than actual, legitimate political parties, including in 1990 when the Social Democratic Party responded to losing to him by disbanding. There’s at least one modern political entity that might want to take note and follow this example. 

Later in the decade, Sutch performed on stage and on vinyl with a variety of major rock ‘n’ roll musicians, including the Who’s drummer Keith Moon, Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, and several members of Led Zeppelin. The album he recorded with the Zeppelinists, Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends, was declared in a 1998 poll conducted by the BBC as being the worst album of all time. Not a high watermark in the legendary band’s repertoire.

Despite his exuberant stage presence, Sutch battled depression in later years. He committed suicide by hanging in his late mother’s house on June 16, 1999. He was fifty-eight years old.

A word about His Lordship’s inspiration, the aforementioned Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, seems relevant at this point in the proceedings. Hawkins was born in 1929. Inspired by both operatic and blues singers, he began performing his piano act in the early 1950s, during which period took to wearing leopard skins and red leather, and other outrageous costumes. His most influential recording was his 1956 hit, “I Put a Spell on You”, a performance of which is in the link above. The piece has since been covered numerous times, including by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Nina Simone, Carlos Santana, and Marilyn Manson, and by Bette Midler et alii in the 1993 film, Hocus Pocus. He passed away in 2000 at the age of seventy. 

Arthur Brown, Screaming Lord Scutch’s first significant follower down that dark, flamboyant musical path was born in 1942 in Whitby, England, the very town in which the Demeter ran aground in the novel and several film versions of Dracula, precipitating the Vampire Lord onto British soil. Brown still performs his wild and crazy act at the age of eighty, although perhaps a bit less frenetically in these latter days. 

Our lagniappe this time is from one of my favorite groups of the 1970s, English folk-rockers Steeleye Span. A few days late for Halloween, but you are welcome to put “The Twelve Witches” aside for next year. Just don’t forget where you stashed it.

And so, until next time…

Be afraid.

Be very afraid.