31 Days of Horror 2014: Days 1 - 6

31 Days of Horror 2014: Days 1-6

This year's 31 Days of Horror got off to a rough start with four snoozers in a row, but Tod Browning's “Freaks” helped us get the month of horror back on track.

1. The Cat and the Canary (1927)

Silent horror movies are often eerie in ways that talkies can never be, so we like to include at least a few silent films in the month of horror. This one tried hard to put us both to sleep. It starts out promising with a rich old man (the canary) on his death bed and his family (the cats) waiting for him to die, so they can claim their inheritance.  But when he dies, a clause in his will makes them wait twenty more years.. Twenty years later, the family members gather at his old, dark house at midnight for the reading of the will and learn that his entire estate will become the property of his most distant relative if she can pass a psychiatric exam the next morning. He gains revenge from beyond the grave by provoking the rest of the family into spending the night in the house with the heiress attempting to drive her insane.

Although interesting as the precursor to later movies like “The House on Haunted Hill” (1959) and “The Haunting” (1963), which also place their characters in an large, spooky house for the night, “The Cat and the Canary” loses its appeal after the first half hour. It has a few interesting visual effects and stylized inter titles that add atmosphere, but the attempts to drive the heiress crazy quickly become tiresome. It would probably have worked better if it had been compressed into a tighter plot cutting about half an hour from its 90-minute running time.

2. Pontypool (2008)

We came across this French-Canadian turd while browsing horror movies available to stream through Netflix. It uses the narrative device of telling the story almost entirely inside a radio station. This works well for a while as unconfirmed reports of attacks by zombie-like creatures keep trickling in as the station's producer tries to keep her new morning talk show host from making the reports public until they receive official reports from the police. The fact that they receive none becomes part of the story. It all starts to stink when we learn that the zombies are created by infected English words and that the best defense is to speak only in French.

3. Night Creatures (1962)

Originally released under the title “Captain Clegg,” this Hammer production stars Peter Cushing as a notorious pirate (Clegg) hiding out from his many enemies in a seaside village, where he disguises himself as a parson. The village also happens to be haunted by marsh phantoms, glowing skeletons on skeleton horses who terrorize the villagers at night. It starts off promising with the phantoms chasing a terrified man through the swamp, but after the initial amusement of seeing Cushing as the parson passes, nothing else interesting happens until the marsh phantoms reappear in the film's last five minutes.

4. Evil of Frankenstein (1964)

Over the past few years, I've become a big fan of horror movies produced by the British studio Hammer (if you don't know about Hammer, the Wikipedia article Hammer Film Productions provides a good introduction), and I'm edging closer to having seen all of them. 31 Days of Horror is always a great opportunity to watch a few more. Peter Cushing plays the mad doctor in six of the Hammer Frankenstein films, and “Evil of Frankenstein” was the only one I hadn't seen. Although I appreciate Colin Clive's manic Henry Frankenstein in the Universal films and love Jeffrey Combs over-the-top portrayal of Herbert West in the Re-Animator series, Cushing's Frankenstein is my favorite cinematic mad scientist. He's cold, calculating, purely rational, and never lets squeamishness about removing organs from the recently departed or even killing for parts stop him from doing what's necessary to complete his experiments.

The opening scene with Frankenstein's assistant stealing a body from a wake while the dearly departed's young daughter watches in horror gave me high expectations. It then devolves into a dull hybrid of “Frankenstein meets the Wolfman” (a lesser Universal film from 1943 that still manages to be fairly entertaining) and “The Captain of Dr. Caligari.” From the former film, “Evil of Frankenstein” borrows the story of Frankenstein finding his original creation frozen in a block of ice. He then enlists a carnival hypnotist to help him communicate with the awakened creature, but the hypnotist has his own ideas, and like Dr. Caligari, uses his power over the creature to have him commit crimes. This sounds like a winning combo, but the result is just a bunch of running around as Frankenstein tries to break the spell the hypnotist has over his creation. (For a much more effective merging of the Frankenstein and Caligari myths, see Jess Franco's “The Awful Dr. Orloff.) Although “The Evil of Frankenstein” is not quite as bad as “Frankenstein Created Woman,” by far the worst of Hammer's Cushing Frankenstein films, it's close.

5. Freaks (1932)

After four duds, we had to get this year's month of horror back on track with a classic: Tod Browning's “Freaks.” Set in a circus with a cast consisting almost entirely of actual circus freaks, “Freaks” is easily one of the most bizarre horror films of the 1930s. The plot revolves around the attempts of a trapeze artist to steal the large inheritance of a little person named Hans. But Browning is clearly more interested in showing off the talents of the circus performers, and this is what makes the movie so fascinating. Its scenes of the “half-boy” walking around effortlessly using only his arms, a woman with no legs eating dinner and drinking wine using only her feet, and a man with no arms or legs rolling a cigarette using only his face, are the closest most of is in the earlier twenty-first century will ever come to a freakshow. Browning has been both praised for his sympathetic portrayals of the freaks and criticized for exploiting them. The interviews with circus freaks included on the DVD release indicate that rather than feeling exploited by Browning and the like, they were happy to get the work. As one of them puts it, how else is a man with no arms or legs supposed to make a decent living?

6. Monster House (2006)

This animated movie about two boys investigating the neighborhood haunted house is always enjoyable because it takes me back to my own childhood when my friends and I performed our own paranormal investigations. The main difference, of course, is that the house in the movie actually turns out to be haunted. It also happens to take place on Halloween and illustrates the struggle that boys face in accepting that they are outgrowing trick-or-treating.