31 Days of Horror: Day 9 - Hellraiser (1987)

An important question I had before watching “Hellraiser”: which monster cereal will go better with it, Booberry or Frankenberry?  So far, the choice has been easy.  If it involves the supernatural, Booberry; if it features mad science, Frankenberry.  But what about a movie that revolves around a puzzle box that summons pale-skinned humanoids with multiple body piercings and mutilations?  Not an easy question, so I had a bowl of each.

Before tonight, it had probably been around ten years since I had seen “Hellraiser,” and it was much more disturbing than I remembered.  It’s the gory tale of what happens when Frank Cotton, seeking to test the limits of pleasure and pain, acquires a puzzle box that summons beings known as Cenobites who oblige by providing him with the extremes of both.  But the pain clearly outweighs the pleasure as his experience ends with hooks piercing his skin and ripping his body apart.  He’s later resurrected when his brother cuts his hand while moving into the family home where Frank died.  Blood from the wound seeps into the floorboards and revives the remaining bits of Frank that were left when the Cenobites destroyed his body.  When they find out that he has escaped them by returning to life, they come looking for him.

“Hellraiser” is disturbing both in its subject matter and its gore effects.  Frank is joined in his depravity by Julia, his brother’s wife, who is drawn to Frank’s hedonism and has an affair with him.  When she learns that he has returned from the dead, she aids in his recovery by seducing men and luring them to the house, beating them to death with a hammer, and leaving their corpses for Frank to eat.  As he regrows tissue, Frank is a gooey, slimy, bloody, mass of bone, nerves, and muscle.  Scenes filled with hooks piercing skin and then ripping it apart are enough to make even seasoned veterans of gory horror cringe.  Horror doesn't get much more visceral than this.

 

        

31 Days of Horror: Day 8 - Bela Lugosi Double Feature

Before tonight, I was one movie behind, so I made it a double feature of two Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Bela Lugosi:  “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1932) and “The Black Cat” (1934).  Neither shares much besides its title with the story that inspired it.  The former reworks the basic elements of the Poe story into a much more entertaining tale involving a mad scientist while the latter takes only the black cat from the original tale and uses it as one of many bizarre elements in a convoluted revenge story. 

In director Robert Florey’s movie, the dead bodies in the Rue Morgue are the products of failed experiments conducted by Dr. Mirakle (Lugosi), who, like Dr. Caligari, has a day job as a carnival showman.  Mirakle’s exhibit features an ape named Erik whose language Mirakle claims to understand and translate for the audience.  He provides a clue to his real work as a mad scientist when he begins talking about evolution and tells his audience he will prove that men and apes share a common ancestor by mixing Erik’s blood with a man’s.       

Poe’s “Rue Morgue” is an engaging detective story ruined by a ridiculous ending revealing that an ape was responsible for the murders; director Robert Florey’s movie is ridiculous from beginning to end, so there’s no reason to complain when a man in a cheesy ape suit makes his appearance.  Florey attempts a bit of early cinematic magic when he alternates close-ups of a monkey and wide shots of the man in the suit.  It’s very unlikely that they ever fooled audiences, but it’s a lot of fun to watch them try.  A final chase scene featuring the ape running over rooftops while an angry mob looks on below is particularly entertaining.

       

I’ve seen several film adaptations of “The Black Cat,” and Edgar G. Ulmer’s is by far the strangest.  Lugosi plays Dr. Werdegrast, a Hungarian soldier who was left to die in the Great War by an Austrian named Engineer Poelzig.  Poelzig, played by Boris Karloff, later built a house on the ruins of the fort where he left Werdegrast.  Werdegrast survived but spent 15 years in prison, and after his release, he seeks out Poelzig to take his revenge.  He also believes that Poelzig killed his wife.  He goes to Poelzig’s house pretending to be visiting his old friend and learns that Poelzig has become a satanic priest and has preserved the bodies of several women, including his wife Karen, through unholy rites.  On his first night in the house, Werdegrast tries to kill Poelzig, but he suffers from a severe phobia of cats, and when a black cat crosses his path, he runs out of the room in fear.  They agree to resolve their differences through more civilized means after Poelzig’s other guests have left, but Poelzig plans to involve them all in a satanic ritual the next night.  All of this happens in just over an hour.

 

As you can probably guess, the movie is a barely comprehensible mess.  I know nothing about its history, but I’m guessing it goes something like this.  Universal had half of two scripts; one was the beginning of a revenge tale and the other was the end of a story about a satanic priest.  Lugosi and Karloff had both signed on to do a movie of “The Black Cat,” but there was no script.  The two half scripts were cobbled together, Werdegrast was given a fear of cats to justify using the title, Lugosi and Karloff were told Universal had a script, the cameras were ready to roll, and the world was better for it.  No early American horror film begins to approach the weirdness of “The Black Cat,” and it’s an utter joy to watch because just as it seems the plot can’t get any stranger or more convoluted, a new layer unfolds, a secret room in the house is revealed, or a preserved body appears.

Tonight's double feature has me eager for more, and the only things stopping me from watching the other three movies in the Bela Lugosi Collection are that it's 4:00 a.m. and I still have papers to grade before class tomorrow.

 

31 Days of Horror: Days 6 and 7

I missed day six because my girlfriend, Vicki, and I watched several episodes of “The Walking Dead,” which is horror, but this blog series is about horror movies not TV shows.  This put me two movies behind, so tonight I had a double feature:  “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1919) and “The Awful Dr. Orlof” (1964), which make a nice combination, since “Orlof” was heavily influenced by “Caligari.” 

One of the first horror movies ever made and my favorite silent movie, “Caligari” tells the story of a murdering hypnotist posing as a carnival showman.  Dr. Caligari’s “cabinet,” which looks more like a coffin, contains a somnambulist, or sleepwalker, named Cesare, whom Caligari claims has slept day and night all 23 years of his life and can tell the future.  Dr. Caligari exhibits his cabinet at a fair in the town of Holsten Wall, and soon after his show begins, people start dying in the night, victims of Caligari, through Cesare, whom he sends to kill them.

What makes this movie so interesting is not its story, but the way it looks.  An iconic example of German expressionist film, “Caligari” uses sets in which everything is off kilter and out of proportion:  all the lines in the movie are jagged, including windowsills and door frames; buildings lean precariously; some rooms are much too small for their inhabitants; chairs have backs several times the size of their seats; and the town clerk sits in a chair that stands so tall his feet dangle several inches from the ground.  All of this creates the impression that the visuals are the product of deranged mind, and this is clearly the point, but it’s an open question whose madness these images externalize:  Caligari’s or the asylum patient who narrates the story?

It’s difficult to overstate the influence of “Caligari,” but for obvious examples, see Tim Burton’s entire filmography.  It had been several years since I had seen “Caligari,” and I’d forgotten how much fun it is to watch.  At times, it’s like watching a cartoon with live action characters.  If you’ve never seen a silent movie, there’s not a better place to start.

“The Awful Dr. Orlof” is an early work of Spanish director Jesus “Jess” Franco, who has made close to 200 movies.  The handful I’ve seen are all entertaining, but many are almost unwatchable.  He worked in every imaginable subgenre of horror, but  I prefer his mad scientist movies.  He made several good ones, including “The Diabolical Dr. Z” and “The Rites of Frankenstein,” and “Orlof” is probably the best.

With the help of his assistant, Morpho, Dr. Orlof abducts and murders women to use in experiments hoping to find a way to repair his daughter’s disfigured face.  He woos the women with drinks and a diamond necklace containing a tracking device that Morpho later uses to find them.  “Orlof” draws on several horror classics, most notably “Caligari,” “Frankenstein,” and “Dracula.”  Morpho is a combination of the monsters from all three, and Orloff is both Dr. Caligari and Victor Frankenstein.  He broke Morpho out of prison, altered his mind through brain surgery and thus placed him directly under his control.  When Morpho abducts the women for Orloff, he kills them by biting their necks.

With their willingness to abandon narrative coherence in favor of elaborate set pieces, European horror movies often do a better job of capturing the irrationality, surrealism, and illogic of true horror than American horror movies.  I’m not suggesting that American horror movies lack plot holes, but even when they reach the point of no return, they tend to keep trying to follow the plot.  European horror movies have no problem disregarding it completely in the interest unsettling their viewers.  At their worst, this makes them completely incomprehensible, and Franco was guiltier than most.  But this was less of a problem in the 1960s than it was later on.  Orlof benefits immensely from a lack of concern with narrative logic as its best scenes are elaborate chase sequences through a castle and a villa that make little sense from a purely narrative perspective but succeed brilliantly in horrifying viewers. 

I enjoy every subgenre of horror, and I don’t even try to pick a favorite, but I’m rarely disappointed by a mad scientist movie, so this subgenre clearly ranks near the top.  Tonight’s double feature enabled me to revisit two early classics and enjoy them with a bowl of Frankenberry.        

31 Days of Horror: Days 4 and 5

I didn’t watch a horror movie on day four, but I had a good excuse:  I went to see the metal band Kreator in concert instead.  The show was part of their Phantom Antichrist tour, and they played several songs from the new album, which was the Cabinet’s Metal Album of the Week several weeks ago.  The songs’ dark themes combined with the stage effects that included smoke machines and backdrops with images of zombies and the antichrist from the album cover gave the performance elements of horror.  But it still wasn’t a horror movie, so I’ll have to work in a double feature to make up for this missed day. 

Tonight, I watched “Halloween III: Season of the Witch” (1982), a very odd entry in the “Halloween” franchise that I had been meaning to watch for years.  Although it’s called “Halloween III,” the only connections between this movie and the other Halloween movies are that it was produced by John Carpenter and that he wrote the music, but it’s not the instantly recognizable score from the other movies in the series; he wrote completely new music for this one.  Michael Myers and Laurie Strode aren’t even mentioned although the original “Halloween” is playing on TV screens in one of the movie’s key scenes.  The subtitle is also misleading as there’s no witch in the movie either.  However, when viewed on its own terms, “Season of the Witch” is a very enjoyable horror movie that presents a unique take on the Halloween theme.

 
An Irishman named Conal Cochran is responsible for the horror. He wants to reclaim Halloween from Americans and return it to its European roots.  Cochran complains that Americans have turned it into a night for children to beg for candy, whereas Samhain, from which Halloween was bastardized, was a night of blood and sacrifice when the barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred.  Cochran runs a company known as Silver Shamrock, which specializes in popular Halloween masks.  He has stolen a pillar from Stonehenge and ground particles from this pillar into his masks, giving them special powers.  At 9:00 on Halloween night, a television commercial will activate this secret ingredient killing anyone wearing one of Cochran’s masks.  A week before Halloween, a man discovers Cochran’s plan, but is soon killed by one of his minions.  The man’s daughter and a doctor who tried to save him attempt to stop Cochran.

 
“Season of the Witch” begins with a pixilated computer image of a Jack-o-Lantern, recalling the opening shot of “Halloween,” which slowly zooms in on a real Jack-o-Lantern.  However, I soon stopped thinking of it as a Halloween sequel and realized that it was instead an effort by Carpenter to allow the franchise to move in a much more interesting direction.  Rather than showing Michael Myers stalking his victims yet again, writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace explores the horror of Halloween night from a different perspective.  It left me wishing that Michael Myers had stayed dead in later sequels and that they had continued to examine the many different kinds of horror associated with Halloween. 

31 Days of Horror: Day 3 - Octaman (1971)

 

I’m a sucker for man-in-a-rubber-suit creature features, and tonight “Octaman” reminded me why.

 

The action begins when scientists studying the effects of nuclear contamination on the Amazon discover what they claim are mutated octopuses.  It’s unclear how they know the octopuses are mutated because they look just like rubber octopuses to me.  However, research on a few specimens they take confirms that the octopuses have human cells.  Before long, Octaman comes looking for them. 

As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, he’s part man, part Octopus, and all terror.  He walks on two legs, and smacks people around with his many limbs like an eight-armed professional wrestler, but he prefers squeezing them to death.  He has large red eyes, and several shots from his perspective enable us to experience Octavision.  Surprisingly, the eyes actually move.  Unfortunately, the same isn’t true of his mouth.  It remains perpetually open revealing sharp teeth that never have the opportunity to tear open human flesh. 

Two common complaints I have about creature features are that it takes too long for the creature to appear and when it does I don’t get to see it enough.  Neither of these is a problem in “Octaman.”  He makes his first appearance less than ten minutes into the movie, and we never have to wait more than a few minutes to see him again.  The rubber suit must have consumed most of the movie’s budget, and writer/director Harry Essex ensured it was money well spent. 

A few scenes feature the scientists trying to explain the existence of Octaman, but Essex doesn’t waste much time having characters talk about the creature.  He knows we’d much rather see it lumbering around in pursuit of its prey.  He was also sure to include the obligatory scene of the creature carrying away a woman, albeit clad in jeans and a sweater rather than a bikini.

Like his distant cousin in "The Creature from the Black Lagoon," Octaman falls for the woman and this ultimately leads to his downfall, but not before we're treated to a chase scene in which he outsmarts his pursuers by leading them into a cave and then hiding out in their trailer.  If you have any appreciation at all for creature features, "Octaman" will keep you entertained for an hour and twenty minutes.   

31 Days of Horror: Day 2 - The Haunting (1963)

I’m ashamed to admit that before tonight I’d never seen Robert Wise’s “The Haunting.”  Released in 1963, this genuinely creepy haunted house film brings its four main characters to Hill House as part of an experiment by Dr. Markway, an anthropologist seeking evidence of the supernatural.  Hill House was built by Hugh Crain, a misanthrope who wanted to isolate himself and his family from the rest of the world, and over the years, the inhabitants of the house have died mysterious deaths, starting with Crain’s first wife, who died in a carriage accident as she approached the house for the first time.  Dr. Markway invites guests who have had prior encounters with the supernatural to spend a weekend with him in Hill House and document their experiences.

 

Unexplained phenomena begin happening almost immediately.  Doors close on their own, and it’s never clear whether this is due to a supernatural presence or the fact that there’s not a right angle anywhere in the house.  The spiral staircase, from which one of the house’s previous inhabitants hanged herself, wobbles precariously when anyone climbs it.  What might be the ghost of a dog runs through the garden on the guests’ first night in the house.  A cold draft marks what Dr. Markway identifies as the heart of the house.    

Free of gore and violent death, “The Haunting” is brutal in more subtle ways.  Hill House targets the character Nell with most of its horrors.  Poor Nell has recently lost her mother, and her weekend in the house is her first getaway in years, so she views her stay as a true vacation despite the fact that she has to endure bumps (and loud bangs) in the night, spooky laughter and voices, bad smells, writing on the wall demanding that she return home, and a throbbing door.  Even when it’s clear to everyone that the house is after her, Nell refuses to leave.

I’m rarely one to criticize a horror movie for gratuitous violence, but it’s still a nice change to see one that relies on atmosphere instead.  It's even better when accompanied by two bowls of Booberry. 

31 Days of Horror: Day 1 - Lucifer Rising (1972)

 

In celebration of Halloween, my goal is to watch an average of at least one horror movie per day, blog about each of them, and eat several boxes of Booberry and Frankenberry.  I started with Kenneth Anger’s silent art house film “Lucifer Rising.”  I knew nothing about Anger before watching the film tonight, and I learned about it from a Metal Hammer interview with the black metal band Watain. In response to a question about Dimmu Borgir, a more accessible black metal band that has enjoyed some commercial success, Watain’s singer compares his band to “Lucifer Rising” and Dimmu Borgir to “Scream,” claiming that while “Scream” has made more money and has broader appeal “Lucifer Rising” has more lasting significance.

The movie is essentially a collection of images of priests and scantily clad, sometimes nude, priestesses walking around ancient religious sites, mostly in Egypt, but Stonehenge also makes an appearance as does some site that seems to be in India.  Anger also mixes in shots of various animals, mostly reptiles, including one of an elephant stepping on a cobra.  As you can probably guess, the film is plotless, and it consists of a series of symbols that I lack both the will and the patience to decipher.  It could have been redeemed, however, if a winged, forked tongue Satan had actually risen.  Instead, Lucifer seems to be a white guy with an afro in a black jacket with “Lucifer” painted on it in colorful letters.  Or the UFO with “Lucifer” painted on its side that flies over an Egyptian temple at the end of the film. Thankfully, it’s only 28 minutes long.  I’ll take “Scream” and Dimmu Borgir; Watain can have “Lucifer Rising.”

 

As if the film itself wasn’t bad enough, I also subjected myself to a few minutes of the commentary track, which is delivered by Anger.  Here’s what he matter-of-factly says about Bobby Beaugolcil, the film’s composer, “He was in prison for doing a murder-to-order for Charlie Manson.  Bobby and I became friends again after he was in prison.” Perhaps Anger would have been capable of making better movies if he had a little humanity.