Boris Karloff Blogathon: The Body Snatcher (1945) trailer

When most people hear the phrase "body snatcher" they think of the 1956 science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel and starring Kevin McCarthy, from Jack Finney's novel. There is, however, another movie a good 10 years prior which also bears the phrase "body snatcher," and it's based on a short story by the venerable Robert Louis Stevenson. Released in 1945 from the production company of the mighty Val Lewton, The Body Snatcher remains one of Boris Karloff's best movies, although, unfortunately, not nearly as famous as his Frankenstein films. Although it's not really fair to compare anything to his three Frankenstein movies, is it? It's also one of a handful of films that paired him with Bela Lugosi. It was released on DVD only in 2005, as part of the Val Lewton Horror Collection. Damn is that thing worth owning.



Check out more of the Karloff Blogathon at the frighteningly fantastic Frankensteinia blog!

"It's Just So Dirty": DePalma's Dressed to Kill (1980)

Dressed to Kill is a lurid and self-conscious thriller, director Brian DePalma's 1980 riff on even more Hitchcock tropes, dressed up as high art. Mostly vulgarizing Hitchcock for the excessive style-over-substance cocaine '80s, you can sense the sleaze dripping off every frame, and not in an appreciatively over-the-top manner but in a let-me-rub-your-face-in-filth way. It has more in common with the Italian thrillers known as giallos, as it's more concerned with formal, stylized cinematic tricks than story, character, human insight or motivation. As for the plot, cf. Psycho.

I certainly have no problem with sleaze or exploitation, etc., but when it's made by a major director (at least he was when he made this) I expect a little more finesse, substance, and irony rather than just amping up a then-20-year-old Hitchcock movie. At times it's a fun sleazy thriller, fizzy and intriguing at first, but it goes flat fast as the cheesy Herrmann ripoff score blows on and on, the silly twists, lots of sexual violence, and at the very end, when DePalma rips off his own Carrie.

"It's just so dirty," says perky prostitute Nancy Allen to psychiatrist Michael Caine. What is Allen talking about? An unexpectedly satisfying afternoon with a john? A sexual fantasy, something she thinks will arouse Caine? A blue movie she saw in Times Square? No, she's talking about a dream she's had - although she's making it up - about being raped with a straight razor.

Dude, what? Razor rape is not something I think of as "dirty." Okay, DePalma, what the hell? You wrote the screenplay, those are your words...

Some very good scenes transcend the pulpiness, of course, which is what gives this movie at least somewhat of a reputation three decades later. What are these enjoyable, brilliantly-crafted sequences? DePalma's use of split screen, and even split/split screen, is engaging, which he stretches nearly to the point of distraction, and then switches back to a single point-of-view. Voyeurism - I get it!I'm thinking of the now-famous art museum chase/seduction, or when Caine and Allen are in their respective homes and we learn about their lives and interests. There's a nice bit when the anticipation of a telephone ringing would shatter our nerves. The murder of Angie Dickinson's character, and then Allen's discovery of it, is terrifically, terrifyingly, framed.

But it's nearly indescribable how poorly this movie has aged. Misogyny, racism, gender identity politics: how could DePalma have gotten everything so wrong? Even insane asylum inmates come off poorly! It's not so much that he deals with these things - Taxi Driver certainly does - it's that you can't tell if he's serious or just smirky. The movie is smooth and assured but it's (mostly) a polished turd. So much of the movie is couched in dream and fantasy so DePalma can have his cake and eat it too, like those biblical epics of decades that past that promised the walls of Jericho would come down, but not before lots of Israelite ladies showed some skin. Every woman must pay in this uptown slasher flick.

I think DePalma was just clueless about his lack of taste and just going through stylistic motions, and inadvertently created a noxious stew of outrageous and ugly prejudices. Rape fantasies have particularly disappeared from pop art because they're just so... wrong. There's practically no way they can be presented as artistic or insightful before you gross out most of your audience. Tastes have obviously changed, so this could be a tough movie to revisit unless you're a fan of the incongruity of what was once considered acceptable entertainment but which now tastes like, well, a polished turd.

Overwrought and Obvious: DePalma's Obsession (1976)

I am usually underwhelmed by Brian DePalma's movies. He's a stylist who wears his influences - his influence, as in Hitchcock and Hitchcock only - on his sleeve. I've enjoyed Sisters, Carrie, The Untouchables, and Carlito's Way, but schlock like Scarface, Raising Cain, and The Black Dahlia are some of the worst movies I've ever seen by a major director. Too often they rely simply on their relationship to another picture; in this case, Obsession's is Vertigo (1958). But in 1976, long before Hitchcock's film had achieved its status as perhaps his greatest film (or just about the greatest film), not everyone pored over films at home like they can do today. You could get away with this kind of thing back then. I watched Vertigo last year and quite often watch moments of it when it's on cable; people seeing Obsession in '76 probably hadn't seen it in over 15 years. I felt like I was watching a watered-down version of Hitch's movie, not a film that existed independently.

This probably contributes to why it is one of DePalma's least-seen works. The DVD is out of print and it's not available from Netflix. Turner Classic Movies showed Obsession recently, as part of their celebration of composer Bernard Herrmann. Good timing, too, because I'd been rereading Schrader on Schrader and learned Paul Schrader and DePalma had watched Vertigo together and decided to an homage/remake of it. This was before Schrader gained Hollywood ascendancy with Taxi Driver. However the script was rewritten and changed so much that Paul Schrader dropped out of the project.

After his wife and daughter are killed in a kidnapping and ransom attempt that goes horribly wrong, Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson) remains a grieving widower, although a successful New Orleans businessman. Fifteen years after the event that gutted his life, he finds himself in Italy near the church in which he and his wife had met. He is drawn to it and wanders inside, only to find the his long-dead wife's doppelganger, Italian art student Sandra Portinari (Genevieve Bujold). They begin a tentative romance and Courtland brings Sandra back to the States. Now he sets out to remake her in the image of his dead wife. John Lithgow, a smarmy Southerner, is Robertson's business partner and views this newfound fascination as alarming...

The Oscar-nominated score by Herrmann (someone Hitch used, of course, numerous times), is busy and intrusive; it plays for virtually the entire movie and rather than accentuating scenes, it overpowers them. Herrmann is one of cinema's greatest composers and it's always a delight to hear his work but in Obsession it only makes you think of Vertigo. DePalma's skills are used to good effect in an inventive sequence near the end in which Bujold relives a childhood trauma that brings the movie full circle. The less said about the climactic fight scene between Lithgow and Robertson the better.

"Should we preserve the original or destroy it?" Genevieve Bujold says when Cliff Robertson meets her restoring a painting in the old Italian cathedral. Behind this painting lies another; the artist deemed it unworthy and painted over it. That's the heart of the movie, of course, both for Robertson's character and for DePalma's work in general. A fine question it is, but I never connected with Obsession, never felt Robertson was in the grip of mania like Jimmy Stewart's Scottie conveyed in Vertigo. All of Herrmann's lush, manic, swirling strings, DePalma's feverish camera work, and editor Paul Hirsch's rippling dream effects (to lessen the ultimate implications of the plot twist) can't make this movie rise above a mildly interesting, decidedly minor '70s thriller. This one is for completists of any of the filmmakers or actors mentioned, for fans of Herrmann, or that wonderful '70s era. I'll take Sisters or Carrie any day over Obsession.

Countdown to Halloween: Kids' Books

Halloween has arrived! Since this awesome holiday is (ostensibly) about kids, I wanted to share some great books I, and plenty of other folks, loved to read and reread as a child. These are the books that made me the Halloween and horror fan I remain to this day!

Norman Bridwell, most famous for creating Clifford the Big Red Dog, had several books of charmingly-drawn monsters. I mean, they are adorable. Look at Dracula waving, for Chrissakes!

Another fantastically well-illustrated monster book was this makeup how-to by Alan Ormsby, who had starred as the most obnoxious theater troupe leader ever in Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things.

Bunnicula! A classic tale of a vampire rabbit. Lots of sequels apparently.

Books like these were a treasure trove of horror movie history. In the days before VCRs, much less DVDs and the internet, the only a kid could see a lot of these movies was to read these books and imagine them in his head...The distinctive orange-spined Crestwood Series has sent many a 30-something dude scouring the net for hours trying to figure out what the heck they were called.

As noted previously, I don't draw like I did when I was kid, but I fondly recall these two how-to books were staples for the after-school and Saturday hours.


Well, I've come to the end of my Countdown to Halloween. Hope you readers enjoyed it, and have a happy horror-day... even if this crazy lady doesn't want you to!

Countdown to Halloween: Horror Around the House

As we get right up on Halloween, here's a nice chunk of the horror-related books and toys and whatnot I like to accessorize with at home.

Three old-school Draculas guard the bookshelf...

Horror fiction in various states of read- and unread-ness. You got your King hardcovers that date from when I was in high school, and countless books good and bad I've collected (I do not recommend re-reading It as an adult, however Song of Kali remains perhaps the greatest horror novel I've ever read). I am particularly fond of '70s and '80s paperbacks, mass market/drugstore rack stuff long before it was reprinted at $14 a pop for a movie tie-in. Looking for a nice I Am Legend paperback, cheap, as well as the splatterpunk stuff I used to read nearly 20 years ago that I've since sold off. Wow, very little Straub and what, no Machen or Blackwood! Gotta get on that. Anybody remember the Dell Abyss line? This guy does.



Some of my beloved Sideshow monster toys!

A stack of horror movie books. You cannot go wrong with The Overlook Horror Encyclopedia, The Book of the Dead, Nightmare Movies, or Immoral Tales! Get your Netflix queue ready.

And Clive Barker's demonic ladies guard over his works below.



I love these 11 x 14" posters; they're great if you don't have a lot of wall space. The one for Zombi 2 came with the 2-disc DVD set!


And Brundlefly and Cesare from Dr. Caligari's cabinet round things up!

Countdown to Halloween: Lovecraft and the Parody of Religion

H.P. Lovecraft was a lifelong resident and antiquarian from Providence, Rhode Island, who supported himself by writing the most vivid star-flung nightmare fantasies of the early 20th century. His shadow over the field of horror entertainment since his death in 1937 is unparalleled and unmistakable. To say something is Lovecraftian is to intimate its awesome alien strangeness, as in, "The early scenes of Ridley Scott's Alien are truly Lovecraftian."

In Lovecraft's tales, gone were the dank castles of Count Dracula, the Gothic laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein, the cross and the silver bullet to destroy the beast, the pure of heart and the Lord's Prayer. He wrote for the new scientific age of Darwin, Einstein, and Freud, when our fears were no longer blasphemous monsters of superstitious Old World folklore, but of the vastness of the universe and humanity’s lowly place within it; terrors not of the soul, but of the mind.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

"The Call of Cthulhu," 1927

Lovecraft's infamous Great Old Ones are not, as some have insisted, simply evil alien creatures, as Arkham House founder August Derleth posited and promulgated in his own stories; no, they represent the inability of humans to comprehend anything outside their own earth-bound experience. From deep space and other dimensions, these beings are not the saucer-eyed, woman-hungry Martians of science fiction; these entities are vast, incorporeal, protean, inconceivable. Degenerate cults worship them as gods, and Lovecraft at once parodies and mocks notions of religion, spirituality, and transcendent knowledge.

An atheist who, as he said, "hated and despised religion," Lovecraft saw no real qualitative difference between, say, "Shub Nigurath, the Goat with a Thousand Young" or "Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth," and "Transubstantion of the Eucharist" or "There is no God but God." The dread Necronomicon is their bible; the acolyte's cry of "Iä! Iä!" is Cthulhu speak for "Hallelujah!"

"They worshiped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him."

"The Call of Cthulhu," 1927

The final lines of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (used so well in Stuart Gordon's film Dagon) can be seen as a nightmarish twist on the Lord's Prayer: "And in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever." Compare: "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen."

"Man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it."

"The Shadow out of Time," 1935

Countdown to Halloween: Rise of the Vampires

From Tod Browning's Dracula (1931):












"And all around them, the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. The vampire's time has come."
Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot (1976)

"You play your wits against me, mine, who commanded armies hundreds of years before you were born?"
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

"If it's raining and you're running
Don't slip in mud because if you do
You'll slip in blood tonight...
The moon may be full
The moon may be white
All I know is you will feel his bite tonight.
It's the night of the vampire."
Roky Erickson, "Night of the Vampire" (1978)

The Delights of Dread: Meeting Clive Barker

"There is no delight the equal of dread," wrote Liverpudlian Clive Barker in the first lines of his 1984 short story "Dread," collected in Books of Blood Vol. 2. I believe him. Also: "The dead have highways... Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places of the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, violence and depravity."


I picked up Vol. 3 first (can't remember why I chose number three) for one reason only: the infamous quote on the cover from Stephen King. At the time (1986 or '87) that meant a lot to me; it was before King could be counted on to whore up a blurb for any writer (Bentley Little? Really?). "I have seen the future of horror," it went, "and its name is Clive Barker." (For you non-classic rock fans, that's a take on something said early in Bruce Springsteen's career). That was plenty good enough for me. King was right in some ways (the Hellraiser movies, Books of Blood) but wrong in others.

Barker proved to be a world-class talent as a novelist too, with ambitious, layered, magic-realist works like Weaveworld (1987), The Great and Secret Show (1990), and my absolute favorite, Imajica (1991). These books were long, ambitious, mythic, darkly fantastic, erotic, and metaphysical, evoking not just horror fiction like King, Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell or Poe, but also William Blake, Tolkien, kitchen-sink realism, surrealism, Peter Pan, Melville, Joseph Campbell, Jorge Luis Borges; a whole host of influences that most horror fans would (unfortunately) have little familiarity with. I can't recall Dean Koontz ever talking about the impact Les yeux sans visage, The Story of the Eye, or The Holy Mountain had on his fiction. Reading Barker improved my cultural literacy when I was just a teenager in a way no Intro to American Lit sophomore class could.




Barker is also a wonderful and quite accomplished artist. You can see his dense, colorfully macabre paintings in Clive Barker: Illustrator I and II. And before he started his career as a published writer, he had written and produced crazy-quilt Grand Guignol plays, collected in Forms of Heaven (1995) and Incarnations (1996). And then children's books like The Thief of Always (1992) and the Abarat series (ongoing); and latter-day more mainstream, yet still visionary, novels like Sacrament (1996) and Galilee (1998). Whew.

Despite these incredible accomplishments, Barker's name is always associated with horror. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it puts Barker in a box (Lemarchand's box, one assumes) too confining for a popular artist. What else is new, right? Look at his stunning artwork for the UK editions of Books of Blood. Come on, what popular author can do all this?

I have a print of Vol. III's cover framed and hanging in my bedroom, it looks awesome!

And this is a seriously Gothed-out me meeting Mr. Barker in January 1991 at a Fangoria Weekend of Horrors convention in New York City. Here he's signing my Nightbreed (his 1990 "epic" monster movie) poster. Seems pretty excited to meet me, doesn't he? I met him several times over the years at these conventions, and he was always terrifically engaging. One year we agreed that only David Cronenberg could adapt the then-upcoming movie version of William Burroughs's seminal Beat novel Naked Lunch; another he recommended I see Bernard Rose's Paperhouse (which has proved elusive). Barker is well-known for making hours-long appearances to sign whatever item someone has and meet his fans. Gracious, funny, patient, he is genuinely a great artist who enjoys interacting with the people who love his work.

Countdown to Halloween: Iron Maiden, "Phantom of the Opera" (1980)

Iron Maiden, with original singer Paul Di'Anno, performing their metal classic, "Phantom of the Opera."

Countdown to Halloween: Trailer Madness (1970s)

These are cool but lesser-known horror movies of the '70s; I've gotten them all from Netflix or Amazon. No bootlegs necesary.

Deathdream, aka Dead of Night


Tourist Trap


Let's Scare Jessica to Death


Alucarda


The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie


Who Can Kill a Child?