The Neck Bone's Connected to...

Film: The Skull
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

So much of old-school horror is a collection of Gothic tales. You have to think that at some point, part of the fun of making horror movies wasn’t specifically trying to scare people but getting to dress up in fancy costumes. The Skull is a film that takes place in the present of when it was made, but has some fun flashbacks to the past. We’re also going to be dealing with people who have a good deal of money, which means many of the trappings of Gothic style and a lot of Peter Cushing walking around in a smoking jacket.

The Skull is also a film in the long subgenre of “cursed item” horror. In this case, that cursed item is the skull of the Marquis de Sade, the guy for whom the term “sadism” was coined. The conceit of the movie is that de Sade was possessed during his lifetime and that this possession has carried on after his death, the skull being the focus. Essentially, everyone who comes into possession of the skull (at least most of the time) will end up themselves possessed by it.

Each Story a Flower

Film: Torture Garden
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

We’re going to dive head-first into a horror subgenre that I’ve attacked before with Torture Garden. This is not torture porn, despite the name. Its 1967 pedigree would put it before even the torture porn-like films of the early and mid-‘70s. No, this is a (sigh) horror anthology film, a film that will give us a framing story and four tales of various levels of scary. Truthfully, they aren’t going to be that scary for the most part. As frequently happens in an anthology like this one, the stories are essentially little morality tales that cause people to realize their own “sins,” perhaps before it is too late.

There are some pros and cons for this one going in. On the positive side, these are all tales written by Robert Bloch, who also wrote Psycho, so at least we’re going to have some quality when it comes to the writing. We’ve also got some classic actors from the era including Peter Cushing and all-time champion scenery chewers Burgess Meredith and Jack Palance. On the downside, this is still very much in the classic Gothic style in a lot of ways. It wants to be more modern, and it can’t quite pull it off.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Evil of Frankenstein

Films: The Evil of Frankenstein
Format: DVD from Nippersink District Library through interlibrary loan on The New Portable.

As a teacher, I don’t let my students use Wikipedia as a reference. That said, I use it all the time myself for this blog. It’s handy for checking plot points when I go through these posts, making sure I know who was who and who did what. That habit causes me some interesting realizations now and then. When I looked up The Evil of Frankenstein on Wikipedia, I discovered that this scant little 84-minute movie was packed with a surprising amount of stuff. The plot summary is ten paragraphs long. What this means is that I’ll be condensing quite a bit, because no movie with this short of a running time needs to have that much stuff going on in it.

We open on a body snatching, where the body snatcher takes the corpse to none other than Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) himself. Working with Frankenstein is his henchman/assistant Hans (Sandor Ellis). Frankenstein removes the heart from the corpse, hooks it up to machinery, and soon enough he’s got that heart a-pumpin’ on its own. Sadly for him, a local many of the clergy shows up in his lab and starts trashing the place. Dr. F. just can’t catch a break, so he and Hans run off. It’s here that we get a long flashback about Frankenstein’s attempt to create the monster (played both in the flashback and the current time by Kiwi Kingston). It was kind of successful, kind of not, and his monster goes on a loopy ol’ monster rampage and eventually the Baron is run off.

Bloody Good

Films: Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
Format: DVD from Putnam County Public Library through interlibrary loan on various players.

I have a love of Hammer horror movies, and honestly I think anyone who has any affinity for horror probably feels the same way. The Hammer films are a sort of a tangible bridge between the tamer Gothic horror tales and weird science fiction through the ‘50s and the much harder and violent horror of the ‘70s. Many of the Hammer films are darker than the earlier films, often bloodier and grittier. But they also resurrect many of the classic Universal monsters and bring them forward, if not in setting in most cases, at least in terms of color and violence. Actors like Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee made a lot of their bones in films like this, often play opposite each other. Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is generally forgotten in the Hammer series, and it’s far better than that sad fate.

In a small Eastern European town in the early 20th century, there are terrible memories of the reign of Count Dracula. But we are a year past that as the movie starts, and while Dracula himself no longer curses the town, his shadow is still on the area and the people. The local priest (Ewan Hooper) has more or less given up on holding mass, forcing a visit from the area’s monsignor (Rupert Davies). He treks up to Dracula’s castle and exorcises it, planting a massive golden cross across the door.

Return of the Giant Hogweed

Film: The Day of the Triffids
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

A good storyteller can make just about anything scary. Some things are certainly harder than others; Night of the Lepus demonstrated that. So what about killer plants? Invasion of the Body Snatchers sits on one end of the “scary plant” continuum with probably Attack of the Killer Tomatoes on the other end. Somewhere in the middle is Little Shop of Horrors, and right along the same line is The Day of the Triffids (sometimes called Invasion of the Triffids. Our creatures are killer man-eating plants from outer space, more mobile than Audrey II, and without the luxurious singing voice.

The film opens with a little backstory on carnivorous plants and introduces us to the triffids, which (in the movie, not the book) crash landed on Earth on a meteor. Triffids can grow to seven feet high or so, and are capable of uprooting themselves and “walking.” This characteristic is interesting, because it brings up something that’s important to talk about before we get into the story aspects of this: influence.

Five for the Price of One

Film: Tales from the Crypt
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

I ride a number of hobby horses on this blog—Tarantino is overrated, “coming of age” stories for girls are always about inappropriate sex—but one that seems to come back over and over all the time is the value (or lack thereof) of horror anthologies. Anthologies are always iffy because the quality is rarely consistent. That said, older anthologies tend to be better in general. That being the case, I had some hope going in to Tales from the Crypt from 1972. That it includes Peter Cushing and Ralph Richardson among others made me hopeful as well.

And, well, it’s not bad. Tales from the Crypt naturally has a framing story and then has five short tales all taken from the pages of EC Comics titles like “The Haunt of Fear” and, well, “Tales from the Crypt.” A group of five people show up for a tour of some catacombs where they are confronted by a robed man (Ralph Richardson), who is our Crypt Keeper. He then shows each of them a tale of dire warning about some terrible misdeed they are planning to commit. Well, kind of. We’ll get to that in a second.

Because "Train Car of Horrors" Wouldn't Sell

Film: Dr. Terror’s House of Horror
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

Anthology movies seem to be horror movies almost by default. I think that’s because you can tell a quick horror story and get people to care at least a little bit about the characters quickly. There’s a natural empathy for people put in danger, and that’s what horror is all about. Still, I prefer movies that have one main story rather than watching anthologies. Anthology films always seem to offer short shrift on the good stories and have too many stories that aren’t that interesting clogging things up. Even one that has a lot of heft behind it, like the awesomely-named Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors doesn’t have the heft it should based on the cast.

Our framing story takes place on a train. Half a dozen men end up sitting in the same train car. It turns out that one of these men is Dr. Schreck (Peter Cushing), which he tells the other men means “terror” in German. Dr. Schreck has a tarot deck with him that he claims will tell the future of each of the other five men, should they wish it. If you guessed that we’re going to get five stories, each one being the future of one of these men, well, you’ve seen the set up to an anthology film before.

Wednesday Horror: Paranoiac

Films: Paranoiac
Format: DVD from Nippersink District Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.

I’ve been watching a lot of weird Hammer horror movies of late thanks to a collection I got from the library. Of all of the movies in this collection, Paranoiac is probably the weirdest in a lot of respects. The basic story is mildly strange, but there are a couple of moments here that are completely inexplicable. I say that because, well, the details of them are not explained in the context of the film.

Our film opens on a sort of requiem, a pseudo-funeral for people who have been dead for years. After a little exposition, we discover that a married couple was killed in an accident years previously. A few years after that, one of their children killed himself with grief. Two children, now essentially grown, remain. Eleanor Ashby (Jeanette Scott) is emotionally fragile and appears to have been quite attached to her dead brother. The other is Simon Ashby (Oliver Reed), who is aggressive, drunken, and the sort of rich dudebro who, today, would probably drive a Hummer and wear his baseball caps backwards. Also in the picture is Harriet (Sheila Burrell), the children’s aunt, who raised them once their parents died.

Off Script: The Creeping Flesh

Film: The Creeping Flesh
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

It’s hard not to love Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee films from the ‘50s through the ‘70s. They’re campy and silly and loaded with cheese, and our two heroes always play things so seriously. It takes a certain kind of actor to be able to say ridiculous lines and work with ridiculous props without becoming ridiculous himself. These two could do it. They elevate the material they are given to work with. In the case of a film like The Creeping Flesh, that ability to elevate the material is going to be important.

This is a typical early-mid 1970s British horror film in a lot of respects. We’re going to jump back in time to the late Victorian period where so much Brit horror seems to be centered. There’s something very interesting about those just post-industrial years where, with a little bit of tweaking, we could have all been living in a steampunk future. Anyway, The Creeping Flesh is right there at the crossroads of the early stages of modern technology and the end of more barbaric eras of medicine and mental health care.