Ten Days of Terror!: Horror Shorts

Film: Frankenstein (1910); Thriller; The Skeleton Dance
Format: Internet video on Fire!

In the early days of film, almost everything was an experiment. When you look at the earliest of the silents, they start by showing essentially real life to the audience. We slowly start to develop the idea of stories and doing something more than just showing people walking or dancing or trains pulling into stations. Frankenstein, very loosely based on the Mary Shelley novel, was produced by the Edison company, is a film that tried to advance the language of film. How successful it is, however, is not as easy to determine.

There’s honestly not a lot here that connects to the actual story. Oh, we’re going to have a guy named Frankenstein (Augustus Phillips) who is engaged to be married to a woman named Elizabeth (Mary Fuller), a ceremony threatened by Frankenstein’s creation of a monster (Charles Ogle). But that’s where the similarities end.

Going Out for Italian

Film: Innocent Blood
Format: Internet video on the new internet machine.

Of all of the basic monster types, vampires are probably the ones who have the most movies about them. Most of them make a few changes to the basic idea of vampire lore, anatomy, or what have you, but they all follow the basics. One thing that a lot of vampire movies have in common is the existential dread that vampires seem to feel about being predators. While there’s a little of that in Innocent Blood (also known by the awesome title of A French Vampire in America), the film does away with a lot of that by having the main prey of the vampires be the criminal underworld.

That right there would set apart Innocent Blood from virtually every other vampire movie going. Our bloodsucker, a French vampire named Marie (Anne Parillaud), survives specifically by preying on the worst elements of society. As the film begins, we find ourselves dealing with the mob. She overlooks a potential meal in Joe Gennaro (Anthony LaPaglia) and settles instead on another crime figure (Chazz Palminteri). When she’s done feeding, she shoots the mobster in the face to prevent him from coming back.

Off Script: The Twilight Zone: The Movie

Film: The Twilight Zone: The Movie
Format: DVD from Byron Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

If you’re older than about 30, you watched The Twilight Zone on television at some point. This was the television version of M. Night Shyamalan’s career, except that the twists almost always worked on the television show. Weird, creepy little stories that sometimes packed a moral lesson and sometimes just wanted to give people the shivering willies made for good television. Seriously, when I was younger, it was probably the only show I knew of where people my age would voluntarily watch a black-and-white television show because the stories were frequently that good. So, it’s only natural that eventually The Twilight Zone: The Movie was conceived of and released.

What I remember most about it from 1983 (it’s release date falls squarely between my sophomore and junior years in high school) is the controversy that surrounded it. Specifically, that controversy was the rather horrifying deaths of actors Vic Morrow, Renee Chen, and My-ca Dinh Le (the latter two being 6- and 7-years-old respectively), who were killed when a helicopter crashed on them while filming the first segment. This accident led to multiple court cases and almost led to the cancellation of the entire project. What I remember most was people being more than a little outraged that the film itself seemed to take no notice of this tragedy, not following the typical pattern of dedicating the film to someone close to the production who had died.

He's the Hairy-Handed Gent Who Ran Amok in Kent

Film: An American Werewolf in London
Format: VHS from personal collection on big ol’ television and streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Certain sub-genres of film get tired. The death knell has been signaled for Westerns more than once, and yet they still show up and some of them are still good. Werewolf movies had a bad reputation for years as low-grade b-movies out for cheap shocks and crappy special effects. In fact, I challenge anyone to name a good werewolf film between the release of The Wolf Man in 1941 and 1980. All of that changed in 1981 with the release of two really good werewolf movies: The Howling and today’s cinematic masterpiece (a term I try not to bandy about lightly), An American Werewolf in London.

According to legend, John Landis got the idea for this film while working on the set of Kelly’s Heroes when he witnessed a gypsy burial. The burial involved putting the corpse into a very deep grave feet first and wrapped in garlic. This was intended to prevent the body from rising again. Landis’s essential starting point was, “but what if it did?” Obviously, that basic premise mutated quite a bit to give us a werewolf picture, but there is a sort of genetic connection here between the idea of a risen corpse and the violent and funny werewolf movie that was actually created.