Author Archives: Glen

Spooky Season Ghost Movies

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I’ve recently realized that in two years of writing this blog, I’ve covered very few ghost stories. I don’t know why, but I just don’t find myself watching a lot of haunted house flicks. I mean, there are some classics that I love, and haunted houses do spooky so well, and yet, I relatively rarely check out a new one on release. So I thought that as it is a busy month for me and it will be difficult to write a lot of posts, maybe I could just set the rule that in the limited time I have, I will mostly watch ghost movies that I haven’t seen before (haunted houses if possible, but not exclusively), and try to write about all that I see.

You may or may not have noticed, but as a rule, I only write positive reviews here. I figure if a movie doesn’t do it for me, it’s no skin off my back, and I have better things to do with my time than write about it, so I try to only discuss work that I actually find interesting, about which I have something to say. I figure it’s not my job to say if something is good or bad, but to give some consideration to whatever in it piques my interest. That said, this may be a bit of a challenge since I don’t know what my response will be to each of these. I hope that even in cases where I don’t love a given movie, there will be something worthwhile to discuss. Let’s see…

Haunted Mansion (2023)

This has got to be the first Disney movie I’m reviewing on this blog, but it showed up on Disney+ recently, and a kid’s haunted house movie just felt like a perfect way to get into the Halloween mood. Will it be the scariest movie you’ve ever seen? Certainly not (I’m assuming none of my readers are five – prove me wrong)! But is it a solid horror movie for a young crowd? I really think so.

Now, I don’t have kids and it’s been a while since I was one, but I felt this was a really fun haunted house ride for young viewers. I’ve also never been to Disney Land and ridden the ride, so I can’t speak to comparison, but I rather got a kick out of this. It’s big and funny and quite silly, with some over the top performances here and there, loads of comedy – both slapstick and sardonic, and a main villain who’s quite cartoony, but it’s also surprisingly well grounded in a palpable sense of grief, it’s got some fun spooky atmosphere and play with scary-not scary ghost moments, and one jump scare that I think would be pretty startling for the target audience, as well as a very likeable cast (I was very impressed with 14 year old Chase Dillon – that kid’s got timing and a great dry delivery). Plus, it takes some rather dark turns, such as a third act plot point centered around suicidal ideation, both from the main protagonist and from a young child.

I have no idea how this was received upon release this summer (I didn’t follow its reviews), but I could imagine some finding fault in its blend of disparate tones – from zany to serious, from cartoony, playfully executed ghost gags to real threat involving a young kid. However, I really like how it blended these elements. Looking back, I feel one of the things that’s so much fun about Halloween when you’re little is that it features the kinds of things that entertainment marketed towards you usually avoids – death, weight, sadness – and it makes it fun (though, to be fair, all the old Disney movies, Halloweenish or otherwise, feature dead mothers, so plenty of stuff for kids has dark elements – but those other kids movies don’t play with death in the same way – allowing sadness, but also showing that spooky, sad, scary things can be a blast). I think that’s the case with this film. It made me laugh, it got one jump out of me, and I was connected to its emotional center (I assume I cried – but I’m an easy mark – I cry at coffee commercials). Plus, it’s set exactly at Halloween, has some cool New Orleans vibes and is a visual treat. I hope some kids liked it – I did.

The Amityville Horror (1979)

My first time watching this, though it is a big movie of its era (and I love me some 70s horror). Honestly, I found this one a mixed bag, but its strengths more than justified the watch. It’s the not unfamiliar story of a family moving into a ‘bad place’ where odd and threatening things start happening and the father starts cracking under the pressure, poisoned by the house until it seems he might take an axe to his wife and three kids, at one point, chopping down the bathroom door behind which they’re hiding (ring any bells?). Along the way, flies fill empty rooms, a friendly neighborhood priest suffers cardiovascular distress and goes blind, a pit of blood opens up in the basement, and quite iconically, the walls bleed and a raspy voice shouts to “get out!”

I’ve never read the book, but as I understand, certain key elements are, in fact, based on a true story. In 1974, a man did murder his family in a house on the south shore of Long Island, and one year later, the Lutz family did move in, only to leave a few weeks later, claiming to have experienced paranormal horrors during their short tenure. I assume that everything else is an invention of Jay Anson, the author of the novel, or Sandor Stern, the screenwriter. And from the paragraph above, one other influence seems evident. I can’t help but note that that Stephen King published “The Shining” in ’76, Anson published his novel in ’77, the film of The Amityville Horror was released in ’79, and The Shining was released in ’80. There is surely a bundle of similarity to be found amidst the works. That said, the points at which the stories overlap were the strongest of the film for me. I can’t help but feel that, given King’s objections to Kubrick’s film, he probably would have liked to steal away James Brolin and Margot Kidder from Amityville. They are great, really carrying the film, and maybe would have given him versions of the Torrences closer to what he’d imagined (I personally do love Kubrick’s film and think Shelly Duvall knocks it out of the park, though her performance was unfairly derided at the time).

But though many things land, I’m not sure I understand everything in this movie – is this house a gate to hell? Is it haunted? Are there problems because it was built on Indian burial ground or because it was built by a Satanist, expelled from Salem? What’s up with the flies? The menacing presence sure seems to hate priests and there’s a strong current of religious horror in the foregrounding of Catholic faith (perhaps still riding the coattails of The Exorcist as so many other books and films did in this period), but that faith never seems particularly efficacious – no demons are cast out; the priest never actually does anything. Does the father really bear an uncanny resemblance to the killer from one year earlier or is this just a dark vision hoisted on his wife to freak her out (but the police sergeant sees it too)? What was that blue, pig headed monster that we see for a flash in the upper window? Are all of these questions supposed to remain unanswered and we should only understand that this is a terrible place and that they should hurry up and leave? Are we just throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the screen and hoping for the best?

At the end of the day, the one thing I really connect to, that feels genuinely solid, is the central relationship. I buy the love between the Lutzes. I believe that James Brolin’s George really cares about his wife and her kids, enough to take a big financial risk in buying this money pit that he can’t afford, enough also to have apparently ‘changed his religion’ as is mentioned by a friend of his – making the scene where he tries to cleanse the house with Catholic prayer kind of moving even if I’m otherwise turned off by such things – he is doing the thing that is important to the woman he loves, he is acting on her belief to try to respond to the very real terrors they’ve experienced at this point. I also absolutely believe the threat he represents. The way he gets closer and closer to the edge is scary. Is an evil force acting on him or is he just under so much stress that he is becoming dangerous, even to those he loves? Or, perhaps most frighteningly, did Margot Kidder’s Kathy just marry a dangerous, angry man, and the house just reveals his true character? The film, and Brolin’s performance, walk a line where all of these could be true. Either way, he gets pretty terrifying (but he goes back for the dog at the end, so I’m gonna say he’s still a good guy). And who couldn’t love Margot Kidder? Seeing how strong and tough and full of life her character begins, but having the sense that she’s been through it (we never learn about what happened with her first husband – did he die? Was he abusive and she had to get away with the kids? What does that mean for her as she watches her new husband fraying around the edges and snapping at them?), when she crumbles under the weight of the house, it’s awful.

So, I can’t say that this is my favorite haunted house film (if it’s even haunted – maybe it’s possessed), but I am glad to have finally seen it. It looks great, the acting is top shelf, there is solid unsettling atmosphere, some very effective filming (the close ups on the flies stand out), and it’s got a memorable, lilting, creepy theme. Plus, I grew up in Massapequa Park, only one stop over on the Babylon line of the Long Island Rail Road from Amityville, so there’s even a small, personal connection.

Brooklyn 45 (2023)

This one is interesting. I appreciate its willingness to be its own thing – less a modern horror movie than a chamber drama revolving around a séance, literal ghosts demanding that characters carry out actions which perpetuate roles they’ve played in the past, roles from which some strive to be free. It is a unique piece, even if I can’t say that I totally fell for it.

Set in December 1945, a few months after the end of the war, a group of old friends meet to comfort one whose wife has recently committed suicide. Though he’d never been religious or spiritual, he has become obsessed with reaching out to her and making contact. Reluctantly, they all agree to try the ceremony. Without going into detail, as there are emotional outbursts, and character revelations aplenty, the night takes a dark turn and everyone in the group is forced to confront the metaphorical ghosts of their pasts – actions they took during the war, identities they’ve forged for themselves, pain and rage and recrimination that they all have trouble letting go of.

The story feels very much like a theatrical play – like “12 Angry Men” with ghosts and war themes – this small group essentially locked in a room in real time, confronting each other and themselves. This is both the strength of the piece and an element that could turn off certain viewers. There is something a bit stagey about it all. They are all very much “characters” – while they are all played very well, and fully inhabited, each is so clearly drawn that it actually feels a bit artificial (at least it did for me), as if each character must hold certain views and perform certain actions so the themes and issues of the piece can be seen in stark contrast, each one not only a person, but also a representative idea.

This may sound intriguing to you, or it may seem like I’m coming down on it, which I don’t want to do. For all that I remained at a bit of arm’s length, I was also thoroughly engaged the whole time, and the play of ideas has moving resonance. Right now, the news is full of the conflict in Israel (sadly, regardless of when you read this, that will probably always be true – now, or in ten years) – and a piece that is all to do with people incapable of letting go of a cycle of past wrongs, people who will never feel the war is over, people forever driven to hate and fight and, in understandably defending themselves, inevitably ignore the perceived enemy’s humanity, and thus do horrible things out of a drive to see justice done – a piece that brings the tensions of such themes to heart feels urgent and meaningful and good.

Also, while it doesn’t do a lot of “spooky,” when it decides to get ghostly or brutal or horrific, this emotional drama is willing to be pretty rough. It is definitely a horror piece and I think it’s a good example of how horror can target complex emotion in a particularly effective manner.

So, if this sounds like something you’re up for, I do suggest giving it a try. It won’t be for everyone, but it is a special little piece and I’m glad it’s out there.  

The Uninvited (1944)

Well, this was just a delight. There is something so appealing to me about the old fashioned wit and charm you get in movies from the 40s and this delivered both qualities in spades. And on top of that, it really offers a solid, spooky ghost story with an engaging, emotional mystery. Apparently, The Uninvited stood out at the time of its release because it was a haunted house movie in which the house was, you know, actually haunted and not just the manifestation of a Scooby-Doo-esque  prank. I haven’t seen enough of its contemporaries to compare, but it navigates the classic ghost elements capably – flowers suddenly wilt in strangely chilly rooms where household pets refuse to go, if they don’t just run away altogether, eerie sobbing echoes though darkened hallways just before dawn, and a young woman is thrust into a trance in which she’s compelled to run heedlessly towards the cliff’s edge where she believes her mother had fallen to her death years before. There is a strong sense that something really does inhabit this space and that it has what might be both affection for and deadly designs on the above referenced young lady.

Much of the haunting is carried out with a light touch, often accompanied by levity (such as when the leading man comforts his sister that everything is alright before running to his room and hiding under the covers), but for all that, the drama of the ghost story proceeds in deadly earnest. There is a dark, sorrowful secret to uncover, and moments of real weight and threat, all of which come to bear in the ghostly presences that fill this old, candle lit house, perched above the crashing waves.

In short, Rick and his sister, Pamela, while vacationing together in Cornwall, come upon a beautiful old manor by the sea and buy it for a song from an elderly man eager to be rid of it. His granddaughter, Stella, is distraught as it had been her mother’s house and the place where she’d died. As the embers of romance are kindled between Rick and Stella, they come to realize that the house is haunted, and that it is very dangerous for Stella to be near it as it seems to drive her to run for the cliff’s side, leading everyone involved down a spooky rabbit hole, investigating the truth of how and why Stella’s mother really died.

Along the way, we get séances, no shortage of things going bump in the night, and a nurse character eerily reminiscent of Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (I do wonder how the overt lesbian subtext was read at the time by contemporary audiences – it is certainly not positive representation, but it is, rather strikingly, such obvious representation…), who is similarly devoted to a long dead woman whose presence so hangs over the house and drives the emotional action of the story. We also get moments of lightness and romance that really worked for me (it’s 1944 – you just have to choose not to be bothered that the adult Rick is falling in love with the 17 year old Stella). There is something so gentle and warm and genuine about the relationships – romantic or otherwise. Neither Stella nor Pamela come across as silly little things, and therefore, seeing love spark (in Pam’s case, with the local doctor) plays out quite movingly. And the degree to which this is really not a “love story,” but rather a story of murder, recrimination, and the weight of the past means that the romance just brings some refreshing life into the proceedings without ever becoming saccharine.

I can’t claim that it scared the pants off me, but it did offer pleasant, gentle chills and spooky seaside atmosphere, I was fully invested in the emotion of the central mystery, I really liked how essential the supernatural was to the drama (a rarity at the time), and I was quite taken with both the comic relief that didn’t undercut the seriousness of the ghost story and the romance that somehow clicked in such a satisfying manner. Just a lovely picture. To be fair, I expect few modern horror fans are probably looking for something that might be described as ‘lovely,’ but if you are open to its old timey charm, I think you may find it rewarding.

Hell House, LLC (2015)

Ok, this will be a little tricky to navigate. Thus far, in this run down of Haunted House movies that I’ve not seen before, I’ve covered a number of flicks that, at least from a modern horror perspective, aren’t exactly suuuper scary – and I wanted to remedy that with this next entry. I’d long read that Hell House, LLC is a properly scary found footage piece that seemed like it would deal with a haunting – it would cover some different ground for this post: more modern and really frightening.

The problem is… that I’m really not a fan of found footage… One of the features I most enjoy in film and certainly in horror is the cinematic pleasure that comes from something beautifully and atmospherically filmed, especially when that beauty is applied to something ugly, scary, or otherwise horrific (the juxtaposition of opposites yields such aesthetic satisfaction. So the vérité style of found footage isn’t that appealing for me, and can honestly be a turn off. The shaky camerawork, the “realistically” shrill presentation of often irritating characters, the attempt to present something as real, thus avoiding, or hiding a tighter dramatic structure, the suspension of disbelief required to accept that the camera is still running at all times. It’s just not my favorite.

That said, this movie did have scares. There were some moments that were certainly quite creepy (the camera looks at a scary clown mannequin, then looks away, then looks back and it’s head has turned – that sort of thing). I was often engaged, watching the whole frame, waiting for a shadow to move in the background or a face to suddenly appear. There is a perfectly enjoyable set up – a haunted house crew prepares a haunt in an abandoned hotel which is actually haunted and terrible things happen, and that dramatic context yielded plenty of creepy atmosphere – the fact that the place is always decorated to scare means that when characters move through it, there are so many things that could somehow activate and do something wrong. A lot of it works very well. And I always appreciate seeing creative people do so much with so little: a house, a small cast, a camera, some scary decorations – it is a low budget, big effect affair – kudos to all involved.

But it was hard for me to get past the basics of its form. The found footage of it all was just a hurdle too high that made it hard to appreciate its strengths (which ironically enough, were mostly products of it executing found footage tricks rather well). But I feel torn writing this – I always hate when some highfalutin film critic who clearly hates horror movies writes critically about a horror movie for doing the things one does in a horror movie – that kind of movie they clearly don’t like (so often true of Roger Ebert – often a good voice on cinema, but he was no friend to the genre). Not everything needs to be for everybody, right? If you like these kinds of movies, you’ve probably seen this already. If you haven’t, check it out – it’s scary. If you don’t have the stomach for the camera constantly being jostled about, maybe steer clear… I guess I’m glad, at least, to have finally scratched it off my watchlist as I’d long heard it praised – and rightly so (if you’re into that sort of thing).

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And maybe that’s all I can squeeze in. To be fair, these aren’t all of the horror movies that I’ve watched this month – I broke that rule pretty quickly, but I do think these five covered a wide spectrum of the genre – from stagey, thoughtful drama, to over the top, seventies, religiously inflected excess, to playful children’s entertainment, to classic, classy old spooky-romance, to solidly scary, modern found footage. Otherwise, the cabaret I work with has been preparing our Halloween show (as I wrote about last year) and I happily enjoyed a steady stream of old favorites to keep me company as I sewed or Papier-mâchéied or painted or what have you (it’s always nice to be kept company by the likes of fun, oft watched fare like Return of the Living Dead, Fright Night, Halloween III, Friday the 13th Part II, Child’s Play, or The Vampire Lovers – all movies I can have on in the background as I accidentally stab myself with a needle – my hand stitching leaves much to be desired).

But as for the hauntings, I’m glad to have seen these all. Each has its own specific charms and excels in its specific fashion. They may not top the lists of ghost movies out there (there’s a reason I hadn’t gotten around to seeing them yet), but it is a pleasure to dig a little deeper and experience what they have to offer.

Also, as I’m just barely squeaking this in under the line before the month is out, I hope you all have (or had) a Happy Halloween!

Me at a Halloween party last night, rocking the creepy burlap mask I made, in my shiny new Faculty of Horror t-shirt.

Horror and Tragedy Pt.I – The Bacchae and The Wicker Man

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I so often say this (and it doesn’t come true), but my intention is for this to be a short post. I just got back from a two week vacation in Greece (fancy, huh?) and I really want to get some quick thoughts down on paper and return to them later to go more in depth (hence, “Pt. 1”). We’ll see how that works out…

I particularly enjoyed in Greece periodically being at some ancient site where it was possible to ignore the modern world and let my imagination spark. To be fair, this was not always the case. So often, significant ruins exist amidst the hubbub of a modern city and it’s hard to visualize the significance of what would have been a grand temple to a god people fervently believed in when you’re looking at two pillars standing bare, next to a busy, noisy street. But there were a few locations where I was able to make the imaginary leap, and in that, there was a special kind of magic. I’ve long been a fan of mythology (for a great retelling of the Greek stories, I highly recommend Stephen Fry’s three volumes of Greek myths and legends, written in a very modern, engaging, exciting, and often funny idiom: Mythos, Heroes, and Troy), and so, frequently it was the mythological significance of a given location that ignited my fancy, but more often it was a link to ancient drama.

The gate at Mycenea, the seat of Agamemnon and hence, the setting of many tragedies.

I came up in the theatre and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides loom large in my understanding of dramatic forms and structure. Walking up the hill to the palace complex at Mycenae, there was a delicate frisson of magic in visualizing Agamemnon returning victorious, Cassandra in tow as a spoil of war, having been stolen away from what had been the richest, most opulent city in the Greek world (Troy) and dragged to this politically and militarily powerful, but otherwise remote, strange land, screaming all the way about how her captor was doomed to meet his death at the hands of his wife and her lover (in revenge for sacrificing their daughter so the Greek ships could set sail), her cries of warning falling on deaf ears, all this more than 3000 years ago. Driving from Corinth to Thebes and then to Delphi, a trip of 200 km, often through craggy mountains, it was fascinating to consider Oedipus making such a journey on foot to learn the disturbing prophecy concerning his parentage, leading him to take every step to prevent it from coming to pass, which of course only hastened its fulfillment (Greek tragedies often prefigured time travel movies, teaching us that you can’t – and really shouldn’t try to – mess with a timeline).

From a 19th century Dutch production of Oedipus Rex, shortly after he stabs his own eyes out.

But this is a horror blog – why am I going on about old Greek plays?

Well, I’ve long had it in mind to dig into the notion of ‘tragedy’ (as an aesthetic concept – not as merely a very sad thing that can happen to someone) and how it relates to ‘horror,’ as I feel there’s a connection and that, in fact, the latter may be the true modern inheritor of the former. For a long time, tragedy was one of the very few genres of dramatic art (in the European context at least). From the Greeks, to the Romans, to Shakespeare – for millennia, we didn’t divide narrative entertainments into westerns or war films or horror, but generally into comedies and tragedies (sometimes histories, morality plays, or sex farces too, but the point is, tragedy was one of the biggies).

Now, in our modern times, perhaps thanks to the advent of nuanced naturalistic performance and writing, more focused on ‘normal people’ rather than larger than life ‘heroes,’ tragedy as a genre has fallen out of vogue. The old ones are still performed, but I think they now more often fall under the umbrella of ‘drama.’ However, I do find it striking that in the horror genre, a critically underappreciated field of artistic endeavor, certain key elements of tragedy live on today.

So I’d like to examine this. I think this first text will be on the short side, as I’ve been away on vacation and my mind is fuzzy, but I hope to return to this idea over the next months a couple more times to flesh it out more fully.

Pity and Fear

I love horror (or I wouldn’t pay for hosting this blog) and I also love tragedy – two genres calibrated to make the viewer “feel bad.” But while tragedy is overwhelmingly associated with ‘high culture,’ horror tends to be viewed as ‘low.’ Still I think they go on a similar journey: In classical tragedy, the protagonist is often given cause for at least concern, if not full on dread – they operate for much of the run time of the play under this pervasive sense of doom – they push on, true to their character, until they recognize what is often a terrible, unbearable truth (what Aristotle termed “anagnorisis”) – which ultimately drives them to a final, heroic, self-destroying (but possibly also defining act) act. Aristotle argued that all of this should come together to inspire pity and fear, calling them the “proper pleasures of tragedy.” By subjecting themselves to this terrible, though fictional experience, the audience can exercise their deepest, most unsettling emotions and in the end, exorcise them as well, undergoing a cleansing “catharsis.” While not every detail maps to every modern horror film (honestly, they didn’t really map to every tragedy in Aristotle’s time either), I think this concept should feel familiar for any horror buff.

Horror fans understand that pity and fear can be a source of great pleasure. We choose to watch, and are able to enjoy, fictional matter intended to be terrible, intended to inspire at least terror, but often much worse. We know the peculiar pleasures of sitting through cringe inducing, gasp eliciting horrors, knowing the laughter that can often follow a good scare or moment of revulsion, knowing how when horror really works, it can leave you feeling fresh, alive, perhaps “cleansed.” Wes Craven is quoted as saying that horror is “like a boot camp for the psyche” and that “horror films don’t create fear – they release it,” and I think for horror lovers, that’s true (mileage may vary – there are people in my life, people I love, who just can’t do horror – for them the tension is never released, catharsis doesn’t occur, and rather than being cleansed, they just continue to feel bad for a long time).

But for those who partake, when it works, it really sings. And I feel I’ve experienced very similar feelings at the culmination of good tragedy and good horror. I love what I think of as the ‘tragic pinch’ – the moment when a tragedy all comes together and just hurts so good – when all that is good and all that is terrible is somehow thrust together and something in the soul cries out in response to unbearable beauty  – the drama revealing some terrible truth. This brings to mind my favorite definition of tragedy, coined by the 19th century German philosopher, Hegel, who described it as “the conflict between two mutually exclusive goods.” For example, both Antigone and Creon act out of unyielding moral purpose and are thus thrust into irreconcilable conflict. Whereas the action of the play may lead to their downfall, for the audience, a kind of reconciliation of moral impulses can occur. Personally, I don’t know about what reads as a prescriptive call for “a new moral synthesis via the dialectic of the drama,” but his descriptive analysis of effective tragedy living in the conflict of two “good” things really rings true for me.

And finally, to once again bring this back to our genre of choice, this particular juxtaposition of conflicting goods that both lead to bad, I contend, can be found in so much horror work, delivering the horrific shudder of something quite akin to my “tragic pinch.” When at the culmination of The VVitch, Thomasina signs the devil’s book and rises, laughing, into the night, she is finally free from unbearable deprivation, hardship, and puritanical oppression, but to get there, her whole family had to die and she had to sign away her soul. At the end of The Cabin in the Woods, forced to choose between the good of her own life and that of her friends and the good of the whole world, Dana chooses to value her friends most, and the world is lost. For a very common example, so much horror turns on the notion of “yes, you’ve made it through the night, but at such cost”; watching Sally ride away in the back of that pickup at the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, covered in blood and laughing maniacally, one doesn’t have much hope for her future – she’s still breathing, but what remains? Like the poster says, “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”

Or furthermore, how many movies feature a character become truly monstrous in order to survive? In 28 Days Later, Jim seems to embrace his own rage (sans viral infection), dropping from the rafters to brutally gouge out the eyes of a rapist soldier, to rescue Selena –and in doing so, something of his humanity seems to be sacrificed.  Sarah’s turn to the monstrous, rising out of a pool of blood with death in her eyes and leaving Juno to die in The Descent follows a similar track. In all of these cases, and so many, many more, the height of not just simple scariness, but full on ‘horror’ consists in this moment of excruciating, exhilarating moral tension. I root for Thomasina and glory in her emancipation; I love Dana’s vengeful decision; I want Sally to escape; and I can roar along with Jim’s and Sarah’s animal rage – and at the same time, I feel the weight of loss and sacrifice and madness that accompany all of these ‘goods.’ Even as I cheer the choices, there is a clench in my gut as well – the dark consequence/cost still lands. And it is often the movies that give me this “horror moral tension” that I love the most.

Don’t mess with a god

Back to the Greece trip, I was particularly happy to make it to Thebes. Little remains at the archeological site of the palace – just a hole in the ground in the middle of a small, contemporary Greek city, but at their rather well organized historical museum, I was struck to be at another site where so many of the old tragedies took place – Oedipus Rex and Antigone are two prominent example, but most notable for me is one of my favorites, The Bacchae by Euripides. And while we were there, I was struck with the realization of how well that play parallels one of my favorite horror films, The Wicker Man. So I think it could be interesting to go through them to see how they both manage to land that moment of the “tragedy pinch,” or the “horror moral tension.”

I’ll start with what may be the more unfamiliar work for the horror crowd. The Bacchae is all about the cult of Dionysus (a new god at that time, not yet established in the pantheon) coming to the city of Thebes. In a way, Dionysus was from Thebes. His mother, Semele, was a Theban princess and a lover of Zeus, compelled by a jealous Hera to beg him to reveal himself to her in his true form. Reluctant, he acquiesced, and thus struck by a lightning bolt, she exploded. Zeus found the fetus of his new child amidst the charred wreckage of his lover and sewed it up in his thigh to grow to term – this grew to be Dionysus, the god of wine and theatre, of wild frenzy and orgiastic abandon. His new cult developed in the east and he eventually brought it to his home town where his cousin, Pentheus was now in charge. 

Vase showing the birth of Dionysus out of Zeus’s thigh.

When the play begins, the cult of Dionysus has been gathering in the nearby mountains for some time, drawing the women of the city out into the wilderness to get wasted and act all mysterious and wild – Theban society is totally disrupted by this and there is a conservative moral panic – what should be done about this hedonistic, new, drunken orgy cult? Won’t somebody think of the children! Pentheus isn’t having any of it and has Dionysus apprehended, humiliated (for example, cutting off his long hippy hair), interrogated and imprisoned. Refusing to accept the claimed divinity of this new presence, Pentheus is tricked by Dionysus into dressing up as a woman and going off to infiltrate the Bacchae (the female followers of Dionysus) in the mountains to see what’s actually going on. While he’s there, the worship grows more and more fevered until, caught up in an inebriated trance, the women go all bloodthirsty, tearing apart goats and cows with their bare hands. Finally, they turn on Pentheus, and it is his own mother, Dionysus’s aunt, Agave, who rips off his head and carries it triumphantly back into the city of Thebes.

Pentheus about to be pulled apart.

And here comes the horror. When she arrives, she’s still kind of worked up, high on the rush of the kill, of the lust, of the wine. She proudly approaches the chorus, declaring how she’s brought back the head of a lion that she, an old woman, managed to kill, as proof of the power bestowed upon her by her new deity, and she demands that her son be brought to her so that she might show him this glorious evidence. There is a solid scene of the chorus trying to get her to really see what’s in her hands before the horrific realization finally dawns on her. And when it does, it is terrible.

Image of Agave carved on an ancient jewel.

Something I love about this play is how for the vast majority of it, Pentheus just comes off as a dick. He is a prude, a moral scold who doesn’t like long haired hippies and is just trying to be a massive buzzkill for everyone else’s fun. Both the chorus and some of the city elders try to get him to see the light, warning him that you shouldn’t mess with a god, and going on to praise the wonders this new god has bestowed on them – inebriation, drunkenness, the ability to find respite from the endless troubles of life in the sweet forgetfulness of the fruit of the vine. And yet, in the end, those elders and that chorus are uniformly horrified at what comes to pass. They want to look away. While Pentheus was an unreasonable jerk, and Dionysus was a real cool guy, and everyone was having a really good time, the power of the god is also terrible and inhumane and unforgiving. The play ends with that horrific tension I love of getting what we want to see, but it’s awful. We had an amazing time last night at the party, but in the cold light of day, with a terrible hangover, we don’t like ourselves anymore. Maybe we have a problem.

The Wicker Man

Which brings us to The Wicker Man. Like Pentheus, Sergeant Howie is an unbearable, puritanical moral scold who cannot accept the pagan ways of the community he finds in Summerisle. We can go along with him in trying to find a missing child who may have been murdered, but he is constantly a jerk to the seemingly fun folk he encounters in this small, Scottish island town. Everywhere he turns, he brings the supposed authority of the Church and the State to bear, shouting at teachers, children, librarians, and people hanging out in a de-consecrated cemetery or singing in a raucous pub about how wicked they are. For the audience, the people of Summerisle come off as rather lovely – lusty, earthy types whose faith isn’t really any weirder than Howie’s Christianity. They seem a fun lot – hearty and having a really good time, with a nice, sex-positive attitude and catchy, bawdy folk songs. Like Pentheus, Howie meets their wild reveries with a moralistic, judgmental attitude. They are both difficult protagonists to like.

But at the end, when the penny finally drops and, after going in disguise to infiltrate their revels (remember, Pentheus largely did the same), Howie is captured, put in a giant, wicker man (we have a title!), and burned alive as a sacrifice to recover the island’s failed apple crop, it is suddenly horrific. As he screams from within the burning effigy, calling out to his Christian god, the people sway in colorful costumes on the cliff side, belting out a joyful hymn, celebrating their sacrifice. It is still beautiful. They are still lovely. But the very thing that makes them so lovely, also makes them premeditated murderers, who have lured this man to their little island with the express intention to kill him in such a terrible fashion.

I’ve never felt The Wicker Man is at all a scary movie, but it stands as one of my all time absolute favorite horrors. The horrific tension of this final moment is just so rich – such overwhelming warmth and loving ‘good’ so inseparably linked to such implacable, cold-blooded ‘bad’. It sings. It screams. It pinches. It is what I want from horror. And tragedy. And, interestingly, its final moments resonate quite loudly with those of The Bacchae.

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So this is a start. Thanks for bearing with me as I try to order my thoughts about this meeting of two artistic loves of mine. Focusing on my recent Greek vacation or 5th century BC Athenian dramatic literature are both perhaps odd choices for a horror blog during “spooky season,” but these ideas have been scratching at me for a while and I’m itching to birth them into the world. Like a fetus stuck in my thigh. Next post, I imagine I’ll hit something more classically “Halloweeny,” but in the future, I hope to dig into this further…

Price, Corman, Lovecraft: The Haunted Palace

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After the interminably long gap between my last two posts, this time, I really wanted to just jump in to something fun that I was sure I could write about immediately, and today’s film certainly fit the bill. Back in the winter, I went on a run of Vincent Price films, particularly digging into some of his appearances in Roger Corman’s Poe cycle. And just last week, I sang the praises of an excellent Lovecraft adaptation, From Beyond (1986). Thus, seeing that Corman’s The Haunted Palace (1963) had recently shown up on Shudder, I leapt at it as a good opportunity to continue in two veins (Price/Corman and Lovecraft). Generally included in the Poe cycle (it stars Vincent Price and takes its name from a Poe poem, two stanzas of which are recited in the film), it is actually more historically significant in the annals of horror for being the first direct filmic adaptation of a work by H.P. Lovecraft, in this case, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.”

At the outset, I will say that while both different in style from the other Poe films and a very loose adaptation of the Lovecraft story, it did not disappoint, so let’s get into it. There will be some spoilers, but I doubt they would actually ruin your appreciation of the film, so don’t let them stop you…

The Haunted Palace (1963)

Apparently, Roger Corman had wanted to take a break from the Poe films when he chose to adapt Lovecraft’s tale, originally giving it the title of “The Haunted Village,” but higher ups at AIP felt the Poe brand was too valuable to eschew and insisted on the name change. Beyond the title, it does share certain surface qualities with the films of the Poe cycle, while very much being its own beast. Corman sets the tale earlier than Lovecraft, capitalizing on the period vibes of his other films, and contrives to place a deteriorating castle (the eponymous palace) in its New England locale, the fictional town of Arkham, the aging structure a familiar sight (and knowing his budgets and cost conscious practices, possibly allowing him to re-use previous sets). There is also a kind of literary, low-budget-classiness about the whole affair – it just feels different from the harsher roads horror would be treading by decade’s end. Finally, there is the recurring element of a house and a family cursed by the past, of horror, of evil being something to inherit.

That said, very loosely adapting a novella by Lovecraft (as opposed to very loosely adapting the works of Poe), The Haunted Palace really does have a different character – pulpier, more spook house than quasi-historical art house. More fog is pumped in front of the camera, more spider-webs are draped over the furniture, more distressing animals randomly startle someone (why is there a large snake slithering in the presumably chilly New England kitchen cupboard?), and more fearful villagers carry torches to rid their town of a terrible evil than you can shake a stick at. There are one or two jumps, though I wouldn’t call it “scary” per se, but there is tons of autumnal, Halloweeny atmosphere; it is a fun, old fashioned horror-show and I think it could be just a perfect movie for a rainy October Saturday afternoon, bundled in a blanket on the sofa.

Following the source material, Price plays dual roles: Charles Dexter Ward (though he bears no resemblance to the young, bookishly obsessive title character of Lovecraft’s novella) and his great, great grandfather, the eeeevil Joseph Curwen, a researcher in the black arts, burned as a warlock centuries earlier. Having inherited a decrepit castle in the small town of Arkham, Ward and his wife, Ann (Debra Paget in her last screen role) come to check the place out, only to be warned at every turn to shove off and go back from whence they came (seriously, I hope to one day open the door to a tavern and have everyone go silent and watch me with such terror and concern – that’s a life goal right there). I particularly enjoy an interchange when the Ward couple questions the idea of a “palace” in America, and an angry villager explains it had been brought over stone by stone “from Europe, somewhere – no one knows – no one wants to know!” This friendly New Englander doesn’t only hate accursed necromancers – he also apparently can’t stand the idea of Europe.

They take against Ward so immediately because he’s a dead ringer for his sorcerous ancestor who had cursed the town as he burned, and whose arcane experiments generations earlier (involving breeding the mesmerized women of the community with deep, dark things from another realm) are the reason that Arkham has an inordinately high rate of people with disabilities (being born without eyes or mouths, having green, scaly skin, being an inarticulate, rampaging monster – that sort of thing). When they finally get to the castle, Ward finds a portrait of his great, great grandfather, which somehow bores into his soul and starts to take over his body and his mind.

Without going into too many details, though Ward puts up a struggle for continued inhabitance of his own flesh, it is a futile one, and before long, Curwen is up to his old sinister ways, when he isn’t systematically burning townspeople so that they might feel flames on their tender flesh as once he’d done, or trying to raise his long dead mistress from the grave. Honestly, I felt there was an almost tragicomic thread about how Curwen needs to get back to his true calling, the serious matter of raising some sort of Great Old One and possibly dooming the world (or more), but driven by his all too human emotions of vengeance and love, he gets distracted from this (un)holy task, and that leads to his downfall.

As a Lovecraft piece, though we see or at least have referenced such iconic elements of the mythos as the Necronomicon, Yog-Sothoth, and Cthulhu, this occurs mostly in passing: early 60s Easter eggs for Lovecraft fans. Past that, while Corman includes the portrait and the idea of the contemporary man’s life being taken over by that of his ancestor, most of the story is new for the film. We still do retain the horrific pit in the basement, containing something with an odd number of arms that never comes into focus (it also doesn’t seem to move, so much as the camera just jitters), but I don’t know that Corman exactly captured that unknowable awfulness so characteristic of the author, bringing an unfortunately anti-climactic note to some later sequences.

That may read as a criticism, but this is no more of a departure than the Poe films. Furthermore, I don’t know for sure, but I believe that in the early 60s, Lovecraft’s work was still only appreciated by a pretty fringe readership who didn’t need to be served to ensure commercial success (thus we should be happy with what we can get), and furthermore, while there are many elements here that feel ‘typical’ of a kind of old fashioned horror flick (fog, scraggly trees, creaking gates, secret passageways in an ancient castle, etc.), it also includes a surprising amount of genuine weirdness, much of which (in Lovecraftian fashion) goes unexplained. We are never told how to interpret the blurry glowing thing in the basement; the notion of the town haunted by its own deformity (admittedly, ‘problematic’ (or just plain offensive) from a modern perspective regarding disability) feels specific (though it’s closer to “The Shadow over Innsmouth” than “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”); and the above mentioned reference to Lovecraftian mythos isn’t explicated, leaving an unfamiliar audience possibly scratching their heads about just what is being summoned (though as I’ve mentioned before, I love how this material offers something so other, dangerous, and horrific without recourse to a Christian notion of the “infernal” – Curwen is not a “Satanist” and a cross would do no one any good).

I mentioned that the blurry thing doesn’t move, and I think one weakness of the film is a lack of creative solutions for presenting (or even just effectively implying) this mysterious horror. Clearly Corman couldn’t produce the kinds of wild practical effects available to Stuart Gordon (last week’s From Beyond is really goopy). However, he did have one special effect that can’t be matched, and that is Vincent Price himself. As with Gordon’s film, Lovecraft’s peculiar style best reveals itself not in fantastical visuals, but in the acting. And the qualities Price could bring to the film were both specific to him and essential.

Obviously, he could chew the scenery, and he’s given the opportunity to do so here once or twice, but I don’t think that’s where his talent really lay. Rather, it was in the nuance. So consistently does he take a line that could be big and make it small, so often does he surprise me with a tiny, sudden shift in tone, reacting to something from without or within (a small sound, a passing thought, a toothache – we don’t always see what it is, but the reaction is so alive and specific – he never traded in bombastic generalities). There is a standout moment when Ward first sees the cursed portrait of his grandfather and in the span of a couple of seconds, so much passes across his face: shock, fascination, fear – there is some unheard first contact from beyond the grave, it revolts him, and then he shakes it all off, is a bit embarrassed or puzzled, recovers with a distant smile, reassures his concerned wife, and they move on. It could have been two minutes of melodramatic voiceover, but instead, it’s about 2 seconds of face acting, or less. It is all bigger than life, true – and this is necessary in order to do justice to the source, but it is also so human, so rich; no matter how dialed up the performance, he never tipped over into artificiality, never lost his grounding. The fact that this man never won an Oscar is just proof of how meaningless such awards are. He was a national treasure.

On one level, we see clear differences between his portrayals of Ward and Curwen, the former an affable, friendly, warm, and loving man, and the latter a fiend, but there is more. Price often brings a softness to Curwen’s villainy that makes it all the more chilling. And it’s not just a quiet intensity as some might do (an effective but possibly obvious affect), but rather, it’s often gentle, even tender. This particular monster is not lacking in human feeling and sensitivity, even if he really is just the worst (subjecting the mesmerized women of Arkham to forced impregnation by otherworldly monsters, assaulting Ward’s wife, and you know, possibly trying to destroy the world). In each moment, I feel Vincent Price makes the most interesting choice, and no matter how repugnant the character, he is never less than magnetic to watch. These qualities are why we still know his work today, and this film couldn’t function without him. I understand some had wanted a younger actor (which would have better matched the story), but Corman was right to stick to his guns and keep Price in the role.

So that is The Haunted Palace. Not the scariest movie I’ve ever seen, sure, but certainly an old fashioned good time, totally itself, and enriched beyond measure by Price’s singular talents. October’s just around the corner – maybe find a rainy afternoon and give it a watch.

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Before signing off today, this is the second anniversary of starting this blog and I just wanted to mark the occasion. I think it’s been a good year and there’s much that I’m proud of.

Basic numbers: I wrote about 130,000 words in 39 posts (just a bit shorter than “The Shining”). I added 58 movie reviews and one book review (I have to read more horror – I know). I did some memoiring in sharing a horror themed holiday I had last year, detailing a Halloween performance of the Cabaret I work with, and reconstructing my personal history with the horror genre. I finally put down in words an analysis of King’s and Kubrick’s respective Shinings that I’ve had rolling around in my head for years. In doing some surface level research for a small performance, I roughed out some thoughts on 50s-teensploitation-as-horror. And I also pinned down a few ideas about sleaze, exploitation, camp, and campiness that have been scratching at the corners of my mind for a while. Along the way, I’ve given myself license to devote thought, energy, and care to consideration of horror films new and old, mainstream and more obscure, that give me pleasure. In a life full of many responsibilities, this time is a gift I give myself – I hope its result is interesting, edifying, humorous, or in some other way valuable for you, dear reader.

Though the blog has never taken on a particularly interactive quality, google analytics tells me more people are coming (mostly for the now five posts on the Lesbian Vampire subgenre – what can I say, people love lesbian vampires), so if you are newly here, welcome to my blog. And if you visit periodically, thank you so much for coming back. We may not communicate directly (though I cordially invite you to leave a comment – it’s always exciting to get one that isn’t from Russian spambots advertising porn and casino links), but I’m glad to know you’re out there. Though I mainly write for my own satisfaction, somehow it wouldn’t be satisfying enough to do it every week (or two, or three – keeping deadlines is tough) if you weren’t looking at it. Hope you keep coming back!

Perfectly “Lovecraftian” – From Beyond

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I make a lot of plans. For example, I’ve got a long spreadsheet for this blog, listing things I know I want to cover – I don’t have it all scheduled, but I know what I want to devote my time to, and there are topics I’m really looking forward to eventually dealing with. But “the best laid plans of mice and men” and all that…sometimes you just see something and have such a strong response that it jumps to the front of the line, and that’s what happened with today’s movie, Stuart Gordon’s 1986 adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, “From Beyond.” But hey, at least when my plans go askew, no one gets an eye sucked out…which only happens once in this movie, but it is memorable.

Now, I’d watched this before about nine years ago, but I think conditions weren’t right for me to really appreciate what was on offer. I was watching it in the background while I was in the kitchen, baking cookies, and though I remember basically enjoying the movie, it hadn’t done a whole lot for me – fair as I hadn’t given much to it, myself. But a few weeks ago, I got home on a hot Saturday afternoon, exhausted and desperately needing a bit of easy fun as a reprieve from the summer heat and my other responsibilities, and as this had just popped up on Shudder, I gave it another try and just LOVED it.

So let’s get into it. I expect this will be short (though that expectation is often wrong) as I mostly just want to shower praise upon the film, and I’m certain there will be spoilers…

From Beyond (1986)

An immediate follow up to his cult breakout hit, Re-Animator (also based on a bit of Lovecraft) from just one year earlier, this was Stuart Gordon’s second feature, bringing back Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs from the first film, as well as much of the creative team (he’d come up in the theatre and was accustomed to working with a company). The script was co-written by Brian Yuzna and Dennis Paoli, who had also co-written Re-Animator, as well as having worked before with Gordon at the Organic Theatre in Chicago. Gordon would go on to do three more Lovecraft films with Paoli: Castle Freak (1995) (arguably at least, inspired by “The Outsider” and again working with Crampton and Combs), Dagon (2001), and Dreams in the Witch House (2005) (for the TV series, Masters of Horror). While I haven’t seen ‘Witch House,’ the others are really enjoyable. But, I’ve gotta say, for my money, From Beyond is my favorite of his Lovecraft adaptations, hands down. In a few ways, it is just more “Lovecraftian.” Some of that is obvious – it’s a story of otherworldly creatures beyond our comprehension that breach reality and drive people mad. They’re squiggly and goopy. There are tentacles involved. It all fits a common perception of what Lovecraft’s work consisted of. But I think it goes much deeper than that. So first, a bit of a digression re: Lovecraft.

On Lovecraft

The work of H.P. Lovecraft is a peculiar case. I can only speak for my own experience, but I imagine it may not be all that dissimilar from others’. I really like his oeuvre, but I can’t praise all aspects of it. Even overlooking the disturbingly blatant xenophobia and racism (a negative trait which he was not alone in having – if you ever pick up Bram Stoker’s “Lair of the White Worm,” for instance, be prepared), I sometimes feel like he didn’t actually write stories. I mean, he did write. A lot. Probably more than 100 tales were published. But they don’t always feel like stories in the classic sense. He didn’t seem particularly interested in character, and protagonists seemed to rarely have much, if any, agency over the events that would play out (thematically appropriate for him, but not always dramatically satisfying). Rather, the recurring narrative would be that of a witness. Some “normal guy,” who sometimes knew enough about the odd things that went bump in the night to sensibly try to steer clear of them, would be thrust into a situation wherein he would discover/observe/experience some shuddering horror beyond that which could be understood by his meager human intelligence. It would shake him to the core, but by the end, he would generally get away, such that he could tell the terrible tale, and through this unlucky narrator, H.P. could lay out some horrifying concept he’d dreamed up.

So with character and plot so decentered, I think the primary appeal of his work exists in two complementary qualities: theme and style. When I first encountered his texts, it was as if he had managed to exactly pin down just what this idea of ‘horror’ was that I’d become so enamored with: an encounter with that which is beyond what we can accept, what we can endure. He generally wrote in a sci-fi/weird fiction mode, creating (in many, though certainly not all) of his works, an extended mythos of all manner of wild, trans-dimensional, ancient beings, godlike to us petty humans, who do not really seek to harm us, so much as they just don’t care about us at all, and in going about their endless, unfathomable, arcane pursuits, just so happen to mortally, psychically, and spiritually threaten and/or destroy us in the process. We inhabit a world far larger, darker, and more terrifying than we can imagine, suffused with alien threat (paralleling his own xenophobia) and if we could see reality as it actually is, our feeble minds and souls couldn’t hope to endure. The thing is, for me, I don’t think this “cosmic horror” of his needs “cosmic” elements, per se. Rather, he paints pictures of encounters with things that shatter our previous conceptions of reality, of morality, of scale, and in so doing, can break us – and not all of them need include massive beings lying in slumber, waiting to awaken and devour the stars. I think this encounter, this revelation of unbearable reality is what “horror” is in life and having an author focus so specifically on setting it down on the page was exciting for me when I first discovered his writing many years ago. Also, the mythos itself is fun and odd and specific – it’s so refreshing to have something that plays the role of the demonic without having to buy into a Judeo-Christian mythology and ethical-moral hegemony.

Referenced below, ‘Under the Pyramids’ was also published as ‘Imprisoned with the Pharaohs,’ and credited to Harry Houdini in its first publication (it’s written first person from his perspective)

But the other thing he focuses on, and what really gives me pleasure in the reading, is his style. He is trying to do so much, to suggest things that test the limits of the imagination, and he will use every damn synonym in the thesaurus to do it. The phrase “over-the-top” cannot hope to capture his lexical abandon. An adherent of the school of thought that says what you can’t see is scarier than what you can, he wrote extensively of the narrator’s reactions, while painting around the edges of the thing itself, maintaining the implication that words couldn’t contain the truth of this horror. But, regardless,  along the way, he did use all the words. Hemmingway he is not. A favorite, thrillingly overwritten passage comes from his 1924 story, “Under the Pyramids,” in which Harry Houdini finds himself in Egypt, captured by sinister Bedouins (ah, the much mentioned xenophobia) and lowered by a rope into a hole in the ground, wherein he will discover ancient nefarious mummified beasties with crocodile and hippopotamus heads, carrying out their dark rites in worship of some eldritch, indescribable, god-like thing, rising into the chthonic darkness. But well before he gets to the horrific payoff, the process of being lowered under the earth just sings:

“Then the mental cataclysm came. It was horrible—hideous beyond all articulate description because it was all of the soul, with nothing of detail to describe. It was the ecstasy of nightmare and the summation of the fiendish. The suddenness of it was apocalyptic and daemoniac—one moment I was plunging agonisingly down that narrow well of million-toothed torture, yet the next moment I was soaring on bat-wings in the gulfs of hell; swinging free and swoopingly through illimitable miles of boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to measureless pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving gaspingly to sucking nadirs of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua. . . . Thank God for the mercy that shut out in oblivion those clawing Furies of consciousness which half unhinged my faculties, and tore Harpy-like at my spirit! That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength and sanity to endure those still greater sublimations of cosmic panic that lurked and gibbered on the road ahead.”

I mean, yeah. That there is a good time! Is it good writing? I don’t know. Maybe? But also, maybe I don’t really care. When I can put myself in the mood for it, his prose is just such a blast. This is writing that is unashamed to go big, and while it is as over-the-top as can be, I don’t feel it ever ventures into a realm of campiness. It is a blast exactly because it is “too much,” but the whole point is to take that “too much” totally seriously – and be broken by it. It’s refreshing in our modern, jaded times to encounter anything so dialed up to eleven, while still being entirely earnest.

Written in 1920, ‘From Beyond’ wasn’t published until 1934, first in “The Fantasy Fan,” and then reprinted a few years later in “Weird Tales.”

So, with that, let’s actually come back to the film in question, which I think is an excellent adaptation of Lovecraft’s horror themes and exaggerated, but lovable style, while filling in some of the gaps his writing leaves open to make for a most satisfying viewing experience.

The Film

First off, the adaptation is, on one level, quite faithful. Most of what happens in the story makes it to the screen: in the text, the narrator goes to visit his friend and colleague, the scientist, Crawford Tillinghast who, in his attic laboratory, has created a sonic resonator that can tune the pineal gland to function as a kind of sense organ, perceiving layers of reality typically unnoticed. However when in the presence of the resonator, whatever lives in those other realms with which we are usually out of sync can perceive us as well – and attack. The mad doctor turns against our narrator, but when the police arrive in the end, Tillinghast is dead, our narrator has destroyed the machine, and he can go on, forever shaken by this encounter with that which came from beyond!

The film takes all of these details as a premise, as a starting point, but then it builds from there extensively. Now, Tillinghast (Combs) is actually the assistant to the mad (and we come to learn, also quite kinky) Doctor Pretorius (in a nod to Ernest Thesiger’s fabulously mad scientist in The Bride of Frankenstein). In a standout cold open, they get the resonator to work, discover the squiggly things beyond, and Tillinghast manages to escape with his life (though not his sanity), having destroyed the resonator, while his boss loses his head to something bigger, something worse.

Tillinghast is rescued from the psyche ward by Dr. McMichaels (Barbara Crampton), a psychiatrist who believes Pretorius’s machine could help schizophrenia patients, and has Tillinghast freed so that he can repair the resonator, enabling her to carry out her own experiments. Once operational, Pretorius returns, now one with the thing that had consumed him, mad with power and lust (the machine’s effect on the pineal gland results in a heightened state of arousal, even as goopy monsters abound), and mind shattering horror ensues.

Past that, I don’t really want to go too much into the plot (and there is a surprising amount of plot – twists and turns and reversals of alliance all over the place). Suffice it to say that Yuzna and Paoli run with the initial premise of Lovecraft’s text, do justice to it, and then add in an actual “story” on top, resulting in a really engaging, colorful, gory, inventive horror flick. Most of all, without ever undermining its own seriousness, it is fun and oh so “Lovecraftian.”

Firstly, beyond just faithfully following the concept of the text, it features wild special effects that live up to most expectations viewers would have of a “Lovecraft piece.” There are all manner of slimy, fleshy creatures that defy logic. The Pretorius-thing is in a state of constant flux, flesh distending and becoming other as it seeks to consume and absorb. Monstrous, cephalopodic tendrils undulate through the ether, wetly grasping at victims. There is an unearthly, pink-purple glow (truly high 80s) permeating the “science” of it all. And there are some jaw dropping moments of gore and weirdness: Tillinghast returning from the gullet of a transdimensional beast, bald and scarred, his pineal fully awakened and rising out of a newly formed orifice in his skull to lead him on a murderous brain-devouring, eye-sucking rampage; the Police sergeant accompanying the experiment to keep an eye on the mental patient (Ken Foree of Dawn of the Dead (1978) as well as countless others) being devoured by a swarm of insects from another dimension until he’s a quivering, meaty skeleton on the ground; and Pretorius eating Tillinghast whole, only for him to climb back up out of his mouth, beginning a goopy game of ‘whose body is this and whose hand is reaching out of whose chest?’ Fun stuff.

But in line with what I wrote above about Lovecraft’s prose, what really makes this feel so in the spirit of his writing is not the tentacles or the goopiness or the existence of horrors well beyond our ken. It is the style, and that best surfaces in the performances. Our three central characters are all obsessed and/or mad in one way or another, and their performances are so perfectly tuned – all achieving a heightened style without tipping over into self-parody. Ted Sorel’s Pretorius is sadistically menacing while also being quite playful and sardonic. He brings great intensity and focus to his madness – not ranting and raving, but deadly in his single-minded desire to consume physically, psychically, and sexually, anything or anyone he can lure into his orbit. Barbara Crampton’s Dr. McMichaels walks a fine line between personally motivated clinical interest and being wholly seduced by the power and allure of the machine, and her fluctuations between self-erasing compulsion and rational self-interest, between victimizing and being victimized are carried with a great deal of nuance. Both performers are excellent.

But the movie really belongs to Jeffrey Combs. While of course, I enjoyed him in Re-Animator (and also Bride of Re-Animator – but I never saw Beyond Re-Animator) as Herbert West, his performance here is just perfectly calibrated, threading the needle with exactly the right amounts of mania, terror, earnest feeling, and fragile humanity in the face of the unbearable, as well as periodically bringing a hint of humor which sells the horror without undercutting it, without diminishing its seriousness. When, after their first encounter with the newly, fleshily otherworldly Pretorius, in which Tillinghast just barely saves the sergeant from being devoured by turning off the machine at the last second, and he says simply, “that – will be quite enough of that,” Combs’s delivery elicits a genuine laugh from me every time – but this small comic moment works with the drama of it all, rather than detracting from it. Without jumping around a lot, he gives a rather physical performance, the play of different mental-emotional-spiritual tensions acting out in his body, his voice, his eyes, and breath. All three actors are on the same page with that Lovecraftian excess, but Combs absolutely shines, delivering moments that in their personal horror, are such a freaking delight. It is pitch perfect horror-melodrama (which really is harder than it sounds) and deeply satisfying.   

And there are some elements which don’t feel much like Lovecraft, but still bring something to the table. As mentioned, there can be occasional notes of comedy here and there. When it arises, though, it is just for a moment and doesn’t dominate the scene (a bit of a departure from the more blackly comic tone of Re-Animator) – still, old H.P. never really came across as a funny guy, so this is a change, but I think a welcome one.

But the most significant introduction is that of sex, something that Lovecraft didn’t generally touch on (if at all – I haven’t read his full catalogue, but I’d be genuinely surprised). The film adds the conceit that the pineal gland is responsible for regulating the sex drive (which, from a quick skim of the Wikipedia page, I don’t believe is true), and thus, when the resonator stimulates the pineal, allowing the veil to be lifted between worlds, the air is filled with a sexual charge. Furthermore, those who succumb to the call of the machine do so out of a kind of sexual obsession, an utterly non-cerebral, even physical drive – a hunger they can’t fully understand or resist – to see, to know, to experience – to possess. This can lead them to monstrous actions in pursuit of their new sensory addiction, and also result in their own violation (a warning, if sexual assault is something that will just ruin a movie for you, as in Re-Animator, in one scene, Barbara Crampton’s character is subjected to unwelcome, sexualized contact – before a giant, slimy, mandibled  thing tries to eat her head).

In a way, to connect to a different author, it made me think much more of Clive Barker than Lovecraft – the mutable body, blurred lines between minds and flesh and sexual need – desire and pain and compulsion all tied up in knots with some unknown quality of the spirit. The addition of sex takes the experience beyond the realm of the merely cerebral – the horrors now existing in an interpersonal space, between bodies and minds, just as it also invites creatures that tread between worlds. Unfortunately, this sexual element didn’t always land for me on first viewing (and I found myself thinking how amazing it would have been if Barker had somehow been brought onto the project to help develop it – but I’m pretty sure he was developing Hellraiser (1987) at the time) – sometimes it felt tacked on and underdeveloped – an excuse to include some ticket-selling titillation and put Crampton in leather gear, though having watched the film a few times in the last couple of weeks, I can now better see its integration through the whole film. Still, even if I think it could have been explored more deeply, it certainly augments the piece.

So that is From Beyond. If you are in the mood for something that goes big, that takes itself seriously while still having just a bit of room for humor, that has crazy physical effect work, that captures a truly “Lovecraftian” style of madness, of excess, of Horror (all on a tidy little budget at Charles Band’s Empire Entertainment in Rome), this is your movie. It sure made my day, and might currently be my favorite Lovecraft adaptation.

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A quick non-Lovecraftian aside – if you are a regular reader, I am sorry it’s been a couple of weeks longer than usual. Life got in the way. It’s even kinda funny. After watching this the first time, I thought, “Wow! Fantastic! Loved it! Let’s get a quick post up about that and not overthink things!” And then more time went by than ever before actually publishing. I’ve been preparing a performance for the cabaret I work with (among other things, finally making that “Youth Runs Wild!” 50s teensploitation act I wrote about months ago) and there has been a great deal of arts and crafts to do in order to build everything. Along the way, I have put this movie on in the background so many times while sewing or hot gluing or painting, keeping it fresh in my mind and always thinking, “Today will be the day I write!” though it’s been weeks since that initial hot Saturday on which I first watched it. Argh. I try to get a post up bi-monthly, but that’s not always feasible. Anyway, I have high hopes for what’s coming next – thanks for sticking around…