Poe, Corman, Price: House of Usher, Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death

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Sometimes when I mention to people that I’m a horror fan and even more, that I have a horror blog, I get the response of, “hey, I like horror movies, what’s good?” and I so rarely know what to tell them. I’m stymied by not knowing how to curate the best suggestion for this person in this moment. Furthermore I expect they often want something new – what’s in cinemas now, what’s just hit Netflix – and I’m always out of date. One reason for that is that I always have so much catching up to do. I feel like I’ve watched so many films, read so many books, and yet there is always so much more (so much of it, essential viewing) that I’ve not yet seen. It’s a kind of fractal experience – no matter which point you choose to dive into – any can yield endless, recursive depth to monopolize your attention, and the alternative is to surf ad infinitum upon the surface, sampling bits and bobs and still missing out on so much (Letterboxd informs me that there were 1,269 feature length horror films released in 2022 alone). So right now, I’m in the midst of a project to somewhat fill-in one significant gap – exploring more fully the works of Vincent Price – one of horror’s biggest names, whom I had previously seen shamefully little of.

So now, having thoroughly enjoyed him in Dragonwyck, House on Haunted Hill, Witchfinder General, and Theatre of Blood (all of which I’d seen previously), and House of Wax, The Last Man on Earth, and The Abominable Dr. Phibes (which I watched for last week’s post), I’m pretty excited to finally try out some of his work with Roger Corman in the iconic (if pretty loose) Poe adaptations. I’m really looking forward to this as a) I’ve really been enjoying his painstakingly mannered, and yet gently rounded performances, and b) while I still won’t be any kind of expert in his oeuvre, I at least feel like I won’t embarrass myself at a cocktail party (people can judge you harshly upon learning that you’ve never seen 1964’s The Tomb of Ligeia). So join me as I indulge in House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964). As always, there will be spoilers, so be forewarned.

House of Usher (1960)

The first of this cycle, I understand this was a departure for Corman, who had been in the habit at AIP (American International Pictures) of producing/directing two black and white films back to back, for a small budget in about ten days, intended to be released as a double bill. Wanting to paint on a larger canvas, Corman convinced those holding the purse strings to increase the budget and filming time by about 50% and let him do it wide screen in color, to go after a different corner of the market and get a larger return. Let me preface this by saying that I loved this film, but with my 2023 sense of audience tastes, I’m surprised that this was the project they chose to roll the dice on, that they were sure it was a good bet. It probably says something about how audiences have changed (for the worse) that I can’t imagine a general audience today having the patience for this slow, steady, atmospheric, beautiful picture. And the target audience was reportedly teen boys (Corman thought they’d be into it because Poe was being taught in schools at the time)! But I’m so glad they did, because House of Usher is just gorgeous.

Adapted very loosely by Richard Matheson (who wrote last week’s The Last Man on Earth), the story is incredibly simple (again – it’s hard to imagine this being a hit today – almost nothing happens). A young man, Philip Winthrop, travels through a desolate landscape to a crumbling old mansion somewhere in New England to see his fiancé, Madeline Usher. When he arrives, her brother, Roderick (Price), who has a heightened condition of the senses such that he cannot bear loud sounds, rough fabrics, or food more flavorful than a bland mash, tells him to leave as she is very ill, carrying the taint of evil that has run through the family for generations, which has furthermore corrupted the house as well as the very land itself. With her hereditary predisposition to madness and cruelty, marriage and children are quite out of the question. Roderick orders Philip to leave the two siblings to die in their rotting abode such that the curse might pass with them. Philip refuses, but after a spell of catalepsy (in which she appears dead), Roderick has Madeline prematurely buried to ensure the two will not marry. This ends badly, as you might expect.

This is not a scary film. Nothing jumps out at you, and there is no real supernatural menace. Still, the three main characters all inhabit a space of horror made physical, both in terms of pathetic fallacy, and how they are trapped and haunted by what they perceive around them. Philip has come to a house of madness wherein Roderick imprisons and attempts to murder the woman he loves – from Philip’s perspective, Roderick is a dangerous, abusive psychopath. Madeline’s whole life has been lived under the dark cloud of her brother’s horror stories, and now she finds herself caged, not allowed to live and love as she will (also, being buried alive is unpleasant and apparently drives you to madness and bloody rage). Finally, Roderick carries the most refined and tragic sense of horror, certain as he is of his dark fate and responsibility, haunted by his family’s cruel past, his fear that it might resurface making him the gentlest, most sorrowful monster imaginable.

The other actors are fine, but this is Price’s picture through and through and I think it’s my favorite performance I’ve seen from him yet. His Roderick is surely the villain of the piece, but he plays the part without a single drop of malice. Rather, suffused with warmth, tenderness, and deep resignation, he is a fully tragic figure – acting only out of his sense of ‘the good,’ making the terrible decisions he alone understands that he must make, following his sense of duty, of morality, to commit the most heinous acts, taking that sin on his shoulders because he must. Just beautiful. And so softly played.

One element of that softness is rooted in his condition, such that he cannot abide loud noises (and compared to him, Philip really seems to be shouting throughout the film – such an irritating, earnest young lover), and the delicacy with which he approaches every moment is exquisite –it is as if every second of lived experience is painful to him. But beyond the simple sensory tortures he must endure, every action and every emotion is handled with a similarly light touch. This is a very dramatic story, but Price plays it all so small, so richly but sincerely. There is no melodrama in his work – no scenery is chewed. And the result is just magnetic whenever he speaks and I lean in to catch each small inflection.

This surfaces in heartbreaking little moments, such as an interchange between Roderick and Philip viewing Madeline in her coffin before she is interred:

-At least she has found peace now.
-Has she?
-Why do you say that?
-Because I do not believe that for the Ushers there is peace hereafter.
-Is there no END to your HORRORS?
-No. None whatever… for they are not mine alone. Mere passage from the flesh cannot undo centuries of evil. There can be no peace without penalty.

If I had just read the script, I would have imagined something so different from the quiet, soft, deeply, deeply sad line readings that Price delivers here. I might expect emotions that rage like the storm incessantly buffeting his aging homestead, but his choice is so much more effective.

In the end, before the house and the family line fall to fire and are swallowed by the blackened land, Philip learns that Madeline is not yet dead and races to the cellar to free her from her tomb, and as he descends, Roderick calls after him so quietly, so defeated, “No, don’t go down there. Let her die.” And in this moment, this monstrous figure, this abusive older sibling, this dangerously crazy man, just breaks your heart. What a picture…

Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

As I continue my journey through Corman’s adaptations of Poe’s stories, I think this next entry offers a good opportunity to discuss these films as ‘adaptations.’ Also penned by Matheson, Pit and the Pendulum takes as its starting point the famous Edgar Allan Poe tale in which a man is tortured by the Spanish Inquisition, held in a chamber with a great pit in the center and a bladed pendulum swinging above. It is an effective and exciting story, painting a rich sensory picture of the terrifying ordeal, but it’s quite short. We never really learn why he’s being tortured thus, so much as we just go on the ride of his terror. Now, this “adaptation” does feature a climactic scene in which there is, in fact, a bladed pendulum swinging above a great pit – in the last ten minutes of the movie. The seventy minutes before that are entirely the work of Matheson and Corman, and while the tale does revolve around Poe-esque elements of guilt (familial and personal), premature burial, mystery, and madness, it is really its own thing (this is generally true of all their “adaptations”). I understand Poe was a commercial draw, but literary purists should probably stay away from these films. These days “fan culture” can be so critical of any departures from source materials (especially if, heavens forbid, you make a formerly white character black) – well, anyone griping on the internet about the new iteration of their favorite work from the eighties should probably be forced to listen to a Poe fan in the sixties detail the indignities they endured and they’ll find that they don’t have it so bad.

That said, this movie was an absolute blast! Whereas the first film was slow and evenly paced, depending so utterly on the strength of Price’s central performance, this is a pretty quick moving mystery that really engaged me in unraveling its threads and guessing after the culprit before building to a dramatic, spectacular climax (pit, pendulum, etc.) and closing on a wicked final laugh.

In short, a young man, Francis Barnard, travels to a Spanish castle to learn how his dear sister, Elizabeth (Barbara Steele, from the great Bava film, Black Sunday), had recently died there. Nicholas Medina (Price), her widower husband, is clearly still distraught at her death, but is also a shifty character, caught in lie after lie as he tries to cover the shameful family secret that he believes led to her demise. Concurrently, he is being haunted by her apparition, rooted in his suspicion that he may have inadvertently interred her before she was actually fully dead. A mystery ensues as Francis; Medina’s sister, Catherine; and Medina’s closest friend, Doctor Leon, uncover secret passageways, dig up the buried past, and try to determine who or what is behind the odd goings on which are slowly but surely disintegrating Medina’s mind, his sanity devoured by guilt and loss.

I don’t want to go into detail as I really did enjoy the mystery of it all, but it results in a satisfying revelation which catapults us into delightfully over-the-top territory in the final sequence, both in terms of a great horror set piece and the leaps of character that Price gets to take.

In a way, it is as if he plays two characters. The first is the pitiful, broken Nicholas Medina, crushed by the loss of his beautiful young wife, tormented by what he considers to be his own responsibility for her expiration, and haunted by a dark, shameful family secret which has scarred him since childhood. Then, late in the film, he (sort of) becomes Sebastian Medina, Nicholas’s cruel father who maintained a torture chamber in the cellar and reveled there in unhinged feats of sadism and mechanical engineering. The wild swing between the two poles of character, from Nicholas’s soft, fearful sorrow to Sebastian’s maniacal, evil vengeance is a treat to behold and is surely worth the Price of admission (that was terrible – sorry). Seriously, it is tons of fun – less nuanced perhaps than the performance in Usher, but no less captivating.

But in this case, that performance exists in the context of a truly entertaining, wild film, full of betrayal, murder, torture, and a more confident and experimental style of filmmaking than had been on display in House of Usher. Corman’s use of color and camera movement, as well as the modern, unsettling score, all tap into a feeling of something beyond mere realism. This still feels like a work of a bygone era (especially with its early gestures towards psychedelia), refined in spite of its low budget and preoccupation with the macabre, but it is easier to see how this could be a hit with its target audience: perverse, playful, and well-paced as it is (and a tidy 80 minutes, no less).  

Masque of the Red Death (1964)

The most artistically ambitious of the three I’m considering today, this film, the seventh entry in the Poe cycle, was a (comparatively) larger budgeted piece and less of a commercial success. That’s not too surprising as, for all that it is a striking, intriguing, visually stunning film that makes bold moves and is full of character and story, it feels less commercial – it is more theatrical, having traveled further afield from naturalism, and at times, even contemplative.

In his most villainous turn out of these three, Price plays Prince Prospero, a sadistic and explicitly Satanic nobleman in medieval Italy during a time of plague. He is introduced laying waste to one of his own villages, burning the place to the ground like a wealthy jerk lighting his cigar with a roll of hundred dollar bills to show just how much he doesn’t care about money. Along the way, he collects Francesca, an innocent peasant girl, taking her back to his castle for the pleasure of corrupting her and turning her from her simple, pure faith. Soon after, he learns of the spreading ‘red death’ and along with a collection of favored nobles, locks himself in to revel in decadence and debauchery until the threat beyond has passed.

His court is a wild, ridiculous, cruel place (or at least it is intended to be – some bits, such as when Prospero orders his courtiers to play animals, are meant to feel degrading, but feel pretty tame through modern eyes – but still, it is easy to see the root of characters like Game of Thrones’s King Joffrey in Price’s fickle, affably evil performance). Much of the film concerns Francesca navigating this wicked world, both threatened and tempted by its sinfulness. Along the way, we also meet a dwarf jester out for revenge (taken from another Poe tale, Hop Frog) and Prospero’s wife Juliana, who, threatened by the young girl’s presence, seeks to complete her initiation into the Satanic cult, thus securing her position and favor. By the end, as in Poe’s story (which is considerably shorter than this post), the plague gets in during a masquerade ball, and all of Prospero’s power, wealth and Satanic dealings can do nothing to protect him or his guests from the bloody disease.

These characters are all given a lot of story along the way, and the court feels fully realized, but at the end of the day, Prospero’s tale is really the heart of the film and it is a simple one. Everything else feels more than a bit peripheral. His is an interesting study – as, though the character is openly “evil,” Price often takes a gentle, warm approach, making some of his whimsical cruelty more chilling for how ‘normal’ it feels. Prospero has come to great power in a world of meaningless death and brutality. He is no more barbarous than the world around him – he is simply more powerful – he’s just better at it. And always charming and genteel, Price never needs to twirl a mustache to communicate the depths of his nihilistic inhumanity.

I was really struck by the Satanic element. An addition to the Poe story, I found it fascinating that it is never really demonized or punished. In the end, death reigns supreme and any deals Prospero has made cannot spare him, but god never shows up. Prospero, his wife, and his guests never seem judged by the film for choosing to give obeisance to the Devil. We abjure the ugliness of his monstrous sadism, but I don’t feel that Corman really wants us to recoil at Prospero taking Francesca’s cross from her and trying to cure her of her pointless peasant’s faith. In the end, he is castigated for hubris, but the devil worship just seems a natural element of this world, part and parcel with Price’s warm, genial portrayal of villainy.

And as mentioned above, this is a visually beautiful film, rich in color scheme and cinematography (by Nicolas Roeg of Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and The Witches). A classic element from the original text is Prospero’s series of rooms, each in a different color, with a different feeling, and they just pop on film so vividly, as do all visual elements of the sets and costumes and lighting. From a genuinely spooky scene of Francesca in her room, terrified of the wind and shadows and distant Satanic chanting, to surreal portents of doom in the final black room, to the village burning to the ground, to the titular masque, with its masked dancers lithely filling these monochrome chambers with bawdy lasciviousness, this whole film is such a vibrant, sumptuous space in which to dwell – as well it should be.

But while I loved this artistic splendor, I can see how it might not have performed as well with its intended audience. For example, the final sequence of the Red Death’s appearance at the masquerade ball plays out with a kind of beautiful artifice, theatrical and balletic as the partygoers begin to bleed through their skin but never play the horror of the moment. They dance silently, elegantly, as a desperate Prospero tries to escape his doom, delivered by a crimson apparition that wears his own visage. It is poetic and it lands thematically – his great power and privilege rendered so powerless, even pathetic, against the inevitable. But it’s not scary, or particularly exciting. The climax of this lavish B-picture is pure arthouse. I love it for its daring, artsy choices, but I could see how it wouldn’t be for everyone.

—

I think the artful nature of particularly this last picture highlights another aspect of Corman’s CV. Sure, he has directed and produced loads of low-budget exploitation features, but he was also the American distributor of Fellini, Berman, Truffaut, and Kurosawa. There is an artistic temperament there, and I think these three films reveal a tension between the low budget impresario of melodramatic thrill-seeking fare and the artist who found that he had more freedom to create interesting work by remaining in the world of independent genre cinema rather than subsuming his creativity to a Hollywood machine that evens everything out, making it all more the same, more palatable for the widest possible audience.

I think in this work, Vincent Price was a perfect collaborator. Throughout these three films (and I’m assuming this to be true in the other four Poe flicks Price did with Corman), as well as all of the work I’ve seen from him so far, he consistently brings a balance between artful class and high melodrama, maintaining a tension between a campy wickedness and a genuine, authentic warmth and groundedness. The way he can portray such an over-the-top villain as Prospero while leaning into an affect of tender gentleness resonates with this film’s presentation of a perverse, thrilling horror show while ruminating in nigh meditative, if also nihilistic, manner on the futility of wealth and power and the passing nature of life’s trials and tribulations.

Catching Up With Vincent Price

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I’ve been a horror fan for quite a while and take some pride in having reasonably expansive knowledge of the genre. And yet, I must admit some significant gaps in my horror education – films which somehow I’ve just never gotten around to. For example, I’ve only taken in a handful of Hammer horrors; I’m always out of date on the most recent releases; and I’ve seen precious few films starring Vincent Price (I have many more gaps of course – this is merely a sample).

That last one particularly stands out for me as this Christmas I received a thoughtful gift from my folks. Unbeknownst to me, Price had a cooking show back in the 70s and also published a few cookbooks. Knowing my love of both horror and cooking, I was given one of these, “Cooking Price-Wise.” And yet, I could probably count on one hand (maybe two) the number of his films that I’ve seen.  All of them I’ve really enjoyed, or at least I enjoyed him (House on Haunted Hill, Witchfinder General, Dragonwyck, and Theatre of Blood all made deep impressions), but though growing up in the 80s, he was always around – a lovable, velvet-voiced public character inextricably linked with the macabre, he is still a huge blind spot for me (he made over 100 movies and I’ve seen perhaps 10).

So this week, I want to start remedying the situation and finally catch up on some of his most known works, thus assuaging my guilt for not having seen them thus far while having the gall to label myself a ‘horror blogger.’ Be warned that there will be spoilers.

House of Wax (1953)

As I understand, Andre DeToth’s film, the first color-3D and stereo movie produced by an American studio (and only the second studio 3D film ever), kicked off the second wave of Price’s career, in which he became a horror icon. He had worked in film since the 30s, playing a range of parts from young romantic leads to drug addled roguish villains (again, Dragonwick is striking), and he had been involved in some Universal horror films (Tower of London and The Invisible Man Returns), but it wasn’t until House of Wax that his silky gentility was first fully tapped in service of horror. And serve it he does – in his unique fashion. The root of horror is the Latin ‘horrore,’ meaning to shudder or tremble, and while this is not a terrifying film by any means, it, and specifically Price’s performance, do get under the skin, delivering a delicate and delicious occasional shudder.

Throughout the role, he brings a kind of warmth, not overselling the villainy, and this element is key to his success. At the beginning, he is Prof. Henry Jarrod, a kindly sculptor of wax figures who only wants to capture beauty, refusing his partner’s demands to produce crowd pleasing torture chamber scenes, but who is also more than a little off. He loves his figures as his own children, talking to them sweetly and seeming to hear them respond. Again, he doesn’t overplay it and in the first scene where he speaks lovingly to his prized figures in front of a potential new investor, it plays like quirky, sweet idiosyncrasy more than anything particularly off-putting. But when his partner burns down his creations for the insurance money, leaving Jarrod for dead in the blaze, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to him completely snapping and becoming a psychotic monster.

The initial burning is quite shocking – one of the biggest horror set pieces of the film. Though they are only wax figures, watching them char and melt, their glass eyes dropping out of their sockets, is still disturbing and grotesque, and seeing the callous way that Jarrod’s partner tries to kill him in the bargain so that he alone can collect the insurance kicks off the film on a bracingly dark note.

It isn’t long before Price’s sculptor, his hands ruined, returns as a burned monstrosity, no longer shying away from scenes of sensationalistic violence, now murdering those whose likenesses are well suited to his wax subjects so that he can dip them in paraffin and use them to people his new exhibit (as well as murdering anyone who get in his way – they too can go in the wax). Seeing him (and of course, listening to him), in typically affable, urbane fashion, lead an audience around the displays, affectionately describing his newest artworks (which we come to understand are actually posed corpses) is both delectable and honestly creepy (reminiscent of the vocal work he would later do for Alice Cooper’s “The Black Widow”). When inviting the female lead, Sue, to model for his new rendition of Marie Antionette, “what I need is you – nothing else will satisfy me,” his manner belies none of his true intentions (she won’t actually be modeling so much as she will be the model). His gentle sweetness is not in quotation marks. But as we understand him more fully (and as she already has her doubts about his new Joan of Arc figure which far too realistically resembles her murdered friend, Cathy), it is all the more chilling.

Past that, it’s a fun spectacle of a movie, a crowd pleasing bit of Grand Guignol which is at once an elegant period piece, a gimmick laden, schticky 3D flick which outdoes Friday the 13th part 3 for ridiculously out of place moments of objects flying at the screen (such as two scenes with a paddleball wielding barker, whacking the ball at our faces or an extended can-can girl performance which gets pretty up close and personal with what’s under their skirts), a periodically exciting thriller with Price’s deformed killer chasing Sue through the streets at night, a surprisingly lurid picture with (implied) nude female victims screaming, bound to a table to be coated in boiling wax, and high melodrama as Price waxes poetic (see what I did there?) on how these deaths are justified to bring his art to life.

My only gripe is that in the final, climactic moments, I wish Jarrod had been able to go down more grandly. I mean, of course you know he has to die – in 1953, the Hays Code was still in full effect –bad guys couldn’t win until ’68. But after such a rich, textured performance, where so much could be savored, I felt he was finally dispatched with so little fanfare and I wanted more. Regardless, this was tremendous fun and I expect it will be one to revisit over the years.  Also, it’s fun seeing a young Carolyn Jones (Morticia from the Addams Family TV show).

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

This is an interesting piece – not always entirely successful, but when it is, it’s quite chilling. The first filmic adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (which I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never read…), it carries notes of post-apocalyptic ennui, zombie movie spooks, personal tragedy, and a Twilight Zone-esque final act reversal of perspective. We open on an empty city, littered with corpses. The city is never named but has a monumental feel (I’d first thought it was DC, and later learned it had been filmed in Rome – more on that later). This sort of imagery just always seems to work, whether here or in something later like Night of the Comet or 28 Days Later.

Price plays Dr. Robert Morgan, a scientist who had been researching the plague which has basically eradicated humanity, including his wife and young daughter. As far as he knows, he is the only remaining living person on earth, with everyone else either killed off or reduced to shambling, undead monsters (here they are presented very much like zombies, but I understand in the book and the 2007 film with Will Smith – I’ve never seen the Charlton Heston fronted The Omega Man – they are more like quick moving vampires). Three years into his isolation, his days consist of acts of mere survival – eating bland canned foods, keeping the generator running, carving new stakes, clearing the corpses out of his driveway and burning them in the local mass grave, and hunting down at least a few more vampires each day before they can harry him by night, when he locks himself in and drinks till sleep comes.

The first act of the film is, I think, the strongest. Watching Morgan go through his days in desolate loneliness, boredom, and bouts of drunkenness, with the looming doom waiting outside his boarded up door, it is easy to get caught up in the gloom. Also, the way he carries out some of his more grizzly tasks, like collecting and burning corpses, brings an ugly weight to it all. And to top it all off, while one clearly sympathizes with his need to hunt down the undead by day, it looks more like he’s just murdering poor derelicts as he hammers stakes into the hearts of these daylight enfeebled ‘creatures.’

But then we hit the second act and an extended flashback to the before times as the plague was hitting and he was somehow spared, and all of a sudden I started to notice how out of sync the sound was. This is when I discovered that this was filmed in Rome with a mostly Italian cast and crew – of course the dub is bad! Regrettably, this middle stretch drags. Whereas the first act consisted of basically wordless action with Price’s rich voiceover giving narration, now there are extended scenes of people stiffly speaking with each other and while the actual story that plays out is at turns tragic and horrifying, the atmosphere and energy of the filmmaking takes a significant dip. I read that Matheson was so underwhelmed with the finished project that he had his name taken off as screenwriter (apparently he’d been told that Fritz Lang would direct – that clearly didn’t happen). He also reportedly felt Price had been miscast, though he’d valued his performances in their other collaborations (Matheson also wrote the screenplays for many of the Roger Corman produced Poe adaptations that Price starred in).

Not having read the source material, I can’t say for sure, but I can imagine a different intended vibe for the character – more of a typical sci-fi leading man perhaps. But I really like the qualities Price brings to the table – he is a weary, broken figure, given to drink and dulled to violence. In the final act, he finds one other survivor, a woman who is infected and not yet turned. She initially runs from him, but convinced she thinks him one of the vampires, he chases her down, shouting that he’s not going to hurt her. The image of this older man chasing this terrified younger woman, grabbing her and dragging her home, where he essentially detains her against her will, is disturbing. But I think this works in the film’s benefit. There is no intimation of possible romance between these two remaining humans – he is just desperate to grab hold of another living being, but he is really a domineering threat. He is, in fact, the monster. The legend told among what has become of humanity that kills by day, hunting down weak, innocent people, some of whom have not yet turned. In the final twist, we learn that a new society is developing, built by the infected who have learned to live with their condition and there is no place in this world for this violent, dangerous relic who will never be able to accept them as anything other than mutated freaks.

I think Price brings a kind of sad menace to the role that ultimately, even if not what the author had originally intended, serves it. His Dr. Morgan is not a good man, and the journey we go on with him is richer and more horrific thanks to that. This was a fascinating, if uneven, watch, with strong notes of horror and an oppressive, fatalistic weight – I think Price’s contribution is a large part of its success.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

What did I just watch? What is this film? I mean, it is…interesting, filled with so much baffling, committed, over the top weirdness. But it’s also static and utterly lacking in dramatic tension or momentum. In the end, I think the glory of its peculiarity outweighs the leadenness of its dialogue and drama, but it is an odd duck to say the least. Set in 1925, it took me a half an hour to realize that fact as it began with a colorful sequence that just felt so very 1970s, like something out of Flash Gordon  or Doctor Who. For the longest time, I was wondering why their cars were all so old fashioned…sometimes I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

We start the film with a 10 minute wordless sequence. A shiny, hooded, cloaked figure rides a pipe organ up out of an underground chamber, pounding it dramatically while bathed in red light. Then he descends into his lavish Art Deco ballroom, turns a key and conducts his clockwork orchestra before a woman in a fantastical white dress enters (I guess it could be period appropriate – but it could also be from a sci-fi movie). They dance a bit before he lowers a covered birdcage into a hole in the ground where the same woman, having instantaneously undergone a costume change, receives it, packs it into a car and chauffeurs the cloaked figure away. Next we see a man cozy in his bed. The skylight opens, and the birdcage is lowered in and out of the room, having been opened. A shadow flits by and then another. The man is scared. He looks down and sees one (fruit) bat crawling up his chest. Another is on the pillow beside him. A look of absolute terror. A series of close ups on the bats faces – and they’re real cuties – not scary at all, just wriggling along, licking their noses with their adorable little tongues. Look of abject terror. Cut to black. Back at the homestead, the clockwork band strikes up again. The mysterious man rides his organ back into the ground as the woman silently watches. The next morning, a housekeeper finds the former sleeper in his bed, surrounded and devoured by bats.

This might, maybe, sorta give some small taste of what this film is like. Past that, when we finally see Price (who utters his first line 32 minutes into the film and largely gives a silent performance), it’s clear his face is not his own, having been crudely spirit gummed into place. His silent assistant is a mystery – I had expected her to be a more sophisticated clockwork, but by the end of the film, when she dies in surprising fashion, it’s evident she’s been a real girl all along. Who is she? Why doesn’t she speak (we come to understand why he doesn’t)? Why is she helping him murder all these people? Furthermore, motivated to revenge by the death of his beloved wife, why is Phibes carrying on with this young woman anyway? What’s with the little vignettes and dance scenes the two of them periodically share? Also, Phibes is taking his revenge on the 8 surgeons and 1 nurse who unsuccessfully tried to save his wife’s life four years earlier, killing them in the style of the 10 Plagues of Exodus – but while there can be some variation in tellings, I’ve never seen a Haggadah (the text recited on Passover) with a plague of ‘bats.’ And isn’t ‘death of the first born’ typically last, and not ‘darkness?’

Frogs are pretty standard though.

But all of the above is really what makes the film such a great, singular ride. I had an acting teacher my first year of college who always insisted that we should “dare to fail gloriously,” and I can’t help but love any artwork that follows through on that ethos. Sadly, it shares the screen with an unfortunately clunky police procedural, riddled with attempts at humor that (for me) simply didn’t land, such as Investigator Trout often being mistakenly called “Pike.” Hilarious, right? The problem with this half of the film is that it seems to exist only to give us the exposition of why Phibes is doing what he’s doing. We just go from one murder to the next, meeting victims for the first time in their death scenes such that we never know them or particularly care that they die, and it never feels like there’s any chance that the police will somehow be able to intervene. Thus, we end up giving over maybe 40% of the run time to characters who have no real narrative agency. They just show up after the fact and help us understand the whys and wherefores, but they can’t really do anything. On the other hand, we do get the police sergeant uttering the classic line, “A brass unicorn has been catapulted across a London street and impaled an eminent surgeon – words fail me gentlemen.” (You know, from the plague of unicorns!) So that’s something.

But I really don’t want to come off as negative – while the film is far from exciting, it has so much in it that is unique and special, even if it never clicked for me as a story. And, as the whole point of this was to dig into Vincent Price’s oeuvre, he really delivers a mad, zany, delightfully arch, and yet still sophisticated and controlled, performance. As I mentioned, he mostly doesn’t speak and when he does, it is by holding a cable to his throat (his mouth can’t move – he also drinks a martini through a tube in the side of his neck – this is a weird movie…) and what we hear is actually overdubbing. Thus, he really is giving a silent performance and it is very effective.

Some of the best moments of the film are when he has some small, subtle reaction: a passing look of disdain, a moment of sadistic appreciation, an expression of satisfaction with his baroque methods of vengeance (such as an exquisite frog mask that crushes the wearer’s head, or coating a sleeping nurse in plant-based goo so that locusts eat her face down to the skull), or a look of tragic despair as he sits at the altar of his dead wife, pledging that his work will summarily be done and he will soon return to her side in the darkness. He manages to balance two extremes here – on one hand, all of his gestural and emotional work is so delicate, careful, and nuanced – and on the other, it is all so very, very, very over-the-top and melodramatic. The inherent tension of those two poles makes for a captivating performance. Sadly, the rest of the film didn’t have any real tension to match it. But maybe that doesn’t matter and we should just appreciate the diamond we’ve found and not complain that it’s surrounded by coal.

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And so there we have our first foray into the works of Vincent Price. He really is a fascinating screen presence – so consistently classy with just the right amount of camp, bringing solid emotional work while maintaining a calculated, almost cerebral mannerism, not always chewing on the scenery (though for that, do check out Theatre of Blood (1973)– it’s great!), but often nibbling on it, savoring every little bite.

And so, let’s keep going. Next week, I plan to continue filling this gap in my classic horror knowledge and also kill a second bird with this particular stone as I have, shamefully, never watched any of Roger Corman’s 1960s Poe flicks. As Price was in 6 out of 8 of them, and these are some of his most iconic works in the genre, I think I should watch a few post haste.

Top Ten (New To Me) In 2022

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Sitting here the morning of New Year’s Day, staring down the fresh new year ahead of me, I want to take one more day for the past. I’m not alone in observing that it’s been a really strong year for horror. I’m not good at keeping up to date with new releases (last year I hadn’t even watched enough 2021 horror films to do a top ten list), but this year I’ve seen about 20, and I think that’s more a testament to how good things have been rather than how diligent of a fan I’ve become.

Lately, I’ve seen countless posts where people list their best (or worst) of the year and I want to hop on that bandwagon. But as I don’t want to be too repetitive on the blog and write about the same stuff again and again, some of the best films I’ve seen are ruled out (as I’ve already discussed them).  So, as I did last year, here, in no particular order, comes a list of the top ten movies (new or old) that a) were first time watches for me and b) I haven’t written about yet. I notice, looking at my list, that it leans hard into entertainment. There have been many films this year that were rich in idea and feeling, which I really felt the need to write about at length and explore. Most (though not all) of the films on this list were just a really good time, and I want to highlight them as well, and not only headier fare. I’ll mostly avoid spoilers, but in some cases, that won’t be possible, so tread lightly.

Night of the Comet (1984)

As we’re still in the holiday season, this seems a good place to start. I don’t know how I hadn’t gotten around to watching this before – it seems like something I would have seen as a kid but somehow missed. Thom Eberhadt’s post-apocalyptic/zombie-hellscape/sci-fi-comedy/Christmas-timed romp is just a hoot and a half. Two teen sisters are some of the very few survivors on earth (or at least LA) after a close call with a comet vaporizes most of the population and transforms the rest into bloodthirsty zombies. As you are here reading a ‘horror’ blog, don’t go in expecting much from the ‘zombies’ – they get about 5 minutes of screen time, but this modestly budgeted film is greatly entertaining and not lacking in horror. A tonal smorgasbord, the film features playful scenes of the two teenagers enjoying the run of the city to do whatever they like, haunting imagery of Los Angeles as a ghost town that is at once beautiful and eerie, surprising moments of depth and weight (such as when, pre-comet, Kelli Maroney’s stepmother full out punches her across the room in a shocking moment of domestic violence – no one mourns her being reduced to a pile of dust), and some narrative twists and turns that really got me. The film goes to some disarmingly dark places, but never loses its sense of fun along the way. And it’s set at Christmas, so it’s still seasonally appropriate.

Barbarian (2022)

Zach Cregger’s breakout film is on many end-of-the-year lists right now for good reason. If you don’t take too much time to think about some details, moment to moment, it’s possibly the best time I’ve had watching a horror movie in a good while. I can’t remember the last time I was actually compelled to yell at the screen, “Don’t go down there you idiot – what are you doing?!?” And at the same time, rooted in very real dangers and concerns that have been highlighted in the post #MeToo era, it lands a punch of relevance and resonance. When Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at a double booked AirBnB and meets the other tenant, Keith (Bill Skarsgård), she is understandably extremely cautious, as are we. Even after the movie has taken some hard left turns and gone to totally unexpected places, it’s hard not to feel that Keith, such a seemingly nice guy, is actually a dangerous sleazebag. But as time goes on, that caution gets exhausted and then it’s shouting at the screen time. And that’s only the first act. When Justin Long appears at the top of the second, it is such a hard but refreshingly sunny and musical pivot, and what his character represents is an interesting inclusion to the film’s thematics in terms of the dangers of predatory men and their inability/refusal to take responsibility for their actions. But beyond those weighty concerns, this is just a blast – also, how weird is it that I watched it on Disney+? (Though I’m still waiting for the new Hellraiser, Disney…)

Puppet Master (1989)

Here’s another case of “how have I never seen this before?” Of course, Charles Band and David Schmoeller’s direct-to-video cult classic has always been on my radar, but I had never actually picked it up back in the video store days, so I was delighted when it came to Shudder this year. Though its modest budget is evident, the creative joy it takes in bringing to life its killer toys, such as Jester, Tunneler, and Leech Woman, is just infectious; its kill set pieces are creepy and weird; and its story is, if somewhat strained, still pretty effective, with a satisfying final act reversal. I really appreciated William Hickey’s turn as the puppet maker and “last true alchemist,” André Toulon, who discovered the secret of eternal life before being chased down by Nazis. The opening scene of him gently and with loving care, placing all his dolls in a chest, hiding it away, and committing suicide before the Reich can extract his secrets really lent an unexpected pathos to the story – you know, before dolls with drills for heads bore through anyone’s guts or sexy female puppets regurgitate leeches onto a prone victim. Endearingly lurid and lovingly nasty, this first entry in the nigh endless series (I think there are 15 so far), with its ever shifting mythology and chronology (sometimes the dolls are kind of good, and when they’re not, they’re Nazis), endures as a low budget gem.

Lux Æterna (2019)

Gaspar Noé’s short film (thankfully under an hour – it’s hard to imagine enduring much more) is not made to be enjoyed. But it is fascinating, captivating, intriguing, intense, sometimes hilarious, cruel, and as ambivalent as the day is long. Filmed in real time with multiple long tracking shots in split screens tracking different characters, this work of sensory overload follows Charlotte Gainsbourg, among others, through a chaotic film set where she is to be burned as a witch. Conflict abounds – between the cinematographer, the producer, and the director – between actresses and costume designers – between pushy guests who have their own projects to pitch and anyone cornered by them. It is a non-stop sea of noise and action and roiling emotion. Finally, as the scene is being filmed, a technical mishap sends the lighting into a colorful strobe effect which would be unsafe for any epileptic and is almost unendurable for the viewer. And it goes on. And on. For at least ten minutes, but it feels much longer. And what had been a fictional martyrdom seems realized in life. And the camera keeps rolling – long after the director has stormed off the set and the other actresses playing witches have escaped – the cinematographer keeps the lens trained on Gainsbourg and captures something transcendent. But does he? Here lies the ambivalence at the heart of the piece. Through the ending, the screen is filled with quotes from directors, including Noé himself, presenting the “auteur” as the sole conduit to true artistic purity, to the divine, demanding any suffering necessary to achieve that sublimity. This can be taken as the point of the piece – how the filmmaker cuts through the tumult and noise and, even if it means violently assaulting the actor, making a martyr of her, reveals truth. But it also feels deeply, deeply ironic – as if it is all to send up this very notion – and at the end of the day, the valorization of the auteur simply excuses pointless, artless cruelty and exploitation – both to the actors, his co-workers, and us, the audience. Whatever it was, it has stayed with me, and I’m very glad to have sat through it, though I must say, it’s not for everyone.

Prey (2022)

Another, “what a blast!” movie, Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator prequel manages to be both excitingly fresh and so true to the original that it could be accused of being an empty retread if it weren’t such a deeply felt and rollicking good time. Amanda Midthunder just kills it as a young, early 18th century Comanche woman determined to hunt, though the tribe has other expectations for her. To prove herself, against orders, she goes out to track down the biggest predator she can and finds herself squaring away with an alien presence seemingly here on earth to do the same. Along the way, there are thrilling action sequences, comedy bits that land, and brutal, tense alien violence – which is of course, overshadowed by the looming specter of European colonialism which will do more damage to her people than this single alien invader ever could. I’d long felt that Arnold in the first movie was basically a male slasher “final girl,” and here that gender flip comes full circle, the degree to which she is discounted as a possible threat (cause she’s a girl) being instrumental to her success. Also, it’s refreshing to see native people presented as just that, people – not “noble savages” or somehow “magically connected to the land,” but just intelligent, tool using people (with a different degree of technology, sure), as capable of pettiness and valor as any others. It’s up there with the original in my book, and I have hopes for the recently announced follow up which will take place in feudal Japan.

Pearl (2022)

So I must admit that I preferred Ti West’s X, released in the spring, to this prequel, delivered mere months later (both filmed back-to back in New Zealand during Covid lockdown), but a) I already wrote about X, b) this is still an interesting, bold piece, and taken together, they make a fascinating character portrait (though we now have to wait for the follow up, Maxxxine), and c) I think it’s more than worthy of discussion and promotion without any connection to the other movie. Filmed in a dreamy, technicolor, old Hollywood style ala Wizard of Oz or a Douglas Sirk melodrama, we once again follow Mia Goth, now as the young Pearl (who will grow up to be the murderous, elderly, physical-affection starved antagonist of X), a young girl trapped in a life of simplicity and familial obligation, dreaming of getting out and, (as Maxine will later repeat) becoming the star she knows she is. She chases after her aspirations with sociopathic fervor, but having seen the earlier film, we know it is all for naught – she’s never leaving the farm. The result is a strange mix of bloody psychodrama, dreamy hopefulness, and simple tragedy. Chekhov’s 3 sisters will see Moscow before Pearl escapes her dreary life of boredom and service, no matter how many people or geese she kills. At the same time, while Pearl is a largely sympathetic character, West pulls no punches in also presenting the inherent self-centered greed and coldness that drives her ambition (and sheds rivers of blood). We are pressed into an uncomfortable identification with her need for the thrill of independence, fulfillment, and joy, while fully cognizant of the callous sacrifices being made. What can we accept – in a protagonist? For ourselves? Where is our line between the demands we can slough off to chase our own stars and the responsibilities that burden us, pinning us down to the earth?

The Father (2020)

Florian Zeller’s adaptation of his own play, starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Coleman, may strike most as ‘clearly-and-in-no-way-a-horror-movie-what-is-it-doing-on-this-list?,’ but I contend that this tale of an elderly man with dementia, losing his grip on reality, progressively less sure of his relationships with those around him as he loses his own certainty of self is absolutely a work of psychological horror – and it is tremendous. Clearly based on a play, characters largely come in and out of the same rooms – there are no special effects or psychedelic sequences, but it is a profoundly horrifying mind-trip. The woman he thinks is his daughter walks out and another woman enters who eventually explains that his daughter lives in Greece. But maybe this is his daughter. Does he actually have a daughter? Does he live with her, or in his own flat, or in a care facility? We watch through his eyes, losing any sense of solid ground as the film goes on. No one involved with the production sold it as a genre piece, let alone a horror film, but I think it’s one of the most effective works of horror I saw this year – beautiful, tender, and sad, and so deeply unsettling and scary. It isn’t the kind of mood I think most come to horror for, but I think it deserves a place among other psychological pieces like Jacob’s Ladder (1990) or Repulsion (1965).

Glorious (2022)

Rebekah McKendry’s Lovecraftian bottle movie concerns a man, Wes (Ryan Kwanten), trapped in a highway rest area Men’s room with a post-break-up hangover, talking to an ancient eldritch horror (voiced by J.K. Simmons) through a hole carved in the wall of the stall (get it? “glory”…). This being, Ghatanothoa, explains that Wes must make a kind of self-sacrifice to help Ghatanothoa escape before his father (who is essentially god) can use him to destroy humanity. It is pretty high concept stuff, but where it lands by the end is so emotionally grounded, getting to the core of who and what Wes is and what he and Ghatanothoa have in common, that it really justifies the world-building flights of fancy that get us there. I enjoyed most of the movie – it is frequently funny, often very weird, briefly quite gory, and consistently admirable in how big of a film it can be in a single, small location with almost only one physical actor and one voice (a few others, some significantly, get a few minutes of screen time, but mostly Kwanten and Simmons carry the flick – it almost feels like this was filmed during a global pandemic). But while I was enjoying the movie, I wasn’t in love with it until the final 10 minutes when the penny finally dropped and it kind of floored me. It’s a gorgeous, unique, small-scale piece and more people should know about it.

Orphan: First Kill (2022)

I don’t think any useful discussion of this can be had without revealing very significant spoilers of the first film. I’m going to say that if you haven’t seen Orphan (2009), please go watch it now before you read any further. DO NOT watch the 2022 film first, even though it’s a “prequel.” So go now – first Orphan (2009) and then Orphan: First Kill (2022). Thank me later.

Ok, I’m going to assume that anyone remaining has watched both films or will never watch both films. Wow – I must say I had my doubts when I heard that Isabelle Fuhrman, who had starred in the first film in 2007/8 when she was 10, now 24, was going to do a prequel, reprising the role of Esther at an even younger age, and that it was going to be done without computer trickery, but just with body doubles and in-camera effects (ala the hobbits in Lord of the Rings). But it really works! I mean it works by not working – hopefully everyone who saw this had already seen the original film and already knew that earlier film’s twist – that Esther is actually a grown-up with a form of dwarfism, masquerading as a little girl to infiltrate families via adoption, hit on the adoptive father, take what she wants, and kill anyone in her way. Here, we all know from the first frame that this ‘little girl’ is actually, as one character later incredulously says, “a grown-ass woman,” and having an adult woman clearly playing her (though we suspend our disbelief to accept that no other characters can see through her dastardly ruse) helps us watch and enjoy the act all the more clearly – though when she breaks that character, driving a stolen car, listening to ‘Maniac,’ wearing sun glasses, and smoking a cigarette, it’s pretty frickin’ fantastic. The first film turned on such a big reveal and I wondered what they could do here without getting repetitive, but the eventual twist is a doozy. I can’t make any claim of thematic depth or significance, but this movie is just a thrilling, ridiculous, delightful ride.

Rope (1948)

This list has not been any kind of countdown, but I have saved the best for last. For years, I’d been meaning to check out this Hitchcock thriller, most famous for its technical trick of appearing to all be done in one take, but I had no idea just how great of a movie it is, how exciting, how funny, and how chilling. The one take gimmick (which is a bit obvious – every time there’s a “hidden” cut, the camera passes behind someone’s back for a moment) is impressive, and is instrumental in the success of the piece, but it is just one part of a significant whole. Mainly it helps establish the breathless urgency of events playing out in a kind of theatrical “real time” (significantly, this real time is not realistic – events take as long or as short as the drama requires, but the exigency is palpable). The film begins with a couple, Brandon and Phillip (striking how in the late 40s, a clearly gay couple could be shown so openly – if unremarked on – there were probably some viewers who assumed they were just “roommates” – but really, how?), murdering a friend, David, and hiding him in a chest in their living room before hosting a dinner party comprising David’s closest friends and family – all in order to experience pulling off ‘the perfect murder,’ achieving a kind of aesthetic perfection. They even invite an old professor (played by Jimmy Stewart) who used to lecture about a Nietzschean ascendancy which would entitle the ‘superior’ man to kill as he sees fit, free from the morals of the herd.

Brandon, the dominant of the two (their relationship dynamics are wild), gleefully plays with how close he can get to the fire without being burned, without the crime being revealed – serving dinner on the fateful chest or tying up some old books to give David’s father using the rope with which he had strangled his son a half hour earlier, while Phillip just gets drunker and more terrified as the evening progresses, and hence, more erratic and incautious. Hitchcock is absolutely impish in his game of tension, with what enters the frame and what doesn’t, with how close they get to being caught. Finally, there is the element that I think really qualifies this as horror. Watching Jimmy Stewart’s Rupert slowly piece together the clues staring at him in plain sight and the dawning realization of the role he has played in inspiring this crime is a horror beat. Additionally, the very concept of murder for aesthetic entertainment – of characters delighting in venturing into a post-moral space – is more than a little chilling – bringing us to a more horrific (though still essentially thrilling) territory than a crime of passion or greed. I can’t overstate how great this was and, even if only ‘horror-adjacent,’ I think it’s more than worth the time of any fan of the genre.

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And so, there we have it. Ten movies that were new to me that I hadn’t previously written about. That was 2022, and at least in terms of movies, it was pretty great. Let’s see what ’23 holds… Thanks for joining me here – I hope your new year treats you well and we can all keep the horror on the screen and page and otherwise, at bay.

You Probably Shouldn’t Give Exotic Pets as Gifts – Gremlins

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So, I write this cruising at 23,500 feet on a flight from Poland (where I live) to the US (where I’m from). It’s a couple days before Christmas and thus, one makes the annual pilgrimage to family, wherever that might be. Just one of many holiday traditions, like roasting chestnuts (which smell nice, but always seemed inedible to me), decorating a tree (didn’t get one this year since I’d be travelling, so I decorated a windowsill – it looks a bit like Christmas vomited all over the houseplants), or tiptoeing around any potential triggers of familial conflict – Happy Holidays, All! But regardless of how, or if, you mark the occasion, I think it’s pretty common to indulge in some kind of seasonally appropriate movies.

For some, that means Miracle on 34th Street or Elf. For others, that means Krampus, A Christmas Horror Story, or Better Watch Out. Just as an aside, it’s not my focus this week, but I recently watched Silent Night, Deadly Night 5 and ye gods, what a hoot – Mickey Rooney as an angry, drunk toymaker (he apparently had protested the first film – what is he even doing here?), effects work by Screaming Mad George (who always has zany, surreal, weird ideas), killer toys, an odd yet wonderful mix of hokey and sleazy, and the mystery of who is trying to murder this little kid (who is doing a lot with his face), that actually kept me fully engaged until the reveal. I really recommend it. (I know it’s on Shudder in the States, but is hard to come by in the UK – I don’t know about the rest of the world.)

But for tonight, following my stroll down memory lane a couple months back, trying to reconstruct how I got here, I thought I would brave the sometimes fraught waters of nostalgia and revisit a beloved film of my childhood (which I haven’t seen in ages), one which I didn’t even think of as horror when I was little, but I can’t imagine a reasonable generic definition which could exclude it from the canon now. I write, of course, of Joe Dante’s 1984 Gremlins. Now, I think there’s always a risk when going back to something you loved when younger – that it won’t hold up, that it may even be cringe inducing and you question how you could ever have thought it was anything more than embarrassing. I am so happy to report that this was not at all the case here. What an absolute delight! I expect I appreciate different things as an adult than I did long ago, but this stands as a tremendously fun ride, and somehow, in spite of a wide range of reasons one could expect it wouldn’t, it really does work. So, let’s get into it. (Note – I’m writing this assuming you’ve seen it. If you haven’t, go treat yourself – where I live at least, it’s on HBO max.)

Gremlins (1984)

I think that it’s easy to detect the presence of the three main creative voices behind this movie. From director Joe Dante (whose earlier film, Piranha (1978), Spielberg had called the “best of the Jaws rip-offs”), there is a madcap energy and an evident love of 50s B-movie sci-fi/horror. Individual camera set ups are not often showy, but the camera movement is so playful, often twisting from one slight angle to the next, granting an off-kilter, weird vibe. The old time monster movie of it all is just so much melodramatic fun, such as the scene in which Stripe, the leader of the gremlins jumps into a pool to spawn a horde of scaly, clawed compatriots. Bright green light suffuses the pool as fog spills out and light flashes. The young protagonist, Billy, backs away in fearful knowledge of the nightmare soon to spew forth (Zach Galligan, who would go on to a long career in cheap horror movies and thrillers – my favorite listing of his on IMDB is from Hellraiser III as “Boiler Room Patron Getting Stabbed with a Pool Stick (uncredited)”).

Or in the science classroom when the teacher who’d been experimenting on a mogwai returns to see what has hatched from its slimy cocoon. As he enters the room, the film projector still turns, bathing the room in a faint flicker, while he stands in a slowly turning silhouette of the film reel. At a slight Dutch angle, he goes into the shadows in search of the experiment gone wrong which will soon end his life. It’s just delicious.

From screenwriter, Chris Columbus (who went on to write The Goonies and direct Adventures in Babysitting and the Home Alone movies, among many others), there is a fun “Boy’s Own adventure” to it all, replete with Rube Goldberg machines of threat and mayhem. It is interesting though, given his later “family friendly” oeuvre, to read that his original script had been MUCH darker – Gizmo (the cute, lovable heart of the movie) would have transformed into the lead Gremlin (ala Stripe) and would have then been responsible for killing Billy’s dog and beheading his mom. Wow…

Finally, from producer, Steven Spielberg, there is a commitment to balancing all of the scary monster movie harshness with something soft, loveable, cute, and utterly bankable. I expect the original script in Dante’s hands, without Spielberg’s mainstream influence, would have been a fun, weird, crazy, and much less successful film. And sure, there is fun to be had with a hard R movie featuring grotesquely comic little monsters attacking people (Gremlins kicked off a wave of such movies: Ghoulies (1985), Critters (1986), Munchies (1987), and Hobgoblins (1988), all of which spawned further sequels), but the way Gremlins has its cake and eats it too is unique. Somehow its disparate elements (B-monster movie melodrama, Christmas movie schmaltz, kid movie cuteness, and horror movie threat and brutality), which seemingly should cancel each other out, undercutting each other’s power, instead work together, and each element has that much more of an effect. The cute is cuter and the scary is scarier. Of course, this wasn’t appreciated by everyone – there was a blowback of parents appalled at how violent this “cute” movie was that they’d brought their kindergartner to. Apparently, it was following the reaction to both this and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) that led the MPAA to adopt the PG13 rating just a few weeks later. While I love the movie, I understand how parents could be upset – it swings abruptly from nigh saccharine moments of heart-warming goodness, to shockingly dark fare.

Perhaps the most iconic tonal shift is when, after escaping from the bar where she works (overrun with drunk gremlins), Kate (Phoebe Cates as the love interest) takes shelter in the bank with Billy and, this Christmas Eve already going somewhat poorly (murderous green monsters everywhere), she finally explains why she’s always hated Christmas and how she “learned there was no Santa Claus.” In short, it involves finding her father, dressed up as old St. Nick, dead with a broken neck, rotting in the chimney days after not making it home for Christmas. It is so dark, so tragic and horrifically ugly, especially for a film largely targeted at young kids. But it’s also hilarious in its extremity.

Without losing the weight of the moment, a kind of irony surfaces – here we have a late in the story dramatic monologue wherein this central character reveals deep, hidden emotional truths of her character. It feels like some kind of play with “drama” schtick, and the fact that it goes so hard on the shocking darkness somehow makes it simultaneously awful and much funnier. The next second, we cut to Billy’s dad trying to sell a malfunctioning “smokeless ashtray” to a gas station attendant as he tries to make it home for the holiday, unaware of the chaos going down. The emotion was there – it’s not overplayed or laughed off, but there is no beat to dwell in that feeling. We’re off to the next thing. I’ve read that Spielberg and Warner Brothers demanded that the scene be excised but Dante had final cut on the film and stuck to his guns. I’m glad he did. It’s kind of the whole tone of the film in a nutshell.

In line with this tonal play, I think what stands out most to me is the aforementioned mix of moviemaking tropes and tools, to which Dante regularly tips his hat. It’s telling that we see on TVs in the background excerpts from both Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the gremlins’ pupal stage pods directly borrowing their look from that earlier film, and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), from which Gremlins borrows the Christmas movie trope of the mean old bank owner who is crushing the poor average Joes of Small Town America, and at Christmas, no less! Also, both films end with the main character running down the streets of town shouting at everyone (“Hello you old Savings and Loan!” “They’re here! They’re already here”!).

Following It’s a Wonderful Life, everything here happens in Christmas Movie Land – a loving father, who just can’t catch a break, but is out there chasing that American dream, comes upon a sweet little creature in a shop in Chinatown and brings it home as a Christmas gift for his son (I’m pretty sure in the original script, Billy would have been a young teenager, such that it made sense for 13 year old Corey Feldmen to be his best friend – instead of a 20-something working at a bank).

Of course, though Billy is a good, loving “owner” to Gizmo (does anyone really “own” a pet? But I don’t know what other word to use), everything goes wrong, no one follows The Rules (Keep them out of bright light. Don’t get them wet. And whatever you do, never ever feed them after midnight), and the town is overrun with monsters. Also from Christmas land, the cruel old lady running the bank where Billy works is foreclosing on everyone’s homes and businesses and doesn’t care how many children starve. Plus, she wants to murder Billy’s dog.

Then by the end, the final image of the film is the old Chinese man from whom Billy’s dad had basically stolen Gizmo, having retrieved the gentle creature, walking off into a matte painting of the town that is an absolute Christmas card. The interesting thing is that I feel like this isn’t exactly a horror movie, a Christmas movie, or a horror-Christmas movie, so much as a horror movie that’s set in a Christmas movie, it’s locations and tropes and characters all straight out of Christmas town. Then it adds monsters. Scary, bloodthirsty, mischievous monsters.

And yet, somehow I didn’t find it scary when I was little (at least I think I didn’t – I’d have to ask my parents I guess) – and just two years earlier, my father’d had to carry me, screaming, out of E.T. (government scientists are pretty scary). Having the adorable little, squeaky voiced Gizmo at the center of it all somehow made it ok, made it feel safe. Also, some of the violence and threat gets pretty cartoony, but it’s a fairly severe cartoon. But no matter how gross and goopy the gremlins were, how sharp their claws and teeth, how many people we see them gleefully murder, I never realized I was watching a horror movie because a sweet little furball saved the day in the end, driving around the department store in his tiny pink remote control car before pulling the blind, letting in the sun, and destroying the villain.

But as an adult, Gizmo recedes a bit and I get the horror movie – a cute, sweet, funny one, but a horror movie no less, one which joyfully revels in its horror, just as it also revels in its slapstick, Looney Tunes puppet show and its endless genre and film homages and references. But when it wants to be scary, it is.

Case in point – Billy’s mom hears a sound upstairs and creeps up to her son’s room where that morning they had discovered a set of large, gross looking cocoons. Coming up the ladder, fog drifts down and she can see something’s wrong. The camera follows her and then opens up to reveal that they have all hatched and are now empty. She’s already unnerved but then, in the stillness, ringing through the house comes Bing Crosby, singing “Do You Hear What I Hear?” She freezes. It’s creepy. Next, having come downstairs to turn off the record player, in one non-showboating, totally effective tracking shot, we see her edge across the living room and peer down a hallway as, unbeknownst to her, a shadow of a gremlin appears and disappears in the kitchen doorway before she makes her way into that room.

What follows is probably the horror centerpiece of the whole movie. Turning the corner, she sees a gremlin (and for the first time, we do fully as well) sitting at the table munching on her gingerbread men, their yellow icing disgustingly smeared all over its face. It discovers more cookie dough in the food processor and dives in head first to glut itself before she whips around the corner and turns the machine on, sucking the critter into its blades and shooting green blood all over the cabinets.

Then she’s hit in the back and turns to see one of these little monsters throwing things at her. Whatever these kitchen items are may not be that dangerous, but the sense of life and death threat is real – it is a scary looking beast and it is malicious. Using a tray as a shield, she braves the assault, makes her way to her assailant and stabs it repeatedly with a kitchen knife, shouting, “Get out of my kitchen!” The way her own violence is so rattling for her makes it all the scarier. And then (here it comes – this is the big one) another one attacks, she forces it back by squirting bug spray in its eyes until it stumbles into the microwave, she turns it on, and after a few moments of bubbling and screaming, it pops wetly.

It’s gross and awesome and surprisingly rough for a kids movie starring an adorable, wide eyed ball of fluff. Then she goes into the den, is attacked by one more hiding in the Christmas tree who gets the better of her and almost strangles her before Billy comes home and cuts off its head with a sword that had been decorating the wall, sending that head spinning into the fireplace where they watch it burn. Wow. It is all violent, thrilling, gory, gross, and really funny.

But something I noticed watching it a couple times this week is that while there is a lot of violence, we only see its direct effect on the gremlins. They get stabbed, microwaved, decapitated, electrocuted and melted into puddles of skeletal, burbling goo, they bleed and explode; they suffer.

However, while they do kill a number of people, we never see the exact final moment. When they drive the snowplow into the house of Mr. Futterman (the always lovable B-movie mainstay, Dick Miller – easy to love even when playing grumpy, drunk xenophobes, complaining of foreign-made goods, full of “gremlins”), crushing him and his wife, we cut between the Futtermans’ reaction shots and the gleeful critters in the cab of the plow until finally we see the Futtermans scream, cut to the Gremlins one last time and then see a jolt as if they’ve just made contact, running into or over the couple. We don’t actually see what happens to the people.

Or, in another scene, the bank owner, mean old Mrs. Deagle is distracted by Gremlin Carolers outside, singing the most excellent theme to the film, “The Gremlins Rag,” all bundled up with song books in hand – just lovely. She takes a pitcher of water to throw on what she thinks will be irritating children and finds them instead and runs back inside to go upstairs to safety– in the meantime, Stripe has sabotaged her electric chair. We see her screaming in terror as it malfunctions, shooting her up the staircase way too fast, and we see her thrown out the window and subsequently fly through the air. But we don’t see her hit the ground. That happens just barely out of frame. The fact that we see violence to humans but not exactly humans dying does soften things somewhat. Often I wouldn’t want my horror movie ‘softened,’ but in this case, it works.

And then there are the gremlins themselves, another element the film gets just right. Their design is properly creepy – long spindly, almost insect-like limbs, their slimy, reptilian green skin, their long claws and sharp teeth. They are gross and goopy (at one point, Stripe blows his nose in the curtain, like you do). They are vicious and bloodthirsty. And they are just unabashedly delightful in every way. Seriously – I know when I watched this as a kid, I loved Gizmo – he was there for me. I was five (I had a little Gizmo doll and everything). But now, I unconditionally love the Gremlins. While scary and disgusting, they are still cute in their way. I mean, they are just fun loving rascals who love playing around, dressing up, eating junk food, and watching movies – just kids really. Dangerous, out of control, deadly children, but children who you can still love, who are still cuties when you catch them in the right light.

For example, I love the moment when Billy and Kate realize that all of the gremlins are off the street and must have gone someplace dark, so they check out the cinema.  We see them happily filling the seats, gobbling up popcorn and Junior Mints, and generally just having a pretty wholesome, if raucous, good time. Billy pokes his head in and when Kate asks him what they’re doing, he replies, “They’re watching Snow White. And they LOVE IT!” And they really do.

The main villain, Stripe only survives Billy and Kate burning down the cinema because he had gone across the street for candy as the concessions stand was all out of popcorn. “Yum yum?…Yum yum!” I mean, sure, later he tries to eviscerate Billy with a chainsaw, but how can you not love this guy?

As they are just effectively kids, the real weight of responsibility for all that’s happened truly falls on Billy’s dad, who should never have ignored the old Chinese man’s warnings in the first place (The Chinese shopkeeper is admittedly quite an exoticized stereotype, but that was the era, and he does come across pretty positively at least). If you want to read something into these proceedings, the dad can be taken as a symbol of America – optimistic and good intentioned, blithely chasing his dreams and unthinkingly seizing natural resources that aren’t for sale, trying to do right by his family with no thought of larger consequences – irresponsible and spawning monsters. When the old shopkeeper, known only as “Grandfather,” returns at the end to take Gizmo back to safety, the dad sincerely apologizes. Though “Grandfather” politely accepts this apology (and a malfunctioning smokeless ashtray), and it is heartfelt, it really feels hollow. It doesn’t matter how he feels. People are dead. But, you know, he’s a nice guy – what are you gonna do?

That reading aside, this is just such a deliriously fun movie and I’m glad I took this opportunity to revisit it. It’s also a great addition to the Christmas Horror list – may it brighten your season!