The last couple of weeks have entailed a series of connections. Thanks to a Christmas present, I went on a run of Vincent Price movies. That led me to take in some of Price’s work with Roger Corman. And in turn, watching some of those great old Poe pictures, I got an itch to revisit something I’d first seen only a few months ago, a loving parody of those films, Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001). When I first watched it in October, featured on the Joe Bob Briggs Halloween special on Shudder, with Cassandra Peterson (the performer behind Elvira) as a guest, it took me quite a while to get into it. I was enjoying the interview portions of the show, hearing Peterson’s stories of her career and the hard and costly road of making the movie, but the humor of the film just wasn’t landing. But somehow, over time, I started to get it. I hadn’t seen the movies it was lampooning (generally, the Corman Poe cycle, with a pinch of Hammer Horror thrown in), but I started to catch what was being sent up and by the end, I kind of loved it.
Having finally watched a few of Corman’s flicks, I really wanted to give this another watch and see how it played with more knowledge of its inspiration. So, that’s what we’re doing today. There will be some spoilers, but I think that is less troublesome in a work of parody such as this.
Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001)
Elvira is an interesting figure in the horror landscape. A horror host since 1981 (before that having worked with a wide range of big names, from Elvis to Fellini), her act walks a line between Borsht Belt shtick with endless cheesy one liners; a kind of camp sexuality wherein she puts on exaggerated characteristics of femininity in a manner not dissimilar to a drag queen, all the while making a constant joke of it – at once, selling and sending up the “sexiness” (there’s no situation she won’t turn into a joke about her chest); and always warmly, lovingly celebrating the Halloween of it all – the fun play with spookiness and the macabre. It’s an odd and unique balancing act, and maybe it doesn’t always work, but that’s where the camp comes in – I think it isn’t always supposed to work – the joke not landing is sometimes part of the bit (and sometimes the failed joke is the actual gag) – there is an irony at the heart of it all that shines through even when a superficial laugh falls flat (insert boob joke here).
Generally, that all applies to this film – it is cheesy. The jokes often fizzle. It goes for the lowest hanging fruit possible – both in its “parody” and in its “bawdiness”; but there is a secret kernel hidden at its center: something knowing, a genuine love of the movies it purports to make fun of, a brave, open-hearted willingness to do the absolutely stupidest things for a laugh. All of this makes it kind of infectious, and surprisingly loveable.
We follow Elvira (basically as her anachronistic “valley-girl” inspired self) travelling to Paris to star in her can-can revue, waylaid at a spooooky old castle filled with nods to (and direct rip-offs of) characters from the Corman Poe films (having only seen the three so far, I can’t track every reference, but it draws largely from House of Usher and Pit and the Pendulum). Family patriarch who can’t stand loud sounds? Check. Someone walled up in the basement? You betcha. A spot of catalepsy? Better believe it! Torture chambers, the dark burden of family history, revelation of marital betrayals, a crumbling ancient mansion, tainted by genealogical evil, waiting to sink into the ground, and prose as purple as sweet plum wine? You want it – we got it! Even the opening credits, with abstract paintings undulating behind the text, suggests the kind of thing Corman was doing in the early 60s.
It turns out that Elvira is a dead ringer for Lady Elura, the first wife, ten years dead, of the long suffering Lord Hellsubus (Richard O’Brien of Rocky Horror Picture Show), but she also seems to sometimes actually be Elura reincarnate, or somehow her descendant – it’s not quite clear, which sets in motion a series of attempted murders, explorations through hidden, cobweb infested passages, and shocking reveals. All the while, Elvira is simply trying to catch a ride to continue on to Paris to do her show (though she is happy to be momentarily delayed by hooking up with the ridiculously hunky and poorly dubbed, Fabio-esque stable boy). By the end, she is of course tied to a slab with a sharpened pendulum swinging above her, but also of course, as the rope tying her down goes over her ample bosom, it gets cut before she does and she manages to escape (there really aren’t any “haunted hills” in this film – that’ s just another boob joke too).
But this movie is not that focused on plot, so much as setting up scenarios to indulge in the silliest gags imaginable. Lord Hellsubus can’t endure loud sounds so there’s a slapstick routine of Elvira and her assistant, Zou Zou, bumping into every suit of armor, knocking over ever vase and hitting every gong. Elvira runs through a graveyard, only to see a spider in its web and scream, see a raven fly past her head and scream, see a bunny sitting sweetly in front of a tombstone and scream.
After having Zou Zou add more bubbles to her Jacuzzi (by blowing into a hose), Elvira is about to get out of the bath when she admonishes the camera operator to look away cause she doesn’t want to “blow the rating on this picture.” She even gets a big, music hall number, with singing and dancing and an applause sign on her tush.
Some of this is pretty funny, and regrettably some of it isn’t. It’s a bit strange, but I think I actually enjoyed the movie more on my first watch when I’d not yet seen the films it was referencing. Having watched them so recently, some of the referential comedy comes off as just that – trying to get a laugh for recreating exact scenes and dialogue from its referents without always coming up with its own jokes. Text frequently feels directly pulled from House of Usher or Pit and the Pendulum. It’s closer to Mel Brooks’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It than it is to his superior Young Frankenstein; the later really making its own characters and comic situations out of the source material, and the former depending much more on recreating (in a silly fashion) specific moments from Dracula films (generally Coppola’s 1992 picture). When I didn’t know the original films, I picked up on the joke that it was sending up a kind of film, a kind of melodramatic, over-the-top, old fashioned, but beloved work. Now, it feels more like it is just redoing bits (but with more slapstick, boob jokes, and sound effects that go “boing!”). It is still enjoyable and lovable in its intentional ridiculousness, but it doesn’t feel as inspired in its stupidity as I’d originally taken it to be.
Also, some elements suffer in comparison. The first time I watched it, I’d imagined that O’Brien’s Lord Hellsubus was affectionately aping a kind of performance one might have found in the originals, and I really got a kick out of just how madcap he went, his performance really growing on me over the film and staying with me afterwards. He was going on a wild ride, and I loved going there with him. However, having just watched some of the Corman movies, I can see how the big choices O’Brien is making are actually the opposite of what Price had done 50 years earlier with a parallel role. Where Price gets quiet, O’Brien gets loud; where Price stays grounded, O’Brien goes round the bend; where Price tenderly touches emotional depths, bringing forth a horrific, subtle shudder, O’Brien waves his arms about and shouts his head off.
That said, I don’t want to be unfair to this actor – what was he supposed to do? Try to recreate Price’s performance beat for beat (and almost certainly fail) – isn’t it better to go in his own direction? And what he’s doing is unquestionably appropriate for the loony tunes world his role exists in – something as gentle and whole as Price had done could have been lost amidst the sight gags and double entendres. Maybe playing it this way just serves to better homage Price’s talent (the movie is dedicated to him), highlighting the surprising and oh-so-successful choices he made by showing the path not taken.
As a whole, this movie is such an odd duck. I really do have affection for it, but I wonder who they thought they were making it for. It has a goofy sense of humor that perhaps a nine year old could best appreciate while it revolves around references to a series of movies no nine year old is likely to have seen. It’s full of allusions to horrific acts (with just a little bit of cartoony gore thrown in at the end), but it is not remotely scary. It leans hard on sex jokes but it still comes off as entirely wholesome. It approaches its source material with such inane absurdity, but it is obvious how much it adores those earlier films. It really does feel like a labor of love, which I understand it was for Peterson and her team. Apparently, she had trouble getting financing, poured loads of her own money into getting the picture finished (partly funded by mortgaging her home), and then couldn’t really get it distributed and took a huge financial loss – in the end, she mostly ended up screening it as a part of AIDS fundraisers she was involved with.
Of course, before she gets stretched out, a character appreciatively comments, “nice rack!”
In the end, for all its faults, I still feel like championing this picture – I think it’s been little seen and while the cohort who will really appreciate it is probably quite small, I really hope those people find this movie. Their inner vaudevillian, sixties-horror-loving child will thank them for it.
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.
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 Bloodall 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 themodel). 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.
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.
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18 months
_ga
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gali
Used by Google Analytics to determine which links on a page are being clicked
30 seconds
_ga_
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gid
ID used to identify users for 24 hours after last activity
24 hours
_gat
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests when using Google Tag Manager
1 minute
_gac_
Contains information related to marketing campaigns of the user. These are shared with Google AdWords / Google Ads when the Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts are linked together.
90 days
__utma
ID used to identify users and sessions
2 years after last activity
__utmt
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests
10 minutes
__utmb
Used to distinguish new sessions and visits. This cookie is set when the GA.js javascript library is loaded and there is no existing __utmb cookie. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
