by Wallace, Amy
Bonus: Playhouse 90’s production of Heart of Darkness (1958)
In the mid-1950s, when his movie roles were at best undemanding, Karloff found rewarding material in the theatre and on television. The theatre performances are forever unavailable, but some of the television work is accessible, with live productions preserved in kinescope form. This Playhouse 90 adaptation strays far from the Joseph Conrad source, and Roddy McDowall is not my idea of Marlow, but his climactic encounter with the enigmatic Kurtz is highly satisfactory. Perfectly cast as Kurtz, Karloff is still a forcefully physical figure, and it is worth much to hear that intelligent, passionate, understated voice speak a variation on Conrad’s lines: “Exterminate all the brutes! Exterminate me! Horror, the horror!”
DAVID WALLECHINSKY’S SIX
OVERLOOKED HORROR FILMS
David Wallechinsky created the Book of Lists series in 1977 with his father Irving Wallace and sister Amy Wallace. He is also the cocreator of the People’s Almanac books, and author of The 20th Century: History with the Boring Parts Left Out, Whatever Happened to the Class of ’65? (with Michael Medved), Tyrants: The World’s 20 Worst Dictators, and numerous other titles. Wallechinsky is also a columnist for Parade and blogs on the Huffington Post.
1. A Page of Madness (Kurutta ippeji)—Japan, 1926
A Japanese silent classic, APageofMadness takes place in an insane asylum. A man whose wife is incarcerated there takes a job as a janitor with the intention of helping her escape. The director, Teinosuke Kinugasa, made at least 100 films, the most famous of which was the Oscar-winning Gate of Hell (1953). APageofMadness, a prime candidate for a modern remake, was thought to be lost for forty years until Kinugasa found a print in his garden shed.
2. Titicut Follies—USA, 1967
Like APageofMadness, Titicut Follies takes place in an insane asylum. But Frederick Wiseman’s groundbreaking cinéma vérité feature documents life inside a real mental hospital, the State Prison for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Wiseman exposed such appalling conditions inside the prison, including abuse of naked prisoners, that the film was banned from public showings for twenty-three years.
3. Demon Woman (Onibaba)—Japan, 1964
During a time of war, an old woman and her daughter-in-law lure soldiers into a covered pit, kill them, and trade their armor and weapons for food. One of their victims, a general, wears a demon mask, which the old woman uses to scare her daughterin-law into not running away.
4. Pulgasari—North Korea, 1985
You don’t see a lot of monster movies from North Korea, and this one has one of the most unusual backstories in the history of cinema. The current dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong-il, kidnapped South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and forced him to make movies in North Korea. Pulgasari was Shin’s last work before he escaped while on a trip to Vienna. Pulgasari the monster begins his life as a doll made of rice and clay, but grows whenever he eats metal. Soon he is protecting oppressed villagers from the evil warlord. But then he grows so big that he becomes a burden to the citizenry he is supposed to be protecting. As for Shin, after being debriefed at length by the CIA, he made his way to Hollywood, changed his name to Simon Sheen, created the 3 Ninjas series and even managed to get Pulgasari remade as an American children’s film called Galgameth.
5. Dead of Night—UK, 1945
Probably the first horror anthology film, Dead of Night consists of five separate tales successfully tied together as one story. My favorite episode is “Golfing Story,” which many horror fans hate because it is a comic yarn in which character actors Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne reprise their sporting-obsessed roles from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. However, “Golfing Story” relieves the tension before the creepiest segment, “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy,” in which Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist who appears to be controlled by his dummy.
6. Witchcraft Through the Ages (Häxan)—Denmark/Sweden, 1922
In this precursor of both surrealism and docudrama, writer/ director Benjamin Christensen, who also plays The Devil, presents a weird and shocking history of witchcraft, with emphasis on the Middle Ages, mass hysteria, and the dangers of superstition. An abridged version, with narration by author William S. Burroughs, was released in 1968.
FRANZ RODENKIRCHEN’S TEN PERSONAL ENCOUNTERS
WITH THE HORROR GENRE (PLUS A CODA)
Franz Rodenkirchen is married to writer/translator Sanna Isto, with whom he has two daughters. He heads the consulting department at the German script development company Script House. As script advisor, he regularly works for the Binger Filmlab, Amsterdam; the European workshop Script & Pitch; CineLink, the co-production market of the Sarajevo Film Festival, and many others. Franz cowrote four legendary horror films—Nekromantik, Nekromantik 2, Der Todesking, and Schramm—with director Jörg Buttgereit, and helped in bringing them to the screen. By now, he has worked on well over 100 international film projects, predominantly with writer/directors.
I realize this is more of a story than a list, but stories are my life . . .
1. 1967: My earliest memory of seeing a movie was at the age of four, when I watched The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, by Nathan Juran, on TV. I distinctly remember the scene with the Cyclops roasting humans on a spit. As it turned out later after we met, Jörg Buttgereit’s earliest film memory is the same, so, given we are the same age, he must’ve seen the same broadcast.
2. 1977: At school, as a preteen, I was thrilled but also scared to hear of all the horror films my friends talked about—especially the moment when Vera Miles touches the shoulder of Mrs. Bates and stares into the face of death. That struck me as the most horrible sight imaginable. Needless to say, when finally I saw Psycho for the first time, as an adult, I was quite disappointed with that particular effect.
3. 1980: Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh-Eaters played, and though my anxiety was strong as ever (oh, those days of puberty . . .), I agreed to go see it with my fourteen-year-old girlfriend. For the length of the movie I tried to both see and not see what was going on. Afterwards, my girlfriend walked home alone through dark fields, while I spent the night with the lights on and seeing zombies in every corner . . .
4. 1981: Age seventeen, and looking fifteen, I tried unsuccessfully to pass for eighteen to see Dawn of the Dead. All my friends got in and another legend was born. But this time I promised myself I’d get a handle on that anxiety problem. As for the looks—time would help.
5. 1984: Now twenty and living in Berlin, I made good on that promise. One night I attended a triple feature at the legendary Sputnik Cinema in Berlin (where we’d have most of our premiere screenings later): Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Carrie. After seeing TCM, I was sure I’d seen the best horror film ever made. And from that day, I launched into a full exploration of the genre.
6. 1984: Some weeks later, while grating carrots, I managed to cut off the tip of my right index finger and, after receiving a tetanus shot at the hospital, I finally went to see Dawn of the Dead. Unlike Psycho, this film lived up to its reputation. I loved it, and still do.
7. July 1988: At the horror all-nighter “Shock Around the Clock,” at the wonderful Scala Cinema in London, the first international screening of Nekromantik propelled our cheap little movie out into the world—where it still enjoys a healthy life.
8. 1990: After a full day of casting for Nekromantik 2, we had not found an acceptable leading lady. Frustrated, I went to a triplebill midnight screening, including Lucio Fulci’s House by the Cemetery. There I saw a woman I wished had shown up at our casting. I followed her out, approached her in a dark alley, and, in a complete cliché moment, asked if she had ever thought about starring in a film. That’s how I met Monika M., who became the star of Nekromantik 2.
9. 1993: We were banned from screening our films at the “Love and Anarchy” Film Festival in Helsinki (due to reputation only), so the organizers of the festival put everybody on a ferry to Tallinn to screen Nekromantik 1 an
d 2 (in a triple bill with Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer). I dedicated the screening to the festival’s top guest John Woo, who was nice enough to accept and sit through the whole thing.
10. 1994: Returning to the Helsinki Film Festival for the screening of our last film, Schramm, I attended a screening of Tsui Hark’s Green Snake and was afterwards accosted by a woman who remembered me from the year before. That’s how I met my wife.
Coda: 2007: On one of the rare occasions when I’m home alone these days, I watched Wolf Creek—it had quite a reputation, and I felt a new hunger to delve back into my favorite genre, after years of sagging interest. I stopped the film after the first time they knock out the bad guy, with no intention of ever seeing the rest. I could find nothing in me that wanted to continue watching.
VINCE CHURCHILL’S TOP TEN LIST OF FILMS IN WHICH,
WOW, THE BLACK GUY LIVED!
Vince Churchill is the author of two horror/science fiction novels: The Dead Shall Inherit the Earth and The Blackest Heart. He contributes a regular column,“TheSplatter Pattern,” to The Hacker’s Source magazine. Next up is a horror novella called Condemned, scheduled to be published by Daystar Studios in the fall of 2007.His next novel, a dark end-of-the-world love story called Good Night My Sweet, is slated for completion in early 2008.
Back in the day, if there was a black character in a horror film, odds were they were there strictly for the sake of the body count. A black guy was the horror equivalent of the red-uniformed guys on Star Trek. So here’s my list of the best horror flicks where the black guy (or gal) overcomes all until the end credits. And there were so many films to choose from, don’t you know.
1. Bats: He’s no Madonna, but the single-named Leon, best known for the Jamaican bobsled classic Cool Runnings, backs up leads Lou Diamond Phillips and Dina Meyer and manages to not bite the big one.
2. Halloween H2O: Rapper-turned-actor Will Smith, uh, no, I mean LL Cool J plays a security guard at a private school with a bullseye on his back so big he might as well have been driving by a KKK meeting with Paris Hilton on his lap. But he does live to bust a rhyme another day.
3. Deep Blue Sea: Well, Samuel L. Jackson might have become shark chow, but that rapper-turned-actor Tupac, uh, I mean LL Cool J, plays a God-fearing cook with a parrot who finds a way to survive intelligent killer sharks and also the ocean. We all know brothers can’t swim, so this ought to count for two. Mr. Cool J is one lucky Negro.
4. Thir13een Ghosts: Rah Digga plays Maggie, a useless housekeeper/ nanny whose abrasive personality makes Florence from The Jeffersons seem like Alice from The Brady Bunch. Most viewers of the film probably wished her character dead, but miraculously she lives to the end.
5. Dawn of the Dead: Ken Foree decides suicide is not the answer, then kicks zombie ass (accompanied by cheap action music) up to the roof to hitch a ride with the pregnant helicopter-flying chick. It ain’t his baby, so no sweat.
6. Day of the Dead: Terry Alexander portrays our island-accented chopper pilot John and manages to fly off into the sunset with the girl in a way reminiscent of the previous Dawn of the Dead. Hey, Zombie Mon, get your dark meat elsewhere.
7. 28 Days Later: By far the most attractive of our survivors, Naomie Harris’s Selena has a cute English accent and is handy with a machete too. Hubba, hubba.
8. Anaconda: Rapper-turned-actor Ice T, uh, I mean Ice Cube, takes a trek into the jungle and defies stereotype by not letting the big snake be his downfall. Plus, he gets to work with a sweaty J. Lo. Better than a free basket of hot wings.
9. The Thing: Keith David literally chills out with Kurt Russell and waits to see what happens when the home fires burn low at the end of John Carpenter’s classic remake. But honestly, what good can come from a brother working in the Arctic?
10. The House on Haunted Hill: In the remake of the old William Castle/Vincent Price shocker, Taye Diggs enters the house a simple baseball player, but by the time the credits roll, he’s not only survived, but is stranded on a ledge with the sexy Ali Larter and has an envelope filled with million-dollar cashier’s checks made out to cash. He not only lives, he lives large!
JOHN SKIPP’S FIVE FAVORITE BENIGN
“FACE OF GOD” MOMENTS IN HORROR FILMS
(PLUS TEN HONORABLE MENTIONS)
John Skipp is one of America’s most cheerfully perplexing renaissance mutants: New York Times bestselling author-turned-filmmaker, satirist, cultural crusader, musical pornographer, purveyor of cuddly metaphysics, interpretive dancer, and all-around bon vivant. With The Long Last Call, Conscience, and the Bram Stoker Award–winning anthology Mondo Zombie, he has returned to the front ranks of modern horror fiction. Other books include The Light at the End and The Bridge (both with Craig Spector), Stupography, and The Emerald Burrito of Oz (with Marc Levinthal). He lives in L.A. and thinks you should visit him at www .johnskipp.com, just for fun.
1. Santa Sangre (1989): Nobody in the history of transcendence-based cinema has used horrific imagery more abundantly or profoundly than Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Death, morbidity, cruelty, madness, and the spiritual perils that the flesh must endure on their way to godhead are continually invoked throughout El Topo and The Holy Mountain: not to mitigate the sacred, but to propel it forward through a landscape of corruption and dread—fighting all the way—until it actually earns the transcendence it craves.
But these are not horror films, in any conventional sense. So it wasn’t until Santa Sangre that he flipped the coin, and used nearly conventional horror tropes (e.g., “He’s a serial killer, and this is how it happened”) as a kick-start toward ultimate, truly staggering enlightenment.
Those moments are far too abundant to count, coming in both sideways and right in your face. (The boy and the bleeding elephant, anyone?)
But I’d have to pick the sequence in which our incredibly broken murderer/antihero buries his latest victim, and a white horse emerges from the grave. Must be seen to be fucking believed. And total genius, no matter how (or how many ways) you slice it.
2. The Shining (1980): Legend has it that Stanley Kubrick called to wake up Stephen King in the middle of the night and ask, “Excuse me, but I need to know . . . do you believe in God?” And when King replied that actually, yes, he did, Kubrick went, “Oh,” and hung up the phone.
So how fascinating is it that the self-professed theist/existentialist/agnostic-at-best — whose 2001: A Space Odyssey turns out to be one of the greatest face-of-God movies ever made—would choose to represent transcendent love and grace almost exclusively through the smile of Scatman Crothers?
But there it is: beneficent and loving and beautiful beyond compare, in extreme close up, as he talks to young Danny. And even though this face of God might have to die (it didn’t happen in the novel) in order for others to be saved, there is no denying the power of that smile.
(Note: Spielberg tried to use the same Scatman modalities in “Kick the Can,” his installment in Twilight Zone: The Movie. But one film’s radiance is another film’s treacle; the smile is still undeniable, but it plays more flim than flam.)
3. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992): If you were to ask me what the greatest horror film ever made was, I would probably say Twin Peaks. The only thing is that it’s about thirty-some hours long; most of it ran episodically, on TV, in hour-long increments; and almost nobody called it horror.
But, of course, that’s just crazy, because I’ve never seen anything down-to-the-soul scarier. Between the inimitable “Bob,” Leland Palmer, Leo, Windom Earle, and the Black Lodge itself, there’s hardly a devastating note left unhit in the entire horror lexicon.
And so it comes down to the closing moments of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me—David Lynch’s posthumous theatrical prequel/final entry in the series—to nail the face of God forever and completely.
In the Black Lodge. With Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer, smiling at each other. While an angel hovers overhead. Letting us know that—on a certain level of Heaven—everything is alrea
dy all right. And that Hell, however dark and deep, is not the end.
4. Hardware (1990): There’s no better place to hit the high notes of transcendence than in an actual death scene: when a character literally parts the veil between this world and the next one, then walks us through the changes.
And this has never been done more expertly than writer/director Richard Stanley does it with the death of Mo (Dylan McDermott) in Hardware: a psychedelic segue so intimate and willful that you’d be proud to die that way, too.
Far too few other filmmakers—Douglas Trumball with Louise Fletcher in Brainstorm, Ralph Bakshi with the pool-shooting crow in Fritz the Cat—have bothered to convey such intimacy with this penultimate moment.
But since Mr. Stanley brought both brilliance and a badass killer robot to the proceedings, he definitely takes the cake. Horror filmmakers, please take note.
5. Jacob’s Ladder (1990): This is, to my mind, the inarguable high point of transcendent horror cinema.
Who would have thought that Adrian Lyne—the director of Flashdance, 9½ Weeks, and Fatal Attraction—would parlay the Hollywood leverage he bought with those successes into such an unadulterated masterpiece?