Frenzy (1972)

Alfred Hitchcock was still a household name – nothing could ever change that. But by the early 1970’s, his status was somewhat tarnished following a pair of films that were less successfully received by both critics and audiences: Torn Curtain (1966; a film I personally enjoy) and Topaz (1969). The director, who had begun his career in silent film, was now in his seventies, in declining health, and seemed to be inextricably linked to Hollywood’s past; he hadn’t produced a genuine sensation since The Birds (1963). What would become his penultimate film, and his most successful in quite a while, had been bouncing about in his mind for years before he actually found the right property and the circumstance to film it. Disappointed with the experience of Torn Curtain, Hitch had decided his next film would be a return to small-scale, scrappy, lower-budgeted filmmaking. In other words, he wanted another happy and creatively liberating experience like Psycho (1960), and in fact the project he pursued would have had a similarly macabre theme, with a necrophiliac serial killer targeting a policewoman. The working title was, at various points, Frenzy. He prepared a treatment with Benn Levy, the screenwriter of Hitch’s Blackmail (1929) as well as James Whale’s classic Gothic The Old Dark House (1932). Alas, the project was scuppered by Universal, who suggested he adapt Leon Uris’s 1967 bestseller Topaz instead. Only when this project was complete did he again begin searching for a more personal project, eventually settling upon the 1966 novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square by Arthur La Bern, about a serial killer on the loose in London. Hitch was able to convince Universal that this new story, to which he was now attaching his favored title Frenzy, was superior to his former treatment and worthy of moving forward. Both Hitch and the studio realized there was something special about this film: it would mean that the director would be returning to his roots. He was returning to London.

Dick Blaney, played by Jon Finch.

Ironically, Hitch was making a film for an American studio in England at a time when the British film industry was entering a slump that would last throughout the decade. Audiences for British films were shrinking, and British film companies increasingly relied upon whatever lucrative avenues they could find, which were primarily TV spinoffs and sex comedies. But Hitch would do his part, employing a British crew, a British screenwriter (Anthony Shaffer, author of the hit 1970 play Sleuth), and no Hollywood stars: when Frenzy was released in 1972, it was the name “Hitchcock” that towered above the title on the poster, an explicit acknowledgement that he was the true star of the film. Instead, the cast would be littered with faces that only British audiences might recognize, including Anna Massey (from Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom), Barry Foster (Battle of Britain), Alec McCowen (The Witches), Bernard Cribbins (The Railway Children), Billie Whitelaw (Gumshoe), and Jean Marsh (a TV actress who would later go on to high-profile films like Return to Oz and Willow). There’s no Grace Kelly here, as Hitch was casting for faces that looked like ordinary, unglamorous Londoners, contributing to the film’s gritty verisimilitude. Star Jon Finch, a theater actor, had been taking bit parts in Hammer horror films only a few years before, but his stock was rising, having just played the title role in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), one of the greatest – and grimmest – Shakespearean films ever made (and Finch is remarkable in it). Hitchcock, who preferred his actors just show up and deliver their lines with no fuss – and originally desired Michael Caine for the part – didn’t get along with the actor. According to Raymond Foery in his book Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy: The Last Masterpiece (2012), when Finch continued to suggest revisions to the dialogue, “Hitchcock quite ceremoniously halted the shooting until Anthony Shaffer could be summoned to the set for a consultation.”

Blaney and Babs (Anna Massey) on the run from the law.

Their rocky relationship is not necessarily detrimental to the film. Part of what makes Frenzy such an unusual Hitchcock film is that the “wrong man” in this Wrong Man plot is very unsympathetic. Finch’s Dick Blaney is a reckless alcoholic with too much pride for his own good. At the start of the film, he’s fired from a pub by the seedy Forsythe (Cribbins) on account of drinking on the job, and proceeds to gamble away the rest of his money with his friend Bob Rusk (Foster), who works at London’s Covent Garden Market. After he’s loaned some money by his patient ex-wife Brenda Blaney (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) – who works at a matrimonial agency that pairs up lovelorn singles – he splurges on a hotel excursion with his barmaid girlfriend Barbara “Babs” Milligan (Massey); never mind that he was sleeping at a Salvation Army shelter the night before. Blaney doesn’t pay much attention to the headlines – ANOTHER NECKTIE STRANGLING – until Brenda is raped and strangled in her office, the latest victim of the killer. The receptionist saw Blaney leaving the office and gives a description to the police. But the real culprit is best friend Rusk, who continues his psycho-sexual spree while Scotland Yard, led by Chief Inspector Oxford (McCowen), pursues the increasingly suspect Blaney.

Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec McCowen, center) arrests Blaney.

It’s a simple, even contrived, plot (adapted from a novel that would have gone forgotten were it not for this film), but a suitable template upon which the director could lavish his trademark detail, humor, and intricate, fastidiously-organized setpieces. Frenzy is another Hitchcock machine – and I don’t use the term unflatteringly – built to evoke the maximum amount of tension and discomfort in the audience before allowing cathartic release. Whatever you think of the film, Hitch’s enthusiasm is apparent, the 73-year-old rejuvenated by the opportunity to surprise, disturb, and thrill his audience in new ways. It’s the work of an auteur who’s finally allowed complete freedom again, and he doesn’t let it go to waste. But Frenzy is so designed to take the audience off-guard that it might take a second viewing to appreciate how carefully constructed the film really is. Shaffer’s plotting can seem meandering and sloppy the first time through. On a second viewing, one can see more clearly the months of work that went into the script, since every moment contributes to the whole. Frenzy, like Sleuth (which was released as a feature film the same year as Frenzy – and featured Hitch’s preferred star, Michael Caine), has the feel of a puzzle, despite the fact that we learn the identity of the killer very early on. This knowledge somehow makes the puzzle feel even more ingenious: it’s a three-way duel among the Wrong Man (Blaney), the Right Man (Rusk), and the Detective (Oxford). The audience is invited to engage in the game and guess how it will resolve itself, how these three players will finally come together, while simultaneously feeling the floor drop out from under them as Hitch pushes his own personal boundaries of shock. The director here enjoyed one of his rare happy collaborations with a writer, having found someone as obsessed with playing the audience as he was. (Regrettably, though he intended to work with Shaffer again on Family Plot, negotiations fell through.)

Hitchcock gets his obligatory cameo out of the way at the front of the film. He wanted the audience's attention on the plot.

Without completely spoiling the ending, I think the way in which the film concludes is telling: our three players are finally standing in the same room, a single, witty line of dialogue is delivered, and the credits roll. Note that there is no actual denouement, a la the final scene of Psycho. There’s no dead weight, and even though the audience has a right to wonder what precisely will happen to Blaney now, it’s something of a relief that we’re spared the details. (Blaney is an unsympathetic character who gains our sympathies only because he’s not guilty of the crime. So Hitch and Shaffer don’t even bother to tell us what ultimately becomes of him!) A similar excision happens during a courtroom scene two-thirds of the way through the film. Hitch and Shaffer dodge the familiar, dull proceedings, which we’ve seen a hundred times in a hundred other movies; instead, we sit outside with the officer watching the door, and when it swings shut, we can’t hear the droning judge’s sentence. We don’t need to. There will be no stock scenes in a Hitchcock film.

Rusk (Barry Foster) strangles Brenda Blaney in "Frenzy"'s most notorious setpiece.

So it’s an efficient and exceptionally clever script that holds up to subsequent viewings. What the audience does take away on that first viewing is that this is the work of a Hitchcock of the 1970’s, a Hitchcock with an adult rating: R in the U.S., X in the U.K. (note that practically every horror film got an X too; the connotations for the rating were quite different in Hitch’s home country). He no longer needed to merely imply rape, as he does in Marnie (1964). He was permitted to show it, and so, for the first time since the one-two of Psycho and The Birds, he could truly shock his jaded audience once more. 1972 was, after all, the year of Deep Throat, so there was no need for him to make the same type of films he was making a decade before. Thus you get the rape of Brenda Blaney, which is disturbing, graphic, and almost unbearable in its intensity. Note that just as with the shower scene of Psycho, it is edited with images like a collage (though not cut as fast, because the intent is that the scene feel queasy and prolonged). I don’t have to watch the film to recall those images: Brenda’s brassiere being pulled down, her flailing legs, her arm extended into the air, the tie tightening around her throat, her eyes dashing back and forth while she loses oxygen. And, of course, Shaffer’s increasingly abstract dialogue, as the bestial Rusk is reduced to repeating “Lovely…lovely…lovely.” Ron Goodwin’s score is silent during this scene, which only makes it more uncomfortable, claustrophobic, and real. Hitchcock has been accused of misogyny – for this film, and in general – but it is important to realize that in a suspense film, the audience only needs to be shocked once. They will remember the shock and dread it occurring again – which is why the next murder occurs off-screen. It happens to a character that the audience has grown very close to, and so Hitchcock only needs to show the door close while Rusk delivers a familiar line, the same he said to Brenda before he killed her. Then, in what might be the film’s most bravura moment, Hitch’s camera slips back from the landing, down the stairs, and out the front door. Amazingly, his camera is in synch with the audience’s grieving.

A lobby card depicting Rusk's nighttime journey to recover his missing pin.

Another notable setpiece is Rusk’s desperate attempt to recover his trademark pin from a body smuggled into a sack of potatoes in the back of a moving truck. The scene, and its placement and intent, directly parallels Norman Bates’ effort to dispose of Marion Crane’s car (and body) midway through Psycho. Famously, the scene generates tension on behalf of the killer: will the car sink into the swamp, or will Norman be stuck with incriminating evidence? There, Hitchcock proved that he could create suspense out of nearly anything, even making the audience empathize with a man who’s covering up the murder of the person we’d thought was the main character (this moment seems even more perverse once the truth about Norman Bates is revealed). Frenzy‘s nighttime truck-ride similarly attempts to put the audience in Rusk’s shoes. If the scene suffers by comparison, that’s because (a) the other film is Psycho, for crying out loud, and (b) Anthony Perkins’ awkward, self-effacing Norman Bates is a considerably more likable character – his real crimes be damned – than Rusk’s brutal rapist. (Note that at the beginning of the scene that will end in Brenda’s rape, she’s uneasy about Rusk as soon as he enters the office. He’s just an unpleasant, disconcerting kind of guy. On the other hand, the couldn’t-harm-a-fly Norman comes across as charming to Marion Crane, and by proxy the audience.) If Frenzy can’t pull off with Rusk what Psycho can with Norman, that’s OK, because Hitch and Shaffer decide to play the scene for a slightly different angle: black comedy. And this is very black comedy, considering that the morbid slapstick – a stiff foot kicks into Rusk’s face while he scrambles to find his pin; rigor mortis stiffens the fingers that are clutching it, so he has to break them one by one – is centered on the corpse of a person that the audience cared about, and was made to care about (which I emphasize, because we’re being manipulated by Hitch and Shaffer), before being killed by this very man. Still, the scene comes off, and it’s one of the most memorable in the film. To invoke “catharsis” again: being reminded that we’re partaking in another of Alfred Hitchcock’s macabre games helps us get over the trauma of the film’s more pitch-black moments. By this point, we want to laugh, and an audience familiar with Hitch’s sense of humor – all those Alfred Hitchcock Presents introductions – can plug into his black humor vibe more easily.

Chief Inspector Oxford is served another ambitious meal by his wife (Vivien Merchant).

More gentle comic relief comes in the form of Chief Inspector Oxford’s all-too-believable domestic life, as we see him endure one ambitious meal after another served by his wife (Vivien Merchant, Alfie). Her culinary creations appear to be largely inedible, and the couple is endearing not just because Oxford tries to endure his wife’s suppers without complaint (though, should she leave the room…), but also because she acknowledges his dislike of the meals by casually noting that she’s sure he’d like some steak and potatoes instead. She’s educating his palate, it seems. And she’s also weighing in on the case, an opinion he values, which makes me wonder if this is how Hitch saw his relationship with his wife, Alma Lucy Reville. It was Alma who at one time received co-authorship credit on many of his scripts, Alma who continued to approve each of his projects and offered suggestions to improve them. He valued her opinion more than anyone’s; I’m not exactly sure how he felt of her cooking. These scenes are deliberately placed to break the tension, to allow the audience to breathe and to smile. And I think Hitch relished the opportunity to showcase warm, simple British domesticity, as it had been so many years since he’d filmed in England. The opening shot of the film, a long helicopter swoop over the Thames, places an unusually formal heraldic banner at the corner of the screen declaring “The City of London,” which I’d imagine generated some applause when it premiered there. But his London was one of the past; as Foery notes in his book, “[Shaffer’s] only stated quibbles regarding the Frenzy scenario had to do with what he took to be Hitchcock’s odd insistence on dialogue that seemed quaint by contemporary standards.” Hitch’s London, gritty and bleak as it might be, could be said to exist outside of time. It’s the London of popular imagination. In an early scene of the film, Hitch deliberately sets his tale against the expectations of that backdrop when one gentleman comments to another: “We haven’t had a good, juicy series of sex murders since [John] Christie. And they’re so good for the tourist trade. Foreigners somehow expect the squares of London to be fog-wreathed, full of hansom cabs, and littered with ripped whores, don’t you think?” With Frenzy, Hitchcock would not only announce that he was still the master of suspense – he would also give cinematic tourists the London they wanted.

Midnight Only is a proud participant in the Hitchcock Halloween blogathon presented by Backlots.net. Please visit Backlots.net for a complete list of Hitchcock Halloween essays.

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A (Suggested) 24-Hour Halloween Marathon

Every year I love reading bloggers’ suggestions for 24-hour horror marathons to celebrate Halloween. I usually sketch out one of my own – to make time pass while languishing at work. So this year I’m presenting my own suggested programming for a 24-hour marathon; and who knows, maybe I’ll even have the guts to sit through it…

6AM: Viy

While you have the coffee brewing, drop in this classic Russian fantasy, adapted from a short story by Nikolai Gogol. It may at first seem to be a simple folktale, with some charmingly goofy special effects, but the film’s justifiably famous second half is the reason this makes such perfect Halloween viewing: a boy (Leonid Kuravlyov) is challenged to spend three straight nights beside the body of a beautiful young woman (Natalya Varley) to pray for her soul’s salvation, though he knew her to be a witch while she lived. And each night the possessed girl rises to attack the boy, summoning black magic and living gargoyles, while he does his level best to fend her off. A favorite among fans of the macabre.

Year: 1967
Country: Russia
Running Time: 77 minutes
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Availability: DVD; YouTube

7:20AM: The Wolf Man

I like to start my Halloween viewing early with a Universal classic, to remind myself of where my interest in horror began. The Wolf Man is one of my favorites, rich with atmosphere and boasting one of Lon Chaney Jr.’s greatest performances. Bela Lugosi has a small but significant role as “Bela.” One of the most affecting of the Universal classics.

Year: 1941
Country: U.S.
Running Time: 70 minutes
Availability: Netflix Instant Streaming; Amazon Instant Video; Blu-Ray; DVD



8:30AM: The Mummy

Originally I was going to stick Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) here, but on second thought, let’s skip ahead to Hammer Films and their first wave of monster classics. Peter Cushing shines as John Banning, Egyptologist, with Christopher Lee as the Mummy, Kharis, and the beautiful Yvonne Furneaux as his reincarnated love (a plot recycled from earlier Universal mummy pictures). Director Terence Fisher is at the top of his game, and the scene in which Lee suddenly charges through a window continues to be surprising.

Year: 1959
Country: U.K.
Running Time: 88 minutes
Availability: Amazon Instant Video; DVD; Blu-Ray (Region 2)

10AM: Race with the Devil

Next we take a vacation in the desert with Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swit, Lara Parker, and their spiffy new mobile home. An accidental encounter with a gang of black-cloaked Satanists enacting a dark ritual leads to a nighttime chase. They think they’ve finally shaken their pursuers, but over the course of the following day, ominous clues indicate they’re being followed. Only in the 70’s could the occult be so perfectly matched with yee-haw car chases on dusty back roads.

Year: 1975
Country: U.S.
Running Time: 88 minutes
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Availability: Amazon Instant Video; DVD

11:30AM: The Devil’s Rain

I consider Robert Fuest’s The Devil’s Rain to be the stealth sequel to Race with the Devil. If you found the abrupt ending of the prior film unsatisfying, just pretend that The Devil’s Rain picks up where it left off, and concerns the same cult, which of course – as we learn now – is led by Ernest Borgnine. It’s left to William Shatner, his brother Tom Skerritt, Skerritt’s psychic wife Joan Prather, and Eddie Albert to destroy the Satanists once and for all. Their evil ranks include a briefly-glimpsed John Travolta.

Year: 1975
Country: U.S.
Running Time: 86 minutes
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Availability: DVD

1PM: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

As a kid, I used to watch this made-for-TV movie every October. It’s largely vanished since the 80’s, but it’s turned up on YouTube, so I’m considering revisiting it this year. Jeff Goldblum is ideally cast as Ichabod Crane – a more accurate version of Washington Irving’s original character than the supernatural-crime-solving hero of the current Sleepy Hollow TV series. Meg Foster is Katrina Van Tassel and ex-line backer Dick Butkus is Brom Bones.

Year: 1980
Country: U.S.
Running Time: 104 minutes
Availability: YouTube

2:45PM: Castle of the Walking Dead

Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel, also known as The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism, is an eye-popping little horror film, filmed on a low budget but managing some hallucinatory sets. Essentially the loosest-possible adaptation of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” it concerns a resurrected Count – played by none other than Christopher Lee – who seeks revenge for past crimes, drawing a young couple into his nightmarish castle. In one scene, the standard-issue carriage ride through a spooky forest to the menacing castle is enlivened by surrealistic imagery, such as body parts protruding from trees. Karin Dor, the femme fatale of the same year’s You Only Live Twice, here plays the damsel in distress. Seek it out!

Year: 1967
Country: West Germany
Running Time: 85 minutes
Availability: DVD; YouTube

4:15PM: Thriller: “Pigeons from Hell”

Boris Karloff introduces this hair-raising segment of his Thriller TV series, which adapts a rather brutal ghost story from Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard. An abandoned Southern plantation forms the setting for this tale of vengeance from beyond the grave. This is pretty edgy stuff for 1961 television.

Year: 1961
Country: U.S.
Running Time: 50 minutes
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Availability: DVD; YouTube

5:05PM: Halloween III: Season of the Witch

It wasn’t until last year that I finally got around to watching Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Despite its reputation as being the flop of the Halloween series, in fact it’s a clever film (with a story by Quatermass Xperiment author Nigel Kneale) that abandons the old Michael Myers plotline for a science fiction-themed story about the origins of the holiday – and its corruption into contemporary commercial marketing. Dan O’Herlihy plays a corporate madman who plans to kill children with Halloween masks (!). The cinematography is by frequent John Carpenter collaborator Dean Cundey, who helps give the film an eerie Prince of Darkness feel. This was intended to kick off a series of non-Michael Myers Halloween sequels, but its box office failure meant that it would soon be back to (tired) formula.

Year: 1982
Country: U.S.
Running Time: 98 minutes
Availability: Blu-Ray; DVD; Amazon Instant Video

6:45PM: The Haunting

As far as I’m concerned, this is the definitive haunted house movie. A somewhat faithful adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, the film, as directed by Robert Wise, places you almost claustrophobically inside the mind of sheltered wallflower Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris, who just passed away this year), as she tags along on an investigation of Hill House’s paranormal activity led by the handsome Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson). Claire Bloom and a very funny Russ Tamblyn round out the crew of inadequate investigators. All these decades later, the film can still provoke a powerful feeling of dread.

Year: 1963
Country: U.S.
Running Time: 112 minutes
Availability: Blu-Ray; DVD; Amazon Instant Video

8:45PM: Kill, Baby, Kill

Kill, Baby, Kill is a simple Gothic ghost story with all the trappings (castle + frightened villagers, check), but Mario Bava uses this basic template for an exercise in spellbinding style. Increasingly, the film becomes more and more dream-like, leading to one mind-bending (and much-imitated) sequence in which a man can’t seem to leave a room, no matter how many times he exits the door. An apparent influence on Fellini’s acclaimed “Toby Dammit” segment of Spirits of the Dead (1968).

Year: 1966
Country: Italy
Running Time: 83 minutes
Availability: Netflix Streaming; Amazon Instant Video; Redbox Instant; DVD

10:15PM: The Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Brian DePalma’s rock musical is one DVD that never gathers dust on my shelf for very long. The songs by Paul Williams – who plays the Phil Spector-like impresario Swan – rank among his best work, sending up then-fashionable trends in pop music with plenty of digs at the business’ sell-outs and charlatans. DePalma regular William Finley is the nerdy Winslow, who transforms into the Phantom of the Paradise. Suspiria‘s Jessica Harper is perfectly cast as Phoenix, the wide-eyed ingenue with the gorgeous voice (Harper’s own) who falls under Swan’s wing. DePalma squeezes in plenty of parodies of famous film moments, from Touch of Evil‘s opening tracking shot to Psycho‘s shower scene. Many fans believe this is superior to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Which means…

Year: 1974
Country: U.S.
Running Time: 91 minutes
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Availability: DVD; Amazon Instant Video

12AM: The Rocky Horror Picture Show

…Why not judge for yourself by scheduling the two most famous horror-musicals ever made back-to-back? Tara Lynne Barr said in Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America (2011) that Glee ruined Rocky Horror for everyone. Certainly the film has become appropriated by popular culture and made a little too familiar, but there’s still some real transgressive (and transgendered) punch to the film, which – long ago, it seems – was withheld from home video release so the curious “virgins” would have to see it at their local midnight screening, with all the freaks and their props. Richard O’Brien’s music is great; Tim Curry is great; Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Meat Loaf, Charles Gray, and all the rest hold their own. Sure, it would have been better if Brian DePalma directed it, but the film holds up as a solid musical even without the crowd. This counts as the “Halloween Party” portion of the marathon.

Year: 1975
Country: U.K.
Running Time: 100 minutes (unedited British version)
Availability: Blu-Ray; DVD; Amazon Instant Video

1:40AM: The Shiver of the Vampires

Jean Rollin’s movies, with their hypnotic rhythms, copious nudity, and sedate line-readings from surreal scripts, should be watched late into the night for maximum effect. I consider The Shiver of the Vampires to be the pinnacle of his vampire series, and a great entry-point for those new to his oeuvre. Newlyweds stay in a castle ruled by a female vampire, who creeps out of a clock at the stroke of a midnight (or, in one scene, out of a fireplace, like Santa Claus). While the husband fumbles about in the Wonderland of a castle – replete with a library that attacks you, and two vampire hunters who talk like Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee – his wife is seduced and bitten by the vampiress, and begins wearing sunglasses during the day.

Year: 1971
Country: France
Running Time: 95 minutes
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Availability: Blu-Ray; DVD

3:15AM: The Church

This Dario Argento-scripted film, at one point intended to be titled Demons 3, makes about zero sense, but that’s OK – it’s 3:15 in the morning, and you’re not likely to notice. I still admire the film. Director Michele Soavi, who would later give us the cult hit Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man, 1994), directs the film as an extended homage to Argento after having served as his assistant director on Tenebre (1982) and Phenomena (1985); he also manages to work in explicit references to Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Boris Vallejo. Argento’s daughter Asia plays a teenager living in the catacombs of an ancient cathedral that was built to seal away evil forces. When that seal is broken by a professor, a host of tourists and visitors become trapped inside, to be possessed by demons or murdered in gruesome ways. The fantastic soundtrack features Keith Emerson, Goblin, and Philip Glass. The final frame of the final shot is a particular favorite of mine: a wicked little touch of subtlety that I attribute to Soavi (Argento wouldn’t be capable of anything subtle).

Year: 1989
Country: Italy
Running Time: 102 minutes
Availability: DVD

5AM: Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn

Just as The Church ends, it seems like the demon action was just picking up, so a screening of Evil Dead II will not just continue the crazy occult action, but may be the only film capable of keeping you awake at this point. Watch Sam Raimi transform into “Sam Raimi” as Bruce Campbell fires up the Deadite-slaying chainsaw in his cabin in the woods.

Year: 1987
Country: U.S.
Running Time: 84 minutes
Availability: Blu-Ray; DVD; Amazon Instant Video; Redbox Instant

6:25AM: Fantasia: “Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria”

Well, it seems like this “mix tape” of a marathon has found a frequently recurring theme of devils and demons. Since the sun will be rising soon, this final selection – the last stretch of Disney’s Fantasia – will ward off all the spirits summoned for Halloween, to slumber for another year. This is Walt Disney at his finest. What at first appears to be the peak of Bald Mountain suddenly opens up to reveal it’s the folded wings of the demon Chernabog. After the devils and ghosts revel and burn (you’ll note there’s some nudity here as well, which would never appear in a modern Disney animated film), Fantasia transitions from Mussorgsky to Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” and a technologically innovative use of the multi-plane camera for one very long tracking shot, creating the illusion of extraordinary depth as the sun rises and holy lights stride through a cathedral of trees. These segments were later excerpted for Disney’s 50’s television series, and I think Walt liked showing them off. It should make for a fitting end for our 24 (or 24 & 3/4) hours of horror.

Year: 1940
Country: U.S.
Running Time: 14 minutes
Availability: Blu-Ray; DVD; YouTube

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The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)

The new Blu-Ray box set The Vincent Price Collection is the jewel in the crown for Shout! Factory’s “Scream Factory” line. Thanks to a licensing deal with MGM, six Vincent Price titles formerly available as aging, often non-anamorphic “Midnite Movies” DVDs are given beautiful new high-definition transfers, allowing you to transform your living room into an ancient Victorian manor by the seaside. The titles in this set include The Fall of the House of Usher (aka House of Usher, 1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm, 1968), and The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), all worthy titles to represent Price’s American International Pictures reign from the 60’s through the early 70’s, and excellent introductions to his brand of chilling (and occasionally cheeky) horror. Among the many bonus features are Price’s introductions to some of the films, taken from an Iowa PBS series from the early 80’s. In a nice touch, Shout! Factory gives you a viewing option to bookend the film with these comments from Price, exactly as though you were watching the presentation on PBS (only with much better picture quality for the film itself, and no pledge drive interruptions); The Fall of the House of Usher even has a restored “overture” section appended to the beginning of the film, spotlighting the score by composer Les Baxter. So this set brings me nothing but nostalgia. I wasn’t born when these films were released, but nonetheless I grew up on Vincent Price; films like The Pit and the Pendulum and Tales of Terror (1962) gave me nightmares, though Price’s self-mocking, over-the-top performances simultaneously reassured me that these were just movies. Thus, my parents didn’t mind my watching them, no matter how morbid they became. What a perfect match Price was for Edgar Allan Poe, then; Poe is still read in schools around Halloween, and teachers don’t seem to care if their students are warping their imaginations with the grotesque imagery of “The Black Cat” or “The Tell-Tale Heart” – because it’s literature, I suppose. I distinctly recall thinking, “I can’t believe they’re letting us read this.” I felt like I was getting away with something. You can see similar thoughts flicker through Vincent Price’s face, and his wicked smile.

Lobby card depicting Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon) and Roderick Usher (Vincent Price) viewing the body of Usher's sister Madeline (Myrna Fahey).

Corman originally was asked by AIP to make two black-and-white films on the cheap, but in his 1990 autobiography (How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime), he states: “I said no. ‘What I’d really like to do,’ I told [James H. Nicholson and Sam Arkoff], ‘is one horror film in color, maybe even CinemaScope, double the budget to $200,000, and go to a three-week schedule. I’d like to do a classic, Poe’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher.’ Poe has a built-in audience. He’s read in every high school. One quality film in color is better than two cheap films in black-and-white.’ Jim wondered if the youth market was there for a film based on required reading in school. I said kids loved Poe. I had.” Poe must have seemed a natural choice. Across the pond, Hammer was at its peak, having revitalized three of the classic Universal monsters (Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and the Mummy) with Terence Fisher’s very British Gothics. To choose Poe was to go American Gothic. At the time, the only other writers so firmly associated with American nightmares were H.P. Lovecraft and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Corman & Price would be getting to them shortly (with The Haunted Palace and Twice-Told Tales, respectively). So The Fall of the House of Usher is significantly a very American film, and its unequivocal success would launch a new series of American horror films, the face of which was Price.

Lobby card: Philip and Madeline journey to the catacombs beneath the Usher House.

With Corman in the director’s seat, he commissioned a screenplay from Richard Matheson, who had just begun writing scripts for Rod Serling’s new show, The Twilight Zone. Matheson had no easy task. Poe’s short story is low on incident, and what everyone really remembers about it is the ending. The tale could fill out an hour, but stretching it to eighty minutes is a tall order; Corman insisted that his film be long enough to be the main event, and not relegated to the bottom half of a double-bill below an inferior product. Matheson told writer Dick Lochte in 2005, “Everybody assumed I was an ardent fan of Edgar Allan Poe, which I wasn’t. But I tried very hard to catch the flavor of Poe’s story. I had to add a character, a suitor for the sister, or there would have been no story.” That character was Philip Winthrop, played by Mark Damon (Between Heaven and Hell), who brought the requisite matinee-idol good looks to the production, and, in the film’s second half, gets to practice some James Dean-style emoting; this very 1960 youth stands in for the narrator in Poe’s original, and doesn’t seem quite capable of the long, rambling soliloquies of the text. But never mind. Matheson does manage to add some dramatic tension, creating a bizarre love triangle with the lovestruck Philip trying to urge the beautiful young Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey, Face of a Fugitive) to elope with him, while the possessive Roderick Usher (Price) insists she remain in the dilapidated Usher mansion, which is not only falling to pieces – a giant fissure runs up one side of the building, seeming to split it in half – but is also sinking into a swamp. Roderick has Madeline convinced that she is dying; and once the two of them are gone, the Usher legacy, with its history of corruption and vice, will finally be dissolved. They have a semi-incestuous bond which would probably be more effectively conveyed if the actors were closer in age. Further, Roderick radiates an obsessive madness, which seems to have infected not only his sister’s mind, but the very interior of the manor: as in the best of the Corman/Poe films, this landscape is one of nightmares. The exterior was shot, strategically, at the scorched location of a recent forest fire. The production design, by future director Daniel Haller (The Dunwich Horror), might be called Gothic-Psychedelic: all antique furnishings, bright colors, and slightly askew angles, as though everything is collapsing inward. Haller’s sets were built from stock sets purchased on the cheap from Universal, and they would be repurposed in subsequent Corman pictures to save on production costs.

One of the Usher clan portraits, by artist Burt Shonberg.

Even more psychedelic are the portraits which hang on the walls, surreal, macabre, and completely over-the-top. When Roderick indicates that these are his family portraits, you know it’s time to turn about and sprint out the door. The paintings are like those from Disney’s Haunted Mansion, if the characters were playing the Avalon Ballroom; one in particular, a female face exploding into rays as though she’s melting into a blood-red sun, reminds me of a famous portrait of Jimi Hendrix by Martin Sharp. These wonderful paintings are by Burt Shonberg (credited as Burt Schoenberg), a unique artist who harbored a fascination for the occult, and by 1960 was allowing his experiments with LSD to influence his work. Your heart may be in your throat when, in the film’s finale, the paintings are shown covered in flames; rest assured that Corman coated them with a fire-resistant gel, and they are now in the hands of collectors, Corman having distributed them to the cast and crew (including Price) once the filming was complete. The director wasn’t just plugged into the proto-psychedelia of Haller and Shonberg, but was fascinated by Freudian psychology, and intended his House of Usher to be the interior space of the subconscious. He noted in his autobiography, “For flashbacks and dream sequences in red and blue, I used either gel over the lights or a colored filter over the lens. We even blew in some fog.” These would all become important elements for the Corman/Price/Poe films, achieving their maximum effect in The Masque of the Red Death, though one could also say that Corman was setting the stage for his later hippiesploitation films like The Trip (1967) and Gas-s-s-s (1970). The matte paintings are also very effective, and the final shot, in which the house finally sinks into the bog, is nothing less than indelible, finally achieving a complete fusion with Poe’s fever-dream text (literally, since his words are overlaid upon the image). We may be watching the ground swallowing the Usher manor, but this single moment, more than any other, represents a cementing of the foundation for the popular and profitable horror series that would follow.

Madeline Usher escapes her sarcophagus.

But Price’s importance to that franchise can’t be undervalued. Sans mustache, Price’s Roderick Usher is one of his greatest roles: simultaneously loathsome, pathetic, and mysteriously haunted. There’s a moment in the film when Madeline is lying in her coffin with Roderick and Philip standing over her, mourning; Roderick notices movement in Madeline’s hands, and realizes she is still alive (she suffers from catalepsy, simulating death). Quickly he seals the coffin before Philip can notice. Why? Because this is his last chance to keep her; otherwise, he will lose her to Philip (and the modern world, and potentially a happy life). His action is despicable, but stems from his affliction of loneliness and self-pity. Matheson places this key moment to trigger the downfall that Poe described: Usher is destroyed by his own selfishness. Yet the real Price was nothing like the characters he’d become so famous for bringing to life. Matheson recalled in a 1994 interview for the New York Times, “Once, in playing a scene with Mark Damon…Damon comes looking for Roderick Usher carrying an ax. At the end of the speech, he swings the ax aside and quite by accident bounced it off Vincent’s shin. Well, Vincent let out a bellowing curse, walked around the entire set, and when he got back he was his old cheerful self again. And never again brought up the incident to Damon. He was a gentleman, a true gentleman.” Somehow this likability translated through the screen, no matter how evil a character he played. The audience liked to watch Vincent Price. For the next several years, as one horror film after another was delivered from the Corman/AIP factory, it was his charismatic presence that would keep audiences flocking to theaters. This shines through on the new box set, collecting some of his most iconic work.

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