Metropolis (1927)

Posted on November 12, 2017 at 10:31 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Even in its near-complete 2010 restoration and running 150 minutes, Fritz Lang’s Silent epic Metropolis (1927) is possessed of churning, frenetic energy, like an industrial works geared to explode. It is a machine; a machine movie about other machines. And it’s running efficiently at the outset, a bright and sparkling city of skyscrapers, automobile skyways, neon signs and low-flying private planes dwarfed by the “New Tower of Babel,” all of it the construction of Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel, Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler). Only when the Eternal Gardens, a sanctuary for the privileged, is invaded by a poor girl named Maria (Brigitte Helm, L’argent), escorting a flock of dirt-smudged children into the sacred grounds to prove a point (“Look! These are your brothers!”), does the machine begin to malfunction and set a course for self-destruction. Transfixed by Maria is Fredersen’s son Freder (Gustav Fröhlich, Asphalt), who follows her into the industrial world beneath Metropolis where grim laborers endure 10-hour workdays of grueling physical hardship within colossal machines. Freder nobly trades places with one of these unfortunates and learns that Maria has been organizing the workers and preaching to them – for the audience she recounts the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Meanwhile, Fredersen visits Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Lang’s Dr. Mabuse), who is nearing completion of a “Machine-Man” in his laboratory modeled after Fredersen’s late wife Hel, whom Rotwang desired. After Rotwang helps Fredersen discover the secret catacombs where Maria is organizing the workers, Fredersen convinces Rotwang to cast his robot in the likeness of Maria so he can infiltrate and control this movement. Rotwang agrees, secretly planning to use the false Maria to destroy Fredersen’s beloved Metropolis. This is not to mention a further array of characters: Freder’s downcast and unfavored brother Josaphat (Theodor Loos, M); the Thin Man (Fritz Rasp, Diary of a Lost Girl), whom Fredersen hires to trail Freder; the worker Georgy (Erwin Biswanger, Die Nibelungen) who trades identities with Freder and becomes dazzled by the sinful thrills of the club called Yoshiwara; or Grot (Heinrich George, She), who guards the Heart-Machine that keeps Metropolis stable. All these characters will crash into each other, the Heart will be stopped, and the city will come tumbling down. Lang orchestrates the destruction with glee.

Rotwang’s robot begins its transformation.

Yet the film’s length and overtly allegorical nature worked against it; the film was poorly received on release and survived only briefly in its original form. A German film that was partly intended to win over American audiences with its spectacle, it was exported to a Hollywood that demanded big cuts. Given the variable rates of speed that silent films could be projected, it is more helpful to express the length in meters rather than running time; Metropolis was shortened from its premiere length of 4,189 meters to about 3,100 meters, sacrificing significant character motivation and a great deal of coherency. In Germany it was withdrawn and also cut, to 3,241 meters. But even in this maimed form, the power of the film’s imagery was enough to cement it in the imagination of pop culture. Movies borrowed from it; they also reacted against it (see H.G. Wells’ Things to Come). Rotwang’s robot, before it takes the likeness of Maria, has become one of the most immortal sights offered by the cinema, and frequently appears on the covers of books chronicling the history of science fiction film – she even directly influenced the design of C-3PO. (She was also ahead of her time, not just a robot but an android, and thus holds up much better to 21st century eyes than the boxy robots of 1954’s Gog, or, for that matter, the Daleks of the past or present Doctor Who.) The impossible skyscrapers and their implicit futurism became a required shorthand for any utopian or dystopian SF film to follow; never mind that Lang was merely drawing from the sights of his trip to New York City. Rotwang became a number of mad scientists that followed, not least Dr. Strangelove. The machines that power Metropolis, which also count the 10-hour workday, were resurrected for music videos and TV commercials. Not bad for a film that couldn’t be properly viewed for 83 years. Following a number of valiant attempts at reconstruction using scattered recovered footage from different uncovered versions of the film, photographs of deleted scenes, censorship cards featuring detailed story notes and the full text of the intertitles, and even screenwriter Thea von Harbou’s original novelization, in 2010 the film was finally restored to nearly its original length (only a few minutes’ worth of footage is still missing). The source was a print of the Latin American export of the film, which had found its way from a private collector into an Argentinian film archive. Though the original 35mm print had been destroyed due to the dangers of storing flammable nitrate film, prior to this the archive had transferred this long cut of Metropolis to 16mm. In fact, the entire film was a different Metropolis than had been seen before: Lang shot his scenes using multiple cameras aligned side by side, and thus the Latin American Metropolis used slightly different angles but also some different takes of the same scene. But what was most valuable to Metropolis historians were the missing scenes, and when viewed in context, the story suddenly acquired a cohesive narrative and substantive meaning that had been missing during all those decades that the shorter cut had stubbornly become a classic.

The false Maria (Brigitte Helm) introduces herself to the Yoshiwara club.

This year marks the film’s 90th anniversary, and the U.K.’s Masters of Cinema label has just released a definitive three-disc set, presenting not just the miraculous 2010 restoration, but also the prior restoration from 2001 and the 90-minute, midnight movie 1984 cut by composer Giorgio Moroder. Checking in with these different incarnations of Metropolis is to step through the history of the film’s re-emergence and piece-by-piece reassembly. Moroder’s film is of particular note, since it uniquely straddled the line between sincere restoration attempt (it really was the best and most accurate presentation of the film’s story for many years) and pop art appropriation. Moroder added his synthesizer scoring and laced in songs from Freddie Mercury, Adam Ant, Pat Benatar, Bonnie Tyler, Loverboy, Billy Squier, Jon Anderson, and Cycle V. The footage was presented tinted, with many scenes colorized in stylistic ways, most notably in Rotwang’s laboratory. Essentially, Moroder was making a silent film accessible to younger audiences by transforming it into a 90-minute rock musical/music video. For a long while, the VHS was a video store staple and quite possibly the easiest way to see Metropolis (apart from cheapo, barely watchable public domain releases – some, I can vouch, without any score at all) – and then it vanished until a Blu-ray release in recent years. It’s nice to see it here, although it’s less likely you’ll be checking in with Disc Three’s 2001 restoration, since it’s long since been overshadowed by the superior 2010 version. Most of all the value of the Masters of Cinema release is its comprehensive look at a film that never quite got its due until very recently, and yet, somehow, still conquered the world. You may still argue that the film’s ending is pat and naïve, that the characters are paper-thin, that the narrative doesn’t hold a candle to the spectacular sights, that perhaps the movie is more machine than human. And yet, in a way, Metropolis is still everywhere, and in looking closer at the 2010 restored cut, even through the shower curtain of scratches worn into the Argentine print and preserved in amber in its 16mm, you can see Lang’s youthful energy, astonishing Brigitte Helm twisting her body into severe angles in a machine’s notion of dancing sexy, the occultism of Rotwang’s lab clashing with the eerie, German Expressionism in the Biblical images, the fiery furnaces of the Lower City and the crashing Flood that deluges in the last act and sweeps the teeming extras together, and you can see that this is what filmmaking is supposed to be: original celluloid mythmaking.

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Double Feature: Tales of Terror (1962)/Twice Told Tales (1963)

Posted on November 3, 2017 at 10:44 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

The success of Roger Corman’s House of Usher (aka The Fall of the House of Usher, 1960) for American International spawned a long-running series of films adapted from or inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and mostly featuring Usher star Vincent Price. Following Pit and the Pendulum (1961) – which established a trend of the plot being only barely related to the Poe original – Corman and Price reunited for Tales of Terror (1962): three Poe short stories brought to the screen with the help of Usher and Pendulum writer Richard Matheson. Matheson, of course, would soon become a genre legend, thanks to his consistently brilliant scripts for The Twilight Zone, his horror novels I Am Legend and Hell House, and so on. But he was also a busy screenwriter willing to meet the demands of an assignment: for an example, check out Fanatic (aka Die! Die! My Darling, 1965), recently released on Blu-Ray for Indicator’s Hammer Volume 1: Fear Warning! box set, for an example of how he could craft an efficient, effective little thriller from modest source material. Matheson has said in interviews that he was not a very big Poe fan, and Usher, too, was just another assignment – but he did take a sketch of a short story and stretch it to feature length in memorable fashion. By the time he was asked to do Tales of Terror, he possibly had an easier job: a Poe anthology, with no story taking up an inordinate amount of time before moving on to the next. The stories were “Morella,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Case of M. Valdemar,” although, in a bit of flourish, he also finds a snug fit for “The Cask of Amontillado.”

Peter Lorre in the “Black Cat” episode of “Tales of Terror.”

Corman often doesn’t get a fair shake for his talents as a director. He’s given credit for launching the careers of many talented artists, and for his prolific output in a variety of exploitation modes, but his sheer speed, and the quality of his worst films, is too frequently taken as evidence that he wasn’t very good when he was behind the camera. In fact, Corman’s array of experience served him well as director, and if the subject of the film interested him, his curiosity, intelligence, and willingness to experiment produced good films, or at least very interesting ones. (I wouldn’t go to the mat for the merits of his LSD opus The Trip, but the sincerity of the effort, and its avant-garde qualities, make it something I’m always willing to sit down and watch.) Matheson’s playful script for Tales of Terror, which makes room for Gothic horror, dream logic, slapstick, and pitch-black comedy, also allows Corman the opportunity to work in different styles, and he acquits himself nicely. This film, though not the first horror anthology (1945’s Dead of Night casts a long shadow on the subgenre), would nonetheless spawn follow-ups and imitations. The use of macabre comedy, teetering at the edge of camp, and the presence of aging/fading stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age (Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone join Price here), speak to trends in horror at the time, but all these elements still feel fresh; they would become a little exhausted only later. Corman deserves praise for making an anthology film in which all the segments are strong in their own right, and in different ways – no mean feat.

Leona Gage as the vengeful “Morella.”

 

“Morella” is the most straightforward story, a sort of generic Poe tale, if there is such a thing; it is essentially “The Fall of the House of Usher” with a different twist. Young Lenora (TV actress Maggie Pierce), who is dying from a disease, visits her father (Price) in that same seaside, storm-swept mansion familiar to all Corman fans. The bitter old man still blames his daughter for the death of his wife Morella, who perished giving birth to Lenora. One night the woman in question (Leona Gage) rises from her coffin to swap places with her dying daughter and end her husband in another conflagration – Price’s frequent fate since House of Wax (1953). Most memorable of the three stories is “The Black Cat,” which is actually “The Cask of Amontillado” with the twist ending borrowed from the other tale. Price is Fortunato, a pretentious expert on wine, and Lorre is Montresor, a drunk who successfully challenges his companion’s expertise in a contest. At home, Montresor is trapped in an unhappy (and improbable) marriage to the young, buxom Annabel (Joyce Jameson, The Apartment), whom Fortunato covets; a black cat also lurks about the house. While Fortunato schemes, Montresor patiently arranges his own elaborate counterstrike. Matheson tells the “Amontillado” story faithfully, but borrows the ending from Poe’s “The Black Cat,” allowing Montresor to pay for his crimes with irony. Lorre is completely sympathetic in his role, despite his character’s slurred speech and sad-sack appearance. The segment is such a success that Price, Lorre, Jameson, and writer Matheson would be brought back for what might as well be a reprise in The Comedy of Terrors (1963, with Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone), directed by the great Jacques Tourneur (Cat People).

Carmichael (Basil Rathbone) places Valdemar (Vincent Price) under hypnosis.

Tales of Terror‘s finale is “The Case of M. Valdemar,” with Rathbone playing Carmichael, a hypnotist who is asked by Price’s ailing Ernest Valdemar to place him in a hypnotic state at the moment of his demise. When the hour arrives, Carmichael obliges, suspending Valdemar in a twilight state between life and death. Valdemar is immobile in his bed but able to speak, and the suffering he expresses causes his daughter Helene (Debra Paget, The Indian Tomb) to plead with Carmichael to release him from the spell. But now Carmichael reveals his true colors, threatening to keep Valdemar thus unless Helene agrees to marry him. The outrage causes Valdemar to rise as a living corpse and come after Carmichael. Tales of Terror is stitched together by abstract segments of dripping blood with titles and quotes from the Poe texts – a simple but effective approach. Suffice to say, this was one of the films I watched for Halloween this year. For me, Price embodies the holiday more than any other actor, with films like this and William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill (1959). In the AIP pictures, it was often enough to get Price to stand in Gothic mansions draped with cobwebs, holding a candle in his hand while gazing up at dusty portraits of dead lovers and basking in the gorgeous reds and greens of Corman’s quasi-psychedelic lighting (Tales of Terror‘s comes courtesy of DP Floyd Crosby, whose filmography ranges from High Noon to Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters). So commercially successful was this formula that others were soon looking to copy it.

Sebastian Cabot and Price in the segment “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” for “Twice Told Tales.”

One of the more blatant imitations was Twice Told Tales (1963), from Robert E. Kent’s Admiral Pictures (which specialized in Westerns) and distributed by United Artists. Price was brought on to star in all three tales of this horror anthology, but the author this time was not Poe but Nathaniel Hawthorne; the title was taken from Hawthorne’s collection of short stories, Twice-Told Tales, though only one of the tales actually originated there. At the helm is journeyman director Sidney Salkow (who would, a year later, reteam with Price for The Last Man on Earth, based on Matheson’s I Am Legend). Hawthorne is a suitable substitute for Poe: they are both permanent fixtures of the American literary canon; they were contemporaries who occasionally corresponded; and their tales often shared a taste for the strange, morbid, or fantastic, though Hawthorne had a tendency to lean more on the allegorical. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the film Twice Told Tales is part of the AIP Poe series for any number of reasons, not least its aesthetic. This is a film in which, at one point, Price is strangled by a skeleton, and skeleton hands feature prominently on the poster against a shocked-looking Price (“The Undead! The Unearthly! The Unholy!” it promises). In these three stories he once more will contend with cobwebs, coffins, ancient manors steeped in legend, and a dose of mad science.

Rappaccini (Price) tests his deadly plants.

Perhaps the most successful of the segments is “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” in which Sebastian Cabot’s Heidegger discovers that his dead wife (Mari Blanchard, McLintock!) has been kept preserved in her mausoleum by a mysterious substance dripping through the earth and into her coffin. He uses this to bring her back to life and to restore his own youth, as well as that of his friend Alex (Price), but revisiting the past only brings to light scandalous, heartbreaking revelations that her death should have put to rest. We also learn that Alex isn’t as good a friend as he’s pretended to be all these years. It’s a tragedy in miniature with excellent performances by Cabot and Price, and also the most Poe-like of the stories. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” casts Price as Dr. Rappaccini, who keeps his daughter Beatrice (Joyce Taylor, Atlantis: The Lost Continent) prisoner in his garden for reasons that will soon become clear. From a distance she develops a love affair with handsome Giovanni (Brett Halsey, who appeared with Price in Return of the Fly), who attempts to learn her father’s secrets. This is both my favorite Hawthorne story and my least favorite adaptation in the film; screenwriter/producer Robert E. Kent makes the mistake of setting Beatrice against her father from the very start, making her so spiteful that she becomes unlikable and sabotages interest in the rest of the story. The final segment is “The House of the Seven Gables,” greatly condensing Hawthorne’s novel. Price had actually appeared in the 1940 adaptation of the book, making this an even more unusual selection for the film. Here, as Gerald Pyncheon, he confronts an old curse upon his family, placed by a rival who believed the land upon which the House of the Seven Gables sits was stolen from him. Corman favorite Beverly Garland (Gunslinger) plays his wife Alice, and the cast also includes Jacqueline deWit (All That Heaven Allows) and Richard Denning (Creature from the Black Lagoon). Though slow to get going, it’s easy to see why this was chosen as the last tale of the film, closing out with another conflagration, an exploding house, and – yes – the iconic sight of Price getting strangled by a skeleton.

Gerald Pyncheon (Price) confronts his fate in “The House of the Seven Gables.”

Twice Told Tales, though a noble effort to make a classy Gothic horror anthology, is crippled by Robert E. Kent’s decision to adapt three stories over the course of two hours (the film is exactly 120 minutes long). At that length, four or five stories would have been more appropriate – look at what Amicus would soon be accomplishing with their anthologies! Notwithstanding the fact that one of the stories here is actually a novel – or the Reader’s Digest version – there’s really no excuse for this film to have been released without severe cutting. Corman, I’m sure, would have gotten this down to 90 minutes (the better to send it out with a B-picture to fill out the bill). Twice Told Tales, despite a strong start, begins to drag once we get to “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and the long set-up required for “Seven Gables” doesn’t help either. Visually, the film does not compare to Corman’s lush Tales of Terror, and there’s a stuffiness to the proceedings which even the always-fun Price has a hard time cutting through. It is not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, but it may have had a tougher time than the Poes convincing kids in the audience that the source material was worth checking out. Back at AIP, Price would soon be making The Haunted Palace (1963) – actually an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation disguised as a Poe – and The Raven (1963), an absolute blast of a picture that sheds the famous poem in favor of a magic battle among Price, Lorre, and Karloff – with Hazel Court and Jack Nicholson trapped in the center. Corman may not have been pleasing the librarians and schoolteachers in the audience, but he knew how to throw a Gothic party.

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24 Hours of Horror for Halloween

Posted on October 27, 2017 at 10:03 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Looking for Halloween (or Halloween-weekend) viewing recommendations? Here’s another proposed 24 hour marathon from Midnight Only, one to fit the season. Of course, rather than indulge in the whole exhaustive thing, you can simply take a film or two that strikes your fancy. Personally, my annual tradition has been to start as early in the morning as possible on Halloween and watch horror movies until I can’t take it anymore (which has become earlier and earlier in recent years). And the first two films on this list were the first two films I watched last Halloween, plugged in here because they were the perfect way to kick off the day:

5:30am: Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (1973) D: Christopher Speeth

Virtually an underground movie, the bizarre, handmade, oddly titled Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood was an utter obscurity before a mention in Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare USA and finally a Blu-ray release from Arrow as part of their American Horror Project Volume 1 box set (it will soon be available for purchase individually). I’m picking this, and the start time of 5:30am, because that’s exactly how I watched it last year – with the sky still dark outside and my head in a somewhat dream-like state before the coffee kicked in. This is a simple little horror movie, with amateurish acting (and an inexplicable Hervé Villechaize), but it’s all about the atmosphere: Speeth shot in a real amusement park – on its rollercoasters, carousel, and Tunnel of Love – and built elaborate, surreal sets for the underground world beneath the park where its cannibals dwell, realms that look like a 60’s hippie happening stained by a bad acid trip. A perfect movie to watch before the sun comes up and your head comes together.

6:45am: Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies: “The Skeleton Dance” (1929)/”The Old Mill” (1937) D: Walt Disney/Wilfred Jackson

When I was growing up, my parents had the Disney Channel – the original, pay channel version, which was a treasure trove of classic animation and live action rarities. Perhaps as a result when I think of classic Halloween family programming, I think of old Silly Symphonies and Mickey Mouse cartoons. I still have a great love of classic Disney animation, particularly the fantastic run leading up to Fantasia. To fill this fifteen-minute slot I’m recommending two of Disney’s Silly Symphony shorts which are available on YouTube. “The Skeleton Dance,” animated by Ub Iwerks and directed by Disney himself, was the first of this series, and is exactly what it describes. Ever the innovator, Disney had this short animated to a pre-recorded soundtrack (instead of dubbing in sound after the fact). “The Old Mill,” arriving eight years later when Disney had become a household name, was the first use of the multi-plane camera, a massive piece of equipment that added extraordinary depth to its layered images. This “day in the life” portrays the ecosystem living in a dilapidated windmill, and how it weathers a frightening storm that threatens to tear the mill to pieces.

7am: Black Sabbath (1963) D: Mario Bava

Mario Bava’s distinctively stylized, dreamlike cinema gets a Gothic workout in this anthology hosted by and starring Boris Karloff. The segments: in “The Telephone,” a woman (Michèle Mercier) receives a series of threatening calls from her former pimp, escaped from prison. In “The Wurdalak,” a Russian family contends with the titular ghoul, which may have bitten and infected Karloff’s glowering character. In “The Drop of Water,” a nurse (Jacqueline Pierreux) steals the ring from the corpse of an old woman and pays dearly for it. As far as horror anthologies go, this is one of the very best. Black Sabbath is available on Blu-ray in both editions: its original Italian-language cut, and the dubbed and rescored American release.

8:45am: Dracula’s Daughter (1936) D: Lambert Hillyer

This belated Universal sequel to Todd Browning’s Dracula (1931) is no classic, but it’s striking and fascinating nonetheless. The original film’s Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan, who also appeared in The Mummy) is arrested for Dracula’s murder(!). One of his former students, a psychiatrist (Otto Kruger), investigates Van Helsing’s claims while falling under the spell of the Countess Marya Zaleska (Goria Holden) – Dracula’s daughter, who wishes to rid herself of her vampiric appetites. In one scene the Countess indulges her appetites with a pretty girl (Nan Grey) whom she asks to model for her; the young woman seems to excite Zaleska in more ways than one. Irving Pichel is memorable as the Countess’s servant Sandor. Decades later, Hammer would take a similar Van Helsing-led approach to a Dracula sequel with Brides of Dracula (1960); but in both franchises, the Count did not stay dead.

10am: Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971) D: Aldo Lado

In this eerie giallo, a man suffering from catalepsy (Jean Sorel) is mistaken for a corpse and taken in for an autopsy, to his horror. Meanwhile, the desperate stiff thinks back on the events which led him here – a Kafka-meets-Polanski mystery involving the disappearance of his beautiful girlfriend (Barbara Bach, The Spy Who Loved Me), the conspiracy of corrupt officials, and the discovery of a malevolent secret society. The score is by Ennio Morricone.

11:45am: Nightbreed: Director’s Cut or Cabal Cut (1990) D: Clive Barker

After Hellraiser (1987), novelist/director Clive Barker embarked on Nightbreed, adapted from his novella Cabal. Subversively, the monsters are sympathetic and persecuted by a society that both fears and envies them. And yet, these shapechangers are still monsters – deadly to encounter and sometimes outwardly repulsive. Boone (Craig Sheffer) is framed for the crimes of his manipulative psychologist Decker (David Cronenberg, perfectly cast), who moonlights as a genocide-obsessed serial killer. But Boone is reborn as a member of the Nightbreed, an ancient race that resides below the cemetery called Midian. This film, featuring a fantastic Danny Elfman score, is one of the most ambitious horror movies ever made, rich with mythology and, yes, overstuffed, convoluted, and difficult to follow on a first viewing. No wonder that for its theatrical release it was edited to a shell of its former self. Though still flawed, a much more satisfying watch is offered through the Director’s Cut (released by Shout Factory), featuring rediscovered footage and restoring subplots and character development, or the even longer Cabal Cut (145 minutes), offered in an extremely limited (and pricey) release on the Clive Barker website.

2pm: Theatre of Blood (1973) D: Douglas Hickox

The best of Vincent Price’s 70’s films is this Dr. Phibes knock-off with a wry appreciation for Shakespeare. Price plays a vain actor humiliated by his critics who fakes his death and returns to take his revenge, aided by a frequently disguised Diana Rigg (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). The plot may sound stale, but the Shakespeare references become a macabre delight for English or Drama majors in the audience, as we wait to see which play will form the next inspiration for an absurdly elaborate demise. Both Price and Rigg have a lot of fun with their roles.

3:45pm: Vampir-Cuadecuc (1971) D: Pere Portabella

This experimental Spanish art film was shot on the set of Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970), which starred Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, Soledad Miranda, and Klaus Kinski. Portabella’s film, though highly unconventional for a behind-the-scenes documentary, at the least provides a more visually stunning immersion into Bram Stoker’s realm. This silent, 66-minute film, augmented by an avant-garde soundtrack, features high-contrast black-and-white images, at times evoking Murnau’s Nosferatu, at other times approaching the abstract. Shot during Francisco Franco’s oppressive reign, it also opens itself to political and allegorical interpretations of the ravenous Count. Fans of Lee will be interested in a reading from the climax of Dracula which the actor performs in his dressing room; we also see him popping out his contact lenses and being sprayed with cobwebs while lying in his coffin. A new 2K restoration has been playing the art house circuit and has just been released on Blu-ray in Region 2.

5pm: Night of the Creeps (1986) D: Fred Dekker

“The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is they’re dead.” This genre-hopping homage to 50’s creature features from Fred Dekker (The Monster Squad) begins like War of the Worlds meets The Ghoulies, abruptly turns into a John Hughes-style teen comedy, then explodes into some very satisfying zombie horror. Along the way, Dekker manages unexpected character depth and warmth, particularly with the teen leads and Tom Atkins’ tragedy-haunted police officer. I showed this at my annual horror movie party this year and more than one attendee noted the similarities to James Gunn’s Slither (2006).

6:30pm: Halloween (1978) D: John Carpenter

Jaime Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence face off against The Shape, Michael Myers, in what is arguably the apex of the slasher film genre. (My heart belongs to Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, I’ll admit, but that’s for another holiday.) Apart from the almost unbearable suspense and the terrific performances, there are few films that capture the spirit of Halloween night so well, which makes it ideal viewing to kick off our evening programming. If you’re watching these on Halloween, is there any better film to watch while trick ‘r’ treaters arrive?

8pm: Pulse (2001) D: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

The most recent film of this list (and more recent than the films I tend to review on this site), I’m including it because it’s time for some genuine scares, and Arrow has a new edition available on Blu-ray, so what better time to revisit one of the seminal works of the turn-of-the-century J-horror boom? I saw this in a dark, mostly empty theater a couple years after its Japanese release, and was so immersed in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s intense ghost story of the early Internet era that during one particular scene (if you’ve seen it, you know the one), I don’t think I’ve ever been as freaked out while watching a movie. Turn the lights off and turn the sound way up.

10pm: From Beyond (1986) D: Stuart Gordon

Immediately following the hit Re-Animator (1986), Stuart Gordon reunited cast members Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton for another lurid, delirious adaptation of a lesser-known H.P. Lovecraft work. The original short story is cared for in its entirety in the prologue, leaving the rest of the running time for Gordon’s imagination to let loose, expanding the concept of experiments in another dimension into a mad scientist tale of sexual liberation and grotesque physical transformations – with, of course, plenty of black humor.

11:30pm: Night of the Living Dead (1968) D: George A. Romero

I wanted to include a tribute to George Romero, who passed away this year, and though there are lots of great films from which to choose, his classic, genre-defining Night of the Living Dead (1968) seems like the perfect choice – not least because there’s a supposedly stunning 4K restoration playing now in select theaters. (Unfortunately we’ll have to wait until next year – the film’s 50th anniversary – for a Criterion release of this edition.) Even if you’re watching in a more degraded version of this public domain film (my go-to is the old Elite DVD, autographed by Romero while he was preparing Land of the Dead), this is still an engrossing, nightmarish little movie. As Romero’s characters barricade themselves into a house assaulted by flesh-eating zombies, then generate self-defeating conflicts all on their own, we’re treated to one of the director’s many microcosms of a contemporary society that’s all too eager to consume itself into oblivion.

1:15am: Belladonna of Sadness (1973) D: Eiichi Yamamoto

The third part of the adults-only Animerama series of animated features initiated by Osamu Tezuka, this erotic horror film was made on a shoestring budget as Tezuka’s studio was shutting down. Tezuka had already left, and production was overseen entirely by Eiichi Yamamoto. Told in beautiful sketches and watercolors, this transgressive fairy tale, adapted from a 19th century French history of witchcraft, La Sorcière, by Jules Michelet, tells the story of a woman who turns to a sexual demon to exact her revenge on the local lord and his army. Long obscure, in recent years a new restoration has brought the film onto the radar of animation fans, and in addition to being available on Blu-ray, it occasionally pops up on Turner Classic Movies as part of the late-night TCM Underground.

2:45am: Young Frankenstein (1974) D: Mel Brooks

A palate-cleanser after the grim Belladonna of Sadness, the hysterical Young Frankenstein (1974) is not just Mel Brooks’ best film but makes a strong argument for being the last entry in the original Universal Frankenstein cycle (Brooks even used some of the original lab equipment from the original film’s set). It’s a loving parody which pays close attention to the original movies, in particular Son of Frankenstein (1939), to find perfectly timed gags amidst the Universal Horror verisimilitude. The late Gene Wilder, who co-wrote, has rarely been better, and it’s also the perfect showcase for Madeline Kahn, Teri Garr, Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman, Kenneth Mars, and Gene Hackman as the blind beggar.

4:30am: The Funhouse (1981) D: Tobe Hooper

Bringing us full circle from the marathon’s carnival (of blood) beginnings, our tribute to Tobe Hooper, who passed away in August, is this overlooked but effective horror film set in a carnival funhouse. Beginning with a parody of the famous opening from Halloween, Hooper continuously pays homage to the legacy of horror cinema (the principal villain is introduced wearing a Frankenstein monster mask) while rooting his characters in gritty reality; these could be real carnies, and real teens wandering into their world. In the third act, Hooper unleashes his trademark brand of insanity, but not before expertly laying out the actions which brought us there. It’s a small film, but a reminder of what Hooper could bring to horror when he was at his most inspired.

Happy Halloween!

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