From Zombos' Closet

Magazines: Monsterpalooza 1

Zombos Says: Very Good

There's a smorgasbord of well-written articles to be found in this first issue of Monsterpalooza, although a little too varied to bring focus to the magazine's tagline "The Art of Monsters." The cheeky editorial doesn't help much either to provide a clear mission statement; it repeats Jack Torrance's dictum about dull work and no play, but doesn't give insight into why another horror magazine is vying for my torch-wielding enthusiasm and yours.

The coverage is both old and new movies and monsters, makeup, a fun little Halloween pop culture insert for this issue, a Vincentennial report, and interviews delivered in a snappy layout filled with photos and welcomed three-column text. David Gerrold's State of the Art (continuing column?) on summer movies is the usual harangue over movie quality for the massess, but it's well written and totally off target for that art of monsters thing. Maybe if he focused the article on specific summer horror/sci fi movies, I'd appreciate it more. 

The reading gem for me is Jeff Baham's The Happiest Haunt On Earth, which for Jeff, me, and many others I'm sure, would be Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion. Baham outlines the history, the influences--an early version called Bloodmere Manor was definitely not so happy--and explains how Walt's originally planned walk-through ride became the Doom Buggie journey we love today. A sidebar relates how some foolish mortals even go so far as to spread cremated remains of die-hard fans along the spooky hallways. But now that he mentions it....

However, one film that did have a lasting impact on the WED designers was the fictional house in Robert Wise's 1963 film 'The Haunting." In Wise's film, the house itself becomes a living, breathing character, which is an idea that resonated with the Imagineers. (Jeff Baham, The Happiest Haunt On Earth)

More treasures to plunder here are Dan Rhodes Dracula at 80, Pierre Fournier's Dare You See It, and Frank Dietz' Bob Burn's Burbank Spooktaculars. Rhodes basically repeats his argument from his lengthier article in Monsters From the Vault (volume 16, #29), but here he summarizes the critical importance of Dracula, a movie many older horror fans love to bash. If you like what he says here, I recommend you read his exhaustive analysis in MFTV.

For a more substantial read, Fournier delves deep in Dare You See It as he examines the research, and the newspaper clippings of the day, to track the evolution of Frankenstein as it bounced from actor to actor, director to director, and screenplay to screenplay. "Through spring and summer of '31, in a Thirties version of viral marketing, Universal's publicity department fed news items to gossip columnists, planting highly speculative and often contradictory articles, building interest." You can sense the feeling of anticipation and excitement potential audiences must have felt here, building up to the premier as the movie progresses from fancy to fact. 

On a lighter note, Dietz brings us personally closer to the out-of-this-Halloween spooktacular with The Thing From Another World, put on by Bob Burns in 2002 with a lot of help from his friends, all for a 4-minute live performance, repeated a heck of a lot for trick or treaters and diehard fans. It's amazing how concise and well-executed these events were, and this one in particular was written by Star Trek's D. C. Fontana, an "old friend of Bob and Kathy." 

There's more, like Ted Newsom's I Was Just Earning Me Wages, giving us a closer look at the career of Jimmy Sangster, and how he switched from producer to script writer with his first job, X the Unknown, and Mark Redfield's article Karloff and the Creation of the Screen Actors Guild. Given the wealth of talent in this issue, I hope the next one sustains it, and also defines more clearly the art of monsters, both present and past.

They're certainly off to a good start.

Mexican Lobby Card: The Face of Fu Manchu

I'd bet if you took a tally of the weapon seen most often in a lobby card, it would be a knife. The Sax Rohmer series may be politically incorrect these days, but Christopher Lee is so sinister, and so evil in this Hammer screen series, it's still fun to watch his machinations for world conquest. And can't you just dig this groovy pyschedelic illo, man?

Mexican Lobby Card: Frankenstein's Daughter

This movie's another guilty pleasure. The makeup is so gonzo, how can you not love it?

Nightmare in Wax (1969) Mexican Lobby Card

What's not to love about this over the top Mexican lobby card for Nightmare in Wax? The maniacal predator; the dripping blood; the victim's head reflecting the terror (I assume the rest of her is in the box); and an action shot filled with menace (though not sure for whom). Yup. A definite keeper. Usually, the more distasteful the advertising, the more tepid the movie. But at least we have the poster art to keep us happy with fright.

Mexican Lobby Card: The Devil's Hand

Mexican Lobby Card: La Mente Y El Crimen

This lobby card shows an excellent use of stark imagery over credits to imply motivations for this 1964 Mexican movie.

Mexican Lobby Card: The Pit and the Pendulum

Jeepers' Keeper Recording

Here's an audio cassette tucked away in Professor Kinema's archive that's historically interesting. Jeepers Keeper (Fred Struthman) is the host, I believe. (The cassette listed 1963 as the date of the source recording, but E-gor's Chamber of TV Horror Hosts lists 1964 as Struthman's start on Jeepers Creepers.)

Click the link below the picture.

Jeepers' Keeper on KCOP TV CH13

Halloween Beistle Art-Tissue Witch Centerpiece

Is it too early to start thinking about Halloween 2012? Anyway, here's to a witchin' New Year!

Magazines: CineAction 82, 83 Black Christmas and Frankenstein

Zombos Says: Very Good

I'm not a regular reader of CineAction, although it does touch on horror-genre subjects with probing and fascinating articles. I just find it difficult to keep up with the more academically-oriented analyses and arguments. Reading academic jargon-filled discursive suppositions gives me a feeling I can only describe as watching a textual dog eating it's subtextual tail, round and round in a circular narrative. I get dizzy when the words semantic, syntactic, trope, and anthropomorphic are used in the same paragraph. I know. It's me.

But this issue has two horror movie-related articles that piqued my interest enough for me to pick it up: James Whale's Frankenstein: Re-animating the War and Black Christmas: The Slasher Film Was MADE IN CANADA.

Sara Constantineau's excellently argued Black Christmas: The Slasher Film Was MADE IN CANADA is a blunt statement inviting discussion, so let's talk about it first.

She posits that 1974's Black Christmas not only predates John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), but it also contains many of the slasher movie tropes Halloween adopts (and many later slashers bore us to death with). No argument from me there. There are important differences, however, which she contrasts and compares along a main theme of how Black Christmas uses a "prominent feminist subtext," because Jess, the Final Girl, is sexually active and lives, while Halloween is more sexist-oriented: women who aren't chaste incur punishment while the virginal Laurie, the Final Girl, lives.

Another key difference involves how patriarchal authority is viewed: Black Christmas pokes fun at authority figures while Halloween, through the sage Dr. Loomis, positions them as "privileged." Constantineau sums it up best: "Black Christmas has the same generic principles as the American slasher, but it does not propagate the same ideology. Halloween arguably punished female sexuality."

Yes, it did, but considering that promiscuous males in Halloween and other American slashers, generally speakig, get their gonads handed to them (sometimes literally) , I don't fully accept the sexist argument as a complete one. I'm sure a body count taken across the slasher movie spectrum may quantify this issue for better clarity, but for now I don't have any qualms saying there is a sexist element to all slasher movies, but I'd also give equal weight to the thematic subtext of miscreant youth being "corrected" for their misbehavior in order to preserve societal norms (aka, making the slasher movie commercially reputable by including a strong moral message).

Looking at Constantineau's notes for her article I'm not sure she went back far enough, however. Wikipedia's entry on slashers mentions one movie I wasn't aware of, and one I already consider a slasher:

Possibly the earliest film that could be called a slasher, Thirteen Women (1932) tells the story of an old college sorority whose former members are set against one another by a vengeful peer, seeking penance for the prejudice they bestowed on her because of her mixed race heritage. Another film important to the sub-genre is Michael Powell'sPeeping Tom (1960). (from Forerunners of the Slasher Film, Wikipedia)

Granted neither of these movies contains the more intense structural and semantic elements now comprising the slasher as we know it--including Black Christmas and Halloween--I'd still include them in any discussion of the slasher genre, which makes Constantineau's presumption that slashers were MADE IN CANADA appear somewhat presumptuous.

On another note, the real wonderment in James Whale's Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein is to be found in the diverse ways you can view and interpret them. That's when all those subtexts and hidden narratives pop up to amaze and befuddle you, providing new depth to a familiar landscape and revitalization of enjoyment. Christiane Gerblinger's James Whale's Frankenstein: Re-animating the Great War, is enlightening in its juxtuposition of Whale's wartime experiences and his direction of Frankenstein, and how the destruction of a world war permeates Frankenstein's laboratory (when seen as metaphor for the battlefield) and the Monster (when understood as a simulacrum for the shattered soldier reborn).

I love this stuff.

Whether you agree with Gerblinger or not, it's an informed argument that helps us appreciate the reality inherent in all cinematic artistry, and allows us to understand, a little more, how a director's life experiences can influence his movie in overt or subtle ways, even when the script, written by others,  is firmly envisioned and budgeted.

Whale was a second lieutenant in World War I and spent most of his time held as a prisoner of war. His experiences led to fame through his stage play, Journey's End, in 1928; a play about "war's conflation of life and death." Whale's early movies also carried war themes, including his Old Dark House, whose "lead character was a cynical war veteran."

Gerblinger views Whale's indelible, life-pummeling wartime moments through the actions of the Monster and the villagers, and the set pieces of his Frankenstein ("Whale re-used the outdoor sets [from] Universal's 1930 film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front"). When filtered this way, the Monster becomes an amalgum of the Everyman and the sacrificial soldier re-animated from the dead toward a higher purpose, and the villagers become the disheveled society left behind, economically displaced and uncertain after the war. Turning on the Monster they reject their own guilt from failure to live up to the immense sacrifice by rejecting Frankenstein's re-animated creature.

Even more interesting is the notion that Frankenstein's failure to accept his responsibility toward his laboratory offspring is reflected by the community at large in their refusal to recognize the Monster as anything but a monstrosity to be feared, hunted, and chained. 

While Shelley's Frankenstein's refusal to meet his creature's requirements was portrayed as an abnegation of basic responsibilities, in Whale, this is transposed onto the villagers and their efforts at persecution. These instances of "increased callousness and neglect towards the weak in general" grow in force and vehemence in the 1935 film. This suggests that it is the conduct of the masses being held up to scrutiny, not Frankenstein's irresponsibility, because Whale's emphasis seems to be overtly upon the mass positioned against the individual (echoes of Metropolis reverberate).

Gerblinger broadens her discussion to include the forces of the Great Depression and the Forgotten Men of World War I, and briefly hits on a revelatory explanation--to me, at least--for the reason everyone is dressed in that hodgepodge of time periods fashion, one which goes beyond the obvious budget and production rationales. 

There's a lot more to enjoy in CineAction # 82/83, especially the article on Georges Melies' influence on sci fi cinema. Considering how much I enjoyed this issue, I may even bite the bullet and read more CineAction. I wonder what they've written about zombies? Their so academic these days, you know.

Four Guys Killing Time: Karloff, Lorre, Price, Rathbone

I couldn't pass up this whimsical tableau when I saw it on eBay...

Magazines: The Paranormal Special SFX Edition

Zombos Says: Very Good

Okay, I'm a sucker for UK horror and sci fi magazines. For one thing, they're larger magazines. When ours keep shrinking--I wonder how much shorter and narrower our magazines and comic books will get--the Brits keep their format robust: a tad larger and you could easily display your tastes quite well on any standard coffee table. Forget digital: no current horror or sci fi magazines do it well.

For another, the coverage is fairly good, even when you toss in the usual publicity accolades and shallow interviews for upcoming movies, current movies, and most everything in-between; it's written without that snarky, glammy, and sometimes pretentious Video Watchdog tone you've got to suffer through from our Canadian and American creepy-print cousins. Instead there's a nicely sophisticated understatedness replacing the know-it-all bombast, you know what I mean? Toss in a few stickers, a keyring Ghost that smells and looks a lot like one of those plastic-goop Mattel Creepy Crawlers, and a 2012 Cult Movie Calendar and, zoinks!, I'm an easy target.

Of course, you might shake your head and counter that Gorezone (or GZ) didn't fit this rosy picture I've painted. You would be right. I admit it didn't. It was in a category all its own; and not a good one, either. It lost its direction a while back and became insufferable to read. Then again, I don't think reading was the actual goal as the male-centric eye-candy was more prominently positioned for attention.

But given all this, is this special SFX edition magazine, The Paranormal, any good? Well, yes, definitely. Television shows and movies, a look at Daniel Radcliffe's upcoming The Woman In Black through an interview with director James Watkins (Eden Lake), and an excellent examination of one of my favorite literary supernatural investigators, Carnacki, the Ghost Finder, created by William Hope Hodgson, are worthy of your attention. (I double-dare you to read The Whistling Room in the dead of night, alone, without the television or iPod on.) The only onscreen portrayal of Carnacki was ably done by Donald Pleasance for The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes television series in the 1970s. They chose The Horse of the Invisible story for that episode, probably due to budgetary reasons. How Hollywood and the Indies haven't yet exploited Carnacki is beyond me.

Also in Jane's script, one of the big references we talked about, believe it or not, was J-Horror. We're both really big fans of films such as Dark Water and Ringu, and they are very definite sources when it comes to approach and tone. I think those films have a real mastery of dread. So it's an English ghost house film meets Japanese horror--there's your high concept! (from James Watkins' The Woman In Black interview)

A listing of ghost stories in print to savor on long winter nights, a top 50 list of ghostly movies, a top 10 list of best Supernatural episodes, and more in-depth interviews (note the key term here, "in-depth" ) fill in the main-article crevices. Even author Colin Wilson's work is examined, and there's a brief go at Ti West's The Innkeepers, which I'm hoping is much better than his lacklustre and boring House of the Devil. While the focus is on Britishly works (The Stone Tape, for instance), the coverage is broad enough to entice and satisfy most horror fans, even if you don't drink tea and think a scone is something orange and placed by road workers onto busy streets. And if you're ever headed to the UK, there's a haunted pubs guide for you, although I wonder if Will Salmon, the bloke who compiled it, was sober at the time.