Although the continuity is a little wayward, the events of many of the Golden Age of Universal horror films actually take place in one of two fictional locales – the village of Frankenstein and that of Vasaria (sometimes spelled Visaria). In turn, these were generally filmed in the same place too, the sprawling Universal back-lot, nicknamed ‘Little Europe’.

Frankenstein Village is home, naturally enough, to the famed Frankenstein family who resided in the area for 700 years. Taking elements of the setting of Mary Shelley’s novel, Ingolstadt in Bavaria, it is referred to in House of Frankenstein as being located near the fictional town of Reigelberg in Switzerland (the country is also referred to in a 1930 shooting script for Frankenstein).

Notable places of interest in the village include a castle on the edge of the village, the ancestral dwelling of the Frankenstein family, latter inhabitants being the Baron and his son, Henry. Located behind the castle was an old watchtower where Henry Frankenstein drew notoriety for his attempts to grant life to cadavers. The building also had a crypt and a windmill is to be found nearby. Overseen by a burgomaster, the locals partake in many traditional trades and much of their economy appears to be based on the large forested area at the edge of their community.

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Generally assumed to be in Switzerland, Vasaria is nestled in the mountains of Eastern Europe, rather isolated from the outside world and approximately a three-day journey from the nearest hamlet – Frankenstein. Vasaria was also home to men of medicine – Dr. Gustav Neimann (played by Boris Karloff in the film House of Frankenstein), and the youngest son of Henry Frankenstein, Ludwig (Cedric Hardwicke in Ghost of Frankenstein). Vasaria also became the residence of Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr), better known in furry mode as The Wolfman.

For the narrative to make any sense at all, the events of the films should take place in roughly this order:

Frankenstein (Frankenstein Village)

Bride of Frankenstein (Frankenstein Village)

Dracula

Dracula’s Daughter

Son of Frankenstein (Frankenstein Village)

Ghost of Frankenstein (Vasaria)

The Wolf Man

Son of Dracula

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man

House of Frankenstein (Frankenstein Village)

House of Dracula (Visaria)

Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (ironically the one film which attempts to put all the monsters in a ‘believable’ real world where they could cross paths). Both towns have a surprisingly high quota of hunchbacks and hanged criminals.

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Stage 12 at Universal Studios was built in 1928, covers 29,500 square feet and was originally created for the 1929 film, Broadway. The sprawling nature of the set meant that in leant itself to epic productions where entire communities had to be housed – these included Dracula, Frankenstein ( both 1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Alas, a devastating fire in 1967 means that the current replica of a town available to visit is not the original.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

With thanks to Universal Monster Army website and Monster Kid Classic Horror Forum

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Conjure Wife (1943) is a supernatural horror novel by Fritz Leiber. Its premise is that witchcraft flourishes as an open secret among women. The story is told from the point of view of a small-town college professor who discovers that his wife is a witch.

This novel was the first by Fritz Leiber. It has been the inspiration for at least three films: Weird Woman (1944), Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn!) (1962), and Witches’ Brew (aka Which Witch is Which?) (1980).

Plot:

Tansy Saylor is the wife of an up-and-coming young sociology professor at a small, conservative American college. She is also a witch. Her husband, Norman, discovers this one day while rummaging through her dressing table: he finds vials of graveyard dirt, packets of hair and fingernail clippings from their acquaintances, and other evidence of her witchcraft. He confronts Tansy, and manages to convince her that her faith in magic is a result of superstition and neurosis. Tansy burns her charms; and Norman’s luck immediately goes sour. He realises that he had been protected, up till now, by Tansy’s charms, and that as a result of his meddling, they are both now powerless to counteract the spells and charms of the other witches all around them.

Critical reaction:

The novel is widely acknowledged to be a classic of modern horror fiction. It was included in David Pringle’s Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels and in Fantasy: The 100 Best Books by James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock. In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, David Langford described it as “an effective exercise in the paranoid.”

Damon Knight wrote: Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber, is easily the most frightening and (necessarily) the most thoroughly convincing of all modern horror stories…Leiber develops [the witchcraft] theme with the utmost dexterity, piling up alternate layers of the mundane and outré, until at the story’s real climax, the shocker at the end of Chapter 14, I am not ashamed to say that I jumped an inch out of my seat…Leiber has never written anything better.

Boucher and McComas similarly lauded the novel as “one of the best of all novels on witchcraft survivals in the enlightened modern world.” P. Schuyler Miller described it as “one of those classics we talk about so glibly,” despite finding the denouement less effective than the setup.

Publication:

Conjure Wife was originally published in the April 1943 volume of Unknown Worlds. An “expanded and revised” version was published by Twayne Publishers in its Witches Three anthology in 1952, then issued as a stand-alone novel in 1953. The latter version has been reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback editions, by a variety of publishers, including Ace Books, Tom Doherty Associates, Penguin Books, and Award Publications.

Keith Emerson’s sound-man at work…

Electronically produced sound has been available to adventurous film composers since the silent era. Among the earliest electronic instruments were the Ondes-Martenot (invented in 1928), which produced a characteristic quivering sound by varying the frequency of oscillation in an array of vacuum tubes, and the trautonium (1930), a monophonic synthesizer-like instrument in which sound generation was based on neon tubes and modulated by the action of fingers on a metal resistor wire.

Later, the clavioline (1947) was the first electronic keyboard instrument to reach a mass market, boasting a five octave range derived from a single tone generator; its rich buzzy timbre can be heard on Joe Meek’s classic single “Telstar” (1962) and the work of jazz maverick Sun Ra. Among the more obscure instruments, the ANS synthesizer (1937) was perhaps the most unusual: created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin, it modified sine waves photo-electronically by means of five glass discs, through which light shines as the player scratches patterns on an outer surface coated with non-drying black mastic. It can be heard on Edward Artemiev’s score for Andrei Tarkovsky’s sublime Solaris (1972) and the Coil album “ANS” (2004).

The Theremin

The earliest and best known of these pioneering instruments is the theremin (developed in 1920), which produces a distinctively eerie tone shifting up and down in pitch according to the position of the operator’s hands in relation to a pair of magnetised antennae. It made its soundtrack debut in a 1931 Soviet film called Odna (“Alone”), for a sequence in which a women gets lost in a furious snowstorm. Miklós Rózsa was the first film composer to use the theremin in the West, in the otherwise orchestral scores for Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Spellbound (1945) and Billy Wilder’s drama about alcoholism Lost Weekend (1945).

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The theremin also turned up in Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase (1946) and was incorporated by composer Ferde Grofé into Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M (1950), after which it became strongly associated with science fiction, thanks to Bernard Herrmann’s influential score for Robert Wise’s classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). The same year, Dimitri Tiomkin added theremin to his score for Howard Hawks’ The Thing (1951), which could be said to mark the first use of electronic sound in a horror movie.

Spellbound Concerto by Miklós Rózsa: Theremin played by Celia Sheen:

The first film to boast a completely electronic score was Forbidden Planet (1956), featuring sounds created by husband and wife team Louis and Bebe Barron (the latter a student of American avant-garde composer Henry Cowell). During 1952-53 the Barrons worked with John Cage as engineers on his first tape work “Williams Mix”, a four and a half minute piece which took over a year to complete.

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In 1956, having realised the limited commercial potential of avant-garde composition, they put feelers out to Hollywood and were commissioned to produce twenty minutes of sound effects for Forbidden Planet. When the producers heard the astonishing results they signed the couple up for the whole score. Using a variety of home-built electronic circuits, principally a ‘ring modulator’, the Barrons further manipulated the results by adding reverberation, delay and tape effects. Such was the sheer novelty of their work that, at an early preview of the movie, the audience applauded the sound of the spaceship landing on Altair IV.

Forbidden Planet – spaceship landing:

Alfred Hitchcock turned to electronic sound again in 1963, for his innovative horror film The Birds. This time he decided to dispense with an orchestral score altogether and opted for Oskar Sala’s ‘Mixtur-Trautonium’ to create synthetic birdcalls, along with an abstract electronic soundtrack by Sala and Remi Gassmann.

Alfred Hitchcock with Oskar Sala at the Trautonium

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Sala also provided an extraordinary trautonium score to Harald Reinl’s 1963 West-German horror-thriller Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor (aka The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle).

Distinguished by complex harmonic arrangements of pure electronic sound, and some striking approximations of brass and woodwind, Sala’s music for this better-than-average ‘krimi’ deserves more attention (a twelve minute suite from the film can be found on the Oskar Sala compilation CD “Subharmonische Mixturen”.)

As a side note it’s worth mentioning the controversial, some would say misunderstood, film Anders als du und ich (1957) by Veit Harlan, a German director accused of working for the Nazi propaganda machine during the Second World War. Harlan denied this, claiming that his work had been tampered with by another director at Goebbels’ orders. If true, Harlan was an unlucky man: after WW2 he tried to relaunch his career with Anders als du und ich, which began life as Das dritte Geschlecht (“The 3rd Sex”), a film about the repression of homosexuals. Apparently this too was tampered with, at the instruction of the post-War German censors, to create a diametrically opposite story about the danger of homosexual influences on young men. The reason I mention this? One of the tell-tale signs of homosexuality in the film is an interest in electronic avant-garde music, as represented by none other than Oskar Sala’s Trautonium!

A young man is ‘turned on’ to electronic music in “Anders als du und ich” (1957).

Robert Moog at the controls

In the mid-1960s, American physics graduate and electrical engineer Dr. Robert Moog unveiled an invention that was to revolutionise the field. The first commercially available ‘synthesizer’ as the term is understood today, the ‘Moog’ was smaller, cheaper and far more reliable than previous examples. Before this the only synthesizers in existence were enormous, unwieldy, custom-built machines like the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer, installed at Columbia University in 1957. Robert Moog, with the assistance of New York recording engineer Wendy (at the time ‘Walter’) Carlos, launched his first production model – the 900 series – in 1967, with a free demonstration record composed, recorded and produced by Carlos herself. (She created an even greater sensation in 1968 with “Switched on Bach”, an album of synthesized Johann Sebastian Bach pieces, and went on to record music for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining).

Wendy Carlos with Moog 900 circa late 1960s.

1968 was the year in which George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was unleashed upon unsuspecting audiences. And at the heart of this seminal modern horror film, electronic sound is deployed to suggest unutterable horror: when would-be heroic young couple Tom and Judy are killed, and zombies grab handfuls of their entrails in graphic detail, a deep, distorted oscillator drenched in white noise and reverb underlines the severity of the scene and amplifies the taboo-busting power. The rest of the score consists of library orchestral tracks, sometimes slathered in echo to add a hallucinatory edge; only this one key scene utilizes pure electronics. It’s an artistic decision that would reverberate through the genre for years to come, setting the seal on the synthesizer as the instrument of choice for representing abject physical horror.

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Tom and Judy devoured, in Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Meanwhile, synthesizers were rapidly finding a place in rock music. San-Francisco based musicians Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause set up a booth at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 to demonstrate the Moog, and soon found themselves in demand for studio session work, leading to a recording contract with Warner Brothers and a commission to provide electronic music for Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s psychedelic masterpiece Performance (1970). During production of Performance Mick Jagger recorded a Moog score for Kenneth Anger’s 11-minute short Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969); the giant Moog synthesizer seen in the Roeg/Cammell film is the one he used.

Mick Jagger (and Moog) in this rare promo film for Performance: 

Keith Emerson of prog-rockers Emerson, Lake and Palmer was another early customer; his personal feedback and consultation helped Roberg Moog to refine the instrument and probably paved the way for the Minimoog, a monophonic three-oscillator keyboard synthesizer launched in 1970. Portable and relatively affordable, it was popular with touring rock bands and soon found its way into recording studios used by film composers, thus becoming one of the first synths to feature on low budget movie scores.

A synth highlight from Keith Emerson’s score for Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980):

Prominent among the ‘early adopters’ to make a mark on the genre in the 1970s was Phillan Bishop, whose bleep-and-bloop approach lent avant-garde menace to Thomas Alderman’s The Severed Arm, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s Messiah of Evil and Chris Munger’s Kiss of the Tarantula.

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The Severed Arm, featuring music by Phillan Bishop:

Carl Zittrer also deserves a mention; he went free-form crazy on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and then cohered a little for the superior Deathdream, both for director Bob Clark. By now a pattern was beginning to emerge; synthesizers signified madness, extreme situations, encroaching terror, and the chilly derangement of the psychopath. All of these elements come together in the score to The Last House on the Left, an assortment of country bluegrass tunes augmented by crude but effective electronics (from a Moog and an ARP 2600), played by Steve Chapin and the film’s lead psycho, musician-turned-actor David Hess.

In 1973, Robert Moog associate David Borden was commissioned to record the soundtrack to William Friedkin’s soon-to-be smash The Exorcist. As it turned out, only a minute of his work was used, with Friedkin instead making the inspired if seemingly unlikely choice of Mike Oldfield’s progressive rock epic “Tubular Bells”. The enormous success of The Exorcist, and the impact of “Tubular Bells”, echoed through the film scores of the 1970s, and with synthesizers now part of the furniture in many a recording studio and film post-production suite, an explosion of electronic sound pulsated through the horror genre.

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In fact, not only Mike Oldfield but progressive rock as a whole was a driving force in pushing synthesizers to the forefront of 1970s film composition; bands like Yes, Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer deployed electric organs, Minimoogs and towering stacks of ARP and Buchla technology, and this would inspire an Italian band who were to become one of the foremost exponents of electronics in film scoring: Goblin.

Goblin lent innovative jazz-rock stylings to Dario Argento’s brutal, beautiful Deep Red (Profondo rosso, 1976), but really hit the musical motherlode on their second Argento collaboration, Suspiria (1977), a tumultuous score built around a circling melody that drags “Tubular Bells” into a cackling synthesized whirlwind.

Their exciting, arpeggiator-driven scores for Luigi Cozzi’s grisly but loveable alien invasion flick Contamination and Joe D’Amato’s sleazy gross-out Beyond the Darkness considerably enhance the films, while the influence of disco (more on that later) supercharges their contribution to Argento’s masterpiece Tenebrae (only three members of Goblin play on this recording, hence the film’s ‘bit-of-a-mouthful’ credit to “Simonetti-Morante-Pignatelli”).

The advent of ever more affordable synthesizers locked step with the rise of the slasher movie, and the two proved a match made in low-budget heaven. In 1978, John Carpenter was putting the finishing touches to his third feature, Halloween.

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There was no way he could afford an orchestral score, but he was a dab hand with a synth (as his previous film Assault on Precinct 13 had shown) so he elected to write and perform the music himself.

The result helped a simple slasher film to become one of the biggest independent hits of the 1970s. For the main theme, Carpenter employed an insistent metronomic pulse, but with a twist; the piano taps out five beats to the bar (shades of prog’ rock again). Meanwhile, the synthesizer provides a rapid ‘ticker-ticker-ticker-ticker’ in the background, creating a jittery sense of things moving at the periphery of your attention, perfectly in keeping with Carpenter’s menacing widescreen framing.

The template set by Halloween would sustain many of Carpenter’s future films, The Fog being an especially wonderful example:

It would inspire a new generation of soundtrack composers; in particular, Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave, whose breathtakingly inventive score for Phantasm (1978) drew on avant-garde electronics, progressive rock, Carpenter-style repetition, and even disco (an influential musical form when it comes to movie soundtracks, and one whose leading lights embraced the synthesizer wholeheartedly).

Tim Krog’s score for another surprise low-budget horror hit, Ulli Lommel’s The Boogey Man (1980), also deserves mention for its lush melancholic synth arrangements.

Videodrome (1983) saw Canadian director David Cronenberg’s resident composer, Howard Shore, using a new computer instrument called the Synclavier to blur the line between synthetic orchestrations and a real string section. The resulting ambiguity mirrored the film’s unsettling philosophical core: were the characters having real experiences or hallucinations; were the instruments real, or artificial?

As the 1980s got under way, the sampler emerged as the big new concept in musical composition, and the post-modern fallout of sampling has persisted ever since. One could argue that synthesizers were historicised by the advent of sampling, and it’s difficult now to escape a sense of nostalgia or deliberate quotation of the past when using the classic Moogs or ARPs on record. However, as recent films like Under the Skin (2014) have shown, electronic sound synthesis, whether based in sampling and software manipulation or ‘traditional’ synthesizer programming, continues to offer creative support to the extreme visions of horror and fantasy filmmakers.

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The following is a partial list of horror film soundtracks featuring synthesizers either exclusively or prominently. The relevant composer is noted alongside:

1969 – Troika – David Johnson & Fredrick Hobbs

1970 – I Drink Your Blood – Clay Pitts

1971 – Let’s Scare Jessica to Death – Orville Stoeber

1972 – Season of the Witch – Steve Gorn

1973 – Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things – Carl Zittrer

1972 – Deathdream – Carl Zittrer

1972 – The Last House on the Left – Steve Chapin & David Hess

1972 – The Severed Arm – Phillan Bishop

1973 – Messiah of Evil – Phillan Bishop

1974 – Nude for Satan – Alberto Baldan Bembo

1975 – Deep Red – Goblin

1975 – Kiss of the Tarantula – Phillan Bishop

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1975 – Shining Sex – Daniel White

1976 – Death Trap aka Eaten Alive – Wayne Bell & Tobe Hooper

1976 – The Child – Michael Quatro

1976 – The Alien Factor -  Kenneth Walker

1977 – Sex Wish – unknown

1977 – Shock Waves – Richard Einhorn

1977 – Suspiria – Goblin

1977 – Shock – I Libra

1978 – Barracuda – Klaus Schulze

1978 – Halloween – John Carpenter

1978 – Phantasm – Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave

1978 – Dawn of the Dead – Goblin

1978 – Jennifer – Porter Jordan

1978 – Terror – Ivor Slaney

1979 – Beyond the Darkness – Goblin

1979 – The Driller Killer – Joe Delia

1979 – Don’t Go in the House – Richard Einhorn

1979 – Zombie Flesh Eaters – Fabio Frizzi

1979 – Terror Express! – Marcello Giombini

1979 – Forest of Fear – Ted Shapiro

1980 – Anthropophagus – Marcello Giombini

1980 – The Beast in Space – Marcello Giombini

1980 – Erotic Nights of the Living Dead – Marcello Giombini

1980 – Cannibal Holocaust – Riz Ortolani

1980 – The Shining – Wendy Carlos

1980 – The Boogey Man – Tim Krog

1980 – Contamination – Goblin

1980 – Fiend – Paul Woznicki

1980 – The Fog – John Carpenter

1980 – Maniac – Jay Chattaway

1980 – City of the Living Dead – Fabio Frizzi

1981 – Strange Behavior – Tangerine Dream

1981 – Don’t Go in the Woods – H. Kingsley Thurber

1981 – Prey – Ivor Slaney

1981 – Inseminoid – John Scott

1981 – Scanners – Howard Shore

1981 – The House by the Cemetery – Walter Rizzati

1981 – Burial Ground aka Nights of Terror – Berto Pisano

1981 – Possession – Andrzej Korzynski

1981 – Macumba Sexual – Jess Franco [as 'Pablo Villa']

1982 – The Deadly Spawn – Paul Cornell, Michael Perilstein & Kenneth Walker

1982 – BoardingHouse – ‘Teeth’

1982 – Mongrel – Ed Guinn

1982 – Tenebrae – Simonetti-Morante-Pignatelli

1982 – El Siniestro Dr. Orloff – Jess Franco [as 'Pablo Villa']

1983 – The Keep – Tangerine Dream

1983 – Spasms – Tangerine Dream

1983 – Friday the 13th Part III – Harry Manfredini & Michael Zager

1983 – Videodrome – Howard Shore

1983 – Xtro – Harry Bromley Davenport

1984 – Don’t Open Till Christmas – Des Dolan

1984 – A Nightmare on Elm Street – Charles Bernstein

1985 – Phenomena – Goblin

Stephen Thrower, Horrorpedia – Stephen is the author of Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesus Franco and one half of Cyclobe

Related: Theremin – musical instrument

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‘He hunted humans for the sheer sport of killing… and made his island paradise into a Hell on Earth!’

Bloodlust! (also known as Bloodlust and Blood Lust) is a horror/thriller film co-written, co-produced and directed by Ralph Brooke.

Filmed in 1959 and released on September 13, 1961, the feature was picked up by Crown International Pictures. Crown later re-released it in 1970 as a double feature with Blood Mania. The film’s cinematography was by Richard E. Cunha (director of Giant from the Unknown, She Demons, Missile to the Moon, and Frankenstein’s Daughter).

Plot teaser:

Two couples (Robert Reed, June Kenney, Joan Lora, and Eugene Persson) are on a boating trip when they come across an uncharted island. The four investigate and find themselves in the clutches of Dr. Albert Balleau (Wilton Graff – Pillow of Death; Valley of the Zombies; Who Killed Doc Robbin), whose hobby is hunting both animals and humans.

After learning about the terrible secrets of the island from the doctor’s wife (Lilyan Chauvin) and her boyfriend (Walter Brooke) as well as an investigation, the group tries to escape only to be thwarted by Dr. Balleau and his henchmen.

Balleau’s wife and her lover are slain and stuffed, while the men are forced to participate in a The Most Dangerous Game-style hunt, with their girlfriends soon joining them. The hunt includes Balleau’s sailor henchmen, the danger of quicksand, leeches and hidden traps, as well as Balleau’s deadly skill…

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Reviews:

“Bloodlust! is no big deal, really, but it is reasonably well made for a quickie drive-in horror film, and it should reward those who come to it with a forgiving attitude. Wilton Graff does a respectable job as the villain, and in particular makes the most of the speech in which he tells how a stint as a sniper during World War II left him addicted to the thrill of hunting humans. Robert Reed makes for a rather dull hero, but he is counterbalanced to some extent by June Kenney’s Betty, who is atypically strong and resourceful for a B-movie heroine of this vintage. Watch especially for the scene in which she uses her judo skills to toss one of Balleau’s men into a vat of acid— not only is it an unexpected show of force, but it leads to a very hard-hitting gore effect by contemporary standards.” 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

” …delivers satisfying late night chiller charm that is surprisingly daring for an overlooked sixties schlocker unjustly derided as a campy disappointment if it is even remembered at all.” Culture Crypt

“With the exception of a few hardy souls interested in seeing “Mike Brady” star in a horror film, Brooke’s Bloodlust! has no real target audience, no real entertainment value, and ultimately, no real reason to even be seen.” Examiner.com

The movie was released on DVD as a double feature with Atom Age Vampire on March 20, 2001, and later released on DVD as another double feature in 2002 with The Amazing Transparent Man.

Bud Westmore (13 January 1918 – 24 June 1973) was a make-up artist in Hollywood and son of George Westmore, a member of the Westmore family prominent in Hollywood make-up. He is credited on over 450 movies and television shows, including The List of Adrian Messenger, Man of a Thousand Faces, The Andromeda Strain and Creature from the Black Lagoon. For his involvement in Creature from the Black Lagoon he assisted the designer of the Gill-man, Disney animator Millicent Patrick, though her role was deliberately downplayed and for half a century, Westmore would receive sole credit for the creature’s conception – not, alas, the only time the work of others was overlooked somewhat. Westmore was also famous for the make-up for TV show The Munsters.

The Westmore Hollywood dynasty was actually headed up by Bud’s father, George, who alongside work on many Douglas Fairbanks Snr films (1924’s The Thief of Baghdad and 1921’s The Three Musketeers, to name but two) could also claim the have been Winston Churchill’s barber. After taking his family across the Atlantic to America from England, he set up Hollywood’s first make-up department.

After George’s suicide (the appropriately theatrical swallowing of mercury), his sons carried on the dynasty; Monte was much associated with MGM until his early death of a heart attack following surgery; Perc became head of Make-up at Warner Bros; Wally himself became Make-up chief at Paramount; Ern worked at 20th Century Fox and low-budget film studio Eagle-Lion, but his career was hampered by an alcohol problem; Bud became head at Universal, and the youngest, Frank, was more freelance and later wrote a book on the family, The Westmores of Hollywood in 1976.

Bud Westmore was born Hamilton Adolph, but changed his first names to George Hamilton both in tribute to his father and after the rise of Hitler made Adolph an unpopular name in the US. After free-lancing in the 40s (including work at “Poverty Row” studio PRC on the classic noir Detour in 1945), Westmore joined Universal, replacing the Godfather of monster make-up, Jack Pierce, as head of the make-up department. Although Bud worked on every conceivable genre of film, it was for his work creating monsters and aliens for horror, science fiction and fantasy films that he is best remembered, beginning with mega-cheapies such as Strangler of the Swamp, The Flying Serpent and Devil Bat’s Daughter (all 1946) until he finally made something of a breakthrough in 1948 in the (slighter) higher budget, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein – later to cover the comedy duo’s meetings with The Invisible Man, The Mummy, The Killer, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Keystone Cops.

Westmore worked at a furious pace and, truth be told, this can be seen in his somewhat basic style, lacking the intricate and ingenious work of the likes of Pierce and making easy to apply prosthetics and cheap and cheerful frights. Many have also questioned how much of the work Westmore is credited for can truly be attributed to him, never more so than with 1954’s Creature From the Black Lagoon. For many years, the creature’s design and creation was solely credited to Westmore, though we are now able to cite the original conceptual designs, drawings and paintings to Millicent Patrick and a good deal of the actual creation as being from the hands of Jack Kevan.

Westmore continued to work relentlessly (or appear to at least), throughout the 50’s and 60’s, amongst the atomic age beasties were particularly notable works on James Cagney for the Lon Chaney biopic, Man of a Thousand Faces, and the creation of the make-up for the long-running television series, The Munsters. Here he was able to fully lampoon not only the work of others but also himself, at last the perfect marriage. Sadly, a combination of industry back-biting and financial belt-tightening meant that by 1970, Universal had cast Westmore adrift and the insolvent make-up artist did his final work for MGM’s Soylent Green in 1973. His legacy may be over-shadowed by doubts over his hands-on input but there can be little doubt that the giant bud-headed creatures of the 1940’s and 1950’s would be a little less memorable without him, to the extent that the largest building in Universal’s back-lot is named after him.

Selected filmography:

The Strangler of the Swamp
The Flying Serpent
Devil Bat’s Daughter
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
The Strange Door
The Black Castle
Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
It Came From Outer Space
Creature from the Black Lagoon
Revenge of the Creature
The Mole People
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy
Cult of the Cobra
This Island Earth
Tarantula
The Creature Walks Among Us
The Deadly Mantis
The Monolith Monsters
The Thing That Couldn’t Die
Monster on the Campus
Curse of the Undead
The Leech Woman
The Night Walker
The Munsters
Dark Intruder
Let’s Kill Uncle
Eye of the Cat
Night Gallery
The Andromeda Strain
Soylent Green

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

‘The weird jungle of cobra plants that feed on women – and rip women apart!’

Voodoo Island is a 1957 horror film directed by Reginald Le Borg and written by Richard H. Landau. The cast includes Boris Karloff, Elisha Cook Jr. (Rosemary’s Baby; The Night Stalker) and Rhodes Reason. The film is set in the South Pacific and was filmed on Kauai, Hawaii back to back with Jungle Heat.

Hotel entrepreneur Howard Carlton (Owen Cunningham) is planning a new hotel/resort on a distant Pacific Island. A survey team that had been sent out earlier disappeared except for Mitchell (Glenn Dixon, Supervixens) who returned in a zombie-like state. In order to make sure nothing suspicious is going on, arch-sceptic Philip Knight (Karloff, Frankenstein, The Mummy), an investigative reporter, is dispatched to investigate. Anything but subtle, Knight takes along a party of five, including the catatonic Mitchell, his assistant Sara Adams (Beverley Tyler), resort manager Martin Schuler (Elisha Cook, Rosemary’s Baby, Messiah of Evil) and various other interested parties. Alas, before the journey begins, Mitchell drops dead, leaving behind only a voodoo effigy as a clue.

Wearing his best baseball cap, Knight and his party arrive at the island, despite the bad omens of a broken ship and their food supplies going off, essentially stranding them on the island. It’s not just a human threat the need to concern themselves with, a carnivorous plant devours one of their group, whilst the rest find themselves captured by fancy dress-clad locals and are further alarmed at the sight of their miniature likenesses, complete with pins in them. Knight is relatively unruffled but when he finds Schuler in a trance (shortly before he wanders carelessly off a bridge), he is forced to admit he believes in what he previously dismissed as hokum but is it too late for the survivors to escape Voodoo Island?

Is this Karloff’s lowest ebb? It must be close, the great actor appearing in an American film for the first time in four years after a brief diversion appearing on television, he’s admittedly given little to work with in terms of an utterly threadbare script but his stoic, clipped delivery is more radio announcer than dismissive explorer and the over-all effect is one of neither hero or villain but insufferable bore. The film itself seems at least a decade out of date in many ways, the pocket-money special effects of the draught excluder killer plant and clearly minute shooting area only tempered by a genuinely courageous attempt to include a gay character in a Hollywood film, the character of Claire (later lunch for for the shrub) played by Jean Engstrom, playing an openly lesbian role.

With hardly any voodoo in the film, indeed there seems to be a good degree of confusion as to what it may consist of, the film is little more than a brief safari, filmed on location but looking far more back garden in scope. The excellently-named Reginald Le Borg also directed The Mummy’s Ghost, whilst writer Richard Landau had no such excuse, having written the screenplays to The Quatermass Xperiment and much-forgotten live-action Disney effort, The Black Hole. Of much more interest is the score by Les Baxter, the master of exotica, in the middle of his Tiki-scapes but at the beginning of his film score career, later to include the likes of The Fall of the House of Usher, The Dunwich Horror and the America cut of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath. In common with much of this film, it’s not his greatest work and features some particularly annoying theremin to denote someone being cursed.

After being released theatrically by United Artists in 1957, the film was briefly re-titled Silent Death for its 1962 theatrical re-release. Future Batman, Adam West, has an uncredited role. It would be the 1960’s before Karloff’s career really took off again, despite the best efforts of all concerned here.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Les Baxter (March 14, 1922 – January 15, 1996) was an American musician and composer. Although he is best know as a practitioner of exotica music, he also scored several films, many of which were horror.

Baxter studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory before moving to Los Angeles for further studies at Pepperdine College. Abandoning a concert career as a pianist, he turned to popular music as a singer. At the age of 23 he joined Mel Tormé’s Mel-Tones, singing on Artie Shaw records such as “What Is This Thing Called Love?”.

By 1950 he had moved to Capitol and had progressed to conducting and arrangement, including one of Nat King Cole’s big early hits, “Mona Lisa”. From here, he branched out into his own strange world, firstly scoring a travelogue called, Tanga Tiki and then a series of concept albums: Le Sacre du Sauvage, Festival of the Gnomes, Ports of Pleasure, and Brazil Now. These thickly-layered, atmospheric works featuring bird song, abstract wailing and all manner of jungle and tribal sounds became part of the exotica movement, the archly-kitsch imagined sounds of far-flung lands and would soon inspire similar minds; Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman and Esquivel.

Sadly, much of his work up to this point was over-shadowed by back-biting and malicious rumour. It was alleged on several occasions that Baxter was actually the front for a ghost-writer, the actual composers of several works suspected to be Albert Harris, Pete Rugolo and Nelson Riddle, most famously Frank Sinatra’s band leader. The evidence for this was Baxter’s extremely slow composition and supposed inability to read music, both claims which have since been largely disproved. Regardless, Baxter shrugged off the criticisms and after further, often ‘challenging’ exotica works, cinema beckoned.

Having already composed the familiar’ whistle’ theme for TV’s Lassie, Baxter’s first work of note and a rarity in respect of the reasonable budget, was the Vincent Price-starring, Master of the World. This association with Price and more especially of the Gothic was to become a cornerstone of his career but one sadly that more often than not went uncredited. The speed at which AIP demanded new scores and the lowly resources afforded him and his orchestra meant that he was lucky to receive a credit for his work, luckier still if he was happy with the results of scores his name was attached to.

Baxter scored many of the Poe cycle of films, which have since become critically acclaimed but at the time were seen as fodder by many. Amongst well over a hundred scores he composed there are a handful of particularly interesting ones, unusual in that he was required to re-score a film which already had a soundtrack, for the American market. These included famous Mario Bava works such as Black Sunday (1960), Black Sabbath (1963) and Baron Blood (1972), peplum – Goliath and the Barbarians, and comedies – Beach Party.

In terms of the slew of Italian films he worked on, there is simply no justification for the so-called need for an alternative score. Composers such as accomplished as Stelvio Cipriani (Tragic Ceremony; Tentacles, a theme recycled possibly more than any other in film history, Piranha II), Roberto Nicolosi (Black Sunday) and Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (Castle of the Living Dead; Queens of Evil) were amongst those whose works were presumably considered ‘too exotic’ for the American palate. In fact, it was naturally conservative AIP who insisted that the films were given a new score for the American market. Their explanation, according to the composer Bronislau Kaper (Them!) was that they found Italian scores, “stupid, arrogant, monotonous and tasteless”.

The fun didn’t end there. Samuel Z. Arkoff’s notorious cost-cutting extended to the regular recycling of not only individual cues but entire tracts of music – the score to Samson and the Slave Queen is nearly all taken from Goliath and the Barbarians, not that Baxter got double the money. Similarly, The Premature Burial (1962) features cues heard in some of his previous scores. It is worth noting that although Baxter was one of the most high profile composers to be put in this position, others, such as Herman Stein (Tarantula, This Island Earth) also had their music re-used or went uncredited.

For Mario Bava’s 1960 classic, Black Sunday, so much money was invested by AIP (over $100,000, more than the film’s shooting budget) that they felt obliged to make it their own, despite it coming to them already successful and fully-formed. Ironically, having dispensed with Nicolosi’s subtle, unobtrusive score, they replaced it with something not only extremely similar but something which, if anything, attempted to overshadow Bava’s visuals. At least with 1963’s, Black Sabbath, a distinctly different score took the place of Nicolosi’s work, a somewhat blander, mainstream effort compared to the shifting and free-form original. The extremely distinctive Cipriani score to 1972’s Baron Blood, was given one of the more extreme make-overs and for once actually adds something new, something less intrusive and, well, scarier.

This bizarre practise continued to an even more ludicrous instance for Cry of the Banshee (1970) with AIP insisting on separate scores for both the British and US versions of the film. There are several explanations for this, however daft; firstly, Baxter had by this stage become part of the furniture at AIP and could apparently do no wrong; secondly, the original composer, Wilfred Josephs, was known only for his work in television, not the familiar big-hitter the Americans demanded; finally, the cuts to the US version were so sweeping that the film made little sense with only minute cues remaining. Regardless, it is one of Baxter’s most revered works, though the original is fun for its faux-Elizabethan sound.

After the mid-70’s, work began to dry up on both sides of the Atlantic as Italy’s industry concentrated on home-grown scores and America entered the realms of enormous blockbusters. There was still opportunity there (some work on Frogs in 1972, the score to The Beast Within, a decade later) but both exotica and his film themes had had their time (though he did compose themes for Sea World, amongst other tourist attractions) and it would be after his death that Baxter began to be reappraised in a much more positive light.

Selected filmography:

Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953 – 1968 is an academic  book written by Kevin Hefferman and published by Duke University Press in 2004.

In the first economic history of the horror film, Hefferman analyses how the production, distribution and exhibition of horror movies changed as the studio era gave way to the conglomeration of New Hollywood. He argues that major cultural and economic shifts in the production and reception of horror films began at the time of the 3-D cycle of 1953-54 – looking closely at House of Wax and Creature from the Black Lagoon – and ended with the 1968 adoption of the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system and the subsequent development of the adult horror movie – epitomised by Rosemary’s Baby.

Hefferman describes how this period presented a number of daunting challenges for movie exhibitors: the highcosts of technological upgrade, competition with television, declining movie attendance, and a diminishing number of annual releases from the major movie studios. He explains that the production and distribution branches of the movie industry responded to these trends by cultivating a youth audience, co-producing features with the film industries of Europe and Asia, selling films to television, and intensifying representations of sex.

The book includes analyses of Hammer Films and The Curse of Frankenstein; Hypnotic horror; William Castle’s movies; Vincent Price’s rise to horror stardom; AIP; Astor Pictures and Peeping Tom; TV syndication of horror movies (with listings of all the packages); Bava’s Black Sabbath; Continental distributing and the success of independents such as Night of the Living Dead.

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Reviews:

“While acknowledging the importance of the insights into the genre provided by such theorists as Robin Wood, Carol Clover, and Thomas Doherty, Heffernan identifies a neglected area in their analyses of the genre’s evolution: how the economic imperatives of an industry shape its final product. As a result, Ghouls becomes a multi-disciplinary text, one that cultural theorists, business historians and horror enthusiasts alike will find both useful and entertaining.” Louise Sheedy, Senses of Cinema

“Historians of the medium will appreciate Heffernan’s detailed scrutiny of the economic and cultural influences at work on the industry, which he intersperses with lively descriptions and critiques of both notable and obscure horror films of the era.” Andrew J. Douglas, Business History Review

“The use of color and gore, first seen in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), was similarly designed to increase profits through exaggerated and stylized responses to conventions completely familiar to hard-boiled movie audiences. As Heffernan notes, audiences found their worlds becoming and tougher and tougher, and it was important for any film to be even tougher in order to elicit the desired reaction.” John F. Barber, Leonardo Online

It’s hardly surprising that the most notorious, indefensible, loathsome and reprehensible movies ever made are those that exploring nasty Nazi sex and violence fantasies. Even the most liberal of critics seem reluctant to defend these goose-stepping abominations, and they sit at the top of that sorry list known as the Video Nasties.

In fact, the pulp fiction and cinema industry had been exploiting the Nazi nightmare since the war ended. Cheesy B-movies like Hitler’s Madman, They Saved Hitler’s Brain; She Demons and The Flesh Eaters exploited the idea that mad Nazi scientists were up to mischief in remote South American jungles and on desert islands, attempting to revive the fortunes of the Third Reich by somehow resurrecting Adolf Hitler or his marching minions. These movies played on knowledge of the very real mad scientist experiments of Joseph Mengele, which reached levels of atrocity that no fictional mad doctor could hope to match.

The theme ran through to the end of the 1960s with films like Search for the Evil One, and was still potent enough to turn up late into the 1970s – The Boys from Brazil had Mengele and a Jewish Nazi hunter racing to track down clones of Hitler and influence them to their way of thinking before they reached adulthood – the question perhaps being was Hitler a result of nature or nurture – while an episode of The New Avengers TV series saw Peter Cushing (also involved with Nazi zombies in Shock Waves) being forced to bring a preserved Hitler back to life on a remote Scottish island!

However, the grubbiest Naziploitation boom began when the 1960s saw the loosening of censorship rules.

Unable to show much actual sex, mid Sixties adult films would fill the gaps with violence, often S&M tinged. Showing a disregard for any sense of taste or decency, it was clearly only going to be a matter of time before some enterprising producer realised the – ahem – ‘erotic’ potential of the Nazi concentration camp. That man was Bob Cresse, and his film was the notorious Love Camp 7, a worryingly personal movie.

Directed by Lee Frost, the film sets the ground rules for the flood of titles which came almost a decade later. It tells the story of two American female spies who are sent to a Nazi ‘love camp’ in order to help another informant escape. This they do, but only after an hour of unrelenting torture and abuse. Women are depicted as being sexually abused, whipped, strapped to unspeakable devices and generally treated badly throughout the movie.

Cresse played the Commandant himself with a barely disguised gloating glee. He was, to a large extent, living out his own sado-masochistic fantasies in the nasty narrative, and stories abound about how he would insist on take after take of the torture scenes, until the suffering on screen was seemingly matched in reality by the actress.

After this pioneering effort, the genre was suspiciously quiet until 1973. It was then that sleaze producer David Friedman decided that the time was right to revive the dubious concept. He went to Canada and produced Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS under the pseudonym Herman Traegar, a name that remained shrouded in mystery until Friedman finally owned up a couple of decades later. Why the false name? Perhaps some things were just too sleazy for even ‘The Mighty Monarch of the Exploitation Film World’ to admit to.

And Ilsa is very sleazy. The title role was taken by busty nightclub performer Dyanne Thorne, who attacked the part with relish. She’s a cold, heartless sadist who is first seen castrating a male prisoner who is of no further sexual use. During the rest of the film, she tortures women, takes part in appalling experiments, and has sex with the only male inmate (American, of course) who can satisfy her.

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is a breathtakingly tasteless affair, yet it does have a (warped) sense of humour. Much of the action is so OTT, it teeters the film into the realms of ‘camp’, and it’s this which saves the film. Two sequels followed, though neither had Nazi themed story lines, instead having Ilsa as entirely separate characters in each.

While Ilsa was shaking the drive-ins, the art house theatres were rocking to The Night Porter, in which Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling indulged in assorted sexual antics that stopped short of the atrocities performed by Ilsa, yet still dwelled indulgently in uniform fetishism and Nazi decadence. The film was another box office success, and suddenly, the Italians – never slow to spot a trend – began to sit up and pay attention. Or stand to attention, perhaps?

The floodgates were opened in 1976 by Salon Kitty, which managed to combine the sleaze of Ilsa with the artiness of The Night Porter. The masterpiece of Nazi sleaze cinema, Tinto Brass’ twisted epic switches from making serious political points about the impotence of fascism (often with heavy handed political symbolism) to lip-smacking scenes of sexual perversion with alarming ease. It also established another great Nazi sexploitation plot-line: Salon Kitty is a brothel with an ulterior motive. SS officers use hidden microphones to listen out for any soldiers who might be less committed to the Third Reich cause than they should be.

The same year saw Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, one of the most notorious films ever made. Based on De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini transposed the story to Fascist Italy, and the parade of atrocities committed by the ‘libertines’ – all fascist big wigs – would become as significant a factor in several Naziploitation films as the uniforms, the prison camps and the soft porn.

The popularity of Salon Kitty ensured it would be followed by a frenzy of titles, mostly emerging from Italy and France. Best known of these in Britain is SS Experiment Camp, which was one of the original ‘video nasties’, thanks in no small part to Go Video’s enthusiastic advertising campaign. The enterprising label took full page adverts in the top video magazines, showing the film’s cover – a topless girl, crucified upside-down. Some magazines found the image offensive, so Go supplied a version that had the breasts covered by a bra… this version was, apparently, considered perfectly acceptable.

After all that, Sergio Garrone’s film is quite ordinary, more softcore melodrama than anything… but there is at least one stand-out moment. The evil camp Commandant is devoid of testicles, and so decides to take those belonging to the one nice-guy guard who, in the great tradition of the ‘good Nazi’, hates what is going on. This is done via some gruesome medical stock footage. Our hero is then seen having sex with his girlfriend, at first blissfully unaware that anything is amiss. Once the awful truth emerges, however, he rushes into the Commandant’s office and screams the immortal line, “You bastard, what have you done with my balls?”…

As for the rest of the movies: all have moments of outrageous bad taste, but are mainly dull, with mind-numbing footage of partisans and battle-field stock footage padding out the moments between softcore groping and limp flagellation. Garrone returned to the genre in the somewhat sleazier SS Camp 5 – Women’s Hell, which saw Sirpa Lane – more used to arthouse Euro sleaze like La Bete and Charlotte – subjected to assorted indignities in a concentration camp. Without the ‘camp’ (no pun intended) aspect of SS Experiment Camp, it proved even less fun to watch.

The Beast In Heat is noteworthy as one of the rarest video nasties, but is also one of the dullest Naziploitation movies out there because the tasteless footage was appended to an already existing war movie. Thus, we have to endure seemingly endless footage of partisans fighting off their German oppressors interspersed with occasional torture scenes that would be repulsive if they weren’t so amateurish.

The infamous scene where Sal Boris (also in the aforementioned Salon Kitty), the titular beast who is the result of fiendish experiments overseen by the Ilsa-like camp commandant, bites off a woman’s pubic hair is fairly outrageous, but it’s a brief moment of bad taste respite from the general tedium. The attention to detail in the film is perhaps summed up by the clumsy on-screen title – Horrifing (sic) Experiments of the SS, Last Days. [Read Daz Lawrence's review on Horrorpedia]

Hack director Luigi Batzella – using the pseudonym Ivan Kathansky (or Katansky, depending on how much attention the credits producer was paying) – also made Kaput Lager: Gli ultimi giorni delle SS, released on video in the UK as The Desert Tigers (amusingly, The Dessert Tigers on a Dutch video sleeve mispelling). This was an even more ham-fisted effort, with exploitative prison camp footage grafted onto the end of a dull war movie starring Richard Harrison.

The Deported Women of the SS Special Section has a certain gritty authenticity to it that makes it stand out from the other films, but is otherwise rather average. It’s one of the more downbeat Naziploitation movies, despite the best efforts of director Rino Di Silvestro (Werewolf Woman) to crank up the sleaze factor, but its saving grace is the presence of Euro cult favourite John Steiner (Shock), who refuses to take it at all seriously and instead delivers a fantastic, eye-rolling, ranting and raving performance. It’s worth seeing the film for this alone, as he flits from obsessing over an inmate he’s known in the pre-war years and buggering his faithful servant Doberman.

The Gestapo’s Last Orgy also uses the ‘camp commandant obsessed with a prisoner’ plot, and becomes a curious hybrid of The Night Porter, Salon Kitty and the Nazi atrocity film. It’s a classier production that most examples of the genre, at least visually – a fait amount of money was obviously lavished here. This, the stylish direction and decent performances goes to make the atrocities seem all the more unsavoury – There are moments of such astonishing repulsiveness that you can barely credit them being in such a handsome film – the throwing of a menstruating woman to a pack of dogs, the burning alive of a woman during the cannibal orgy and the dipping of another woman in a pit of lime. The female cast are naked for much of the film and of course there are numerous sexual assault scenes. It’s so shamelessly horrible that you have to admire its audacity, especially as none of it seems to be pandering to the audience – this isn’t soft porn by any stretch of the imagination, and it seems designed to repulse. In the end, the film is perhaps best seen as a prime example of 1970s Italian excess, where restraint was for wussies. It’s from the same mindset that brought us films as diverse as Cannibal Holocaust and Suspiria, the notion that too much is never enough and that everything should be shown. It’s not on the same level as those two films, of course, but it is strangely admirable within its own perimeters.

Less ambiguous was the particularly unpleasant Women’s Camp 119, directed by Bruno Mattei (Hell of the Living Dead; Rats – Night of Terror). This unpleasant film seems designed to leave a bad taste in the mouth, even managing to work actual concentration camp footage into the credits sequence (an all-time low in filmmaking?). Yet it doesn’t have the style, the audacity, or the intelligence to get away with its parade of grim atrocities. (Read Stephen Thrower’s review on Horrorpedia)

As well as the films exploiting concentration camp atrocities, there were also a number of less brutal films exploiting the uniform fetish. SS Girls was another blatant imitation of Salon Kitty and The Night Porter while The Red Nights of the Gestapo was a fairly sumptuous affair that tended to concentrate on the decadence of the SS top brass. Elsa – Fraulein SS, on the other hand, was cheap and deliciously tacky, and despite the title similarity to Ilsa She Wolf of the SS (coincidence I’m sure!), was more of a T&A romp than a parade of atrocities, following the Salon Kitty theme of prostitutes being used to spy on Nazi officers who might be slipping in their love for the Third Reich. Many of the same cast and crew returned in Special Train for Hitler and Helga, She Wolf of Spilberg, which utilised the same sets and much the same plot.

Erwin C.Dietrich’s Frauleins in Uniform is a softcore movie that is notable for the strange normalising of the Nazis. While it briefly deals with the horrors of war, it does so from the point of view of the German army recruits – female German army recruits – and while there are hints at a totalitarian state, much of the film is surprisingly uncritical of the Nazi war machine. There’s little in the way of dramatic threat (though one deserter is caught and told “we have ways of making you talk”!), but the constant stream of bare flesh and dialogue like “cleanliness is next to Naziness” ensure that it passes by quite painlessly.

Meanwhile, American porno producers were dabbling in the concept with Prisoner in Paradise and Hitler’s Harlots. But for whatever reasons, the theme didn’t catch on in the adult movie theatres. In Hong Kong, film-makers replaced Nazis with Japanese invaders and unleashed the likes of Concentration Camp for Girls and Bamboo House of Dolls, the latter of which was used as an example of the worst excesses of cinema by British BBFC censor James Ferman during lectures about censorship. This sub-genre eventually led to the notoriously nasty Men Behind the Sun series.

By 1978, the Nazi sexploitation genre was all but dead. Perhaps the moral outrage and censorship problems which greeted such films proved to be too much trouble for producers only interested in profit. Who knows? Whatever the reason, there hasn’t been a single significant addition to the cycle since, making it one of cinema’s most short-lived genres. The only films to dabble in the genre now are zero budget affairs aimed squarely at the cult horror audience.

Keith Crocker’s Blitzkreig: Escape from Stalag 69 (2008) attempts to channel the spirit of the Italian films, but despite star Tatyana Kot spending the whole film naked, either gunning down Nazis or (more frequently) being tortured, plentiful nudity – male and female – throughout, two castrations, tongue pulling, eye stabbing, throat slitting and plenty more gory mayhem, all delivered with bargain basement FX, the film still manages to be the dullest Naziploitation film since The Beast in Heat. Why it needed to be 135 minutes long is anyone’s guess.

More interesting, but still unrealised beyond being a fake trailer in Grindhouse, is Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS, which has Sybil Danning taking on the Ilsa role and Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu. The trailer was, by far, the best thing about the whole Grindhouse project and hopefully Zombie will eventually get around the making the complete film.

It’s understandable that many people will be upset at the idea of Nazi fantasies. But I’ve never yet come across a genuine fascist amongst fans of this grubby sub-genre, and even the worst of the films doesn’t attempt to portray the Third Reich as being remotely admirable. If we can laugh at sit-coms like Allo Allo (okay, no-one should laugh at Allo Allo, but you know what I mean…), then surely we can be amused by these cheesy, high camp exercises in bad taste without feeling guilty about it? In fact, it’s probably our duty to do so, reminding ourselves that Nazis are little more than a bad joke in a good uniform…

Heinz Von Sticklegruber

Nazis on Horrorpedia: BloodRayne: The Third Reich | Cataclym aka The Nightmare Never Ends | Dead Snow: Red vs Dead | The Flesh Eaters | Frankenstein’s Army | Night of the Zombies | Night Train to Terror | Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz | She Demons | Women’s Camp 119

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is a 1955 film directed by Charles Lamont (Francis in the Haunted House) from a story by Lee Loeb and a screenplay by John Grant for Universal International. Obviously, it stars the comedy team of Abbott and Costello, plus Marie Windsor (Cat-Women of the Moon; The Day Mars Invaded Earth; Chamber of Horrors), Michael Ansara and Peggy King. Although Abbott and Costello were called “Pete and Freddie” in the script and in the closing credits, they used their real names onscreen during filming.

Plot teaser:

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello are Americans stranded in Cairo, Egypt due to a lack of money. They happen to overhear Dr. Gustav Zoomer (Kurt Katch) discussing the mummy Klaris, the guardian of the Tomb of Princess Ara. Apparently the mummy has a sacred medallion that shows where the treasure of Princess Ara can be found. The Followers of Klaris, led by Semu (Richard Deacon), overhear the conversation along with Madame Rontru (Marie Windsor), a business woman interested in stealing the treasure of Princess Ara…

Reviews:

” … their material is pedestrianly hokey …” Hollywood Reporter

“Dreadful in every respect, with jokes that are older than the Mummy is supposed to be. The last of the classic Universal monsters to be killed off by Abbott and Costello and an unworthy end.” Alan Frank, The Horror Film Handbook

“The film is a cheap and miserable one. The studio backlot production values entirely fail to convince one that the locations are in any way Egyptian. The sets are cheap – there is one supposedly stout wooden door that can be seen to crinkle when it moves. The plot is a tedious, dull matter. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was the duo’s last film at Universal and second-to-last in total and, while they give it the good old college try, nobody around them seems to be making much effort. Proceedings are dragged to death by the endless, extended scenes of the two leads’ tomfoolery.” Richard Scheib, Moria

” … cult B movie queen Marie Windsor showed up here as the main villainess, and although she simply goes through the motions required of her, you know the type of thing, order the henchmen about, mock-seduce Lou and so on, she does it with her customary professionalism. Costello ends up swallowing the medallion required to, er, do something mystical with the Mummy, which is all the excuse the baddies need to take him along to the hidden temple in the desert for the climactic chase, a cliché but so often used to pick up the pace in the latter stages. Not an embarrassment by any means (aside from maybe the Mummy costume), this was the duo’s true swan song.” Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image

Cast:

Wikipedia | IMDb

In the lacklustre Milton Subotsky production The Uncanny, Peter Cushing plays a man desperate to expose a sinister cat conspiracy against the human race: ‘They prowl by night… lusting for human flesh!’ Seemingly laughable… but an idea that possibly strikes home more than a similar theory about, say, dogs? For cats have always had a singularly spooky quality to them that has seen them both revered and reviled throughout history.

The ancient Egyptians worshipped cats as gods: to kill one was punishable by death and if yours was killed then the owner would shave their eyebrows in honour! On the other hand, in the middle ages, cats were often seen as demons or devils. Thought to be the familiars of witches (by virtue of often being the only companion of the poor old wretches who would be accused of witchcraft), many unfortunate moggies were hung, burned and stoned to death.

Undeniably, cats are odd creatures, at least by domestic standards. Independent and aloof, they often seem to stare at their owners’ inscrutably, almost contemptuously, before disappearing into the night. Their amazing athletic abilities and disturbing nocturnal cries only add to their aura of mystery. And there remains something strangely sexual about the image of the cat. Many films have used the word “cat” to conjure up images of the exotic and the mysterious, whether it be the sexy and seductive Catwoman, arch nemesis of Batman, or the outer space cuties of Catwomen of the Moon. It’s no surprise then that horror filmmakers have found them to be a rich source of inspiration.

The earliest “cat” chillers didn’t, in fact, feature a cat at all. 1919 saw the German film Unheimliche Geschicten, an omnibus collection directed by Richard Oswald that included a story based on several Edgar Allan Poe tales, including The Black Cat. The first of many films to use either the title or the plot (rarely, oddly enough, both together) of Poe’s tale, it was remade by Oswald as a comedy using the same title (renamed The Living Dead for English speaking audiences) in 1932.

The Cat and the Canary – first filmed in 1927, and remade in 1939 and 1978 – was an archetypal “Old Dark House” film, where an escaped lunatic (known as The Cat) may or may not be responsible for a series of murders. It was 1934’s legendary sideshow shocker Maniac that first brought genuine feline fright frolic to the screen. Again “inspired by” The Black Cat, this ‘ghastly-beyond-belief’ cheapie from Dwain Esper threw in every shock image it could think of, including a scene where a cat’s eye is seemingly gouged out.

The same year saw a rather more intellectual adaptation of Poe’s story. Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat saw the first teaming of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in a whacked-out, Bauhaus-infused, expressionist nightmare that, brilliant as it was, had no connection with the original story (at one point, a black cat runs across a room and is killed by Lugosi, presumably as a token gesture justification of the title).

Poe was even less present in the next version of the story, made in 1941 by Albert S. Rogell. A passable attempt to cash-in on the success of Bob Hope’s comedy chillers (started, ironically, in 1939 with The Cat and the Canary), it also featured Lugosi, alongside Basil Rathbone and Gale Sondergaard. The Case of the Black Cat, made in 1936 had even less connection to the story, being a Perry Mason mystery.

For a while, it seemed that cats were only good for movie titles. Then, in 1942, Val Lewton’s Cat People appeared. Here at last was a movie that fully exploited the sensual and supernatural aspects of felines. Making use of chilling atmospherics and suggestion, Cat People is ambiguous in its approach: we never see the heroine/monster transformation, and the film never explains if she really could become a cat, or if in fact it was all a mental delusion. The film was popular enough to spawn a sequel, Curse of the Cat People (1944), which despite its lurid title was a gentle fantasy with little connection to the original film.

Most cat-themed horror films were rather less subtle than Lewton’s poetic tales, though. The Catman of Paris (1946) was a Lewton-inspired twist on the popular werewolf theme, and is more murder mystery than supernatural horror film, while Erle C. Kenton – who had brought us the humanimal Panther Girl in his 1932 version of The Island of Dr Moreau, Island of Lost Souls, made The Cat Creeps in 1946 (unrelated to the 1930 film of the same name, which was another Cat and the Canary remake), from the same year had a cat possessed by a dead girl… a theme that would crop up in more than one future pussycat production. Indeed, the strongest theme of cat movies is the idea of the feline avenger, persecuting and punishing those responsible for its owner’s death.

A variation on this possession theme – mixed in with a claw-back of Cat People - cropped up in the entertaining British shocker Cat Girl (1957), in which Barbara Shelley, resplendent in a black shiny mac, was cursed with a psychic link to a leopard, causing her to have sporadic attacks of possession when aroused!

Barbara Shelley obviously enjoyed feline thrills, and returned in 1961’s The Shadow of the Cat, an effective John Gilling chiller in which the cat of a wealthy murder victim causes no end of trouble for the killers. Gilling keeps things relatively ambiguous: it’s never clear if the cat is actually taking vengeance, or if its presence simply adds to the guilt of the murderers and drives them to madness and death.

1966 saw another version of The Black Cat, once again showing only few connections to the Poe story. Rather, this was a gore shocker, featuring axes in heads and violence, ala H.G. Lewis, albeit in black and white.

Roger Corman also tackled the story in his Poe anthology Tales of Terror (1962), playing the story as black comedy, with Peter Lorre as the cat’s persecutor/victim. Cats also featured in another Poe-inspired Corman project, The Tomb of Legeia (1964), in which Vincent Price’s dead wife returns as a cat.

1969’s Eye of the Cat was a textbook “vengeful cat” movie, directed by David Lowell Rich and scripted by Psycho writer Joseph Stefano. Michael Sarrazin and Gayle Hunnicutt play a scheming couple who do away with a wealthy aunt, only to fall victim to her hordes of cats. The implausible plot is given a slight twist by making Sarrazin a cat phobic.

Cats have played a role in Japanese horror cinema, most notably in 1968’s classic Kuroneko, in which the ghosts of two women brutally murdered return to take vengeance, assuming the form of a cat at times.

Also from Japan, bizarre Hausu (1977) features supernatural cats amongst its series of strange events and genuinely surreal visuals.

Cats made their way into the Italian giallo thrillers in the 1970s. While Dario Argento’s The Cat O’Nine Tails and Antonio Bido’s The Cat’s Victims might not have actually featured feline killers, 1972’s The Crimes of the Black Cat had the novel idea of featuring a cat as a murder weapon: a mad old woman has poisoned the claws of her pet with curare and induced it to cause mayhem and mischief when irritated by dousing yellow scarves – sent as gifts – with an irritant!

Human beings became unwilling cat food in Ted V. Mikels’ The Corpse Grinders (1971), in which unscrupulous pet food manufacturers add corpses to their cat food mix! Before long, cats are attacking people on the street and in their homes… Although the original has some macabre merit, Mikels went on to make a forgettable and entirely unnecessary belated shot-on-video sequel in 2000.

Cats with a taste for human flesh cropped up in Rene Cardona’s Mexican schlocker Night of a Thousand Cats (1972), where a mad killer women feeds his victims to his half-starved pets; inevitably, the tables are turned in the grisly end.

The Cat Creature (1973) was a slightly above-average TV film, directed by Curtis Harrington (Night Tide) and written by Robert Bloch (Psycho screenplay). Despite the stifling restrictions of American TV at the time, the film is a fairly solid story of the reincarnation of an Egyptian cat goddess.

Sergio Martino’s Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, aka Excite Me (1972), was another retread of The Black Cat, staying slightly closer to the original tale than most others, and starring Edwige Fenech as the eye-gouging, walling up villainess.

Another Italian production, directed by horror veteran Antonio Margheriti, was Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eyes, a bizarre late entry in the gothic-style tales of the 1960s involving a Scottish castle, a family curse and a gorilla! As the title suggests, whenever a murder is in the offing, the omnipresent cat is in attendance. The film’s eccentricities make up for its defects (chiefly its languid pace, a trait from the Sixties) and there are some memorably absurd images.

In Britain, Ralph Bates fell off the deep end through a combination of sinister feline activity and a domineering mother (Lana Turner) in Persecution aka The Terror of Sheba (1974). It was the first production from Hammer wannabes Tyburn, and the only one that was actually worth watching.

Más negro que la noche (“Blacker than the Night”) was a 1975 Mexican gothic horror about four women that move to a creepy house, inherited by one of them from an old aunt; as a condition, they must take care of the aunt’s pet, a black cat.

Once the pet is mysteriously found dead, a series of bizarre murders begins…

The Uncanny (originally titled Brrr during shooting!) was produced by Milton Subotsky in 1977, shortly after the demise of Amicus and using the same tax shelter deals that made many Canadian productions possible. It was another compendium film, obviously designed to follow in the footsteps of previous Subotsky winners like Tales from the Crypt. However, thanks to the dull direction of Denis Heroux, and a change in public tastes, the film was a total disaster. Each story dealt with spooky cats taking revenge on generally bad eggs, something that didn’t quite gel with the linking theme of cats wanting to take over the world. Subotsky had also featured an evil cat in his earlier Amicus anthology Torture Garden in 1967.

A white cat was up to mischief in the low budget British film The Legacy (1979), which tried to emulate The Omen with a series of bizarre deaths (including The Who’s Roger Daltrey choking to death on a chicken bone!), but failed to ignite the box office – although the paperback tie-in was a surprise best seller. Also in 1979, an unlikely space traveller was Jones the cat in Alien (and briefly Aliens) but he was a feline friend not intergalactic foe.

Lucio Fulci, on a cinematic roll with gore-drenched surreal horrors such as The Beyond and House By the Cemetery, made his version of The Black Cat in 1981. Shot in the UK, this take on Poe’s tale stars Patrick Magee and David Warbeck, and, although generally considered to be a minor addition to the director’s canon, is actually one of his best films, with the emphasis on supernatural atmosphere rather than gore for once.

The film also managed to incorporate a few elements of the original Poe tale into its plot, including the walling up of cat and victim (interestingly, Fulci had also used a similar idea in his 1975 thriller Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes).

Director Paul Schrader updated Cat People with a glossy 1982 remake, but despite lashings of blood and eroticism, and the screen presence of Natjassia Kinski and Malcolm McDowall, the film doesn’t work as well as it should, coming across as little more than an expensive retread of the popular werewolf shapeshifter films of the previous year.

Far better, and considerable more honest in their treatment of the erotic aspects of cat mythology, were The Cat Woman (1988) and Curse of the Cat Woman (1991), two hardcore porn films from actor turned director John Leslie. While Cat Woman is merely above average, Curse… is quite startling, with unsettling but potent sex scenes as it delves deeply into the world of the cat people.

Somewhat less classy than Leslie’s film was Luigi Cozzi’s incredibly clumsy version of The Black Cat (1990), which attempts to bring Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy to a close. Filmed as a tribute to Argento (the plot concerns a film-makers attempts to make a sequel to Suspiria!), the film has nothing of Poe, and little of Dario Argento either. Argento himself, oddly, was also filming The Black Cat around the same time, as his contribution to the Poe film Two Evil Eyes. It was far from vintage Argento, despite a suitably deranged performance from Harvey Keitel, but it did follow the original story fairly closely, and benefited from being paired with George A. Romero’s truly awful The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.

Romero also produced Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, a feature film based on the lacklustre TV series. Nevertheless, this three story anthology was better than it should have been, and includes a tale about a Cat from Hell that leaves a trail of victims in its wake.

Evil Cat arrived from Hong Kong in 1986, the tale of a cat demon that possesses human bodies and has to be killed every fifty years by a member of the same family. Cheerfully trashy, it’s a fun horror romp. More deranged is 1992’s The Cat, directed by Ngai Kai lam, which features a cat from space and features – as far as I’m aware – the only dog-cat kung fu battle ever captured on film!

Greydon Clark’s amusing Uninvited (1987) features a mutant cat on the loose aboard a cruise ship, where it terrorises horny teenagers and gangsters, to no great effect. 1991 TV movie Strays tries to make a house full of killer cats seem scary, but fails miserably, and has human characters so dull that you are actually rooting for the cats by the end.

Stephen King has been attached to a handful of cat related horrors. As well as the underrated 1985 film Cat’s Eye – a trilogy of stories linked by a heroic cat, and directed with style and fidelity to the original stories by Lewis Teague (Alligator), there was the 1989 Pet Semetary, which sees a zombie cat brought back to life after being buried on cursed ground, and 1992 saw Sleepwalkers, a gory and sexy retread of the Cat People theme based on a somewhat incoherent King screenplay. Mick Garris’ film tells the story of demonic cat people (who fear real cats!) and is ludicrous enough to be throwaway fun.

A hand-drawn Ghanian poster for Sleepwalkers!

More recently, in 2011, Korean film The Cat featured a feline that was the only witness to a murder, a ghostly child and possible demonic possession, as bad things start to happen to the woman who is looking after the titular cat.

The aforementioned 1975 Mexican movie Más Negro Que La Noche (“Blacker Than the Night”) has just been remade in 2014, in 3D, as a full-blown gothic Spanish production with a focus, like the original, on murders that occur once a cat has been killed.

Meanwhile, Alexandre Aja’s produced The Pyramid (2014) pits a group of archeologists against hairless cat-creatures based on the Ancient Egyptian Anubis mythology.

It seems certain that cats will continue to provide a steady flow of ideas for film-makers looking for sinister ciphers. Only Alien and Cat’s Eye has shown cats in a particularly positive light within the context of the horror film. Other than this, the best they could hope for was to be witches familiars in the likes of Bell, Book and Candle or I Married a Witch. This might seem like an outrageous slander against this innocent animal. But, even if the feline population were made aware of their sly image in the cinema, one imagines that they would simply stare at you for a while, yawn disinterestedly, and then walk away. Cats have better things to worry about…

David Flint, Horrorpedia

Graham J. Ingels (June 7, 1915 – April 4, 1991) was a comic book and magazine illustrator best known for his work in EC Comics during the 1950s, notably on The Haunt of Fear and Tales from the Crypt, horror titles written and edited by Al Feldstein, and The Vault of Horror, written and edited by Feldstein and Johnny Craig. Ingels’ flair for horror led EC to promote him as Ghastly Graham Ingels, and he began signing his work “Ghastly” in 1952.

Born in Cincinnati, Ingels began working at age 14 after the death of his father. Graham was 16 when he entered the art field drawing theater displays. He studied at New York’s Hawthorne School of Art. He started as a freelancer aged 20 and worked on pulp magazines and comic books.

In 1948, Ingels was hired by Al Feldstein, the editor of EC Comics, to provide artwork for their Western and romance comics. When EC introduced Tales From the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear, it soon became apparent that Ingels was an ideal choice as an illustrator of horror.

Ingels’ unique and expressive style was well-suited for the atmospheric depiction of horrors amid crumbling mansions in hellish landscapes populated by twisted characters, grotesque creatures and living corpses with rotting flesh. A trademark image was a character with a thread of saliva visible in a horrified open mouth.

As the lead artist for The Haunt of Fear, he brought to life the Old Witch, horror host of “The Witch’s Cauldron” lead story, and he also did the cover for each issue from issue 11 through 28. A prolific artist, Ingels also drew the Old Witch’s appearances in Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, plus stories for Shock SuspenStories and Crime SuspenStories. The Old Witch’s origin story was told in “A Little Stranger” (The Haunt of Fear #14).

Because of his many “Witch’s Cauldron” stories, he was strongly identified with the character of the Old Witch, an association that continues until the present day. Ingels’ artwork on the eight-page lead stories, and his splash pages, particularly on issues #14 and 17, set a new standard for horror illustration that have rarely been equaled. “Poetic Justice” in the 12th issue, was adapted for the 1972 Tales from the Crypt film from Amicus studios in England, with Peter Cushing as the kindly old junk collector, and Ingels’ “Wish You Were Here” (The Haunt of Fear #22) was also adapted.

After EC ceased publication in the mid-1950s due to censorship pressure, Ingels contributed to Classics Illustrated but otherwise found little work. Ingels took a teaching position in Connecticut and became later an art instructor in Florida, refusing to acknowledge his work in horror comics until a few years before he died.

“Horror We? How’s Bayou?” in The Haunt of Fear issue #17 is considered by many EC’s best illustrated horror story ever and perhaps the best by anyone in any era.

Read more on Wikipedia

The Addams Family is a group of fictional characters created by American cartoonist Charles Addams. The Addams Family characters include Gomez, Morticia,Uncle Fester, Lurch, Grandmama, Wednesday, Pugsley, Pubert Addams, Cousin Itt and Thing.

The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal American family; an eccentric, wealthy clan who delight in the macabre and are unaware, or do not care, that other people find them bizarre or frightening. They originally appeared as an unrelated group of 150 single panel cartoons, about half of which were originally published in The New Yorker between their debut in 1938 and Addams’s 1988 death.

Addams’s original cartoons were one-panel gags. The characters were undeveloped and unnamed until the television series production.

Gomez and Pugsley are enthusiastic. Morticia is even in disposition, muted, witty, sometimes deadly. Grandma Frump is foolishly good-natured. Wednesday is her mother’s daughter. A closely knit family, the real head being Morticia—although each of the others is a definite character—except for Grandma, who is easily led. Many of the troubles they have as a family are due to Grandma’s fumbling, weak character. The house is a wreck, of course, but this is a house-proud family just the same and every trap door is in good repair. Money is no problem. — Charles Addams

The family appears to be a single surviving branch of the Addams clan. Many other “Addams families” exist all over the world. Charles Addams was first inspired by his home town of Westfield, New Jersey, an area full of ornate Victorian mansions and archaic graveyards.

Although most of the humour derives from the fact that they share macabre interests, the Addamses are a close-knit extended family. Morticia is an exemplary mother, and she and Gomez remain passionate towards each other. The parents are supportive of their children. The family is friendly and hospitable to visitors, in some cases willing to donate large sums of money to causes, despite the visitors’ horror at the Addams’s peculiar lifestyle.

Characters:

Gomez – master of the Addams household and the Addams patriarch, married to Morticia and the father of Wednesday and Pugsley. In the original cartoons in The New Yorker, he appeared tubby, snub-nosed and with a receding chin.

In the 1960s television series, Gomez was portrayed as a naive, handsome, and successful man, although with a childlike, eccentric enthusiasm for everything he did. Though a peaceful man, he was known to be well-versed in many types of combat; he and Morticia fenced sometimes.

Gomez professed endless love for his wife, Morticia. He had studied to be a lawyer, but rarely practiced, one of the running jokes being that he took great pride in losing his cases. Gomez was depicted as extremely wealthy, through inheritance and extensive investments, but he seemed to have little regard for money.

Morticia Addams – matriarch of the Addams Family, a slim woman with pale skin, clad in a skin-tight black hobble gown with octopus-like tendrils at the hem. Her visual aspect suggested that of some kind of vampire. She adores her husband, Gomez, as deeply as he does her.

Gomez and Morticia had two children, a son called Pugsley and a daughter called Wednesday. In the television show she was a sweet-natured, innocent, happy child, largely concerned with her fearsome pet spiders.

The movies gave Wednesday a much more serious and mature personality with a deadpan wit and a morbid fascination with trying to physically harm, or possibly murder, her brother (she was seen strapping him into an electric chair, for example, and preparing to pull the switch); she was apparently often successful, but Pugsley never died. Like most members of the family, he seemed to be inhumanly resilient.

For his part, Pugsley was largely oblivious to the harm his sister tried to inflict on him, or an enthusiastic supporter of it, viewing all attempts as fun and games. In his first incarnation in The New Yorker cartoons, Pugsley was depicted as a diabolical, malevolent boy-next-door. In the television series, he was a devoted older brother and an inventive and mechanical genius. In the movies he lost his intelligence and independence, and became Wednesday’s sidekick and younger brother, cheerfully helping her in her evil deeds.

Fester is a bald, barrel-shaped man with dark, sunken eyes and a devilish grin. He seemed to carry an electrical charge, as he could illuminate a light bulb by sticking it in his mouth. In the original television series, Fester was Morticia’s uncle. In all subsequent animated and film media, Fester was Gomez’s older brother, save for The New Addams Family where Fester is portrayed as Gomez’ younger brother.

Grandmama is a witch who deals in potions, spells, hexes, and even fortune-telling. Her trademarks were her shawl and grey, frizzy hair. Charles Addams originally named the character Grandma/Granny Frump in his notes for the adaptation of the cartoons to television in 1965, thereby making her Morticia’s mother.

“Thing” as created by Charles Addams, was a shy creature mostly seen in the background of Addams’s drawings; however, the television series suggested it was a disembodied hand named “Thing“, and was Gomez’s friend since childhood. He (it is implied in the original television series that the character is male) often performed common, everyday tasks such as retrieving the mail, writing a letter, or just giving a friendly pat on the shoulder, appearing out of ubiquitous boxes or other convenient containers throughout the house. He communicated with the Addamses with a Morse-like alphabet, sign language, writing, and knocking on wood.

Lurch served as a shambling gravelly-voiced butler, unscarred yet reminiscent of Frankenstein’s Monster, and a funereal but obedient “jack of all trades”. He tried to help around the house, although occasionally he botched tasks due to his great size and strength, but is otherwise considered quite a catch by the Addamses for his skill at more personal tasks, such as waxing Uncle Fester’s head and amusing the children (to whom he was deeply devoted). Surprisingly, he was often seen playing the harpsichord or organ with great skill and uncharacteristic passion.

Cousin Itt, as so named by the television series producer, who frequently visited the family, was short-statured and had long hair that covered his entire body from scalp to floor. Cousin Itt drove a 3-wheeled car: a Messerschmitt KR175. Although in the series he was shown wearing opera gloves, it is unclear what, if anything, is beneath the hair.

The Addams family’s mansion had many different incarnations over the years. In one of Charles Addams’s cartoons. The house was depicted as being a dilapidated mansion that had been condemned (and was seemingly haunted, due to the strange creatures at the top of the staircase). Since then, it had become almost a character itself, and served as the main setting for the rest of the cartoons featuring the Addams family.

In the 1960s television series, the house was given an address: 0001 Cemetery Lane. Instead of being a dilapidated house, it was now practically a museum, filled with odd statues, trophies, and other interesting knick-knacks. The house also sported a playroom with medieval racks, nailbeds, iron maidens, pillories and stocks, used for family relaxation.

The house once again became a condemned mansion in the New Scooby-Doo Movies television show, in which the Addamses made a guest appearance. In the subsequent Addams Family 1970s cartoon, the mansion was mounted on a trailer and dragged all over the world with the globetrotting Addams clan.

The two Addams Family movies in 1991 and 1993, along with the second animated television series in 1992, resurrected the mansion’s original exterior design from the Charles Addams cartoons. The movie Addams Family Values had the mansion appearing exactly as it did in Charles Addams’s drawing of the family, about to dump boiling oil on a group of carollers from the roof (a gag that was acted out in the opening sequence of the previous film). The first film reveals the mansion to have a cavernous, pillared, vaulted-ceilinged canal system deep underneath it, traversable by gondola boat to reach the family vault, itself a cluttered room filled with childhood mementos, home movies, and a bar which revolves around to reveal vast halls filled with countless gold doubloons and other treasure.

Unlike The Munsters, which explicitly stated its characters’ supernatural origins, the exact nature of the Addamses is never established. They all seemed to share a bond with the occult and supernatural. Uncle Fester was often portrayed as something of a mad scientist, and Grandmama as a potion maker, and Morticia states that her study is spells and hexes in the 1991 movie The Addams Family but, these activities don’t really explain the Addams’s seemingly immortal state. Much of the food they live on is inedible or outright deadly to normal humans, and they take an interest in painful activities like walking across minefields or having a sharp pendulum cut them in half.

Television series, episodes, and films

In 1964, the ABC-TV network created The Addams Family television series based on Addams’s cartoon characters. The series was shot in black-and-white and aired for two seasons in 64 half-hour episodes.

The television series featured a memorable theme song, written and arranged by longtime Hollywood composer Vic Mizzy (who also wrote the score for William Castle’s The Night Walker). The song’s arrangement was dominated by a harpsichord, and featured finger-snaps as percussive accompaniment. Actor Ted Cassidy, in his “Lurch” voice, punctuated the lyrics with words like “neat”, “sweet”, and “petite”. Mizzy’s theme was popular enough to enjoy a release as a 45rpm single, though it failed to make the national charts.

The New Scooby-Doo Movies (1972)

The Addams Family’s first animated appearance was on the third episode of Hanna-Barbera’s The New Scooby-Doo Movies, which first aired on CBS Saturday morning September 23, 1972. Four of the original cast (John Astin, Carolyn Jones, Jackie Coogan, and Ted Cassidy) returned for the special.

The Addams Family characters were drawn to the specifications of the original Charles Addams cartoons. After the episode aired, fans wanted more animated adventures featuring the Addamses, and Hanna-Barbera obliged.

The Addams Family Fun-House (1972)

Meanwhile, in late 1972, ABC produced a pilot for a live-action musical variety show titled The Addams Family Fun-House. The cast included Jack Riley and Liz Torres as Gomez and Morticia, Stubby Kaye as Uncle Fester, Pat McCormick as Lurch and Butch Patrick (who had played Eddie Munster in The Munsters) as Pugsley. The pilot aired in 1973, but was not picked up for a series. Judging by the image below, we can see why!

The Addams Family (1973–1975)

The first animated series ran on Saturday mornings from 1973–1975 on NBC. In a departure from the original series, this series took the Addamses on the road in a Victorian-style RV. This series also marked the point where the relations between characters were changed so that Fester was now Gomez’s brother, and Grandmama was now Morticia’s mother.

Although Coogan and Cassidy reprised their roles, Astin and Jones did not, their parts being recast with Hanna-Barbera voice talents Lennie Weinrib as Gomez and Janet Waldo as Morticia, while a ten-year-old Jodie Foster provided the voice of Pugsley. One season was produced, and the second season consisted of reruns.

A complementary comic book series was produced in connection with the show, but it lasted only three issues. The show’s theme music was completely different and had no lyrics and no finger snaps.

Halloween with the New Addams Family (1977)

A television reunion movie, Halloween with the New Addams Family, aired on NBC Sunday, October 30, 1977.

The Addams Family: The Animated Series (1992–1993)

The New Addams Family (1998–1999)

The New Addams Family was filmed in Vancouver, Canada, and ran for 65 episodes (one more than the original TV series) during the 1998–1999 season on the then newly launched Fox Family Channel. Many storylines from the original series were reworked for this new series, incorporating more modern elements and jokes. John Astin returned to the franchise in some episodes of this series, albeit as “Grandpapa” Addams.

The cast included Glenn Taranto as Gomez Addams, Ellie Harvie as Morticia, Michael Roberds as Fester, Brody Smith as Pugsley, Nicole Fugere (the only cast member from Addams Family Reunion to return) as Wednesday, John DeSantis as Lurch, Betty Phillips as Grandmama and Steven Fox as Thing.

Theatrical feature films

The Addams Family (1991)

In the 1990s, Orion Pictures (which by then had inherited the rights to the series) developed a film version, The Addams Family (released on November 22, 1991). Due to the studio’s financial troubles at the time, Orion sold the US rights to the film to Paramount Pictures. It took $191,502,246 at the box office.

Addams Family Values (1993)

Upon the last film’s success, a sequel followed: Addams Family Values. Loosened content restrictions allowed the films to use far more grotesque humour that strove to keep the original spirit of the Addams cartoons (in fact, several gags were lifted straight from the single panel cartoons). The two movies used the same cast, except for Grandmama, played by Judith Malina in the first film and Carol Kane in the second. A script for a third film was prepared in 1994, but was abandoned after the sudden death of actor Raúl Juliá.

Addams Family Reunion (1998)

Released direct-to-video on September 22, 1998, this time by Warner Bros. through its video division. It has no relation to the Paramount movies, being in fact a full-length pilot for a second live-action television version, The New Addams Family. The third movie’s Gomez, played by Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show; It), follows the style of Raúl Juliá.

Cancelled film

In 2010, it was announced that Illumination Entertainment, in partnership with Universal Pictures, had acquired the underlying rights to the Addams Family drawings. The film was planned to be a stop-motion animated film based on Charles Addams’s original drawings. Tim Burton was set to co-write and co-produce the film, with a possibility to direct but it was eventually cancelled.

Reboot

On October 31, 2013 it was announced in Variety that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer will be rebooting The Addams Family as an animated film with Pamela Pettler writing the screenplay, however this has not come to fruition, so far…

Adult features

Inevitably, as with The Munsters, there were adult-entertainment takes on their exploits, namely The Maddams Family – with Ron Jeremy as Uncle Fester – and The Addams Family XXX. According to online reviews, the latter seems to be the better of the two…

Video games

Five video games released from 1989 to 1994 were based on The Addams Family.

• Fester’s Quest (1989) was a top down adventure game that featured Uncle Fester.

• In 1992, two versions of The Addams Family were released by Ocean Software based on the 1991 movie; an 8-bit version for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, Sega Master System, Sega Game Gear, ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, as well as a 16-bit version released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Amiga, Atari ST and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis. ICOM Simulations published The Addams Family video game for the TurboGrafx-CD in 1991.

• The games’ sequel, The Addams Family: Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt (1993), also by Ocean Software, was based on the ABC animated series and was released for NES, SNES, and Game Boy (although the latter two were just 8-bit remakes of the first SNES game, swapping Pugsley and Gomez’s roles).

• Addams Family Values (1994) by Ocean was based on the movie’s sequel and returned to the style of gameplay seen in Fester’s Quest.

• A Game Boy Color game was released in the 1990s for promotion of The New Addams Family. The game was simply titled The New Addams Family Series. In this game, the Addams mansion had been bought by a fictional company called “Funnyday” that wanted to tear down the house and surrounding grounds to make room for an amusement park.

Pinball

Books

The Addams Family

This first novelization of the television series, written by Jack Sharkey, was released near the end of the show’s second season by Pyramid Books in 1965. The book details the family’s arrival in their new home, and explains how it got its bizarre décor. The arrival and origins of Thing are explained. Each chapter reads as a self-contained story, like episodes of the television show. The novel concludes with the Addams family discovering that their lives will be the basis for a new television series.

The Addams Family Strikes Back

“The Addams Family Strikes Back” by W.F. Miksch tells how Gomez plans to rehabilitate the image of Benedict Arnold by running for the local school board. The tone and characterizations in this book resemble the TV characters much more closely than in the first novel. Cousin Itt appears as a minor character in this story, but as a tiny, three-legged creature rather than the hairy, derby-hatted character seen on television and in the movies. The novel was published in paperback form by Pyramid Books in 1965.

The Addams Family: An Evilution

Merchandising: Games and Toys

The success of the 1960s TV series spawned a vast array of merchandising including a board game and target game, both from Ideal.

The success of the 1990s feature films led to further merchandising of all kinds, plus arcade games.

Advertising

In 1994, the actors cast as the Addamses in the first two films (sans the recently deceased Raúl Juliá) were in several Japanese television spots for the Honda Odyssey.The Addamses—most prominently Gomez (for whom a voice actor was used to impersonate Juliá while footage from Addams Family Values was seen) and Morticia—are seen speaking Japanese.

In 2007 and 2008, the Addams Family appeared as M&Ms in an advertising campaign for M&Ms Dark Chocolate.

Musicals

The Addams Family (2010 onwards)

Wikipedia | Related: The Munsters

Famous Monsters of Filmland is a horror genre-specific film magazine started in 1958 by publisher James Warren and editor Forrest J Ackerman.

Famous Monsters of Filmland inspired the creation of many other horror-themed publications, including Castle of Frankenstein, Fangoria and The Monster Times.

Famous Monsters of Filmland was originally conceived as a one-shot publication by Warren and Ackerman, published in the wake of the widespread success of the package of old horror movies syndicated to American television in 1957. But the first issue, published in February 1958, was so successful that it required a second printing to fulfil public demand. The success prompted spinoff Warren magazines such as Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella.

Famous Monsters offered brief articles, well-illustrated with publicity stills and graphic artwork, on horror movies from the silent era to the current date of publication, their stars and filmmakers. Warren and Ackerman decided to aim the text at late pre-adolescents and young teenagers. Unfortunately, in doing so, he also elected to add supposedly amusing juvenile captions to the images and thereby denigrated the horror genre for fans and its detractors.

Forrest J Ackerman promoted the memory of Lon Chaney, Sr., whose silent works were mostly beyond the accessibility of fans for most of the magazine’s life, but were a great influence on his own childhood. He also introduced film fans to science fiction fandom through direct references, first-person experiences, and adoption of fandom terms and customs. The magazine regularly published photos from King Kong (1933), including one from the film’s infamous “spider pit sequence”, featured in Issue #108 (1974) that, until Ackerman discovered a photo of a spider in the cavern setting, had never been proven definitively to have actually been filmed.

FM‘s peak years were from its first issues through the late 1960s, when the disappearance of the older films from television and the decline of talent in the imaginative film industry left it with a dearth of subject matter acceptable to both editor and fan.

Bizarrely, Warren and Ackerman created a jump in issue numbering from issue 69, which was printed in September 1970, to issue 80 in October 1970. They did this (according to their editorial in issue 80) because it brought them closer to issue 100, justifying the numerical jump because of the publishing of ten issues of the short-lived companion magazine Monster World as issues that “would have been” Famous Monsters issues. Lazily, during the 1970s, the magazine came to rely heavily on reprints of articles from the 1960s.

In November 1974 and November 1975, New York City was host to the “Famous Monsters Convention,” a fan convention centered on FM, which featured such guests as Forrest J Ackerman, Verne Langdon, James Warren, Peter Cushing, Ingrid Pitt, Barbara Leigh, Catherine Lorre, Cal Floyd, and Sam Sherman.

In the early 1980s, the magazine folded after Warren became ill and unable to carry on as publisher, and Ackerman resigned as editor in the face of the increasing disorganisation within the Warren Publishing Company. The magazine stopped publication in 1983 after a run of 191 issues.

Famous Monsters of Filmland was resurrected in 1993 by New Jersey portrait photographer and monster movie fan Ray Ferry. After finding that the Famous Monsters of Filmland title had not been “maintained” under law, Ferry filed for “intent to use” for the magazine’s trademark, unbeknownst to Ackerman or the trademark’s owner and creator, Jim Warren. Ferry, poised to restart publication of FM on a quarterly basis, offered Ackerman the position of editor-in-chief for a fee of $2,500 per issue, which he accepted. Starting at issue #200, the new Famous Monsters acquired subscribers and over-the-counter buyers who believed they would be reunited with Ackerman in print. While Ferry tried to maintain Ackerman’s style in his own writings, he apparently heavily edited and rejected contributions from the man himself.

In an effort to help Ferry finance his full-time efforts, Ackerman agreed to a reduced editor’s fee of $1,500 per issue. With four consecutive unpaid issues and a continued rejection of his work, Ackerman resigned from his position. Aside from removing Ackerman’s name from the masthead, Ferry did not inform FM readers that they were no longer reading material by, or authorised by, Ackerman. Instead, Ferry infused his writing with Ackerman’s trademark puns, and mimicked his writing style, which led to legal action brought forth by Ackerman.

In 1997, Ackerman filed a civil lawsuit against Ferry for libel, breach of contract, and misrepresentation; Ferry had publicly claimed that Ackerman’s only connection with the new FM was as a hired hand and that Ferry “had to let Forry go” because he was no longer writing or editing for the magazine. Ferry also claimed rights to pen names and other personal properties of Ackerman. On May 11, 2000, the Los Angeles Superior Court jury decided in Ackerman’s favour and awarded him $382,500 in compensatory damages and $342,000 in punitive damages.

As of mid-2007, Ferry had been allowed to continue to publish issues of FM due to lack of efforts on the part of bankruptcy trustees and Ackerman’s lawyers to force the sale of the trademark or personal assets attached to his income. Ferry had also failed to pay any of the $720,000-plus cash judgment against him.

In late 2007, Philip Kim, an entrepreneur and a private equity investor, purchased the rights to the logo and title, entering into an agreement with Ackerman to use his trademarks to retain the magazine’s original look and feel. The new Famous Monsters of Filmland website was launched in May 2008 and on December 7, 2009, Kim announced the magazine’s return to print.

Ackerman died just before midnight on Thursday, December 4, 2008.

The revival of the classic horror magazine came in July 2010, with the publication of Famous Monsters of Filmland #251 at the Famous Monster Convention in Indianapolis, Indiana. The success of the print magazine at the Famous Monster Convention and Comic-Con International in San Diego yielded the announcement of the magazine’s expansion in distribution and circulation into major bookstore chains and independent retailers throughout North America and select markets in the US, Canada, and UK. Publisher Movieland Classics, LLC announced concurrently that the magazine would be entering into a bi-monthly publication schedule to meet the significant increase in requests from captivated readers beginning with Issue 253.

Writer and filmmaker Jason V Brock created The Ackermonster Chronicles!, a 2012 documentary about Ackerman. The movie is billed as the definitive film about Ackerman’s life and cultural influence, and features in-depth interviews with Ackerman, Ray Bradbury, John Landis, Greg Bear, Richard Matheson, Dan O’Bannon, Ray Harryhausen, David J. Skal, and others…

Wikipedia | Image thanks: CoverBrowser.com

‘Human or inhuman? No woman is safe…!’

The Man Who Turned to Stone is a 1957 science fiction horror film directed by László Kardos from a screenplay by Bernard Gordon [as Raymond T. Marcus] (Earth vs. the Flying Saucers; Zombies of Mora Tau; The Day of the Triffids).

The film stars Victor Jory (Kolchak: The Night Stalker; Circle of Fear; Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell), William Hudson (The She-Creature; The Amazing Colossal Man) and Charlotte Austin (Gorilla at Large; The Bride and the Beast; Frankenstein 1970).

Plot teaser:

Two hundred years previously, a group of doctors learned to extended their lives by draining the vitality of others. Without such a tranfusion, they begin to petrify. They become the staff doctors of a girls’ reform school, assuring a supply of vital young bodies.

However outsiders sent to the school, Doctor Jess Rogers and social welfare officer Carol Adams, become suspicious of the unusual number of otherwise healthy inmates dying of heart failure or suicide…

Reviews:

Plot wise, this is an enjoyably claustrophobic, cynical and ambitious sci-fi shocker that’s been unduly overlooked amidst the plethora of late ’50s oversized monsters, alien invaders and teen terrors. Unfortunately, non-genre director László Kardos’ delivery lacks real style, so few of the nuances of Bernard Gordon’s intriguing story are amplified on screen. Despite it being an early women-in-prison entry, the film’s uninspiring title lacks immediacy, perhaps explaining its obscure status, which is a shame as its better than many of its better known counterparts. It might not be Invasion of the Body Snatchers but it deserves a look for devotees of more intelligent Fifties anti-Authoritarian Americana.

Adrian J Smith, Horrorpedia

“An odd mash-up of old school mad-science, a juvenile delinquency melodrama, and a women in prison flick, The Man Who Turned to Stone comes courtesy of Bernard Gordon, who, after being blacklisted, eked out a living writing this kind of sci-fi whiz-bangery for producer Sam Katzman under a parade of false names (Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Zombies of Mora Tau). And just like all those other Katzman flicks of the 1950s, this movie is a rollicking — if a slightly hair-brained —  good time.” Micro-Brewed Reviews

“The brisk running time allows for little personal dimension among the captives and suggests no ambitions greater than survival for the death-defiant predators. Victor Jory displays a fine collection of historic art, too grand for a provincial reformatory — a hint of problems greater than administrative corruption. Paul Cavanagh’s confession to William Hudson accounts for a more memorable sequence, which leads in turn to Hudson’s dodgy search for a diary of ancient secrets.” Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6: Up from the Depths

Buy Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6 from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Choice dialogue:

Carol Adams, Social Welfare: “Oh look Tracy, you’re not going soft and spooky on me are you?”

Dr. Jess Rogers: “Alright, then let’s talk about art. About Rembrant.”

Cast:

• Victor Jory as Dr. Murdock
• William Hudson as Dr. Jess Rogers
• Charlotte Austin as Carol Adams
• Jean Willes as Tracy
• Ann Doran as Mrs. Ford
• Paul Cavanagh as Cooper
• George Lynn as Dr. Freneau
• Victor Varconi as Dr. Myer
• Friedrich von Ledebur as Eric (as Frederick Ledebur)
• Tina Carver as Big Marge Collins
• Barbara Wilson as Anna Sherman

Wikipedia | IMDb | Image credits: 3B Poster Archive

‘Blood-hungry spawn of the world’s most bestial fiend!’

Daughter of Dr. Jekyll is a 1957 American horror film directed by Edgar G. Ulmer (The Black Cat; The Strange Woman; The Man from Planet X) from a screenplay by producer Jack Pollexfen (The Neanderthal Man; Captive Women; The Man from Planet X).

The film stars Gloria Talbott (The Cyclops; I Married a Monster from Outer Space; The Leech Woman), John Agar (Tarantula; The Brain from Planet Arous; Zontar: The Thing from Venus), Arthur Shields, John Dierkes and Martha Wentworth.

In the US, it was released by Allied Artists as a double-bill with Bert I. Gordon’s The Cyclops.

Plot teaser:

It features Gloria Talbott as Janet, the daughter of the infamous Dr. Henry Jekyll, and John Agar as her fiancée. Janet learns that she may have inherited her father’s condition, and she begin to believe she may be guilty of murder when people are found horribly killed. However, all is not what it seems…

Reviews:

” …the film succeeds with eerie music and gloomy atmosphere, particularly in the dream sequences. It’s much better than Columbia’s boring Son of Dr. Jekyll (1951) in that we actually get to see a monster running around.” Joe Lozowsky, DVD Drive-In

“Ulmer has no patience for the niceties of smooth plotting or transitions; he’s only got a little over an hour to tell this story, and he seems determined to milk it for all the potent imagery it can yield, even if it means giving in to incoherence and silliness from time to time. The film’s finest scene comes towards the end, during the monster’s last nighttime raid, as it pauses to peer into a window at a sexy young woman changing into raunchy black lingerie. It’s an unashamedly exploitative moment, one that’s completely out of tune with the rest of the movie…” Only the Cinema

“Talbott is perfect in the role as she exudes that innocent and demure quality needed, and that wild-eyed wonderment at each revelation that is proffered to her.  And while the actress is a great fit for the film, sometimes the script works against her a little as she is perhaps a little too accepting of each and every situation she is made aware of.” The Tell-Tale Mind

“Shortcomings aside, Daughter of Dr. Jekyll is an engaging, entertaining, and atmospheric job from a masterful director. Ulmer transformed a miniscule budget and an indifferent script into an exercise that retains a thrall of unease.” Jay Alan Henderson, Forgotten Horrors, Vol.6: Up from the Depths

Buy Forgotten Horrors Vol. 6 from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Cast:

• Gloria Talbott as Janet Smith
• John Agar as George Hastings
• Arthur Shields as Dr. Lomas
• John Dierkes as Jacob
• Molly McCart as Maid Maggie
• Martha Wentworth as Mrs. Merchant
• Marjorie Stapp as Woman Getting Dressed
• Reita Green as Young Woman
• Marel Page as Young Man

Wikipedia | IMDb | Image credits: Wrong Side of the Art!

‘Tales to give you nightmares!’

Monster Parade was an American horror magazine issued by Irwin Stein’s Magnum Publications in 1958 and 1959. It was an attempt to cash-in on the success of Warren’s Famous Monsters of Filmland but its mix of original horror fiction and comics (reprints of pre-code horror comics), articles, pin-ups and movie coverage didn’t gel with fans and it ran for just four issues.

We are grateful to Monster Magazines for info.

The rectory in 1892

Borley Rectory was a Victorian mansion that gained fame as allegedly “the most haunted house in England”. Built in 1862 to house the rector of the parish of Borley, Essex, and his family, it was badly damaged by fire in 1939 and demolished in 1944.

The large Gothic-style rectory had been alleged to be haunted ever since it was built. Reports multiplied suddenly in 1929, after the Daily Mirror published an account of a visit by paranormal researcher Harry Price, who wrote two books supporting claims of paranormal activity.

The uncritical acceptance of Price’s reports prompted a formal study by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which rejected most of the sightings as either imagined or fabricated and cast doubt on Price’s credibility. His claims are now generally discredited by ghost historians. Neither the SPR’s report nor the more recent biography of Price has quelled public interest in the stories, and new books, television documentaries and two upcoming 2015 films continue to satisfy public fascination with the rectory.

A short programme commissioned by the BBC about the alleged manifestations, scheduled to be broadcast in September 1956, was cancelled owing to concerns about a possible legal action by Marianne Foyster, widow of the last rector to live in the house.

The first paranormal events allegedly occurred in about 1863, since a few locals later remembered hearing unexplained footsteps within the house at about this time. On 28 July 1900, four daughters of the rector, Henry Dawson Ellis Bull, reported seeing what they thought was the ghost of a nun at twilight, about 40 yards (37 metres) from the house; they tried to talk to it, but it disappeared as they got closer. The local organist recalled that the family at the rectory were “very convinced that they had seen an apparition on several occasions”. Various people were to claim to have witnessed a variety of puzzling incidents, such as a phantom coach driven by two headless horsemen, during the next four decades. Henry Dawson Ellis Bull died in 1892 and his son, the Reverend Henry (“Harry”) Foyster Bull, took over the living.

Alleged sighting in the grounds

On 9 June 1928, Henry (“Harry”) Bull died and the rectory again became vacant. In the following year, on 2 October, the Reverend Guy Eric Smith and his wife moved into the home. Soon after moving in Mrs Smith, while cleaning out a cupboard, came across a brown paper package containing the skull of a young woman. Shortly after, the family reported a variety of incidents including the sounds of servant bells ringing despite their being disconnected, lights appearing in windows and unexplained footsteps. In addition, Mrs Smith believed she saw a horse-drawn carriage at night. The Smiths contacted the Daily Mirror. On 10 June 1929 the newspaper sent a reporter, who promptly wrote the first in a series of articles detailing the mysteries of Borley. The paper also arranged for Harry Price, a paranormal researcher, to make his first visit to the house that would ultimately make him famous. He arrived on 12 June and immediately objective “phenomena” of a new kind appeared, such as the throwing of stones, a vase and other objects. “Spirit messages” were tapped out from the frame of a mirror. As soon as Harry Price left, these ceased. Mrs Smith later maintained that she already suspected Harry Price, an expert conjurer, of causing the phenomena.

The Smiths left Borley on 14 July 1929, and the parish had some difficulty in finding a replacement. The following year the Reverend Lionel Algernon Foyster (1878–1945), and his wife Marianne (1899–1992) moved into the rectory with their adopted daughter Adelaide. Lionel Foyster wrote an account of various strange incidents that occurred between the time the Foysters moved in and October 1935, which was sent to Harry Price. These included bell-ringing, windows shattering, throwing of stones and bottles, wall-writing, and the locking of their daughter in a room with no key. Marianne Foyster reported to her husband a whole range of poltergeist phenomena that included her being thrown from her bed. On one occasion, Adelaide was allegedly attacked by “something horrible”. Foyster tried twice to conduct an exorcism, but his efforts were fruitless; in the middle of the first exorcism, he was struck in the shoulder by a fist-size stone. Because of the publicity in the Daily Mirror, these incidents attracted the attention of several psychic researchers, who after investigation were unanimous in suspecting that they were caused, consciously or unconsciously, by Marianne Foyster. Mrs Foyster later stated that she felt that some of the incidents were caused by her husband in concert with one of the psychic researchers, but other events appeared to her to be genuine paranormal phenomena. Marianne later admitted that she was having a sexual relationship with the lodger, Frank Pearless, and that she used paranormal explanations to cover up her liaisons. The Foysters left Borley in October 1935 as a result of Lionel’s ill health.

Borley remained vacant for some time after the Foysters’ departure, until in May 1937 Price recruited a corps of 48 “official observers”, mostly students, who spent periods, mainly during weekends, at the rectory with instructions to report any phenomena that occurred.

In March 1938 Helen Glanville (the daughter of S. J. Glanville, one of Price’s helpers) conducted a séance in Streatham in south London. Price reported that she made contact with two spirits, the first of which was that of a young nun who identified herself as Marie Lairre. According to the planchette story Marie was a French nun who left her religious order and travelled to England to marry a member of the Waldegrave family, the owners of Borley’s 17th-century manor house, Borley Hall. She was said to have been murdered in an earlier building on the site of the rectory, and her body either buried in the cellar or thrown into a disused well.The wall writings were alleged to be her pleas for help; one read “Marianne, please help me get out”.

The second spirit to be contacted identified himself as Sunex Amures, and claimed that he would set fire to the rectory at nine o’clock that night, 27 March 1938. He also said that, at that time, the bones of a murdered person would be revealed.

On 27 February 1939 the new owner of the rectory, Captain W. H. Gregson, was unpacking boxes and accidentally knocked over an oil lamp in the hallway. The fire quickly spread and the house was severely damaged. After investigating the cause of the blaze the insurance company concluded that the fire had been started deliberately.

Rectory after the fire

Miss Williams from nearby Borley Lodge said she saw the figure of the ghostly nun in the upstairs window and, according to Harry Price, demanded a fee of one guinea for her story. In August 1943 Harry Price conducted a brief dig in the cellars of the ruined house and discovered two bones thought to be of a young woman. The bones were given a Christian burial in Liston churchyard, after the parish of Borley refused to allow the ceremony to take place on account of the local opinion that the bones found were those of a pig.

After Price’s death in 1948 Eric Dingwall, Kathleen M. Goldney, and Trevor H. Hall, three members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), investigated his claims about Borley. Their findings were published in a 1956 book, The Haunting of Borley Rectory, which concluded Price had fraudulently produced some of the phenomena.

The “Borley Report”, as the SPR study has become known, stated that many of the phenomena were either faked or due to natural causes such as rats and the strange acoustics attributed to the odd shape of the house. In their conclusion, Dingwall, Goldney, and Hall wrote “when analysed, the evidence for haunting and poltergeist activity for each and every period appears to diminish in force and finally to vanish away.” Terence Hines wrote “Mrs. Marianne Foyster, wife of the Rev. Lionel Foyster who lived at the rectory from 1930 to 1935, was actively engaged in fraudulently creating [haunted] phenomena. Price himself “salted the mine” and faked several phenomena while he was at the rectory.”

Marianne later in her life admitted she had seen no apparitions and that the alleged ghostly noises were caused by the wind, friends she invited to the house and in other cases by herself playing practical jokes on her husband. Many of the legends about the rectory had been invented. The children of Rev. Harry Bull who lived in the house before Lionel Foyster claimed to have seen nothing and were surprised they had been living in what was described as England’s most haunted house.

Wikipedia

‘A dead man’s brain told him to kill kill kill..’

Donovan’s Brain is a 1953 American science fiction horror film directed by Felix E. Feist from a screenplay he co-wrote with Hugh Brooke, based on the 1942 novel Donovan’s Brain by Curt Siodmak (The Wolf Man; Son of Dracula; The Beast with Five Fingers).

The film stars Lew Ayres (She Waits; Damien: Omen II; Salem’s Lot), Nancy Reagan (then Nancy Davis), Gene Evans and Steve Brodie (The Giant Spider Invasion).

Plot teaser:

After an horrific plane crash, despised millionaire Tom Donovan (Michael Colgan) is declared dead. Dr. Patrick Cory (Ayres) has ideas beyond his station however when he decides to operate on the corpse and retrieve the brain for research purposes. When Dr. Cory finds himself committing violent acts against his will he starts to believe that the brain of Tom Donovan, now stored in a tank, is controlling his actions…

Buy Simply Media DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

“This version (sticking closest to the novel), scripted and directed by a rather obscure film-maker who subsequently went into television, is modest but effective, distinguished by an excellent performance from Ayres…” Time Out

“This film is far better than you might initially expect. It actually encouraged weak imitators like The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. It has all the fun qualities of a 50’s Drive-In flick with elements of Film Noir sprinkled in. Lew Ayres is no Olivier, but gets the job done…” DVD Beaver

“Star Lew Ayres is able to use the inflections of his voice to signal when he’s evil-Cory and when he’s just mad-scientist Cory and there are nice touches like having Cory order Donovan’s favorite cigars and getting Donovan’s style of suit made for himself. That’s just the sort of stuff you would expect a disembodied brain controlling a new body to do!” MonsterHunter

“This telepathic control is extremely well conveyed through impressive sound design, the one filmmaking technique that achieves a zenith of stylistic excellence in an otherwise unobtrusive cinematic endeavour. Like most science-fiction/horror pictures of the 1950’s Donovan’s Brain suffers from abysmal dialogue and the prevailing sexism of the day.” The Celluloid Highway

Buy MGM DVD from Amazon.com

Choice dialogue:

Dr. Frank Schratt: “Ah, you’re off your rocker, pal!”

Cast:

• Lew Ayres as Dr. Patrick Cory
• Nancy Davis as Janice Cory
• Gene Evans as Dr. Frank Schratt
• Steve Brodie as Yocum, a freelance photographer

Film locations:

Dear Old Hollywood

Wikipedia | IMDb | Related: The Brain (1962)

‘The mammoth monster that terrified the Earth! Too awesome to describe! Too terrifying to escape! Too powerful to stop!’

Monster from Green Hell is a 1957 science fiction horror film directed by Kenneth G. Crane (The Revenge of Dr. X) from a screenplay by Endre Bohem and Louis Vittes. It was produced by Al Zimbalist (Robot Monster; King Dinosaur; Cat Women of the Moon). The film’s strident score was provided by Albert Glasser (The Amazing Colossal Man; Earth vs. The Spider; Tormented).

Plot teaser:

In preparation for sending a manned rocket into space, American scientists Dr. Quent Brady and Dan Morgan are put in charge of a program that sends various animals and insects into orbit to test their survival rates. After one of their rockets carrying wasps malfunctions and goes off course, a computer calculates that the rocket is likely to land somewhere off the coast of Africa.

Some time later, in Africa, Dr. Lorentz and his daughter Lorna perform an autopsy on a native and determine that he died of paralysis of the nerve centers caused by an injection of a massive amount of venom. Arobi, Lorentz’ African assistant, then informs him that a monster is believed to be terrorising people and animals in an area known as Green Hell.

Several months later, Brady reads a newspaper account of turmoil in Central Africa caused by gigantic monsters and surmises that the wasps in the missing rocket were exposed to huge amounts of cosmic radiation because an earlier, minimal overexposure had resulted in the birth of a spider crab twice the size of its mother. Brady and Morgan request a leave of absence from Washington and head for Africa to investigate…

Reviews:

‘You might think it impossible to make a mostly boring film about giant, radioactive wasps, especially when the giant, radioactive wasps look like the ones in Monster from Green Hell. These are some of the most comprehensively failed atomic bugs in the business, making even Roger Corman’s notorious Crab Monsters look good by comparison. The stop-motion models used for those scenes in which we get to see a wasp’s entire body are reasonably detailed and fairly well animated, but the fact is that they look nothing on Earth like wasps.’ 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

‘Crane’s monstrous film incorporates ingenious trick photography, model work and stop-motion animation, as well as extensive footage culled from the 1939 Spencer Tracy picture Stanley and Livingstone. The result is not so much a movie as a patchwork.’ Time Out

‘The script calls for a socko conclusion with a hive of wasps on the rampage. Money and time must have plain run out, for we see only a couple of angles with more than one insect. Instead of a real sequence, editor/director Crane can only come up with a meaningless, freeform dissolve montage. Every effect shot we’ve seen before is double-exposed with lava flows and boiling magma, and intercut with some of the dullest ‘observers’ I’ve ever seen. Bad movie, + bad effects, = dissatisfaction.’ Glenn Erickson, DVD Talk

‘Dialogue is so dull and stupid that you have almost no choice but to laugh. “Instinctively I knew something was going to happen,” the hero solemnly tells us; “the only trouble was, I didn’t know what.” … Adolescent kids in the 50s must have felt pretty disappointed, heading to theatres to see giant insects but forced to watch people tramping through African brush lands looking for water.’ David Elroy Goldweber, Claws & Saucers

Buy Claws & Saucers book from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Wikipedia | IMDb