On Halloween, I ate Sauerbraten with mashed potatoes and apple Kuchen. The Sauerbraten had an authentic taste and the gravy, made with ginger snaps and a macerated dill pickle was excellent but my verdict on my efforts was that the rather stringy, vinegar-marinated beef was, perhaps, not worth the effort involved in its preparation. This is generally true of roast beef -- for every superb and memorable pot roast, I have made a half-dozen that were tasteless, dull, and either too tough to eat or decomposed into filaments that embed themselves between your teeth like injurious slivers. While eating supper, I watched The Devil's Bride (1968) a dim-witted, if amusing, Hammer Horror film, brightly shot in the English studio's trademark Eastmancolor. The little ghosts and goblins abroad in the windy night trudged through ankle deep heaps of leaves to reach my front door. In my old age, it seems that the number of trick-or-treaters has steeply declined so that I am always left with a heavy bowl of unused candy when I turn off my porch light at 7:30 to signal that, as far as I am concerned, the bacchanal is at an end. Youth is a time of abundance -- everything is new and seems to last longer with crowds of extras surrounding you: the past is like those movies that dissolve into a yesteryear always characterized by streets full of colorfully dressed people scurrying about their errands: there are lots and lots of people and all of them are handsome and they are all moving about purposefully as if directed to perform very specific and emblematic tasks on a tight schedule. How different, I suppose, from actual pictures of Victorian city streets or western villages: empty arcades and barren sidewalks or gaunt-looking houses strewn randomly across vast, grey plains empty to their treeless horizons. Probably, the traditional trick-or-treating on Halloween eve has suffered attrition due to competitor venues: on a Saturday a week before Halloween, the grocery store was full of small children receiving treats gratis in the aisles of the store, candy dispensed by staff wearing cat-suits or springy antennae on their caps. Then, on the Friday before Halloween, I went downtown to see a jam session, Art Rocks, in the old bank building by the police station. The streets were crowded with trick-or-treaters dragged by their parents from one downtown merchant to the next and it was hard to find a parking place -- I ended up putting my car next to the Lutheran Church three blocks away, across from the mortuary. Most parents, I would guess, ration their children to one orgy of trick-or-treating and a kid that has harvested candy from the downtown merchants or at Hy-Vee between the deli and meat counter is not likely to be abroad on the night of the actual celebration.
The Devil's Bride is not scary. It is a rather refined British period picture in which immaculately dressed men and women in evening gowns stand around well-appointed great rooms in old manors discussing Satanism. You expect the people to speak in a witty and intelligent manner, but, of course, this drawing room discussion is not exactly Oscar Wilde -- rather, it's dreary stuff about curses and spells interlarded with imprecations and spots of Latin. There are lots of shots of lovely old cars speeding through idyllic countryside. Terence Fisher, the director, doesn't really edit -- he spends too much time showing you people walking across pastures or lounging around in palatial rooms waiting for something to happen. When the devil worshippers make their appearance, they are risible: a nicely interracial group of upper-class Brits dressed like High Church choir members gathered around a beefy yeoman in an Aleistair Crowley get-up with an elderly sibyl who slinks around like a harem girl but who, also, seems to be conspicuously cross-eyed. The people all have names that might be latte drinks at Starbucks: there's Tanith and Macota. For some reason, Christopher Lee, the witchhunter extraordinaire in this film, is called Duc d' Richlieu -- is he some kind of relative of the Cardinal, famous among other things, for his appearance in Monty Python skits made about the same time as this film? At one of the mild orgies of the damned, Satan appears briefly, a good-looking chap with horns and a furry beard, a bit like Bernini's Poseidon but with elegant, well-manicured antlers. Satan looks entirely impassive, bland, indifferent to his worshipers who are mostly an unprepossessing lot. He vanishes when the hero throws a bottle at him. Later, the satanic forces besiege Christopher Lee's little band of valiant Christians -- they stand within a protective circle chalked on the floor, back to back, while various phantoms attack or tempt them. There's a skeleton on a big armored horse and a tarantula that changes size from shot to shot -- sometimes its the size of a poodle, other times fist-sized and, at one point, it bulks up to be as large as a Shetland pony. A child is captured and threatened with sacrifice, but, then, a spirit occupying an elegantly dressed woman speaks in a sepulchral voice forbidding the murder and God reasserts His hegemony -- the devil-worshipers vanish in puffs of smoke and an austere cross emerges from behind a fiery explosion that eradicates the devilish diagrams on the cloister wall. Someone who was dead comes back to life and the charming girl-child awakes from her trance and all is well in the world. These proceedings are shot in bright color, the night scenes imaged in bluish day-for-night, and everything occurring against the backdrop of autumnal pastoral landscapes. Everything is visible and clear and, of course, this is unfortunate because what you can see in sharp focus generally isn't too scary. The petty, murderous bourgeois devil-worshippers in Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim are just as banal as this coven, but because we understand them less perfectly and, because they clearly have no magical power except to kill, are much more alarming than the villains in The Devil's Bride.
The devil, or, at least, his fire demon, appears as well in Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon aka The Night of the Demon (1957). Tourneur was a director of B pictures in Hollywood and he made several very effective, and literate, horror movies produced by Val Lewton in the forties -- among them Cat People and I walked with a Zombie. It's pretty widely understood today that Lewton was the actual auteur of those films -- all of them are stylistically similar and demonstrate some of Lewton's trademark effects (for instance, the sudden shock-cut in which an apparition leaps out of the frame to startle the audience). Tourneur made a variety of very good films in Hollywood, including the notable and lyric western Canyon Passage as well as some distinguished film noir. The Curse of the Demon is a British production, one of Tourneur's last films, and it harkens back to the sophisticated and eerie suggestiveness -- the horror is typically intimated but not shown -- evident in the Lewton-produced pictures made almost twenty years earlier.
The French don't use the word "horror" to denote a genre --in French film criticism, a film like The Curse of the Demon is styled "a fantasy film" in the genre of "films of the fantastic." This label seems better to me for an elegant and dream-like movie like Curse of the Demon than calling the film a "horror" picture -- the movie's imagery is mostly lyrically sinister, but not really "horrible". The plot involves a stolid American psychologist, apparently an expert on fear and the subconscious, who travels to England to present a lecture debunking parapsychology. The psychologist encounters a jovial, if evil, sorcerer who kills his victims by handing them a parchment inscribed with runes. When the victim reads the runes, the parchment becomes animate and flees from him so that he can not rescind the spell -- exactly how one would rescind the spell is not clear to me. The runes advise the victim that he will die at a certain time and date. A snarling fire demon with a blow torch for a mouth and long, pointed claws arrives at the appointed time and shreds the unfortunate victim of the runic curse. (The film is adapted from stories by M. R. James but so loosely and approximately that the connection of the movie to its source material is all but indecipherable.) Running afoul of a fat, goateed, and, somewhat slovenly, sorcerer, the hero and his girlfriend struggle to avert the curse of the runes decreeing death to the leading man in three days time. Of course, the evil spell is deflected so that it boomerangs back to the Magus who suffers a spectacular death in the claws of the very demon that he had summoned forth. (The fire demon, who looks a bit like a mentally retarded version of Godzilla eats the sorcerer like an hors d'oeuvre, then, spits out his torso to lie smoking next to some complex, interweaving railroad tracks.) The movie is brisk and nimble, cramming all sorts of weird activity into its ninety minutes running time. Curse of the Demon is flat-footed only with respect to its hero played by Dana Andrews. Andrews is so resolutely obtuse and unimaginative as to defy belief -- surrounded on all sides by evidence of an active and omnipresent supernatural, he continues in his skepticism up to the final appearance of the Fire Demon. And, perhaps, even that apparition doesn't exactly satisfy his doubts -- the demon, after all, is amateurishly contrived, mostly immobile, a leering puppet-like fellow in a smoky rubber suit. Andrews' voice, always remembered as silky and pleasing, has a gruff, gravelly sound in this movie and, when someone else speaks, the actor doesn't know what to do -- so he grimaces and stands stiffly upright showing his disapprobation by the set of his manly jaw. But horror films or "films of the fantastic" don't require much in the way of acting or dialogue -- silence, music, and the occasional sound effect should be more than sufficient to elicit their primitive effects from the audience. And, visually, Curse of the Demon is splendid, even, majestic: the villain, incongruously dressed as a clown with a bulbous nose, conjures up a great wind storm and we see the demon coalescing out of a whirl of sparks and luminous mist; the hero consults runes inscribed on the megaliths at Stonehenge and the great monument on its dreary plain provides a suitably awesome opening shot to the film. In the most remarkable image, the fire demon hops a ride on a locomotive, approaching its victim in a cloud of steam and smoke jetting up from the engine. The hero wanders through a disorienting woodlands with the monster following him, its footsteps smoking in the leaf litter and there is an indelible image of the sinister Magus departing down an ill-lit corridor at the British Museum, a shadowy presence distorted into a mirage against the bright outside light. Tourneur deploys shock effects of the kind he perfected in The Curse of the Cat People -- when burglarizing the bad guy's house Dana Andrews is startled by a cat that turns into a rather unpersuasive leopard; at a Halloween party, the hero (and audience) are jolted by the sudden appearance of a child in a skeleton mask. The movie is elegant and entertaining, not so much scary as poetically eerie. (This is true in particular of a séance in which two old ladies have to croon a pop song of the time to knock the medium into his trance; also effective is a sequence in which Dana Andrews' hypnotizes a man accused of a horrible murder, injecting him with "methyl amphetamine" with the result that the killer runs amuck and, then, plunges to his death through a hospital window.) When I was young, the standard work on horror films was a book by Carlos Clarens. In that book, the author derided this film for spoiling its sophisticated and weirdly suggestive style by actually showing the farcical demon -- in my view, the demon's ludicrous but ferocious appearance is part of the retro-charm of the movie.
"To show or not to show" was one of the questions raised by practitioners in the fantastic genre when I was an adolescent and college student. How much horror should be shown and how much merely suggested? Of course, that question is now beside the point, the industry having decided the issue long ago -- probably beginning with the vomit, masturbation and sarcoma-like lesions in The Exorcist. Horror films of the past several decades have been absurdly graphic, a trend exemplified by the new Starz series, Ash v. the Evil Dead. The premiere episode of this cable series, directed stylishly by Sam Raimi, was broadcast on Halloween night. Replete with geysers of arterial blood, dismemberments, and shotgun beheadings, the show is so gory as to be cartoon-funny: it's like the "Itchy and Scratchy" (Tom and Jerry) mayhem featured as cartoons within the cartoon world of The Simpsons.
Ash v. The Evil Dead illustrates a suggestive, and important point: the genre most closely similar to horror is slapstick physical comedy. Both types of films rejoice in showing audiences the very worst things that can happen. And Ash v. The Evil Dead doesn't resist this comparison -- in fact, the show is marketed as slapstick comedy and, in fact, is very funny. Ash is a late middle-aged hunk of beefcake, overweight and none too smart. While copulating with a pick-up in tavern, Ash discovers that his paramour, a hardened middle-aged barfly herself, is one of the evil dead. Momentarily, discountenanced by this discovery, Ash, nonetheless, doggedly completes the sex act before fleeing to his squalid trailer to try to figure out what is going on. There, he finds that a few days earlier, while smoking marijuana with another woman, he inadvertently had her chant certain nonsense syllables from a Necronimicon-style book, bound in human flesh, that unleash the scourge of the Evil Dead on the earth. With a Honduran side-kick and a homely-looking girl, possibly Jewish, as allies, Ash straps on his chainsaw -- he wears it in place of the hand he had to hack off when it was infected by a bite from the Evil Dead thirty years earlier -- and goes forth to battle the powers of darkness. The comedy in the show arises from the fact that Ash is old, flabby, and extremely stupid as well as clumsy -- he's the kind of fellow who can't carry a sack of light bulbs without spilling them all over the floor. The Evil Dead films are noteworthy because their army of monsters derive from Chinese ghost and horror films from the late seventies -- the dead have skeletal faces with eyes that look like soft-boiled eggs but they are alos tremendously agile and strong, can rotate their heads, with much grisly cracking of bone, to look straight behind themselves and seemingly can fly like decomposing torpedoes through the air. They are cousins to the monsters inhabiting Hong Kong supernatural films like The Bride with the White Hair, undead creatures equipped with tongues that can extend hundreds of feet or ghouls outfitted with acres of animate and malevolent hair in which to ensnare and, then, strangle their victims. Since the dead leap around as if in zero gravity, Ash and his cohorts also have to fly through the air to combat them and so there is much bounding about, wire-work with hero and undead adversaries colliding with titanic force in mid-air, severed heads shooting around like cannonballs The mayhem is aerobatic, jaunty, and extremely cheerful, self-indulgent virtuosity much enthused by itself. If the show can keep up the energy of its first episode, it promises to be a wonderfully amusing guilty pleasure.
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