21 October: Black Moon

 

Macklin: The voodoo drums are going. They started when the natives found out that you were coming back. For the first time in years, there was a sacrifice that night.

Juanita: Well, you don't mean to tell me that my coming has anything to do with the voodoo drums?

Today we’re going to set sail for the Caribbean and take part in some dark rituals for today’s Cinematic Void 31 Days of Voidoween movie challenge: “Voodoo.” Didn’t we already do this, you may well ask? Sure, for “Val Lewton” day we walked with a zombie, but today things are gonna get a tad more freaky, because we’re going back to Pre-Code Hollywood, that moment in time before the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code. Today, we’re talking 1934’s Black Moon.

As a child, Juanita (Dorothy Burgess) escaped after her parents were killed during a voodoo ritual on a Caribbean island. Now that she is all grown up, Juanita has a burning desire to return to the island. Her husband Stephen (Jack Holt) doesn’t realize the danger, so he sends Juanita, their daughter Nancy (Cora Sue Collins), and Nancy’s nursemaid Gail (Fay Wray) to stay with Juanita’s uncle on the island. Once she arrives, the island’s black residents all hail her as their voodoo goddess. Soon, she begins taking part in their rituals...something she had done as a child. Anyone who tries to stand against her is killed. Before long, Juanita’s own daughter is in danger of becoming a sacrifice for Juanita’s voodoo death cult.

I stumbled upon this movie thanks to Michael H. Price’s Forgotten Horrors books and podcast. Price and George E. Turner began the Forgotten Horrors series of books in the 1970s to document the works of Poverty Row studios in the 1920s and 1930s. After Turner’s death, Price continued the work with writer John Wooley, and together the two started the Forgotten Horrors podcast. If you have an interest in off-beat cinema, older movies that you’ve only heard mention of, black-and-white horror from smaller studios, then Forgotten Horrors is for you.

Black Moon was made at Columbia, which was one of the larger studios operating in Hollywood in the 1930s. Jack Holt was one of their bigger stars. Fay Wray had starred in a string of genre pictures by the time Black Moon came out - The Most Dangerous Game, Mystery of the Wax Museum, and King Kong just to name a few. Dorothy Burgess, too, was an old hand at quickie Hollywood studio productions when she starred in Black Moon.

Black Moon has beautiful black-and-white photography which gives the plantation sets and jungle settings a creepy feel. Because this is a Pre-Code picture (just...strict enforcement of the Hays Code began in July of 1934...Black Moon was filmed in April/May and released in June), Black Moon presents its subjects in the (slightly) lurid light that would not be allowed in later films. Gail, for instance, tells Stephen that the man she is in love with is already married, but she won’t live with him in sin...unless he asks her to!

That said, Black Moon is not a politically correct film by a long shot. The people of color in the film are not depicted in a very positive manner. It should be pointed out, however, that their portrayal isn’t anything out of the ordinary for the time period. Not that that makes it any better. With that in mind, proceed at your own risk. I think there is enough outside of the ugly racism to warrant a look.

20 October: The Bay

 

Today for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween, we’re talking the much-maligned genre of the “Found Footage” film. Though there were earlier examples of the genre - namely Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust - when you mention found footage most people tend to think of The Blair Witch Project. These films are usually chock full of first-person perspective, official news footage, surveillance camera footage, and/or pre-existing footage of some sort, all of which are presented in a faux-documentary style. Oh, and shaky-cam. Lots and lots of shaky-cam.

(I am fighting the urge to go off on a tangent about my hatred of shaky-cam. It works well if you are showing someone being chased through the woods, but not so well if you are showing someone crossing the room to get a drink of water. Buy a tripod and leave the darn camera alone, folks.)

Anywho...where were we?

Oh, yeah...found footage movies.

Let’s talk Barry “Diner” Levinson’s 2012 f-f, eco-horror picture, The Bay. And let’s do it quickly, because it creeps me the heck out!

The bay in The Bay is Chesapeake Bay, a 64,000-square-mile watershed that covers parts of six states along the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States. It’s a beautiful area of the country, but thanks to the chicken industry, it’s become one of the yuckiest and most dangerous. Due to the use of steroids to make the chickens bigger (bigger = more money, natch) and the dumping of the chickens’ droppings into the bay, the water of the Chesapeake around the town of Claridge, MD, has become toxic.

But the toxicity of the water is only one of the problems facing the good people of Claridge. It seems the chicken-poop infected water has affected a tongue-eating louse, Cymothoa exigua, in the bay. These isopods are a normal part of the environment, but thanks to the toxins in the water, their life-cycle has sped up. They are no longer willing to settle for feeding on fish...they want bigger, two-legged game now.

Not only is The Bay a great found footage horror movie, it is also another variant of one of my favorite movie genre: the “We aren’t closing the beaches!” picture. Yep, it seems Claridge’s mayor, John Stockman (Frank Deal), took a page from Amity Island’s Mayor Vaughn’s playbook. He doesn’t want anything to get in the way of tourist dollars, even if that means that the streets of his town fill with corpses.

Who’da thunk that Barry Levinson would be able to bring the yucky, horror goods the way he does here in The Bay? Using pre-existing material that he’d shot for an actual documentary on the problems facing Chesapeake Bay, Levinson constructs are really creepy-crawlie film that’ll have you brushing imagined (or are they?!) isopods from your arms, neck, and legs.

19 October: Tales of Terror & Twice Told Tales

 

We have an anthology of anthologies, so to speak, lined up for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween. Both films were made in the early 1960s, both starred that doyen of Gothic cinematic horror, Vincent Price, and both were released together on a M-G-M Midnite Movies double-sided disc. We’re talking Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Terror (1962) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales (1963).

All in all, you get six spook-tacular stories for your Halloween buck, a not too shabby return. From Poe, you get "Morella," "The Black Cat," and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar;" from Hawthorne, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," "Rappaccini's Daughter," and "House of the Seven Gables." While the Roger Corman-directed Poe picture is the better of the two, Sidney Salkow does a fair job with Hawthorne’s material, especially the first tale, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment."

The cream of the crop is a toss-up between “The Black Cat” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” In the former, screenwriter Richard Matheson combines Poe’s “The Black Cat” and “A Cask of Amontillado” into a single black comedic tale. Vincent Price and Peter Lorre engage in a campy wine-tasting contest for the ages. In the latter, Basil Rathbone plays a mentalist who hypnotizes a dying Price. Caught between the worlds of the living and the dead, Price’s Valdemar has a bit of a meltdown when Rathbone finally releases him.

Both of the these pictures have stunning visuals and that bright color palette that screams early-1960s horror. Both are also a wonderful gateway to early American Romanticism. Watch the movies, then seek out the stories they were based upon. It’s a great way to pass the night during this spooky season.

18 October: Kingdom of the Spiders

 

Today is all about animals for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween.

Uh...not quite.

No, not him either.

Now we’re talking!

It’s time to celebrate those movies that show us just where humanity stands in Mother Nature’s view. When we’ve gotten too big for our britches, ol’ Mom sends a horde of the creepy-crawlies to put us back in our rightful place. I can take an animal attack movie that uses big critters like lions and tigers and bears, but when movies start using our six- and eight-legged friends, that’s when I say, “Oh, my!” In 1977, one of the creepiest of the “animals attack” movies was released to theaters, but it wasn’t until it started showing up in video stores and on cable TV did the nightmares really begin. We’re talking John "Bud" Cardos’s classic Kingdom of the Spiders.

The film’s events take place in rural Arizona. Local veterinarian Dr. Robert "Rack" Hansen (played by none other than William Shatner) is asked to look at an ailing prize calf owned by local farmer Walter Colby (Woody Strode). The calf dies for unknown reasons, and Rack sends the animal’s blood to the university to get checked out. The test results come back: it’s spider venom!

Soon, spiders are attacking more than cows. People are found cocooned in webbing in their homes and vehicles. What’s more, these aren’t just the attacks of one kind of spider. Nope! It seems that for the first time ever, all spiders are putting aside their differences and working together, as the giant spider mound in the Colbys’ backyard makes apparent. Rack and university Professor of Arachnology Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling) try to figure out why this is happening while also trying not to let it happen to them.

Kingdom of the Spiders is not only an “Animals Attack” movie, it’s also a proud member of that post-Jaws genre: the “We’re not closing the beaches” movie. That’s right - not only are spiders attacking people, but the powers-that-be won’t deal with the problem in the manner that Dr. Ashley (an actual, honest-to-goodness expert on the subject) suggests because it would interfere with the County Fair! Sorry folks, spiders are oogie, but business is business!

This is also one of those movies that I saw on TV as a kid, and it gave me all sorts of nightmares. Tarantulas crawling all over the place - in basements, in cars, in planes - gave me the willies, but it’s the movie’s final shot that sent me over the edge. I won’t ruin it for you if you haven’t seen it, but I’m sure you’ll feel the same way when you do. It’s the perfect downer ending, maybe one of the better ones the 1970s served up. You'll sleep with the lights on for a month, unless...

17 October: Nightfall

 

For today’s Cinematic Void 31 Days of Voidoween, we are making a run for the border.

No, not that border…

Today’s topic is “Canada,” so we are headed to the Great White North. While we’re up there, we’re gonna drink a lot of Molson, eat some poutine, and listen to one of the scariest radio programs ever, Nightfall.

Nightfall was created by Bill Howell and aired on CBC Radio from July 1980 to June 1983. The majority of the episodes were horror, but there were other styles and genres mixed in, including science fiction and mystery. Nightfall's opening voiceover ranks up there with the credit sequence for Tales from the Darkside for spinechilling creepiness. Indeed, many listeners complained to the CBC that Nightfall was too scary and convinced certain affiliates not to run the program. If that isn’t a recommendation, I don’t know what is!

You can find many, if not all, of Nightfall’s 100 episodes on the Internet Archive. Today, though, I want to focus attention on just one episode: “The Monkey’s Paw.” Adapted by Len Peterson from the W. W. Jacobs short story, Nightfall’s rendition of is a terrifying piece of work. The sound design is just right - the chanting and singing that comes up in the background when the Sergeant-Major tells of his time in India, for example, is especially spooky. The performances by Eric House and Ruth Springford as the elderly couple whose lives are thrown into utter disarray by the wish-giving paw are heartbreaking.

All in all, it’s perfect listening material during this spooky season!

16 October: Snapdragon

 

Whither the erotic thriller?

During the 1980s and the 1990s, the erotic thriller (today’s Cinematic Void 31 Days of Voidoween movie challenge topic if ya haven’t guessed already) was as ubiquitous on cable TV and the shelves of the nation’s videostores as mullets on an NHL team.

The erotic thriller was where the nation’s youth went to experience the thrill of seeing the likes of Shannon Tweed and Tanya Roberts in their birthday suits. The soft-lit, Vaseline-lensed sex scenes were often counter-balanced with violent scenes graphic enough to keep your average slasher movie fan interested. Indeed, those of us old enough to remember the monthly HBO guide can recall going through the pages and circling anything containing “graphic violence, adult situations, and nudity.” Theses were the hallmarks of the erotic thriller!

My choice, Snapdragon, was released in 1993, right in the middle of the genre's heyday. It’s got all the markers of a good erotic thriller: nudity, sex scenes, murders, nudity, cheating boyfriends, nudity, “exotic” locales (if you consider L.A.’s Chinatown exoitc), nudity, and nudity.

Starring Pamela Anderson (in her first feature film role), Steven Bauer, and Chelsea Field, Snapdragon at first concerns the investigation of two murders with the same m.o. (both men were killed in bed during the throes of passion) by Sgt. Peckham (Field). Cool, you think, a female cop chasing after a female serial killer. Then, sadly, Peckham asks her police psychologist boyfriend, David Hoogstratton (Bauer) to help profile the murderer. Before you can say “Florence Nightingale Effect,” Hoogstratton is on the make with Felicity (Anderson), a beautiful amnesiac who keeps having these dreams about murdering her lovers. Weird, huh?

You probably think you know what happens next. And it does. Oh, it does. But there is also a twist that happily gives this by-the-numbers picture an ambiguous ending. Pamela Anderson was fresh off her 1990 Playboy layout and had recurring roles on Home Improvement and Baywatch. She does a nice job here as Felicity, though I maintain that the picture would have been helped if she had had more to do opposite Chelsea Field. 

If this has piqued your interest, and you want to learn more about this “lost” genre, do yourself a favor and read "Sex & Death on the Cheap: the Lost World of the Erotic Thriller" by Anthony Penta in Diabolique Magazine. (Part 1 Part 2 Part 3) It is an excellently researched and written essay that will have you wanting more.

Ah, the erotic thriller! Ah, humanity!

15 October: Wolfen

 

Today for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween, we’re taking a trip to the big city for an unhealthy helping of “Urban Horror.” Before Disney came along and cleaned everything up, New York City was like one of those ambulatory corpses in a Romero movie. The city was rotting before our very eyes, bleeding money and people in equal amounts. The pictures of places like the South Bronx looked eerily like those taken in post-WWII England, Germany, and Japan. What better landscape for a horror movie, then? Let’s go back to 1981 and take a look at Michael Wadleigh’s adaptation of Whitley Streiber’s novel, Wolfen.

Albert Finney is former NYPD Captain Dewey Wilson. He’s been talked into investigating a strange bunch of murders only after a rich land developer and his wife are killed in Battery Park. Working with criminal psychologist Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora) and coroner Whittington (Gregory Hines), Wilson uncovers clues that suggest the murders are being committed by wolves. Later, after speaking to Native American activist Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos), Wilson begins to believe that shapeshifters - specifically The Wolfen - are responsible.

Wolfen was made at a time when there were a lot of werewolf movies hitting the theaters: An American Werewolf in London, The Howling, Full Moon High. Wolfen stands out from the crowd by not really being about werewolves. The creatures in Wolfen are, instead, shapeshifters. And maybe that’s why the movie never really made a splash. While special effects artists like Rick Baker and Rob Bottin were busy creating mind-blowing human-to-wolf transformation sequences, Wolfen used POV camerawork filtered through a thermographic-esque in-camera technique to suggest the presence of its creatures. Real wolves were used as the Wolfen.

Another issue working against the movie is that perhaps its scariest scene has nothing to do with the Wolfen. When Dewey Wilson talks to Eddie Holt, their conversation is held high above the city atop the Manhattan Bridge. I’ve only seen Wolfen on television. I don’t know if I could handle this scene on the big screen:

[Eddie and Dewey are up on the top of a bridgeworks]

Eddie Holt: Shape shifting. We do it for kicks. Turn yourself into a different animal. One night a deer, next night a salmon...

Dewey Wilson: Or a wolf?

Eddie Holt: Sure.

[Eddie unhooks Dewey's safety line]

Eddie Holt: Or an eagle.

[Dewey looks down, a long way...]

Eddie Holt: C'mon Dewey, just flap your arms and jump, it’s easy. It's all in the head...

Nope. Don’t even want to try it. Just looking at the pictures of this scene makes my stomach flutter. I’m quite happy with the small screen, thank you very much.

14 October: Quatermass and the Pit

 

At the end of Christian Nyby’s 1951 classic sci-fi-horror film The Thing from Another World, reporter Ned Scott says, “I bring you a warning: Everyone of you listening to my voice, tell the world, tell this to everybody wherever they are. Watch the skies. Everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!” A good idea as he and a rag-tag collection of military and scientific minds have just managed to fend off a would-be invasion from space. But what good does watching the skies do when the threat is already on Earth? And it’s been here for over five million years just waiting to be dug up? And the would-be space invaders aren’t little green men from Mars...but you and me?

That is the premise behind my choice for today’s Cinematic Void 31 Days of Voidoween. The topic is “Aliens,” and I’ve chosen the 1953 BBC TV serial Quatermass and the Pit. Written by Nigel Kneale, it is the third in the series about the intrepid head of the British Experimental Rocket Group, Professor Bernard Quatermass. And it’s a doozy! Quatermass and the Pit is a beautifully constructed story. Kneale blends together folk tales, folk horror, evolutionary science, race memory, and science fiction hooptedoodle into a 6-part series that scared the pants off of the British television-viewing public.

Quatermass and the Pit is all about digging. The series opens with a construction dig happening at Hobbs Lane...or is that Hobs Lane...because if you dig through the history of the area, you’ll discover that Hob is the old name for Satan, and people throughout the history of Hobbs/Hobs Lane have been bedeviled by poltergeists and the like. The construction dig comes to a stop when workers pull human remains out of the ground. But these aren’t any human remains. Dr. Matthew Roney determines that they are of a human ancestor more than five million years old. That makes humanity far older than scientists had hitherto thought. But that is only the first surprise awaiting humanity in the dirt at Hobbs Lane.

The scientists soon unearth what they at first believe is an unexploded Nazi V-rocket...but the Germans had nothing to do with it. It isn’t a bomb at all. It’s a space ship. And inside are more of those ancient human ancestors...and the craft’s decidedly UNhuman owners and operators. With the help of Quatermass, Roney comes to the conclusion that the insect-like pilots are Martians, and the ape-like creatures in the ship -- OUR ancestors -- are an experiment of theirs. But what was the purpose of the experiment? And is the experiment over or is it on-going?

Quatermass and the Pit is sci-fi-horror of the highest quality. Kneale does such a fine job of bringing together so many different strands and weaving them into a complex tale. If you ever get the chance to see other shows based on his work, do yourself a favor and watch them. Everything the man set on paper is a wonder to behold. (Shameless self-promotion: I wrote a little something about “Murrain,” Kneale's episode of the British show Against the Crowd. It is a terrific slice of folk horror. You can read my take here.)

Once you’ve seen the Quatermass series, you’ll never hear Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite, The Planets, in the same way. It’s opening section “Mars, Bringer of War,” IS Quatermass. The drama of the music epitomizes Kneale’s scientist-hero’s battle with human bureaucracy and alien invasion.

13 October: "The Fall of the House of Usher"

 

"Not hear it? — yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long — long — long — many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it — yet I dared not — oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! — I dared not — I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb!"

Today’s topic for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween is “Family Dysfunction.” The choices available to horror fans on this topic are myriad. Horror, it seems, is all about dysfunctional families. I mean, if they were functional...there wouldn’t be much horror, would there? Hereditary would have been a lot different if Toni Collette actually liked her kids, is all I’m saying. I’m going old school for my choice today. Let’s go back to America’s OG (Original Gothic), E.A. Poe and talk “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

First published in 1839 in Burton’s Gentleman's Magazine (was that the 19th Century Playboy?), “The Fall of the House of Usher” is all about familial madness and insularity. The Ushers, brother Roderick and sister Madeleine, spend their days secluded in the family home, a dark, dank mansion on the edge of a tarn. The house, according to Roderick, is as alive as he and his sister. The crack that extends from the roof to the foundation suggests that the house, like the family, is falling apart.

Both members of the Usher family are ill. Roderick can’t stand loud noises, and Madeleine falls into cataleptic-like trances that resemble death. Soon, Maddy dies (or does she?), and her body is placed in the family tomb in the catacombs beneath the house. Time passes until one night, with a storm raging outside, Madeleine appears before her brother and the unnamed narrator. She is bloodied from her time spent clawing her way out of her tomb. She falls on her brother, who dies of fright. The narrator hightails it out of the house just as the mansion crumbles and sinks into the tarn.

You can find “The Fall of the House of Usher” everywhere on the internet. You might say you can’t go anywhere on the web without “falling” over it. (Har-har!) You can read the story in its entirety here. If you like movies, check out Roger Corman’s adaptation from 1960. The script is written by the excellent Richard Matheson, and it stars Vincent Price.

If you prefer audio drama, then check out this episode of the old time radio program Escape. If you want straight up storytelling, then you can’t go wrong with this version read by the one and only Basil Rathbone.