Wednesday, June 29, 2011

13 Spine-Tingling Horror Scores

Strings that scream and synthesizers that growl, menacing orchestral music and spooky jazz, from the funereal to the phantasmagoric, the cacophonous to the melodious, great scores are often essential ingredients in great horror movies. In honor of the 100th birthday of one of the cinema’s greatest composers— Bernard Herrmann— Psychobabble surveys 13 of horror’s greatest scores.



1. White Zombie by Abe Meyer (1932)

Sound horror was still a new thing in the early ‘30s, and the genre’s first films were short on non-diegetic music. Universal’s Dracula and The Mummy both settled for brief passages from Swan Lake over their opening credits sequences. Bernhard Kaun provided the overture to the otherwise music-devoid Frankenstein. Over on Poverty Row, Abe Meyer of the Meyer Synchronizing Service put together a feature-length, newly recorded score for the Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie. Meyer chose a superb selection of compositions by Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Modest Mussorgsky, Hugo Risenfeld, and Leo Kempenski. Particularly memorable are the excerpt from Gaston Borch’s Incidental Symphonies that swoops through the gloom while Lugosi casts a voodoo spell over Madge Bellamy and Guy Bevier Williams’s percussive “Chant”, which opens the film. Aside from Bevier Williams’s piece and a jota by Xavier Cugat, White Zombie does not feature original music, but its use of background music, orchestral and otherwise, broke new ground for sound horror.


2. King Kong by Max Steiner (1933)

King Kong was one of the most lavish productions to pummel the early sound era. There was no skimping on its special effects, sets, or globe-spanning scope. RKO had pumped so much money into Kong that studio president B.B. Kahane schemed to cut corners in post-production by asking Max Steiner to create a composite soundtrack of existing music. Producer/director Merian C. Cooper hadn’t copped out on any aspect of Kong so far, and he wasn’t going to start with anything as important as its score. Unable to convince Kahane to compromise, he paid the $50,000 cost himself, and Steiner created one of cinema’s most magical, memorable scores. The composer enhanced onscreen action with pieces that worked as both music and sound effects: booming brass blasts along with each blow from Kong’s mighty fists. The harp laced piece that sets the tone for the crew’s foggy journey toward Skull Island— and the entire picture when it unfolds during the “overture”—is groundbreaking in its eerie subtlety.

3. Bride of Frankenstein by Franz Waxman (1935)

For its sequel to the smash success Frankenstein, Universal sprang for a lush score to accompany its most lush monster movie. Director James Whale recruited Franz Waxman after meeting him at a Christmas party and explaining how much he liked the composer’s work in Fritz Lang’s Liliom. Waxman outdid himself, creating the instantly recognizable leitmotifs that electrify the picture. For Karloff’s Monster, Waxman wrote a raspy, four-note brass grunt. Ernest Thesiger’s charmingly nefarious Dr. Pretorius is introduced by shuddering strings, while his drunken escapades in a crypt are accompanied by a loopy rattle inspired by Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre. Elsa Lanchester’s Bride is signified by a swooning ellipsis that serves as her shorthand whether she’s on screen or merely discussed by other characters. Elsewhere Waxman discharges what Scott MacQueen describes as a “charming period-style minuet” that devolves into an ominous fugue when Shelley and Byron recount the story of Frankenstein, a clangor of church bells when we first see The Bride in her wedding gown, and an orchestra rush that heightens the already apocalyptic destruction of Frankenstein’s laboratory to utter hysteria.

4. The Night of the Hunter by Walter Schumann (1955)

Friday, June 10, 2011

A Golden Circle: Looking Back at the “Twin Peaks” Finale

*Warning: This must be where Spoilers go to die…


So little time passed between that golden era when Laura Palmer’s blue face smirked out of every magazine cover in America to the barely-on-the-radar “Twin Peaks” finale that first aired twenty years ago today. The story has been told countless times: ABC forced Mark Frost and David Lynch to reveal Laura’s killer earlier than they intended (i.e.: never), the viewers who so demanded that revelation tuned out as soon as it dropped early in the second season, ABC rescheduled and preempted the show so many times that real fans could barely keep track of when and whether or not it was on TV. Following an extended break after Josie Packard was left trapped in a wooden pull knob in the Great Northern Hotel, ABC allowed “Twin Peaks” to return briefly enough to finish out its second season while manacled in the ratings dungeon. ABC was so over “Twin Peaks” that the network crammed its final episodes into a two-hour “movie of the week” format just so it didn’t have to deal with the show another day. Some who worked on it, including David Lynch, claimed they weren’t sure whether or not “Twin Peaks” would be renewed for a third season, but it’s unlikely anyone involved was really that naïve. When Mark Frost directed the first-season finale, he purposely loaded the episode with so many cliffhangers that the network would have to renew it. The scheme was a clever one, but not realistic from a business stance. No network pours money into a program that isn’t pulling in viewers. “Twin Peaks” ended its first season as a hit, which guaranteed its renewal more surely than the notion that anyone at ABC cared to find out if Shelley Johnson and Catherine Martell survived the mill fire, if Ben Horne discovered his daughter was the masked prostitute at One Eyed Jacks, and who shot Agent Cooper.

Still, the “Twin Peaks” team tried that scheme again with the episode that would be the series’ last. Audrey Horne, Pete Martell, and Andrew Packard blow up in a bank explosion, their fates unknown. Nadine Hurley recovers from delusions that she’s a high school girl, leaving her relationship with teen Mike, and her husband’s with Norma Jennings, in uncertain shambles. Doc Hayward may or may not have murdered Ben Horne. And, most shattering of all, Agent Cooper is left under the influence of the demonic Killer BOB. That’s quite a lot of unfinished business, but the show’s abysmal ratings meant none of it would be resolved.


Writer Bob Engels has spoken quite a bit about where “Twin Peaks” might have headed in its phantom third season. He told the Twin Peaks Archive that it might have shifted “away from the high school setting, so after the resolution of the Cooper-BOB-possession plot point, they would have cut to something like ‘Ten Years Later’, and then shown us a Twin Peaks where Cooper had quit the FBI and had become the town pharmacist, Sheriff Truman had become a recluse, etc.” He also mentioned the possibility of bringing “Sheryl Lee back yet again, this time as a redhead, and having her character killed by BOB again.” No one else involved in the show has corroborated any of this.

The fact remains that there was no way ABC was going to bring back “Twin Peaks”, and that David Lynch had yet to begin toying with the idea of a feature-length sequel (or prequel, as it would turn out). One can reasonably surmise that everyone involved knew “Episode 29” would be the series’ last even before it was finished being scripted. So how does it hold up as such? Most of its cliffhangers discussed above end on an unsatisfying note—assuming one views the show as a soap opera in which no one is ever really dead. “Twin Peaks” had played that game before when Coop survived getting plugged three times and Catherine Martell finally emerged weeks after everyone believed she’d perished in the mill fire. The bizarre nature of Josie’s “demise” suggests she might have returned too. But most of the folks who were supposed to be dead stayed that way: Laura and Leland Palmer, Maddy Ferguson, Harold Smith, all three Renault Brothers, Blackie and her sister, etc. The fates of Audrey, Pete, Andrew, and Ben may very well have been tied up in the finale. It would certainly be farfetched to have everyone survive that bank explosion. Ben’s “death” is more ambiguous, but it certainly looks as though he is breathing his final breath and shuddering into oblivion after clunking his head on the Hayward’s fireplace.

This leaves us with the finale’s biggest shocker: Cooper left in the Red Room while his BOB-“possessed” (for lack of a better word) doppelgänger is free to roam Twin Peaks, and presumably, cause a lot of mischief. But think way back to Episode 2, which ends with Cooper’s famous dream in which we first glimpse BOB, the Red Room, and the rest of the phantasmagoria with which the show is associated. In this dream, Cooper is twenty-five years older. And what does Laura (or the spirit who resembles Laura) tell the agent during his disorienting trek through the Red Room in the series’ finale?
"I’ll see you in twenty five years."
While these two details do not clue us in to everything that transpires during that twenty-five years, they do give us a degree of closure on Cooper’s fate. In Twin Peaks, there is only the thinnest veil separating the dream world from the waking one. The bizarre characters that populate Cooper’s dream in Episode 2 eventually appear in the waking world. Messages he receives in his dreams relate to events yet to pass in the real world. Dreams are not mere nocturnal fancies; they relate tangibly and directly to waking life. The old Cooper we see in his dream really is Cooper, just as the Little Man from Another Place and the “dream Laura” really give him real clues about her murder that will manifest in the real world: Leland reveals that he is his daughter’s murderer (or the vessel that housed her actual murderer) when he repeats the Little Man’s strange statement, “That gum you like is going to come back in style”; the Little Man refers to the cousin who would be BOB’s next victim even before Cooper is aware that Maddy Ferguson exists.


According to this interpretation, “Twin Peaks” itself is a “golden circle,” just like the ring the Giant takes from Cooper, or MIKE and BOB’s “golden circle” of appetite and satisfaction. Cooper essentially begins the show in the Red Room, so it is inevitable he will end up there. Time is cyclical in the Twin Peaks world. But the situation is not so simple as to conclude that the Agent Cooper left waiting in the Red Room for twenty-five years is the “real” Coop and the one we see leering at his reflection in the Great Northern bathroom while cackling “How’s Annie?” is nothing more than an evil replica created by BOB. They are both Cooper. Like all of us, the heroic special agent is capable of good and bad. Remember, this seeming paragon of good had an affair with his former partner’s wife. Cooper’s two poles have split à la Jekyll and Hyde. As his new love, Annie Blackburn, will later explain, “The good Dale is in the Lodge, and he can’t leave.” Annie speaks these truths to Laura in what may be a dream, reinforcing the realness of dreams in the Twin Peaks world. That she speaks them in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which takes place before Laura dies, reinforces the looping nature of time in that world.

So the “Twin Peaks” finale does give us some idea of Agent Cooper’s future (as well as his past): his good self remains in the Red Room for twenty-five years, while his evil, BOB-possessed self continues to hunt in the outside world. That period could conclude with the Good Dale reemerging from the Red Room to defeat his evil twin. That, of course, we’ll never know. But as it stands, Episode 29 works fairly well as a series finale since it finally shows us how Cooper ended up languishing in the Red Room for twenty-five years: a mystery presented very early in the series, whether we viewers realized its importance or not.


We are also left with what may be network television’s most experimental and disturbing hour. Following a diffuse period in which characters and situations were becoming increasingly silly and meandering, David Lynch finally returned to set “Twin Peaks” back on track with reinvigorating confidence. The power of those early episodes leading up to the revelation of Laura’s killer is back. Episode 29 unravels with the slow queasiness of a nightmare (a Lynch trademark) as we see beloved characters dispatched mercilessly. Then there’s Cooper’s walk through the Red Room, which stands alongside his first dream of The Red Room (Episode 2) and the death of Maddy Ferguson (Episode 14) as one of the series’ most mesmerizing sequences. To a backdrop of sawing string bass, characters emerge from behind curtains and furniture to posit puzzles and threaten Cooper. Long lost Laura, Maddy, and Leland are back in various states of good and evil. Little Jimmy Scott materializes to croon a haunting torch song about the sycamores standing guard around the entrance to The Black Lodge, then disappears. Cooper comes face to face with Caroline Earle, the lost love about whom we’ve heard so much. She transforms into his new love, Annie, then into her own wicked husband, Windom. But as soon as we catch sight of Cooper’s own cataract-eyed doppelgänger lurching into the strobe light, we can already guess how all this will turn out. His pursuit of the Good Dale is terrifying. The resolution of that pursuit in the Great Northern bathroom is punishing, heartbreaking. Painful as it is to see our friend Cooper making a mockery of the good person we’d come to love throughout the previous 28 episodes (and pilot), there is comfort for viewers open-minded enough to experience the unfairly maligned Fire Walk With Me. We see the Good Dale once again, gabbing to his little tape recorder, chatting with his curmudgeonly buddy Albert Rosenfield, investigating, drinking coffee, being the old Cooper we all adore. In the end, we see him during his twenty-five year stint in the Red Room, as angelic as ever, guiding the Good Laura to a better world where she will finally be at peace. A happy ending for Coop, Laura, and “Twin Peaks”, because as Lynch informed us in his first film, he believes that “in heaven everything is fine.”


Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Review: 'Boris Karloff: More Than a Monster'

Boris Karloff would have hated Boris Karloff: More Than a Monster. The man who became a legend by portraying the Frankenstein Monster and the Mummy beneath pounds of movie makeup loathed nothing more than having his private life revealed. The two instances in Stephen Jacobs’s 500-page-plus biography in which Karloff allows his politesse to drop is when being ambushed on TV’s “This Is Your Life” and prodded by a tactless interviewer. Karloff’s intense privacy is all the more interesting and endearing considering the lack of skeletons in his closet. Nearly everyone of the countless colleagues and friends Jacobs quotes have nothing but effusive praise for the screen’s greatest villain. “A true gentleman” and “sweet” are repeated with such regularity that readers of the more common muck-raking biography might wonder why Jacobs even bothered chronicling Karloff’s life. His legions of fans will recognize that life was so rich and fascinating because it was so far removed from the creatures he played. Tremendously generous with his time, loyal, caring, and dignified, Karloff lived up to all the wonderful things people said about him. That innate kindness really shone through creeps like the Frankenstein Monster and the Mummy, making them deeply sympathetic and infinitely more complex than their heroic human costars.

Jacobs sets out to make More Than a Monster the definitive Karloff biography by including absolutely every scrap of information on the actor he could locate. Fans will be amazed by what he has uncovered, particularly the numerous correspondences with his brothers reproduced throughout the book. Sometimes the writer doesn’t know when to curtail himself. Pages and pages of reviews of plays and minor films in which Karloff appeared may cause some readers to start skimming. However, they will likely find the detailed chapters on the makings of his Frankenstein movies and Targets riveting. Such exhaustiveness— the riveting and the not-quite-as riveting—makes More Than a Monster an invaluable resource for all Karloff completists and future biographers. Too bad for them that this may be definitive enough to serve as the final word on this subject.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Review: Simon Pegg's 'Nerd Do Well'

Simon Pegg is the role model horror, sci-fi, and comedy geeks always craved. Less contemptuous of his fans than Bruce Campbell, Pegg is the ultimate geek hero because he is completely grateful for and humbled by his success with such stellar work as “Spaced”, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz. That humbleness pervades his memoir Nerd Do Well, although I’m not really sure why this is categorized as a memoir rather than an autobiography. I’ve always made the distinction that autobiographies are by famous people and memoirs are by unknown people who’ve been hooked on crack, abused in some way, or most commonly, both. Pegg is famous enough, and aside from a good deal of ganja puffing, there isn’t anything in the way of drug abuse in this book. Aside from his parents’ divorce, several teen heartbreaks, and one genuinely tragic event involving a boyhood friend, he seems to have lived a pretty happy, pretty charmed life.

Pegg often writes that he doesn’t really know why such a jolly story needs to be told. He’d rather be doing other things, like making up a cheeky sci-fi scenario starring his superhuman alter-ego and robot butler buddy that could easily have made a neat novel in itself, or delivering a thoughtful multi-chapter essay about his favorite movie, Star Wars. Pegg’s autobiographical vignettes aren’t always as interesting as his tangents, but his flawless writing and sincere amiability make every page enjoyable reading. Pegg knows a straight life-story narrative is no way to convey the geekiness that made him a cult hero. By showing us what he likes to do and talk about, what cracks him up, and what inspires him, he creates a complete, personal, and specific self-portrait. And like his best work on TV and film, it is breezy, often touching, and frequently hilarious fun. Pegg’s accounts of befriending his own heroes—George Romero, Gillian Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, John Landis, Rob Morrow—are delivered with geeky awe rather than name-dropping smarm. He is just as jazzed about meeting these people as anyone reading his book would be to meet him. Simon (I hope he doesn’t mind my assumption we’re on a first-name basis) never lets us forget he is one of us.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Charlie Watts's Ten Greatest Beats

Keith Richards may have recently spent nearly 550 pages grumbling about the prancing vocalist to his right, but only one Stone was terse enough to tell Mick Jagger “Don’t ever call me ‘your drummer’ again. You’re my fucking singer!” before giving him a face full of knuckles. That’s the kind of forthright might one should expect from Charlie Watts. He is equally brusque on drums, never overplaying or needlessly upstaging his cohorts, but like that famous punch, he isn’t above letting you know who’s really pulling Jagger’s strings every once in a while. The Charlie Watts Beat is as instantly recognizable as Ringo’s wash of hi-hat or Keith Moon’s thunderous chaos: never a hi-hat and snare played in unison, always a little behind the beat. Funky, loose but driving, the perfect compliment to Mick’s mercurial yowling and Keith’s sparse shades of strumming. Charlie Watts is The Rolling Stones’ “Man Behind the Curtain,” but in honor of his 70th birthday, we’re gonna yank that curtain down, shine a light on him, and groove to his ten greatest beats.


1. “Get Off Of My Cloud” (1965)

With “Get Off Of My Cloud”, Charlie Watts essentially does for the drums what Keith Richards did for the guitar on The Stones’ previous single, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”: he creates his instrument’s most instantly recognizable lick. The big difference is that iconic guitar riffs had been a Rock & Roll staple since Ike Turner choked out the boogie-woogie on “Rocket 88”. How many iconic drum beats had there been? “Peggy Sue” perhaps? “Bo Diddley” maybe? But even on those songs the drums served as backdrop for Holly and Diddley’s manic strumming. Right from the start of “Get Off Of My Cloud” we know who’s ruling the record. That purposeful thunder of semi-open hi-hat invaded by a lightning-bolt snare fill is to Rock & Roll drumming what “Once upon a time” is to storytelling.



2. “Paint It Black” (1966)

“Paint It Black” is a glorious testament to The Stones’ ensemble power. Everyone is delivering stellar work: Keith’s snaky guitar riff later echoed by Brian’s zingy sitar, Mick’s crimped inflections, Bill’s bass swoops that propel the track through its concluding dervish dance. But it is Charlie’s tom-tom pounding that inspired Melody Maker to swoon that he “creates a galloping beat suggesting high-speed elephants.” The powerful thumping Charlie muscles through the majority of the song is only topped by the simple yet shattering fill he discharges after the quiet mid-song break. A curt volley between toms and snare and the track is immediately thrust back into frenzied violence. Transcendent.


3. “My Obsession” (1967)

The potency of simplicity. As he did on “Get Off Of My Cloud”—and as he would do often throughout Between the Buttons—Charlie provides a track’s chief instrumental hook on “My Obsession”. Bass-snare-bass-snare-snare. When the sound evaporates at the end of each verse, the drummer ushers the band back in with a return to his ponderous solo like a nightmare that refuses to end. Only by killing it mid-beat is Charlie able to halt his obsession.


4. “Please Go Home” (1967)

Another Between the Buttons track gets its oomph from the man behind the kit. While Keith’s absurdly overdriven guitar doesn’t slack, it is Charlie’s “shave-and-a-haircut” jive that launches “Please Go Home” into the stratosphere. Punctuated only by the occasional gong-like cymbal crash, the beat never relents or alters, and the listener’s heart never stops racing until that final wave of guitar shudders into the shadows.


5. “Complicated” (1967)

Charlie gets even funkier on “Complicated”. Once again, he provides the hook, a hypnotic cha-cha-cha that expands into an unbreakable roll by the end of the track. There’s something very cheeky about his shifts into a Ringo Starr-like wash on the verses.


6. “2000 Man” (1967)

Here’s where words fail me. I’m not a drummer, so I can’t really explain what Charlie is doing in this song. I’m guessing most drummers couldn’t either. As Keith picks out a fairly conventionally rhythmic folk melody on his acoustic, Charlie trips the beat into disorienting psychedelia (or is it prog rock?) with his syncopations, keeping the beat moving with his hippity-hoppity bass drum but landing the snare where you’d least expect it. On first listen, his beat sounds completely out of place and distracting. After the third or fourth listen, you couldn’t imagine “2000 Man” without it. And just in case you’re concerned that Charlie has succumbed to some sort of massive psychedelic head trauma, he lays down his familiar funk on the mid-section to remind us he is still well capable of kicking out a basic beat.


7. “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968)

Mick and Keith did not provide Charlie with a lot of material requiring Latin rhythms, so hearing him samba as naturally as Tito Puente on “Sympathy for the Devil” is kind of shocking. He gets the intricate rhythm jingling from the opening seconds. When Rocky Dijon on congas and Bill Wyman on cabasa join in, the voodoo ritual is in full effect. Add in Mick’s screams and Keith’s tortured guitar shrieks and jittery bass, and you have one of the most rhythmically exhilarating Rock & Roll tracks ever cut.


8. “Honky Tonk Women” (1969)

No Latin flourishes here. No tricky syncopations or signature hooks. “Honky Tonk Women” is where Charlie lays down the archetypal Charlie beat, and this list would be incomplete without such an example. A few insouciant clicks from Jimmy Miller’s cowbell then Charlie thuds in slightly behind the beat, as is his way. He then propels the tempo without pushing it, barely altering the beat throughout the track’s three minutes. Notice how consistent the drums remain even as the brass, guitars, and bass approach euphoria on the instrumental break. Then when all instruments and voices cut loose on the grand finale, swooping and diving around each other like asteroids, Charlie trips up his beat a bit for emphasis, but doesn’t hit harder, doesn’t really go out of his way to up the intensity because he doesn’t need to. “Honky Tonk Women” is a sublime example of the drummer’s taste and his ability to lead the show from the back row. And you can dance to it.


9. “Moonlight Mile” (1971)

Perhaps the most gorgeous song in The Stones’ catalogue is also one of the band’s most deceptively powerful ones. Gentle acoustic guitars and piano provide a velvet backdrop to Mick’s sensitive vocal. Charlie rolls in with what sounds like soft mallets, creating cinematic flourishes redolent of crashing waves. He never breaks into standard bass-snare interplay. Rather he washes and booms and tumbles his way through the track, providing its exhilarating might, driving Mick to wails that ring with greater sincerity than the mass of his vocals. “Moonlight Mile” suggests that Charlie may have missed his calling as a great movie director.



10. “Time Waits for No One” (1974)

Charlie’s rhythm on “Time Waits for No One” is just as visual as his work on “Moonlight Mile”, cracking a rim shot that instantly conjures images of a grand, looming clock even before Jagger begins decrying the stoic cruelty of time. When the guitars flood in, he releases all of his signatures: the lax beat, the cinematic rolls, the Latin off beats, the simple yet mighty tom fills. By the end of the track, he’s back to tick-tocking, leading this epic out toward infinity.


Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Psychobabble’s 200 Essential Horror Movies Part 4: The 1950s

In this feature, Psychobabble creeps through 100 years of horror cinema to assemble a highly personal list of the genre’s 200 most monstrous works, decade by decade.


(Updated in September 2021)


45. Invaders from Mars (1953- dir. William Cameron Menzies)

By the 1950s, Gothic horror had been all but stamped out in America. The increasingly schlocky films Universal was churning out, as well as “poverty row” studios such as Monogram and Republic, have a certain charm but don’t compare to their thirties predecessors. World War II had left most folks with enough real horror to last their lifetimes. The fifties began with a gasp (“Good lord!”) as E.C. Comics seemed ripe to pick up where cinema left off with its beloved horror titles Tales from the CryptThe Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear. Upping the level of gore and delicious bad taste of cinematic horror, these comics were squelched almost as soon as they were born during the absurdly alarmist hearings by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. However, science fiction, especially that which pushed “American” (cough... anti-communist... choke) values, was A-okay.

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