(Updated in September 2021)
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 Crypt, The 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.
Invaders from Mars is basically a precursor to Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which the alien replicas are really, really nasty and a little boy fills the Kevin McCarthy role. After 13-year-old David Maclean (Jimmy Hunt) sights a U.F.O. during a late-night thunderstorm, his family and friends start acting funny. David suspects that mom and dad are no longer mom and dad, but only astronomer Dr. Blake (Helena Carter) takes his concerns seriously. Soon the expected intergalactic (cough, cough...communist) plot comes to light.
William Cameron Menzies’s penultimate picture has its intense moments, but its artificiality prevents it from being very frightening (though period reviews indicate that 1950s audiences felt otherwise). Blatantly phony sets and richer- than-reality Cinecolor make for delectable eye candy, and with its young hero, Invaders from Mars plays as a sort of Body Snatchers for juvenile matinee crowds. An endless pseudo-science lesson sequence causes the film’s center to sag, but Invaders manages to get back in orbit with a war-of-the-worlds finale masterminded by a mutant squid-man living in a snow globe. Yahoo! Raoul Kraushaar’s score, which appropriates bits of Holst’s The Planets, is phenomenal. Look out for a fleeting cameo by June Cleaver!
With mounting fears of nuclear war kidnapping imaginations in the fifties, Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster started to seem as non-threatening as Abbott and Costello. This did not mean that the public had its fill of monsters; it just meant the new sci-fi monsters were of a different sort than the Universal creeps of old. Ants and spiders made monstrous by atomic energy were the latest purveyors of nightmares, though they hardly possessed the personalities or appeal of the humanoid monsters they replaced. However, Universal still had one more bipedal beast in its menagerie.
Enter the Gill Man, not a product of the nuclear age, but an ancient evolutionary false start, a mutant missing link between fish and humans. Despite the creature’s scientific, rather than supernatural, origin, he’s as sympathetic and tragic as Imhotep or Larry Talbot. He’s perfectly content swimming around in his lagoon, minding his own business, and being gruesome. Then a boatload of meddling ichthyologists come along, flick their cigarette butts into his home, and scheme to drag him out of the Amazon and off to a lab in the States.
Revisionist critics often read The Creature from the Black Lagoon as an ecological statement, although it’s pretty unlikely that Jack Arnold wanted to do anything but scare the dungarees off matinee audiences in glorious 3-D. Hans Salter’s score is grating, but the deadly Amazon, where everything is a “killer,” is a setting every bit as atmospheric as the Gothic castles in the Universal pictures of yore. The underwater photography is as gorgeous as Millicent Patrick’s creature design is dazzling.
While the Gill Man was terrorizing American kids, a bigger, badder scaly menace was rising from the waves off the Japanese coast. The monster’s incubator was Toho, a production company that had most recently produced Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. Tojo’s latest picture would almost instantly make it as synonymous with awful beasts as Universal is. Unlike the Gill Man, Gojira—or Godzilla, as the Yanks renamed him—was a product of nuclear energy, specifically the hydrogen bomb tests that awoke him from hibernation in the depths of the Pacific.
Anyone who grew up with the full-color schlock fests in which Godzilla stomped Tokyo while wrestling giant moths and lobsters will be shocked by his eponymous debut. This is a moody, black and white requiem that draws some pretty explicit correlations between the horrible destruction Gojira wreaks on Odo Island and the horrible destruction America rained down on Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a decade earlier. The victims of Gojira’s radiation breath are shown reeling on row after row of hospital cots in a scene directly inspired by the aftermath of the hydrogen bomb detonation that ended World War II. Gojira is the most depressing fifties sci-fi film, a reality overshadowed by an endless string of silly sequels. The original is a sad and angry invective hailing from a country that still had much to be sad and angry about. Gojira was recut for the American market with Raymond Burr awkwardly edited into the picture and the tragic implications muted. The original cut is the only way to view the film that established Japan as
Great Britain would never be known as a major exporter of science fiction cinema. BBC TV was a different story. A pioneer precursor of future favorites such as Dr. Who, The Prisoner, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Torchwood was The Quatermass Experiment. The six-episode serial used the British space programme as a launching pad for a tale of an alien that infiltrates a crashed rocket. Professor Bernard Quatermass (a supremely surly and unlikable Brian Donlevy) leads the search for runaway astronaut Victor Carroon (a sensitive yet intense Richard Wordsworth), who is possessed by an alien bent on spewing spores into the atmosphere capable of exterminating all life on Earth.
The show was a big hit in 1953, so two years later a British studio known for its cheap “quota quickies” brought the series to the big screen in a bid for quick cash. Hammer Studios took its first major step into the horrific with The Quatermass Xperiment, so retitled to exploit the X-rating the film earned for its shocking level of gore. Indeed it is more gruesome than anything that would appear in America prior to splatter-king Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast in 1963. Carroon leaves a trail of mutilated corpses as he lumbers to Westminster Abbey where he will complete his transformation into a giant octopus monster and unleash his deadly spores.
The Quatermass Xperimentis technically science fiction, with its rockets, astronauts, space programmes, and aliens. The E.C.-style gore, Carroon’s monstrous deeds, and his increasingly monstrous appearance are pure horror. His encounter with a girl played by a very young Jane Asher is an obvious nod to Frankenstein, as his ultimate destination of a major landmark is a cap-tip toKing Kong.The Quatermass Xperimentis a thrilling and smart flick that should appeal to sci-fi and horror freaks alike, but its historical value is monumental, prepping Hammer’s coming domination of horror cinema, as well as bracing viewers for all the blood and entrails the studio would soon show them in ghastly full color.
49. The Night of the Hunter (1955- dir. Charles Laughton)
Adapted very faithfully from the novel by Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunteris indicative of how American cinema assimilated non-sci-fi horror during the fifties. This is not a traditional supernatural horror film, although it is hardly realistic. It isn’t a precursor to the serial killer films Psycho would soon spark, although the villain is a serial killer. Scares are not its sole aim, although it is scary and in a variety of ways, discharging creepy suspense, threats of violence, startling shocks, and quietly haunting images.
If there is a precursor to this thoroughly unique film it is the grim fairy tales some parents unwisely tell their children at bedtime. Young Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce are Hansel and Gretel, orphaned siblings adrift in nature, hunted by Robert Mitchum’s Big Bad Wolf. Lillian Gish is Mother Goose, swooping in to protect the children beneath her guiding wings. Director Charles Laughton makes these connections explicit when having Mitchum howl like an animal after Gish wounds him and showing geese trail after Gish when we first meet her. Like “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Hansel and Gretel”, and the rest, The Night of the Hunter may disturb children, but it might also enchant them with its moments of fairy tale innocence, particularly the famed riverboat-escape sequence, which may be cinema’s most magical.
Because The Night of the Hunter is such a jarring union of childlike wonder and adult themes—Mitchum’s Henry Powell is a preacher whose sexual disgust drives him to murder women—it had trouble pleasing critics and finding audiences. Further trouble arrived when officious religious groups protested the film because of its depiction of a killer preacher, while completely ignoring the fact that the film’s heroine is a saintly Bible quoter. Perhaps such groups did not appreciate the complexity of Gish’s Rachel Cooper, who does not castigate her oldest charge after discovering that the girl has been sneaking out to fool around with men but responds with understanding and sympathy. Whatever the reason, a minority of viewers appreciated The Night of the Hunter during its initial run. Time, of course, has been gracious to Laughton’s film and it is now regarded as an absolute classic. That he never directed another film makes it all the more precious.
Just when the Universal horror tradition seemed dead in the ground after ten years of spoofy, schlocky sequels and monster rallies (albeit absurdly fun spoofy, schlocky sequels and monster rallies), a new monster came lurching from the depths to give it a last gasp.The Creature from the Black Lagoonwas so successful because it conflated the horror tropes of old (sympathetic, romantic, iconic monster doomed by small-minded, selfish humans) with the new brand of sci-fi (non-Gothic setting; non-supernatural explanation for the creature’s existence). Because the Gill Man is so much worthier of our care than all the aliens and giant bugs of his generation, audiences wanted to reconnect with him after his— no hyperbole here— tragic death at the end of Black Lagoon.
Of course, no bankable monster is ever really dead, and just one year later we learned the Gill Man had survived his first adventure and was now ready to star in his second. Coupled with its predecessor, Revenge of the Creature plays a bit like a remake of King Kong. Black Lagoon updates Kong’s Skull Island sequence; Revenge puts a new twist on the amok-in-Manhattan portion. The Gill Man wouldn’t have much to do in the big city, so he is relocated from hisAmazonian home to a Florida marine park instead. There he is shackled, gawked at, and zapped with an electrified prodder to keep him in line. Like Kong, the Gill Man makes off with the human object of his desire (Lori Nelson subbing for Julia Adams) and meets his (temporary) end in time for the final credits.
Along with the chance to spend more time with one of our favorite monsters, Revenge of the Creature provides the pleasure of seeing him raise hell in a totally new environment. Fifties movie goers got the additional thrill of seeing him do his thing in 3-D, though the picture is probably a lot more enjoyable without having to endure the eye strain and headaches that come with that format. A few decades later, Revenge of the Creature would basically be remade as the execrable Jaws 3-D, highlighting the importance of a charismatic monster.
The same year The Quatermass Xperiment was taking over movie theaters, Jack Finney published The Body Snatchers, another tale of outer-space invaders bent on taking over the Earth by taking over human bodies. The scares in Quatermass are firmly rooted in the shocking monster movie tradition. As realized for the screen as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Finney’s story plays harder on the psyche. It is the ultimate paranoiac thriller.
Coming during an era of intense fear on both ends of the political spectrum, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its alien pod people were inevitably viewed as metaphors for both communism and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crazed actions to root out communists in the U.S. By all accounts, neither Finney nor director Don Siegel had any such ideas when making the film, which works perfectly without a political agenda. The dead-eyed replicas are considerably more frightening than any of the decade’s more monstrous creations. One would never expect to meet anything as outlandish as Godzilla or the Gill Man in real life, but seeing the husk of a loved one flushed of all free will, consciousness, and humanity is not completely beyond possibility, and therefore, far more disturbing. Siegel orchestrates the tempo masterfully, building to the frenzied climax in which the formerly composed Dr. Bennell rushes through traffic shouting at motorists—and most terrifyingly, at the audience directly — “You’re next! You’re next!” This tragic finale is made more tragic by Allied Artists Picture’s insistence on a tacked-on epilogue that undercuts the more powerful, pessimistic ending Siegel and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring intended. Do yourself a favor and turn off the film as soon as Bennell tells you you’re next. Though that unfortunate addition weakens Invasion of the Body Snatchers, nothing can diminish its influence on the similar flights of paranoia that emerged in its wake, from Rosemary’s Baby to The Stepford Wives to The Omen to its own remakes.
In Paris (where everyone speaks Italian), a killer who exsanguinates victims is on the loose. An old woman who hides her face behind a curtain of scary veils is pulling the strings.
That detective plot will be fairly predictable for anyone familiar with the Elizabeth Bathory myth, but I Vampiri doesn’t depend too much on its hoary script. The film takes wing with neat nods to Dracula and Frankenstein; Roman Vlad’s fab score, which breaks out the Theremin at just the right moment; superb use of the transformation effects Rouben Mamoulian pioneered in Jekyll and Hyde; and some of the most marvelous sets I’ve ever seen in any film.
I Vampiri achieved its greatest historical significance when director Ricardo Freda scuffled with the picture’s producers and quit twelve days into the shoot. Into the director’s chair came the film’s cinematographer. Kismet. Mario Bava completed the picture with bravura style, his eye for shadows and the macabre a perfect fit for Italy’s first sound horror film. Bava would go on to better things, but I Vampiri remains a commendable start to a fruitful strain of Gothic nightmares.
The Quatermass Xperiment was successful, but it wasn’t the film that made Hammer synonymous with horror. Almost two years of non-horror fare passed before that landmark film arrived. Like Quatermass, Hammer’s reimagining of Frankenstein put more bloody flesh on the screen than audiences were used to at the time, but it did so without masquerading as science fiction and in shocking color. The Curse of Frankenstein is capital-H Horror. It also fully established the conventions fans would soon associate with Hammer: excessive blood, exploitative sexuality, and source material with roots in Universal horror. Terence Fisher’s remake arrived just a few months shy of the 25th anniversary of Whale’s original, but the new film could hardly be called a respectful homage. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster makes his film great by jettisoning much of what made Whale’s great. Frankenstein was a poetic, deeply humane portrait of a monstrous innocent driven to horrendous acts after being abandoned by his equally sympathetic creator. The Curse of Frankenstein is a portrait of cruelty. Focus shifts away from the Monster and onto the doctor, who is more villainous than any horror character since Mamoulian’s Hyde, and like Hyde, he is not without his charms because he is played with electrifying gusto. Peter Cushing is great in the title role, magnetic even as he murders a kindly houseguest, launches into megalomaniacal rants, or torments the maid with whom he’s having an affair. Christopher Lee is fine but makes a lesser impact as the Monster because gets a minimum of screen time and a minimum of the complexities Whale and Karloff showered on their Monster. Humanity and complexity are not on the agenda here. Its utter cynicism, undiluted by an Invasion of the Body Snatchers- style disclaimer, can be felt in many horror films to follow. Typical of a Hammer Horror, critics loathed The Curse of Frankenstein but audiences loved it, and its international success confirmed the studio as the new generation’s Universal and Cushing and Lee as its Karloff and Lugosi.
Ray Harryhausen is the most famous special effects artist who ever lived—the only one who inevitably gets billed above directors in moviegoers’ hearts and minds. The film that changed his life was King Kong, and he spent his life improving upon Willis O’Brien’s already excellent stop-motion effects for that picture. Harryhausen came closest to making his own Kong—the character— with the family-fantasy-gone-ape Mighty Joe Young. He came closest to making King Kong—the film—with 20 Million Miles to Earth. Its giant monster even ends the picture by climbing an iconic structure, with the Coliseum of Rome standing in for the Empire State Building.
But like Mighty Joe Young (the character), the monster of 20 Million Miles to Earth is a heart warmer—an intergalactic hulk who just wants to feel safe and loved but constantly finds himself on the business end of fear and aggression because he looks scary (imagine the Kraken from Harryhausen’s Clash of the Titans with two arms instead of four and legs instead of flippers) and because he has the admittedly unsettling habit of growing from homunculus-size to Gulliver- proportions in just a few days due to an adverse reaction to the Earth’s atmosphere.
So the Ymir, as Harryhausen named his creation, is not just a scaly King Kong. He also shares DNA with the Frankenstein Monster, Godzilla, and even Superman. Although Bob Williams and Christopher Knopf’s screenplay is careful to convey that the Ymir only attacks when provoked, he is still presented as a classic horror monster, lunging at the film’s shrieking cast from the shadows, his beady eyes peering beneath a permanently furrowed brow.
Jacques Tourneur drifts the dark shadows that distinguished his work with Val Lewton overNight of the Demon. This British adaptation of M.R. James’s “Casting the Runes” is one of the earliest to touch on the touchy subject of Satanism. James based his villain on Aleister Crowley, the self-styled occultist and huckster whom the tabloid John Bull labeled “the most wicked man in the world” (reports of Crowley’s wickedness are actually bit overstated; he was mostly guilty of being callous, druggy, and full of shit).
Night of the Demon differs from the documentary Häxan and thrillers such as The Black Cat and Lewton’s own The Seventh Victim by presenting its satanic subject matter as unambiguously supernatural. This isn’t a bad thing, but the demon studio execs insisted on showcasing is a pretty phony looking prop resembling the offspring of King Kong and King Ghidorah. Many argue that the creature is more effective in its incarnation as a flying ball of smoke, though the great horned demon makes Night of the Demon far more satisfying as a monster movie.
In any event, the beast receives little screen time, and Tourneur executes the plot sandwiched between its two appearances superbly. American Dr. Holden (Dana Andrews) arrives in Britain for a conference to discover his colleague has been killed, which leads him to the insidious yet charming Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), who entertains children as a clown-faced magician and whips up an impromptu windstorm for kicks. Karswell flares the suspense level when he tells Dr. Holden the exact time of his death— which will come to pass unless he calls off his investigation into his colleague’s death. Atmospheric, inventive, and entertaining, Night of the Demon is a neat missing link between Lewton’s subtle horrors and the more monstrous movies lurching out of Hammer studios. But beware Curse of the Demon, the U.S. drive-in edit that loses fourteen essential minutes, including Holden’s chilling meeting with a clan of farm folk and portions of a bizarre and pretty hilarious séance.
Significantly, Hammer’s two big monster movies coincided with a burgeoning monster revival sweeping kid culture in the late fifties. In the U.S., the syndicated Shock Theater movie-package program gave a new generation of TV viewers its first taste of Universal’s classic horror. Forrest J. Ackerman capitalized on the craze and fueled it further with his Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Like the Mummy, the iconic monsters had laid dormant for a long spell, but a few conjuring words from Forry, horror hosts such as Zacherley and Vampira, and Hammer’s chief screenwriter Jimmy Sangster were enough to bring them back from the dead. Their young legion of followers, now known affectionately as “Monster Kids,” guaranteed these creeps would never be out of the pop cultural floodlights again.
Back in the States, science fiction continued to reign as a more acceptable alternative to Gothic or supernatural horror. Yet some sci-fi started resembling the horror films of old. The Fly is essentially an old-fashioned mad scientist picture not too far removed from Frankenstein, although it may not have had such high production values had it slipped out without its sci-fi designation. Director Kurt Neumann’s use of Cinemascope and Color by Deluxe makes most other sci-fi thrillers look cheap. The Fly is as lush as a Douglas Sirk film, and its melodramatic, tragic take on romance, as well as its tiered structure, also suggest a monster movie made by the king of “women’s pictures.” Screenwriter James Clavell develops George Langelaan’s original short story into a clever three-act play: Act I is a murder mystery, Act II a passage of sci-fi techno-drama, and Act III a scary monster movie. Its structure saves The Fly, which is talky and short on creature screen time, from ever feeling static. The search for a mysterious white- headed fly tethers the film together and sets up the infamously disturbing denouement. Neumann and his fine cast wring real emotion out of the search, though everyone seems unaffected by the tragic events they experienced in the strangely cheerful epilogue. American horror still had a way to go before becoming as steely as its British counterpart.
58. House on Haunted Hill (1959- dir. William Castle)
In the final year of the 1950s, major Hollywood studios still seemed convinced pure horror was dead. With the continued reign of science fiction, they were perfectly happy to leave the monsters and mausoleums to the Brits and Z-grade American studios. Such blinkered attitudes meant the big studios were missing out on the new horror fascination spreading amongst kids hooked on Famous Monstersand Shock Theater. The Monster Kids were eager to spend their quarters on anything remotely resembling the old movies they’d been catching on late-night TV, and if the majors weren’t going to capitalize on that interest, then low-budget entrepreneurs like Samuel Z. Arkoff, Roger Corman, and the former William Schloss were more than happy to.
Translating his last name from the German “Schloss” into English, William Castle might have seemed the most exploitative of the new B-horror kings. The flimsy plastic skeletons and grue make-up proliferating his movies weren’t nearly as flimsy as the gimmicks he employed to sell them. To publicize his Macabre, Castle took out an alleged $1,000 life insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London in the event any kiddies dropped dead of fright while watching the less-than- frightening flick. For his next picture he developed the exotic sounding effect “Emergo”— an inflatable skeleton dangled over the audience during a key point in House on Haunted Hill. Did the kids in the audience feel cheated by the effect’s chintziness? Adults witnessing them tossing their popcorn boxes at the crappy skeleton probably would have said, “Yes.” But those kids were having a ball. Castle’s gimmicks were silly (even as the later “Percepto” and “Illusion-O” did indicate greater levels of ambition and imagination), yet they helped drum up interest and engage audiences in movies that were pretty damn interesting and engaging already.
House on Haunted Hill is Castle’s best: corny (the “spend a night in a haunted house to win a fortune” plot), visually inventive (Elisha Cook’s floating-head prologue; the “living rope” sequence), and effectively scary (the classic “witch on roller skates” shocker). Most of all, House on Haunted Hill is great fun. The fact that his gimmicks were so memorable is a testament to Castle’s abilities as a showman; the film itself is a testament to his abilities as a B-movie craftsman. None of this was lost on Alfred Hitchcock when he started crafting the horror movie that would define the next decade.
House on Haunted Hill also solidified Vincent Price as the most important and delightfully magnetic American horror star of his day, and his urbane, camp presence would enliven many of the best (and a few of the worst) horror movies of the next two decades.
Hammer stuck close to formula with its final horror of the fifties by remaking Universal’s successor to Dracula and Frankenstein. Cushing, Lee, Sangster, and Fisher all return for The Mummy, which actually has more in common with the mediocre sequel The Mummy’s Tomb than the 1932 Karloff vehicle. This is not one of Sangster’s cleverest scripts, but Lee gets to upstage costar Cushing for the first time. Spending much of the movie wrapped in dirty bandages, his face caked in Egyptian mud, Lee is still more sympathetic as lovelorn Kharis than he was in his earlier monster roles. He also gets some face time and dialogue during a lavish, 13-minute sequence reimagining the mummification scene from the original Mummy, though without reaching similar heights of claustrophobia- inducing terror. Unfortunately, that face-time also involved brown-face makeup as British Lee attempts to portray an Egyptian man. Approach with caution.
The greatest triumph of The Mummy is that of Fisher, cinematographer Jack Asher, and their brilliant art department. The team’s use of colored lights, painted backdrops, spectacular costumes and props, and sets cluttered with detail make the whole picture look like a canvass thick with the full spectrum of oils. The Mummy was Hammer’s first horror film to receive some positive critical notices, but its appeal was certainly most obvious to young monster enthusiasts. The horror genre, however, was about to grow up during a decade of near constant upheaval and violence.
