20 Things You May Not Have Known About Mary Shelley

215 years ago today, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was born. 19 years later she’d give birth to horror’s most notorious —or should I say beloved?— monster. We all know that much, but here are twenty other things you may not have known about Mary Shelley.

Psychobabble’s 200 Essential Horror Movies Part 10: The 2010s

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)

175. Black Swan (2010- dir. Darren Aronofsky)

The Psychobabble Movie Challenge: 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me' (1992)

Mike:

While running Psychobabble from 2009 through 2011, I occasionally moonlighted over at my good friend Jeffrey Dinsmore’s site Awkward Press.com. Together we played amateur Siskels and Eberts, sifting through classic and not-so-classic movies in a feature we called The Awkward Movie Challenge. Precisely 16 months after our farewell analysis of The Lost Boys, Jeffrey and I are resuming the challenge here on Psychobabble to take a twentieth anniversary look at David Lynch’s big screen prequel to his small screen cult classic “Twin Peaks”.

One of the reasons I called on Jeffrey’s help for this piece is because I’ve written about Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me quite a lot on this site, particularly in last year’s 120 150 Essential Horror Movies. Since Jeffrey has not pored over this movie as much as I have, I figured he’d bring a fresh perspective to it and save me a lot of typing. I also figured that if he hates the movie, which is one of my favorites, I’d finally have a concrete excuse to murder him, which is something I’ve been plotting for a good decade or so.

So I now hand you faithful Psychobabble readers over to Jeffrey Dinsmore. Take it, Jeffrey:

Jeffrey:

“Twin Peaks”, the TV series, debuted a week before my 15th birthday. At that age, Blue Velvet had already knocked A Clockwork Orange out of the top spot on my all-time favorite movies list, a position it retains to this day. Yes, my parents should be in jail, and at least half of them already are. But that’s a discussion topic for another time.

Point being, when I heard David Lynch was doing a TV series, it was as exciting to me as some dumb sporto thing would have been to a normal 14 year-old boy. I was hooked from episode one: the gorgeous visuals, the otherworldly dialogue, the absurd humor, the terror, the mystery: everything I loved about Lynch’s movies had been distilled into one magnificent package for the small screen. And better yet, it was going to be there every single week!

During the initial run of “Twin Peaks”, I only missed a single episode, due to an eighth grade school band “concert” in which I was one of eight “drummers” smashing the same cacophonous rhythm on a snare (I'm pretty sure everyone involved probably would have been better off if I’d just stayed home and watched “TP”). I read and loved The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. And when the movie was released, I was one of approximately seventeen people in the state of Michigan who rushed out to see it.

I had not revisited the film until Mr. Psychobabble asked me to lend some street cred to this cash grab he calls a website. Let me start by acknowledging that, although I consider myself a fan, I am not the expert on “Twin Peaks” that our beloved host is. I have seen the entire series through maybe twice, the first season maybe a couple more times than that. I haven’t watched any of it in about three years, and when I rewatched the film, I was hoping to approach it as a stand-alone film without letting my knowledge of the series intrude upon my analysis.

Sadly, I set myself up for an impossible task. Fire Walk With Me simply doesn’t work as a self-contained film. It wasn’t made for the fans, although true fans will certainly find a lot to enjoy about it. It wasn’t made to convert any new fans to the “Twin Peaks” franchise (although it probably did its part to repel a few). This movie was made for one reason and one reason only: because David Lynch wanted to spend more time in the world of Twin Peaks.

In fact, from the very first moment of the film, Lynch does everything he can to poke fun at the fair-weather fans and critics who initially embraced and then quickly turned against his groundbreaking, if occasionally meandering series. The opening credits play over fuzzed-out TV static. When the credits are over, we pull out of the static to reveal a TV … which is immediately smashed with an ax. Although I realize it can be a fool’s errand to assign specific intention to Lynch’s films, I can’t help but see this sequence as a great, big, glorious "fuck you" to anyone who came to the theater expecting to have all their “Twin Peaks” questions answered. The picture seems fuzzy? How does it look after I smash the TV?

A few minutes later, Lynch further mocks the need for answers that fueled the series backlash. Agent Chet Desmond (Chris Isaak) is called in by Lynch’s character Gordon Cole to investigate the murder of one Teresa Banks. In a hilarious sequence, Cole introduces Desmond to his “mother’s sister’s girl,” Lil, who does a bizarre chicken-legged dance. In the following scene, Desmond describes the symbolic meaning of every aspect of Lil’s dance and appearance, from her “sour face” to her hand movements to her clothing. Desmond becomes the pre-Internet “Twin Peaks” fan boy who parses every frame of his videotape to find the answers to mysteries that Lynch always intended to remain unsolved.

The remainder of the film opening is both entirely memorable and totally incomprehensible. Harry Dean Stanton shows up as the owner of a trailer park where Banks used to live; soon after that, Desmond finds a mysterious ring and disappears. Kyle McLachlan’s Agent Cooper makes a brief appearance in a strange sequence featuring David Bowie. Aside from two recurring characters, the entire opening forty minutes of the film have so little to do with the TV show that it seems as if Lynch is doing everything in his power to push the audience out of the theater. Mystery is piled upon mystery, until we flash forward one year later to (finally!) spend some time with America’s sweetheart, Laura Palmer.

Review: 'A Very Irregular Head: The Life of Syd Barrett'

Syd Barrett fans tend to fall into one of two camps. There are those who have a genuine appreciation for the innovative, imaginative music he created as both the short-lived leader of Pink Floyd and an even more impulsive solo artist. Then there are those who worship him as some sort of loony-toony acid guru known to hail airplanes as if they were checkered cabs and mash a homemade tonic of Brylcreem and Mandrax into his obligatory Hendrix perm. The latter fan will likely be disappointed by A Very Irregular Head: The Life of Syd Barrett. Despite its title, Rob Chapman’s biography is anything but a sensationalized trot through crazy old Syd’s craziest moments. Quite the opposite, in fact. As a fan who has absolutely nothing but respect for Syd-the-artist, Chapman makes his goal to debunk the most outrageous Syd myths, including the infamous Brylcreem and Mandrax tall tale, which despite being completely devoid of evidence, has been repeated so many times it is taken as face-value truth by many biographers.

Chapman’s Syd is a human being, not an acid-guzzling comic book character. He is a serious painter with serious talent, who also displayed a flair for music, had a go at it while it suited his interests, and largely walked away because he couldn’t deal with pop stardom any longer. Yes, our author acknowledges that his subject developed mental problems, and he discusses them with neutrality that does not make any sweeping, doomed-to-fail diagnoses about the cause. Was Syd the textbook “acid casualty?” Was he schizophrenic? Chapman doesn’t pretend to know because, well, no one does. He sticks to the facts, which he researched with precision and a knack for weeding out the bullshit. The end result is a story that may not produce a bunch of wild new tales to titillate the ghouls but may comfort the true fans because Syd’s life was not quite as sad or tragic as the most sensational biographers would have us believe.

Psychobabble’s 20 Greatest Singles of 1957!

The training wheels were off Rock & Roll for good by 1957. Parents, teachers, priests, and politicians deemed Rock & Roll dangerous enough to inspire its most impassioned defenses. It started developing beyond its blues base into fascinating new territory. And all the founding fathers were in full swing: Elvis, Buddy, Chuck, Larry, Jerry Lee, and Little all making some of their definitive records. 1957 is Rock & Roll, and these are 20 of its rockingest rockers.

20. “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” by Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers

By 1957, Rock & Roll had its grip on America’s youth sufficiently enough that its supposed detrimental effects had become common knowledge. It made kids horny, violent, disrespectful little criminals. A nation of teenage werewolves. With that came some impassioned defenses from the Rock & Rollers who bashed out this heinous new form of “music.” In the case of “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” by 15-year old Frankie Lymon, it came from an actual teen too. His call for his fellow youngsters to “stay out of trouble” is weepily sincere, but Lymon’s tragic true story told a different tale.


19. “The Monster” by Billy Ford and the Thunderbirds

Frankie Lymon’s doo-wop plea is lovely, but it’s not the most defiant stance. Billy Ford and the Thunderbird’s (soon to transform into the soul duo Billy & Lillie) “The Monster” is another beast entirely. “I’m the monster Rock & Roll” he growls, threatening that everything you moms and dads fear about your kids’ music is true, true, true. The louder the critics complain, the harder he rocks. Try cutting off his head, and two will grow in its place. As his young fans grow up, they’ll still love him and worship him as a king. That every one of Ford’s monstrous assertions would come true shows that parents really did have something to fear in Rock & Roll. Hail, hail the monster!


18. “Pink Champagne” by The Tyrones

Rock & Roll is dumb, inarticulate, a bad influence that appeals to its fans’ basest instincts. Yeah, so what’s your point? Down some booze, whip your hair and hips to the out-of-control, endlessly modulating mania of The Tyrones’ “Pink Champagne”. “Wine! Wine! Wine!” the boys shout in unison to a raunch-o-la sax wail. The track may begin with a list of all the ways pink champagne wrecked the singers’ lives, but their cheery delivery and chug-a-lug chant speaks a lot louder. Get drunk, get crazy. Rock & Roll’s essence served up in long-stemmed crystal.


17. “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors

10 Non-Horror Movies That Think They're Horror Movies

We expect monsters and suspense and shocks and disturbing images when we watch horror movies. They’re all part of the gravestone-littered territory. But what happens when such elements creep into dramas and crime pictures and kiddie-flicks and musicals and sci-fi spectaculars and pseudo documentaries? They may get under our skin even more assuredly because they don’t belong; they’re wrong, and horror has always drawn much of its power from showing us very wrong things. Thus some of the scariest movies are not horror movies at all, but movies that apparently think they’re horror movies. Here are ten of the most horrifying.

1. The Curse of the Cat People (1944 – dir. Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch)

We begin with an exception to the rules delineated above. Val Lewton may be horror’s most renowned producer, yet most of his films could just as easily have found a place on this list because he so emphatically avoided commitment to the supernatural. RKO pictures handed Lewton goofy titles like I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and Cat People, expecting him to make cheapo monster flicks to turn a quick profit. He in turn paid as little lip service to standard horror as possible, mining these pictures for unsettling psychological insight and allowing his stock company of directors— Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise— to realize them with artful light and shadow. RKO wasn’t getting exactly what it asked for, but it was getting hit films. Cat People was one of the biggest, so a sequel was a natural demand. Not only did Lewton barely bother to tie The Curse of the Cat People to its predecessor, but he made almost no effort to imbue it with anything recognizably horrifying. There is a ghost—former cat person Irena (Simone Simon)—but she is probably just a figment of little Amy’s (Ann Carter) imagination, and she is hardly an entity of horror. Rather, the once murderous monster has been totally rewritten as a benevolent presence, a beautiful and gentle playmate for a lonely girl whose parents (Kent Smith and Jane Randolph from the previous picture) don’t like her wasting her young years daydreaming. The Curse of the Cat People is a truly lovely piece of work—beautifully filmed and bittersweet—that was Lewton’s first to really give horror the heave ho. However, RKO was still able to market it as such because of its lurid title, its ghost, and a single scary sequence in which a local Miss Havisham (Julia Dean) tells Amy a story about the headless horseman that pitches the girl’s overactive imagination into hyperactive mode. There’s also a slight danger that the old lady’s daughter (Elizabeth Russell) is going to wring the kid’s neck in a fit of daughterly jealousy, but come on, that obviously isn’t going to happen in such a sweet film that really only thinks it’s horror.

2. Sunset Boulevard (1950 – dir. Billy Wilder)

When horror fell out of favor in the ‘50s, it immediately began assimilating into other genres. This is clearest in the decade’s sci-fi pictures that exuded fear more readily than the celestial and technological wonder at the heart of the genre. Horror also worked its way into noirs such as Kiss Me Deadly, with its apocalyptic finale, and The Night of the Hunter, a true genre straddler with a villain who is equal parts swindler archetype and boogeyman. In his 1950 noir Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder absorbed horror in subtler ways. Dimming star Norma Desmond (silent film legend Gloria Swanson) skulks through a Gothic old dark house replete with rat-infested swimming pool, Chas Addams-style dead chimp, and wheezy pipe organ on which the grim butler (one-time silent filmmaker and later-day horror character actor Erich von Stroheim) plays the classic horror signifier “Toccata and Fugue”. Norma, herself, is both beautiful and eerily possessed; a dead ringer for Gloria Holden’s Dracula’s Daughter. In his book American Gothic, Jonathan Rigby draws numerous fascinating parallels between Norma and Dracula senior, and her thrall over Joe Gillis (William Holden) is easily comparable to that of the Count over Mina or Renfield, even if the reason is more economic than supernatural. Though Rigby’s treatment of Sunset Boulevard as true horror is a stretch, there is no question that its final image of Norma— now completely insane, floating toward the camera, her eyes ablaze with madness, her predatory, claw-like fingers reaching for the audience—is among cinema’s most terrifying.

3. Vertigo (1958 – dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Lucifer Sams and Satanic Majesties: Cult Sects of Rock Gods

Who is Pink Floyd? Cold experiments and saxophones. Twenty minute opuses and barren atmosphere. Faceless, immobile, serious musicians. Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.

Who are The Rolling Stones? Sleazy sex and heroin. Mick’s lips and strutting. Blues, booze, and Berry. Exile on Main Street and Some Girls.

Who are The Beach Boys? Surf and sun. Hot rods and bikinis. Prancing old Reaganites in Hawaiian shirts. “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Surfin’ Safari”.

Who are The Who? Rock operas and ponderous proto-metal. Bluster and bashing. Classic Rock radio staples and Broadway bounders. Tommy and Who’s Next.

Four of Rock’s institutions as they’re understood by the masses. When their congregations file into the hallowed halls of their local stadiums to hear the hits, the hits are what they most often receive. A sacrament of the familiar, fulfilling essential stereotypes, banishing the obscurities to torchlit basement gatherings where the freaks and obsessives huddle around turntables to spin gouged copies of Their Satanic Majesties Request and fifth generation bootlegs of SMiLE. Bruce Johnston calls them “the one percenters”: the one-percent of The Beach Boys’ fans who hope to never hear “Kokomo” again but cannot get enough of “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” and “Do You Like Worms?”

Classifying these acts as cult bands is a far-fetched stretch. They are among the most enduringly popular in Rock history. The Beach Boys were the biggest white American Rock band of the ‘60s, scoring three number one hits in their hey day and another some 25 years after their debut. Pink Floyd are responsible for one of Rock’s all-time bestselling and most iconic records. The Stones and The Who may only fall behind The Beatles and Led Zeppelin in the British Rock race. Yet within each of those band’s expansive histories lay genuine cult items; recordings that the majority of their fans and the bands, themselves, generally ignore. The cultists these oddities have attracted feel decidedly stronger about SMiLE, Their Satanic Majesties Request, The Who Sell Out, and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. We are the one percent.

Cult items are natural products of any long and fruitful career. Perhaps The Beatles and Zeppelin are the only top Rock bands of the classic era who don’t really have any, which is likely because both had relatively short careers that produced relatively few records. Had The Beatles continued making music for another decade, it is possible that at least one of them might have dipped through the cracks. It was inevitable that The Beach Boys and The Stones would make their cult records, because they both created tremendous bodies of work (as of this writing, The Beach Boys have made 30 albums; The Stones made 22 and are apparently at work on another) and are both confined by most people into tight compartments. Those people include the artists, themselves. Brian and Dennis Wilson were the only Beach Boys who really seemed to recognize the genius of the stereotype-defying SMiLE, with its fragmented structures, whimsical humor, and stoned avant gardism. Mike Love famously (perhaps apocryphally) warned Brian to not “fuck with the formula” of surf and hot rod songs. He hated Van Dyke Parks’s poetic, cryptic lyrics and most of the guys claimed they felt degraded by being forced to simulate barnyard noises and orgasms by a giggling, LSD-infused Brian during the sessions. Keith Richards is similarly embarrassed by the blues-eschewing, psychedelic onslaught Their Satanic Majesties Request, dismissing it as “flimflam” in his autobiography. Mick’s embarrassment seems to cloak a genuine affection for the record, constantly vacillating between deeming it “nonsense” and “lovely” throughout the years.