Review: 'I, Monster' DVD

In 1971, Hammer was having another go at Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a decade after its failed first attempt, Terence Fisher's generally misguided The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll. Perhaps to avoid confusion with Roy Ward Baker's Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Milton Subotsky opted to call his own adaptation of the same year I, Monster and changed the names of the title character(s) to Dr. Marlowe and Mr. Blake. 

Review: 'Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us! More Dark Alleys of Classic Horror Cinema'

Armed with a great deal of old-school research, some over-heated writing, and an embarrassing "Watch out! The Progressive Mob is coming to burn your DVD collection!!!" foreword, Greg Mank returns for a semi-sequel to his chaotic 2014 book The Very Witching Time of Night: Dark Alleys of Classic Horror called Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us! More Dark Alleys of Classic Horror Cinema. This time Mank tightens up his approach for (mostly) uniformly formatted chapters to examine how classics such as Murders in the Rue Morgue, Island of Lost Souls, Mad Love, House of Frankenstein, and Bride of Frankenstein, mediocrities such as Werewolf of London and the 1941 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and crap-fests like Captive Wild Woman fared against Joseph Breen's censorship board. 

Mank consults period documents to carefully note instances of censorious notes, how the filmmakers followed or worked around the meddlesome directives, and how regional exhibitors made their own cuts. In the case of Werewolf of London (which he insists on typing as WereWolf of London), the author argues that it could have been a better film without such changes as bumping a prostitute character down to the role of alms beggar. In the case of Captive Wild Woman, he offers no such possible avenues for improvement or redemption, and despite the author's dopey opening, he actually comprehends why folks were so horrified by the film's likening of black women to apes. That's pretty surprising since Mank thinks you're a dummy if you take offense at The Mask of Fu Manchu, an equally ugly pile of rubbish with a "happy" ending that involves Asian genocide by ray gun. Not a whole lot of philosophical consistency there, Manky.

Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us! switches to soft focus in its concluding chapters that deal with (A) the depressing end of Basil Rathbone's career and (B) how horror performed at the box office in the thirties and forties. These chapters don't quite fit with the rest of the book but are as useful to the monster movie historian as the rest of it, which I'll admit is pretty useful.

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 3

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 12

Straight Jacket (1964- dir. William Castle) ***

This is a minor William Castle shocker, but Joan Crawford makes her presence felt as a woman trying to put her life back together after a long stint in an asylum for offing her husband with a wire hanger an axe. The twist is so-so, but getting the chance to see Crawford ham it up in a Castle picture is enough. The picture loses half a point because Castle never actually appears on screen to charm us with a schlocky gimmick while sucking on a giant cigar.

October 13

It Follows (2014- dir. David Robert Mitchell) ****½

Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Monsters!

Welcome, foolish mortals, to Psychobabble’s House of 100 Monsters. Creak up the steps and over the threshold. Within this vile abode you will encounter not 98, not 99, but one hundred of the most terrifying, horrifying, unpleasantifying creatures who have ever haunted the page, the screen, and the breakfast table. They are my personal favorite freaks, ranked from terriblest to really terriblest. No Halloween is complete without a visit to a spook house, and my house of horrors is as spooky as it gets. So I formally invite you to freak out to Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Monsters. Step right this way…

100. Tar Man

First, allow me to guide you down into the basement where a certain deceased individual has recently been resurrected by a certain military-grade toxic gas. Don’t ask me who he was in life, but in death this standout star of Return of the Living Dead is like an E.C. Comics zombie in the oozing flesh and he wants one thing only... brains!

99. Black Frost

Sidestep the Tar Man and take a break by our deep freeze. Oops. Bad idea, because inside is a terrifying thingy that blasts incapacitating frosty air from its jockstrap. This is how Black Frost brought down The Mighty Boosh, and it traumatized many viewers of their surreal British comedy by baring its unsettlingly white teeth before breaking into a hideous dance of death. He’s one icy bastard.

98. Clayface

Wait a minute… that chap wasn’t Black Frost at all! His face has morphed back into its natural state—that of one Matt Hagen, better known as Batman’s hulking, shape-shifting nemesis Clayface, one of the nastiest and most genuinely monstrous monsters to ever menace Gotham City!

97. Wampa

Back in the deep freeze is another terrible creature, a towering snow beast with white, shaggy fur and clawed paws the size of trashcan lids. Is it the Yeti? Nah. They wouldn’t know what the hell a Yeti is up on the distant planet of Hoth. That’s where the Wampa whomps Luke Skywalker’s face off in the shocking attack that kicks The Empire Strikes Back into gear.

96. Pumpkinhead

5 Superior Adaptations of Horror Lit

Adapting literature for the cinema is always tricky, and this can be especially true when dealing with stories intended to raise shivers. What is terrifyingly evocative on the page can flop like a sack of wet leaves when realized with a dude in a zip-up monster suit on screen. Acts unimaginably awful when described cease to play on the imagination when depicted with a rubber knife and karo-syrup blood. Some of horror’s greatest literary works, such as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, It, and I Am Legend, have never received ideal screen adaptations. Some page-to-screen trips have been more lateral with stories such as Frankenstein and Dracula offering very different yet equally essential elements when turned into movies or ones such as The Haunting of Hill House and Rosemary’s Baby being faithful enough to be genuine cases of “six of one/half dozen of another.” On occasion, a film goes above and beyond, reinventing the story upon which it is based in ways that make the original text virtually irrelevant. Here are five of those superior horrors.

"You're Like Me": The Strange Links Between 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' and 'Blue Velvet'

David Lynch has created some of the scariest moments on film. The infamous scene behind Winkie’s Diner has been rated cinema’s scariest scene more than once. Twin Peaks has been named television’s scariest show. Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, INLAND EMPIRE, and, of all things, The Elephant Man have been categorized as horror movies through the years. However, Lynch has never really been a horror film director. Rather he works horror into his work in the same way that he works in comedy and melodrama, and because he does not really make films we expect to hit the beats of specific genres, those moments of humor, naked emotion, and terror always hit harder than they would in genre pictures because they are so unexpected.

Review: Mill Creek's Hammer Horror Double Feature Blu-rays

For a long period of the blu-ray age, being a Region A Hammer Horror fan was very frustrating. The most vivid hunks of monstrous comfort food were sparse in the U.S. despite being abundant in a number of other regions. That began to change last year with Warner Brothers’ release of The Mummy, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, Taste the Blood of Dracula, and Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. Since then, other companies have started serving famished fans such titles as Twilight Time’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, Universal’s Hammer Horror 8-Film Collection, and Mill Creek’s double features of The Revenge of Frankenstein/The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb and The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll/Gorgon (blu-ray upgrades of DVD sets originally released in 2008).

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 277

The Date: July 3

The Movie: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937)

What Is It?: Disney’s historic debut animated feature boasts the studio’s trademark painterly artwork, enchanting music, and darkness. The Wicked Queen and her ghostly mirror adviser are terrifying. Snow White’s escape into a dark wood is the stuff of nightmares, and the Queen’s transformation into an apple-wielding witch (in a sequence inspired by Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) would give a nightmare nightmares. If you can stomach the endless capering of those Seven Dwarves, you’ll find some rewarding stuff in this not-quite perfect Disney classic.

Why Today?: Today is Compliment Your Mirror Day.

Review: 'The Big Heat' Blu-ray

Cruelty is to be expected in film noir. Maybe a big ox gets rough with a woman. Maybe a femme fatale leads a patsy to his doom by his prick. However, few of the classics are as up front about their cruelty as Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat is. Looking and acting more like a sitcom dad than a grizzled anti-hero, Glenn Ford enters the film as doting family man and upright police sergeant Dave Bannion. After getting sucked into a hellish underworld writhing with dirty cops and sleazy thugs, Ford finds his oasis of a home life shattering by murder. He then begins to resemble the criminals who destroyed his happiness more than he resembles Ward Cleaver.

Lang, renowned for phantasmagoric expressionistic masterpieces such as M and the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, holds back his wilder impulses for completely calculating purposes. What could go wrong when Bannion is merrily tucking his adorable daughter into bed under bright lighting as a jolly tune whistles away on the soundtrack? The horror that breaks this scene is all the more horrific for the preceding images and sounds of serene domesticity. Ford gives a great against-type performance as Bannion—and there are also brilliant supporting turns from Jeannette Nolan as the widow of a cop who committed suicide (maybe) and Lee Marvin at his sleaziest as a mobster’s right-hand scuzzbag— but I think we can all agree that The Big Heat belongs to Gloria Grahame. Recalling Miriam Hopkins’s similarly crushing performance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Grahame’s Debby Marsh transitions from a charmingly fun-loving gal to utterly devastated being, but unlike Hopkins’s Ivy, Debby fights back like Charles Bronson. The Big Heat is extraordinary for the meaty, stereotype-smashing roles it allows its women, and Grahame is unforgettable in this film.

The Big Heat may not be one of Fritz Lang’s most visually imaginative films, but it is beautifully shot with Charles Lang’s deep contrast black and white photography. Twilight Time’s new blu-ray looks absolutely fabulous. The presentation is perfectly organic, and I don’t think I noticed a single scratch, spec, or flaw in the picture. The disc comes with two director appreciations: a pretty in-depth eleven-minute one from Michael Mann and a more basic six-minute one from Martin Scorsese, who, as I do, tends to remember the film as being more expressionistic than it actually is, probably because its splatter of grotesque images are the ones that linger longest on the brain. Get it on Twilight Time films.com here.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 8

The Date: October 8

The Movie: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

What Is It?: MGM’s bid to cash in on the success of Dracula and Frankenstein bested both films and still stands as one of the most upsetting and brilliantly conceived monster movies. Rouben Mamoulian constantly whips out new tricks to dazzle the audience while Frederic March and Miriam Hopkins give realistic performances atypical of the time that suck you deep into a very dark story better than R.L. Stevenson's book. It gets my vote for best pure horror film ever made.

Why Today?: On this day in 1897, Rouben Mamoulian was born.

Review: 'Essential Horror Movies: Matinee Monsters to Cult Classics'

Narrowing a century of horror cinema down to 72 essential films is a goal doomed to fail. Genre fans tend to be bloody-minded in more ways than one. We are a tough breed to please, and Michael Mallory really stuck his hand into the monster’s mouth with his new book Essential Horror Movies: Matinee Monsters to Cult Classics. I can’t say that his selections totally defeated my own bloody mindedness, but I can say that most of them fit the bill. While I’d never argue that movies such as The Last House on the Left, Friday the 13^th, or Saw are good, I will admit that they are essential by representing major facets and turning points in horror history. Some of his choices are more confounding. Since this book covers so few films, I can’t understand how some of these made the cut (Polanksi’s beautifully shot but dull and embarrassingly unfunny horror comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers; a film called Waxworks that I have not seen but does not really seem to qualify as horror based on Mallory’s write-up; The Beast with Five Fingers) while others— such as The Black Cat, The Innocents, and Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (a shockingly ahead-of-its-time film that Mallory criticizes for being more dated and less grim than the silent version starring John Barrymore!) weren’t even in the running. Mallory’s extended “Fifty Additional Horror Films Worth Seeing” list doesn’t even sweep up the debris and contains a number of notorious stinkers (Roger Corman’s The Terror, Son of Dracula, Count Yorga).

Of course, this is the kind of reaction we serious horror freaks are supposed to have, and I’m sure there were more than a few outraged reactions to my own 150 Essential Horror Movies series from a few years back. I tried to make my list worth reading by writing what I hoped were insightful readings of the films and their places in horror history. This is also what Mallory did to make his cases, and although photos receive pride of place in his coffee table book (and those images do make this a very appealingly grotesque volume), his text is the real essential elements because of its insights and its trivia, although I’d keep a wide birth when reading his spoiler-sprinkled summaries of films you’ve never seen. I was actually surprised that I’d never seen a handful of these (Waxworks, Mill of the Stone Woman, Mark of the Wolfman), so his book even fulfilled the purpose that all books and lists of this sort should: convincing recommendations.

Review: 'The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters'

You know you’re not reading a typical encyclopedia when it starts with a quote from Bugs Bunny. Nevertheless, The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters earns its name, covering an array of fantastic creatures in a single, monstrous 625-page volume. Editor Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock whittled his initial list of 1,000 monsters down to about 200, but because some of those entries are very wide-ranging (Animals, Monstrous; Bible, Monsters in The; Women, Monstrous) Weinstock’s contributors check a lot more than 200 off the list. With that multitude of contributors comes a multitude of approaches, some more successful than others, to studying creatures from Angel to Zombie. Some of the most pervasive monsters— Demon, Extraterrestrial, Ghost, Witch/Wizard—comprise a sizeable chunk of the book with multiple contributors exhaustively detailing how they have been portrayed in books, films, TV shows, comics,  and games throughout world history. Some get more attention than they deserve (Brownie is a slightly longer entry than Devil, The, Dracula, or Frankenstein’s Monster). At least one of the most essential and influential monsters—Hyde, Edward—is absurdly short-changed, the most essential and influential of his films—Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 adaptation— not receiving any mention at all. Some entries are little more than lists of books and films with microscopic synopses and little in the way of historical background or analysis (Death, Personified, for example).

Most entries, however, strike a strong balance between the histories, insightful analyses, and lists of examples we expect of an authoritative encyclopedia. There are no significant absences and plenty to discover in the way of relatively unfamiliar creatures, such as Devil-Bug, the monster doorman from George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall, the soothsaying Donestre of the Middle Ages, the child-killing Empousa of ancient Greek folklore, the world-creating ocean goddess Tiamat, a big Kosher bird called Ziz, and Kappa, a goofy-looking Japanese swamp monster that pulls kids’ internal organs out through their butts.

20 Horror and Cult Classics That Deserve the Criterion Treatment

For thirty years, the Criterion Collection has been restoring “important classic and contemporary films” and releasing them back into the wild on laser disc, DVD, and blu-ray. As their inaugural titles—King Kong and Citizen Kane— indicated, Criterion has long had great enthusiasm for horror and cult films. Yet even with more than 700 titles under its belt, Criterion has not refurbished every horror and cult classic that deserves it. Some of the most deserving have not been well served in the blu-ray age by any of the company’s chief rivals either. So for Criterion or Twilight Time or Shout/Scream Factory or any other distribution company with a serious interest in seriously great movies, here are twenty terrifying and strange titles for your consideration.

1. The Fall of the House of Usher (1928- dir. Jean Epstein)

What is it? A masterpiece of bad dreaminess and surreal imagery. An essential French horror film, of which there are few.

Current Region 1 availability Image Entertainment’s 2001 DVD is out of print.

Why Criterion? The Fall of the House of Usher is certainly important in that it is arguably the first great feature-length Edgar Allan Poe adaptation. Its art house status is right up Criterion’s alley. Director Jean Epstein co-wrote the screenplay with Luis Buñuel at the same time he was making “Un Chien Andalou” with Salvador Dali. That short film would make a fabulous bonus feature!

2. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931- dir. Rouben Mamoulian)

What is it? The first and best sound adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s transfiguring horror classic. Released the same year as Dracula and Frankenstein, Paramount’s attempt to pounce on the monster bandwagon trounced Universal’s hits and helped complete the trio of classic monster movie tropes: vampire, creation monster, and transformation monster.

Why Criterion? Beautifully filmed, beautifully acted, and still really disturbing, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is important in that it is the first horror film to score an Oscar (Frederic March shared the best actor award with Wallace Beery). Obviously, it’s a classic for its quality too, though its underdog status next to the ubiquitous Dracula and Frankenstein makes it a perfect candidate for Criterion. MGM certainly doesn’t seem in any rush to restore this one and get it back on the streets.

3. The Old Dark House (1932- dir. James Whale)

What is it? James Whale’s second horror film is an alternately funny and frightening flick with a superb ensemble cast featuring Charles Laughton, Boris Karloff, Lilian Bond, Ernest Thesiger, Gloria Stuart, and Eva Moore.

Why Criterion? Well, Kino can do this one if they like, but if not, Criterion should swoop in and give it the business. Either way I’d be happy.

4. The Black Cat (1934- dir. Edgar G. Ulmer)

What is it? An adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe in name only, Edgar Ulmer’s demented art-deco pairing of Karloff and Lugosi is one of the most deliciously weird entries in the Universal horror canon.

Why Criterion? Well, Universal still has enough interest in this essential title— chosen ahead of The Mummy, the 1943 version of The Phantom of the Opera, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon by a panel of critics for inclusion in The 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die—to rerelease it in 2012, but its failure to refurbish the film for blu-ray is enough indication that an intervention is in order.

5. Mad Love (1935- dir. Karl Freund)

Review: 'The Horror Show Guide: The Ultimate Frightfest of Movies'

All right, Mike Mayo, you got me. Based on your rave review in The Horror Show Guide (and I’ll admit, the presence of Naomi Watts), I watched 45 minutes of Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering. That must be the horror guide version of a Rick Roll. I should have known better. Mayo’s taste can be a bit questionable. While he gives the thumbs up to garbage such as The Lawnmower Man, Hollow Man, and the aforementioned Corn movie, he’s pretty dismissive of many of the best movies in his book, among them Bride of Frankenstein, Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Haunting, and Eraserhead. His problem with most of these movies? They’re “dated.” Woo-ee! Does Mike Mayo love that word! There’s barely a review of a film made before 1960 in The Horror Show Guide that escapes it. Gee, a movie from the ’30s is dated? What insight! Well, I can say the same about 1992’s Lawnmower Man, but there is a big difference between its dated early-CGI effects and the “dated” effects in, say, James Whale’s The Invisible Man: Claude Rains’ disappearance remains incredibly charming and impressive, while the sub-ColecoVision frogs and sex robots in Lawnmower Man look like shit. Mayo’s not having any of that, though. The effects in The Invisible Man are “dated.” The humor in Bride of Frankenstein is “dated.” The acting in The Haunting “has aged poorly” (nice variation!).

Still, I can’t completely write off The Horror Show Guide. Mayo has seen a lot of horror movies (though not all of these are horror movies. Whatever their tenuous connections to the genre, Dolores Claiborne, Fellini Satyricon, Ed Wood, and others don’t belong in this book. I was kind of tickled that he included Passion of the Christ, though). Like any good horror guide, his book should be read with a pen and paper in hand to jot down intriguing and unfamiliar titles for future viewing. Just be sure to take his assessments with a big grain of salt, or you may get suckered into seeing something like Children of the Corn IV, or worse, steered away from something like The Haunting.

A Strange Case for ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’

Early in his amusing study Danse Macabre, Stephen King lays out the three essential monster archetypes: “the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name.” Each of these creatures serves as the central villain of three “twentieth-century gothics which have become known as ‘the modern horror story’.” King’s categorizing of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a vampire novel and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a “thing without a name” novel need no explanation. His werewolf tale is slightly dodgier. But the gnomish ghoul in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has always sat outside the pack despite his broad influence and importance. Mr. Hyde is not a werewolf in any official sense, but it isn’t too tough to suss where King is coming from. Hyde is a monster brought on by transformation, a not-so-subtle representation of uncontrollable, destructive id. He parallels alcoholics and drug addicts neater than the Wolf Man does, but the similarities are still significant. So is King’s categorization of Hyde as a werewolf. There was never a major werewolf novel in the vein of Dracula or Frankenstein, yet that beast naturally completes the holy trinity of major monsters. The werewolf took its fated position alongside Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster in 1941 when Universal Studios released The Wolf Man, its final great, serious monster movie during its great golden age of monster movies, and one of its few without literary precedent.

Psychobabble’s 200 Essential Horror Movies Part 2: The 1930s

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)

12. Dracula (1931- dir. Tod Browning)

And the Oscar Goes to… Anything but Horror! : A Brief History of Terror Cinema and the Academy

Only a liar would deny that Oscar night is the cinematic celebration of the year, a time when millions tune in to revel in movies, the artists who make them, and the celebrities who star in them. Only a fool would believe that Oscar consistently rewards the best of the best. While not nearly as absurd as The Grammys or Emmys, The Oscars has a long-standing tradition of applauding professionally crafted, uninspired films that usually don’t take many artistic chances. There’s an odd middlebrow elitism to the Academy Awards. Terrible performances will warrant statuettes because the actors in question were “brave” enough to portray people with disabilities (Rain Man winner Dustin Hoffman, Scent of a Woman winner Al “Hoo-Ha!” Pacino, Forrest Gump winner Tom Hanks). Terrible movies will warrant them for dealing with such serious topics as suicide (Ordinary People), racism (Driving Miss Daisy, Crash), and disasters (Titanic), albeit in totally superficial and patronizing manners. Meanwhile, a certain genre is generally shunned because it is not what the punter who cried when Tom Cruise said “You complete me” considers to be “Art” with a big, dumb, capital “A”. Obviously, the genre I’m talking about is one of the focuses of this site: horror.

(Mild spoilers in the following paragraph…)

Despite a long history that has produced a parade of classics that all but the most blinkered critics agree are great films—from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Bride of Frankenstein, Psycho to Rosemary’s Baby, Jaws to An American Werewolf in London—horror gets little respect come Academy Awards night. That’s not to say that Oscar has never tossed the creeping skeleton a bone. In fact, this year is one of just eight since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences started handing out its little naked men in 1928 that a horror film has received multiple nominations in non-technical categories. Darren Aronofsky’s daring, messy, mad, and ultimately brilliant Black Swan is up for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress (as well as best cinematography and film editing) awards. In a more just world, Black Swan would sweep (and Mila Kunis wouldn’t have been robbed of a Best Supporting Actress nomination). The film was a rare explosion of imagination in a mostly unremarkable year, and a terrific opportunity to watch a filmmaker take crazy chances, perhaps not always succeeding. I’m still wondering if Portman’s transformation into an actual swan was completely necessary, but I was still impressed that Aronofsky had the guts to toss such a bizarre idea into his film’s climax and risk losing an audience that he’d already asked to go along with some pretty eccentric twists and turns.


It is that riskiness, that audacity, that commitment to an obtuse vision that guarantees Black Swan isn’t going to score a single award this Sunday night. It certainly won’t win the Best Picture or Directorial awards. It’s too “weird.” No, you can count on the Best Picture award going to The King’s Speech, which I have not seen but have it on good authority is perfectly competent and perfectly ordinary, or Facebook: The Movie!, which is almost vengefully unremarkable aside from being browner than a clogged toilet. Why this dreary tale of litigious assholes has received so much drooling praise is utterly beyond me.

Whatever the outcome Sunday night, it is nice to see Oscar give a little due credit to a really well made horror film, as it is not the academy’s inclination to do so. Over the past 82 years, only eight non-technical awards have been presented to actors, actresses, screenwriters, directors, and films trafficking in scares and monsters. Promisingly, the first horror film to receive a nomination won, but tellingly, it won with a catch. Just a few years into Oscar history, Fredric March grabbed the Best Actor award for his astonishing double-duty work in Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1932. This is pretty impressive considering the disdain and outrage that greeted most horror films to date, including the perennials Dracula and Frankenstein. The catch was that March had to share his award with Wallace Beery, who also won for playing a “washed-up boxer” cliché in King Vidor’s The Champ.


Also nominated that year were Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath for adapting Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella and pulling off the significant feat of improving greatly on the source material, which nursed its central metaphor at the expense of fully fleshed characters, relationships, and incidents. A tremendous achievement, their screenplay for Jekyll and Hyde lost to Edwin J. Burke’s for Bad Girl. Don’t worry; I’ve never heard of it either.

‘Bad Girl’ sez: "What am I?"


The mysterious Bad Girl also scored an award for director Frank Borzage in a category that didn’t even acknowledge that Mamoulian’s work on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was groundbreaking on nearly every level, from his use of first person point-of-view shots to establish empathy with the doctor, to his still stunning on-camera transformation trick shots.

During the ‘40s, a couple of nominations were tossed to actors in horroresque roles—Walter Huston for playing Lucifer in The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) and Angela Landsbury for playing a barmaid in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) —but neither resulted in a win. Nor did The Bad Seed, the second horror film to receive multiple nominations. Nancy Kelly and Patty McCormack may have gone home empty handed, but both could rest assured that neither Anastasia (featuring Best Actress winner Ingrid Bergman) nor Written on the Wind (with Best Supporting Actress Dorothy Malone) would ever inspire rabid cult followings or drag-queen homages.

Four years later came the third horror film to receive multiple nominations, and most will agree that the recipient is a cinematic milestone. Alfred Hitchcock was up for Best Director and Janet Leigh was up for Best Supporting Actress for their work on Psycho. Both lost, and as is well known, Hitchcock never won a directing Oscar despite being arguably cinema’s greatest director. At least the award went to a deserving Billy Wilder for The Apartment that year.


Despite its lack of acclaim from the Academy, Psycho played a major part in improving horror/critic relations, and made room for more artistic achievements in the genre. During the ‘60s, human-monster Roman Polanski proved to be one of the most innovative and artful horror filmmakers, creating a tour de force of sexual paranoia with Repulsion in 1965, then doing the same for maternal fears three years later with Rosemary’s Baby, the film that fully made good on the promises mapped out by Psycho. Exceptional direction, acting, and writing convene in a truly great film distinguished by both oppressive terror and deliciously perverse humor largely by way of Ruth Gordon as officious neighbor and fun-loving Satanist, Minnie Castevet. Gordon wrangled the Oscar for her tremendous performance as a woman who never stops being lovable, even after she orchestrates a demonic rape. Polanski, however, failed to win the Best Adapted Screenplay award for which he was nominated and failing to garner a nomination for his directing.

The demon infant of Rosemary’s Baby blossomed into the demonically possessed adolescent that would crack through Oscar’s anti-horror façade more assuredly than any previous contender. The Exorcist only won a single award (a Best Adapted Screenplay statuette for William Peter Blatty), but its level of nominations was unprecedented for a horror film, particularly a full-blooded horror film that doesn’t straddle any lines as stuff like The Bad Seed, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (which scored acting nominations for Bette Davis and Victor Buono in 1962), and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (featuring 1964 Best Supporting Actress nominee Agnes Moorehead) do. The Exorcist was also up for Best Actress (Ellen Burstyn), Supporting Actress (Linda Blair), Supporting Actor (Jason Miller), and Best Picture; a first for a horror film.


Whether or not there is some connection between the Exorcist phenomenon and the relatively plentiful horror nominations that followed almost immediately (a Best Picture nod for Jaws in 1975; Best Actress and Supporting Actress nods for Carrie’s Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, respectively, in ’76), that flame burned out quickly. Aside from a Best Actress nomination honoring Sigourney Weaver’s performance in Aliens (1986), horror was relegated to the back of Oscar’s bus for fourteen years. Then in 1990, Kathy Bates became the first actress to win an Oscar for a horror performance when she scored one for playing psychotic Annie Wilkes in Misery. Horror was back on the Oscar map and about to make its greatest splash in the Academy’s fetid pool.

Oscar sweeps are rare. Oscar sweeps by horror films are less common than two-headed calves. However, both happened in 1991 when Silence of the Lambs trounced the competitors, raking in the statuettes with greedy talons. Congratulations, Best Actress Jodie Foster! Congrats to you, too, Best Actor Anthony Hopkins! Way to go, Best Adapted Screenplay writer Ted Tally, and we can’t forget you, Jonathan Demme! You’re the first director to win an Oscar for a horror film, and the horror film for which you won was the first to be named Best Picture!

Creeps and ghouls rejoice, but don’t get too comfortable. Despite a strong start, the ‘90s proved to be an unremarkable decade for horror, overly dominated by mediocre “The Crazy ______” movies (as in: “The Crazy Roommate,” “The Crazy Tenant,” “The Crazy Nanny,” etc.). That also meant Oscar wasn’t going to be knocking on horror’s door again anytime soon. Still, it is not utterly meaningless that Martin Landau was able to nab a well-deserved 1994 Best Supporting Actor award for his miraculous transformation into horror star Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood and Sir Ian McKellen got a nomination for playing legendary horror filmmaker James Whale in the 1998 film Gods and Monsters. Though both actors surely did extraordinary work in both films, one might also view these awards and nominations as belated posthumous tributes to the men portrayed.

If one is still looking for some sort of pattern regarding the Oscars’ uncomfortable relationship with horror at this point, one is probably jerking off into the breeze. Like a derelict dad deciding its time to come home and visit the kids for a spell, horror strolled back onto the Oscar stage in 1999 with The Sixth Sense, another multi-nominated film, yet also the least potent horror film to make its way onto the Academy’s docket yet. A predictable script and way too much pseudo-creepy whispering notwithstanding, The Sixth Sense managed nominations for its director (“emperor’s new clothes” exemplar M. Night Shyamalan), screenplay (Shyamalan again), Supporting Actress (Toni Collette), Supporting Actor (Haley Joel Osment), editor (Andrew Mondshein), and itself (that means it was nominated for Best Picture). It won nothing.

Then the ‘00s, another fairly fallow period for horror as far as the Academy was concerned. It only lowered itself to bestow non-technical nominations on three horrors during the decade: the first for Willem Dafoe, so marvelous as Max Shreck in the ingenious collision of fact and fiction Shadow of the Vampire (2000); the second for Guillermo Del Toro’s sumptuous and profound grim fairy tale Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), nominated for Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Film; the third for Johnny Depp, very good in Tim Burton’s terrific, gruesome musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007).

And now the pendulum shutters back into horror’s Gothic manse once more. Last year Oscar finally acknowledged that horror was worthy of one of its cheesy little tribute montages. That a pair of stars from the juvenile Twilight movies were chosen to introduce the montage, and that the tribute spends so much time humping the legs of celebrities like tabloid-fave Jennifer Aniston rather than presenting a comprehensive, rich overview of the genre, reveals that horror still hasn’t crawled out of Oscar’s fruit cellar of shame.

If Black Swan does win anything this Sunday, it will be joining a most exclusive society of horrific Oscar winners: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Rosemary’s Baby, Misery, and Silence of the Lambs. Feel free to wish it luck, but don’t hold your breath, lest you end up like one of the wan corpses that litter so many films deemed unworthy of the Academy’s chintzy statuette.

Diary of the Dead 2010: Week 3

Week 3 of Psychobabble’s Monster Movie-a-thon...



October 8th

The Changeling (1980- dir. Peter Medak) ****

The Changeling begins as if it’s going to be a moody exploration of grief along the lines of Don't Look Now, but it shakes that off pretty quickly and gets down to being a less emotionally complex but still very good ghost story/murder mystery. The picture begins with composer John Russell’s (George C. Scott) wife and daughter getting calzoned by a big truck. Four months later he moves into a creepy old mansion where he intends to start writing music again but gets sidetracked by a ghost he thinks will give him information about his lost loved ones. The Changeling takes some rather interesting twists during its fourth quarter. I particularly liked the wronged ghost, which behaves in a far less passive manner than most wronged ghosts do in contemporary wronged ghost stories.

Psycho (1960- dir. Alfred Hitchcock) *****

You see, this is where this project gets challenging. Psycho is a movie I’ve written about so often on this site that I really can’t think of much fresh to say about it. Here’s what I got:

1. Ever notice that the Paramount logo at the beginning of the movie looks all lined like a bad TV picture? I wonder if this was a reference to the fact that Hitch shot the movie with the crew he used for his “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” series. Perhaps I’m reaching.

2. The movie begins in Phoenix, Arizona. The phoenix, of course, was a mythological bird that was reborn from its own dead ashes. Wonder if Hitch chose this setting because Norman Bates’s mother was similarly reborn through her crazy son’s crazy assuming of her identity. I might be reaching again.

3. I guess the outcome of this movie is so well known that I’ve never really paid attention to the red herring tossed in the middle of the film. When Lila Crane and Sam Loomis visit that Sheriff and his wife, I think we’re supposed to suspect that Mother Crane murdered her boy toy’s wife and buried her in Mom’s Greenlawn Cemetery grave. Not reaching this time.

4. Yes, that is Ted Knight playing a cop in the penultimate scene of the movie. A little comic relief right before that final, scary scene with Norman and the fly perhaps? Reaching perhaps.

And there you go. I’ve now said everything I’ll ever need to say about Psycho. Expect more of this shit when I get to Dracula and Bride of Frankenstein later this month.

October 9th

Dagon (2001- dir. Stuart Gordon) ****1/2

Man, I really have to start watching more Stuart Gordon movies! Not only is he an expert at making the most of a miniscule budget, but he’s actually able to make H.P. Lovecraft fun. That’s what he did with Re-Animator and that’s what he does with Dagon. A small boat crashes off the coast of Galicia during a storm. When two of the people aboard row to shore for help they encounter a freaky cult of fish people. The CG effects are strictly Sci-Fi Channel quality, but the physical ones get the job done, especially during a horrific flaying scene. Consistently fun, often suspenseful, and the ending approaches transcendence. Extra points for having the most realistic hotwiring scene I’ve ever seen.

Shaun of the Dead (2004- dir. Edgar Wright) *****

Is this the greatest zombie movie ever made? Certainly Night of the Living Dead is the greatest pure-horror zombie movie, but don’t hold its comedy against Shaun. A lot of the horror in Edgar Wright’s genius look at a bunch of pub-monkeys going up against a London zombie plague isn’t merely played for laughs. The finally swarm at the Winchester Pub is pretty suspenseful, and often, pretty revolting. I also care more about these characters—lovable loser Shaun, his ever-uncomplaining mum, his ever-farting best mate Ed, and the rest—than anyone in Living Dead. Let’s just call Shaun of the Dead the greatest horror movie of the ‘00s and let the debate die there.

October 10th

Dracula (1931- dir. Tod Browning) *****

Dracula gets a bad rap, but I’ll defend it ‘til I’m moldering. The cliché is that the movie’s first twenty minutes is great, but the rest is a static bore. That’s not true. Yes, that opening portion is the movie’s strongest, mostly because Dracula’s castle is such a monumental picture of Gothic gloom, but Tod Browning’s camera is more mobile than I remembered after Dracula gets to London. Plus the film’s later half has some great confrontations between the vampire and Van Helsing and greater ravings from Renfield. It’s also a lot more faithful to Stoker than, say, Whale’s Frankenstein—which is rarely hailed as anything less than a masterpiece—is to Shelley. My only beef is there isn’t enough Lucy. But Lugosi is still the ultimate Dracula, and Frye is the ultimate Renfield. All hail.

October 11th

John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982- dir. John Carpenter) ****1/2

It’s bad horror geek form to prefer a remake over the original, but I personally like John Carpenter’s The Thing better than Christian Nyby’s 1951 original, The Thing from Another World. The characters, a gritty horde of booze-drenched research scientists led by gnarly Kurt Russell, are more interesting, as is the alien. The original creature was a plant man that looked like Richard Kiel in “To Serve Man”. Carpenter’s creature is an entity that transforms into all manner of configurations grotesque and mundane. The Thing is a serious, pessimistic hybrid of horror, sci-fi, and action flick that would make a nice—if unrelentingly grim—double-bill with Alien.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931- dir. Rouben Mamoulian) *****

It amazes me how well Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde retains its potency no matter how many times I watch it. This is a really upsetting movie, both for its horrific depiction of relentless, demonic bullying and for the raw emotion spewed forth by its two magnificent leads: Miriam Hopkins as tragic music hall girl Ivy and Fredric March as the title characters. I can’t think of another movie from this period that’s nearly as harrowing. It’s not what I’d call fun viewing, but it is what I’d call the greatest pure horror film ever made.

October 12th

Torture Garden (1967- dir. Freddie Francis) **1/2

This Amicus portmanteau has quite a horror pedigree. Psycho scribe Robert Bloch wrote it. Freddie Francis, who helmed Amicus’ best film: Tales from the Crypt, directed it. The cast includes Burgess Meredith (“The Twilight Zone”), Jack Palance (Dracula), and Hammer mainstays Peter Cushing and Michael Ripper. All that talent can’t elevate this lazily paced assortment of mostly lame stories. There’s an evil cat, some evil actors, and an evil piano. The neat final tale, in which Cushing and Palance play Edgar Allan Poe fanatics, is the only one worth watching. Meredith is also good as the master of ceremonies leading a tour through a carnival house of horrors.

October 13th

Suspiria (1977- dir. Dario Argento) ****1/2

The plot of Dario Argento’s masterpiece about a ballet academy that fronts for a witch’s lair unfolds with the entrancing illogic of a nightmare. Set pieces involving maggots, razor wire, and a wall of secret irises are terrifically imaginative. The vividly colorful, poetically choreographed images are as gorgeous as they are grotesque. Goblin’s soundtrack is less obnoxious than I remembered. The film would still be better without it, but there’s so much here to love, why quibble? Plus seeing Udo Kier dubbed with a flat American accent is hilarious.

Deathdream (1974- dir. Bob Clark) **1/2

Bob Clark is a pretty eclectic character. I never realized that Porky’s, A Christmas Story, and Black Christmas were all directed by the same guy. Deathdream lacks the humor that is the common thread in those other movies. Andy (Richard Backus) returns home from Vietnam even though he was killed in the war. This is a depressing metaphor for the guys who returned from the war changed for the worse. If Andy had become a murder addict solely because of his experiences in Vietnam and not because he’s a zombie, Deathdream would be a braver and more disturbing film. But maybe 1974 was too soon to take such a hard look at what the war did to some of the people who fought in it. Tom Savini’s make up effects are good, though, and I liked Andy’s mother who remains loyal to her son to the very end, just like a good mom should.

October 14th

The Monster Club (1981- dir. Roy Ward Baker) ****1/2

Remorselessly silly portmanteau based on the stories of R. Chetwynd Hayes is also remorselessly delightful. John Carradine plays Hayes and Vincent Price is a vampire in the goofy wraparound story set in a nightclub stocked with dancers in rubber monster masks and a surprisingly good line-up of pop acts, including Psychobabble favorites The Pretty Things! Price narrates a trio of quite good tales about a beauty and the melancholy beast who loves her, a boy who learns his dad’s a vampire, and a movie director who provides sustenance for a village of ghouls. The makeup budget is three dollars; the nonstop fun is priceless. Plus the animated skeleton striptease is a gas.

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974- dir. Jorge Grau) ****

Clever British zombie flick is kind of a precursor to stuff like Shaun of the Dead and Black Sheep. It definitely seems to have influenced those two movies, not just in setting and humor (although it’s not a comedy) but in its emphasis on character over killing. The cast of potential victims includes a wiseass rogue, a creepy photographer, a bastardly police detective, a junkie, and her pretty sister. Much fresher and more satisfying than most contemporary zombie movies.

The Hunger (1983- dir. Tony Scott) **

Woo woo! Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon are a pair of sexy lesbian vampires in Tony Scott’s sexy, sexy vampire movie The Hunger. Hubba hubba! David Bowie is a sextacular thin white duke of a vampire! Boi-oi-oing! All the vampires can see their reflections in mirrors and go out in daylight. Ah-wooo-gah! It’s boring, pretentious, and blue. Honk if you’re horny!

Ten Terrible Scenes in Otherwise Terrific Terror Movies!

There’s some old story about how master makers of Persian rugs were always sure to tie one knot incorrectly to keep their work from achieving perfection. I never understood this. You’re making a rug, it’s awful nice, why not just make the best damn rug you can make? Perhaps I don’t possess a poetic enough soul to suss the sense in the whole “one bad knot” approach to making art, which sets me apart from the creators of some of the greatest horror films. Movies such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bride of Frankenstein, and Psycho contain flaws that keep them just a hair’s breadth from achieving absolute perfection. So let’s take a look at the blunders in those great films and seven others in Psychobabble’s Ten Terrible Scenes in Otherwise Terrific Terror Movies!

April 22, 2010: The Bride’s Many Veils: 75 Years of Bride of Frankenstein

When this site was in its infancy, one of my first posts was a list of my 100 favorite horror movies. I’ve since deleted the post because tastes change. But one thing hasn’t: James Whale’s 1935 Bride of Frankenstein is still #1 as far as I’m concerned. At the time, a reader took issue with this, writing that while the film has its charms, it does not even try to be frightening, and, therefore, doesn’t qualify as a horror movie. A few months later I attended a showing of Bride of Frankenstein at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. I was on a date with my then girlfriend, now Bride, Elise. She’d taken me to see her favorite movie, West Side Story, at MOMA recently, and though I’m not a fan of musicals, I went along to score new-boyfriend points. To my surprise and delight, West Side Story was a brilliant piece of work: colorful and energetic, but deepened by a strong atmosphere of dread (actually, this shouldn’t have been that surprising since director Robert Wise also made the brilliantly energetic and powerfully dreadful The Haunting). What made the film all the more enjoyable was the responsive audience. The attendees who were moved to sing along were pretty annoying, but the ones who laughed at the odd moments of humor and swooned at the stretches of romance and shimmied in their seats to the music made the film a more engaging experience.



Going tit for tat, I asked Elise to come to that Bride of Frankenstein screening with me, even though she’s pretty indifferent about horror movies, classic or otherwise. Seeing the theater was full of folks who were probably old enough to have seen the movie during its original release, I felt a little twinge of disappointment. I figured this wouldn’t be the invigorating experience that West Side Story showing had been. Well, call me an ageist bastard, because I guess that’s what I was, but I certainly learned my lesson that evening. As soon as the Universal logo flashed on the screen, the crowd sprang to life. But what really took me by surprise was the way they audibly shuddered when Karloff first appeared in his monster make-up.


As much as I loved the movie for its humor and its bizarre imaginativeness and its wonderful characters and its Gothic style, I couldn’t really argue with that commenter who insisted that Bride of Frankenstein wasn’t scary. Yet now I was sitting in a theater full of spectators who would disagree. There truly was a time when Karloff’s square-head haunted dreams, there was a time when the abomination of reviving stitched-up corpses was a concept too ghastly to ponder, and in a way, this screening was like traveling back to 1935 and experiencing that firsthand.


That Bride of Frankenstein could be viewed as a genuinely horrifying horror film, as opposed to a merely ironic one made by master-ironist James Whale, added an extra level to a film that already possessed so many levels that to accept another made it seem almost greedy. Bride already stood as a brilliant comedy, what with Una O’Connor’s snappy housekeeper Minnie providing a bit of slapstick and the diabolic Dr. Pretorius offering wry double-entendres and dry witticisms (“Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn't be much more amusing if we were all devils, and no nonsense about angels and being good.”). As James Whale was one of Hollywood’s earliest luminaries to intrepidly step out of the closet, the film is also often viewed as a milestone of gay cinema, with Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and Pretorius (openly gay Ernest Thesiger) serving as a male couple who father the monster together. This theory is particularly emphasized in Bill Condon’s bio-pic Gods and Monsters when Ian McKellan’s Whale tells Matt McKenzie’s Clive that his character is a little in love with Pretorius. Most film historians suggest the gay subtext of Bride is revisionist theorizing and wasn’t Whale’s intention. David Lewis, Whale’s longtime boyfriend, insisted the director never created a film in accordance with any social, sexual, or political agenda. Still, while Whale may not have consciously allowed his homosexuality to influence his work, he may have done so subconsciously, and Bride is difficult to view outside of that context today.

Along with being a (definite) comedy and a (possible) pioneering gay text, Bride of Frankenstein is also an affecting melodrama (the Monster’s absurd yet undeniably moving encounter with a blind hermit; his brief and tragic courtship of Elsa Lanchester’s Bride), a trove of indelible cinema iconography (the Monster, the shock-quaffed Bride, Frankenstein’s oft-referenced shriek of “She’s alive…alive!”), a fairy tale (Pretorius’s miniature people; the fantastical forest the Monster wanders), a goofy history (the uproarious prologue in which Lanchester plays author Mary Shelley), a costume spectacle, and a knowing parody of monster-movies. And now, on top of all this, we’re to also accept Bride of Frankenstein as an actual horror movie? Most younger viewers will have a tough time swallowing that, even though the film was deemed “a grotesque, gruesome tale” by the New York Post in 1935 and was heavily edited for its horrific content overseas (particularly in Asia and Sweden). For my six pence, the only horror picture of the ‘30s that still holds up as genuinely scary is Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and perhaps “disturbing” or “upsetting” might be more accurate descriptors than “scary.” As such, Jekyll can’t really be called “fun,” even though Fredric March’s early scenes as Hyde are quite funny. Bride of Frankenstein, however, does not possess a frame that isn’t delirious fun, which is the real reason viewers have been returning to it for precisely 75 years. No other classic Universal monster flick can match it for sheer enjoyment, and few films of any other ilk can, either. I suppose that was the most overwhelming revelation of that MOMA screening: everyone in the joint—whether they were in their ‘20s or their ‘90s—was having one hell of a great time.



Bride of Frankenstein was released 75 years ago today.