Review: 'Corman/Poe: Interviews and Essays Exploring the Making of Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe Films, 1960-1964'

In the late fifties, Hammer Film Productions struck a blow for Gothic horror just when it seemed as though bulb-headed martians and giant bugs had banished vampires, Frankensteins, and spooky cobwebs for good. That was great for UK, birthplace of Gothic horror, but what of the U.S.? Without having even seen Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein or Dracula, all-American Roger Corman came to the stateside rescue with a series of horrors based on stories by America's premiere Gothicist, Edgar Allan Poe. With more than a little help from screenwriters like Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont (both veterans of the Twilight Zone writers' room, not incidentally), producer/director Corman managed to inflate Poe's exceedingly short, not-exactly-action-packed tales of mystery and imagination into crowd-pleasing features. The guy who gave the world highly enjoyable but undeniably schlocky fare like A Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors suddenly displayed a true artist's eye, with his rainbow palette, brilliant use of foreground set dressing, and zeal for psychedelic dream sequences. With a stock team of iconic actors such as Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Ray Milland, and Hazel Court, Roger Corman had found the formula for iconic, unforgettable, enduring films. 

Review: 'The Incredible Shrinking Man' Blu-ray

The sci-fi boom of the fifties produced a lot of flicks that trafficked in the fear of the Gothic-horror era it superseded. Paranoia about communism and the atomic age was paramount. However, certain creators took a more nuanced view of science-fiction to create some of the genre's most thought-provoking items. Writers such as Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson and directors such as Robert Wise and Jack Arnold saw sci-fi's potential to tell us more about ourselves than merely what we fear. One of the most profound picture's of the era originated with a Matheson novel simply titled The Shrinking Man. Matheson assessed his own position as a man transitioning from the action of World War II to domestic life where he spent a good deal of his time hunched over a typewriter in his basement. He channeled those impotent feelings into the story of a man who literally gets smaller and smaller. 

When Universal Pictures recognized the sci-fi craze potential of Matheson's novel, the author insisted on adapting his own work for the screen. When Universal assigned the project to Jack Arnold, the director recognized the human concerns at the center of potential pulp and insisted on treating the material with the utmost respect.

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 24

Series: Night Gallery

Episode: “Green Fingers/The Funeral/The Tune in Dan’s Cafe”, in which Cameron Mitchell is a sleazy industrialist who wants to build a factory on the property of gardening-enthusiast Elsa Lanchester. Mitchell would have probably backed off if he’d known just how effective the sweet, old lady’s green fingers are. “Green Fingers” soars with a macabre script by Rod Serling (based on R.C. Cook’s short story), creepy direction by John “Saturday Night Fever” Badham, the star of the greatest monster movie ever made, and an awesome tribute in Siouxsie and the Banshee’s “Green Fingers” (song not included in this episode). Our next painting is a morsel of fun silliness from Richard Matheson in which a vampire plans the funeral he never got a chance to have. The mourners look like the cast of The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t. Yay! The portrait at the end of our museum of miscreants depicts Susan Oliver and Pernell Roberts as a couple incessantly blabbing about their flailing marriage in a bar while the same crappy country song plays over and over on the juke box. Apparently, it was the song that was playing when another doomed couple was swept up in violence at the joint years ago. Despite some groovy psychedelic solarization effects and an elegantly filmed shoot out, this last tale is a whole lot of nothing. The other two are essential Halloween season viewing.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 143

The Date: February 20

The Movie: Trilogy of Terror (1975)

What Is It?: This made-for-TV portmanteau of Richard Matheson stories has an unpromising ratio of two weak stories and one great one, but that great one is so taut and terrifying that it makes this trilogy essential horror viewing. I don’t actually have to tell you which story is the great one, do I?

Why Today?: On this day in 1926, Richard Matheson is born.

Monsterology: Dolls

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

 Before kids have the social skills to make human friends, they often find companionship in little blobs of cotton or plastic. A child clutching a doll, pretending to nurse the toy while he or she is still gnawing on a pacifier, is a familiar—and adorable— sight. Thanks to the ways storytellers love to twist signifiers of innocence, images of dolls gnawing on children have become pretty common too.

Sorry. That was just too easy a transition to pass up. In truth there aren't a ton of images of dolls gnawing on kids. More often the doll will settle for a good, sharp kitchen knife. Or maybe its limbs will grow to monstrously ropey proportions so it can drag the tyke under his own bed and start strangling the lad. And maybe dolls menacing kids isn't even the most common way these playthings menace. If we were to do an official tally (we aren't going to), we'd probably discover that dolls most often pick on adults. Sometimes the dolls in question are really protecting the little ones from grown ups who would do the youngsters in question harm. In that way, these killer dolls are still doing the jobs of all dolls: helping children deal with a very difficult world.

The idea of a beloved doll coming to life has been a literary staple for centuries. In his 1986 essay “A Few Small Corrections to a Commonly Held Image,” Walter Scherf wrote of an old fairy tale in which a doll comes to life and starts shitting gold. When a prince pisses on the doll, the doll grabs the prince's ass. Just to be clear, Scherf notes that this is a children's story. More typical are tales such as Paddington Bear and Winnie the Pooh, in which cute (if neurotic) teddy bears come to life.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 7

The Date: October 7

The Movie: House of Usher (1960)

What Is It?: Roger Corman’s first Poe adaptation has all the classic elements in place: Vincent Price, Gothic overload, gorgeous color, lavish sets, and a Richard Matheson script. It's a bit meandering, but the apocalyptic climax is a big pay off.

Why Today?: On this day in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe dies.

Review: 'Tom Sutton's Creepy Things'

Perhaps you know him as Sean Todd, or more fittingly, Dementia or Grisly, but no matter what name he drew under, Tom Sutton was at the forefront of seventies horror comics largely because of his black and white work on Vampirella. Yoe Books/IDW’s new anthology, Tom Sutton’s Creepy Things, mostly focuses on his color work for titles such as Ghostly Haunts, Haunted, Ghost Manor, Midnight Tales, Haunted Love, and yes, Creepy Things (oddly the source of only one story in this collection). As it turns out, Sutton’s work was just as effectively goopy and kooky in color as it was in black and white. His style, which takes Graham Ingels’s signature ooze to nearly abstract levels, always works best when he was rendering ghouls, corpses, and creeps. His humans, particularly the ones he intended to look attractive, are often awkwardly drawn, sometimes distorted. This might not necessarily be a flaw though, as it leaves even his most “normal” panels looking unsettlingly abnormal. And Sutton had little patience for normality. Although he didn’t write everything in Tom Sutton’s Creepy Things, each of its stories reflects his innate weirdness. The book collects a nutso tale about a murderous teddy bear, one written from the grave’s point of view (and featuring some of the finest art in this book), one about the ghost of a hypocritical temperance advocate who finds himself a new drinking buddy, a nonsensical monster rally intent on cramming in references to every classic movie and literary monster you can think of, and a twisted twist on Richard Matheson’s “Twilight Zone” episode, “A World of His Own”. The book gets even weirder when Sutton works outside of the horror genre on the sci-fi fantasy “Lost in Transit”, the prehistoric sci-fi sci-fi fantasy “Goo”, the time-hopping sword-and-sandal fantasy “Journey to Lost Orlaak”, the hilarious fairy tale “The Tower Maiden”, and the adventure yarn “The Kukulkaton”, starring a sleazy, racist proto-Indiana Jones. In the final tale, “Through a Glass Darkly”, Sutton’s psychedelic B&W art and metaphysical, Lovecraftian storytelling are nothing short of sublime. All of this makes for one of Yoe/IDW’s very best anthologies yet.

Review: 'Steven Spielberg and Duel: The Making of a Film Career'

By the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, TV had overtaken movies as America’s number one entertainment for good, so it is fitting that the number one moviemaker of that period got his start on the little screen. Steven Spielberg was a TV junkie who’d made his name directing episodes of “Marcus Welby, M.D.”, “Columbo”, and most famously, “Rod Serling’s Night Gallery” when he was still barely old enough to drink. In 1971, he got his first break into feature-length movie making, though Duel was consigned to his usual living room-based medium. Spielberg’s ABC movie-of-the-week adaptation of Richard Matheson’s short story, however, revealed a big screen talent. This brutally minimalistic showdown between a suburban schlub and a literal monster truck was filmed with all the consideration and imagination of a major motion picture. That may not sound like a big deal in the day of “Mad Men” and “Game of Thrones”, but it was completely revolutionary in an age when TV movies were low-budget, disposable filler between episodes of “The Brady Bunch” and “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father”. In fact, Duel was so high quality that it earned a critically smashing feature run in Europe. Spielberg’s career as a TV director was coming to an end.

Duel is not generally mentioned among Spielberg’s signature films, but based on this above brief history, I’m sure you’ll understand its significance. If you need any further convincing, check out Steven Awalt’s excellent new book Steven Spielberg and Duel: The Making of a Film Career. Awalt gets deep into this film’s creation, from the inspiration for and publication of Matheson’s story to the film’s eventual American theatrical run in 1983 in the wake of Spielberg’s domination of cinemas with E.T. The history is complete, amusing (the “casting” of the automobiles is documented here, as is the Incredible Hulk’s theft of Duel footage), critical (though mostly of Awalt’s fellow Duel theorists), and often just as thrilling as the film it details. The author relates Matheson’s near-death experience that inspired his tale and Spielberg’s boyhood short movie about a head-on collision between model trains with a master storyteller’s grasp of suspense. He also really emphasizes the importance of master storyteller Richard Matheson in this history. Because Duel is so significant a milestone in Spielberg’s career, Matheson’s major role in its creation is often minimized. Not so in this book, which also contains that writer’s complete teleplay for his and Spielberg’s film. So this book functions as both an informative—and very entertaining—resource for students of Spielberg and a nice tribute to the recently deceased Richard Matheson.

Farewell, Richard Matheson

 His work helped launch Steven Spielberg's career, was a staple of "The Twilight Zone," and essentially birthed the modern notion of the zombie (the swarming variety versus the voodoo one). Richard Matheson was one of horror and sci-fi's greatest yarn spinners, as I covered a couple of years ago in this piece written in honor of his 85th birthday. This very brief tribute marks a sadder occasion as Richard Matheson died yesterday at the age of 87. So pop Duel or "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" into the DVD player or give I Am Legend a long-overdue reread tonight in celebration of the many shudders the man gave us during his remarkable lifetime.

Twilight Zone A - Z

“The Twilight Zone” was often directed with great artistry, but like most fine television series, it was a writer’s show. Struggling in a medium still regarded as lowbrow, head writer Rod Serling did much to bring credibility to T.V. writing. In the brief teasers he’d film to set up the following week’s show, Serling often gave featured credit to the writer. His very appearance in these pieces and his famed introductions at the head of most episodes highlighted the starring roles writers played in “The Twilight Zone”. Serling chose some of the very best sci-fi and fantasy authors to assist him in realizing his series.

From the series’ very beginning, Richard Matheson was among the most prolific “Twilight Zone” contributors. His involvement was a true coup considering the impressive bibliography he’d been building since the start of the ‘50s: the tremendously influential apocalyptic horror novel I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, the short stories “Death Ship”, “Little Girl Lost”, “Long Distance Call” and “Steel”, all of which he’d adapt for “The Twilight Zone”. Matheson’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” was a rare moment of greatness in the series’ uneven final season. Charles Beaumont would do the same for his short classics such as “The Man Who Made Himself” (adapted as “In His Image”), “Perchance to Dream”, “The Howling Man”, and “The Devil, You Say?” (adapted as “Printer’s Devil”), while also contributing such first-rate original scripts as “Long Live Walter Jameson” and “Miniature”. Having also devised the story that would become “Living Doll”, Beaumont was responsible for some of the series’ most frightening pieces. George Clayton Johnson’s scripts and stories were fewer, but the humanity of “A Penny for Your Thoughts”, “Nothing in the Dark”, “Kick the Can”, “The Prime Mover”, and “A Game of Pool” has earned him a place among the most memorable authors who’ve passed through “The Twilight Zone”.

Serling’s work with one of his favorite genre writers didn’t go quite as smoothly as his collaborations with Matheson, Beaumont, and Johnson. He admired Ray Bradbury enough to pay tribute to the author with sly references in “Walking Distance”, “A Stop at Willoughby”, and “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up”, but the men’s working relationship was troubled. Serling wanted Bradbury to contribute scripts from the show’s conception. Bradbury was excited by that prospect. Once the series went into production, Bradbury began accusing Serling of plagiarism in private, citing “Walking Distance” among those he found a bit too Bradbury-esque. Serling later rejected Bradbury’s elaborate first script, “Here There Be Tygers”, for budgetary reasons. “A Miracle of Rare Device” met a similar fate. In the end, only the author’s “I Sing the Body Electric” made it to “The Twilight Zone”, only achieving that after two years of revisions and polite criticisms from Serling. Bradbury’s tale of a robotic grandmother was sweet enough, but failed to capture the heart or awe of the series’ classics. The writer’s stay in the Zone ended there.

Serling and his gang also adapted several stories by outside writers that achieved their greatest renown as locations in “The Twilight Zone”: Lynn Venable’s “Time Enough at Last”, Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life”, Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man”. Ironically, Serling’s love of prose and talent for screenwriting never translated to success as a writer of short stories or novels outside the television universe he created.




Much of the “Twilight Zone” magic radiates from the deep sense of nostalgia in so many of Rod Serling’s scripts. Rarely was this feeling more palpable than in the series’ fifth episode. In “Walking Distance”, a harried ad man steps through a time portal and returns to his childhood hometown where band concerts are still a summertime staple and the neighborhood carousel still spins. The fictional town of Homewood in “Walking Distance” is a thinly veiled stand-in for Serling’s own hometown of Binghamton. No doubt the hectic schedule of running and writing “The Twilight Zone” left him longing for the laziness of that burg in Broome County, New York. Further inspiration struck when he noticed how similar the back lot at MGM was to his boyhood stomping ground. The carousel is a particularly telling touch as Broome County’s signature landmarks are its six antique merry-go-rounds.

Richard Matheson On Screen: 10 Essential Works

Throughout 20th century horror’s Pre-K era (i.e.: pre-King), Richard Matheson dominated. Matheson is a tough, clean writer who has composed some of our most unforgettable works of terror and imagination. Without the ornateness of plot and/or language that distinguished his major horror peers—Poe and Lovecraft, Bradbury and King—Matheson writes tales with the punchy immediacy of campfire ghost stories. A scant phrase can instantly conjure one of the many indelible images he created: a man shrinks toward oblivion, a gremlin terrorizes a man from the wing of a plane, a murderous fetish doll stalks a woman through her apartment, a monstrous big-rig hunts a motorist, the last man on Earth fights to survive a plague of vampires.

Matheson’s lean, pointed stories were absolutely ripe for adaptation. His short stories resulted in several of the most beloved episodes of “Twilight Zone”, although oddly enough, there has never been a truly great version of what may be his definitive work, the apocalyptic vampire novel I Am Legend. Be that as it may, there are still plenty of wonderful examples of Matheson on-screen. Here are ten essentials.

(For the purposes of this article, I steered away from Matheson's adaptations of other writers' work, but his scripts for Poe's Fall of the House of Usher and Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out are pretty essential viewing, too)

1. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)