Track by Track: 'Spook Along with Zacherley'

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, I’ve been taking a close look at albums of the classic, underrated, and flawed variety, and assessing them Track by Track.

Like most American families, mine spent Christmas with the usual choir of vinyl carolers: Johnny Mathis and Nat King Cole, and since my dad loved Rock & Roll as much as I do, Phil Spector’s stable of stars. Most American homes, however, had no annual carols for my favorite holiday. Mine did though. As soon as my mom had affixed the final cardboard jack-o-lantern to the living room windows, I was begging my dad to take his yearly trip down to the basement and brush the cobwebs off an old record called Spook Along with Zacherley.

A Vincent-a-Day: 'Shock'

Leading up to the 100th anniversary of Vincent Price’s birth I’ll be checking out one of the maestro’s lesser known films every day this week.

Shock (1946- dir. Alfred L. Werker)

The festivities begin with a film rather different from the others I’ll be reviewing this week. Despite its title and dark-and-stormy-night credits sequence, Shock is more melodramatic noir than monster movie. Vincent Price still gets to work his creepy hoodoo as a psychiatrist who has his own psycho episode that zaps emotionally fragile witness Anabel Shaw into catatonia. This is straight up, B-grade Hitchcock, with its macabre voyeurism, psychobabble, and nifty twist: naturally, Price turns out to be the shrink brought in to rescue Shaw from Daffy Town. Alfred L. Werker’s direction is stylish, tossing a psychotic dream sequence, a spooky stalking scene inside a mental ward, and plenty of montage into the stew. But Price is the cat who really makes this picture swing, playing his mad-doctor-of-a-different-sort with hand-wringing guilt and slow-talking menace. I dug it.