Review: 'Ad Nauseum: Newsprint Nightmares from the '70s & '80s'

As a young child in the seventies and early eighties, I'd flip through the newspaper every day and stop at two sections: the comics and the movies. When I'd come across an ad for a horror movie, I'd inevitably think, "What kind of disturbed, sick individual would want to torture themselves by watching this horrible stuff?" What I should have been thinking when perusing the paper was "Does anyone actually think B.C. is funny?"

Baby’s First Exorcism: 10 Movies to Desensitize Your Kids to Monsters and Murder

Every new parent faces the same serious dilemma: When do I first show my child The Exorcist? Age 3? 4? 7? It’s a pickle, indeed, and the answer is a bit convoluted, because if you sit little Johnny or Suzie in front of Regan MacNeil’s pea soup vomiting and crucifix…errr… “play” too early, you might do serious damage to his or her psyche. Wait too long, and your child might spend the rest of her or his life watching the same damn Barney tape over and over, never conditioned to take in hardier fare.

No worries, Big Johnny or Suzie, because I am an experienced parent equipped to guide you down the perfect path toward ensuring your child will one day join you for marathons of horrifying, terrifying, disgustifying movies all Halloween Season long. The key is to systematically expose your child to the following 10 movies guaranteed to desensitize your kids to monsters, murders, and anything else your favorite horror flick may lob at them.

Step 1. Curse of the Cat People

We begin with a film that does not quite qualify as a horror movie despite being a sequel to Jacques Tourneur’s chilling masterwork Cat People. A sequel may seem like an odd starting point, but Robert Wise’s Curse of the Cat People really has very little to do with Tourneur’s picture about a woman with serious sexual hang ups who turns into a blood thirsty panther (or at least thinks she does) whenever she gets horny. Clearly, that movie would not be very appropriate to show to your three year old, but Curse of the Cat People has more in common with Alice in Wonderland. Oliver Reed and Alice Moore from the original film have an over-imaginative little daughter named Ann who finds a photo of her dad’s ex, the now deceased cat-woman Irena Dubrovna, and fantasizes her into existence as a ghostly playmate. Ann also makes friends with an old actress with a penchant for telling especially vivid tales of the Headless Horseman. Curse of the Cat People is ultimately a very charming, moving tale of growing up fit for any tot, but its ghost and scary stories will gives your kid the heads up that there are things more intense than Cars 3 out there.

Step 2. The Wizard of Oz

Review: 'Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction'

So you just took a nice leisurely ride in the front seat of a shopping cart and successfully fooled your mom into buying you a box of teeth-rotting Fruit Brute. Things have been going pretty well during this supermarket outing. But then, just as you’re about to leave, you catch sight of a young girl’s face absolutely bulging with terror as she peers through a tiny die-cut window. What could be destroying this child’s nerves? As your mom rummages in her handbag for a ten-cents-off Palmolive coupon, you pull the cover open and are assaulted by the terrifying image of that girl in the arms of some sort of skeleton-faced demon.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 87

The Date: December 26

The Movie: The Exorcist (1973)

What Is It?: For those with a serious hangover after a holiday crowded with wide-eyed children, priests, various religious icons, and hearty pea soup dinners, this delightful coming of age story is the perfect antidote.

Why Today?: On this day in 1973, The Exorcist is released. Someone at Warner Brothers has a fabulous sense of humor.

Review: 'I Lost It at the Video Store: A filmmaker’s Oral History of a Vanishing Era'

Everything about film seems to be shrinking these days. I’m not just talking about the minuscule screens on tiny gadgets that people use as substitutes for theaters. I’m also referring to the way people get those films. They visit itunes, click a few pictures, and a minute later they’re streaming the latest Marvel comics movie or whatever. Seeing a movie was not always so instantaneous. If you missed it during its theatrical run, you had to wait as much as a year for it to come out on video. Then you had to leave your home to visit the local mildew-stinking video store to find out if it was available yet. Maybe the movie was out on video, but it wasn’t necessarily available because some other joker had already rented it. So you had to wait until demand died down to the point you could pay your two bucks, get it home, and shove it in the VCR.

This probably all sounds like a pain in the ass to those who did not grow up in the video store age, and it probably was, but it was all we had (well, maybe not all we had…there were also premium cable and pay-per-view channels). It was also something to do on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon. Sometimes it was more about the activity than the movie: get a few friends together and spend an hour pacing up and down the rows of garish yet empty video boxes until you just give up and grab whatever is closest at hand. I wonder how many hours I wasted doing that between 1984 and 2004. It was such a big part of my life that there’s no wonder why it makes me nostalgic.

I’m not the only one. Former editor of Premiere magazine, Tom Roston is another guy who misses those mildewy days, and he pays tribute to them by gathering a couple dozen filmmakers to gab about the video store era in his new book I Lost It at the Video Store: A filmmaker’s Oral History of a Vanishing Era. I’m glad Roston went the oral history route, because the tone of his introduction is too academic to capture the sleazy joys of visiting video stores. Fortunately, former video store employees Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith lead Roston’s roster of commentators, and they keep the discussion funny and fanatical even though the book is largely about the business side of video. We learn how the stores came to be and how they bred a new generation of filmmakers. There is an entire chapter on Reservoir Dogs and how it could have easily become a direct-to-video release. There is less about the vanished communal experience of video browsing, which was such a huge part of the era. But maybe that’s not the best way to make use of film professionals, at least not when there are only 150 pages of large text to get their recollections down. However, we do get some fascinating tidbits distinct to the era, like Smith’s adventures in the porn closet of his store or how Morgan Spurlock would watch the guy’s head exploding in Scanners or the werewolf’s snout growing in An American Werewolf in London frame-by-frame. My friends and I did the same thing with those “subliminal” images of a demon’s face in The Exorcist. Do people still do that type of thing on their iPhones or was it particular to that bygone age of crappy pan-and-scan VHS tapes? Either way it made me nostalgic, and I Lost It at the Video Store is nothing if not nostalgic and elegiac. 

Monsterology: The Devil (666th post!)

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

“Please allow me to introduce myself... ”

Dracula? The Wolf Man? Freddy Kruger? The Mummy? They’re a bunch of petty criminals. Even a whole army of drooling, shuffling zombies just don’t measure up. This cat isn’t capable of evil; he is evil. He is the very embodiment of the thing without which there would be no monster movies, no nasty ghost stories, no Frankenberry, and no Bible, which is where the Devil made his debut in Christian culture. Depending on your interpretation of that story, he may not have starred in as many scenes as is often thought. Was the snake that tempted Eve to eat the apple supposed to be the Devil? Or was he just one of those talking snakes that live in apple trees? One thing is for sure: the result of his temptation was way direr than anything Jason Voorhees ever did. That guy just killed some horny teenagers. The snake turned paradise on Earth into Earth on Earth, a craphole congested with war, pestilence, the NRA, and iPhones. Of course, we shouldn’t absolve Eve of all blame, because as the Bible teaches us, women are very bad. 
 

Some have also interpreted the character of Lucifer as the Devil. An angel or man, depending on your interpretation of the King James edition, Lucifer got too big for his britches and aspired to raise his “throne above the stars of God.” God hates that kind of shit, and he kicked Lucifer, the “morning star,” out of heaven to become the concierge of Hell.

 
The Devil has also been identified as the guy who tempted Jesus during his forty-day fast with the sweet ability to make bread out of rocks, free himself from a pinnacle, and gain control of all the kingdoms in the world. That last one doesn’t sound like much of a prize. What kind of idiot would want all that responsibility? The Devil may also be the dragon of Revelations, a big snake with sheep horns who will rise out of the sea to help get the apocalypse started. The dragon is not named Lucifer or Satan. In fact, the Bible plays coy about who this giant sheep-dragon is, only cluing us in that his name corresponds with the number 666. 
 

The Bible is one of those books that everyone thinks they’ve read but haven’t. Kind of like Moby Dick. So the assumptions about who the Devil is in that book have taken precedence over the fact that many editions of The Bible are reluctant to finger him. Consequently, it’s basically assumed that all the bad shit that goes down in that book of wall-to-wall bad shit is the Devil’s doing. It’s all tremendously hard to swallow, of course, but what a villain! Naturally, the Devil has found his way into many, many other works of fiction, and the depiction of him, and sometimes her, is even more varied than it is in the Bible.

The most popular portrayal of Old Scratch is the most endearing. The baddest guy in the universe is regularly portrayed as a fellow in red pajamas with horns and a pointy tail. According to Jim Steinmeyer in his upcoming book Who Was Dracula? (more about that here on Psychobabble soon), the red Devil can be traced to actor Henry Irving’s portrayal of Mephistopheles in a lavish production of Faust at the Lyceum Theater in 1885. Before then he usually wore black. The horns and tail stem from the devil’s association with sheep and goats and other horrid beasties found in petting zoos. This is the tongue-wagging Devil of Häxan and the one on vintage jars of Red Hots candy and in episodes of “The Twilight Zone” and “The Simpsons.” He is the Devil it’s OK to dress up as on Halloween.

In more legitimately terrifying versions of this Devil, the horns become more antelope or bull-like, he grows to giant proportions, and his muscles get bigger than Glenn Danzig’s. This is the title terror of Night of the Demon, the massive Satan of Fantasia, and the Lord of Darkness of Legend. Scarier still are the devils who bridge the human and the bizarre, the hooded, hairless creatures of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Mel Gibson’s belligerent, torture-porn odyssey, The Passion of the Christ, in which the devil and its devil baby take in the floor show that is Jesus getting the bloody shit beaten out of him for eighteen hours.

In this form, how tempting can the Devil be? How can you concentrate enough to decide whether or not to sell your soul when you’re busy crapping your pants? The more insidious Devil is the one who takes on pleasing, or at least non-monstrous, shapes. These more human Devils tends to take such stock shapes as the unthreatening elderly gentlemen of All That Money Can Buy and the “Printer’s Devil” episode of “The Twilight Zone,” or more in keeping with The Bible’s very healthy view of female sexuality, the temptresses of Bedazzled 1967 and 2000. Movies such as The Witches of Eastwick, Angel Heart, and The Devil’s Advocate have given the big-marquee names Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino opportunities to chew scenery as the biggest evil of them all.

Most unlikely of all is the Devil as he appears in The Exorcist, both because he controls the body of a nice little girl and because his urbane, seductive persona has devolved to straight-up crassness. This devil pukes, pulls faces, belches, and unleashes a string of expletives and toilet insults that Andrew “Dice” Clay might agree push the limits of good taste. This is a Devil smacking of desperation, one that may have read Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, in which the author admitted, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”

In truth, The Exorcist manages to terrify, horrify, and gross us out, though it is at its most terrifying when The Devil is off screen, when we hear bumps in the attic or weird tape recordings of his backwards legion of babblers. When he steps into frame to make Regan MacNeil puke and stab herself in the crotch with a crucifix and spin her head and tell a priest that his “mother sucks cocks in Hell,” the Devil has been reduced to a less fearful creation, a purveyor of gross-out shtick. In this most famous and often-believed terrifying of Devil movies, he merely menaces one mother and daughter, their friends, and a couple of Van Helsing-wannabe priests. In a modern world with greater concerns than fictions such as him, the Devil has become just another movie monster.

Review: John Landis's 'Monsters in the Movies'

John Landis made terrific monster movies such as An American Werewolf in London and Innocent Blood by not taking the genre very seriously. However, Monsters in the Movies: 100 Years of Cinematic Nightmares proves he is nothing less than awestruck by monster movies. You will be too as you peruse the spectacular array of photos he collects in this new coffee table book.

The filmmaker divides the book into the various familiar categories to provide brief overviews of vampires, werewolves, mummies, space monsters, and the rest before inundating readers with the photos that are its reason for existing. A fabulous double-page, behind-the-scenes shot of the Metaluna Mutant from This Island Earth. A creepily eroticized picture of little Linda Blair in her demon makeup that says as much about the subtext of The Exorcist as any extended analysis. An ultra-rare image from the 1863 photomontage “Henry Robin and the Specter.” From the classics to the cheap-o exploiters, the most ancient relics to the most recent CGI pot boilers. Some 1,000 films are represented in this gorgeous, gorgeous book.

Landis’s text initially seems disappointing. His opening chapters on vampires and werewolves are primers that will reveal nothing to faithful horror hounds and lack the cheeky, sometimes curmudgeonly, irreverence that has made him such a welcome talking head in horror documentaries. But he quickly loosens up to crack wise about the Resident Evil movies (“You could take random scenes from each of these films and cut them together and I don’t think anyone would notice”), the unseen genitals in Zemeckis’s Beowulf, and other flicks that don’t quite rise to his standards.

Landis’s writing gets even more intriguing when he allows his personal politics to come into play, as when discussing the conservative nature of mad scientist films and the need to suspend his own atheism to appreciate The Exorcist. Best of all are his interviews with Christopher Lee, Joe Dante, David Cronenberg, Sam Raimi, Guillermo Del Toro, Ray Harryhausen, Rick Baker, and John Carpenter. Because he’s on chummy terms with these various actors and filmmakers, the conversations are casual and provocative. He gives Cronenberg a hilariously hard time regarding the unintended reactionary nature of his films. Someone needs to give Landis his own talk show!

Psychobabble’s 200 Essential Horror Movies Part 6: The 1970s

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)

93. Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly (1970- dir. Freddie Francis)

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.

October 28, 2009: The Eleven Most Memorable Musical Moments from Monster Movies!

Well, kids, Halloween season is winding down, which means I’ll soon be folding Rock & Roll posts back in among the horror nuggets. To make the transition just a little bit smoother I’ve cobbled together a post that focuses on both sides of Psychobabble’s Jekyll and Hyde persona: monster movies and music. So get on your death shrouds and boogie shoes, because I will now chronologically present The Ten Most Memorable Musical Moments from Monster Movies!

1. “Fort Collins Calypso Song” from I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

When RKO Studios told producer Val Lewton that his next project would have the goofy title I Walked With a Zombie, the cagey director started work on a film that was essentially an adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë classic Jane Eyre reset on a sugar plantation on the zombie-plagued island of Saint Sebastian. Filling in for Brontë’s Jane is Betsy Connell (Francine Dee), a nurse who learns that the Rand Family, for which she has come to care, has a dark past via a catchy ditty sung by Calypso legend Sir Lancelot. When the “Fort Collins Calypso Song” is first heard, Wesley Rand (James Ellison) flies into a fit of rage. Later, Sir Lancelot sings the song in a gloomier rendition aimed at Betsy. Calypso never sounded so creepy.


2. “The Headless Horseman” from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)

Disney’s telling of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” may be the most faithful version of this oft-told tale. Well, that is if you ignore Bing Crosby’s snappy songs. But why would you? For a film that isn’t generally ranked among Disney’s greatest, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad has some truly memorable musical numbers, the best of which is this complex piece in which yellow-bellied Ichabod Crane learns of the headless Hessian haunting the woods surrounding Sleepy Hollow.


3. “Once Upon a Time There Was a Pretty Fly (Lullaby)” from The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Is there a more haunting scene in film than the riverboat escape in Charles Laughton’s masterful The Night of the Hunter? Two young children flee from Demonic Preacher/Big Bad Wolf Robert Mitchum and take to a little wooden boat. Suddenly, the manic, terrifying tone shifts toward the eerily dreamy, and the little girl begins to sing a beautiful song about an escaping fly in an incongruously mature voice (actually sung by former vaudeville singer Kitty White). The journey downriver is accompanied by various tableaux that draw equally on fairy tales and wild nature: a perfectly spun spider’s web; a croaking frog. There may have never been a more transcendentally beautiful marriage of music and film as the “Once Upon a Time There Was a Pretty Fly” sequence, but special mention should also go to Mitchum’s creepy rendition of “Hymn #59” (a.k.a. “Leaning”), which he sings whenever he’s on the hunt.


4. “Willow’s Song” from The Wicker Man (1973)

A lot of viewers stumble into The Wicker Man without knowing it’s a demented pagan musical. The soundtrack is a trove of wonderful British folk songs that comment on the action of the film in unexpected ways. We get to hear Christopher Lee’s port-rich bass as he sings the rollicking “Tinker of Rye” and multiple fine songs by Paul Giovanni & Magnet. Yet no song is as evocative as “Willow’s Song”, sung by Lesley Mackie (who plays Daisy in the film) and lip-synched by Brit Ekland as she frolics in the nude in an attempt to lure Edward Woodward to his doom. Ekland’s voice is not the only phony in this scene—as she was pregnant at the time, director Robin Hardy incorporated a stunt butt to substitute for the Bride of Rod Stewart during her rear shots.

5. “Tubular Bells” from The Exorcist (1973)

William Friedkin had a bastard of a time finding an appropriate score for his little demonic possession opus The Exorcist. After violently rejecting the music he commissioned from Lalo Schifrin, who is most famous for writing the theme to “Mission Impossible”, he resorted to the needle-in-a-haystack method of hunting through random records in Warner Bros.’s music library. That’s when he happened across the yet-to-be-released Tubular Bells, a severely pretentious new age symphony by former Soft Machine bassist Mike Oldfield. Friedkin was so enamored with the creepily tinkling music that he used the first movement of “Tubular Bells, Part 1” as a running theme throughout his film, so there isn’t necessarily one moment with which the piece is best associated. But it became so powerfully linked to the blockbuster that Oldfield’s highly uncommercial album ended up selling in the neighborhood of 16 million copies throughout the world. It’s hard to believe anyone can listen to “Tubular Bells” today without conjuring up images of green vomit and spinning heads.

6. “Puttin’ on the Ritz” from Young Frankenstein (1974)

Mel Brooks was adamantly opposed to the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” dance number Gene Wilder wrote for Young Frankenstein, feeling it strayed too far from the Universal Monster Movie parody at the heart of the film. Brooks had a point, as Wilder’s Frankenstein and Peter Boyle’s Monster high-stepping to Irving Berlin’s standard seems to come out of nowhere, yet it may be the most famous scene in this most famous horror-comedy. The spectacle of Boyle answering Wilder’s lines with a yowled “Puttin’ ona riiiiiiss!” doesn’t sound like the stuff of comedy gold, but it’s the scene’s bizarro incongruity that makes it stand out among the picture’s innumerable gags.


7. “Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

The most popular Midnight Movie is also the greatest monster musical, so The Rocky Horror Picture Show has no shortage of revered songs. Still, I doubt that many of the film’s crazed followers would argue that its most supreme musical moment is this insanely catchy rocker that informs squares Brad and Janet that time-traveling ecstasy is just a pelvic thrust away. The three solo spots in the song—Riff Raff (Richard O’Brien) careening from Karloffian lugubriousness to Bon Scott screeching, Magenta (Patricia Quinn) sing-speaking like the Bride of Bela Lugosi, Columbia (Little Nell Campbell) chewing her lines like a Queens car hop—are exhilarating. It’s just a jump to the left…

8. “In Heaven (The Lady in the Radiator Song)” from Eraserhead (1977)

Few filmmakers integrate music as seamlessly into their films as David Lynch. Even the sound of steam escaping from a radiator takes on a musical quality in Eraserhead, although actual music is used relatively sparsely in Lynch’s debut feature. There are a couple of organ pieces by Fats Waller and this childlike ditty sung by Peter Ivers and lip-synched on screen by actress Laurel Near. Following the birth of his monstrous baby, Henry X (Jack Nance) starts seeking solace from Near’s tiny, puffy-cheeked figure residing in his radiator. At one point, she interrupts his nightmarish visions to emerge from the darkness and serenade him with a song essentially impelling him to commit suicide, because “In heaven, everything is fine.” It’s beautiful and haunting in execution, oddly disturbing in intent, and absolutely unforgettable.

9. “Blue Moon” from An American Werewolf in London (1981)

The film that basically gave birth to the ironic use of music, An American Werewolf in London sports a soundtrack loaded with moon-themed oldies. After Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” plays out in its entirety as David Kessler (David Naughton) nervously paces around his new girlfriend’s apartment waiting to turn into a ravenous man-dog, he settles in for the evening as Sam Cook’s version of “Blue Moon” oozes from the soundtrack. Suddenly, Kessler screams in agony as he undergoes the single greatest werewolf transformation ever conceived. The sweetness of Cook’s voice matched with the violence of Rick Baker’s werewolf effects achieves weird transcendence.

10. “96 Tears” from Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye (1985)

The filmmakers responsible for Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye did not secure the rights to the original version of “96 Tears” by Question Mark & the Mysterians, but I will forever associate the classic garage rock anthem with this fairly decent anthology nevertheless. This somewhat generic remake by the Northern Orchestra is featured in the first and best segment of Cat’s Eye: “Quitters Inc.” James Woods plays a schlub struggling with a mean nicotine addiction. He tries a radical solution that involves his wife being placed in an electrified booth in the event he sneaks a ciggie. Of course, he does, and wifey winds up hopping and screaming to “96 Tears” in the “Cat Room.” It’s an ironic combo of disturbing torture and danceable Rock & Roll that makes for the most memorable scene in the picture.

11. “Partytime (Zombie Version)” from Return of the Living Dead (1985)

Goth-metalists 45 Grave did not write the horrifying “Partytime”—a truly depressing song about the rape and murder of a five-year old girl—for Return of the Living Dead, but surely that’s where the vast majority of folks heard it. At the behest of Orion Pictures, 45 Grave frontwoman Dinah Cancer agreed to dump the original bleak child-abuse lyrics in favor of dopey ones that are far more in step with the fun-loving zombie flick. In the film, the track plays as the dead first start rising from the grave en masse, but it’s equally memorable for its place of pride in the trailers that ran on late night TV constantly throughout the mid-‘80s. There are better songs on the Return of the Living Dead soundtrack than this goofy headbanger (contributions from the Cramps, the Damned, and TSOL), but none that better sum up the movie with the tagline “They’re back from the grave and ready to party.”

October 12, 2009: The 20 Most Astounding She-Monsters!

As in most other areas of characterization, women have tended to be relegated to second-string status in the realm of monsterdom. Frankenstein’s Monster? Dracula? The Phantom of the Opera? King Kong? All dudes. Even the Invisible Man was a guy. While the vast majority of A-list monsters are male, there are plenty of fictional females that either qualify as inhuman creatures or simply partake in particularly monstrous activities. There are ghosts and vampires, aliens and devil dolls, and witches, witches, witches. So, here are twenty of the scariest, creepiest, and incomparably most astounding females ever to induce a nightmare.

20. Mater Suspiriorum (a.k.a.: Helena Markos)
Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers Trilogy” took twenty years to complete, but there’s no question that its first episode was the series’ finest... and the greatest film in Argento’s gorgeously grisly oeuvre. Suspiria introduces mother number one: Helena Markos, the Mother of Sighs. As the film begins, Markos merely seems to be a long-dead presence at the Tanz Akademie, a dance academy in Germany’s Black Forest where American Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) is studying ballet. All we get is the occasional image of the witch’s shudder-inducing disembodied peepers as various folks are murdered in horrific ways at the academy. Those scenes are notorious for both their brutality and the painterly way Argento executes them. But the most deeply chilling moment in the film comes at the climax when we discover that Mama Markos isn’t as dead as Banyon thinks. But she sure looks like she is. According to Jessica Harper, Argento employed a 90-year old former hooker he found in Rome to play Mater Suspiriorum, but this monster’s memorability stems more from Pierantonio Mecacci’s make-up wizardry than acting.

19. Countess Marya Zaleska
Had Dracula’s Daughter (1936) come off the way screenwriter John L. Balderston intended, Countess Marya Zaleska might have been a lot closer to the top of this list. Alas, the Powers-That-Be at Universal Pictures rejected his outrageous script, which contained scenes of a lusty vampiress committing acts of S&M torture. Frankenstein director James Whale was originally slotted to make the picture, and he was apparently determined to craft a film that would have made Bride of Frankenstein look like an episode of “The Donna Reed Show”, but he backed out when Universal informed him that they expected something quite a bit less elaborate (and costly) than what he had in mind. So, Dracula's Daughter is not as spectacular as it surely would have been with Balderston's racy original script or Whale at the helm, but Gloria Holden still manages to save the day with her icy, ethereal, intense portrayal of Drac’s spawn. And her seduction of a street girl is about as daring as Hollywood got in the wake of the Hays Code.

18. Countess Muriel Arrowsmith

No one does weird sensuality like Barbara Steele, who pretty much took the Goth look invented by Vampira and drained it of its bombshell campiness. Steele brings all of her gaunt allure to her dual roles as sisters Muriel and Jenny Arrowsmith in the surreal Italian ghost story Nightmare Castle. Muriel floats through the first quarter of the film like a looming storm cloud until her sadistic mad-scientist husband Stephen tortures her to death for her marital indiscretions. But Muriel has the last laugh when she takes possession of the sister who replaces her and returns from the grave as a grotesque ghoul triumphantly shrieking “It’s my moment now!” in one of the most wonderfully overwrought scenes in ‘60s horror. Countess Muriel Arrowsmith is not as well remembered as Steele’s similar turns as Princess Asa Vajda and Katja Vajda in Black Sunday (more on that further down the list), but she is nearly as terrifyingly mesmerizing.

17. The Alien Queen
Call me a monster movie blasphemer, but I’m not a fan of James Cameron’s Aliens. Whereas Ridley Scott’s original Alien was a dark, moody horror film, Cameron’s sequel is kind of a loud, dumb shoot-‘em-up (Cameron sure loves loud and dumb). Regardless of my opinion about the film as a whole, I’d feel remiss to not give credit to the magnificent Alien Queen with whom Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley has an unforgettable showdown at the climax of the film. While Ripley searches for a missing girl with the unfortunate name Newt, she discovers just who is responsible for birthing all of those nasty aliens… and she’s massive and very, very miffed.

16. Regan MacNeil
The reason why a horror character as iconic as sweet, little Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) is not higher up on this list is because, technically, she isn’t the monster in The Exorcist (1973). She merely plays host to Old Scratch. Still it’s Regan we see doing all manner of horrendous things, from peeing on a perfectly good carpet to giving herself a villainous gynecological probe with a crucifix to shoving her mom’s face in her bloody crotch. I’d add “projectile puking on a priest” to her list of atrocities, but who among us wouldn’t do the same if given the chance? She looks scary, she’s got the mouth of a longshoreman, and she’s 12-years old. If that isn’t the definition of a monster, nothing is.

15. Virginia Merrye
Spider Baby is that rare cult horror movie that works both as outrageous camp and as a quality movie, and the late Jill Banner perfectly embodies that dichotomy as the equally uproarious and sinister Virginia Merrye. A decade before he made celebrated blaxploitation flicks like Coffy and Foxy Brown, Jack Hill made this perverse, droll, disturbing, stylish, and vengefully original little movie about a completely insane Southern family in 1964. Finally released four years later, Spider Baby might best be described as Tennessee Williams meets Charles Addams. The cast is cult-horror fan manna with Sid “Captain Spalding” Haig as twitchy, dangerous simpleton Ralph Merrye and Lon Chaney Jr. as Bruno the Chauffer, the family’s father figure. But Jill Banner as Virgina Merrye, a loony woman-child with a penchant for creepy-crawly pets and slicing folks up, steals the show completely. The late Banner only had a few credits (mostly TV guest spots), which is unfortunate because she displays real star power as the title creep in Spider Baby.

14. Irena Dubrovna
Irena Dubrovna: average woman wracked with emotional problems or flesh-feasting were-cat? As is often the case with a Val Lewton film, Cat People leaves such supernatural questions ambiguous. What isn’t ambiguous is the power the beautiful Simon Simone wields over the film. As Irena— a Serbian refugee recently wed to American engineer Oliver Reed (Kent Smith)— she is at first cute and care free, but when she realizes her superstition-born terror of sex is causing a marital rift, she turns morose… then murderous. Cat People is unusual for its time as it portrays religious-superstitions and a woman’s denial of her sexuality as destructive (compare how Irena fairs in the film to Jane Randolph’s sexually confident Alice Moore). Irena ultimately falls victim to her hang-ups, but viewers who fall under her feline charms, as Oliver Reed did, will be happy to see her back in ghostly form in Curse of the Cat People, which arguably trumps its predecessor.

13. Elizabeth Selwyn
It takes a really powerful presence to upstage Christopher Lee, and that’s just what Patricia Jessel as Elizabeth Selwyn does in City of the Dead (a.k.a.: Horror Hotel). The film begins in 1692 as the innocent Selwyn is burned at the stake for allegedly playing footsy with Satan. Disgusted by her religiously crazed neighbors, she vows allegiance to the Devil as she burns and her terror turns to elated vengeance. Cut to that same town in 1960 where a woman, who looks suspiciously like Selwyn, is running a creepy hotel in the foggiest little nook in New England. Whether she’s spitting on the assholes that sentence her to death or orchestrating human sacrifices almost 300 years later, Selwyn is tough and self-possessed in a stately manner that makes her cinema’s strongest female equivalent to co-star Lee’s Dracula.

12. Rhoda Penmark
There has never been a child as terrifying as tap shoe-wielding maniac Rhoda Penmark. Unlike Regan McNeil, she’s no vessel for Satan. Nature vs. nurture arguments notwithstanding, Rhoda’s evil is all hers. Nothing that cheerfully polite and seemingly eager-to-please could be anything but a psychopath in waiting, and Rhoda gives in to her urges after classmate Claude Daigle usurps the penmanship award she so covets. The big screen incarnation of The Bad Seed swathes the story in stagy camp, earning it a passionate following of ironic cultists. But William March’s original novel is far more disturbing. Patty McCormack’s performance as Rhoda in the 1956 film is certainly cult-worthy, but it is her literally predecessor that may inspire nightmares.

11. Granny Hart
The title character of “The Twilight Zone’s” “Jess-Belle” is a brooding, beautiful, lovelorn witch played by Anne Francis, but the episode’s real star is Jeanette’s Nolan’s horny, happy-go-luck Granny Hart. After Jess falls in love with Roscoe from “The Dukes of Hazzard”, she calls on local broom-rider Granny Hart to “witch” her in exchange for her soul. Granny is renowned in the Ozarks for her love potions, but her neatest trick is the ability to transform herself from a hag to a quite attractive senior citizen in the blink of an eye. Whether she’s hunched over a cauldron or pawing James Best, Granny Hart is invariably in a chipper mood and absolutely delighted by her sorceress status. When Jess-Belle expresses remorse after making her Mephistophelean deal, Granny cheerfully responds, “Well, you’re lookin’ at it all wrong. Be a witch. Take a witch’s pleasure. Take the man you bargained for—give him witch’s love!” That’s the spirit!

10. Princess Asa Vajda
Although it’s slow-paced, Mario Bava’s Black Sunday is a masterpiece of Gothic atmosphere and exquisitely creepy sets. But the film’s most memorable element is the haunting presence of one Princess Asa Vajda, who we first see as she’s about to be burned at the stake for witchery or Satan worshipping or some such crime against Christian decency. The peeved Princess vows revenge on the crazed mob right before they hammer a spiked mask onto her face (the spikes are on the inside, incidentally). Many years later she is resurrected as a sort of vampire-witch, her face still polka-dotted with the puncture wounds she suffered so many years before and sets off on a macabre quest for eternal life. Most will remember the Princess for her unforgettably gruesome visage, but it’s Barbara Steele’s wild performance that makes her a truly great She-Monster. With eyes and nostrils flaring, Steele delights in executing the Princess’s escapades and every one of her scenes is a showstopper. The results: Italy gains its first great horror film and its most unforgettable monster.

9. Baby Jane Hudson
Long before Danny Bonaduce and Dana Plato became the models for the child-star-gone-wrong there was Baby Jane Hudson. Of course, there really isn’t that much difference between the apple-cheeked, attitudinal singer she was as a tyke and the psychotic pentagenarian she would become. Honestly, I think I’d rather be bound and gagged to a bed like Joan Crawford than have to listen to little Baby Jane sing “I’m Sending a Letter to Daddy”. But that’s just me. Bette Davis’s portrayal of the title character of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is the stuff of legend: she’s creepy, she’s hilarious, and she’s also pretty heartbreaking — try not to feel for her when she convinces herself that Victor “King Tut” Buono will resurrect her long-dead career. Just don’t let her serve you lunch.

8. Medusa
The most ancient monster on this list may also be the scariest. Just think of how terrifying a creature has to be to have the power to kill you just by looking at you. In Greek mythology, Medusa was one of three gorgon sisters (Stheno and Euryale were the others), which had snakes for hair and the power to turn humans into stone with their gazes. Terence Fisher’s 1964 film The Gorgon played really fast and loose with mythology, having Magaera (actually a Fury, not a Gorgon) strolling around London and committing murders beneath the full moon like the Wolf Man. Medusa as realized by stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen in 1981’s Clash of the Titans is a lot closer to the original myth, and with her snake-like body and scaly face, she truly lives up to her horrifying reputation.

7. Carrie White
Like so many of the classic creatures (Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolf Man, the Gill Man), Carrie White is not really the monster in her story. It’s the “normal” folks who really epitomize monstrosity in their hatred, prejudice, and small-minded superstitions. The destructiveness the title telekinetic teen unleashes at the climax of Carrie—novel and film—is an act of righteous retaliation. How many who’ve been victimized by the “cool kids” fantasized about perpetrating similar revenge? Too many, according to the media, but Carrie may provide a vicarious outlet for some of these kids. For the victimizers, there’s a valuable lesson to be learned: don’t fuck with the weird kid.

6. The Evil Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
The great thing about the Evil Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is that she’s two monsters in one. For the first half of the film she’s a sadistic but beautiful creep of the wicked-stepmother variety who orders the death of fairer stepdaughter Snow White. In a gruesome move that would never past muster in a contemporary Disney film, she asks her huntsman crony to bring Snow’s heart back to her in a jeweled box as proof that the deed is done (a detail from the original Brothers Grimm tale). In the second half of the film, the Queen transforms into a witchlike crone and delivers the non-proverbial poison apple to the subject of her seething jealousy. The chilling presence of the Evil Queen has stretched far beyond the original Snow White, and films ranging from Annie Hall to John Waters’s Desperate Living to Enchanted have paid tribute to her unforgettable evil.

5. Minnie Castevet
The women and girls on this list do some nasty things, but really… orchestrating the rape of a newlywed by Satan? That’s going a wee bit too far. Yet all is forgiven because Ruth Gordon, as the witch Minnie Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby, is utterly adorable. Yes, she’s a pretty obnoxious neighbor, constantly showing up at the Woodhouse’s apartment uninvited, slipping a Mickey Finn into Rosemary’s “chocolate mouse”, and stealing her demon baby (plus the whole rape thing), but she’s so upbeat, so full of vigor, so funny and charming that it’s impossible to begrudge her. Few monsters are as thoroughly evil and thoroughly likable as Minnie Castevet.

4. Talky Tina
The original gabby demon doll, Talky Tina is the anti-hero at the center of the “Twilight Zone’s” scariest 30 minutes. In “Living Doll”, a little girl named Christie is having difficulty acclimating to her mother’s new dickhead boyfriend, played with sweaty menace by Telly Savalas. Kojak has a cow when he sees his wastrel wife has purchased an expensive talking doll for Christie, but outrage turns to terror when Talky Tina starts giggling, “I’m Talky Tina, and I’m going to kill you.” Voiced by June “Rocky the Flying Squirrel” Foray, Talky Tina is a terrifying combination of relentlessness, indestructibility, Charles Bronson-cool, and plastic.

3. Lady Sylvia Marsh
Male or female, few monsters relish their evilocity with the zeal of Lady Sylvia Marsh in Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm. The Lady is a vampire/snake-priestess thingy who worships a giant night crawler and just has to dance whenever she hears a wind instrument. Russell’s empathy is clearly with the vivacious, anti-religion, anti-priggishness, and very funny Marsh and not with the dull prudes who would thwart her plot to feed virginal Catherine Oxenberg to her wormy master. She can barely contain her glee when blasting venom on a crucifix (a stunt that equally delighted atheist-actress Amanda Donohoe and atheist-viewer me) or baring fangs at her numerous victims. Based on a Bram Stoker novel that isn’t Dracula, Lair has many detractors, but those losers are missing out on a bottomless pit of fun… and most of that fun can be traced directly to the antics of Lady Sylvia Marsh.

2. The Wicked Witch of the West
I’d wager that if a poll were taken assessing the fictional character that traumatized the most children, the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz would come out on top. She’s just such an embodiment of the things that most terrify impressionable kids: her ruthlessness, her apparent ability to materialize anywhere at anytime, her cadre of hideous flying monkeys that follow her every command, her twisted tower in which she imprisons young Dorothy, her boner for Dorothy’s beloved pet, her leering green face and grasping fingers, and the way she delights in her own evil. As mean and scary as Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch is, you have to admit that she has a legitimate beef with Dorothy. What would you do if some Kansas yokel dropped a house on your sister and ripped off her shoes? You’d probably go as ballistic as the WWW. Of course, The Wizard of Oz directs all of our empathy squarely toward Dorothy, so it’s tough to see the Witch as anything other than the ultimate bogey woman.

1. The Bride of Frankenstein
She only has four minutes of screen time in the film named after her, but Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein is without question the most memorable monster on this list, and may only fall behind Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster and Lugosi’s Dracula in overall terms. With her lightning-streaked fright wig and childlike awkwardness, the Bride has inspired countless imitators and been captured on an innumerable amount of merchandise. Her unsettling combination of morbid weirdness and early-Hollywood glamour laid the groundwork for all of the sexy grotesques that followed her, from Vampira to Morticia Addams to Princess Asa Vajda to Elvira to Lady Sylvia Marsh. Her hairstyle has been appropriated in one form or another by personalities ranging from Lily Munster to Dave Vanian of the Damned. Her elliptical presence in The Bride of Frankenstein sparked numerous attempts to fill in the gaps (Elizabeth Hand’s imaginative feminist novel The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride; the films The Bride and an upcoming remake that promises to focus more on the title character than the original did), yet she packs a lot of living into her four minutes on film. She learns to walk by leaning on the shoulders of her creators, takes in all around her with a wide-eyed mixture of wonder and disgust, tentatively considers a romance with an ugly but sensitive brute, and ultimately says “no thanks” to it all. That concise arc from childlike hesitancy to aggressive self-reliance makes the Bride a fully-realized personality despite her lack of screen time. Couple that complexity with an iconic appearance and you’ve got the most astounding She-Monster of them all!