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.

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)

Psychobabble recommends 'Confessions of a Scream Queen'

The “scream queen” label is as seemingly limited as women’s roles in horror films. It brings to mind some torndress-clad victim shrieking for her life as she’s about to be carried into a boggy lair or hacked to death by a psycho killer. Too often this is the case, but the queens may also be the ones eliciting the screams. Thankfully, Matt Beckoff’s interview anthology Confessions of a Scream Queen doesn’t define the term rigidly. His discussions range from Carla Laemmle, who danced in Lon Chaney’s silent Phantom of the Opera and spoke the first words in Dracula, Universal’s debut talky horror, to Adrienne Barbeau, who played the hero (Stevie Wayne in The Fog) just as well as the victim (Wilma Northrup in Creepshow). In between are talks with 13 other actresses, including Lupita Tovar (the Spanish language Dracula), Judith O’Dea (Night of the Living Dead), Karen Black (Trilogy of Terror), Ingrid Pitt (Countess Dracula, The Wicker Man), Marilyn Burns (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and P.J. Soles (Carrie, Halloween).

Beckoff tends to tread lightly with his questions, so the success of each interview often hinges on how much the subject is willing to dig into her own experiences. Some of the older actresses are too polite to compel. Others, like Jessica Harper (Suspiria), come off as a little short on time and interest. But interviews with Burns, who goes deep into the horrendous hardships she suffered while making Texas Chainsaw…, Dee Wallace Stone (The Howling), who isn’t afraid to get her claws out, and Black, a great eccentric who insists she’s never been in a horror film (!), make the book worth reading.

August 20, 2009: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #8

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty-palm panic. In this ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I've been reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

Case Study #8: The climax of Trilogy of Terror



Unlike most of the things I’ve dealt with in the Things That Scare Me series, the one I’ll be discussing today is not something that I first encountered at an exceptionally young, impressionable age. I’m pretty positive I was fifteen when I first caught Trilogy of Terror on TV, and I remember this because that was the age I discovered Led Zeppelin. Late one night, when my parents were out and I had the house to myself, I was flicking between The Song Remains the Same and Trilogy of Terror (and if you don’t understand why a budding Zeppelin fan might be compelled to switch channels while watching The Song Remains the Same for the first time, you’ve never endured John Bonham’s 65-minute drum solo). While The Song Remains the Same needs no introduction, Trilogy of Terror might. It’s a 1975 made-for-TV movie anthologizing adaptations of three short stories by horror maestro Richard Matheson (the cat behind the books that inspired The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Omega Man, as well as classic stories like “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and “Long Distance Call”). B-movie queen Karen Black stars in all three segments. The first two are pretty lame; there’s “Julie”, the story of a murderous tutor, and “Millicent and Therese”, which is about voodoo and doppelgangers or something. The final segment, however, is a classic. “Amelia” (based on Matheson’s story “Prey”) is a tension-packed piece about a woman who picks up a “Zuni hunting fetish” at the local mall and must fend for her life when the nasty-looking doll comes to life and pursues her with a teensie-weensie spear. The segment is the kind of thing hacks might describe as a “nail-biter,” but I’m not a hack, so I’m going to call it a “toe-biter.” Still the piece wasn’t really terrifying enough to terrify fifteen-year-old me… at least not until the ending (suck on these spoilers!).

So, Amelia has punted the Zuni hunting fetish thingy into her oven, set it to broil, and all seems well. But it ain’t. Following up on her game-winning kick, Amelia opens the oven door to check on the smoldering dolly. Bad move. The oven belches forth a huge plume of smoke, pumping zillions of pyrolysis-ized Zuni particles into the atmosphere and up Amelia’s schnoz. She passes out. The screen goes black.

When we next see Amelia, this happens… the scene that worked its way into quite a number of my teenage nightmares:

The Verdict: OK, here’s why this scene is so horrifying: she breaks the fourth wall. If the now-Zuni-possessed Amelia had merely called her mom, invited her to her doom, squatted on the floor, and started stabbing the boards, it wouldn’t be so bad. But she looks directly into the camera, creating an intimate connection with the viewer. So, you’re watching this movie that’s two parts crappy and one part terrific, and people are killing each other, and dolls are hunting people, and people are hunting dolls, and you— the viewer— are sitting on your sofa with one hand down your pants and another in a bowl of popcorn, and it’s all fine and good because, hey, it’s not like anyone’s bothering you. But, wait a minute, now they are. Shit, that possessed chick is staring right at you! And she’s got a knife! And she’s smiling at you with a mouth full of plastic, joke-shop fangs! You didn’t sign up for this. Movie characters are supposed to snarl at other movie characters, not at you, innocent viewer! Breaking the fourth wall is perhaps the most personally engaging thing a filmmaker can do, and it doesn’t just work in horror movies. When Eddie Murphy stares into the camera in Trading Places, a joke about how patronizing the two old white guys are becomes a thousand times funnier. When Giulietta Masina takes a quick peek into the lens at the end of Nights of Cabiria, a poignant scene becomes a tear-flooder. So when director Dan Curtis gets Karen Black to look directly into the camera during the final frames of Trilogy of Terror, it becomes much, much, much scarier than any scene in any made-for-TV horror movie deserves to be. In other words, I was absolutely justified in my terror... fifteen-years old or not.