A rather odd off-shoot of all the chemical experimentation going down in the mid-‘60s pop scene found groups embracing their new found, pin-pupiled “innocence” and brewing up psychedelic kiddie tunes. Like Captain Kangaroo after a hit of Orange Sunshine, The Beatles, The Stones, Pink Floyd, and just about anyone who was anyone leaped onto the trippy toddler choo choo. In his book 33 1/3: The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, Andy Miller describes this short-lived genre as the “something far-out in the nursery strand of British psychedelia.” The dominant influences were, indeed, English eccentrics like Lewis Carroll and, to a much lesser extent, Kenneth Graham and nonsense guru Edward Lear. As was the case with most things British and trippy, The Beatles led the way with…
1. “Yellow Submarine” by The Beatles (1966)
Psychobabble: For Groovy Ghouls, Retro Rockers, & Kooky Cultists.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
January 21, 2010: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #10
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 #10: The Poltergeist face-ripper.
The schoolyard is the campfire of urban and suburban kids. Stories are passed around, myths are related and created. Based on my own experience, most of these yarns involved horrific scenes in popular movies. I recall a friend seeing Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom for the first time and regaling me with stories about still-beating hearts being torn from chests, feasts of monkey brains, eel babies, and eyeball soup. “Nice try,” said I, “but you took it too far. No way am I going to believe that some family-film by Steven Spielberg contains such graphic grotesqueries” (actually, I probably said “gross shit”, as I was ten at the time). Alas, my friend was not having a tug at my leg, and the picture did, indeed, contain all these nasty images and more.
As potent as the Temple of Doom stories were, I was a little too old at that point for them to deter me from seeing the movie. The same cannot be said of Poltergeist released two years earlier. Here we have another Spielberg-created dark fantasy aimed at a PG crowd (PG-13 didn’t come around until 1984, and was partially inspired by the aforementioned Indiana Jones film) replete with pull-no-punches shocks: a goopy kid-eating tree, a monstrous kid-strangling clown, droves of corpses rising from a swimming pool, JoBeth Williams’s ghost-rape.
Everybody loves a clown...
However, the only scene to really make the playground rounds was one in which a guy, apparently, tears his own face off with his bare hands. What this had to do with a ghost story wasn’t particularly clear to me (and, frankly, it still isn’t), but it conjured an image so punishingly violent and grisly that I couldn’t feature it really existed. At the same time, it kept me from watching Poltergeist for several years. When it debuted on HBO and the rest of my family was gathered around the tube to take in its sundry horrors, I was perched at the kitchen table upstairs with the lights off, terrified, listening to all the screaming and screeching emanating from the TV, watching the ample strobe effects from the screen flash through the kitchen like lightning. Why I put myself through this is anyone’s guess, but afterward my family confirmed that the guy-ripping-off-his-own-face scene was very much present and accounted for... as was the guy snacking on a maggoty chicken leg right before doing the deed. Observe:
The Verdict: OK, so the guy is obviously tearing pieces of latex off a dummy head, his hands groping as unnaturally as those of a Muppet. Still, this is some pretty heavy stuff, as the chunks of flesh splosh in the sink, the dummy’s eyes roll up in its head, and the actor’s fingers tear away at his mouth, revealing a skeletal grimace. There’s also the nightmarish inevitability of the act, that sense of being unable to stop oneself from doing something dreadfully self-destructive. And let’s not forget about that self-eviscerating steak. All in all, a sequence of visceral mutilation and surreal grottiness worthy of Buñuel, as well as a rare instance of a cinematic visual being every bit as horrific as any I could cook up in my overactive eight-year-old imagination. Had I watched this when I was eight, rather than cowering in the kitchen, my parents probably would have had to ship me off to the local kiddie shrink. In other words, I was justified in my terror. Quite justified.
Case Study #10: The Poltergeist face-ripper.
The schoolyard is the campfire of urban and suburban kids. Stories are passed around, myths are related and created. Based on my own experience, most of these yarns involved horrific scenes in popular movies. I recall a friend seeing Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom for the first time and regaling me with stories about still-beating hearts being torn from chests, feasts of monkey brains, eel babies, and eyeball soup. “Nice try,” said I, “but you took it too far. No way am I going to believe that some family-film by Steven Spielberg contains such graphic grotesqueries” (actually, I probably said “gross shit”, as I was ten at the time). Alas, my friend was not having a tug at my leg, and the picture did, indeed, contain all these nasty images and more.
As potent as the Temple of Doom stories were, I was a little too old at that point for them to deter me from seeing the movie. The same cannot be said of Poltergeist released two years earlier. Here we have another Spielberg-created dark fantasy aimed at a PG crowd (PG-13 didn’t come around until 1984, and was partially inspired by the aforementioned Indiana Jones film) replete with pull-no-punches shocks: a goopy kid-eating tree, a monstrous kid-strangling clown, droves of corpses rising from a swimming pool, JoBeth Williams’s ghost-rape.
Everybody loves a clown...
However, the only scene to really make the playground rounds was one in which a guy, apparently, tears his own face off with his bare hands. What this had to do with a ghost story wasn’t particularly clear to me (and, frankly, it still isn’t), but it conjured an image so punishingly violent and grisly that I couldn’t feature it really existed. At the same time, it kept me from watching Poltergeist for several years. When it debuted on HBO and the rest of my family was gathered around the tube to take in its sundry horrors, I was perched at the kitchen table upstairs with the lights off, terrified, listening to all the screaming and screeching emanating from the TV, watching the ample strobe effects from the screen flash through the kitchen like lightning. Why I put myself through this is anyone’s guess, but afterward my family confirmed that the guy-ripping-off-his-own-face scene was very much present and accounted for... as was the guy snacking on a maggoty chicken leg right before doing the deed. Observe:
The Verdict: OK, so the guy is obviously tearing pieces of latex off a dummy head, his hands groping as unnaturally as those of a Muppet. Still, this is some pretty heavy stuff, as the chunks of flesh splosh in the sink, the dummy’s eyes roll up in its head, and the actor’s fingers tear away at his mouth, revealing a skeletal grimace. There’s also the nightmarish inevitability of the act, that sense of being unable to stop oneself from doing something dreadfully self-destructive. And let’s not forget about that self-eviscerating steak. All in all, a sequence of visceral mutilation and surreal grottiness worthy of Buñuel, as well as a rare instance of a cinematic visual being every bit as horrific as any I could cook up in my overactive eight-year-old imagination. Had I watched this when I was eight, rather than cowering in the kitchen, my parents probably would have had to ship me off to the local kiddie shrink. In other words, I was justified in my terror. Quite justified.
October 6, 2009: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #9
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 #9: The prologue of Twilight Zone: The Movie
In keeping with the ongoing Twilight Zone 50th Anniversary festivities here at Psychobabble, I’m going to delve into one of the more embarrassing installments of “Things That Scare Me.” “Embarrassing?” you ask. “But I too found the opening sequence of Twilight Zone: The Movie terrifying when I was five-years old!” OK. Mistake number one: I was not five-years old when I saw Twilight Zone: The Movie. I was nine or ten, which is well out of the range of acceptability. I mean, this sequence is surely one of the better things in the very hit-and-miss big screen adaptation of Rod Serling’s great series (George Miller’s remake of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”? Hit! Steven Spielberg’s remake of “Kick the Can”? Great big stinking miss!). But scary? I don’t know. Judge for yourself with your jaded, 21st century eyes.
The scariest thing about this is the build up: Dan Aykroyd asking Albert Brooks if he wants to “see something reeeeally scary.” Nice establishment of suspense, director John Landis! Too bad you didn’t bring a similarly deft hand to your lame full-length segment in the film, which finds racist Vic Morrow trotting through history as the victim of various violent bigots (I’m not getting into the whole death controversy thing here, though). The problem is that the pay-off is weak: Aykroyd turns into a demon, growls like a cougar, and strangles Brooks. Thud. Still, many people profess to having been scared by this scene as kids, so perhaps I shouldn’t flagellate myself too much.
But then again, maybe I should. And this brings us to mistake number two: I wasn’t actually scared by watching this scene. You see, my mother was the one who watched it. I asked her what happened in the movie, and she began to explain this opening sequence in intricate detail. Once she got to the “You wanna see something really scary” part, my terror had apparently become so palpable that she halted the story, perhaps out of concern that I might piss the bed that night. But that was a bad move on her part, as my overactive nine-year old imagination commenced completing this scene with every horrible horror it could conjure. Had she simply said “Akyroyd turns into a cougar monster and throttles Albert Brooks,” I think I would have slept quite soundly that night. Instead, I had the fear something awful.
The Verdict: Obviously, I lose considerable points for being frightened of something I hadn’t actually seen. But let’s not underestimate the power of oral-storytelling, which utilizes the listener’s imagination in a way that no film could (The Blair Witch Project excluded). The fact that my mother didn’t finish telling me what happened at the beginning of Twilight Zone: The Movie left even more room for my imagination to go nutty. When I finally watched the movie, I was pretty unaffected by it, so I think I score some points for that. Perhaps the bottom line is that I was nine, though. That’s too old to get spooked by an unfinished story told by my fucking mommy. What a wiener.
Case Study #9: The prologue of Twilight Zone: The Movie
In keeping with the ongoing Twilight Zone 50th Anniversary festivities here at Psychobabble, I’m going to delve into one of the more embarrassing installments of “Things That Scare Me.” “Embarrassing?” you ask. “But I too found the opening sequence of Twilight Zone: The Movie terrifying when I was five-years old!” OK. Mistake number one: I was not five-years old when I saw Twilight Zone: The Movie. I was nine or ten, which is well out of the range of acceptability. I mean, this sequence is surely one of the better things in the very hit-and-miss big screen adaptation of Rod Serling’s great series (George Miller’s remake of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”? Hit! Steven Spielberg’s remake of “Kick the Can”? Great big stinking miss!). But scary? I don’t know. Judge for yourself with your jaded, 21st century eyes.
The scariest thing about this is the build up: Dan Aykroyd asking Albert Brooks if he wants to “see something reeeeally scary.” Nice establishment of suspense, director John Landis! Too bad you didn’t bring a similarly deft hand to your lame full-length segment in the film, which finds racist Vic Morrow trotting through history as the victim of various violent bigots (I’m not getting into the whole death controversy thing here, though). The problem is that the pay-off is weak: Aykroyd turns into a demon, growls like a cougar, and strangles Brooks. Thud. Still, many people profess to having been scared by this scene as kids, so perhaps I shouldn’t flagellate myself too much.
But then again, maybe I should. And this brings us to mistake number two: I wasn’t actually scared by watching this scene. You see, my mother was the one who watched it. I asked her what happened in the movie, and she began to explain this opening sequence in intricate detail. Once she got to the “You wanna see something really scary” part, my terror had apparently become so palpable that she halted the story, perhaps out of concern that I might piss the bed that night. But that was a bad move on her part, as my overactive nine-year old imagination commenced completing this scene with every horrible horror it could conjure. Had she simply said “Akyroyd turns into a cougar monster and throttles Albert Brooks,” I think I would have slept quite soundly that night. Instead, I had the fear something awful.
The Verdict: Obviously, I lose considerable points for being frightened of something I hadn’t actually seen. But let’s not underestimate the power of oral-storytelling, which utilizes the listener’s imagination in a way that no film could (The Blair Witch Project excluded). The fact that my mother didn’t finish telling me what happened at the beginning of Twilight Zone: The Movie left even more room for my imagination to go nutty. When I finally watched the movie, I was pretty unaffected by it, so I think I score some points for that. Perhaps the bottom line is that I was nine, though. That’s too old to get spooked by an unfinished story told by my fucking mommy. What a wiener.
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.
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.
February 24, 2010: 20 Things You May Not Have Known About The Creature From the Black Lagoon
The recent 3-D revival fad that has even found two such films nominated for Best Picture Oscars has inspired me to look back on one of the first and greatest 3-D movies. Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) is rarely screened in its original gimmicky format these days, but its iconic creature, timeless Beauty & the Beast plot, and subtle ecological themes have made Jack Arnold’s film as enduring as earlier Universal Monster hits like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. While even those who’ve never seen the movie are well-familiar with the scaly sensation known as the Gill Man, even the most fish-frenzied fans may discover something to fascinate them among Psychobabble’s 20 Things You May Not Have Known About The Creature From the Black Lagoon!
1. Creature From the Black Lagoon was born during a party thrown by Dolores del Rio and Orson Welles while the latter was filming Citizen Kane. Cinematographer Gabriel Figeuroa entertained producer/actor William Alland (who played reporter Jerry Thompson in Kane) with stories about a mythical race of fish-men living along the Amazon River. Eleven years later, Alland hired several writers to develop treatments based on the idea, which he initially referred to as “The Sea Monster”. The project was soon re-titled The Black Lagoon.
1. Creature From the Black Lagoon was born during a party thrown by Dolores del Rio and Orson Welles while the latter was filming Citizen Kane. Cinematographer Gabriel Figeuroa entertained producer/actor William Alland (who played reporter Jerry Thompson in Kane) with stories about a mythical race of fish-men living along the Amazon River. Eleven years later, Alland hired several writers to develop treatments based on the idea, which he initially referred to as “The Sea Monster”. The project was soon re-titled The Black Lagoon.
February 16, 2010: Psychobabble’s 10 Greatest Horror Movies of 1960!
The Gothic horror pictures that were the bread and butter of the genre’s 1930s golden age were practically extinct by the ‘50s. Monster fans had to sate themselves with the giant ants and spiders of nuclear-age sci-fi flicks like Them and Tarantula. While fairly entertaining, such movies completely lacked the creepy atmosphere, the delicious gloom, the iconography of Universal’s classics or the more recent films of Val Lewton. In 1957, Hammer studios in England finally gave horror fans an alternative to big bugs with The Curse of Frankenstein, the first in its smashing series of bloody, sexy, beautifully filmed and designed homages to the monster movies of the ‘30s. Hammer’s horror pictures were internationally popular (well, popular with audiences. Critics, not so much) and revitalized the genre for a true renaissance in the ‘60s. Filmmakers wasted no time flooding cinemas with a new crop of pictures that picked up on the Gothic décor and buckets of blood of Hammer’s films while also pushing the genre into new realms of artistry. Revered filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell made their first horror films, with varying effects on their careers. William Castle and Roger Corman proved that entertaining, witty, and inventively shot horror pictures could be made on loose-change budgets. Mario Bava, Chano Urueta, and Georges Franju took horror international with wildly individual and influential results. All of this went down during the first year of the ‘60s. The debuts of future masters of the genre like Romero and Polanski were soon to come, as were late-night movie packages like “Chiller Theater” and monster fan-mags like Forest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland, which would soon turn a whole new generation of creeps on to the classics. So let’s take a peek back fifty years to the ten greatest movies to debut during the first year of horror’s new age. Here are Psychobabble’s Ten Greatest Horror Movies of 1960!
10- El Espejo de la Bruja (Chano Urueta)
Chano Urueta was to Mexican horror what Mario Bava was to Italian, and there is a definite similarity between their shadowy aesthetics and obsessions with the occult. But whereas Bava’s films were serious and mythic despite their schlocky obsessions, Urueta’s were schlocky all the way, with silly characters glowering through silly plots that reach the silliest of conclusions. Yet his films are also loaded with style, his best known being El Espejo de la Bruja (released in the U.S. as The Witch’s Mirror in 1962). It’s a wild mash-up of Karl Freund’s Mad Love, Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, and particularly, Bava’s Black Sunday. Urueta differs from Bava, and aligns himself more with the classic monster movie makers of the ‘30s, by clearly asking us to identify with his vengeful witch even though the prologue establishes witches as the worst of the worst. Ureta also moves his picture along at a sprightlier pace than Bava tended to. While The Witch’s Mirror cannot compete with Black Sunday in terms of artistry or influence, it is a little seen gem worth seeking out.
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9- Brides of Dracula (Terence Fisher)
There was no way the second installment of Hammer’s Dracula franchise would ever compare to the first since Christopher Lee was not present to reprise the title role (he’d be back though). Still there’s a lot of what made Horror of Dracula great in Brides of Dracula. Peter Cushing returns as a far sprier Van Helsing than Universal’s Edward Van Sloan, and his showdown with a dashing non-Dracula vampire is genuinely thrilling, especially as it climaxes with Cushing getting chomped. Terence Fisher, the backbone of Hammer horror, takes the canvas chair again and infuses the film with his trademark air of baroque decadence. The screenwriting team also came up with a sufficiently intriguing mystery (why is the Baroness Meinster keeping a young man prisoner in her sprawling castle?), which is a nice change of pace after yet another reinterpretation of Stoker’s overly familiar tale. But as is the case with most Hammer pictures, the main allure of Brides of Dracula is that it provides yet another opportunity to gawk at marvelous sets and costumes rendered in glorious Technicolor and indelible images of vampire brides rising from the grave.
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8- 13 Ghosts (William Castle)
William Castle was Hitchcock for 8-year olds, crafting gimmicky, violent horror flicks and thrillers for popcorn-tossing matinee crowds. Yet he also took great care in shooting his movies, even when working with the scantiest of stories, as he was with 13 Ghosts. A family moves into a house haunted by an unlucky number of spooks, which can only be seen after popping on a pair of “Illusion-O” glasses. Theater goers in 1960 were given their own Illusion-O glasses through which they could either see the ghosts through one set of lens, or if they were too chicken, nothing through another set. The 3-D-like gimmick is what drew the most publicity, but the film is tremendous fun even without the flimsy hook. The prologue in which Mr. Castle explains how to use those goofy glasses and an appearance by Margaret Hamilton as a grumpy housekeeper, who may be a witch, are a hoot.
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7- The House of Usher (Roger Corman)
The influence of Hammer Horror is profound in Roger Corman’s series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. His use of a vivid palette, sex, overwrought music, lush sets, and period costumes is straight out of stuff like Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula, but Corman’s films are much more than pretenders. Certainly no one has ever brought the works of horror’s greatest writer to the screen with more flair, and that he did so on such chintzy budgets makes them all the more miraculous. There isn’t a cheap-looking frame in The House of Usher, the first and best of his Poe films. Richard Matheson’s screenplay doesn’t take the radical liberties that many of Corman’s future Poe pictures would, many of which would only resemble the source material in name. This is fortunate as “The Fall of the House of Usher” is arguably Poe’s greatest tale and doesn’t require rejiggering. Like that story, the film is a creepy slow burn that builds to an apocalyptic climax. Matheson and Corman don’t even shy away from the incestuous themes of the original story. As Usher, Vincent Price strikes a wan, haunted figure, and wisely doesn’t sink his teeth into the scenery with his usual resolve. If there was ever evidence that Price was the rightful successor to Karloff’s throne, it’s here in The House of Usher.
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6- Peeping Tom (Michael Powell)
The universe must really be a totally random and unjust place considering that Psycho became a massive hit for Alfred Hitchcock during the same year that Peeping Tom almost destroyed Michael Powell’s career. Powell had been a highly respected British filmmaker most famous for making the gorgeous but interminable classic The Red Shoes. His reputation suffered a near-fatal slashing when he decided to make Peeping Tom, a nasty little thriller about a loony photographer who captures the expressions of his victims’ faces on film just as he skewers them with a blade secreted in his tripod. The uproar over the film’s treatment of sex and violence never touched on its psychological complexity and Powell’s images, which are every bit as sumptuous as those of The Red Shoes. Karl Heinz Bohm is equally sympathetic and creepy as the murderer, not unlike Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, another psychopathic young fellow with serious parental issues. Peeping Tom has since been reevaluated as a great piece of cinema (in 1999, the British Film Institute rated it among the 100 greatest British films of the 20th century) and Michael Powell fought through the controversy to make more pictures. Most impressively, Peeping Tom remains as potent and disturbing today as it was fifty years ago.
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5- The Little Shop of Horrors (Roger Corman)
Don’t be naïve: if plants had the ability to kill us people, you and everyone you love would be in the belly of a Ficus right now. All the evidence you need is in Little Shop of Horrors, in which intergalactic, man-eating Venus flytrap Audrey Junior grows to massive proportions on a diet of local folks. Roger Corman’s original version may not have the snappy song and dance numbers of the terrific ‘80s remake, but it still holds up marvelously well. Aside from inspiring the musical, the original Little Shop is most famous today for young Jack Nicholson’s delirious portrayal of a masochist dental patient, but Jonathan Haze, Jackie Joseph, Mel Welles, and Corman-fave Dick Miller are nearly as memorable in their respective roles. The script by Charles B. Griffith (the man responsible for some of the best Corman-produced horror/comedies, including A Bucket of Blood and Death Race 2000) ripples with priceless schtick. Re-shoots notwithstanding, it took Roger Corman a mere two days to film his most entertaining movie, which has to qualify him for some sort of world record. Right?
_____________________________________________________________________________
4- The City of the Dead (John Llewellyn Moxey)
Much of the praise Psycho receives is owed to its ingenious structure. A lot of critics to cry “rip off!” when The City of the Dead (aka: Horror Hotel) appeared with a similar plot featuring a pretty young woman in the seeming lead role who is dispatched in a grisly manner a half-hour into the picture. Thing is, both films were produced in the same year and director John Llewellyn Moxey insists that his was actually made before Psycho. If this is true, then The City of the Dead is even more deserving of rediscovery than it already is. Either way, it’s an atmosphere-rich tale of satanic cults, witchcraft, ghosts, and graveyards that should delight any classic horror buff. With shades of another 1960 shocker, Black Sunday, the film begins with accused witch Elizabeth Selwyn (the marvelous Patricia Jessel) getting a dose of capital punishment at the stake in the 17th century. She vows vengeance and we next see her working as the caretaker of a creepy hotel 300 years later. That’s resolve. Like most horror films of the era, The City of the Dead was produced on the cheap, but the star turns by Jessel and Christopher Lee as a co-conspirator and the bold black and white cinematography by Desmond Dickinson are first rate.
_____________________________________________________________________________
3- Black Sunday (Mario Bava)
The flick that launched the career of Italian horror maestro Mario Bava is a tale of witchly revenge told with the deliberate queasiness of a lingering nightmare. In a star-making performance, Barbara Steele is Princess Asa Vajda, who enters the picture on route to the stake where she’s to have a spiked mask hammered to her face before being burned to death. Accused of playing footsy with Satan, the Princess vows the requisite revenge rigmarole on the bloodthirsty mob sentencing her to death. Years later the princess is resurrected as a Swiss cheese-faced vampire/witch intent on achieving eternal life. The story is a bit slim, but Bava’s masterpiece is more about meditated pacing and ghastly visuals than plot, which only contributes to its logic-damning nightmarishness. The gloomy castle interiors and gloomier graveyard exteriors are exquisitely designed, as is the puncture-faced make up on Steele, which only emphasizes her creepy allure. For pure Gothic atmosphere, Black Sunday is without peer.
_____________________________________________________________________________
2- Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju)
France is not exactly known for its horror movies, but the French Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face) is one the best, most original, most stylish, and most grotesque horror movies ever made. Everyone thinks that the beautiful Christiane (Edith Scob) died in the terrible car accident her father Docteur Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) caused. That’s just what the doctor wants them to believe for, you see, he’s not just a doctor…he’s a mad doctor! And his zany scheme is to replace his daughter’s now horribly scarred face with a brand new one procured from one of the lovely young lasses strolling around Paris. Those face-replacement surgery scenes are shown in surprisingly graphic detail for a 1960 film. A few years ago I saw a revival of the film and was really tickled to see the audience growing increasingly uncomfortable as they realized the camera was not going to turn away from the gruesome face removing. It’s wonderful to see a fifty-year-old film still pack such a punch, but as ghastly as that sequence is, and as seminal it is in the role of graphic gore in horror films, Eyes Without a Face also possesses a haunting beauty. Franju’s richly detailed, Poe-like imagery and Edith Scob’s ethereal presence in her death mask are unforgettable. But it’s the great Alida Valli who steals the film as Edna, the nefarious nurse who does the doctor’s dirty bidding. Unfortunately, when Eyes Without a Face was first released in the U.S., it was dubbed into English, given the idiotic B-movie title The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, and run as a double-feature with a cheapie called The Manster. That’s pretty shabby treatment for such an artful film. In the ensuing years it achieved a sort of cult classic status, but Eyes Without a Face deserves to be regarded on the same level as any of its contemporary art films by Fellini or Bergman.
_____________________________________________________________________________
1- Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
Although it was made at a fraction of the cost of the average Hitchcock picture, although it utilized a cut-rate TV crew, although it didn’t make use of color or the kind of glorious sets or locations Hitch used in movies like North By Northwest, Psycho is the man’s masterpiece. This is the definitive suspense film and the definitive film by the master of suspense, even though screenwriter Joseph Stefano deserves a lot more credit than he tends to receive. Stefano exaggerated the pacing of Robert Bloch’s novel to build the ingenious structure of the film: get the audience so involved in the story of sexy, conflicted thief Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) for the first half hour of the movie that they forget they are even watching a film called Psycho, then… SLICE!... carve up their expectations by having Norman Bates carve up Marion in cinema’s most famous shower scene. But the twisting and throttling of audience expectations doesn’t end there. Hitchcock cast the boyish, sympathetic Anthony Perkins to play maniac Norman Bates, and we empathize with him uncomfortably even when he is committing the most heinous deeds. There is no better example of this than that very famous scene in which Bates rolls Marion’s car (containing her dead body) into a bog. Hitchcock stages the scene to manipulate us into actually rooting for the car to sink and Norman to get away with his horrible crime. It wasn’t enough for Hitchcock to show us a murder; he wanted us to feel complicit in it. That was also his sense of humor, even though this is one of his less mirthful films (the exception being the very funny early sequence in Marion’s office featuring Hitchcock’s daughter Pat as a self-obsessed chatterbox). What Psycho may lack in laughs, it more than makes up for in incredible performances, fascinating characters, and genius direction. The influence of Psycho would stretch far. Corman, Castle, and Hammer studios all produced self-conscious responses to it. The slasher films born in the late ‘70s owe a direct debt to it, too, even if none of them came within a mile of Psycho in terms of quality, style, or smarts.
_____________________________________________________________________________
10- El Espejo de la Bruja (Chano Urueta)
Chano Urueta was to Mexican horror what Mario Bava was to Italian, and there is a definite similarity between their shadowy aesthetics and obsessions with the occult. But whereas Bava’s films were serious and mythic despite their schlocky obsessions, Urueta’s were schlocky all the way, with silly characters glowering through silly plots that reach the silliest of conclusions. Yet his films are also loaded with style, his best known being El Espejo de la Bruja (released in the U.S. as The Witch’s Mirror in 1962). It’s a wild mash-up of Karl Freund’s Mad Love, Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, and particularly, Bava’s Black Sunday. Urueta differs from Bava, and aligns himself more with the classic monster movie makers of the ‘30s, by clearly asking us to identify with his vengeful witch even though the prologue establishes witches as the worst of the worst. Ureta also moves his picture along at a sprightlier pace than Bava tended to. While The Witch’s Mirror cannot compete with Black Sunday in terms of artistry or influence, it is a little seen gem worth seeking out._____________________________________________________________________________
9- Brides of Dracula (Terence Fisher)
There was no way the second installment of Hammer’s Dracula franchise would ever compare to the first since Christopher Lee was not present to reprise the title role (he’d be back though). Still there’s a lot of what made Horror of Dracula great in Brides of Dracula. Peter Cushing returns as a far sprier Van Helsing than Universal’s Edward Van Sloan, and his showdown with a dashing non-Dracula vampire is genuinely thrilling, especially as it climaxes with Cushing getting chomped. Terence Fisher, the backbone of Hammer horror, takes the canvas chair again and infuses the film with his trademark air of baroque decadence. The screenwriting team also came up with a sufficiently intriguing mystery (why is the Baroness Meinster keeping a young man prisoner in her sprawling castle?), which is a nice change of pace after yet another reinterpretation of Stoker’s overly familiar tale. But as is the case with most Hammer pictures, the main allure of Brides of Dracula is that it provides yet another opportunity to gawk at marvelous sets and costumes rendered in glorious Technicolor and indelible images of vampire brides rising from the grave. _____________________________________________________________________________
8- 13 Ghosts (William Castle)
William Castle was Hitchcock for 8-year olds, crafting gimmicky, violent horror flicks and thrillers for popcorn-tossing matinee crowds. Yet he also took great care in shooting his movies, even when working with the scantiest of stories, as he was with 13 Ghosts. A family moves into a house haunted by an unlucky number of spooks, which can only be seen after popping on a pair of “Illusion-O” glasses. Theater goers in 1960 were given their own Illusion-O glasses through which they could either see the ghosts through one set of lens, or if they were too chicken, nothing through another set. The 3-D-like gimmick is what drew the most publicity, but the film is tremendous fun even without the flimsy hook. The prologue in which Mr. Castle explains how to use those goofy glasses and an appearance by Margaret Hamilton as a grumpy housekeeper, who may be a witch, are a hoot._____________________________________________________________________________
7- The House of Usher (Roger Corman)
The influence of Hammer Horror is profound in Roger Corman’s series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. His use of a vivid palette, sex, overwrought music, lush sets, and period costumes is straight out of stuff like Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula, but Corman’s films are much more than pretenders. Certainly no one has ever brought the works of horror’s greatest writer to the screen with more flair, and that he did so on such chintzy budgets makes them all the more miraculous. There isn’t a cheap-looking frame in The House of Usher, the first and best of his Poe films. Richard Matheson’s screenplay doesn’t take the radical liberties that many of Corman’s future Poe pictures would, many of which would only resemble the source material in name. This is fortunate as “The Fall of the House of Usher” is arguably Poe’s greatest tale and doesn’t require rejiggering. Like that story, the film is a creepy slow burn that builds to an apocalyptic climax. Matheson and Corman don’t even shy away from the incestuous themes of the original story. As Usher, Vincent Price strikes a wan, haunted figure, and wisely doesn’t sink his teeth into the scenery with his usual resolve. If there was ever evidence that Price was the rightful successor to Karloff’s throne, it’s here in The House of Usher._____________________________________________________________________________
6- Peeping Tom (Michael Powell)
The universe must really be a totally random and unjust place considering that Psycho became a massive hit for Alfred Hitchcock during the same year that Peeping Tom almost destroyed Michael Powell’s career. Powell had been a highly respected British filmmaker most famous for making the gorgeous but interminable classic The Red Shoes. His reputation suffered a near-fatal slashing when he decided to make Peeping Tom, a nasty little thriller about a loony photographer who captures the expressions of his victims’ faces on film just as he skewers them with a blade secreted in his tripod. The uproar over the film’s treatment of sex and violence never touched on its psychological complexity and Powell’s images, which are every bit as sumptuous as those of The Red Shoes. Karl Heinz Bohm is equally sympathetic and creepy as the murderer, not unlike Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, another psychopathic young fellow with serious parental issues. Peeping Tom has since been reevaluated as a great piece of cinema (in 1999, the British Film Institute rated it among the 100 greatest British films of the 20th century) and Michael Powell fought through the controversy to make more pictures. Most impressively, Peeping Tom remains as potent and disturbing today as it was fifty years ago._____________________________________________________________________________
5- The Little Shop of Horrors (Roger Corman)
Don’t be naïve: if plants had the ability to kill us people, you and everyone you love would be in the belly of a Ficus right now. All the evidence you need is in Little Shop of Horrors, in which intergalactic, man-eating Venus flytrap Audrey Junior grows to massive proportions on a diet of local folks. Roger Corman’s original version may not have the snappy song and dance numbers of the terrific ‘80s remake, but it still holds up marvelously well. Aside from inspiring the musical, the original Little Shop is most famous today for young Jack Nicholson’s delirious portrayal of a masochist dental patient, but Jonathan Haze, Jackie Joseph, Mel Welles, and Corman-fave Dick Miller are nearly as memorable in their respective roles. The script by Charles B. Griffith (the man responsible for some of the best Corman-produced horror/comedies, including A Bucket of Blood and Death Race 2000) ripples with priceless schtick. Re-shoots notwithstanding, it took Roger Corman a mere two days to film his most entertaining movie, which has to qualify him for some sort of world record. Right?_____________________________________________________________________________
4- The City of the Dead (John Llewellyn Moxey)
Much of the praise Psycho receives is owed to its ingenious structure. A lot of critics to cry “rip off!” when The City of the Dead (aka: Horror Hotel) appeared with a similar plot featuring a pretty young woman in the seeming lead role who is dispatched in a grisly manner a half-hour into the picture. Thing is, both films were produced in the same year and director John Llewellyn Moxey insists that his was actually made before Psycho. If this is true, then The City of the Dead is even more deserving of rediscovery than it already is. Either way, it’s an atmosphere-rich tale of satanic cults, witchcraft, ghosts, and graveyards that should delight any classic horror buff. With shades of another 1960 shocker, Black Sunday, the film begins with accused witch Elizabeth Selwyn (the marvelous Patricia Jessel) getting a dose of capital punishment at the stake in the 17th century. She vows vengeance and we next see her working as the caretaker of a creepy hotel 300 years later. That’s resolve. Like most horror films of the era, The City of the Dead was produced on the cheap, but the star turns by Jessel and Christopher Lee as a co-conspirator and the bold black and white cinematography by Desmond Dickinson are first rate. _____________________________________________________________________________
3- Black Sunday (Mario Bava)
The flick that launched the career of Italian horror maestro Mario Bava is a tale of witchly revenge told with the deliberate queasiness of a lingering nightmare. In a star-making performance, Barbara Steele is Princess Asa Vajda, who enters the picture on route to the stake where she’s to have a spiked mask hammered to her face before being burned to death. Accused of playing footsy with Satan, the Princess vows the requisite revenge rigmarole on the bloodthirsty mob sentencing her to death. Years later the princess is resurrected as a Swiss cheese-faced vampire/witch intent on achieving eternal life. The story is a bit slim, but Bava’s masterpiece is more about meditated pacing and ghastly visuals than plot, which only contributes to its logic-damning nightmarishness. The gloomy castle interiors and gloomier graveyard exteriors are exquisitely designed, as is the puncture-faced make up on Steele, which only emphasizes her creepy allure. For pure Gothic atmosphere, Black Sunday is without peer._____________________________________________________________________________
2- Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju)
France is not exactly known for its horror movies, but the French Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face) is one the best, most original, most stylish, and most grotesque horror movies ever made. Everyone thinks that the beautiful Christiane (Edith Scob) died in the terrible car accident her father Docteur Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) caused. That’s just what the doctor wants them to believe for, you see, he’s not just a doctor…he’s a mad doctor! And his zany scheme is to replace his daughter’s now horribly scarred face with a brand new one procured from one of the lovely young lasses strolling around Paris. Those face-replacement surgery scenes are shown in surprisingly graphic detail for a 1960 film. A few years ago I saw a revival of the film and was really tickled to see the audience growing increasingly uncomfortable as they realized the camera was not going to turn away from the gruesome face removing. It’s wonderful to see a fifty-year-old film still pack such a punch, but as ghastly as that sequence is, and as seminal it is in the role of graphic gore in horror films, Eyes Without a Face also possesses a haunting beauty. Franju’s richly detailed, Poe-like imagery and Edith Scob’s ethereal presence in her death mask are unforgettable. But it’s the great Alida Valli who steals the film as Edna, the nefarious nurse who does the doctor’s dirty bidding. Unfortunately, when Eyes Without a Face was first released in the U.S., it was dubbed into English, given the idiotic B-movie title The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, and run as a double-feature with a cheapie called The Manster. That’s pretty shabby treatment for such an artful film. In the ensuing years it achieved a sort of cult classic status, but Eyes Without a Face deserves to be regarded on the same level as any of its contemporary art films by Fellini or Bergman. _____________________________________________________________________________
1- Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
Although it was made at a fraction of the cost of the average Hitchcock picture, although it utilized a cut-rate TV crew, although it didn’t make use of color or the kind of glorious sets or locations Hitch used in movies like North By Northwest, Psycho is the man’s masterpiece. This is the definitive suspense film and the definitive film by the master of suspense, even though screenwriter Joseph Stefano deserves a lot more credit than he tends to receive. Stefano exaggerated the pacing of Robert Bloch’s novel to build the ingenious structure of the film: get the audience so involved in the story of sexy, conflicted thief Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) for the first half hour of the movie that they forget they are even watching a film called Psycho, then… SLICE!... carve up their expectations by having Norman Bates carve up Marion in cinema’s most famous shower scene. But the twisting and throttling of audience expectations doesn’t end there. Hitchcock cast the boyish, sympathetic Anthony Perkins to play maniac Norman Bates, and we empathize with him uncomfortably even when he is committing the most heinous deeds. There is no better example of this than that very famous scene in which Bates rolls Marion’s car (containing her dead body) into a bog. Hitchcock stages the scene to manipulate us into actually rooting for the car to sink and Norman to get away with his horrible crime. It wasn’t enough for Hitchcock to show us a murder; he wanted us to feel complicit in it. That was also his sense of humor, even though this is one of his less mirthful films (the exception being the very funny early sequence in Marion’s office featuring Hitchcock’s daughter Pat as a self-obsessed chatterbox). What Psycho may lack in laughs, it more than makes up for in incredible performances, fascinating characters, and genius direction. The influence of Psycho would stretch far. Corman, Castle, and Hammer studios all produced self-conscious responses to it. The slasher films born in the late ‘70s owe a direct debt to it, too, even if none of them came within a mile of Psycho in terms of quality, style, or smarts._____________________________________________________________________________
February 13, 2009: The Psychobabble Double-Feature: ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ and ‘Eraserhead’
One of the earmarks of a truly great movie is that it can be watched over and over again while offering something new with each viewing. Last night I was watching my favorite movie, David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), which I’ve seen so many times that I’ve basically stopped thinking that it might continue doling out nuggets of newness. So naïve. What struck me with this latest viewing are the numerous similarities it shares with another of my favorites, James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. Hear me out. Yes, the films were made forty years apart and for completely different kinds of audiences (Whale’s film was aimed at mainstream, blockbuster-attending crowds; Lynch’s at tiny Midnight Movie audiences), and whether or not Lynch ever even saw Bride is highly questionable. According to Greg Olsen’s biography David Lynch: Beautiful Dark
, Lynch spent a good portion of his youth attending screenings of B-horror flicks like The Fly, yet he professes to not be a fan of the genre. Still the influence of period horror films is unmistakable in much of his work, from The Alphabet (1968) to Blue Velvet (1986) to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) to Inland Empire (2006). Lynch also says that he is not a film buff and hasn’t seen most of the essential classics. In any event, whether or not Eraserhead was directly influenced by Bride of Frankenstein (even I think that’s a stretch), the thematic resemblances are uncanny.
Both films:
, Lynch spent a good portion of his youth attending screenings of B-horror flicks like The Fly, yet he professes to not be a fan of the genre. Still the influence of period horror films is unmistakable in much of his work, from The Alphabet (1968) to Blue Velvet (1986) to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) to Inland Empire (2006). Lynch also says that he is not a film buff and hasn’t seen most of the essential classics. In any event, whether or not Eraserhead was directly influenced by Bride of Frankenstein (even I think that’s a stretch), the thematic resemblances are uncanny.Both films:
February 8, 2010: Track by Track: ‘Psonic Psunspot’ by The Dukes of Stratosphear
In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, I’ll be taking a close look at albums of the classic, underrated, and flawed variety, and assessing them Track by Track.
The mid-1980s: a barren wasteland of antiseptic record production distinguished by harsh, gated drum sounds, tinny horns, and synthesizers. Aside from the most lo-fi college bands, no one came out unscathed. Elvis Costello and the Attractions put out Goodbye Cruel World (1984), a record that kicks off with a Darryl Hall duet complete with farty sax solo. The Damned also got saxy on Phantasmagoria (1985), their over-polished, synth-swathed bid for big chart success. Even the filthy Replacements broke out some flatly recorded horns on the otherwise fierce Pleased to Meet Me (1987). The real tragedy of such records is that they often contained a good deal of excellent songs that could have really shined in a different setting. But labels remained convinced that their acts had to delve into DDD flawlessness in order to compete with the soulless likes of Phil Collins and Duran Duran. Consequently, ‘60s holdovers like The Stones, The Kinks, Pete Townshend, and Robert Plant were among the worst offenders, probably because they had to struggle the hardest to remain relevant.
Some of the cagier groups skirted contemporary production trends by releasing one-off, “novelty” records credited to some long-lost, fabricated ‘60s band. They put together collections of organic, Retro-Rock that stood in warm contrast to the icy sounds of the day. In 1984, The Damned masqueraded as Naz Nomad and The Nightmares to release Give Daddy The Knife, Cindy, a phony soundtrack to a phony Roger Corman-esque psychedelic horror movie containing gritty covers of American psych and garage classic such as The Human Beinz’s “Nobody But Me”, Paul Revere and The Raiders’ “Kicks”, and The Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)”. It wasn’t anything incredibly essential; just a fresh palette-cleansing before they mounted Phantasmagoria.
XTC never succumbed to the trappings of ‘80s production as severely as many of their contemporaries, but an album like Skylarking (1986) still displayed a slightly off-putting sheen—though one that could not significantly spoil its uniformly excellent songs. But the ‘60s-psych-enthusiasts yearned for that era’s “compact magic” (in guitarist/singer/chief composer Andy Partridge’s words) enough to feel the need to retreat into their own pseudonymous project. Thus, Partridge transformed into “Sir John Johns”, bassist/singer Colin Moulding was now “The Red Curtain”, keyboardist Dave Gregory became “Lord Cornelius Plum”, and drummer Ian Gregory, “E.I.E.I. Owen”, and XTC was reborn as The Dukes of Stratosphear.
Upon the re-release of the entire Dukes output in May 2009, Andy Partridge told The Chicago Tribune “these days you’d just lean on a button, and there it is; it’s all sampled and pre-screwed-up for you. But then you really would have to play an electric saw at the bottom of a well and then have that spun in backwards and stuff like that.” He could have said the very same thing in 1985 when The Dukes of Stratosphear were conceived and digital effects made anything possible, and quite easily achieved, in the studio, but lacked the naturalness, the opportunity for magical accidents, that the whimsical, experimental techniques of the past allowed.
Unlike The Damned/Naz Nomad, XTC/The Dukes of Stratosphear composed original music, making their ruse a bit more convincing and a lot more artistically significant. In fact, the records XTC released as The Dukes of Stratosphear rate as some of the best music they produced and probably the most successful and accurate homage to ‘60s psychedelia ever recorded. Today Partridge considers Psonic Psunspot to be an official XTC L.P., serving as the missing link between Skylarking and Oranges and Lemons (1989), and credits the entire Dukes project with refreshing XTC’s creatively by giving them the “excuse to dress up crazy and not be (ourselves).”
The Dukes’ first release, the 1985 E.P. 25 O’Clock, puts a very fine point on their intentions, with each song serving as a specific take-off on a specific classic of the original psychedelic era. “25 O’Clock” is a ringer for “I Had To Much To Dream”, “Bike Ride to the Moon” is a poppier rewrite of Pink Floyd’s “Bike”, and “The Mole from the Ministry” not only sounds like The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus”, but its fabulous music video reinterprets the “Walrus” sequence from Magical Mystery Tour. Such specificity makes 25 O’Clock sound a bit too much like a Rutles-style novelty (albeit a superb novelty). The Dukes of Stratosphear relaxed a bit on their one and only L.P. With Psonic Psunspot, they crafted a neo-psychedelic classic that still pays all-due tribute to Floyd, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Kinks, and other behemoths of the mid ‘60s, while still sounding quite like XTC (by this point, they’d fessed up about The Dukes’ true identity). By parading out all the essential tropes of psychedelia—satires of the military and straight society, drug songs, music hall, backward tape loops, Mellotrons, ostentatious surrealism, half-baked conceptual devices—XTC essentially create the ultimate album of 1967 twenty years after the fact.
Psonic Psunspot by The Dukes of Stratosphear
Originally released August 1987 on Virgin Records
Produced by The Dukes of Stratosphear
All songs by Andy Partridge unless otherwise stated.
*blue-highlighted song titles are links to audio clips
Track 1: Vanishing Girl (Colin Moulding)
Normally, comparing a band’s work to another’s is an all-too easy Rock criticism cop-out. However, a self-conscious homage like Psonic Spunspot cannot be considered without acknowledging its various influences. Critics often cite the exhilarating “Vanishing Girl” as The Dukes’ homage to the sweet, jangly pop of The Hollies. Drawing inspiration from one of the less psychedelic acts referenced on the album, “Vanishing Girl” is its most straight-forward track, and hearing The Dukes this naked would have ensured their
The mid-1980s: a barren wasteland of antiseptic record production distinguished by harsh, gated drum sounds, tinny horns, and synthesizers. Aside from the most lo-fi college bands, no one came out unscathed. Elvis Costello and the Attractions put out Goodbye Cruel World (1984), a record that kicks off with a Darryl Hall duet complete with farty sax solo. The Damned also got saxy on Phantasmagoria (1985), their over-polished, synth-swathed bid for big chart success. Even the filthy Replacements broke out some flatly recorded horns on the otherwise fierce Pleased to Meet Me (1987). The real tragedy of such records is that they often contained a good deal of excellent songs that could have really shined in a different setting. But labels remained convinced that their acts had to delve into DDD flawlessness in order to compete with the soulless likes of Phil Collins and Duran Duran. Consequently, ‘60s holdovers like The Stones, The Kinks, Pete Townshend, and Robert Plant were among the worst offenders, probably because they had to struggle the hardest to remain relevant.
Some of the cagier groups skirted contemporary production trends by releasing one-off, “novelty” records credited to some long-lost, fabricated ‘60s band. They put together collections of organic, Retro-Rock that stood in warm contrast to the icy sounds of the day. In 1984, The Damned masqueraded as Naz Nomad and The Nightmares to release Give Daddy The Knife, Cindy, a phony soundtrack to a phony Roger Corman-esque psychedelic horror movie containing gritty covers of American psych and garage classic such as The Human Beinz’s “Nobody But Me”, Paul Revere and The Raiders’ “Kicks”, and The Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)”. It wasn’t anything incredibly essential; just a fresh palette-cleansing before they mounted Phantasmagoria.
XTC never succumbed to the trappings of ‘80s production as severely as many of their contemporaries, but an album like Skylarking (1986) still displayed a slightly off-putting sheen—though one that could not significantly spoil its uniformly excellent songs. But the ‘60s-psych-enthusiasts yearned for that era’s “compact magic” (in guitarist/singer/chief composer Andy Partridge’s words) enough to feel the need to retreat into their own pseudonymous project. Thus, Partridge transformed into “Sir John Johns”, bassist/singer Colin Moulding was now “The Red Curtain”, keyboardist Dave Gregory became “Lord Cornelius Plum”, and drummer Ian Gregory, “E.I.E.I. Owen”, and XTC was reborn as The Dukes of Stratosphear.
Upon the re-release of the entire Dukes output in May 2009, Andy Partridge told The Chicago Tribune “these days you’d just lean on a button, and there it is; it’s all sampled and pre-screwed-up for you. But then you really would have to play an electric saw at the bottom of a well and then have that spun in backwards and stuff like that.” He could have said the very same thing in 1985 when The Dukes of Stratosphear were conceived and digital effects made anything possible, and quite easily achieved, in the studio, but lacked the naturalness, the opportunity for magical accidents, that the whimsical, experimental techniques of the past allowed.
Unlike The Damned/Naz Nomad, XTC/The Dukes of Stratosphear composed original music, making their ruse a bit more convincing and a lot more artistically significant. In fact, the records XTC released as The Dukes of Stratosphear rate as some of the best music they produced and probably the most successful and accurate homage to ‘60s psychedelia ever recorded. Today Partridge considers Psonic Psunspot to be an official XTC L.P., serving as the missing link between Skylarking and Oranges and Lemons (1989), and credits the entire Dukes project with refreshing XTC’s creatively by giving them the “excuse to dress up crazy and not be (ourselves).”
The Dukes’ first release, the 1985 E.P. 25 O’Clock, puts a very fine point on their intentions, with each song serving as a specific take-off on a specific classic of the original psychedelic era. “25 O’Clock” is a ringer for “I Had To Much To Dream”, “Bike Ride to the Moon” is a poppier rewrite of Pink Floyd’s “Bike”, and “The Mole from the Ministry” not only sounds like The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus”, but its fabulous music video reinterprets the “Walrus” sequence from Magical Mystery Tour. Such specificity makes 25 O’Clock sound a bit too much like a Rutles-style novelty (albeit a superb novelty). The Dukes of Stratosphear relaxed a bit on their one and only L.P. With Psonic Psunspot, they crafted a neo-psychedelic classic that still pays all-due tribute to Floyd, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Kinks, and other behemoths of the mid ‘60s, while still sounding quite like XTC (by this point, they’d fessed up about The Dukes’ true identity). By parading out all the essential tropes of psychedelia—satires of the military and straight society, drug songs, music hall, backward tape loops, Mellotrons, ostentatious surrealism, half-baked conceptual devices—XTC essentially create the ultimate album of 1967 twenty years after the fact.
Psonic Psunspot by The Dukes of Stratosphear
Originally released August 1987 on Virgin Records
Produced by The Dukes of Stratosphear
All songs by Andy Partridge unless otherwise stated.
*blue-highlighted song titles are links to audio clips
Track 1: Vanishing Girl (Colin Moulding)
Normally, comparing a band’s work to another’s is an all-too easy Rock criticism cop-out. However, a self-conscious homage like Psonic Spunspot cannot be considered without acknowledging its various influences. Critics often cite the exhilarating “Vanishing Girl” as The Dukes’ homage to the sweet, jangly pop of The Hollies. Drawing inspiration from one of the less psychedelic acts referenced on the album, “Vanishing Girl” is its most straight-forward track, and hearing The Dukes this naked would have ensured their
January 26, 2010: Psychobabble recommends ‘The Black Room’
The Black Room (1935) begins as a Baroness gives birth to twins. Her husband is horrified to learn of this, as a family prophecy dictates that the next pair of twins born to it will end in murder: one will kill the other in a black room in the Baron’s Gothic castle, bringing the family line to an end. One of his buddies suggests bricking up the black room to side-step the prophecy, which the Baron thinks is a pretty good idea (I guess he didn’t read Oedipus in High School). Anyone with a passing knowledge of Greek tragedy can guess where this is all headed, but part of the pleasure of The Black Room is seeing just how the story unfolds. The main pleasure is undoubtedly Boris Karloff’s portrayal of twins Anton and Gregor. He plays Anton as a soft-spoken dandy. Gregor, the Kane to Anton’s Abel, is a bellowing slob who allows Karloff to fully indulge in his trademark gleeful nastiness. A superb showcase for Karloff’s range and R. William Neill’s lively direction, a trove of sumptuous Gothic interiors and exteriors abounding in secret chambers and skeletal trees, and a nifty precursor to “The Patty Duke Show” mashed into one delicious package, The Black Room is a little-seen treat for classic horror hounds. And look out for a completely unrecognizable and uncredited Edward Van Sloan as Gregor’s doctor!
January 25, 2010: Track by Track: ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’ by The Rolling Stones
In this new feature on Psychobabble, I’ll be taking a close look at albums of the classic, underrated, and flawed variety, and assessing them track by track.
For the first installment of Track by Track, I’ve chosen The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, probably the most controversial and misunderstood album the guys ever released. Largely dismissed as a misguided Sgt. Pepper’s rip-off that betrayed The Stones’ blues and basic Rock & Roll reputation, Their Satanic Majesties Request is undeniably symptomatic of Mick Jagger’s yen for trend-hopping, yet I personally find it to be a far more intriguing and complex album than Pepper. As we’ll see, there is still a great deal of blues and basic Rock & Roll beneath the Mellotrons, strings, horns, synthesizers, sitars, bells, and whistles of Their Satanic Majesties Request, and The Stones hardly relinquished their trademark nihilism in favor of flower-power platitudes. Rather they cagily adapted their established sound to psychedelia, injecting bluesy elements into the Moroccan-influenced jams, vaudevillian larks, space rock excursions, and baroque ballads that dominate the album. Not everything is completely successful, but it’s all interesting and greatly deserving of reassessment by any listener who isn’t too blinkered to accept The Stones attempting anything other than unadorned blues and Rock & Roll.
Today The Rolling Stones tend to speak of Their Satanic Majesties Request through embarrassed smirks, justifying it by saying that no one can work outside of the zeitgeist (Dylan didn’t seem to have a problem with that, though). But had the album not received such a pitiless critical drubbing you can bet your ass that the band would have embraced it with greater enthusiasm. Instead they all seem to have a rather ambivalent relationship with Satanic. In 1972, Mick Jagger told the New Musical Express, “At the time I kinda liked the album, and then I went through a period when I really hated it. Now I find that it’s good to listen to.” Just two years later, he would say, “I’m rather fond of that album, and I wouldn’t mind doing something like that again.” In the interim, 1973's Goat’s Head Soup contained a track called “Can You Hear the Music”, which sounds like a relic from the Satanic days. “Continental Drift”, from 1989’s Steel Wheels could also be interpreted as a tribute to this maligned oddity, and the subsequent “Urban Jungle” tour featured the first ever live performance of a Satanic Majesties number: “2000 Light Years from Home”. In 1995, Jagger told Rolling Stone, “It's a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience. There’s two good songs on it: ‘She's a Rainbow’ and ‘2000 Light Years From Home.’ The rest of them are nonsense.” At other times he unconvincingly suggested it was actually a comedy album.
Keith Richards basically shared Jagger’s opinion that most of the album was crap, while tossing in “Citadel” among the good tracks. Jagger and Charlie Watts at least admitted it was fun to make (and it sounds like it was). Other members of the band, particularly Bill Wyman and unofficial Stone Ian Stewart, have been less equivocal about their dislike of the album, yet it has enjoyed something of a critical reassessment in recent years, Kurt Loder labeling it “unjustly underestimated” in 2002 and the All Music Guide calling it “unfairly undervalued” in its four-star review. I, for one, rate Their Satanic Majesties Request as my personal favorite Rolling Stones album, even though I’ll admit that Beggars Banquet (which places many of the themes and a good deal of the instrumentation of Satanic in a less otherworldly environment) is their best. Their Satanic Majesties Request solidified both my love of psychedelia and my love of The Rolling Stones, and while I’m a fan of most phases of the band’s career, none fascinate me like that fleeting period when they donned a bunch of goofy Merlin hats, cranked up their sitars and Mellotrons, and conjured the most exotic, most spellbinding music of their seemingly endless career.
(Instead of embedding audio clips, which slows down this site considerably, I’ve included links to the appropriate clips instead).
Their Satanic Majesties Request by The Rolling Stones
Originally released December 8, 1967 on Decca Records
Produced by The Rolling Stones
Track 1: Sing This All Together
For the first installment of Track by Track, I’ve chosen The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, probably the most controversial and misunderstood album the guys ever released. Largely dismissed as a misguided Sgt. Pepper’s rip-off that betrayed The Stones’ blues and basic Rock & Roll reputation, Their Satanic Majesties Request is undeniably symptomatic of Mick Jagger’s yen for trend-hopping, yet I personally find it to be a far more intriguing and complex album than Pepper. As we’ll see, there is still a great deal of blues and basic Rock & Roll beneath the Mellotrons, strings, horns, synthesizers, sitars, bells, and whistles of Their Satanic Majesties Request, and The Stones hardly relinquished their trademark nihilism in favor of flower-power platitudes. Rather they cagily adapted their established sound to psychedelia, injecting bluesy elements into the Moroccan-influenced jams, vaudevillian larks, space rock excursions, and baroque ballads that dominate the album. Not everything is completely successful, but it’s all interesting and greatly deserving of reassessment by any listener who isn’t too blinkered to accept The Stones attempting anything other than unadorned blues and Rock & Roll.
Today The Rolling Stones tend to speak of Their Satanic Majesties Request through embarrassed smirks, justifying it by saying that no one can work outside of the zeitgeist (Dylan didn’t seem to have a problem with that, though). But had the album not received such a pitiless critical drubbing you can bet your ass that the band would have embraced it with greater enthusiasm. Instead they all seem to have a rather ambivalent relationship with Satanic. In 1972, Mick Jagger told the New Musical Express, “At the time I kinda liked the album, and then I went through a period when I really hated it. Now I find that it’s good to listen to.” Just two years later, he would say, “I’m rather fond of that album, and I wouldn’t mind doing something like that again.” In the interim, 1973's Goat’s Head Soup contained a track called “Can You Hear the Music”, which sounds like a relic from the Satanic days. “Continental Drift”, from 1989’s Steel Wheels could also be interpreted as a tribute to this maligned oddity, and the subsequent “Urban Jungle” tour featured the first ever live performance of a Satanic Majesties number: “2000 Light Years from Home”. In 1995, Jagger told Rolling Stone, “It's a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience. There’s two good songs on it: ‘She's a Rainbow’ and ‘2000 Light Years From Home.’ The rest of them are nonsense.” At other times he unconvincingly suggested it was actually a comedy album.
Keith Richards basically shared Jagger’s opinion that most of the album was crap, while tossing in “Citadel” among the good tracks. Jagger and Charlie Watts at least admitted it was fun to make (and it sounds like it was). Other members of the band, particularly Bill Wyman and unofficial Stone Ian Stewart, have been less equivocal about their dislike of the album, yet it has enjoyed something of a critical reassessment in recent years, Kurt Loder labeling it “unjustly underestimated” in 2002 and the All Music Guide calling it “unfairly undervalued” in its four-star review. I, for one, rate Their Satanic Majesties Request as my personal favorite Rolling Stones album, even though I’ll admit that Beggars Banquet (which places many of the themes and a good deal of the instrumentation of Satanic in a less otherworldly environment) is their best. Their Satanic Majesties Request solidified both my love of psychedelia and my love of The Rolling Stones, and while I’m a fan of most phases of the band’s career, none fascinate me like that fleeting period when they donned a bunch of goofy Merlin hats, cranked up their sitars and Mellotrons, and conjured the most exotic, most spellbinding music of their seemingly endless career.
(Instead of embedding audio clips, which slows down this site considerably, I’ve included links to the appropriate clips instead).
Their Satanic Majesties Request by The Rolling Stones
Originally released December 8, 1967 on Decca Records
Produced by The Rolling Stones
Track 1: Sing This All Together
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