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I am hosting the blog on a separate server, under its own domain, to allow me maximum flexibility. I learned a great deal here at WordPress last year and learned more hosting another blog on its own server. I now hope to put my lessons from both blogs in service of The Morbid Imagination. I am still using WordPress, however, and can’t imagine publishing with any other platform.

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It’s not certain, but likely that her initial viewing of the  revival showing of Freaks (1932) in 1959 strongly influenced Diane Arbus’ subsequent focus on photographing not only the physically deformed but a long string of societal outcasts.

Arbus faced significant resistance during her lifetime in gaining acceptance for her unsparing portraits of deformities, transvestites, strippers, street personalities, and ordinary people captured in arresting moments. Even following her suicide in 1971, when she had gained some measure of respect within the arts community, it was difficult for her admirers to mount an exhibition of her work. She is not without her critics today.

One of the charges leveled against Arbus is that her work exploited and demeaned her subjects. The same charge has been made against Freaks. This is despite the fact that many of Arbus’ subjects were happy with her work and that many of the performers in Freaks, interviewed years later, painted their experience on the film as positive.

Taking that into account, and acknowledging that Freaks is generally a sympathetic portrayal of sideshow performers where the “normal” people are the monsters, you can’t escape the truth that in both cases, deformity and ugliness give these important works their power.

Freaks is one of the greatest horror movies of all time, and it would not have been so if it had relied on putty appliances, costumes, or lighting tricks to change normal actors into freaks. For most of it’s running time, the freaks are portrayed in ordinary domestic situations: playing cards, washing clothes, or discussing circus business. But in the final act, when they turn on the evil bare-back rider and her accomplice the strongman, it is their alieness that supplies the chills.

Arbus’ work plays the same card. My personal favorite Arbus photograph: “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park” seems somewhat staged, which lends credence to the idea that she exploited her subjects, but it’s the final effect which matters. And ultimately, with any piece of art, including Freaks, it is the final effect that should be judged, not the manner of its creation or the feelings of the participants.

Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. - Diane Arbus

“It Ain’t Easy When You Fall” by Ian Hunter just came on the radio and I am a mess.

The Wolfman (1941) is a fine film, one that created an icon of horror that has been copied numerous times since. But it is not a great film. I think its impact was due mainly to Jack Pierce’s make up and John Fulton’s lap dissolve transformation scenes.

Beginning with Son of Frankenstein, which launched a new cycle of monster movies, Universal assigned studio functionaries to their monster films, like George Waggner, Curt Siodmak, or Roy William Neill. Contrast this with the impressive list of artists involved in 1930s Horror: James Whale, Robert Florey, Edgar G. Ulmer, Karl Freund, or Tod Browning. In the 1930s, Horror Films were “A” list productions, in the 1940s they were “B” movies churned out for a quick buck along with Sherlock Holmes or Abbott and Costello films. While pre-WW2 films of this cycle, like The Wolfman or The Mummy’s Hand (1940), were clearly better budgeted and crafted than the sequels and team-up films that followed, all of these movies were a step or two down from the sophisticated fare of the previous decade.

That doesn’t mean they weren’t fun or enjoyable, but it’s stretching it to try and hold them up favorably to the ground-breaking, sometimes truly chilling masterpieces that created a whole genre.

Here are few things, however, I loved about the 1940s Universal Horror Movies:

• The opening scene in Frankenstein vs. The Wolfman (1943) where grave robbers break into Larry Talbot’s crypt and unleash the Wolfman. Genuinely creepy.
• Lon Chaney, Jr.’s Kharis
• Evelyn Ankers, Ilona Massey, and Elena Verdugo. Universal made sure it included a hot actress in nearly every film, and either glammed them up with striking gowns or draped them in negligees. A special nod to Virginia Christine, who was exotic and sexy in The Mummy’s Curse (1944) and many years later went on to fame as “Mrs. Olsen” of Folger’s Coffee.

But what elevates the third film in the series above what followed in the 1940s and even what had passed before is the emphasis placed on set design, photography, and atmosphere.

Helmed by director Rowland V. Lee, Son of Frankenstein features eye-popping set design/art direction by Jack Otterson and shadow-rich photography by George Robinson. The film ranks as one of the finest Hollywood derivations of German expressionism. A sense of unreality permeates the proceedings, thanks to out-sized doors, furniture and stairways broken into forced perspective, and layers of sharp angled shadows. 

While Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) were no slouches in art direction and photography, in those films they served mainly to support the story and acting. In Son of Frankenstein, they nearly  overwhelm the film. This appears to have been a deliberate choice made by Lee, who supposedly was aiming to  create a fairy tale horror film, one rooted in Grimm’s and other Germanic primal folklore. Or it’s possible that since the film was created to capitalize on the box office success of the re-release of the original, that Lee was merely trying to create a film that served up as much sensation as the censors of the time would allow. At a time when cleavage was banned and gruesome shock was unknown, spooky corridors and suggestive shadows were as much horror as the public was allowed.

Son of Frankenstein

Son of Frankenstein

Son of Frankenstein

Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) carries a hefty artistic repuation, primarily for it’s imaginative use of light and camera tricks to convey an atmosphere of unworldly mystery. After a recent viewing of the Criterion reissue, I have to conclude that is all it has to recommend it.

There are undeniable moments of power and brilliance in the film as shadows literally come to life and events unfold in as if in a trance. Dreyer filmed everything on location and took great care in choosing abandoned chateaus, desolate factories, and fog-shrouded woods for his settings. But one huge failure dooms Vampyr; the failure of Dreyer to appreciate the value of sound in the art of Horror.

Vampyr was filmed silent, with the snippets of dialogue and minimal ambient sounds dubbed in later. This was done partly for economic reasons, to allow the film to be dubbed into German and Danish more easily, but the limp manner in which Dreyer used sound makes it clear that he had no concept of how to utilize sound in film.

The same problem, to a lesser degree, affected Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931). Vampyr was actually completed shortly before Dracula began filming, so there is no significant difference in the technology available to both filmakers. Dracula has the disavantage of being a stageplay adaptation filmed on soundstages, which gives it an artificiality and woodeness that contrasts with Vampyr’s naturalistic settings. But even so, Browning still manages to use sound much more effectively than Dreyer, who barely uses it at all. Compare the two films approach to explaining the vampire legend: Vampyr forces the viewer to read pages from a book on vampires like silent film intertitles, while Dracula has Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing explains it in a few lines of dialogue.

The power of sound in Horror films was driven home to me during a viewing of a contemporary of these two films: Frankenstein (1931). I had seen that movie a dozen times or more but had never appreciated how startling and evocative the sounds of shovels hitting coffin lids, chains clanking, or heavy boots dragging could be. It struck me, sitting there in the dark theater, just how terrifying this experience must have been back in 1931, just a few years after the premiere of the The Jazz Singer (1927). If you ever get the chance to see a classic Universal monster movie in a theater, by all means do so.

• Several Val Lewton classics – I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Cat People (1942) and The Body Snatcher (1945)
• Roger Corman’s classic Poe film, The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)
• Night of the Demon (1958)
• The Japanese masterpiece Kwaidan (1964)
• An overlooked, nasty gem The Shuttered Room (1967)

Many of these films will be repeated on the schedule in the next few weeks, and there will many other great films shown before Halloween, as well (Peeping Tom, Vampyr, The Haunting) so check your local listings.

Unfortunately, I will be out “tricking and treating” in the local taverns Halloween night, but TCM has a special surprise for all us degenerate revellers: back to back uncut showings of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s gore trailblazers, Blood Feast (1963) and Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) starting at 2:30 a.m. eastern time. From closing time to slaughter time!

Strongly Recommended!

I picked up a copy of Dracula, illustrated by Edward Gorey, this weekend at our local library sale and it brought back a whole raft of fond childhood memories. Sweet, nostalgic memories of rotting jack-o-lanterns, lost friends entombed in frozen ponds, and dark, deserted schoolyards still wet with tears…

There is no doubt that the subtle, subversive images of Edward Gorey greatly shaped my worldview. He gained fame as a children’s author and illustrator, but he brought death and creeping horror to a whole generation. Gorey marked us with a dark worldliness that was more profound than the standard images of werewolves and shambling corpses we found in movies and comics.

I discovered Gorey right around the time that I experienced death for the first time. One of my childhood friends died of leukemia when I was in second grade, and I refused to go to the funeral with the rest of my class. Since then, I have hated funerals, not because of a fear of death but rather a distaste for grief. Somehow, Gorey helped me to understand very early that death, if nothing else, is final and arbitrary. Asking why or lamenting loss was pointless; death would come for us all and often when least deserved or expected.

My favorite Gorey work is the Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet primer featuring a different mode of child death for each letter of the alphabet. Each was accompanied by a suitably chilling but slyly comic rendering by Gorey. Gashlycrumb Tinies was firmly in the stern tradition of Victorian cautionary tales or the bloody, original Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

In these more “enlightened” times it might be instructive to remember that one of the most important services that an author or illustrator can provide to children is to give them insight into the adult world. Too many modern authors render this service pedantically, with pre-teen melodramas heavy with meaning or not-too-subtle attempts at brainwashing. There is more power in a single Gorey illustration than a whole shelf of Judy Blumes. 

“Although Gorey’s books were popular with children, he did not associate with children much and had no particular fondness for them.” Wikipedia

A is for Amy who fell down the stairs,
B is for Basil assaulted by bears.
C is for Clara who wasted away,
D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh.

Night Tide

Written and directed by Curtis Harrington, Night Tide proves that, even on a Roger Corman level budget, quality writing, solid acting, and restrained direction can yield superior results.

Dennis Hopper plays a sailor on leave who falls in love with girl who works in a waterfront side show and who may or may not be a mermaid. The mysterious Mora (Linda Lawson) is suspected in the deaths of two of her previous suitors but Hopper pursues her in spite of the warnings of everyone around him.

Night Tide is a quiet movie that progresses at a measured pace, sustaining an atmosphere of unease with only half-hearted efforts at shock (the rubber octopus in a dream sequence doesn’t work any better than the rubber octopus in Bride of the Atom). Best of all, the movie resolves itself believably in a way that reinforces the underlying human tragedy.

Harrington had art movie cred; he had worked with Kenneth Anger and had produced several avant garde shorts prior to this, his feature directorial debut. Night Tide is clearly a nod to Val Lewton’s Cat People (1942) and it has much of the same quiet power as that masterpiece. Like Cat People, Night Tide draws its tension and tragedy from the vulnerability of lonely people reaching out to each other, heedless of warnings of imminent doom. Sometimes, the best love stories are tragic, and sometimes the best chills spring from pathos.

“I still think the Val Lewton approach is the best one, and that is the power of suggestion. What you don’t see is more unsettling than what you do see.”
Curtis Harrington

A Mask Tolls the Knell

“My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.”
Odilon Redon

The paintings and drawings of Odilon Redon (1840-1916) are among the most striking and evocative of their era; Redon infused even his less bizarre creations with a sense of mystery and wonder.

He worked in several media, with his impressionist style works in oils most familar. I am include several works of his done in ink or pastels, just because those are among my favorites.

Tentation de Saint Antoine

Nightmare

The Crying Spider

A large collection of his works can be found online at: Museum Syndicate.