Horror Express to Killer B Cinema

April 12, 2024April 12, 2024 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I started The Horror Doctor three years ago at the height of Quarantine. It was during a time when most of us were staying indoors, hiding from the amorphous and ominous thing we were warned could be lurking within both strangers and loved ones, and for which there was no cure and many deaths.

Three years later, the world has opened up again. The thing is still out there- we have since developed a vaccine and devised methods of detection, but the threat continues. Life, in all of its forms, goes on. Before the Pandemic, I particularly enjoyed going to the Toronto After Dark Film Festival – an event that happens every October showcasing independent and open premieres of horror and all manner of weird films. I missed this event during the Pandemic, but found an online substitute in the form of The Last Drive-In on Shudder with Joe Bob Briggs, Darcy the Mailgirl, and crew. Unlike After Dark, this was a communal event that allowed me to engage with the hosts, as well as my fellow watchers. As another contrast to the festival, I got the opportunity to talk about the show in real time, and riff on the films along with others around the world. Some people I know had this experience with Mystery Science Theater 3000, but I never really got into that. For a few years, as the Pandemic loomed over us, for me and my fellow Mutants, as the show’s community is known, it was all about blood, breasts, and beasts.

Alongside other benefits, The Last Drive-In got me to appreciate B movies again- those low budget productions with equal parts cheese and charm. Then, one day, I ventured out again. I met new people, some of whom became very special to me. I slowly began to rebuild a public and private life that I had previously feared had been permanently overtaken by darkness. In the midst of reforming my life from the ashes of the Pandemic, I found out about Killer B Cinema. My partner stumbled across tickets for Zuma and immediately bought them to cheer me up, suspecting this would be exactly my kind of thing.

After seeing only a few select people for so long, I admit it took some time and encouragement to warm up to the idea of being in a public communal space again. But in the end, thankfully, we decided to go. Along with a strange and enjoyable film, we also discovered a niche event filled with an IRL community of weird movie aficionados adjacent in many ways to Joe Bob’s Mutant Fam.

Nestled into Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood, the movie was held in a unique and cozy cyberpunk-themed bar known as See-Scape. Past the unassuming exterior, we entered to find a whole other world within. As Joe Bob Briggs has said, science-fiction – particularly the classics – and horror tended to go hand in hand. The cool and quirky See-Scape blends genres in both its aesthetic and purpose: the main floor has good food and drinks alongside board and video games, while the upper level features a patio, second bar, and versatile space that is intermittently a stage/dance floor as well as a theatre of the absurd.

This is, fittingly, where Killer B Cinema, a recurring film event running the first Friday of every month, resides. The B films selected, restored, subtitled, and shown by Lizzie Violet and Zoltan Du Lac run the gamut between strange international versions of familiar films like Cellat! (Turkish Death-Wish), Aysecik in the Land of the Magic Dwarves (AKA the Turkish Wizard of Oz), Pape Gudia (a Bollywood reinvention of Chucky), a North Korean propaganda film Hong Kil-dong, the vintage sci-fi spectacle Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, and first for us, the strangely spliced and endlessly entertaining Filipino film Zuma. And then in October, 2023, we were treated to a classic: Eugenio Martin’s Horror Express.

I first heard about the film from a Creepshow episode called “Night of the Living Late Show,” in which a man recreates the 1972 horror movie in a virtual reality simulation so that he can live out his childhood interacting with facsimiles of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and later sleep with the Countess. The episode, with the protagonist’s death within the Night of the Living Dead simulation due to the machinations of his jealous wife, was excellent, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I needed to see the film for myself. And I did. A few times. I’ve reviewed Horror Express before on Letterboxd. However, I gained a new appreciation and perspective of the film after seeing it at Killer B.

So let me tell you how it goes. Before every film, we have the opportunity to order drinks and pub food, while Zoltan plays animated shorts in the form of a silly 1963 anime called 8th Man, or 8 Man. It is black and white with minimal frame rates, jerking wooden movements, and bad dubbing that nevertheless manages to be hilariously entertaining, particularly when watching it along with a live audience. It is based on the manga by Jiro Kuwata and Kazumasa Hirai in which a detective is injured and rebuilt into a humanesque android that functions as the sole member of the eighth division of the Tokyo Police, overseen by one Chief Bumble Thumbs.

But somehow, the episodes of 8 Man always foreshadow the main presentation, and this showing of Horror Express was no exception. So, after a strange episode with a child prodigy who invents an imagine-maker device that creates monsters from the psyches of its users – including dinosaurs – which 8 Man relentlessly strives to keep out of the wrong hands, leaving the poor boy with a train set to amuse himself, we get right into the feature film.

The best way to describe Horror Express is taking The Thing, but instead of a research station in Antarctica where American scientists succumb to infection and paranoia, we are on a Trans-Siberian Express from Shanghai to Moscow in 1906. However, this iteration of the being – which is also, albeit loosely, analogous to The Thing From Another World, and before The Thing, a creature adapted from Joseph W. Campbell Jr.’s novella Who Goes There? – is a fossil of an early hominid. This monster is really a creature suspended in ice, with the ability to absorb the knowledge of anyone it touches. As it makes contact with its victim, the cursed individual’s brain will essentially be erased, their eyes turned into unseeing white orbs with blood running down their sockets, and they will die.

It gets worse… Not only did this creature survive its deep freeze to steal the contents of people’s minds, it can also transfer its essence into the bodies of its victims, essentially hiding among the train’s passengers. In that sense, it seems to function not unlike a member of the Great Race of Yith from H.P. Lovecraft’s works, albeit without the switching of minds and bodies, just a simple possession of consciousness. The being has weaknesses, of course. It has a hairy hand that it needs to hide, likely the result of frequent astral masturbation. It can only use its power to mesmerize and absorb someone’s mind in complete darkness. At the same time, light allows the entity to pass as anyone else, and the darkness is a double-edged sword in that it both strengthens the being, while also revealing its red eyes, leaving it open to detection.

This entity, which we later find out is a being of pure energy that had been abandoned on Earth, manages to consume a thief (a spy who Peter Cushing’s character Dr. Wells has been heavily macking on – which actually surprised me as the man tends to portray sexless intellectuals like Sherlock Holmes, Grand Moff Tarkin, and The Doctor), and eventually a cast of suspicious characters including an engineer, a detective, and many others.

The friendly rivalry between Peter Cushing’s Wells from the Geology Society, and Christopher Lee’s Professor Sir Alexander Saxton is as entertaining as anything you might observe from these two real-life friends and consummate actors’ interactions. Saxton is nefariously hiding the creature’s remains in a crate for his great discovery, while the inquisitive Wells wants to know what he is holding, and isn’t above bribing a train employee to peer at this potentially groundbreaking discovery.

There were a lot of things I didn’t remember from my first watches. I didn’t recall that there had been a voice-over narrative by Christopher Lee at the start foreshadowing the events to come, and the actual discovery of the creature in ice in Manchuria. I recalled the film starting on the bustling train station in Shanghai. While perhaps this initial scene added more “telling than showing,” it’s a narration from Christopher Lee, and who would turn that prospect down?

I think there are so many wonderful things about this film: the ornate setting of the train, the snowy landscape of the journey, the dark isolation juxtaposed with the warmth of camaraderie broken by mysterious murders. There are even hints of romance: chemistry with Helga Line’s Natasha, and even the Countess Irina Petrovsky, played by Silvia Torosa, who is seen flirting with Lee’s Professor Saxton despite her husband standing by. And last but not least, the mad Eastern Orthodox priest Father Purjardov, played by Roberto de Mendoza – who basically looks like Rasputin – somehow manages to steal the show just as much as Lee and Cushing.

But what I think really struck me, both viewing it with others and seeing it again, is the turn of the century imperialism and patriarchal elements inherent within this film. Natasha and the Countess are clearly set up objects of desire to the predominantly male horror viewer-audience. Saxton, and to some extent Wells, blatantly look down on foreigners, even as they rely on their craft for transportation. Wells’ scientific assistant, the taciturn, capable, and pragmatic Miss Jones, played by Alice Reinheart, has her mind devoured by the creature- the only woman aside from Natasha the spy that it consumes. Wells ends up penetrating Natasha’s body (though perhaps not in the way he would have liked), when he conducts an autopsy after her demise. Eventually, he and Saxton perform surgery on the eyes of the creature, as well as its victims, and in the process see the last things the monster has seen, including beings from millions of years back. For me, this is reminiscent of the 8 Man’s imagine-machine, with its visions of dinosaurs fantastical creatures. Through this parallel, we spiral back thematically to the anime preceding the film.

The theme of penetration, driven by momentum of the male gaze, doesn’t stop there. There are frequent shots of the train pummeling down the track, a seemingly inexorable and blatantly phallic image which is central to the narrative. Purjardov the priest, desperately begs the creature, who he thinks is the Devil, to enter his mind and take his body. But I think the darkest embodiment of these ideals is the figure of the Cossack Captain Kazan. An imposing, large, bald man played by Telly Savalas, the captain chews up the scenery, intimidating the other passengers with his body language and crass manner, and proceeds – like the historic Cossacks of legend, a Slavic semi-nomadic militaristic people – to get results in direct and brutal ways. When first introduced, the captain is pictured in bed with a woman, probably another in the latest, while he intimidates an old staff member providing him news about the latest troubles on the train. He comes in, and – mockingly giving respect to nobility, in the form of the Count and Countess – proceeds to beat up passengers and threaten their lives until someone gives up “the murderer” among them.

Even the creature, hiding in another body – having looked into the eyes and violated the bodies of so many – is terrified of this man; the monster itself couldn’t comprehend the inhumanity that humans display toward each other. For all of its atrocities, the being is simply attempting to steal the knowledge it needs to build a ship, to get its borrowed physical form home. Captain Kazan, while supposedly doing his duty, uses that as an excuse to exercise his sense of power and brutality. The inspection scene still stays with me; as a child I was told harrowing stories about the Cossacks and their role in pogroms by my Polish Jewish grandparents. In some ways, Kazan seems a larger monster to me than the creature. The contrast of the two begs the question: which being is worse, the alien entity itself, or the manner with which humans treat those deemed foreign and “other.” Amidst the classism and anti-foreigner sentiment, and entitled superiority displayed by the English and American contingents, there is a powerful, violent, hyper-masculine energy that emanates off Kazan, as he physically enacts what the creature is doing psychically. It is no coincidence, I’m sure, that he endures the thing’s onslaught longer than anyone else.

I will say, more people survive this film than they would in modern cinema. Wells and Saxton manage to get everyone to another car of the train, and detach the car containing the creature, who, as it transpires, can reanimate its victims into extensions of itself. Thankfully, the bodies all seem to be on the detached cars. The entity is seemingly destroyed because Kazan’s superiors gave orders to Russian soldiers in another station to change the track of the train, and ultimately send it off a cliff should there be no word back. Even the soldiers question this order, realizing it would potentially doom countless lives, but knowing they have to be sure, that they have to obey orders. And it works out, but it may not have done. The reanimated corpses could still be on the surviving cars with vestiges of the being’s mind. Even if they weren’t, the train could have crashed and killed everyone.

The most haunting thing about the film, is that after we see the rest of the train crash and burn, the camera pans out to show the Earth in space, as we had previously seen through the eyes of the creature, and we’re left to wonder if a being of pure energy can truly be destroyed by a train wreck. And if we are in fact seeing the Earth through the monster’s perspective, are we any better than it? Is the danger actually outside, or always lurking within?

These were some of the thoughts that swirled around my head as the B movie fans began to applaud. The perspective shifts once more. And for all the harrowing events of the movie as well as our reality, the fictional deaths and theatrical ridiculousness, for all the fear and anticipation it took to get us here, to this place where we can gather in a room with a like minded community, to talk and laugh and eat and drink in person again. It was a long dark journey that led us to a good night. And I look forward to the future, to more films at Killer B Cinema, and all the other live events now possible as we collectively reanimate from the perpetual fog of the last few years.

Consuming the Sublime: Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man

March 20, 2021 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I almost didn’t watch The Wicker Man.

Unlike Cannibal Holocaust, which I thought would be too extreme even for me, I didn’t watch The Wicker Man for a long time because of not only my ambiguous place in horror media, but also because later I’d seen Ari Aster’s Midsommar — and I loved that film so much, that I was afraid that if I saw The Wicker Man I would end up seeing the former as something of a pretentious bastardization of the latter.

Luckily, my love for Midsommar remains intact as it that is a different story. And while Ari Aster’s movie revolves a remote choreographic Nordic communal culture in which the protagonist faces the demons of her grief and gains a twisted form of resolution, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man is ultimately a folk horror musical film about a man who finally gets the chance to become a contemporary Christian saint in on an island ruled by a form of Celtic paganism.

I think about this film on the surface. Imagine: a movie that utilizes musical tropes to complement and institute the philosophical quandaries, a murder mystery, and the final psychological horror of the entire thing. I don’t think I will ever be able to get any of it out of my mind: not the folk songs the children sing when talking about the cycles of reproduction and nature and the harvest, not Sergeant Howie literally being made a fool of — and unlike Punch, the costume he takes, the Devil didn’t make him do it, just his own sad sense of self-righteousness, not the brilliant Lord Summerisle’s (played by the towering Christopher Lee) monologues and observations of human nature, nor just the way that the entire story reaches its peak. And I can say, with certainty, that if the innkeeper’s daughter Willow sang to me like that, I would definitely have not been the sacrifice that the inhabitants of the Hebridean island of Summerisle would have been looking for.

So much can be forgiven, really, when you look at the quality and the build of the film that so many other critics and scholars, far better than I — a dabbler student in horror — have already dissected and spread across the world like a glorious, beautiful, terrifying harvest. Certainly, you have to suspend your disbelief to consider that anyone on that island would have known that Sergeant Howie was a virgin at all, and gone through the machinations through the “kidnapping” or “death” of a child of theirs to bring him there. But when you look at all those cheerful, awe-inspiring songs almost pulling you back into English folklore, the elemental rituals of dance, and music, and copulation also reminiscent of the free love spirit of 1973 in some parts of the world, and just watching Howie’s own Puritanism — which in the Final Girl trope would have saved her — become his complete, and utter undoing, it is a perfect bloody film.

Someone once pointed out that Howie could have saved himself if he had just given into Willow, into fornication, into living, into feeling beyond a set of ancient, strict, patriarchal guidelines. This is no Golden Calf, but a flesh and blood woman who actually offered him genuine connection and tenderness beyond the bounds of socially and religiously accepted marriage. But Howie just couldn’t do it. And, in a way, there is almost this tragedy there: that he had one moment where he could have had this, had this link to the earthly joys and the here and now, and it’s lost to him forever because of his sense of duty. In a Christian paradigm of some kind, he passed a test and resisted temporal sin, but fittingly enough he also passes the standards of the Summerisle villagers and their pagan roots by proving himself worthy to be sacrificed in The Wicker Man.

The Wicker Man itself makes me so tempted to make a bad pun of the strawman argument, where something is argued against but not properly represented. It is a scarecrow, made to scare off things that would devour it or refute it but is ultimately just empty clothes and bails of straw. In this sense, Lord Summerisle believes his people can make a harvest happen again through animal and human sacrifice based on their Celtic belief-system, believing the faith of Christianity and science and mainland civilization to have failed them. But another way of looking at it is Howie considering the ways of the villagers immoral and wrong because they abandoned Christianity, and believing that the death of a girl is clearly their fault because they are “heathens.” The straw man is the Wicker Man for both whereby it is an object ritualistically destroyed in order to prove one side, or the other right: a sacrifice to the gods, and an eventual martyrdom for Christianity.

It’s too simple, though, and perhaps not a great analogy in its own. The fact is, Howie is a terrified man being burned alive cursing the villagers for tricking him — the fool and the trickster, the outsider and the stranger — to this fate for dying for their “sins” while Lord Summerisle believes that the harvest will happen despite all logic, and that he will not one day be called on by his people and “volunteered” should it fail again.

Perhaps, again, the Wicker Man isn’t so much a strawman as it is the scarecrow I mentioned: created to placate the villagers’ fears of the harvest not happening, of starvation occurring, while allowing for the nominal civil and spiritual independence of the island. At least, this is what Lord Summerisle seems to believe.

When I look back on the film now, one issue I actually have with it has to do with Lord Summerisle. I just don’t see him as being afraid of the sacrifice. If the man had been raised through two or three generations on the culture, even with his education, he would see it as his own duty: as his own sense of noblesse oblige, to give his life to protect and better that of his people. To me, this faith — or fanaticism — should be bones deep and unshakable. Of course, there is the fact that by the paradigm of his people the man is also not a virgin — whatever that ultimately means — but that is almost irrelevant. I just don’t see someone as composed as Lord Summerisle being rattled by one setback, or the threat of his own life in the balance. He would understand the cycles of the world. He would know it was his time when the gods decreed it. It’s just that simple me, as real to me as Christopher Lee’s other character in Star Wars — Count Dooku — not begging for his life which ultimately doesn’t do in that film.

Lord Summerisle should be an ideologue with absolute conviction, and that should make him more horrifying than any blood-starved monster, that behind all the colourful pomp and circumstance is a man who is willing to serve the gods and the natural order at all costs: including murder. But, let’s play the Devil that doesn’t kill our Punch-wearing protagonist Howie, and say that perhaps it’s not an effrontery of his beliefs being insulted, but actual arrogance or pride masking a fear of failure and death motivating our friend Lord Summerisle. Aside from the fact that it makes him, and his belief as hollow as a straw man, consider what he tells Howie at the beginning of the film: that his Victorian grandfather revived the local pagan practices and rituals of the people of Summerisle to convince the people that his new strains of fruit trees would prosper in the climate.

But what if it was Lord Summerisle’s grandfather who was fooled, or ultimately fooled himself? What if, deep down, he did believe or it was the people he “led” that convinced him to reinstitute pagan elements that already existed in Summerisle, and just brought them to the surface again? What if these Lords of Summerisle really don’t lead using the name and acts of gods, but they are just figureheads for the people who are truly in charge? Lord Summerisle still operates from the monotheistic mainland order of rule, for appearances sakes, but what if the people just let him believe so long as he is useful? You know, until his role has to change? We see in Midsommar that there are a variety of different sacrificial rituals, so why couldn’t that be the case in The Wicker Man’s community of Summerisle? Lord Summerisle himself has, to an extent, realized that what began as a tool in his grandfather’s arsenal has become real, but what if it had always been real, and the Lords only deluded themselves into thinking that they could control it: this act of human sacrifice and growth and sex and primal renewal?

Howie believes this impulse needs to be denied, while Lord Summerisle thinks he can embrace it, but perhaps both want to control it: one through rejecting it entirely, and the other through indulging, and directing it. .But I don’t know if either particularly understands what it is they fight for or against: certainly not Howie who realizes he had been playing a whole other kind of game, and maybe not even Lord Summerisle or the villagers to think they will get what they want by following this belief and instinct to kill and burn to have their conception of Nature give them what they want.

In the end, the fire that burns through Howie consumes the hearts of the villagers and Summerisle, and there is something beautiful in that destruction and the all-too bright joys depicted in that place and site. What is it that Lao Tzu is supposed to have said: “The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long.”

Right now, as of this writing, Spring has just begun — however it will look — but when you look past the literal and go into the metaphor, at the nature of what happens when you release something from the constraints and strictures of security and fear, of a structure that fails its people, what do you have left to do with that passion? Does it go into a resurgence of spirituality, of land-based beliefs, into a renaissance of sensuality and sexuality? Does it challenge the status quo and grow into something else? Or does it run rampant, become chaotic, and self-destructive beyond the sight of those who first the light the fire, or carry the spark? It’s almost romantic: in the old eighteenth century terrifying and sublime sense of the word, but somehow still beautiful for it.

These are some of my thoughts as The Wicker Man continues to smoulder in my thoughts. Forever.