Tag: horror

A Duet In An Unholy Place

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

He slowly approaches the Orthodox church: a dilapidated white ruin, crumbling in the setting sun. Before this, he had supped at the sotnik’s1 manse. The Cossack chief Zupanski , the so-called Gospodar2 of this meagre plot of land had reached out, had written to him of his grief and loss. Of his daughter’s last wishes.

As if he, the Graf von Orlok, had not been first reached by her.

The shadows gather around him as he enters the church. It is a monument to a broken arrogance, a decaying vanity. The Cossack soldiers and villagers give his large, lumbering form sway. Even those nobles at the sotnik ’s table felt uneasy by his presence, as he barely sipped at the wine proffered to him by virtue of his station. Perhaps, once, his people and theirs were enemies, or allies against other lost city-states. But here, he is a nobleman offering his condolences and vigil to their pannochka .3 Her father, aged premature by his loss, had said it was a pity that she had not lived so long, that she had been taken so foully, that he could not avenge the grievance of her having been taken from him so soon. Perhaps, the Cossack had said, he and the Graf could have been family had his beloved daughter survived.

The Graf almost grins under his moustache at both of those lies.

Katerina Zupanski lies in her coffin, surrounded by the dimmed portraits of saints, blackened by time and neglect. This place, supposedly sanctified, had been left for too long to the elements, and the forgetfulness of its builder to hurt the Graf nearly as much as it once could have. Most places founded by blood only strengthened and hailed one such as himself. This site, however, is not what he plans to ward himself against.

He had told the grieving father that he had brought his own holy text to read the girl’s last rites. The Graf von Orlok did not lie. In one large, long fingered hand he holds his book, inscribed with the seven-pointed star of a heptagram. He hears the doors close behind him as he reaches into his cloak, and takes something from his pockets with his other clawed hand.

The Graf sprinkles his grave soil around himself into a circle. He watches the young woman’s body, pale in her white funeral gown, her hair the colour of night, her nose bold, and proud high-bone cheeks making him wonder how she could have come from such lowly stock as her forebears. The long candles with their branches of bright red kalina4 bathe her face in an unearthly light. He reaches one hand towards her – as though the shadow of him lurches to possess her – and stops. No. Not yet.

He can wait three nights.

He takes one talon, and slices his palm. The Graf sprinkles his grave soil around him, murmuring an incantation from his book. Then, he settles down. He sits, his bulk still tall from the floor. And he waits.

*

She rises from her coffin. Somehow, she is more beautiful now, as her anger overcomes her corpse. Thwarted in life, trapped by her temporal beauty, Katerina walks slowly, silently, out of her resting place. Her feet do not disturb the dust of the ancient church as she stumbles towards him.

The Graf watches, his dark eyes glimmering in fascination as this ethereal creature approaches him, sensing him from her deathly state. Her footsteps become steadier. More sure. There is no power, beyond what she has put upon herself, past what fights to become free. Her eyes are blank as they stare directly and sightlessly at him. But the Graf knows she can see him. That she wants him. Of course she does. One appetite recognizes another.

She explores the space around him, her puppet-body examining the length and breadth of his power. He smiles at her as she seems to dance around him more sedately than St. Vitus ever could. Eventually, with almost disappointment in her somnambulist body language, she glides back to her coffin. Then, she lies back down and crosses her hands peacefully over her breasts again. For a few moments, the Graf thinks he can see her breathe. Fascinating. Then, she is still again.

Eventually, he gets up, breaking the circle with his feet. The cock has not yet crowed, and there is no virginal blood to help him sleep forever this morning. He considers her spell. He thinks about how they have taken the measure of each other.

The Graf looks forward to what she offers him the next night.

*

When the Graf comes to the church the second time, he considers Katerina. The little lady. He thinks about her last moments, the ones that her father and her people had not seen.

As the people avoid his presence, with him not bothering with the peasants, and the sotnik’s retainers noting how he barely ate their bread, or drank even vodka, he can still recall the night he sensed Katerina’s death. 

Katerina’s resentment had allowed her to treat with the entities of this land, and below, as his ambitions as a Solomonari5  let him bind his soul back to his own corpse. In the form of an old woman, she embraced the Old Ways as she rode the backs of the human beasts that always dominated her. The priesthood supported men as much as any noble or soldier did. Unfortunately, she challenged the wrong man that night, a young man in the cottage she used to lure her prey.

In the deep darkness of his slumber, he had felt her calling out for someone, for anyone, who could understand her pain as she lay dying, beaten, and broken. And his black heart found hers. It gave her just enough succor. Just enough time.

It had been hard to journey to this so-called Little Russia, to Kiev, but young Knock had proven his use. Orlok’s servant, an aspiring rechtsanwalt für grundbesitz,6 used his contacts to transport him this far, into a land not unlike his own. Orlok will remember those other qualities, perhaps to cultivate his devotee a little further. But Knock’s mind, while fanatical to their contract, his slow but steady temporal growth a testament to some level of ambition, paled by the loneliness and despair, and the absolute hatred embodied within this gorgeous porcelain of womanhood before him. 

Outside his circle of blood and grave soil, she hisses at him spitefully. Her voice rumbles and crackles like the depths of the Pit. Winds buffet the dust around them, making the walls tremble under their power. She practically hovers around him now, almost flying. The Graf admires her imperious, commanding fury as she tries to get close to him and seize his power. To conquer another man.

Yet as she claws the air with an electricity almost an echo of lightning, her own spell fails to overcome his. His deep voice reverberates like the Pit itself. He has been dead longer. She has only had three nights. She only has three nights, if he understands the ritual of her kind. There is a desperation in her words and movements. Her skin is blue now, yet her eyes seem more alive than ever. These burning pinpricks of fire only accentuates that feeling of darkness calling darkness. Like communing with like.

Eventually, she grows tired. She retreats, slowly, back to her resting place. And it is just as before. The Graf takes it all in. He knows this is not over. In fact, he is counting on it. There is one night left. One final moment. This is where she will be at her best. At her zenith. At her end.

And he will be there, to see what the being once called Katerina Zupanski can do.

*

She does not disappoint him.

He is glad of this. He traveled all the way to this small place at great cost, had awakened himself from his Castle, to see and feel in the flesh what he had experienced from the dark of his tomb.

Her wrath is both terrible and glorious. The winds are vaster now, her influence over the elements as tempestuous as her deathless, vengeful soul. Her teeth chatter and each curse is a spell created to destroy him. The windows of the church shatter. The icons of saints fall. And creatures fly down from the rafter. They crawl across the dusty floor. The Graf observes it all and marvels.

Upiór, spirits controlling the bodies of the lesser dead try to claw at his protections. Wurdulac, fanged creatures that usually feed off the people they loved most in life, are forced to assault him. And so many more lelkek, spirits of the trees and stones themselves, under her thrall come to her.

He would find it insulting not to match her, as he summons his own hosts. Bats, rats, and wolves leap through the windows her power destroyed, tearing at her creatures as they face each other down. His face twists into a death rictus as his spells match this little girl’s – this pannochka’s – own.

Then, the Graf has had enough. He tires of this child’s tantrum. He toes his circle, smudging the edge, as he comes forward. Katerina flies at him, and they wrestle in the church. He is larger, stronger, but she has the fury of her last night in her, and her natural place of power. She flings him into her own coffin. Somehow, it fits him, holding him as he sits up.

She floats over him, staring down at him in triumph. When she stands over him, and on him, he knows. He knows what she is about, and what she is going to do. He watches as she straightens the hem of her white dress, revealing her stocking. She smiles as she smashes her foot down into his groin. The Graf gasps, with air that he no longer breathes. Then she smiles wider, and stomps on his manhood again. 

He grabs her, suddenly, by the throat. He holds her up as their creatures rage around them. She chokes out a word. A name. The creatures, both of their forces, grow quiet.

But nothing happens.

She suddenly looks at him. It’s as though this dead witch truly sees him for the first time. One hand, a dainty blue finger, traces his thick eyebrows, his large eyelashes.

Viy.

The Graf’s stolen blood rages in his living corpse body. Katerina slides out of his grasp and around. She circles herself on top of him. Onto his back. She cries out, shrieking with glee from dead lungs, as she rides him. He sees her beaming joy. Her triumph.

And then, he starts to change.

He lets his power warp and twist his body. Bones break and reassemble into a four-legged position. His hair, on his head, his face, and his palms grow out. Even his talons elongate. All around the room, upturning more disused pews, and books and artifacts, the corpse-witch rides him, a giant wolf. Rats and scattering things flee in terror. The dead back away from their betters. 

The being once known as Katerina also changes. First, she folds into herself, and becomes a dog, as the wolf grapples with her. Then a cat, to escape him. But he holds her by her nape. Seizing her in his jaws. She changes back into herself as he bites her throat, mounting her, on her coffin. Her eyes flash with rage, but also lust as she runs her dead, blue fingers through his hair. The Graf von Orlok claims her, shooting his dead man’s seed into the cold unliving thighs of his new bride. Now she is free. Now she is his.

*

A plague hit those who came to the church the following day. Those that survived, fled in terror at the rats and the bloated corpses of their fellows, surrounded by the ossified statues of terrible monsters caught in the sunlight. 

The sotnik, Zupanski, fled to his estate. He locked himself in his room. But in the wavering candlelight, a shadowy hand reaches forward, holding him in place. He can’t move. The old colonel struggles against the unseen grip. He sees the portrait of his naked daughter, made to pose for him and the artist he hired, unveiled. Then, he looks at the portrait of his wife. His late wife.

The vastelina7 Zupanski, the dame of Katerina, stands before him. Not lost in the darkness. Not roaming the cabins of his land, or the corridors of their manse. Dignified in her finest dress, her dark hair greying, she looks down on him and the portrait of their daughter. He does not seem to notice the familiar gleam of fire in her eyes, so much like his Katerina’s, as the shadow holds him in place, as she reaches out towards him.

Afterwards, the manse is burned. The bodies of the dead are lost. The painting of Katerina Zupanski, once beloved property of her father, is lost in the flames.

*

Toma the Philosopher is left by his fellows in the barn. That was the agreement he and his other fellow seminary peers made with the hoary old babushka of this place. They were lucky. He is warmed by the drink left to them, and he settles down into the straw as he thinks about the seminary and the sickness that broke out in the village. It hit while they were gone on errands, and quarantine was swift. They were not allowed back in, and left to fend for themselves.

After being exhausted, they found their way to this cabin. He tries not to think about the last time he stayed in such a place. He vowed never to do so again. Not after the evil he faced, the temptation he barely kept from consuming him.

So when he sees the old woman in the moonlight, and realizes it is the same one. The same witch. The one that he thought he killed. The one, by God in Heaven, he tried to forget. It’s as though his heart’s blood has frozen into ice. Toma does not even scream as she comes forward. A dark claw almost seems to pin him in place. Rats come out of the straw. So many, just like the village outside the seminary. No. There are even more …. They screech around him hungrily, biting, clawing, and hissing.

The old woman’s face melts away, her shawl and dress vanishing, turning into white linen and revealing the terrifying beauty of the witch that has haunted his nightmares, that he thought he had killed without consequence. 

The being once called Katerina, her mortal life now fully mourned, stands over the young man’s body. Her groom uses his power to hold the seminary student in place. She smiles down at him, as she lifts up her skirt hem, revealing her garter, before plunging her foot down.

Pop Toma won’t die, she decides. For killing her, for freeing her, he won’t die for some time.

*

A plague begins to spread throughout Kiev, and the rest of this place that some called Little Russia. Then further. The krayina8 suffers as the Rus blame a ship that came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire for carrying rats into the land.

As city-states begin to rattle sabers, and corpses burn, in the night a cat and wolf run together through the grass. During the day, they will retire to a carriage that always seems to follow them. For his own part, he feels as though he may have returned to this world, prematurely, but there is much more to be consumed. And she, her life extended, feels like it is only just beginning; their danse macabre continues. 

  1. a military rank among the Cossack starshyna (military officers), the Russian streltsy and Cossack cavalry, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the Ukrainian Galician Army, and the Ukrainian People’s Army. ↩︎
  2. Slavic term for “lord” or “master” ↩︎
  3. a young unmarried lady or mistress in Ukrainian and Polish ↩︎
  4. a Viburnum opulus shrub, often called the guelder rose or snowball bush. Its bright red berries are a powerful symbol of love, beauty, youth, and femininity, and also represent home, blood, and family roots. Kalina also appears in the context of the Kalinov bridge, which connects worlds in Slavic mythology ↩︎
  5. a wizard believed in Romanian folklore to ride a dragon and control the weather ↩︎
  6. a German real estate lawyer ↩︎
  7.  interpreted to be a Ukrainian term for “landlady,” “lady of the manor,” or a feminine form of “owner” or “proprietor” ↩︎
  8. Slavic term for “land” or “country” or “a region or province” ↩︎

Friday the 13th: A Halloween Journey

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

When I first made The Horror Doctor, I was fascinated with the idea of Strains and Mutations. By no means I have been particularly exhaustive when exploring what could have been in the horror genre – specifically the cinematic, which is where my Blog tends to go – but I feel that there is a somewhat healthy medium between looking at what happened, and speculating on what could have been in a genre as mutable as horror. 

Halloween has come and gone, both the holiday and the series. And yes, I know that the day and franchise themselves will return – like all undead creatures or slasher killers tend to do. But consider the following.

Most horror fans probably know that John Carpenter and Debra Hill wanted to expand the Halloween series beyond The Shape – beyond Michael Myers. In 1982, Halloween III: The Season of the Witch came out. Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis were both presumably dead, destroyed in a hospital fire a year before, leaving Laurie Strode to recover from her trauma, and the terror of Silver Shamrock and its Halloween products for children and adults alike would make humanity fear Samhain again. But audiences wanted their clear-cut avatar of darkness. They wanted Michael back.

But just as Halloween returns, so does Friday the 13th. Again, most fanatics know that Sean Cunningham wanted to emulate the story beats of Halloween, and after the story of The Shape was seemingly over, he and writer Victor Miller introduced the world to the idea of Jason Voorhees in 1980. Interestingly enough, both Halloween and Friday the 13th came as their third films in 1982, but what is fascinating is that after the first Friday the 13th, the film series gained another producer in the person of Frank Mancuso Jr.

And it seems as though the creators of the second Friday the 13th film, director Steven Miner and writer Ron Kurz, also wanted to make the film series an anthology and changed their minds, perhaps the decision also had something to do with Frank Mancuso Jr.  Mancuso Jr. not only produced Parts Two and Three of Friday the 13th, but he also helped create another series. Originally called The 13th Hour, this television series made by Mancuso Jr. and Larry B. Williams was renamed Friday the 13th because Mancuso Jr. believed it would attract more viewers. And while Mancuso Jr. said that it was still a play on the idea of a dark and unlucky day, it can’t be denied that the title itself would bring in fans of a certain other franchise of the same name. But Friday the 13th: The Series is a different beast from its film namesake. Jason Voorhees never appears, or is even referenced in the show, unlike Michael Myers who actually exists as a fictional character in his own first Halloween film shown in Season of the Witch.

Friday the 13th: The Series is a television series released in 1987, after Halloween III: Season of the Witch and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, where two adolescents named Micki Foster and Ryan Dallion inherit an antique store filled with cursed artifacts given to their late, and aptly named, Uncle Lewis Vendredi by the Devil. This framework allows them to keep having some kind of new evil to combat every episode while also granting the opportunity to have antagonists, and allies that recur whenever the plot needs them. The series itself ran until 1990, and while it isn’t perfect – sometimes the various plot points grow contrived, awkward, and flat-out ridiculous – Friday the 13th: The Series functions as something of an assortment of different candies all wrapped up in the same grab-bag. I especially love the fact that the series not only starts off during Halloween, much like its how its spiritual namesake was inspired from another Halloween, the cousins even have the assistance of a former stage magician and occultist – a more benevolent Uncle Jack Marshak to help them deal with the cursed artifacts that they need to collect and from which to protect the lives of others.

Fittingly enough, at least from my perspective, what Halloween failed to do in film as an anthological series, Friday the 13th almost succeeded in accomplishing as a television serial. Perhaps if Laurie Strode had continued in other films unrelated to Michael Myers, or if The Shape had never truly been vanquished from the first film and recurred as a background character in others, or as a revenant that could potentially return in other settings even with Haddonfield as a determinator, both John Carpenter and Debra Hill might have almost achieved what they originally sought. It might also be possible that had Miner, Kurz, or even Mancuso Jr. kept Crystal Lake as a location, they could have built a larger world and referenced it in relation to another bit of folklore they could have built upon. I mean, look at Jason Voorhees himself and his transformation from a waterlogged deformed child, to an imitation of the Moonlight Killer, to the iconic hockey masked fiend we all know and fear.

Horror is a mythology and a process. Monstrosities, and their stories, do not come up ready made and whole. They are a messy process. And who knows if it might have been possible to lean into that development, into that dark and bloody journey of figuring out what something horrible is, and how it can be faced, and encourage audiences to want to follow along. Imagine it as another dark road not traveled. It’s awesome where we have already been, but these creative nightmares are always something fun on which to speculate. 

Red Lips in the Castle of Blood

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

“I loathe that portrait.” Julia Alert says, her elbow locked with her companion’s, her nose upturned, the scowl on her perfect face all too clear.

Valerie looks up at the framed painting on the wall, inclining her white blonde hair slowly, glacially, in deliberate consideration. “It is a beautiful piece of art. The artist captured, at least, the surface feeling of you. Your forbidding look. Your tempestuousness. Your passion.”

Both women wear fine lace gowns, low cut, their skirts billowing out at the ground like flowers. Julia’s dress is made from a fine black material, while Valerie’s is white. Julia regards her companion, and her dark eyes seem to smoulder almost as much as that of her likeness in her painting. “Flattery.” She pats Valerie’s hand. “I’ll admit,” her eyes narrow, “that is the first time someone had assumed that this was my portrait, and not that of an ancestor’s.” Her eyes narrow. “Or an ancestor of Elisabeth’s.”

A faint smile forms on Valerie’s lips. “Interesting. It seems as though we have been both defined by an Elizabeth in our lives.”

Valerie’s pronunciation of the name comes out as a drawl, a dactyl vanishing in the shadows of the torchlit castle hall. Julia inclines her head, a resigned but amused smile acknowledging the other woman, as though noting that detail as well. She runs a hand through her dark golden hair as she turns back to look at the painting. “Do not misunderstand, Valerie. I used to love this portrait. It is well done. It has lasted years. Even decades. It was made to capture my beauty. To celebrate it. That is what they tell me.”

“But it is just so still. So … static.”

Julia stares, directly. The latter woman, for her part, keeps her eyes on the painting above them both, looking down at them all. “Yes. Precisely.” She regards her companion with as much intensity and focus as Valerie had the painting, before looking back at her facsimile and shaking her head. “I am tired. Of being here. Of being stuck here. In this place. In that time. Never changing. Never moving. A pretty good little thing to entertain, but that is all the meaning there will ever be. Just a bauble to be admired in an old house always having the same parties.”

Valerie takes Julia’s arm more firmly, inclining them away from the painting. They start to walk. Slowly. Languidly. It’s as though their gown hems are gliding on air. Julia takes one last look at her picture before moving full step, side by side, with Valerie. “I’m sorry.” She says, after a time. “I used to enjoy these ballroom parties. These celebrations. But I forget myself. There is nothing that can be changed. That is what I said. That is what I told her –” She sighs, and looks down for a moment, a rueful quirk forming on the corners of her mouth.

“You mean, to your Elisabeth.”

“Every time.” Julia says, without hesitation, caught in her own inner momentum as Valerie steers them onward. They move through the corridors, away from the music, away from the conversation, the sounds becoming more distant, ethereal, lost to time. “But it seems, at times, as though I’ve trouble heeding my own advice.”

Valerie moves her head, slowly back and forth, a bemused expression on her face. “If only our portraits could rot from our excesses and debauches, showing the marks of our years and experience, while we celebrate our lives, young and whole, eternally.” She sees the blank look on her companion’s face. “I believe that came from the work of an Irish author, of your Commonwealth?”

Julia rolls her eyes. “Probably after our time. Though it does sound familiar. Perhaps one of our other guests mentioned it in passing.”

“And imprisoned as well. Broken by it, at the end.” Valerie looks out into the darkness around them. “Perhaps you can only celebrate, only flout life, so many times before the walls of your bower become your fortress, become your jail, and then your only company. Your tomb.” Valerie stops, suddenly, her white dress standing out in the gloom. She places both hands on Julia’s shoulders, leaning in, conspiratorial, smirking. “And so, you continue. You defy that end. You escape those walls. That fate. A coward dies a thousand deaths, but a traveler lives a thousand more.”

There is a sour look, almost a pout on Julia’s face as she stares into Valerie’s, though it does not match the fire in her eyes. “You almost sound like Elisabeth’s journalist companion, misquoting the Bard at me.”

Valerie smiles, pushing back a strand of hair from Julia’s face. “My friends will be at the ball for a while?”

Julia leans her own face into Valerie’s, running her hand through her soft hair the colour of platinum. “You mean the young couple you brought with you?”

Valerie nods, resting her forehead against Julia’s. “I know that, especially to this fine … how do you say … Victorian -themed ball of yours, it is customary when visiting another’s home to bring gifts. A part of guest right.”

“It is very Continental. Or Old World as the Americans say.” Julia’s arms wrap around Valerie’s waist. “But it is also the duty of a hostess to provide party favours.”

“Well, Lady Alert.” Valerie’s lips brush the other’s, the ghost of a kiss. “I have enjoyed these appetizers. Shall we come to the main course?”

“Mes chambres.” Julia’s stringent tones have become quiet, husky. “Elles ne sont pas loin. Les autres seront occupés avec leurs nouveaux… millésimes de bourgogne.”1

“Bon.” The two of them regard each other for a long moment, with a whole other kind of hunger before separating, and holding arms again. “J’ai vraiment hâte de goûter au mien, ma chère.”2

“De même.”3 Julia replies, before inclining her head and her body towards another direction, another set of stairs. “But before my chambers, another detour. There is something else. Before midnight.” Her eyes are deep. “Something that I would like to show you.”

*

They lie together under the drapes of the canopy bed. The room is a gentle, but pervasive red. Valerie traces a finger tip down Julia’s exposed neck, a lazy, amused smile forming. “I cannot hear your heartbeat.”

Julia lies on the mattress, her hair, once neatly in a bun now completely down but not hiding her one thousand yard stare into the shadows made by the candles in her room. Finally, she turns towards Valerie on their pillow and smiles back. “Then you have done your job, Lady Chilton?”

Valerie laughs. A crystalline tinkling sound. “What fire. I am glad that it remains. I hope that we can appreciate this night. We have survived the time between the commemoration of Saints, and the place of all lost souls.”

“Your hair, gliding across my chest, my skin …” Julia strokes Valerie’s collarbone absently, “it certainly elevated me from any Purgatory where I might have been. I can understand, even remember now, why Elisabeth seeks such solace in the sensual. The ultimate escape. I would, and I will, do anything for that.”

“For you.” Valerie gets up, and begins to put on her dress, red this time, and a long, feathery white boa.

“Red becomes you.” Julia drawls, resting her chin on the palms of her hands, her elbows in the pillows.

“And you have become the red you were always meant to be, long ago.” Valerie straightens her garb. She smiles down at the other woman. “Are you ready?”

“Aren’t you scared?” Julia inclines her face. There is a defiance there, but her eyes are distant.

“My dear.” Valerie leans forward, and holds her face in her hands. “Look at me. A letter-opener, a book-knife in the heart. I have seen death more times than you can imagine. You are more than just art for men to admire, and for your Elisabeth to disdain and take for granted. This is an opportunity. Death is the first part of the greater journey. I am honoured to have seen the start of yours. Now is the time for new cycles. New dances. New stories.”

“Of course, Lady Chilton.” There is a reverence and, perhaps, a bit of playful mockery in Julia’s tone as she gets up to get dressed herself. “You know, having known the Blackwoods and the other families, I must confess that you do not look like a Chilton.”

“Only by marriage.” Valerie shakes her head. “Or so I thought.” She smiles at Julia’s questioning glance. “Let us just say that my husband was a bad little boy, titillated by young blood spilled in Bruges, but too cowardly to take anything in Ostend, or in your Mother Country. The Elizabeth I knew, she was the real thing. Far more than the ‘Mother’ that he left behind. So no, my dear Julia, I might be a Chilton, but in name only. And not in deed. If anything, I come more from a Countess ‘ line than from where I had ever been solely with him.” She straightens out her shoulders. “Now then, the hour is late. It is almost morning. Come, Julia. I will take you from this place, and we will continue our journey together.”

Valerie holds out one hand, waiting for Julia to take it. There is a wistful smile on her face, but an imperious mien to her gesture. Julia laughs, bowing her head, slightly but visibly.  She takes the other’s hand, letting her come to her feet. “You have a lot of confidence, my Lady.”

“Only in you.” Valerie responds. “You know the way out. I have only secured it. For the both of us.”

“And the others?”

Valerie looks lost in thought for a moment, her blood red fingernail tapping at her lip. “My friends are already permanent guests by now, yes.” Julia doesn’t answer, but that is a reply in and of itself. “I am sure they will remain entertained, and for entertainment. As for your friends, well you know the wager.”

“The reason you are here at all, yes.”

“The attorney made it clear to me.” Valerie and Julia step towards the doors. “One night. A … carriage, or conveyance will be waiting for us. This place, your prison, will become mine. My property. And I will raze it, to the ground, on your behalf. No more exhausting dances. No more deaths. No more men to compete with. No more Elisabeth. Just as I escaped from the shadow of mine, so you will yours. Only the voyage. Only the limits of Oceanus. Only the Night, for the two of us.”

Julia takes this in, and she smiles. “Yes.” Her face twists into a grimace of hatred for a few moments. “They have made their choices.” She turns back to Valerie, her benefactor, and so much more. “Now, we can make new ones.”

*

The castle walls and passageways warp and shift. But Julia, obediently, leads Valerie onward, knowing the way, seeking their final destination out of this place. Julia opens the passage in the wall, directing them both into the darkest chamber. They descend deeper, and deeper down until they finally come to the basement.

“Just a little further, my Lady.” Julia intones. She guides them, through boxes and tables. Mists, swirling at the edges of the chamber, begin to grow, obscuring the visibility of everything else in their way. Her cloak, the one she brought with her to the castle in the beginning, settles around her shoulders. There is something … familiar about some of the objects that they pass. This place, it looks like catacombs, older than the castle itself. She closes her hand over something in her cloth that she took with her as they move farther inward.

“What is this place?” Valerie murmurs. “They remind me of a family crypt … I sense much death here.”

“I believe,” Julia says, her own tone absent, “that Elisabeth’s grandfather, the first Lord Blackwood, meant it to be a family plot. But for some reason, his family never chose to inter their remains here. You saw the gravestones outside when you came in? That is where most of them … most of us lie.”

“Then what … or better yet … who is here?” Valerie’s grip under her cloak tightens, just a bit. “Tell me, my Julia. What should we expect here?”

Julia comes to a stop. The mists begin to rise higher. Two objects, in front of them, strangely enough become more definite. “You are a connoisseur, yes my Lady?” She peers back at Valerie. “The Blackwoods had another name, before their founder was given this land and title. Before he chose to build his castle here. I don’t think you would have enjoyed the taste of them, my Lady. They were called … Blackbloods.”

Valerie chuckles at that. “Blackbloods. You told me their founder was a Hangman? If they’d only known the Countess …”

“It’s true.” Julia nods. “Elisabeth’s grandfather was given this power for his executions. Her brother, from what I was told later, Thomas is worse. Yet it all started here. At the foundations. I imagine that Blackblood did more than just kill criminals and dissidents to the Crown to get this privilege. I think this is where he held the … other bodies. I am sure you can understand such things. Personally.”

That is when the objects in front of them come into focus. Two boxes. Oblong. One of them has a face inscribed onto it.

“Doesn’t that seem familiar to you, my Lady?” Julia asks, pointing at them. “They are not quite Iron Maidens, but …”

“Iron Maidens.” Valerie’s eyes narrow at Julia, at her impertinence. “How would I know of such things? They were before …”

“In a way, wouldn’t that be you?”

The figures materialize from the mists. There are so many of them. Most of them are garbed in nineteenth century clothing, but others wear clothing from different ages of England, and across the world. Valerie’s chin tightens. “I see that many others made the wager, then.”

“That is one thing I understand about gambling,” Julia says, stepping right to Valerie’s side. “The House always wins.”

The figures walk closer to the two women. Valerie remains tall. She does not flinch.

“Julia.” She says in a low voice. “I order you. I command you to see us through this.”

“I will see us through this, Valerie, if that is your real name.” Valerie turns to see Julia smiling at her. The other has let go of her arm. “You know, something occurs to me.”

“Julia.” Her name in Valerie’s mouth is iron. A warning.

“It’s just … well. I suppose traveling all across Europe, all over the world even, costs you a considerable amount of money.”

The apparitions of the castle loom closer. 

“Julia.”

“I mean, truly. You benefited from the good graces of your wards at first. I imagine the Chiltons did not give you the money you seek. And judging by your existence of wanderlust, of not being able to stay still, you must have run out of your original funds long, long ago. Let me guess? If you were to get out of here, you would raze this place to the ground, sell the land, and take all the money for yourself?”

“Julia, you are my –“

Julia laughs. It is a mocking, scornful sound. “Did you mean anything you said, Valerie, or whoever you are truly? Would you have let go with you?”

Valerie lunges forward, suddenly. Julia’s mouth widens into an O. A slender blade pierces through her chest and out of her back, where her heart would have been. Valerie withdraws the blade, as Julia staggers back, and crumples onto the ground. In the mists. But her laughter doesn’t end. It rings on, and on.

“Oh come on now, Valerie! Stabbing me in the heart, at this point, is a little on the nose!”

Suddenly, Valerie is surrounded. There are two men. One of them is in frilled finery. The other is topless, and heavily muscled. They hold both of her arms. She struggles, but it is no use. Julia steps out of the mists again, in front of the other figures, completely unharmed, her gaze piercing into Valerie’s with a sly smirk on her face.

Valerie’s face twists into shock and rage. “I turned you. I could not feel your heartbeat! You were mine!”

“My heart never beat, Valerie.” Julia says, with sweetened venom, as she comes closer. “And I never felt yours.” She leans in closer to her as the two spectral men hold her in place. “And I was never yours.” She turns to the men. “Thank you, William. Herbert. You know what to do.”

Then the figures surround Valerie. Their hands, their fingers, scratch at her. Their teeth find themselves in her flesh. Valerie shrieks Julia’s name until they, all of them, are swallowed by the mists and the darkness.

*

Julia Alert stands in the basement on her own. Her hands are folded in front of her as she regards one particular object. She looks at it almost as intensely as she had the painting of herself in the hallway of the castle. After a moment, she speaks in the direction of the object.

“Dr. Carmus finds you fascinating, you know. He believes that we are, in his words I believe, ‘localized’ versions of what you are. We’ve had so much time here, in this place, that we read a few of his works. I suppose that is one more way in which we could be related, you and I.”

Julia sighs, running her fingertips up and down the object in front of her. “Usually, we can only consciously exist one night once a year. The good doctor told us that human beings have three forms of life. Our bodies, that die quickly. Our souls, that we never truly understand … and our senses. I know our senses can continue a long time after we’ve died. The sensual life is long, and majestic. Blood is the best way to keep it going. I think, perhaps, that is how you have kept yourself going .. though you have been able to move, unlike ourselves. Blood feeds the five senses after we’re gone. And violence, well, it makes it feel all the more poignant. I am sure you find this very familiar.”

She moves around, her skirts twirling. “The young couple you brought us are new. But you are different. You always were. You weren’t exactly subtle, my dear Valerie. Even your voice sounds much older than how you look. Frankly, if anyone deserves to exist in a Castle of Blood, it is you, Countess .” 

She shakes her head, splaying her fingers out on the object in front of her. “Oh, I know who and what you are. I know you’ve killed many people. You like little girls, if I recall the stories. Alan wouldn’t understand. He was always such a do-gooder, even now. And poor, sweet Elisabeth is too squeamish for that sort of thing. Do not worry. We will not kill you. We are after all, all of us, murderers. By necessity. Lord Blackwood, Thomas, feeds us blood once a year to keep us in existence. To give us company. And I have it on the good doctor’s authority that we can use your blood to extend our existence for another year. To increase our sensual life. And we, darling, are nothing if not sensual. But with your blood in particular, even more than that of your darling couple, we could have longer. We might be able to even leave the Castle and its grounds. That is what you promised me, even though I suspect you never believed it would work. Just one more pawn discarded for the Countess, yes? But who knows?”

Julia shrugs her shoulders. “We might even be able to go as far as paying Thomas himself a visit. To … repay him for his generosity in keeping us existent. But you needn’t worry.”

Julia walks away. “Alan was a journalist before he joined us. He interviewed Poe. He likened your situation to ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ you know? I think he almost feels sorry for you. It is a pity. I once thank you beautiful. Like a worldly Galatea. But really, I think you remind me more of a Ligeia than anything. Yes. Legends. Your fate, right now, reminds me so much of that legend of how you spent the remainder of your days locked in your room in your own castle for your crimes, slowly starving to death. How that must have driven you mad. No wonder you could never stay, willingly, in one place.

“But it is all right now, my dear Countess. All you have to do, now, is lie back, be still, be beautiful. And be useful. Yes. Close your eyes, and think of … well, not so much England, as we are already here, but Hungary perhaps. Yes,” Julia slowly grins. “That should be appropriate.”

Julia leans down, and kisses the sarcophagus in front of her. She gazes down at it, her gaze filled with transfixed contempt. There is a determination in her eyes as she rises fully to her feet. She takes a piece of cloth in her hands. It is Valerie’s cloak. She looks, meaningfully, at the sarcophagus and drapes the cape around her shoulders. She pushes back her hair from her face. Then, she walks away, leaving the sarcophagus and the other coffins in the darkness and blood. Beautiful. Marble. Still. 

  1. My chambers. They’re not far away. The others will be busy with their new… burgundy vintages. ↩︎
  2. Good. I really can’t wait to taste mine, my dear. ↩︎
  3. Likewise. ↩︎

Horror Express to Killer B Cinema

~ 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.  

The Case of The Haunted Palace

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been watching the entire Corman-Poe cinematic cycle – a series of eight films mostly based on the nineteenth century writer of the macabre’s stories – for a while, and have continued on into this Halloween month. I went into Roger Corman and Charles Beaumount’s film The Haunted Palace cautiously thinking that it would only tangentially be related to Edgar Allan Poe’s works, with some adaptation from H.P. Lovecraft’s novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward to a Lovecraftian, rather than a Cthulhu Mythos degree. 

What do I mean by that? 

More specifically, I thought it would be a loose adoption of Lovecraft’s plot focusing on the inherent malevolence and indifference of a reality based in cosmicism as opposed to specific elements of the Cthulhu Mythos- the Great Old Ones, Miskatonic University, and the like.

But I was wrong. And you know what? As an avid Mythos lover, and corresponding to the spirit of The Horror Doctor itself, I’m glad that the film adaptation wasn’t what I thought it would be. Of course, I’m not alone in this: Corman, the director, and possibly even the screenwriter, Beaumount, also didn’t believe this film would become what it did. Due to the intervention of American International Pictures (AIP), the film’s title was changed from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward to The Haunted Palace – forcing the addition of a few of Poe’s stanzas from the eponymous poem into the cinematic narrative. Corman wanted to try something new with his work. The result was different, but reminiscent of the horror-comedy experiment of The Raven – the film introducing Vincent Price and other classical horror actors, after the notable lack of them in Premature Burial, with its convoluted ending. However, AIP then made the decision to centre this work in the same continuity as Corman’s Poe Cycle, which, in my view, further obfuscated the film.

If anything, Poe’s The Haunted Palace poem is indeed more at home with something like “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The poem is incorporated into Roderick Usher’s song in Poe’s short story of that name, and could have easily been an epigraph or voiceover in Corman’s film adaptation. Nevertheless, the stanza “And travellers, now, within that valley/Through the red-litten windows see/Vast forms that move fantastically/To a discordant melody …” fits well with the preceding scene of Joseph Curwen conducting experiments- terrifying cosmic eugenics- on captive women who end up cursing the town of Arkham, somewhere in the eighteenth century. This fragment seems to hint at the Cthulhu Mythos creatures known as shoggoth: eldritch abominations and predominantly formless beings created by, and in servitude to the Elder Things; shape shifting beings that can form any organ or limb at will. These were the monstrosities contained under Joseph Curwen’s old estate in Lovecraft’s novella. Distinctively, in Corman’s film, there is one entity that is vaguely humanoid and wavering between realities, and whom Curwen and his followers utilized to forcibly impregnate young women from Arkham whom he had mesmerized. 

This might be a stretch, and indeed Poe’s “The Haunted Palace” is all about something that was once beautiful: the seat of a wise ruler was overthrown, the memory has become bitter and corrupted by the proceeding violence. You can see how that might fit “The Fall of the House of Usher” to an extent when you look at something beautiful becoming rotten through terrible acts, but Curwen’s estate is already a font of evil- taken from Europe, and transplanted there brick by brick to continue his family and coven’s work, into allowing the dark gods a way back to Earth’s reality through his mutants. 

It is generous to say that Corman’s The Haunted Palace is a fully faithful adaptation of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” or even Edgar Allan Poe’s poem. 

There are several other key ways in which the film adaptation departs from the source material. One such factor is that of setting. One could make the argument that the origin of Lovecraft’s Curwen did indeed come from the eighteenth century, but the main story took place in 1928 and not 1875. It may be that Corman’s film is set in the nineteenth century, complete with horse and buggies, to make it fall in line with the background and scenery of the Poe Cycle – it essentially being Poe’s time period – but it is fascinating to consider how the grafting of Charles Dexter Ward to the late nineteenth century as opposed to the early twentieth might pan out, and how that would change the telling of the story. Lovecraft’s story takes place in Providence, Rhode Island while Corman’s work occurs in Lovecraft’s creation of Arkham, Massachusetts. 

Charles Dexter Ward is a bachelor amateur antiquarian who lives with his parents. He is fascinated with the history of his home and family. Through his research, Ward discovered his ancestor Joseph Curwen’s ashes in his old residence, and with more investigation into his occultic practices, he resurrected his predecessor. Ages before his death, Joseph Curwen had created a space-time spell that affected the flows of fate. This had his descendant – who aside from a birthmark, and a lack of a forehead pit and witchmark, was practically his ancestor’s twin – find, and bring him out of his “essential Saltes.” In the context of the novella, these “Saltes” are the basic compounds left from a body that can be reanimated into a humanoid form- to be controlled, and interrogated by a necromancer. After that, Curwen – who still speaks an older dialect of English – disguises himself as Doctor Allen. You may recognize this surname to be an important one in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos. Wearing a fake beard and dark glasses to disguise himself, Curwen manipulates Charles into helping him continue his work.

“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” novella begins with what seems to be Charles in a mental institution having physically and psychologically changed. The entire narrative is about family doctor Marinus Bicknell Willett attempting to figure out what is afflicting his young patient, which leads him to discovering secrets of the world that he really did not want to know. In the end, Doctor Willett discovers that Charles died a long time ago, having refused to do something truly heinous for his ancestor. In turn, Curwen killed Charles, hid his remains behind an old portrait of himself – which led Charles in his quest to find more information about him in the first place – and took his place, hoping to continue his experiments. However, the good doctor realizes what happened, and has studied just enough Mythos lore to not only unleash an ancient spirit of immense power on Curwen’s lich colleagues Jedediah/Simon Orne and Edward Hutchison, but to also undo Curwen’s own resurrection as he’s trapped in his cell in the asylum. In Lovecraft’s work, a young man’s benign but misguided focus on family genealogy takes a dark turn, and he is taken advantage of by forces he doesn’t understand; ultimately, reason, logic and kindness win out against the darkness, avenging his demise. 

Corman and Beaumount’s cinematic narrative begins with Curwen and his mistress Hester Tillinghast luring young women to his estate. The purpose of this is to implant what seems to be Great One-Human hybrids inside of these women. Again, there are some interesting references evoked from their choices in name for Curwen’s mistress, the etymology of which has likely been based in Lovecraftian lore. She shares the surname of the mad scientist Crawford Tillinghast in Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”, and Hester possibly mirrors the name of “Hastur,” a terrible deity adopted by Lovecraft from Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers.

In the film, we find a completely different practice from the Joseph Curwen in Lovecraft’s novella: while the man was involved in the slave trade, and experimented on countless human beings, he and his compatriots seemed more fascinated with reanimating and tormenting the dead through their essential salts in order to question them, and gain their powerful lore. Necromancy seemed the word of the day for Lovecraft’s Curwen, and forbidden knowledge his ultimate vice- at any cost. Further, we know that Curwen had fled one witch trial before, and was prolonging his life unnaturally. He took a wife, and gave to civic pride in Providence to keep up appearances before the citizens raided his lair after hearing rumours of his atrocities. 

Corman and Beaumount’s work posits that Curwen, in taking Hester as his mistress, infuriated her betrothed Ezra Weeden. This, combined with seeing countless young women go to their estate, brought the wrath of Arkham down on him. Curwen’s death in the film seems far more personal, compared to the relative civic duty that Lovecraft makes clear in his work. Yet this also sets the way for personal revenge, as Curwen, in being burned alive by a mob, curses the entire town for generations until – one day – he intends to return. 

One hundred and ten years later, in the film, we get a Charles Dexter Ward who isn’t a young twenty-six year old introverted bachelor who loves antiquity, but an older, more cynical and sarcastic man, accompanied by his wife Anne to Arkham. They have come to this town to check on some property that is in Charles’ family. Charles clearly doesn’t even want to be there, and it’s Anne who is fascinated with this dark and dreary town with its sullen, unfriendly people, as well as many afflicted with a terrible mutation. In this version Doctor Marinus Willet, the only person in the town who isn’t superstitious, doesn’t even know them, but he guides them to the estate, informing them of what occurred before. Further, it seems to be Joseph Curwen’s portrait on the mantle in the estate that begins to affect Charles’ mind, and he begins to struggle with the spirit of his ancestor. It is interesting to note that this Curwen doesn’t try to befriend or even manipulate Charles. Charles himself has almost no idea what is going on. In the end, a hapless but kind man is overcome by the soul of his ancestor. The idea of bad blood telling is both a Poe and Lovecraftian idea, or a Gothic one at least. There is some resonance to Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep.” While in “Charles Dexter Ward”, Curwen is resurrected from his ancestor’s remains, here he switches minds with his descendant, and no longer has a body of his own.

In fact, there is a moment where I thought Curwen would get his original body: when he and Simon Orne and Jabez Hutchinson- in this iteration, as his followers, rather than his friends and equals as in the original story- robbed a graveyard. However, that is only to get the corpse of Hester Tillinghast back, to reanimate her. It is the only instance beyond Lovecraft’s novella where we see Curwen use necromancy to raise the dead, and there is no mention of “essential Saltes,” just a repetition of the Latin word for “live.” I do have to say, though, that given the cold and dark beauty that is Tillinghast’s actress Cathie Merchant, I can’t say I particularly blame him.

However, whereas Lovecraft’s Charles Dexter Ward had his father afraid for him, and his family doctor fighting for him, in Corman and Beaumount’s work it is his wife Anne, played by Debra Paget, who won’t leave him despite all of his terrible changes in behavior after coming to the estate. In the end, she calls on Doctor Willet – the descendant of one of the men who helped burn Curwen – to help her and her husband. It is interesting to see the character dynamics play out in this setting. Lovecraft’s Curwen uses blackmail, extortion, and murder to get his way in “Charles Dexter,” as a matter of course, whereas the Curwen in Corman’s film is petty and spiteful against the descendants of the people who killed him the first time, but strangely proud of the man whose life he has now possessed. He almost admires Charles in resisting him, though only because of that “Curwen blood,” which of course is an extension of him. He is an entity that ruins Charles’ life, consuming it into the void that is himself, and attempts to rape Anne. When he gets tired of doing all of that, he even gaslights her to Doctor Willet, trying to get the man to take her away, and let him continue his plans. Vincent Price plays both Charles and Curwen, and the mental dynamic and struggle between them pretty well, but that is no surprise when you look at his dual-roles in Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum a few movies ago in the Cycle. 

And those plans are sinister as all get out, even as they are amazing to someone who is a fan of the Cthulhu Mythos. You have a man who possesses a copy of the Necronomicon, a book that has links to the powers of the “Elder Gods” – or as Lovecraft calls them Great Old Ones – such as Cthulhu himself, and Yog-Sothoth. You also have the fact that the afflicted villagers and their ever-worsening mutations are reminiscent of the Innsmouth Deep One-Human Hybrids, and the Dunwich Whateley sons of Yog-Sothoth in Lovecraft’s work. This is not just a Lovecraftian film, you realize at this point, but a Cthulhu Mythos adaptation. And it is exciting to see something like that occur in 1963, long before Stuart Gordon’s films, and other depictions. This may well be one of the first cinematic adaptations of Lovecraft, and you can witness it through so many of these themes.

But while many of those elements – the Necronomicon and Yog-Sothoth – are referenced from Lovecraft’s story, several plot point in Corman’s film are different. Curwen’s ultimate plan in making Anne the mate of the shoggoth, the demonic thing in the wavering green pit, is foiled when Charles seems to regain control of his body. The townspeople attack the estate after Curwen used fire to assassinate two of their number. This actually troubles his followers, as, after waiting for Curwen to return for over a century, they wanted to continue resurrecting their dark gods. This makes the viewer wonder if there was going to be a mutiny, though it never happens. Then, Orne, Hutchinson, and Hester Tillinghast disappear, as Willet goes back to rescue Charles from the fire. I can almost forgive this rush job given how awesome performances were by Price, and Lon Chaney Jr. – who plays Simon Orne – but it does feel a little rough. Even so, I do like the idea that however we got to that point, there is the strong implication that despite the destruction of the portrait, Joseph Curwen is still in possession of Charles Dexter Ward, and ending the film on that dark note finishes strong. There is no stalwart, elderly doctor that vanquishes evil here. No banishment into dust. No deus ex machina destroying Curwen’s peers off page or off camera. Curwen continues on. Evil survives. 

It makes you wonder who had a far worse end: Lovecraft’s Ward, who at least got to die after all of his suffering, (though he knew the terrible truths of the world and was forced to commit unspeakable acts before he did so), or Corman and Beaumount’s Ward, who didn’t know anything before being subsumed by his ancestor’s malignant soul. The film’s end, and the thoughts they conjure up, tend to linger long after their stories are over.

It’s mentioned by Willet – or perhaps it was the descendant of Weeden – that the estate, or “the Palace” of Curwen and his family was taken from somewhere in Europe in pieces, and reassembled in America. I feel, too, that this is the case in a more localized geographical, but literary way in North America. According to Corman in his interview with Chris Alexander in Corman/Poe: Interviews and Essays Exploring the Making of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe Films, 1960-1964 A.I.P. took fragments of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem and attempted to expand it, to mutate and build blocks from it as the Elder Things – and sorcerers after them like Curwen – would shoggoth. One can even argue that Curwen and his associates learned how to reanimate the dead through breaking down organic beings into their salt contents by studying – and feeding – shoggoth as basic building blocks of life. But more like Lovecraft’s Herbert West – and it’s hilarious as there is a Benjamin West as one of the townsfolk that killed Curwen ages ago – in that they attempted to regrow this reptilian skin loosely over a whole other kind of body of work in Lovecraft himself. “The Haunted Palace” stanza, at the end of the film, “While, like a ghastly rapid river, /Through the pale door /A hideous throng rush out forever, /And laugh—but smile no more,” just doesn’t quite … fit. 

I am a fan of stories and films that use epigraphs – fragments of literary passages and quotes from other works – and even include parts of them within the body of their narratives. Even Lovecraft and Poe utilized these devices. So if I were to change anything about The Haunted Palace, (aside from not having Orne, Hutchinson, and Tillinghast vanish for no reason, or Charles suddenly return again, or Curwen falsify that act), and I had to make this very clear specimen of the Cthulhu Mythos in the cinematic medium fit in with the thematics of the Corman-Poe Cycle, I wouldn’t have used “The Haunted Palace” at all.

Instead of “The Haunted Palace,” one could speculate on what might happen if the filmmakers took another tactic. What if we go back to right after Curwen’s burning, and have Vincent Price recite in his velvety sardonic voice:

That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

And then end the entire film with the following lines on screen:

But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Just think about how these stanzas fit the themes, and the content of this film: the mob mentality, the plot of the film, the non-human elements in the form of the mutants and the thing in the pit, the desecration of the dead, and the ghouls that play with death and flesh. It goes back to the mutants, and the disease, and the curse. I mean, if you are going to name a Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos story after Poe’s work, you might as well title it “The Conqueror Worm.”

But really, it should have just been The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and if you look at “The Haunted Palace” as a genuine inspiration of this film, perhaps it is less a commentary on the film itself, and it more refers to its place in the Corman-Poe Cycle. It is placed in a continuity of lush and vibrant, startlingly colourful films, but it is twisted, dark, and cynical. Perhaps the poem talks about the beauty that once existed in the Corman-Poe Cycle, but is now consumed by Lovecraft’s indifference towards any concept of human life and  meaning, and the changing of a cinematic era: where all of that dark wonder has become shadows of what they once were. Chris Alexander, in his Corman/Poe, mentions that the change of writers – from Richard Matheson to Beaumount – represents a shift in the Cycle from an immersive experience of twists and turns to “the mechanics of plot.” He argues that the film is almost “pornographically direct” and he further calls Lovecraft the antithesis of Poe, and in his interview with Corman, the latter mentions how Lovecraft is darker and more overt: an approach that both he and Beaumount were looking for in trying something new.

And I think they did make something new, though not necessarily what they might – or might not – have been looking for. They made the first Cthulhu Mythos film for the general public. And while it might be awkward to place it into the Corman-Poe Cycle, as one of Lovecraft’s adaptations it is solid on its own merit for the most part. Like Lovecraft, while it might seem more blatant and steeped in realism, instead of the surrealism of the previous films, Corman’s film reaches into the supernatural and its inherent madness, leading to further grandiose and terrifying spectacles to come. 

Shaking On It: Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk To Me

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Fangoria co-owner Tara Ansley told us repeatedly on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) to see Talk to Me in the theatre, and advised us to come into it as cold as we could. And that cold ceramic hand hits hard; this handshake with the dead is the stinging slap of gore and horror you know is coming, but yet can’t quite predict. Telegraphed to an almost ridiculous degree, the film’s initially slow momentum takes a concept that could be funny, trite, but ultimately forgettable, and transforms it into something genuinely dreadful, eliciting a range of feelings in the viewers. Neither a handshake nor a slap, Talk to Me closes its hand into a fist and delivers a solid punch to the gut that upends the very foundations of reality, ruthlessly blurring the lines between the worlds of the dead and the living.

It’s not that teenagers meddling with spirits of the dead for fun is a new idea. It isn’t, not at all. No. Directors Danny and Michael Philippou, and writer Bill Hinzman play with your basic horror tropes, and bring them to a terrifying but familiar place – an embalmed, porcelain-coated hand, reputedly belonging to a deceased medium is used casually and carelessly to interact with the dead, with serious repercussions. In place of a Ouija Board, the cursed artifact is passed around at parties; teenagers, spurred on by peer pressure and an obsessive fascination with the macabre display that ensues, call upon the hand to possess them, for the sheer hedonic rush of it. Following the horror precedent of a roadside harbinger of doom, reminiscent of the graphic death of Charlie in Hereditary, and the deer roadkill from Get Out, there is a pivotal moment at the beginning of the Australian Talk to Me in which the protagonists stumble upon a suffering kangaroo on the road, and Mia tries but can’t find it in herself to put it out of its misery with her car. These early scenes provide character introduction, but more importantly hint at the darkness to come; this film gets ugly, fast, as it is made clear that unanticipated consequences come from well-meaning actions.

The idea of a hand with powers beyond human comprehension is also nothing new, though this film offers a variation on previous models. Legend has it that a hanged murderer’s hand can create a Hand of Glory that renders people motionless when they see it. A Monkey’s Paw can grant three wishes- in the absolute worst ways possible. The hand in Talk to Me opens up a portal to the spirit world, allowing a tormented soul caught between life and death to possess a human host. Aside from the universal appeal of occult practices, holding hands with this cursed object has another draw as it simultaneously puts the user into an altered state of spiritual elation, as Mia — a protagonist mourning the second anniversary of her mother’s death — describes. Mia’s backstory is explored through memory and montage. Mia has an emptiness and longing for connection. She uses the hand to escape this, if only briefly- to not only feel better, but also find deeper meaning, and an understanding of the events that led to her mother’s death. The answers uncovered may be precious truths, or, more likely, malicious lies that will drag her toward actions that ultimately hurt her, and destroy her remaining relationships. After the initial ungodly high, she becomes fascinated with the hand primarily because it allows her, for a fleeting ninety seconds (the time it is deemed safe to be possessed by the hand before you lose yourself to the control of the spirits), to be reunited with her beloved mother, or at least, an entity reminiscent of her mother, to predictably horrific results.The draw to connect with her once more causes Mia to exceed the allotted time, jeopardizing her relationship with her only friend, and throwing the young boy she considers a brother into the tormented grasp of the spirit world.

Like all forms of media, there are many ways to read a horror film.The obvious metaphors are there. As mentioned, the hand is first a drug experimented with by irresponsible teenagers, before it gets, for lack of a more apt phrase, out of hand. Seen through some of the more graphic scenes in this film, the euphoria induced by the hand can also be interpreted as a symbol of sexual experimentation. It is portrayed as a pubescent rite of passage seeped in peer pressure, as one after another volunteers to touch the hand and invite the spirit into themselves, with dramatic consequences, and often accompanied by an orgasmic spectacle for the teenage crowd of onlookers. 

The hand, passed around among friend groups and brought out at parties, can be seen as symbolic of social media: the reference to viral trends and online spectacle-making platforms like TikTok come to mind as the teens record the possessions on their phones, traded around for popularity’s sake. Along with a total disregard of future consequences, the teens show a distressing lack of empathy towards the peers they manipulate and pressure to undergo the invasive ordeal. Cautionary tales of social media’s addictive, self-delusionary and sometimes destructive nature as demonstrated through the teen’s documented encounters with the hand are told through a lens of the unreliable narrative. 

There is also a commentary implicit in the narrative about the dangers of ignorant people meddling with powerful tools they do not understand until it is too late. Like Pandora’s jar, once opened, it becomes impossible to put the evils back inside. Further, this film critiques the human need to interact with perversity and death, to tempt fate and succumb to temptations, amid extensive backdrops of graphic horror porn. Fans of this genre go to movies in part for gratuitous gore, but we stay for explorations of our collective human tragedy, interspersed with ridiculous frivolousness. We enjoy vicarious experiences of fear as epic bloody scenes are splayed out on the screen, as well as the uncanny, such as a disembodied hand enthusiastically passed around among teenagers like a joint at a party. In this way, Talk to Me does not disappoint as it takes us along for a ninety minute journey, far longer than the altered state brought on by a ninety-second handshake, as we encounter vicarious trauma, and grapple with alienation and the drive for connection and belonging. The screen allows us this exploration of pressing existential questions from a safe distance, leaving us exhausted from a profoundly disturbing and cathartic experience. 

Happy Halloween

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

For Diana Prince, Darcy the Mailgirl, of The Last Drive-In. Happy Belated Birthday.

From a shattered store window, a black and white television screen flickers with static. There is a picture on there, barely visible to anyone who might see it, who might remain. It’s as though a mashed pumpkin leers out from a space long dead, or alive not so long ago. 

Happy happy Halloween Halloween Halloween, the device chirps out, faded, stuttering, discordant, happy happy Halloween, Silver Shamrock …

It is the only sound in the silence that is Haddonfield now. 

It lumbers into the deathly quiet town. It had never left. Its breathing is laboured, muffled, from its exertions. The Shape tilts its head to the side, to look at the treats that another’s trick had made. It kneels down, bending on one knee, at one small form. It moves its mask off what’s left of its face. Just like the others, it notes to itself, filled with insects and snakes. They chitter and hiss in the growing darkness of the night, and the chill of autumn. The Shape sees them in the gloom and the dying street lamps, feasting on burned and rotted faces. Some of the masks have survived. Green warty witch faces. The leering facades of skulls. The visages of Jack O Lanterns. 

All these small shapes, their brains burned from the inside, boiling their blood, sizzling their nerve-endings, the ozone of electricity and elemental power unleashed, and then releasing compartments or using fragments of power to release the spontaneous generation of pestilence to swarm, and eradicate the larger forms nearby. The Shape feels nothing as it peels off those rubbery death masks, looking at the paroxysms of screams from the remains of the adults. It notes how some of them held the children, spilling candy and chocolate and apples all around them, offerings to a grim, arbitrary harvest that only The Shape can appreciate now, reluctantly. 

It looks at the remains of one of the masks, with its silvery component, its medallion and its piece of stone. For a few moments, it thinks it sees the rune of a Thorn on it. It pauses, and something shifts inside of it. Something deep in itself, in the place where its chest is, where it lungs are, and its heart resides. It can feel it. 

Nothing in this town is alive anymore. Nothing is alive anywhere. 

It can’t explain how it knows, even if it talked, even if there was anyone around to talk with about it. It looks at the knife in its hand, stained with chemicals instead of blood. There were trucks. After the televisions played the song, the endless cycle still reverberating through the town, through the country, perhaps even the world, it had made its way to those vehicles. They had been around the stores, the houses of families. These strange suited constructs, The Shape noticed they didn’t bleed or come apart like the others. Only chemicals and wires. Only plastic faces. One, if one still lived, might have believed The Shape to be disappointed by it all: to see these ends as anticlimactic. 

But The Shape doesn’t feel that way. Not at all. 

It feels … different now. These were all treats. And this was a trick. Something is lifting from The Shape, something it cannot name. 

It walks on. It breathes, more shallow, behind its own mask. It recalls finding it in a store, and even now it smells like devil’s rain. It considers going to another house. It pauses. It knows how far it would be. How easy it would be. But somewhere, deep in the void that it is, The Shape can’t find itself to bother. 

It knows that she is already gone. Perhaps gone while babysitting another child. Or hiding. It didn’t matter. Not anymore. 

There is only one place now. The Shape steps on crisp fallen leaves, scattered confections, slithering vermin, the burned and rotted corpses of parents and children, the scattered grains of broken dreams.

Until it finds the house. 

Its footsteps become heavier on the old floorboards. It closes the door behind it, more out of habit than any other purpose. It has been habit and instinct for so long, in any case. Blood, viscera, pain, killing has been the only thing it ever cared about. As it stomps slowly, ponderously, up the steps where a family used to be, long before this last Halloween, it remembers how disgusting it had been. Before it had been darkness, before it had been perfect. Before the doctor tried to mould an intelligence from it, before all of those experiments, before the fear, it remembered the revolting smell of skin and lust, and grossness of being. Of human bodily function. Flesh making flesh. It couldn’t stand it. The idea that something tied it by blood to blood. The knife had been cold and perfect. Then it moved on, it recalls as it comes to the room where it started, to the vessel that carried it, and the other thing that put it in that vessel. That girl. That woman. That man. 

Sister. Mother. Father. 

Little Sister. 

Ugly, there should never have been more than one of him. Stars and cycles. Blood. How much of it had been real? How much had any of it mattered? He stared that day into his own darkness, and knew that it wouldn’t stop until there was no one, and nothing left to kill. But it is quiet now. There is nothing. There is just the night. 

The knife drops from his fingers as The Shape loses cohesion, leaving him empty, possibly bereft. The mask feels artificial now, fake and dead. He slowly strips it off of him. The clatter of the knife echoes through his home. The cool fall air kisses his face almost unbearably, making him raw. Tears flow down his face. He kneels on the floor, near the window, looking for something. He remembers now. Before the doctor tried to kill him, before he tried to lock him away, before he experimented on him silent and helpless, before his parents locked him away, before he started all of this by ending it. 

He finds it in the floor boards. He sits down, cross legged, all of the force and momentum of what has kept him going now long gone. He has just enough wherewithal to put it on. And as he puts the old, small clown face on, he knows The Shape is gone. He smiles behind his old face to match it. He takes his treat. He sits against the wall under the window for a long time, before slowly sliding to the side, and slumping over onto the old, hard wood.  

And this is how Michael Myers spent his best Halloween ever.

A Horror of Errors: Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

So Fangoria sent me an email as part of my subscription. In it, it implored me to go see Ari Aster’s 2023 film Beau Is Afraid. It was the first film I’ve seen by myself in a long time, approximately three years. I took an Uber at practically the last minute to see it before opening day.

And let me start off by saying that Beau has a lot, and everything, to be afraid of.

When I was talking about Aster’s 2019 Midsommar, I was reminded of the fact that it came out the same year as Joker, and far before I decided to see Beau Is Afraid, I knew that Joaquin Phoenix – who played Arthur Fleck and eventually that iteration of the Joker, on his journey parallel to Florence Pugh’s Dani Ardor – would be the aforementioned Beau.

My initial thoughts, after describing Beau’s existence are the following. Imagine a nightmare maternal Jewish guilt-trip psychodrama set to the tone of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Brother Where Art Thou? and you might get something like Ari Aster’s latest film. Let that set in for a few moments. It’s so tempting for me to envision Beau Wassermann as something like what would happen if Fleck from Joker had never fully thrown off the narcissism of his mother, or killed her, aged and broke down under her manipulative care, and was left completely adrift. He even had one love interest, who does exist, that he held one innocent wish to be reunited with one day.

There is something incredibly surreal and almost magically real about this movie and its narrative, and like Joker or Taxi Driver you have to wonder if Beau’s mental illness is causing various truths and hallucinations of the Freudian, and Jungian kinds to intermix. I can definitely see there being many different interpretations of this movie going forward, complete with critics toting the “elevated horror” line, but also examining the strengths and limitations of A24’s arthouse film sensibility or ethos. Is this film something that pushes the envelope of genre, or storytelling? Or is it more artistic indulgence, and vanity?

We get glimpses of some concrete truths in Beau’s life, even if they are distorted, and necessarily limited by his own perspective. It feels like everything bad that can happen to him does, from the small and inconvenient to the utterly tragic: and all of these little things turn into a tide that threatens to drown the man, especially as he can’t find any water. It’s basically a Comedy of Errors, with little bits of Manners – tongue and cheek words of graffiti on the wall, and throwaway statements – that shape this poor man’s utter existence. For instance, Beau is prescribed medication by his psychiatrist that he has to drink with water, but after somehow losing his house keys and luggage while having slept in due to loud music and neighbour harassment in his apartment, he doesn’t get to the airport to get to his mother’s, and the apartment happens to have shut off all of the plumbing. This leads to him having to go outside into a dystopian neighbourhood filled with corpses, and fights, and orgies – and because he leaves the door open without his keys, the barbarians from outside invade his space and utterly destroy it.

And then, afterwards, he finds out his mother died.

Seriously, Ari Aster seems to be attempting a monopoly over grief and familial breakdowns in the horror genre: from Hereditary, to Midsommar, and even The Strange Thing About the Johnsons. I mean, I can firmly believe that his narcissistic businesswoman mother Mona Wassermann is a witch, a failed Ellen Taper Leigh, for various reasons I won’t go into, and some of her “love” for her son borders on the incestuous if only because her sense of self always trumps his every time: in life, and in death.

Beau’s tragedy isn’t just the death of his mother, and the low, awkward, uncomfortable paces of finding out this truth, and dealing with the cold, unfeeling, shallow, self-centered actions of everyone else around him. It’s that in her attempt to mould him into what she thought of as the perfect man, and make him love her the way she wanted him to express that affection – and only in that way – he has severe mental trauma that the world around him seems to exploit. It renders him nearly inarticulate, and passive: to the point of small things like not having enough change, or being able to renew his credit card utterly fuck him. Some people with mental illness or challenges have called this a difficulty executive dysfunction. Literally, you see Beau wrestling with one frustrating, infuriating thing, only to have to put the other aside and you really feel for him: if only because we have all been there in some way, or form.

It just doesn’t let up. It just doesn’t give him a break. Instead, the film proceeds to break Beau down with various twists and turns, and folds in reality, time, and belief that never give him relief. And some of these you can see coming a mile away. On risk of making a terrible extended pun, even sharing an orgasm with another person, someone he once loved, ends poetically and horrifically, and it only cascades from there after one false moment of peace. Even his mental retreat from the meta-fictional play in a play, whose mileage may vary for viewers, and the strange animation that would not have been out of place in Midsommar, only leads him into a deeper, dark forest of his mind, the feminine, maternal, voice-over telling his story and threatening to overcome and manipulate his first-person perspective, until eventually after not being able to find water at the start of the film, he finds all the water he could want …and very much cannot escape.

There is so much to say about this film, and how almost every agent in it wants to take away Beau’s sense of identity, and I feel like as I describe it I make a lot of other cinematic and even literary comparisons to other works in order to properly elucidate my feelings on how I’ve experienced it. Sometimes, as I followed the film for two hours and fifty-nine minutes, I felt like I was in a Jewish cautionary folktale hijacked by Art Spiegelman’s Prisoner on the Hell Planet comic. I don’t think this is a coincidence, at least in my mind. In the comic, Spiegelman attempts to communicate how his Jewish mother’s death, and her own mental illness before it – her suicide in that case – traps him. He struggled with her own behaviour while she lived, along with the rest of his family, and in her death and how people reacted callously to his grief – and supposed abandonment of her in life – she still imprisons him. Or perhaps it wasn’t Spiegelman’s mother who put him in that place, but the trauma that shaped their lives.

Beau’s mother came from a long line of cold, unfeeling women and she attempted to escape it by pouring toxic love all over Beau. She smothered him, and he rebelled in little ways that he castigated himself over. He doesn’t live with her, but her shadow looms over him. It threatens to consume him with her impossible expectations, and her projected disappointments. She’s become larger than life at the end of the film. Whether or not she’s dead is irrelevant. Whether or not the world is inherently flawed and unfair to Beau is also irrelevant. When Beau is sitting in that broken boat as judgment is proclaimed on him by the prosecution, and the defense is barely even heard: it is that childhood trauma winning over the adult sense of knowing none of this was his fault. It’s heartbreaking to watch especially as it eventually swallows the man, and the boy he was, whole.

And as the credits roll over that upended boat, as the criminal that is Beau is unfairly punished, as the shadows consume the anonymous and distant jury of his self-condemnation into darkness, you realize that Beau’s mother is only part of the terror in this ridiculous film. It’s the entire world. It’s Beau’s world that is the ultimate horror, where his answer to Kafka is that he is not helmsman, he is less than Gregor Samsa’s vermin – and you can recall the spiders in his apartment at the start of the film – and he does find his brother, and himself, and he doesn’t like what has seen. Nothing makes sense, but everything does, and it isn’t the answer he wants, but one to which he has resigned himself. 

If I were to give this maddening film a rating, I would give it three and half imagined family members out of five. I say check it out if you are lost, and want to find someone or something even more so. 

Monstrous Achievements: Lost Drive-Ins, Terror Teletypes, and Killer Shorts

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Greetings, fiends.

It has been some time since my last experiment here, a dissection of another thing that I’d come to love.

 I’ve maintained The Horror Doctor for over two years. It began as the alchemical child of the Pandemic and personal grief. Then it became something else.

I originally was going to use this as a platform, or medium to rewrite horror films into short stories the way I envisioned them in my head – the way I would have written them – hell, Demon Wind was going to be my crowning revised masterpiece. But again, it changed into another thing.

I’ve even mentioned before how I would only focus on reviewing obscure, or more quiet films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, and leave the mainstream horror and weird films to their own devices. But my Blog had other plans. And The Horror Doctor, that was just a working title before I would call it something else, a placeholder for what I was grasping at: finding my voice, and collecting my thoughts in this bizarre and amorphous genre crossing different media. 

But The Horror Doctor has stayed.

And yet, I’m going to just say that The Horror Doctor is going to go on something of a witch’s sabbatical. 

Like my Mythis Bios Blog before it, I haven’t been writing here as often as I once did. Letterboxd really got me to write shorter and more concise, or just stream of consciousness and note-based reviews. My analyses, and syntheses, take time and commitment in which my brain doesn’t always find itself as much these nights. Between going out more now, and my other new activities, I am not in that mindset in the same way as I was when I was here for about two years along with most other people. 

I am not abandoning this Blog, even if WordPress itself has made itself less user-friendly. There are still some Lovecraft films I want to compare to their source material. I also plan to write something about Barbara Crampton’s upcoming adaptation of “The Thing at the Doorstep,” which will have more exploration of sex and identity. You bet your soul I will be back here to deal with that. I know I will find a film I really want to talk about, or reminisce over a story. And hell, I might want to create and cross-post more weird and horror fanfiction. 

This year is almost up, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to say anything about this trajectory or just leave Ray Bradbury here before me talking about a normal child being adopted by monsters, and wishing that he wasn’t human. But I am a monster, in that I have accomplished a lot, and while it is my natural impulse to say that it isn’t nearly enough I want to spend a bit of time telling you what I’ve done before Father Time comes in with his scythe much to the second-hand embarrassment of Death of the Endless whose sense of zen can only be peachy-keen for so long. 

I am a Moderator for the Lost Drive-In Patreon. I did a podcast on Elevated Horror with the Lost Drive-In Discord server’s administrator Magi Savage, and Critically Optimistic: Movie Reviews. Magi is responsible for me having done, and doing, both things. When I wasn’t brushing up on some Eli Roth’s History of Horror to say something intelligent on the horror equivalent to the comics industry marketing their sequential works as “graphic novels,” I make Spoiler Discussion channels, and generally hang out on the Discord while Joe Bob and Darcy the Mailgirl comment on a movie we are streaming: and just in general. The Lost Drive-In Patreon is great, by the way. I never intended to stay so long, and I came for the DVDs of Drive-In Theater and MonsterVision, but I stayed for the mugs and hoodies, and the excellent company in the Patreon Saints server. Darcy created the Patreon to restore and preserve all of Joe Bob Briggs’ commentaries throughout the years, along with other media: as part of Drive-In history, and it is something to definitely check out if you find yourself interested.

Then, I sent a letter into Fangoria responding to its Editor in Chief Phil Nobile Jr.’s Monstrous Musings column on the Terror Teletype newsletter. It specifically focused on Halloween Ends. Phil decided to publish that letter as a Monstrous Musing itself, for which I am grateful. Did you know that two years ago, when this Blog started, The Horror Doctor was featured as a link on Fangoria’s website? It’s true, and now there is much more content on here than there was last. And it was an honour to have something I wrote in the newsletter. Unfortunately, it only exists on email to subscribers but it was great having my name featured under a Fangoria logo: something that I hope will happen again. If you want to see the contents of what I wrote about Halloween Ends, let me know and I will show it on this Blog. I was told by Barbara Crampton herself that she told Phil that I was a good writer. I have the Tweet preserved, for posterity even now: right along with actual praise from Jerry Smith on that same platform. I wish I could convey what that means to me, but I think it speaks for itself.

But I did something else as well. As of this writing, I created my first ever short film screenplay: a horror film adapted from a short story I made years back. And I entered it into a contest called Killer Shorts: whose judges include Joe Bob, as well as Barbara, and Kane Hodder. I meant to apply to it a year or so before, but I didn’t have a screenplay.

Until now.

It is my first attempt. A prototype. The short story I wrote, that I adapted this monstrosity from, had a tough critique from Strange Horizons, and it was only the first of several stories in the series I made before life and the Pandemic distracted me from continuing them. I am trying to be realistic about my chances in advancing through the rounds, but the mere fact that I made this happen, that I experienced and questioned aspects of my story when I switched from the medium lens of prose to film, and that I will get feedback from some professionals I’ve grown to respect and admire, and that I sent in what I did is an achievement. 

I want to thank my friend Miriam for reminding me of Killer Shorts, and also Killer Shorts Top Ten FInalist and Hollywood HorrorFest Best of Fest winner Phillip Dishon for being interested in my work, and taking a look at what I’ve made after my submission. It is probably too late to format my work properly for Killer Shorts, but he has offered to give me guidance for other film festivals. And as I’m going over this invaluable feedback, I realize there is still a lot for me to learn. 

I am still not where I need to be, I feel, but I am slowly getting to where I want to be. And that is a lot of places. I’ve learned, over these past couple of years, that it isn’t a straight path but several crooked ones that meander and branch off, and that sometimes you need to mentally split up and cover more ground just as much as you should stay together. I wanted to share these triumphs with you as the uncertainties of another year encroach along because you’ve been here, or you just got here and you are interested in what I’m doing.

I’m glad I did this. All of it. And I am thinking of making more screenplays with more of the knowledge and insight that I hope to gain. Who knows: maybe one day there might be a remake of Demon Wind in the works … or something based on that as a monster of my own design. In the end, one of the major reasons I am stepping away a bit from this Blog is to write less about other people’s works, and to make more of my own original creations: or at least more creative endeavours. 

I do plan to earn that Silver Bolo one day. But if I don’t, that is all right too. I just want to construct a monster to be proud of. Happy New Fears, my fiends – from a student of horror.

Taking Laughter Away From Slaughter: Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Imagine you got the Naturom Demonto, and use its pages of finely cured human flesh to go back in time to 1981. A year later, New Line Cinema acquires the distribution rights to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, but even as it makes the film successful, it denies him and his crew the rights to make a direct sequel: one Evil Dead and the Army of Darkness.

But the Book in your hands is a Monkey’s Paw, and the mere existence of you here at this time in history changes everything. Evil Dead is released in fifteen theatres, but all the people that saw it in the original timeline do not see it. Or Stephen King doesn’t write a review of the film, and someone else creates an article that attracts another distribution company. Or producer Irvin Shapiro didn’t help screen the movie at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982. Maybe the film goes underground and builds a large following over time. Or it becomes a rare oddity horror fans talk about in small viewings: pondering just how something that looked like The Exorcist piggybacking on The Night of the Living Dead just could not have caught on? Perhaps if you told these hypothetical film students and watchers that it might have been different had there been a sequel, and some Three Stooges elements – which is hilarious as Raimi directed a short film in 1978 called Shemp Eats the Moon – injected into the high energy, insanely paced cinematic monstrosity, with more of a callback to his proof of concept work of the same year Within the Woods. 

Yet there is a demonic force, a demented genius, in Evil Dead that could not be ignored. It wouldn’t just end with one weird, incredibly gory, disturbing high octane aberration. Certainly, the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, if it were called that, would not allow it to be so, and that Kandarian Demon is restless as fuck once you mess with that Book in general. Yet if that first film had a different set of reviewers or critics, another distributor, or if Raimi and his crew gained more capital in those early years, could the Evil Dead franchise have evolved differently?

I think about what would have happened if Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn hadn’t existed and we simply gained a direct continuation from the first film. Maybe Raimi attained the fame and influence needed to convince New Line Cinema to let him make the film he planned, or simply produced and distributed it himself that early on. What would we have seen?

It’s more than possible that we might have gotten Army of Darkness almost immediately, placing Ash in a medieval era surrounded by Deadites. Whether or not Army of Darkness would have had different production scale, or practical effects in 1987 instead of 1992 is anyone’s guess as temporal manipulation goes, but perhaps Ash would be a different hero entirely. 

When you look at Ash Williams in Evil Dead, he is fairly toned down from the loud-mouthed ultra-masculine chainsaw wielding badass that we all know in popular culture. He genuinely seems to care about his friends, and especially his sister Cheryl and his girlfriend Linda. Ash isn’t the one that turns on the tape recorder in this movie, but it’s his obnoxious friend Scott that does it just out of some morbid curiosity, or to freak out the rest of his friends. Ash is a young man that wants to do right by his girlfriend, and his sister: and even after being forced to do horrible things to the bodies of his possessed friends and loved ones in order to survive, the magnifying glass necklace he gave Linda keeps him going. He destroys the Naturom Demonto and the Deadites boil, sizzle, and die away in putrefaction. Everything is horrifying in this film, and there is no respite: and even at the end, when everything seems finally put to rights, the Kandarian Demon – whose perspective we’ve seen as it violated Cheryl with the trees and attacked the others – lunges at Ash, and ambiguously kills him.

But what if the Kandarian Demon, without the anchor of the Book – which isn’t called the Necronomicon at this point, the name borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, but rather the Sumerian version of the Egyptian Book of the Dead – uses the last of its waning power, which had been latent in the Knowby cabin and its grounds even before Scott played the recording along with the energies of the Book’s destruction to send Ash back in time to kill him, and therefore save the Book and continue its reign of terror on humankind?

What I’m trying to get at here is what if a serious Ash, without the Three Stooges comedy of Evil Dead II, went back to this medieval era in what might be a version of Kandar Castle? What would the characters look like? What would the franchise look like going forward from that?

I do not have the Necronomicon with me, sadly, to tell me about the dark pasts and futures that could have been. But it is possible that there could have only been two films as a result of this lack of comedy, or very little of it. On the other hand, this version of Evil Dead II might have been a major hit of a darker Ray Harryhausen variety, and inspired the need to make more of itself, and gain more profit. It is also possible that, like most popular horror franchises that start out with darker and grimmer tones, that so many sequels would have resulted in the work eventually parodying itself. You don’t have to look far when you consider Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. So it is possible that Raimi may have led the series to the camp and black comedy it was meant to go into itself, or someone else directing the future films would have begun that process with varying results of quality. 

Yet Raimi, when he did get Stephen King’s aid, along with Dino De Laurentiis, did something truly amazing. Not only did Raimi make a soft reboot of his original concept, removing or not mentioning the existences of Scott, Shelly, and Cheryl, and take a cue from Within the Woods where Ash actually gets possessed, he takes the comedy and ridiculous parody that might have happened to his franchise anyway, and institutes in the second movie. It’s almost as though he, and his crew, anticipated this change in tone, or mythology. Horror, more than a lot of cinematic genres, loves to reinvent its own continuity if only to create and propagate more of itself. Ash becomes more belligerent and arrogant, even absent-minded. There is an aggression there that is exaggerated as opposed to the PTSD-fuelled fight and flight of him and his companions in the other film iteration. The chainsaw arm, of course, its utter madness makes its appearance. The other companions that come in afterwards are all antagonistic until they work together, and then they don’t.

And Henrietta Knowby, played by Ted Raimi, changes the relation of the Deadites not only to Ash and his companions such as Annie Knowby, but to the audience as well. Before this, we saw a group of friends turn on each other as the invisible turned tangible and monstrous through their bodies. And while this does happen in Evil Dead II, we have the presence of the tangible malformed evil of Henrietta locked in that horrible cellar. The Book is now called the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis as well, and more about Kandar itself is revealed through missing pages, and the Dagger. After this, we see Ash sent through a portal into the medieval period: even though by the time we get to Army of Darkness, the beginning is different from the Evil Dead II ending. 

The change in continuity would not have phased Raimi and his crew either, or even the tone of the series. Raimi himself had background in comedy films, and it is more than possible that he not only paid attention to Friday the 13th and A Nightmare, but also Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm: a franchise that constantly reinvented its own mythology in hallucinogenic, dreamlike ways.

But I keep on thinking about what would have happened if Evil Dead II had been made the way Raimi originally intended, or if the comedy simply hadn’t entered into its sequels. I wonder about which film I like more: Evil Dead, or Evil Dead II. The second film does add a lot more to the Evil Dead Mythos: with the Book, the Dagger, the Pages, a terrifying being in Henrietta who we don’t see transform into a Deadite like the others but is well into her advanced stages, Ash facing his own dark self through possession and also his severed hand, the chainsaw prosthetic, the portal into the past, and the whole iconic insanity of this world.

Yet there is a simplicity in the first film that I greatly appreciate. It is straightforward horror with suspense, and tension. Evil Dead II has us laugh at the hijinks that happen, helping us with moments to release the tension that has been wound throughout every mad action and gore scene while wincing at the weirder moments, but the first Evil Dead makes us sympathize more with the people in that cabin. The sequel lets Ash survive, while the first one seems to kill him off, and it just hits harder in my opinion. 

But if the franchise continued without the comedy, what would it look like? The closest thing I can think about, when I consider alternative paths, is The Evil Dead remake directed by Fede Álvarez, but also produced by Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and Robert Tapert. It is, arguably, another soft reboot of the original but there is no comedy in it whatsoever, or tongue in cheek references – popular-cultural or otherwise – and it is genuinely unsettling, and upsetting. David Allen is an Ash Williams analogue, a throwback from the first Evil Dead film, who actually dies at the end. And Mia Allen, a drug-addicted artist, is like a darker version of Cheryl Williams who actually survives and is freed from her possession in a ridiculous but clever way, as well as some mutilation on her part. The other characters are almost different versions of the ones from the first film, and the Book is called The Naturom Demonto again. Mia does take that chainsaw, but she doesn’t make it into a prosthetic, and I can’t help but wonder that even with the Ash Williams cameo at the end, what a sequel to this film would have been with that evil Book of the Dead still in existence. In some ways, I think a sequel to this 2013 remake would have answered a lot of my speculative questions.

As it is, Evil Dead Rising, written and directed by Lee Cronin, with our usual suspects as producers might provide another possibility: with a girl named Beth going back to her sister Ellie and her family, and finding that damned Book. The funny thing is: Ash’s love interest in Within the Woods was called Ellen. And maybe Mia Allen’s journey, this Cheryl Williams analogue that survives, is continued at least spiritually by Beth in a world of Deadites and Kandarian Demons without laughter for humans, but plenty of slaughter for their enemies.