Friday 4/26/24
Something from a piece I'm doing today. It'll likely also be in And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art.
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The City of the Dead stars Christopher Lee as Alan Driscoll, a history professor who is not only a history professor, because where would that leave our movie then? Put it this way: He sure knows a lot about witchcraft and has a fair amount of double-duty going on in his life. He’s one of those professors who hangs out after class and engages in informal back-and-forth with gabby undergrads, shooting the shit about the deeper meanings of life as professors like this only seem to when they’re off the clock, while keeping an eye out for prospective recruits to the old Satanic cause.
Lee was one of those rare actors who had a remarkably long career and yet rarely dipped in his level of performance. Consistency served as his forte, aided by Lee’s naturally good taste. It wasn’t surprising later on to find him on camera reading the stories of M.R. James and advocating for the value of the ghost story writer’s work.
Lee was pure class—as was his frequent running mate, Peter Cushing—in a genre that was shedding some of its reputation—one that had been in place since the 1940s—as being primarily for kids. Adults thought that they couldn’t take horror seriously after the end of the initial Universal wave of films in the first half of the 1930s, when the novelty of the fright movie—in all of its newness—had people literally fainting in the aisles.
Quaint stuff now, but Lee represented grown-up, sophisticated horror, whether he was playing Dracula for Hammer in the late 1950s and giving the entire terror enterprise a dose of new blood by excelling at sucking out the old, or as the chthonic professor in The City of the Dead.
Hammer was a mix of splashy color and earth-tone saturation, the pictures possessing this forever-autumnal look, as if the various hues of dead tree leaves, forest paths, and exterior castle walls had leached further down into a canvas than they had ever gone before, taking hold of the viewer the way that a John Constable depiction of a heath could. Hammer red was never just red; it was either vermillion—a smoothed-over, but still torrid, former bubble of impasto—or a scumbled russet in which one could practically detect grains of earth.
The City of the Dead represents an inversion of the Hammer palette. The black and white photography is to the horror medium as that of 1947’s Out of the Past is to noir. It’s a film, like Robert Wise’s The Haunting in a few years hence, in which the chiaroscuro patterns of contrast between somewhat light/dark/darker still/darkest-of-all act as a spectral character unto themselves—or a demonic bevy thereof.
