From the pages of the in-progress horror film book

Sunday 5/25/25

I've spent the weekend working on the horror film book. These are from its pages...

On 1937's Lonesome Ghosts:

The ghosts discover an ad for the Ajax Ghost Exterminators and decide that their doldrums could be relieved by pretending to be humans and bringing the team in to frighten the wits out of them. Keep those ghost muscles sharp. A call is then made to the offices of these self-styled eradicators, who are no less than Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy. We see them with their Ghost College degree displayed—need to tout those bona fides in a profession that invites incredulity—along with axe, net, blunderbuss. The tools of the trade. After all, ghost removal has never been, and is unlikely ever to be, an exact science.

We’re quick to associate ghosts with pain as a reason for why they stick around—the old unfinished business theory—and as a source of fear. And yet, in an indirect fashion at least, the ghost can provide so much pleasure to the life of the horror fan. M.R. James advised his readers to treat them gently, because they are a wellspring, and not in a misery sense either. James himself fell in love with the idea of ghosts after watching a Punch and Judy show as a child. This Disney short functions in the same manner. The ghosts are witty and oh-so-human. Prey to boredom, requiring stimulation, and needing to overcome ennui of the spirit, pun very much intended; for are there not times in which each of us is a ghost in all but name?

On 1984's The Slumber Party Massacre:

The Everly Brothers had a 1961 album called, Both Sides of an Evening that was meant—if you were a girl—to soundtrack your sleepover party (the record failed to chart), and The Slumber Party Massacre, though far less innocent, is pitched in a similar register. There are many who have fond memories of it as rite of passage film. You slept over your buddy’s house, popped this bad boy in the VCR, you got gore, ideas for new ways to use kitchen utensils, and some snatches of breasts, but not—well, we needn’t go there. Slumber parties feel transgressive. Like you’re being mildly bad but without actually being bad. They’re benignly rebellious. We’re staying awake until tomorrow! We ate all this junk! They contribute to growing up and are likely to number among the first times we’ve truly left home—if only for an evening.

Director Amy Jones knew her demographic—boys having sleepovers—while still making a picture that does feel like it understands high school girls, at least in a writ large movie-based way. This isn’t the sexist would-be romp—if it wasn’t so rape-y—that Revenge of the Nerds was, and is instead closer to Fast Times at Ridgemont High but from a horror point of view and minus the penetrating social commentary.

Parts are funny—well, silly—and parts are scary. High school is a terrifying environment for many kids, and the early scene in which one of the girls who is destined not to make it to that night’s big event is stalked and slain in an otherwise empty locker room is apt to make someone think, “At least high school wasn’t that bad for me,” which will be, of course, cold comfort.

On 1959's The Bat:

If Vincent Price awoke one morning and said, “There isn’t a bad horror film that I am in because I am in it,” he would have been on to something, and we can make this claim in his stead. At the least, we’ll watch a not-so-great film for Price, eagerly awaiting his arrival when his character is offscreen, relishing—and likely imitating—his words and the manner in which they’re delivered whenever he speaks. We’re apt to wish to hang out with him. Take a road trip through the Berkshires. Go antiquing. Classy, cultured, prepossessing guy.

Judging by its title, 1959’s The Bat sounds like it’ll be a vampire picture, but it’s similar to Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires in that the crux is criminal doings rather than supernatural ones. Price plays Dr. Malcolm Wells, and as is always the case with a Price character, this one seems like he’s a good guy even when we know he’s anything but. Call it the Vincent Price Effect, and sweet unholy terrors was it effective.

On 1961's Mr. Sardonicus:

These were Castle’s showman years, when each of the producer’s movies was accompanied by a gimmick, whether that was skeleton on a wire passing over the heads of a theater’s occupants, or a certificate provided to each moviegoer for a $1000 insurance policy lest they die of fright from watching the picture.

Castle was fun, so people updated their wills and took their chances. Or something like that, because it’s also fun to play along. His movies were well made, with touches of Orson Welles, James Whale, and that manner of shot-by-shot quality control of the by-then defunct studio system in which everything seemed like it’d been given the once over and then given it again just to be safe. You could say that no education in horror history is complete without having seen the half dozen Castle films from his heyday any more than if you’d somehow bypassed the Universal glory days of the early 1930s, the sci-fi/horror conjoinings of the 1950s, or the teen slashers of the 1980s.

Ray Russell wrote the screenplay for Mr. Sardonicus, adapting it from his short story. Russell was a major player in 1960s horror, though mostly forgotten in the twenty-first century. His 1962 novel, The Case Against Satan, for instance, is a far better read than Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, a book which liberally helped itself to Russell’s wares, and makes for excellent thought-provoking reading on a crisp October evening.

On 1952's Crow Hollow:

In other words, there’s an unsettling nebulosity to director Michael McCarthy’s Crow Hollow, which is maybe why critics didn’t like it. One remarked that the title is the movie’s best quality, and while the title is pleasingly foreboding, the remark misses the mark. English B pictures of this nature won’t dazzle you; that’s neither their aim nor how they’re made. They’re movies that we cozy up with in today’s world. Put on the kettle, pour the cup of tea, settle in for seventy minutes, and if there’s some rain against our windows while we watch, all the better.

Accidents befall Ann. Or are they accidents? What’s up with these old gals? A spider strikes, then there’s an incident with a bowl of soup. Someone wearing Anna’s dress receives a knife in the back, and we’re not being figurative. The stolid husband in these pictures is often useless (“It’s your imagination, dear”) until the last, and that’s if his wife is lucky, but Ann isn’t a wholly sympathetic creature herself. Bit of an attitude with this lady. You’re never rooting against her, hoping she gets bumped off so that Bob can meet someone else on a Saturday and marry her by Friday and try the Crow Hollow experiment all over again, but maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. Depends on your mood and if your bloodlust has come down after getting that cup of chamomile tea just right.

On 1959's The Man Who Could Cheat Death:

One such thoughtful Hammer movie is 1959’s The Man Who Could Cheat Death, directed by Terence Fisher, who was guaranteed to bring you down a dark path always worth perambulating, lantern in hand. Anton Diffring plays Dr. Georges Bonnet, a man who is104-years-old but who looks, as we’re told, thirty-eight at the most, which makes him like a man on a twenty-first century dating site. He is the imbiber of a bubbly green drink that he keeps locked up in a safe, who sometimes must harvest some glands to keep himself going, which he believes is his right and that his victims don’t deserve life as much as he does, being less consequential. 

Shades of Raskolnikov (“I should be able to adjudicate whether my landlady gets axed because I am very important!”). Hammer was fond of the abridged Dostoevskyean treatment and people likely left the theater a tad smarter than when they went in. The same idea holds now, wherever we happen to be watching, and may have greater resonance, given that we’re less intelligent than previously with our screens and social media and the intellectual devolution therefrom. It’s a cool picture to screen for a high school English or science class and then discuss.

Christopher Lee plays a good guy, which was unusual for him at the studio upon which much of his legacy is founded, though this was also true with his role in that same year’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Hammer was pretty literate as far as horror factories are concerned, and if someone today were to tell you that they’re a Hammer buff, then they’re likely what passes for an intellectual in our society, which is ironic, given Hammer’s somewhat seedy late 1950s reputation for peddling flesh and gore.

On 1958's Monster on the Campus:

Props, too, for prescience, which all good sci-fi needs to have. In a lecture to his students, Blake says, “…man can use his knowledge to destroy all spiritual values and reduce the race to bestiality, or he can use his knowledge to increase his understanding…” Might as well be talking about the internet and what most of us ended up doing by staring into our screens.

This is a horror film in which there’s no bad guy. The most Blake can be faulted for is being something of a womanizer—albeit an aloof womanizer, if that’s possible—but despite having two ladies who were obviously, in the parlance of the time, hot to trot with him, his focus is on his studies. We find him admirable. Besides, one of these women isn’t long for the world, thanks to the transformative effects of getting coelacanth plasma in your blood stream—a coelacanth that was treated for shipment with gamma rays because, after all, this was the 1950s.

The discovery of her body—which is festooned to a tree, and that we, the viewers, see before the characters do—makes for one of the grislier moments of horror at the time, and watching the scene you have to wonder if it was in Robert Wise’s mind when he made The Haunting a few years later when the scientist’s wife provides one of the earliest jump scares.

On 1953's It Came from Beneath the Sea:

Perhaps you’ve seen Leave It to Beaver reruns in which “the Beav” is itching to go to a Saturday matinee horror showing with his pals, and his dad interposes with something along the lines of “Stop rotting your brain with this balderdash and have fun with trigonometry like I used to do.” It Came from Beneath the Sea is exactly the sort of movie that none of those boys would want to miss so that they could talk about it next week at school. In other words, it’s the good stuff and Ward Cleaver can suck it.