Shock!

The Shock Influence on Shock!

2012-01-14T12:42:00.000-08:00

The Shock! phenomenon currently holds several mysteries as to who thought up the idea of the film package at Screen Gems, who developed the marketing plan for it and the choices made during that time regarding catalog design and even the name of the package of Universal films the company was preparing for television sale. I believe I may have accidentally stumbled upon a couple of answers. The genius or geniuses behind Shock! are still unknown, but it appears that the 1946 film SHOCK, with Vincent Price and Lynn Bari, may have generated the idea for the title of the package AND a significant part of the design of the Shock! catalog.

Take a look at the cover of the Screen Gems catalog:

And then a poster for the SHOCK film:

Clearly, the font selection for the Screen Gems' catalog mimics to a substantial degree the font and color of font that had been designed for the film's poster, as well as the prominent placement of the upper face of a person above the "Shock" title. It is not a long stretch to deduce that Screen Gems also borrowed the film's title as an effective, bold pronouncement for their own catalog of Universal horror and mystery films.

SHOCK IT TO ME: GOLDEN GHOULS OF THE GOLDEN GATE

2012-01-01T18:29:00.000-08:00

Published recently, Michael Monahan's SHOCK IT TO ME: GOLDEN GHOULS OF THE GOLDEN GATE is an important document on the SHOCK! phenomenon in San Francisco's Bay Area and its aftereffects. Even though I wasn't raised in that part of the country, I could feel the same excitement as one felt on the East Coast as I went through the book's 135 pages, reading about the horror show programming of the time and viewing the many TV ad mats, horror host photos, and copies of pertinent TV guide pages that illustrate this handsome paperbound volume.

In the Bay Area the first SHOCK! programming arrived with NIGHTMARE and the premiere of the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN on October 3, 1957. As in other parts of the country, this classic horror programming became a huge success among the younger crowd, in the Bay Area's case even causing wild monster-inspired disturbances at the UC Berkeley campus. NIGHTMARE lasted until October 1961, and it's interesting seeing the evolution of its programming through the years, from the original Screen Gems' SHOCK! package to films like THE BLACK SLEEP and PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.

Complete listings are given not only for NIGHTMARE, but the other horror film packages in the San Francisco area through the years, which were very similar to the types of programming that would run in varied areas of the country. So, for instance, we see the emergence of foreign horror films and Germany's krimis (mystery-crime films) into the viewing habits of growing monster kids, which for many such kids were the first, and very impressionable, samples of a cinema that was more askew, more deviant, than the type of classic horror cinema crafted by such studios as Universal.

Of course, a good portion of Monahan's book is taken up with the horror hosts of San Francisco, to include by-now such legendary figures as Asmodeus and Bob Wilkins.

If you have any interest in the SHOCK! phenomenon and its programming and horror hosts, you need to acquire and delight in Michael Monahan's book, which can be purchased here.

Last Three Pages of the SHOCK! Catalog

2011-11-28T05:43:00.000-08:00

In this SHOCK! catalog series, I will be skipping the individual film entries which follow page 8 (unnumbered in the original), placing, instead, each at the end of the corresponding SHOCK! film that may be reviewed on the blog.

So we then arrive at the last three pages of the unnumbered catalog.

Order forms for stills, ad mats, and balops. What's a balop, you ask? It's a slide or card bearing a picture or other visual material for projection in television.

Contact info for "the full SHOCK treatment":

And we end with Frankie!...

Shock! List (page 8 in the unnumbered original)

2011-11-27T18:52:00.000-08:00

The next page of the SHOCK! catalog lists, in alphabetical order, the 52 films presented by Screen Gems to TV station. The catalog numbers run from 693 to 744. I wonder what came before and after?

Audience Promotion to Excite Your Public (page 7; unnumbered in the original)

2011-11-13T10:49:00.000-08:00

The next page in Screen Gems SHOCK! promotion book contains advice on "how to excite your public."

One direct audience participation gimmick is to consider what you would cook should a monster come to your house for dinner. (I'm sure we've hosted many a monster at a meal.) The public would be encouraged to send in their menus, from which a winning menu would be selected and then served at a restaurant to people in the city with the name of Frankenstein! According to the writer of the text, there were 13 Frankensteins in New York City at the time. I wonder what the number would have been in smaller cities?

An exploitation item has a "mummy" escaping from a museum that's having an Egyptian exhibit. When the mummy is interviewed by the pseudo-press, he states that he made his escape in order to get his "SHOCK treatment." Crazy mummy.

Another exploitation tactic mentions dressing up a woman in the style of a Charles Adams (sic) cartoon, clearly a reference to Charles Addams' main female character who would be named Morticia when THE ADDAMS FAMILY TV series was broadcast in the 1960s. The Morticia character was already iconic at the time. (Interestingly, Vampira, who took her look from the Addams character and who had been hosting horror films prior to SHOCK!, is not mentioned.) "Monster Society of America" membership cards would be handed out by this female character and the monster riding with her in a hearse.

Fun suggestions all. I wonder how many were actualized?

Review: Famous Monsters of Filmland: The Annotated Issue # 1

2011-08-27T09:37:00.001-07:00

Of all the publications released by the current regime of FAMOUS MONSTERS (shorthanded as FM 3.0 and headed up by Philip Kim "Kong"), I was most looking forward to THE ANNOTATED ISSUE #1. My enthusiasm was slightly lessened when I learned that this publication would most likely contain a major chunk of what once had been published before, a special mock FM edition honoring the 90th birthday of Forrest "Forry" Ackerman, FM's legendary 1st and longest-standing editor. So it seemed to be a reprint, rather than the promised original publication per its promotion, but the original was rare nowadays and, when found, fetching high prices. I was still very eager to own and read this annotated edition, as it would surely, I thought, offer an invaluable look at the crafting of the first issue of the first monster magazine in the world that was published at the epicenter of the Shock Theater craze. After all, that's what the word "annotated" implies, something that digs deeper into the text being offered.

Unfortunately, the people who put this edition together do not know the meaning of "annotated." Annotated is not just reprinting some typescript of issue number one of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND. "Annotated" is offering editorial commentary at least--notes and research material that explain and expand upon the text being presented. There is no such commentary in this edition. It is not "annotated."

What we have, as the meat of the edition, is a simple photographic reprint of what we are told is the 1958 manuscript of the 1st issue of FM, interspersed with full-page photo illustrations, worked on a bit through Photoshop, so they don't look like the actual photographs being used. The vast majority of the manuscript is type-written, but there are some minor corrections in hand dispersed about, yet there's no way of knowing if these come from the hand of Ackerman or James Warren, the publisher of FM 1.0, a man as equally legendary as Ackerman and who rarely gets the credit he deserves in the making and success of FAMOUS MONSTERS. Nor do we know if a copy of a handwritten listing of contents with remarks on them comes from Ackerman or Warren, either. One assumes they come from Ackerman, but readers will be unfamiliar with Ackerman's handwriting to make a judgement. If one compares Forry's signature, which can be found in the publication, the answer may be that the markings come from Warren! (Warren is still alive and may have been able to resolve this very easily. In fact, it's a considerable lost opportunity that this publication does not have Warren making his own comments on the manuscript or at least offering up an introduction to the whole.)

So rather than providing a genuine annotated edition of issue 1, which would have been work and have taken some knowledge and intelligence to put together, we have a cheat. Something being sold as something it is not.

That said, there are a few perks to this softbound edition, which is admittedly handsomely designed and on glossy paper, with a nice wraparound illustration by Pete Von Sholly. The first 33 pages of the 160 pages is made up of a reprint of Ackerman's "Birth of a Notion," in which the first editor of FM goes through the history of the rise and making of the 1st issue. Forry wrote variations on this article several times, but it's impressively illustrated and quite readable. Two articles follow this one--"Following Forry" by Kevin Burns and "The House that Ack Built (and Re-Built)" by Joe Moe--and both are equally very well illustrated and engaging reads.

There are several typescripts after the manuscript proper that are the most interesting pieces of all. One, shows the editorial markings (or were they the publisher's markings?) on a Shock Theater press release from Screen Gems that was employed in FM #1 as original matter. A couple of other typescripts look of interest, but since there is no annotation regarding them, we are lost in suppositions as to where they may or may not fit into the history of FM 1. The one I got the biggest surprise from is something titled "TV Means Terrified Virgins." As you can see from the following sample sentences, it was definitely not meant for public consumption....

"The chips are down in TV, and so are the heroine's panties. It's the next step after strip-tease: pan-tease."

"One impatient televiewer's reaction was: 'I'd rather see a girl raped by a monster than watch a good five minute commercial.'"

"Yes, TV augurs well for Terrific Vaginas, Thrilling Vulvas and Tortured Victims."

Did Ackerman write this? If so, was it a way to let off steam from the task at hand? Was it sent around the FM "office", ie, to Warren? You won't know in the ANNOTATED edition that's being sold for $29.99.

Daughter of Shock! - Bombay Mail (1934)

2011-07-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting curio, a film that would have fit perfectly into the SHOCK! or SON OF SHOCK! packages--and better than some other films that made it into those two lineups. It's BOMBAY MAIL, a Universal murder-mystery film from 1934, with Edmund "Chandu" Lowe. The music should be very familiar. The score by Heinz Roemheld was reused by Universal, most notably in the Flash Gordon serials. We'll call this part of the never released package of films from Screen Gems, their follow-up to SON OF SHOCK!: DAUGHTER OF SHOCK!

Inspired Stunts (page 6; unnumbered in the original)

2011-06-17T09:58:00.000-07:00

The next page in the SHOCK promotional book gives TV programmers suggestions on how to promote the package to potential sponsors and news-people. You are urged to have a party at your studio or a haunted house. (Yeah, good luck trying to find a haunted house!) "Ghoulish props" include masks and daggers on the walls, a coffin, and....

Your buffet supper should be "ghouled-up" with a witch serving meat balls from a steaming cauldron.

Bottles labeled poison, bowls of aspirin and milltown, and a bucket of ketchup labeled "BLOOD" should be placed at convenient spots for the use of your guests.

Masked waiters, horror-inspired door prizes -- such as daggers, nooses, etc., and a public address system emitting weird sounds should add to the creepy atmosphere.

Then come the "inspired stunts" for your guests, such as:

The lights go out -- a scream is heard -- and a "spider-woman" dressed in a long, sleek, black gown enters the studio with a lighted candle.

A shot is heard -- a weird character staggers in with a knife in his back, and falls cold in the middle of the room. He is nonchalantly carried out by two waiters.

Men dressed in Frankenstein's monster make-up, converge on the room.

The day after these stunts it's recommended that you send your guests a bottle of smelling salts and a note asking them if they have recovered!

The Stunning Impact (pages 4-5; unnumbered in the original)

2011-06-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

The unnumbered pages 4 and 5 from the SHOCK! promotional book. (I've increased the pixel size; click on photo to make larger in a new window.)

Starting with: "For years, tales of terror, macabre stories of ghouls and ghosts have fascinated millions in every form of entertainment. Now, for the first time, this eerie world of the weird and supernatural comes to television with stunning impact in SHOCK -- an irresistible attraction for mood programming of feature films."

And ending with:

"SHOCK! captures audiences! holds audiences! builds audiences!"

... these pages try to convince television programmers about the enduring fascination the public has with horror, and how Screen Gems is offering just what they need to attain impressive audience numbers.

Interesting that the "screen's titan's of terror" includes the Mad Ghoul (hardly on the level of Universal's other classic monsters), but does NOT mention The Mummy! Also of interest is that E. Phillips Oppenheim is placed on the same literary and popularity level as writers Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells. Oppenheim (1866-1946) was, indeed, a popular writer of thrillers, but one wonders if by 1957 his renown had faded. The SHOCK! package included a film based on one of Oppenheim's most successful novels, THE GREAT IMPERSONATION.

The promo mentions Universal's THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA as examples of the company's "memorable films," but neither of these silent films was in the SHOCK! package--understandably so, as television audiences would not have patience with non-talkie films.

Pop-up Frankie (pages 2 & 3; unnumbered in the original)

2011-06-11T21:38:00.000-07:00

If you were one of the lucky TV station programmers to receive from Screen Gems your promotional SHOCK! book in October 1957, you may have been shocked (well, slightly shocked) to have a pop-up Frankenstein Monster jump at you as you opened it up. What a fun idea from whomever crafted this promotional book.

Tellingly, the promotion on the first two pages zeros in exclusively on Universal's monster films, not any of the other films that were also offered in the package.

The first several pages of the book were unnumbered. The numbering is reserved for the films themselves, one film per page.

Shocking Cover (Cover of SHOCK!)

2011-06-11T13:35:00.000-07:00

In this next series of posts, we will be taking a look at the Shock! promotional book, sent to TV program directors in October, 1957. The rectangular 11" x 14" publication was plastic-comb bound. The top part of the cover shows a man's frightened upper face peering through his fingers. The bottom part of the cover shows John Carradine as Dracula, Bela Lugosi as the Frankenstein Monster, Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man, Eric the Ape from MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE and Noble Johnson as Janos, from the same film. In between is the now legendary name for the film package being presented: SHOCK!

We currently do not know who the cover artist was, nor do we know the names of the person or persons who thought up the campaign, including the SHOCK! title. Perhaps one day an investigation in the archives of Columbia Pictures' Screen Gems, if such archives exist, will give us the answers.

Regarding the artist, I would consider the possibility that two artists worked on the cover, one for the top work and the other for the monster gallery bottom, which is a tad more primitive than what's above it.

More Ads from Nightmare!

2011-03-12T18:00:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Michael Monahan (Doktor Goulfinger) for the above ads from Nightmare, San Francisco's Shock showings.

MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM (1939)

2011-02-01T02:11:00.000-08:00

The "white room" of the title is the operating room where Dr. Finley Morton is stabbed in the back with a scalpel during surgery on a rich society woman. By the time the operation is over, hard-boiled big city police Sergeant MacIntosh Spencer has arrived and is untangling the various relationships of the doctors and nurses in the operating room in order to find a motive. It is the usual soap opera-- some of doctors and nurses are romantically involved with one another; two rival doctors are competing for the big promotion that Morton is helping to decide; there are senior medicos with a complicated professional relationship involving medical ethics, jealousy, and a five year-old botched surgery; and there's even a skulking senior medical staff superintendent thrown in for good measure. One of the most likely suspects is the dashing Dr. Bob Clayton (Bruce Cabot), but he confounds Sgt. Spencer by trying to solve the case on his own with the help of his lover, Nurse Carole Dale (Helen Mack). There is also an irritating comedy relief couple consisting of a meddlesome half-witted ambulance attendant (Tom Dugan) and a braying, grating nurse (Mabel Todd), but the less said about these two, the better.

The Daily Times-News, Burlington NC, October 28, 1939, seven months after MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM was released theatrically

The only witness that can help solve the Morton murder is Tony the deaf janitor; the killer tries to do away with Tony by viciously smashing a bottle of acid into his face, an attack that leaves Tony blind, unable to speak, and paralyzed. This surprising bit of nastiness is one of the fleeting grotesque touches in MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM that makes this whodunit into something different from the usual fare. The other bit of pulp wackiness is the lurking scalpel-wielding murderer; on the eve of an corneal transplant operation (using Morton's dead man's eyes) that will hopefully restore Tony's sight and allow him to recognize his attacker, the shadowy, surgical-glove-wearing killer appears in the middle of the night on the fire escape outside of Tony's room and hurls a scalpel at him through some venetian blinds.

But none of these almost-horror tweaks is enough to make MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM into anything other than a B-movie murder-mystery of the 1930s. The cast is interesting one that connects MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM to KING OF THE ZOMBIES, KING KONG, SON OF KONG, MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, DR. X, HOUSE OF FEAR, MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE MUMMY'S CURSE, MAN MADE MONSTER, VALLEY OF THE ZOMBIES, and some of other things, but there's really not a whiff of horror to be had despite the best efforts of some TV horror hosts over the years.

San Antonio [TX] Express, May 2, 1958
The copy in this oddly-shaped ad reads in part: "A mystery 'Shock' thriller about the terror that stalks the corridors of a hospital. To bed before the Witching Hour"

Daily Review Hayward, CA, April 9, 1960

The Capital, Annapolis, MD, December 22, 1973

MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM was one of three "Crime Club" movies that Screen Gems had bundled into the SHOCK! assortment for TV (Universal made eight all together between 1937-39 and MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM was the second to last). Mirek mentioned the "Crime Club" series in a post here two and a half years ago; the helpful "Crime Club" blog sketches out the history of Doubleday's series and includes mention of both the Universal film series and the radio show (CBS 1931-32; Mutual 1946-47). According to that blog, Universal subcontracted Irving Starr Productions to make the films and retained control over only half of them later on, with the last three being sold off to Screen Gems in 1957. I know nothing about the history of the book series' sales figures or its popularity in the late 1950s-- would knowing that this was a "Crime Club" movie draw in viewers to the SHOCK! telecast? I didn't see any promotion of that angle in the television listings, so maybe not...

From the perspective of 2011, the copyright business seems tangled enough to doom MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM to never appear on legitimately-licensed DVD. There's not a big market for obscure B-movie thrillers these days, particularly those that would require some expensive legal wrangling to secure the rights. That's unfortunate, because this might be the best of the "Crime Club" bunch-- once the relationships between all the characters are established in the first reel, this 58-minute film plugs right along and does its damnedest to cover up some of its flaws in narrative logic. And the sprinkles of weirdness help this one go down easy on late-night viewing.

(As a footnote to this, let me add that any viewer interested in seeing a murder-mystery set in a hospital ought to check out the well-made British film GREEN FOR DANGER [1946].)

MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM page from the SHOCK! catalog:

click to make larger

NEXT: "They accused him of risking human lives for his experiment! Shrieking headlines declared he invented a mechanical monster. For top thrills and excitement in televiewing, see William Gargan fight the man-made terror stalking the skies in REPORTED MISSING, the Shock feature film presentation coming on this channel."

WEIRD WOMAN (1944)

2011-01-28T19:42:00.000-08:00

Monroe College sociology professor Norman Reed (Lon Chaney, Jr.) is jinxed. A "mental giant" and a rising star, Reed has just returned from a jaunt somewhere in the tropical isles of the South Seas; he has brought back with him new research for a groundbreaking study on religion called Superstition vs. Science and Fact and a new wife, a lovely woman-child native priestess named Paula (Anne Gwynne). He seemed to be on the fast-track to becoming department chair, but that's when things spiraled out of control: his colleague Professor Millard Sawtelle (Ralph Morgan) shot himself to avoid a possible plagiarism scandal; Sawtelle's Lady Macbethian wife Evelyn (Elizabeth Russell) accuses Reed and his "witch" of engineering the scandal; and nasty rumors that Reed "has taken advantage of" his pretty undergraduate research assistant (Lois Collier, who may have been recognized by some SHOCK! viewers for her recurring appearances between 1951 and 1953 on Ziv's "Boston Blackie" TV show) dog him all over campus-- in fact, Reed is said to have beaten up his assistant's boyfriend when the latter tried to defend her honor. Then, while Paula continues to be the target of terrorizing harassment by Reed's bitter ex-lover Ilona (Evelyn Ankers), there is shooting on campus and the blame falls on Reed.

Ad for KUTV-Channel 2's "Shock Theater" with horror-host Roderick in Salt Lake [UT] Tribune, February 27, 1960. COUNTER-ESPIONAGE (1942) was one of the "Lone Wolf" mystery-thrillers

As I've said previously when I've written about the Inner Sanctum series in the SHOCK! collection, these were popular with audiences when they were first released and when theatrically re-released (WEIRD WOMAN made the rounds again starting in 1952). I've also seen a few of them turn up as special midnight spook shows, so Screen Gems' inclusion of these titles in SHOCK! was probably viewed as a selling point for the package.

San Antonio [TX] Light, June 6, 1957. What a Universal horror drive-in line-up! WEIRD WOMAN (the typo that pluralizes the title is actually more accurate considering what happens in the movie) is shown here on Monday night with NIGHT MONSTER.

The Daily Republic, Mitchell, SD, February 24, 1961

Many fans seem to like WEIRD WOMAN best; I prefer it because there is at least a not-easily-explained-away supernatural thread that runs through this picture that you don't find in the other five films of the series. But I also like it because of the almost campy level of neurotic hysteria that energizes everything here, particularly Paula, Ilona, and Evelyn (when all is said and done, who is the titular weird woman, anyway?).

Ordinarily, watching WEIRD WOMAN elicits a few harsh hoots of derisive laughter from me, but I made a very conscientious effort to watch it in good faith this time for the SHOCK! Viewing Project. Lon Chaney, Jr. still seems miscast as the brilliant and desirable intellectual, and his acting cannot keep up with the work done here by Gwynne, Ankers, and Russell, but I wanted to avoid thinking about that and just try to focus on the persistence of supernatural elements in an effort to recreate the horror-movie-on-TV experience as best as I could. And I feel that I largely succeeded-- I think that I could see WEIRD WOMAN's horror movie appeal for the first time.

A big stumbling block for me, though, was the handling of the dance and prayer ceremony on Paula's island. In Drums o' Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema (1998), Bryan Senn describes this more as "a genteel luau" than a "frenzied rite": "Though Paula ominously labels it the 'Dance of Death,' sarong-wearing native girls pathetically stomp their feet and clap and wave their hands in an innocuously choreographed motion, making this weird pagan ritual look like low-rent nightclub filler." I have to wonder if the ceremony could have had a more disturbing edge in the hands of a director other than Reginald LeBorg (John Fulton's shooting star that crosses the sky at the climax of the Dance of Death looked good, though).

The Dunkirk Evening Observer, Dunkirk-Fredonia, NY, January 14, 1958

I enjoy seeing some of the names that television stations used for their late-night movies-on-TV showcases. "Operation: Swing Shift" on WGR-Channel 2 in Buffalo, NY is one of the most unusual names. "Operation: Swing Shift" featured a variety of film genres in their offerings and very few of them seemed to have been horror films.

NEXT: "A young doctor-- a beautiful nurse-- and murder! For spine-chilling entertainment, set your dial to this channel and see MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM starring Bruce Cabot. It's an absorbing feature film, another premiere telecast on Shock. Don't miss MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM."

THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET (1942)

2011-01-24T02:03:00.000-08:00

There is no monster, nor is there any supernatural or paranormal menace. But there are two very sinister humans-- one who murders and mutilates beyond recognition the faces of two women; another who is a greedy, amoral sociopath whose disembodied brain (stolen from the Paris morgue in the middle of the night) is ruled as pathological by an examining criminologist. And there's also a ton of nighttime gothic gaslight atmosphere that makes the movie interesting to look at (even though it's not that great to watch). So while there are others who will complain that THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET is just a murder-mystery that has gotten a lot of hot-air horror-film hype over the years, I'm going to say that it is a very minor Universal horror film that would satisfy those viewers who can tolerate a weird mystery or two every once in a while in their monster-movie diet.

Paris, 1889: Hot-ticket Comédie-Française warbler Marie Roget (Maria Montez) has been missing for a week and half, prompting all of Paris (it seems) into speculation that she's either run off with one of her lovers or fallen victim to foul play. Minister of Naval Affairs Henri Beauvais (John Litel), an intimate friend of the Roget family (especially of Marie's, it turns out), pressures Prefect of Police Gobelin (Lloyd Corrigan) to solve the case. Gobelin calls on his pal, police forensic chemist Dr Paul Dupin (Patric Knowles), for help. Dupin is famous for having solved the ghastly Rue Morgue murders some years back, and he agrees to help out just as word comes that a horribly disfigured corpse of a young woman has been dragged out of the Seine.

San Mateo[CA] Times, August 16, 1958

Things get cluttered and confusing quickly from there: Dupin is hired by the cantankerous Roget matriarch (Maria Ouspenskaya) to bodyguard Marie's stepsister Camille (Nell O'Day, almost looking like a monochrome Gillian Anderson in a few shots) at a swanky party; Camille's sketchy fiancé Marcel Vigneaux (Edward Norris) lurks around and muddies the water a bit; Marie disappears again; Beauvais threatens and blusters and looks suspicious; Madame Roget's pet leopard is accused of mauling the faces of the dead women; and Dupin and Gobelin argue about who and what is behind it all.

Gazette-Mail, Charleston, WV, May4, 1958

To be honest, the mystery doesn't work at all-- none of it makes a lot of sense when the movie is over and you try to figure out some of the basics (like motive). This is frustrating since the movie is very talky in parts as Dupin (as Sherlock Holmes) and Gobelin (as a cross between Dr. Watson and Inspector Lestrade) work through various scenarios in their efforts to solve the case, yet the solution still leaves a lot of unanswered questions: with all the yammering that these two do, why didn't they also have a conversation that ties up all the loose ends of the case instead of introducing more complications? So, as a viewer in search of maximum enjoyment, it's probably just best to kick back and go along for the ride.

Viewers would be less forgiving, I suspect, if not for the impressive work of director of photography Woody Bredell. Bredell did good, textured cinematography for BLACK FRIDAY, THE MUMMY'S HAND, HORROR ISLAND, SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE VOICE OF TERROR, MAN MADE MONSTER, and THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN, as well as the very visually-interesting films noirs THE KILLERS, PHANTOM LADY, and THE UNSUSPECTED. The night scenes in THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET (and there are a lot of them) are really well-done and must have worked wonderfully on late-night SHOCK! television. Whatever horror movie ambiance is in this movie comes from Bredell and he does a helluva job that these screen-caps can't even begin to illustrate. (Perhaps someday soon this title will turn up as a Universal manufactured-on-demand DVD-R like HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES [1940] recently did and I can finally throw away my murky bootlegs.)

One of the many mysterious nocturnal comings and goings in the garden during Du Lac's party

Lots of coaches zipping through the wet, cobble-stoned streets of Universal's European village set

The cloaked killer escaping across the Paris rooftops in the dead of night

Armed with the Edgar Allan Poe pedigree for this tale, Universal's publicity department did a lot to convince people that this was a straight-ahead horror flick-- the original theatrical trailer for THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET that Mirek posted on Friday certainly seems to push things in that direction as does this movie poster with its spectral, scarlet-cloaked fiend with clawed, clutching hands.

Realart Pictures followed Universal's lead when it re-released THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET in 1951. They refer to the killer as "the Phantom Mangler" in the promotional materials (the name sounds like a foe in an El Santo movie), re-titled the film PHANTOM OF PARIS, and sent it back out to theaters as part of a double-feature with WEREWOLF OF LONDON.

Charleston [WV] Daily Mail, February 13, 1952

But I've got no problems with this sort of packaging because this movie delivers a satisfying kind of horror-movie atmosphere that is missing from many other SHOCK! offerings. For all of its lack of narrative logic and general incoherence, THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET could hold its own against one of the spookier Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies (such as THE SCARLET CLAW or THE PEARL OF DEATH), dopey "Inner Sanctum" titles like THE FROZEN GHOST and THE PILLOW OF DEATH, and not-so-weird mysteries like THE CAT CREEPS and SHE-WOLF OF LONDON.

NEXT: "Superstition and fear terrorize a tropic island in WEIRD WOMAN, the full-length feature film on this channel. It's an exciting Shock premiere. Don't miss it!"

THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET preview

2011-01-21T10:00:00.001-08:00

"Is she a beautiful beast? Maddening with her soft caress-- murdering with steel-clawed terror? Only Edgar Allan Poe could pen such a masterpiece of horror and thrills. See THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET, the full-length feature film on Shock on this channel."

THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET (1942)

2011-01-19T01:31:00.000-08:00

How many horror-movie fans have actually seen this on commercial-broadcast TV? I pose this question because I was surprised to see just how infrequently THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET was shown in the usual "Shock Theatre/Creature Feature"-style time slots. In fact, it turned up more in the late afternoon and early evening, sometimes as part of of showcases with unintentionally amusing titles like "Hollywood's Best" and "Million Dollar Movie" (this movie is a long way from meeting either of those descriptors). Perhaps one reason for its appearance in those other programming niches is that it plays more like a tropical island adventure tale-comedy-romance than it does a horror melodrama.

Mirek first wrote about THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET back in June 2008 for this blog and emphasized the atmosphere of the first seven minutes or so when we visit Dr. Benson's lab in San Francisco one dark and stormy night. Most of the research that I've read about this movie says that these scenes were tacked-on as an afterthought-- the entire movie was originally set on the New Zealand-bound luxury liner and on the island after the shipwreck. This underscores for me the possibility that this film had been meant more as a South Pacific island adventure than a horror movie.

Gazette-Mail, Charleston,WV, November 22, 1959

It's worth watching for Lionel Atwill's work as Dr. Benson; the guy seems to be savoring his every line as the megalomaniacal research chemist who believes that he can find a way to make suspended animation a viable medical procedure for beating death. When he sets up himself as the "God of Life" among the island's "superstitious savages," things almost get a little bit Heart of Darkness, but Atwill's mad scientist is too incompetent to really pull off the Kurtz business. He's not a mad scientist because he's brilliantly unorthodox; rather, he's dangerous because he doesn't realize that he's not very smart at all. This is the one interesting idea-kernel at the center of this silly movie: what would happen if one of those sad, creepy misfits who would ordinarily be shunned by society was able to achieve absolute social power? (When the movie was made in 1941, this could very well have been meant as a pointed critique of the anti-social losers who had risen to the top by joining fascist political parties. And then in 1965, that theme gets applied to juvenile delinquents in Bert I. Gordon's VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS, I suppose...) There's not enough time in this movie to explore the theme, but it is in there somewhere.

I also like small parts of THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET because I'm a fan of director Joseph H. Lewis; as in a previous SHOCK! offering THE SPY RING, Lewis manages to smuggle in some cinematic style and atmosphere despite the microscopic budget and two-week shooting schedule. (One bit of business that's overdone, though, are the scenes where Atwill delivers anesthetic to his patients by advancing into the camera and smothering the lens with ether-soaked items-- Lewis does this three times in 61 minutes).

Beyond Atwill and Lewis and the mutant fusion of horror, comedy, romance, and South Seas island picture (and it's as messy as it sounds), THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET is sort of entertaining in a goofy, Poverty Row horror kind of way. I almost want to like it, but top-billed Una Merkel's shrill, grating Aunt Margaret and Nat Pendleton's distracting mugging as boxer Red Hogan is a deadly, unfunny combination. The two of them all but snuff the life out of this motion picture for me.

"PSSST!! PSSST!! PA-TRICCCCC-IA!!"

THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET drinking game: take a shot of liquor every time that Nat Pendleton rolls his tongue along the inside of his cheeks like he's doing in this still. But beware the "weenie roast" scene!

I don't know much about these South Pacific island adventure movies; I've read that they were very popular with audiences over the years. The filmmakers do they best that they can with camera set-ups and blocking to give you the impression that this is a sizable tropical island rather than some Universal studio lagoon beach. The natives on the island are of the usual hokey Hollywood ooga-booga variety and there is plenty of grunting and mumbling gibberish that is supposed to pass for language. African-American actor Noble Johnson-- last seen around here a few days ago in whiteface as Janos the Black One in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE-- returns in the MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET as chief Elan; he really makes the most of this very limited material and comes off better than you might expect. It's a shame, though, that Dr. Benson's hubristic fall at the hands Elan is alluded to off-screen rather than shown.

Listing in the Lowell [MA] Sun for WLVI-Boston's 10PM double-feature, Friday October 27, 1967. It's a full ten years after the launch of the SHOCK! package on TV and so outside of my usual scope of investigation, but I had to reproduce the listing here-- how's that for some clever programming of a late-night double-feature?!? And what a completely bizarre description of what THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET is about...

NEXT: "Is she a beautiful beast? Maddening with her soft caress-- murdering with steel-clawed terror? Only Edgar Allan Poe could pen such a masterpiece of horror and thrills. See THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET, the full-length feature film on Shock on this channel."

MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932)

2011-01-15T19:50:00.000-08:00

It's difficult for me to imagine how any SHOCK! fan who tuned in to watch MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE on television in 1957-58 could not have been swept up by this movie. How could SHOCK! watchers who had fallen for FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA, and THE MUMMY not take to MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE? Yet, oddly enough, it is a film that not a lot of people mention as among their favorites of Uni's golden age of horror. "Though flawed and creaky, MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE is very likely the most underrated of Universal Horrors," Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas write in the 2007 edition of their Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films, 1931-1946. "Beyond its vulgar excesses and insipid theatrics lurks a daring, full-throttled, Poe-inspired thriller couched in a darkly sinister aesthetic all its own."

To my eyes, MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE is a darkly twisted and wildly subversive horror film. Although occasionally it does get bogged down in what seems to be some of the old-fashioned visual grammar of silent film-making, I think that, in terms of radiating a sense of out-and-out pre-Code unclean weirdness, this movie is second only to THE BLACK CAT. Anyone unsuspectingly stumbling upon it on TV in the late '50s just had to have been unnerved by it.

Salina [KS] Journal, April 25, 1958

For my part, I had never seen MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE on TV back when I was a kid. I knew the Poe tale very well, but I had seen only Warner Bros.'s 1954 PHANTOM OF THE RUE MORGUE, which I had seen multiple times on WOR-Channel 9's outstanding "Fright Night" showcase in the 1970s ("Fright Night" also showed Universal's MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE four times, but somehow I always missed it). To further confuse things, scenes from Hammer's THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1962) which I saw on "Chiller Theatre" on WPIX-Channel 11 during that same period were tied into my memories of PHANTOM OF THE RUE MORGUE. But I never saw MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE until it was available on home video in 1992 or 1993, and never as a television broadcast, so I can't even imagine how the film works broken up by commercials.

I mention these commercial interruptions because on of the most notorious things about MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (and maybe one of the things that keeps fans from liking it more) is that the narrative is a little choppy in the telling because of some out-of-sequence editing that took place in post-production. This scrambled the continuity of the film-- it would seem that a block of TV commercials every 25 minutes or so would add to the confusion, and maybe that would turn off some people to this tale.

Another aggravation for many is the dispelling of Erik the Ape's monstrousness through the use of actual chimpanzee close-ups (some of which reminded me of shots in THE UNHOLY THREE [1925]). Erik is hailed as the "gorilla with a human brain," and there's something missing-link-y about him as he is presented in the sideshow by Dr. Mirakle (I really enjoy Lugosi's lecture in this movie). Charles Gemora was the guy in the shaggy gorilla suit; Gemora is legendary for his performances, yet someone on the film's production staff decided to toss out his very expressive facial close-ups as Erik in favor of chimpanzee footage which really breaks the spell, I think.

And what in the name of the Hays Production Code is Mirakle up to? The movie description that I posted above suggests that Mirakle wants to create "an ape-woman," but what Mirakle actually says is that he wants to prove to his pre-Darwinian Parisian audience that human beings evolved from apes by "mixing blood" between a human and Erik. His "great experiment" (carried out in a fantastically Caligarian old deserted house in the Rue Morgue) so far has involved injecting Erik's blood into at least three women (presumably sex-workers whose syphilitic "dirty blood" compromises his experiment).

Finally, Mirakle hits upon the idea of kidnapping a virgin in order to avoid contamination by venereal disease, but he doesn't count on the fact that Erik has fallen in love with Camille; Erik attacks Mirakle during the course of the experiment because he has already seen what happens to the women subjected to Mirakle's transfusions and he doesn't want this happening to her. So Erik kills Mirakle and makes off with her across the rooftops of Paris like a mid-nineteenth century Kong. What is Erik's plan for Camille if he ever eludes the crowd that is chasing him? Is this-- like so many apesploitation movies like INGAGI (1931)--suggesting the threat of bestial rape?

detail from Emmanuel Frémiet's 1887 sculpture; an earlier version was displayed in Paris in 1859

I'm not sure what the hell is going on in all this or what a TV-viewing audience some thirty years after the Scopes Monkey Trial would've made of the thing, but I do think that MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE is a kind of delirious, bizarre horror movie that would've made excellent late-night viewing.

One last point about this film as it relates to SHOCK! requires us to look at the cover art of the Screen Gems promotional book. The painting used for the cover illustration is not a terribly good work, but it is certainly evocative of the horror film programming that Screen Gems was selling. Uni-holics will have no trouble matching the figures here with the movies despite the sometimes just-off caricatures. One of the things that surprises me about the rogues' gallery here on the cover is the inclusion of the troglodytic Janos the Black One (Noble Johnson in whiteface, of all things) and Erik from MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE.

I don't know if there was a source for Erik's image, but it would appear that Janos' simian-like posture is lifted directly from this production still.

NEXT: "A fire at sea maroons a strange group on a savage-infested island. See this thrilling adventure in THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET. It's another Shock feature film presentation on this channel. Lionel Atwill stars as a crazed scientist who believes he holds the secret of life."

MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE preview

2011-01-12T18:32:00.000-08:00

"MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, the masterpiece of America's greatest creator of horror, Edgar Allan Poe, is coming your way in the Shock feature film presentation starring Bela Lugosi on this channel."

SHOCK! and the Communist Menace

2011-01-11T01:15:00.000-08:00

On February 3, 1958, King Features syndicated editorial page columnist George Dixon identified SHOCK! as a threat to US homeland security. He went on to propose that SHOCK! programming be used as a psychological weapon against Russian kids in the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

I don't know a lot about Dixon; my casual snooping around turned up a little bit about his work in newspapers during the post-war years. He seems to have worked for a few different Hearst publications before getting his nationally-syndicated column, "Washington Scene"; he was associated for a time with the right-wing Washington Times-Herald of the late 1940s and ended up at the Post before his death in the early 1970s.

It looks like he was courted by politicians as a well-connected and very gossipy Beltway insider; for instance, I read in Donald A. Ritchie's Reporting From Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps that Joseph McCarthy appealed to Dixon for help in choosing a DC press agent for his first senatorial re-election campaign prior to kicking off his 1950 anti-communist witch-hunt. (I find it hard to read Dixon's columns and not picture J.J. Hunsecker from THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS [1957]). In general, the Dixon columns that I read reflect the dominant political mentality of the day, sprinkled with a bit of Red-baiting and some nasty, stupid comments about women and Blacks, all delivered with a lot of innuendo and between-the-lines suggestion and larded with lots of good-natured "aw, I was just joking" smarm that gave him room to backpedal if anyone called him out on what he said.

His writings on pop culture were infrequent, but the few that I read struck me as being especially clueless: in one column in late December 1955 about the CBS radio show "The FBI in Peace and War" (1944-58), he expressed outrage that the theme music for such an upstanding and (in his words) "heroic" radio program had been composed by a Russian: "'The FBI in Peace and War' chases Communists and other misguided creatures each week to the tune of 'The Love for Three Oranges' by the late Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev!"

Laika the space dog, 1957

Dixon's denunciation of SHOCK! in early February 1958 reflects an intersection of two concerns: the Sputnik Crisis and the striking success of the Screen Gems package. Sputnik 1 was a basketball-sized Soviet orbital satellite launched October 4, 1957; Sputnik 2 was about the size of a washing machine and was launched a month later with a canine passenger named Laika. The sputnik launches freaked-out folks in the US-- in addition to escalating fears of Red nuclear weapons raining down on Americans (the first Soviet H-Bomb test was in 1953), the success of the Soviet sputnik program provided hard evidence that the Russians had a considerable educational, scientific, and technological edge on Americans. The effort to catch-up to the Russians (and the Russians' efforts to stay ahead) started the intense scientific and political competition called the Space Race that lasted well into the 1970s. (TCM frequently airs a short 1957 film from RKO called DECADE FOR DECISION that captures this moment really well; there's also a 2007 PBS documentary called SPUTNIK DECLASSIFIED that you can watch on-line. I haven't see the History Channel's SPUTNIK MANIA [2007], but I see that it is available in chunks on YouTube.)

Boy Scouts train to spot Red satellites, Summer 1958

Dixon's second concern, as I said, was the enthusiastic response by TV viewers to the SHOCK! movies. Based in DC, I'm going to guess that Dixon at least knew about SHOCK!'s rating numbers on local markets (WTOP-Channel 9 on Sunday nights and maybe WBAL-Channel 11 [Baltimore] on Saturday nights), as well as the broader national trends in other cities-- as I have mentioned before, it was clear by January 1958 that SHOCK! had struck a nerve with sizable ratings advances made in the largest US television markets (NYC and LA) and elsewhere, such as KRON-San Francisco's notorious 807% jump in the numbers. Anecdotally, it seems like those most attracted to these programs were young people who had never seen the movies in the theaters.

Dr. Lucifer, Mrs. Lucifer, and Lucretia, horror hosts of "Shock!," WBAL-Baltimore, 1957-59.
For more on the Lucifers, see E-gor's Chamber of TV Horror Hosts

In a few weeks, I'll be putting up a blog post on SHOCK! and moral panic: outrage by concerned politicians, teachers, clergy, and parents about what monstrous effects late-night monster movies had on kids. But you get a whiff of some of that in Dixon's remarks here; this column is not just an attack on the Soviets but also a warning that SHOCK! was endangering a young generation of Americans by making them "logy" and unwilling "to be torn from their television sets." How can we possibly overcome the Russians' scientific advancements if our kids are more interested in monster movies than in hitting the books?

Dixon begins his column by mentioning a new Eisenhower-initiated USA-USSR agreement to exchange culture and entertainment as a means for lessening Cold War tensions. "If only we could send them some of our television programs, we could clutter up their minds so they couldn't concentrate on weapons of destruction," he writes. "Unlimited possibilities lie in our weekend horror shows alone" which could be used to "stultify that country's future generations," since "instead of cramming themselves with dangerous science, all they would want to do is get back to the gory romance of Frankenstein's unblushing little Bride."

"Every weekend in this more advanced land [the USA], we have late and late, late horror shows that keep the kiddies up later than the bars keep open for adults in the nation's capital," he continues. "We have 'Shock,' 'Horror,' 'The Creeper,' 'The Invisible Man,' and vintage movies that are horrible without even trying. The Russian youngsters would probably be so entranced they wouldn't even stick their heads out of a window to look at a third sputnik." Dixon adds that "these grisly programs, of course, would only be for Russians of a tender age" because "the older Bolsheviks wouldn't see the characters as anything out of the ordinary."

Dixon's column goes on to poke gentle fun at the National Symphony Orchestra and to suggest swapping the Philadelphia Symphony for the Bolshoi Ballet. He concludes by calling for nuclear war: "If we really want to impress our new trade partners, we should launch a deal direct from the rocket pad and send them our only remaining member of the peerage-- Count Down."

excerpt from Dixon's "Washington Scene" column as it appeared on the editorial page of The Dominion-Times, Morgantown, WV, February 4, 1958

Dixon is joking, of course, about exporting Screen Gems' horror movie selections to the USSR as part of a cultural exchange. But I think that he is seriously concerned about how SHOCK! programming is going to retard the development of young minds at a time when they needed to be ideologically yoked to the educational rigors of the Space Race.

NIGHT KEY (1937)

2011-01-08T04:23:00.000-08:00

A question that I like to return to in the course of this viewing project is how and why some of the horror-less SHOCK! features have come to be horror-ized over the years while others have not. The most recent example of this that I have written about was SECRET OF THE CHATEAU; SECRET OF THE CHATEAU is no more of a horror movie than, say, THE WITNESS VANISHES (a film from the "Crime Club" series that also turned up in SHOCK!), yet SECRET OF THE CHATEAU frequently passes as a horror film among Universal fans. The only explanation that I can see is that the inclusion of some movies in the post-SHOCK! feature showcases of the 1960s and 1970s must have given them reputations as horror films, but how did some films benefit from this horror-movie notoriety and others did not?

listing for WTOL-Toldeo, Saturday April 18, 1959

In NIGHT KEY, Boris Karloff plays David Mallory, a gentle, mild-mannered inventor (as opposed to the crazed, cunning mad scientist) who is losing eyesight and would do anything to protect and care for his beloved daughter. Not very monstrous. But 1937 was a tough year for lovers of Universal horror films: the British ban on horror movies robbed the studios of European markets and dampened their enthusiasm for making them; moreover, it appears that ticket sales in the US were dropping off. A new horror cycle would begin at Universal in 1939 with SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, but in the meantime, the pickings were mighty slim. (Karloff did three pictures for Warner Bros [WEST OF SHANGHAI; THE INVISIBLE MENACE; DEVIL'S ISLAND] and the Mr. Wong movies for Monogram during this time.) This explains why the only listing for "1937" in Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas' Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films, 1931-1946 is a crime melodrama: NIGHT KEY.

Times Record, Troy, NY, August 28, 1958. The "CinemaSix" show frequently featured SHOCK! pictures.

NIGHT KEY got a lot of play on the SHOCK! circuit (probably because of the Karloff factor: "Let's see: Universal, Karloff, a spooky title like 'NIGHT KEY'-- this must be a horror movie," etc.). Based on small sample that I perused, it appears that, remarkably, the film got even more play as a horror movie between 1970 and 1980 (as well as putting in some appearances on "Science-Fiction Theater"-types of shows, thanks to the titular anti-alarm gizmo, Mallory's electric eye security system, and the d.i.y. electrical force-field that he rigs to get away from the crooks).

I wonder if NIGHT KEY's horror-movie reputation in the late 1950s on TV had gathered some momentum from the Realarts publicity push. Realarts theatrically re-released NIGHT KEY in 1954 and had no qualms about concocting the idea that the movie had horror-content. In this Realarts lobby card that I lifted from the NIGHT KEY thread on the Classic Horror Film Board, the image of Karloff isn't Dave Mallory from NIGHT KEY but the far more sinister Dr. Friedrich Hohner from THE CLIMAX (1944). The "Death in the Wax Museum!" come-on line is completely make-believe... there is no wax museum in this movie.

Amusingly, even today, NIGHT KEY's reputation as a horror film continues: the cover of Universal's 2006 five-film DVD set "The Boris Karloff Collection" promises "The Master of Horror in His Most Frightening Roles!" To put it plainly, I don't think that anyone who has ever seen Karloff playing a practical joke with twirling open umbrellas or wearing a party hat made from an old newspaper while eating cake in NIGHT KEY would classify David Mallory as one of Karloff's most frightening roles.

edited from a listing in the Evening Standard, Uniontown, PA, March 14, 1959

Lastly, here's a listing for a telecast of NIGHT KEY on a program on WJAC-Johnstown called "Ghoul's Paradise." It's counter-programmed against BEHIND THE MASK (a Son of SHOCK! title) on WTAE-Pittsburgh's "Shock Theatre," hosted by Sir Rodger (see E-Gor's Chamber of TV Horror Hosts for details and scroll down to "Sir Rodger"). I couldn't find any information on the wonderfully-named "Ghoul's Paradise"-- it appears to have run for only a few months in 1959 and I believe that it was hostless with an offscreen announcer. If anyone reading this has more information on "Ghoul's Paradise," please let me know-- I'd like to learn more.

NEXT: "MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, the masterpiece of America's greatest creator of horror, Edgar Allan Poe, is coming your way in the Shock feature film presentation starring Bela Lugosi on this channel."

THE BLACK CAT (1934)

2011-01-04T20:06:00.000-08:00

THE BLACK CAT made the rounds as a Realarts re-release starting in 1953 under the title THE VANISHING BODY; it looks like Realarts paired it with THE MISSING HEAD, which was their re-release of the "Inner Sanctum" title STRANGE CONFESSION (thanks for the spoiler, Realarts). I'm sure that there's some legalistic explanation that is too arcane for me to understand, but why didn't Screen Gems go with the re-release titles? Presumably TV audiences would've been more familiar with THE VANISHING BODY from the early '50s than THE BLACK CAT from almost twenty-five years before, right? (And where did they get that title from? Part of what's so unnerving about this movie is that the bodies haven't vanished-- they are kept in glass coffins in the basement for everyone to see and that's what's so freaky...)

Council Bluffs [IA] Nonpareil, May 22, 1953

I'm one of those tiresome classic horror movie fans who is absolutely obsessed with this obsessive movie, so it is difficult for me to write about THE BLACK CAT without dragging in all the research that I've read about it over the years-- the artistic sensibilities of director Edgar Ulmer, the controversies surrounding Ulmer and the film, the multivalent symbolism in many of the scenes, the re-writes, re-shoots, and re-edits, and all the rest. But for the purposes of this SHOCK! Viewing Project blog, I can't get into any of that fascinating back-story behind-the-scenes stuff about this feverishly visionary horror film. What I need to do is imagine what audience reaction might have been like for those seeing it on television in the late 1950s and to leave out all my theories about the movie's enigmatic atmospherics of morbid ecstasy.

Charleston [WV] Daily Mail, March 12, 1960

Salina [KS] Journal, December 9, 1958

Hammond [IN] Times, March 18, 1960

To get into that mindset, I tried to find someone to watch THE BLACK CAT with me who had never seen it before, but no one was interested in being my guinea pig with this one. The best that I could do was to think back to the time in the early 1970s when I first saw THE BLACK CAT. It was a Saturday afternoon in late Spring on a New York City television station and I figure that I was about eight years old. Of course, I knew nothing about Ulmer or the First World War or Aleister Crowley or the aesthetic tensions between Expressionistic Caligarism and Neue Sachlichkeit in post-Habsburg Central Europe at the dawn of the Nazi era, so that would've been the most "raw" viewing experience of this movie that I have ever had.

My memories are wispy, distant and vague: the only thing that I can recall with any certainty was my general feeling of unease that something very confusing and very disturbing was going on that involved my favorite monster-actors Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi. I remember only the last twenty minutes or so of the film-- the showdown in the dank, sepulchral cellars beneath the outrageously modernist mansion, the detonation of Fort Marmorus' high explosive self-destruction system, and the escape of the two clueless American newlyweds. I have to wonder if the SHOCK! television audience in the Eisenhower era identified themselves most closely with those newlyweds (Jacqueline Wells and David Manners) when the film was over: "Damn! What the hell was that all about? I can't wait to get back to my normal life." In his edited volume Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row (2010), Gary Don Rhodes includes an essay of his on the reception of THE BLACK CAT in 1934; I would be very interested in reading a similar study of its reception by TV viewers of the SHOCK! films.

San Mateo [CA] Times, November 12, 1960

A couple things about the entry on THE BLACK CAT in the Screen Gems SHOCK! promotional booklet: the first is a mistake in the copy for the twenty-second on-air promotion that was meant to be read or telop'ed. I edited it when I used it as a preview at the end of CHINATOWN SQUAD blog entry, but I reproduce it here verbatim:

"Two fiends clash in a death struggle while THE BLACK CAT creeps on Shock this [day], [date], at [time] on this channel! Who will be the loser when Karloff and Lugosi meet! It's anyone's guess. Be sure to see the full-length feature film, THE CAT CREEPS, on this channel [day], [time]."

As you can see, the movie changes in the course of twenty seconds from THE BLACK CAT to THE CAT CREEPS. It's easy to understand how such a slip-up happened in the Screen Gems office, but it is sort of amusing to think that these two movies were confused for one another when they are so very, very different.

The second item that I want to mention is that the Screen Gems books uses a photo of Boris Karloff to promote THE BLACK CAT which is clearly from a later time. Like the use of a 1950s-era photo of Lyle Talbot to promote 1935's CHINATOWN SQUAD that I talked about in my last blog entry, Screen Gems chose to use a picture of an older and mustachioed Karloff, more like YOU'LL FIND OUT (1940) or THE DEVIL COMMANDS (1941) than the unmistakably distinctive look of Hjalmar Poelzig that one sees in THE BLACK CAT. In the newspaper TV listing ad reproduced below, KUTV-Channel 2 has chosen to use that picture of Karloff that Screen Gems has provided for THE BLACK CAT; for comparison, a production still of Karloff as Poelzig is reproduced directly below it.

Salt Lake City [UT] Tribune, October 31, 1958

NEXT: "A city in turmoil at the mercy of the underworld. See NIGHT KEY starring Boris Karloff as the inventor who falls into the hands of a gangster mob. NIGHT KEY is a tense, absorbing drama, grand entertainment on Shock. Tune in for the premiere telecast of this full-length feature film on this channel."

CHINATOWN SQUAD (1935)

2011-01-02T03:02:00.000-08:00

Shady importer/exporter and "high-class con man" Albert Raybold is stabbed in the heart with a fork (!!) one night in a private booth at the Peking Café in San Francisco's Chinatown. A number of the restaurant patrons are suspects: Raybold's secretary George Mason (Andy Devine), international tea dealer William Ward, businessman Claude Palmer, restaurant manager Quong Su, and restaurant owner (and presumably tong elder) John Yee. Details surrounding Raybold's dirty dealings complicate things as it is learned that he was in the midst of a transaction to sell fighter planes to Communist rebels in Fuzhou at the time of his death-- $70,000 of the rebels' money held by Raybold has gone missing, as has a packet of incriminating letters written to him by a mysterious Woman in Black (Valerie Hobson) and a valuable jade ring.

(Whoever wrote up the synopsis for this movie on TCM's website describes "a mystical jade ring" which "gives its wearer the power to do irreparable harm to his enemies," but this makes it sound like a prequel to THE LORD OF THE RINGS or something. Actually, the ring is like a letter of introduction or a password or a secret handshake that can give its enterprising wearer entry into the darkest and most lucrative corners of the Chinese criminal and political underworlds. After all, if the ring was so powerful, how come it didn't protect Raybold from being forked to death?)

Another diner at the Peking Café at the time of Raybold's murder is ex-cop Ted Lacey (Lyle Talbot), formerly of the SFPD's elite Chinatown Squad but presently a neighborhood tour-bus guide (Jake Gittes, he ain't). Lacey's accidental involvement in the Raybold case reminds him of how much he enjoyed being part of the Chinatown Squad despite his conflicts with his sergeant, McLeash. Before long, Lacey joins forces with the Woman in Black and works with the squad to put all the clues together to solve Raybold's killing; he also squeezes a confession out of the killer and personally drives him to SFPD headquarters in a stolen police patrol van where the chief offers him his old job back with a promotion.

CHINATOWN SQUAD is one of those utterly monster-less, non-horror movies that Screen Gems tucked into the SHOCK! bundle. It's a fast-paced B-movie whodunit (written by Dore Schary) brimming with light banter and humorous touches (a reviewer on IMDb likened it to a "Thin Man" movie, but that's going way too far). Lyle Talbot's Lacey spends much of his time making wisecracks, needling Sgt. McLeash, and chuckling and grinning... in the still shown below, he has just slammed the door of the Chinatown Squad office and shattered the glass; he smiles and makes some dumb joke before running off and leaving McLeash impotently fuming. Such jackassery is typical of Lacey in this movie and it gets tedious quickly.

The Chinatown Squad was a special unit of the San Francisco police organized in the late 1870s that was re-activated in 1921 in the midst of concern with the alarming number of homicides in that neighborhood linked to tong control of prostitution, narcotics, smuggling, gambling, illegal immigration, extortion, and municipal political corruption. But in this movie the squad comes across like a bunch of inept clowns, a day late and a dollar short for whatever is going on. McLeash's mugging is especially grating; at one point, he takes a pratfall off of the Sausalito ferry pier while tailing Lacey and Yee. A darker murder-mystery melodrama about Chinatown's crime world would've been a better fit for SHOCK!-- CHINATOWN SQUAD is very light-weight.

(Oddly, the publicity photo of Talbot that Screen Gems uses for CHINATOWN SQUAD in the SHOCK! booklet is older, heavier, and has grayer hair than the guy in this movie. Actually, it looks more like the Talbot of GLEN OR GLENDA? [1953] and JAIL BAIT [1954].

January 7th EDIT: Thanks to doctor kiss for emailing me the following shots of Lyle Talbot from JAIL BAIT, confirming for me that this was the source for Screen Gems publicity photo.)

Lyle Talbot as Inspector Johns in Ed Wood, Jr.'s JAIL BAIT (1954)

Probably the only saving grace here for Universal horror-movie lovers is Valerie Hobson as Janet Baker, the black-clad mystery woman. Hobson was supposed to be all of 18 years-old in 1935; immediately previous to CHINATOWN SQUAD, Hobson had appeared in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and WEREWOLF OF LONDON.

She's cool and lovely in this movie; surprisingly, she spends the last reel in a yellowface disguise meant to elude the Chinatown Squad (Lacey jokingly calls her "Ming Toy," a reference to Lupe Velez's character in Universal's EAST IS WEST [1930]). There are supposed to be romantic sparks between Hobson's character and Talbot's in this movie, but I didn't see them. Still, this film is worth watching just to see Hobson-- she's simply radiant (as usual) here.

Daily Review, Hayward, CA, March 11, 1960

After its syndicated release through SHOCK! and right up until 1979, CHINATOWN SQUAD appeared on television mostly in the morning and late afternoon time-slots. When it did show up at night, it was often as just a late show movie rather than part of a named "Shock Theater" or "Creature Feature" program. But it did make it into those showcases every once in a while. In an essay called "'Shock Theater' Memories," writer Rich Scrivani (I recommend his 2006 book Goodnight, Whatever You Are! My Journey with Zacherley, the Cool Ghoul) recalls: "Occasionally the supernatural aura of 1958 would be dispelled when some questionable entries would run. Titles like CHINATOWN SQUAD […] padded out the series. While we can enjoy them for their place in Universal history now, they were unwanted intruders at the time, tepid 'B' mysteries, holding no interest whatsoever for kids who wanted monsters."

For fans of zippy B-movie mysteries of the 1930s, there are worse ways to spend an hour than CHINATOWN SQUAD. But, as Scrivani says, for monster-crazy kids who waited all week to stay up late for SHOCK!, this movie must have been an aggravating and unsatisfactory viewing experience.

NEXT: "Two fiends clash in a death struggle while THE BLACK CAT creeps on Shock on this channel! Who will be the loser when Karloff and Lugosi meet! It's anyone's guess. Be sure to see the full-length feature THE BLACK CAT on this channel."

SON OF DRACULA trailer

2011-01-01T16:57:00.000-08:00

A bit too late to be a preview, but here's the trailer to SON OF DRACULA, discussed by Creeping Bride below. The Shock promo:

"Alucard or Dracula? It doesn't matter which way you look at it when Shock brings to your screen SON OF DRACULA. You won't want to miss Lon Chaney and Louise Allbritton in this chill-drama about that famous vampire. It's a feature film presentation."

SON OF DRACULA (1943)

2010-12-31T01:57:00.000-08:00

Old World vampire gothic meets New World Southern Gothic in SON OF DRACULA. It's an interesting idea, right? Transplant the Germanic expressionism of the Carpathian foothills to the Dark Oaks plantation in the Deep South and let's see what happens...

For me, a lot of it works: the cellar under the Caldwell mansion is a great place to stash coffins, as is the old playroom in the disused attic and the swamp drainage flumes. And then there's the great ambiance of the family graveyard on the estate and the old shack of the hoodoo conjure-woman Queen Zimba. Kay Caldwell (Louise Allbritton)-- all jet-black bangs and diaphanous gowns and a "morbid" (as we're told a bunch of times by different characters) obsession with the occult-- is some sort of character that you might find threatening the heroine in one of those pre-Anne Rice gothic romance potboilers. In general, I think the Southern setting works a helluva lot better in SON OF DRACULA than it does in THE MUMMY'S CURSE (1944).

Southern Illinoisan, Carbondale, IL, July 1, 1960

The relocation of the vampire from Europe to the USA may have had something to do with the motion picture being a wartime production. There are a couple times in SON OF DRACULA when the comment is made that the vampire has left the Old Country because the land and its people are barren, weak and exhausted; America, by contrast, is a "younger country, stronger, more virile" (in the words of Dr. Brewster). Alucard materializes and confirms this theory in his conversation with Professor Lazlo: "I am here because this is a young and virile race, not dry and decaying like ours," he tells the Hungarian. "They have what I want...what I need...what I must have." For a bit of historical context, recall that the Kingdom of Hungary was run by a right-wing, pro-fascist Axis government when SON OF DRACULA was in production; when the movie first appeared on TV as part of SHOCK!, Hungary had been very recently invaded and occupied by the USSR after a failed attempt by its people to overthrow the Soviet-backed regime there. I don't want to make too much of this, but it seems like an interesting way to re-imagine the vampiric threat: America's youthful vigor, vitality, and virility menaced by a symbol of fascism during WWII and then later by a symbol of Stalinism during the Cold War. (This latter connection for SHOCK!-era viewers of SON OF DRACULA also makes me think of that other vampire-from-behind-the-Iron-Curtain movie from the same time, THE RETURN OF DRACULA [1958] from Gramercy Pictures and United Artists.)

"Hey, wait a minute... I wonder if...?"

"Nah, it just couldn't be..."

"But that's what the TV guide in the El Paso Herald-Post for June 28, 1958 says! It must be!"

I can't help but think what this film would have been like if someone other than Lon Chaney, Jr. played Count Alucard (or, as Frank Stanley [Robert Paige] sometimes sounds like he's pronouncing it in this movie, "Count À La Carte"). This is another instance of Chaney being painfully miscast. At "six foot, three and one-half inches tall and weighing 220 pounds" (according to the SHOCK! promotional book's news release on Chaney), this doesn't look like the starving, desperate vampire refugee from a weak, dry, decaying race. Chaney goes for the mysterious, dangerous European vampire look by sporting that suave John Waters mustache from the "Inner Sanctum" pictures and spouting contraction-less English (as opposed to the article-free pidgin English he used to play a Native American in the 1957 series "Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans"), neither which are very effective in making anyone think that he's someone other than Lon Chaney, Jr. One positive thing that I will say about Chaney's Alucard, though, is that his hysterical outburst at the end of the movie (bellowing at Frank : "Put it out! Put it out, do you hear me?!") makes me think of the ways that Christopher Lee would play a more ferocious, feral Dracula in the Hammer films starting in 1958.

I need to say a little something here about director Robert Siodmak. Just as his brother Curt has his fingerprints all over the development of the classic American horror film, Robert Siodmak was a key figure in film noir, directing important movies in that highly-stylized manner like PHANTOM LADY (1944), THE KILLERS (1946), THE DARK MIRROR (1946), CRISS CROSS (1949), and THE FILE ON THELMA JORDAN (1950). In each of these movies (and in his other quasi-noir melodramas, like THE SUSPECT [1944], THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY [1945], and THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE [1945]), Siodmak includes a scene or two where he goes all-out to craft an almost haunted, symbol-laden mise-en-scène of space and shadow that says a lot about the interior world of the characters on the screen, and you can see some of this skill in parts of SON OF DRACULA.

This movie was Siodmak's first after signing a long-term contract with Universal in 1943 (within a year, he would direct Chaney in Technicolor in COBRA WOMAN) and just a few months prior to his exquisite work with cinematographer Woody Bredell on PHANTOM LADY. With this mind, I like to watch SON OF DRACULA with an eye to its film noir elements: as we learn in the jailhouse scene, Kay is the femme fatale who has been deceiving Alucard in order to gain immortality; she confesses that she really has loved Frank all along, despite her whirlwind romance with and wedding to Alucard. Frank, the typical masochist noir protagonist who is ruined by guilt, teetering on the edge of insanity, and in jail for murder, is love-sick and isn't turned off at all by this revelation. Kay convinces Frank to destroy Alucard so that they can be together forever. Frank does away with Alucard, but then double-crosses Kay and destroys her as well, but not before he lovingly slips a wedding ring on her finger. What a sap. It's not hard for me to imagine Louise Allbritton's Kay as Yvonne De Carlo, Robert Paige as Burt Lancaster, and Lon Chaney, Jr. as Dan Duryea in some alternate-universe version of Siodmak's CRISS CROSS, or as Barbara Stanwyck, Wendell Corey, and Richard Rober in THE FILE ON THELMA JORDAN. SON OF DRACULA lacks the claustrophobic sexual tension and overdetermined Freudian mumbo-jumbo of Siodmak's later work, but I still think it's an interesting near-crossover of horror and noir sensibilities.

NEXT: "Behind the Frisco fog lurk treachery and death. See the exciting thrill of the underworld battling the CHINATOWN SQUAD on Shock over this channel. It's an action-filled feature film premiere that will keep you gripping your seat with excitement."

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN (1943)

2010-12-28T04:52:00.000-08:00

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN was re-released by Realart in 1949 and frequently ran in movie theaters right up until its appearance on TV as part of the SHOCK! program beginning in 1957. It was most often paired with DRACULA'S DAUGHTER, but it turned up as well alongside THE MAD GHOUL, THE MUMMY'S CURSE, and THE MUMMY'S GHOST. FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN was also a familiar offering in those years at cinemas that ran late-night spook shows and kiddie matinees.

Daily Times-News, Burlington, NC, April 28, 1951

Hamilton [OH] Daily News Journal, March 16, 1957
That's not a bad way to spend a quarter on a Saturday afternoon...

Like GODZILLA VS. KING KONG (1962), the title alone would be enough to drum up excited anticipation for FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN; the prospect of seeing Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf Man whale the tar out of each other almost certainly sold a lot of tickets. Maybe seeing it in a movie theater with a lot of rambunctious kids hopped-up on refreshment-stand goodies on a Saturday afternoon or with nervously giggling popcorn-munching teenagers on a date-night makes all the difference with this movie, but watching it by yourself on television only emphasizes its faults.

Lima [OH] News, February 14, 1959

(...still, I'd rather watch FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN on WTOL-Toledo on Saturday night's Shock Theater than WTVN-Columbus' option of ENEMY AGENT. Channel 10's mystery movie WHO IS HOPE SCHUYLER? [1942] is not so bad, though... )

I'm not sure who to blame for this messy, de-centered movie-- Curt Siodmak's script is sloppy, but maybe producer George Waggner forced some last-minute changes that account for the biggest disappointments here. Tom Weaver and the Brunas brothers explain in Universal Horrors that one of the major changes was the excising of all the scenes of dialogue between Béla Lugosi's Monster and Lon Chaney, Jr.'s Larry Talbot; in so doing, a lot of plot exposition goes missing (I don't know how many times I had seen the movie before I realized that the Monster was supposed to be blind from the previous Frankenstein film). It also explains many of the odd aspects of Lugosi's performance as the Monster-- let's give the guy the benefit of the doubt and say that the edited-out dialogue would've made him appear less bizarre in his acting than he seems in the pantomime version that was released. Editing out those scenes make this already Wolf Man-centered film even more so, raising the question as to why this wasn't called THE WOLF MAN MEETS FRANKENSTEIN. (That this film is included in Universal's 2004 "Legacy Series" DVD set for the Wolf Man rather than Frankenstein underscores this.)

The germ of the idea that Talbot is searching the ruins of Frankenstein castle for the means of death after being buried alive for four years is good and grim, and this should give the movie a pop-existentialist tang. But that gets crowded out by all the other threads of the story, none of which are given much development, such as the changes that the Baroness Frankenstein (Ilona Massey) goes through in the course of the film and, even more mysterious, the motivations behind Dr. Frank Mannering's (Patric Knowles) actions. (What's more highly compressed in this movie? Mannering's decision to give up his post in a Cardiff hospital to chase Talbot? His switch to completely believing Talbot's "Oh, but I'm a werewolf!" story after all rather than continuing to insist that it is a lycanthropic delusion? His love affair with the Baroness? His decision to become a monster-maker?)

In addition to the holes and confusion within the story itself, there are also problems with FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN being able follow the larger story-line arcs laid out in FRANKENSTEIN, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, and THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN. But that's really not worth squabbling about-- a couple weeks back in comments to my post on THE MUMMY'S HAND, the argument came up that the non-chronological showing of films in the SHOCK! package meant that viewers experienced these films as discrete, stand-alone stories that couldn't be tied to any sort of narrative continuity that carried from one film in the series to the next. And that's probably the only way to view FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN in the end.

What works best about this movie for me, though, are some of the sets in FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN which create such an iconic monster-movie mood when I see them. For example, the Hollywood gothic Llanwelly cemetery might be the best graveyard scene in the Universal horror movie canon. (By the way, does anyone know how Talbot got from the cemetery to Cardiff and how he got that nasty head wound in the first place?) I also groove on the Frankenstein ice caves and the burned-out ruined cellar laboratory. And even though it is such a hokey-looking miniature, I still always love the castle at the foot of the dam-- just seeing it conjures up the sheer thrill of watching this movie on TV despite all of the disappointments.

NEXT: "Alucard or Dracula? It doesn't matter which way you look at it when Shock brings to your screen SON OF DRACULA. You won't want to miss Lon Chaney and Louise Allbritton in this chill-drama about that famous vampire. It's a feature film presentation."

More ad mats/new clippings for SF's NIGHTMARE

2010-12-27T07:31:00.000-08:00

Michael Monahan (Doktor Goulfinger) graciously sent this blog more ads and a newspaper clipping for San Francisco's NIGHTMARE Shock showings. Note the plans for a "Tales of Frankenstein" TV show with Boris Karloff. This eventually became the Hammer/Screen Gems pilot starring Anton Diffring.

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN preview

2010-12-25T10:54:00.000-08:00

"Two of the world's most fearsome horror creatures combine their wickedness to provide a double measure of chills and thrills in the Shock full-length feature FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN. See it on this channel!"

THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933)

2010-12-23T04:38:00.000-08:00

Probably as a result of the popularity of SHOCK!, rumors began to spread in 1958 that a number of horror and sci-fi shows were being planned for the new Fall season. When autumn came, some TV writers mentioned how surprised they were that so few of these programs actually turned up on the small screen. One of those that did was a half-hour British television series that had been picked up by CBS called "The Invisible Man." CBS first began airing it in early November 1958, not too long after Universal's THE INVISIBLE MAN first appeared on TV as part of SHOCK! films.

Indiana [PA] Evening Gazette, Wednesday December 3, 1958

Directly below that listing, this movie theater double-feature ad appeared:

What a fun couple of days that must have been in Indiana, PA!

Unlike Universal's remarkable horror film of the same name, the TV series "The Invisible Man" was a fantasy-spy show. Rather than a crazed chemist going on a murderous rampage, the scientist in the television series is a respectable, trusted, and stable chap who agrees to do Cold War missions for British intelligence after he has been irreversibly rendered transparent in a lab accident involving radioactive materials. Originally, CBS had intended to follow "The Invisible Man" on Wednesday nights with a second fantasy-spy series called "World of Giants"; produced by Ziv, "World of Giants" featured a secret agent who had been miniaturized down to six inches following his exposure to experimental missile fuel while behind the Iron Curtain, an obvious take-off on THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957). The pairing of "The Invisible Man" and "World of Giants" on CBS never happened because of the programming emergency that erupted in 1958 when a series of corruption scandals connected to TV quiz shows forced abrupt cancellations that had networks scrambling to fill slots. ("World of Giants" ended up being first-run in syndication in Fall 1959 rather than on network telecast.)

"The Invisible Man" show was the creation of Ralph Smart, who later went on to make the great "Danger Man" ("Secret Agent" in the US) series with Patrick McGoohan. A young Brian Clemens worked as a writer on "The Invisible Man," as well; Clemens is responsible for a number of classic action-adventure British TV series of the 1960s and 1970s, such as "The Avengers," "The Protectors," "The Professionals," and "The Persuaders." Despite such an impressive pedigree, however, "The Invisible Man" didn't impress: one syndicated TV columnist dismissed it out of hand as "juvenile" fare, while another writer for UPI called it "really more of a short-circuit" than "a shocker." The critic goes on to say that "it's not that there isn't a kernel of an idea in the Invisible Man bit. Witness the crackly old Claude Rains movie." The TV series, however, is "completely uncrackly" because the writing "is simply absurd-- heavy-footed and clodpated."

I admit that I wasn't too sure what was meant by "crackly" in this context, but after looking it up (I also had to look up "clodpated," which I first read as "coldplated," for some reason), I think that it is a good adjective to describe Uni's THE INVISIBLE MAN: the writing of the dialogue and the action is crisp, sharp, sprightly, neat, and clever. Even on television and interrupted with commercials, the movie clips along nicely and keeps you engaged. The same can't be said of the episodes of "The Invisible Man" that I watched on-line-- television, of course, has always been (and still is) a stiflingly conservative medium, so it's probably unfair in the first place to even think that a TV show about a heroic British spy could compete with the late-night movie lunacy of this James Whale motion picture.

In addition to the crackly writing, you also have to marvel at some of the performances that Whale drew from his cast. Claude Rains' Jack Griffin dominates the proceedings with his manic mood swings from growling threats to hysterically over-the-top proclamations ("Even the Moon is frightened of me!"), all of which is punctuated by his tittering cackles and megalomaniacal braying. I find these outbursts to be equally unnerving and funny during his freak-outs, and it's hard to keep your eyes off of this see-through terrorist. But I also really like William Harrigan's performance as Kemp in the almost totally wordless scenes when he first encounters the unseen naked maniac. Harrigan's physical reactions as he interacts with another actor that is not actually in his study (as well as the later scene where he walks from the car to the Lion's Head to retrieve Griffin's notebooks) is a very convincing performance (Harrigan's later hysterical scenes with the police aren't at all as interesting).

Whale's film is dense with these kinds of fabulous things, all of which add up to make THE INVISIBLE MAN so compellingly watchable. Watering all that down into a half-hour spy show is just a bad idea all around since comparisons would be inevitable, and one needed only turn in to SHOCK! to see the superior original.

Gazette-Mail, Charleston WV, November 15, 1959

A final note: the other day I saw TCM's annual musical memorial montage listing many of the prominent film folks who have passed away during the previous year. Naturally, TCM editors chose something from TITANIC to commemorate Gloria Stuart (who died in late September at the age of 100) and that's a completely understandable decision. But wouldn't it have been great to show her in THE OLD DARK HOUSE, SECRET OF THE BLUE ROOM or THE INVISIBLE MAN? Whale doesn't give her much to do in THE INVISIBLE MAN except look luminescent and outrageously desirable, but she does that so well...

NEXT: "Two of the world's most fearsome horror creatures combine their wickedness to provide a double measure of chills and thrills in the Shock full-length feature FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN. See it on this channel!"

THE INVISIBLE MAN preview

2010-12-20T19:36:00.000-08:00

"Now you see him --- now you don't! That's what you'll see or think you see in Shock's THE INVISIBLE MAN telecast on this channel!"

THE MAD GHOUL (1943)

2010-12-18T04:35:00.000-08:00

I'll say it again: THE MAD GHOUL is the best PRC horror movie that Universal ever made. It's every bit as strange and oddly engaging as any Poverty Row monster movie of the 1940s that you can name, but it's got all the brand-name (B-unit) trappings of Universal Studios to give it that little bit extra and deliver a lasting, satisfying, and fun film. Although it was probably pretty forgettable as the second-banana feature in the cinemas in 1943 to SON OF DRACULA, THE MAD GHOUL--- complete with grave robbing, corpse desecration, and the best treatment ever of an unfunny, wisecracking, comic-relief news reporter--- might be the ideal, archetypal selection for a horror movie shown on late-night TV.

Creepy middle-aged chemistry professor Alfred Morris (George Zucco) is sexually obsessed with young, beautiful concert singer Isabel Lewis (Evelyn Ankers); he delusionally thinks that the feelings are mutual, and so to move things along, he sets out to dismantle Isabel's engagement to a promising surgery student named Ted Allison (David Bruce). Morris hires Ted as a laboratory assistant and deliberately exposes him to a nerve gas vapor that had been developed for religious rituals by the ancient Mayans. Anyone who inhales these fumes is robbed of his consciousness and his will, and he is left as a sort of living-dead zombie slave. To pull the dead-alive out of this eventually terminal state of being, the Mayans had concocted a blend of herbs and the blood-clotting agents extracted from a recently-deceased heart, and Morris has mastered this ancient secret as well.

Once Ted has been zombified, Morris figures that he can order him to break off the engagement with Isabel. But his plan to move in on the singer gets sidelined when he discovers that the remedy's effects are only temporary: it appears that Ted collapses back into zombie-slave mode following a period of intense emotional stress, and that forces Morris to march Ted off to the nearest cemetery and dig up a fresh heart to revert him back to his normal self.

Rather than simplifying his love life, Morris finds that he's made things more complicated for himself. Ted insists on following Isabel around on her concert tour like a stalky puppy dog and Morris tags along. Isabel, meanwhile, has fallen in love with her smarmy-suave Continental accompanist, Eric Iverson (Turhan Bey), but she hasn't worked up the nerve to tell Ted about it because of his spells of unexplained illness. In between attending Isabel's recitals and plundering the graves of the recently deceased to steal the corpses' hearts, a desperate Morris finally decides to use Ted to kill Eric so that he can pounce on Isabel, but by then a couple of wise-ass reporters and a couple of clueless police detectives have started to close in on this morbid lovers' quadrangle.

My summary of THE MAD GHOUL doesn't come close to explaining how grisly and weirdly delirious the whole thing gets, and it is those quality that brings to mind some of the "suspenstories" that might be found in the old EC anthology titles like The Haunt of Fear or The Vault of Horror. But like I said at the outset, THE MAD GHOUL also makes me think of some of my favorite Poverty Row monster & mystery movies of the early 1940s. I have a genuine affection for many of those low-budget quickies churned out by the likes of PRC, Monogram, Republic, and Invincible/Chesterfield; there's a sort of underdog charm that always wins me over when I watch these movies that allows me to accept whatever bizarre and unlikely scenario is being presented therein and leaves me admiring their audaciousness--- for the sake of illustration, let me mention some favorite stuff of mine like THE CORPSE VANISHES, BLUEBEARD, FOG ISLAND, and THE FLYING LIZARD.

In previous posts on this blog, mention has been made of the movies hosted by Swami Drana Badour (Chicago's WBKB, 1950-52) and Vampira (LA's KABC, 1954-55) as a kind of pre-history of SHOCK! broadcasts. And if you look at those lists, you'll see that Poverty Row mysteries & horror films constituted the bulk of what was shown on TV before SHOCK!'s release in 1957. But even in the 1970s and 1980s, when there was so many more movies available for telecast on the weekly horror/sci-fi movie programs, there was still a stubborn smattering of Poverty Row horrors that would turn up and still satisfy--- as a recent example, there's the appearance of PRC's DEAD MEN WALK (1943) on TCM's "Underground" in November 2007. There's something so primitive and dreamlike about these claustrophobic soundstage-bound pictures that seem to work so well on late-night TV... it was as if they had been specially made to be seen by someone alone at night on a small television screen. This is the same vibe that I get off of THE MAD GHOUL: it feels like it had been produced as a made-for-TV movie designed to be shown on branded showcases like "Shock Theater" or "Creature Features" of the late 1950s and early 1960s where it would blend in easily with some of that other Poverty Row fare. Other B-movie Universal titles with a similar Poverty Row feel include NIGHT MONSTER (1942), MAN MADE MONSTER (1941), THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK (1946) , HOUSE OF HORRORS (1946), and THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. RX (1942), all of which were included in SHOCK! and will be discussed in the weeks to come.

Gazette-Mail, Charleston, WV, Saturday November 8, 1959

As a footnote, I want to mention that at same time that THE MAD GHOUL was first appearing on television, THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL was released into theaters. In most of the ad mats, one of the tag lines coincidentally trumpeted: "Mad ghoul rules terror villa!" But in terms of theme (young person cruelly exploited by mad mentor), there are strong similarities between THE MAD GHOUL and AIP's I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF (1957) and BLOOD OF DRACULA (1957).

NEXT: "Now you see him --- now you don't! That's what you'll see or think you see in Shock's THE INVISIBLE MAN telecast on this channel!"

"Shock" Host Christopher Lee Introduces THE MUMMY'S HAND

2010-12-15T12:25:00.000-08:00

A couple of decades late as a true Shock horror host, but Christoper Lee did introduce horror films on TV for Sci-fi Channel's "Classic Monsters Month" in 1994.

You can pick up the thrilling vibe that monster kids must have felt in Shock Theater times when the film (this time THE MUMMY'S HAND) actually starts, with the Universal logo, the familiar score kicking in, the credits....

THE MUMMY'S HAND (1940)

2010-12-14T04:29:00.000-08:00

Nowadays if we were to compare THE MUMMY'S HAND to Universal's original THE MUMMY (1932), we would say that the 1940 film is neither a remake nor a sequel but rather a reboot of the franchise. Rebooting is what Hollywood studios do to re-center and re-engage with a property that they feel can still make money. The studio had recently undergone a fairly serious re-organization and the new regime was faced with a number of new commercial, aesthetic, and social realities. SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939) and THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS (1940) had been successful reboots of first-generation Uni monsters; THE MUMMY'S HAND was hoped to be a similar fresh start that could provide a new story arc : Im-Ho-Tep's atmospheric menace was replaced by the unstoppable supernatural killer Kharis; the thick, dreamlike gloom & doom of THE MUMMY was stripped out and replaced by the rough & tumble action-adventure of THE MUMMY'S HAND. Gone was the brooding Germanic dark Romance and in its place was substituted a plot line more akin to a Saturday matinee serial.

New York Times, October 8, 1958

But all this analysis is probably too esoteric and of little general interest for viewers of this film on TV. It was only much later that I was able to piece together why there were parts of THE MUMMY and THE MUMMY'S HAND that were so similar (the recycled hand-cranked-silent-film-looking origin scenes of the Mummy, for example) yet so completely different. But who cares? It was a Mummy movie--- how much more really needs to be said? When I first saw THE MUMMY'S HAND on television in the early 1970s, I had already seen mummy rampages on re-runs of my favorite cartoons, all of which were obviously inspired by the Universal Kharis series rather than the Im-Ho-Tep film, so everything looked like it should be to me.

"Curse of Anubis," from "Jonny Quest," originally broadcast in October 1964

Screen Gems had bundled together THE MUMMY (1932), THE MUMMY'S HAND (1940), THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1942), and THE MUMMY'S GHOST (1944) for SHOCK! (THE MUMMY'S CURSE [1944] would show up on TV beginning in 1958 as part of Son of SHOCK!), but as yet I have not found a single station that aired the films of the SHOCK! package in the order of its theatrical release. Thus, if you were seeing these movies for the first time ever as a regular viewer of SHOCK!, then there was no telling what order you would see them in. It was probably just best in the interests of coherence to treat them as individual, stand-alone films rather than try to decipher them as part of a series. Leave chronologies and arc mythos to the detail-obsessed fanboy bloggers fifty-something years in the future.

As mentioned around here somewhere, kids really seem to connect somehow with Mummy movies and there's a lot to thrill young viewers here. (But let me get sidetracked for a minute: I watched this the other night with a nine year-old and her first question was: "But I thought the Mummy was ordered to kill everyone in the tents... how come he grabs the lady instead of killing her like he's supposed to?" She's right, of course--- at no point does Andoheb explicitly change his instructions; Kharis sort of improvises, roughs up Solvani, abducts Marta, and brings her back to the Temple of Karnak, where, out of nowhere, Andoheb decides to embalm her, marry her, and make her high priestess. Where did that plot point come from?) Kids probably also like the grating comic-relief sidekickery of Babe Jenson (Wallace Ford), though I wonder if I ever did.

But as an adult, I think my favorite thing about this film is George Zucco. I always like his fanatical criminal style in movies from the 1930s and 1940s--- quiet, measured, articulate, intelligent, but always nuts. When it comes to movie villainy, it's no use competing against such a visually arresting figure as Tom Tyler's Mummy, so you would have to take a different road entirely, which is just what Zucco does with his urbane but insane Andoheb. But rather than scaring me, Zucco's bad guys bring me a kind of malevolently familiar comfort, like Vincent Price's Captain Robur or Gert Fröbe's Auric Goldfinger. (And put me down as a fan of Zucco's work in DARK STREETS OF CAIRO from the same year as THE MUMMY'S HAND.)

The score of THE MUMMY'S HAND (much of it rehashed from SON OF FRANKENSTEIN) really adds a lot of atmosphere to the picture, as does the the detailed ruins from GREEN HELL (1940) which are pressed into duty as the exterior and interior of the Temple of Karnak. Russell Gausman and Jack Otterson were busy together doing art direction and set design for THE MUMMY'S HAND, GREEN HELL, DARK STREETS OF CAIRO, and a bunch of other movies at Universal in 1940, so it's not surprising to see so much of their work being reworked for maximum efficiency and minimum cost on a wartime budget.

GREEN HELL, by the way, is a jungle adventure pic about some heavy-breathing explorers probing Brazilian rain forests at the Amazon's headwaters; in addition to having ugly run-ins with some laughable natives from Central Casting, they also encounter the forgotten ruins of an ancient city that hide some treasure. It's amusing to see that the crackerjack archeologists in THE MUMMY'S HAND are nonplussed by the discovery of all this Egypto-Incan architecture and art; perhaps they all adhere to the "ancient alien astronaut" theory of world civilizations popularized by Erich von Däniken which explains such similarities and connections as the result of an extraterrestrial cargo cult from thousands of years ago --- that's why everyone is so nonchalant about the bizarre cultural cross-pollination on display in the Valley of the Seven Jackals. All that silliness aside, though, it still looks cool as hell in this movie and it is used to good effect. I remember the climax being particularly suspenseful when I first saw it on TV.

Brazosport Facts, Freeport, TX, Sunday August 23, 1959

I've reproduced this Freeport, TX listing only because I find it so evocative of what used to be so weird and wonderful about late-night television. These days, of course, many cable channels re-run shows at these hours that they had telecast earlier in the day, or else they sell off these blocks of time to that nemesis of us night-owl TV watchers--- infomercials and paid religious programming. Looking at this listing from 1959, you see that, for one thing, stations used to "sign off" of the air; if you stayed up to watch "Shock" on this Sunday night, there followed five minutes of news headlines and then the sign-off with the anthem (if you've never seen one, here's a recreation featuring a pre-1959 National Anthem film). I'm especially intrigued by Channel 13's one-minute "Wanted by the FBI" broadcast at 2:15 AM-- I want to imagine that it was a different profile of some hunted desperado that the station provided every night just before sign-off: "...and is sought in nine states for a series of horrific and random axe murders. Please contact the FBI if you have any information. Good night and pleasant dreams!"

NEXT: "For spine-tingling thrills tune in to this channel when Shock presents the full-length feature film THE MAD GHOUL. George Zucco plays a crazed scientist who brews a poison that terrorizes a nation. It's exciting entertainment so don't miss it!"

A Speculative History of the "Shock Monster" Mask

2010-12-11T08:00:00.000-08:00

At the end of 1957, the ratings data strongly indicated that there was a Monster Culture revolution brewing. SHOCK! had boosted the ratings for KTLA-TV in Los Angeles from seventh to second place; WABC-TV jumped from sixth to first place in the NYC market. Most famously, KRON-TV in San Francisco had increased its ranking 807% with the SHOCK! films. It wasn’t long before the popularity of monster movies on television spawned other media manifestations, the most beloved of which were monster movie magazines for kids.

One such mag was Famous Monsters of Filmland, launched in February 1958 by publisher James Warren and editor Forrest J. Ackerman. FM's pages were crammed with reproductions of publicity stills and promotional material for horror movies going back to the age of silent movies. Brief articles covered the work of classic horror movie actors and provided extended explanations of movie plots as well as some production notes. FM was wildly popular with the younger generation of monster-movie lovers, many of whom caught the bug by seeing these films for the first time on SHOCK!--- the first issue of FM had an article called “TV’s Monster Parade,” in fact.

publisher James Warren in a Topstone mask on issue #1 of FM

Warren Publishing set up its own in-house mail-order service, Captain Company, which advertised in the pages of FM and the subsequent other titles of the Warren publishing line. For kids who couldn’t find any monster-related goods at their local department stores, Captain Company mail order must have seemed like paradise: posters, monster novelties, model kits, magazines, costumes, Super 8 reel versions of monster movies, and other fascinating outré items.

Warren expected to turn a much higher profit with Captain Company items than he did with the 35-cent magazine itself. It is not uncommon today to hear old-timers complain that they had been bilked out of their hard-earned allowance money because the Captain Company’s sensationalistic come-on ads were not always completely accurate accounts of the item purchased. (Personally, my bitterest rip-off memories involved sending away for a completely cool “giant life-size moon monster” for a $1 in the summer of 1969, but that scam wasn’t the work of Captain Company.)

Masks made by the Topstone company were among the most popular items sold by the Captain Company in the pages of FM. Topstone’s full-face latex masks were inexpensive ($2.00 plus .25 postage) and usually avoided movie studio licensing fees by presenting monsters and fiends who were not directly tied to specific motion pictures, such as “Gorilla Monster,” “Lagoon Monster,” “Horrible Melting Man,” “Savage Cannibal,” and “Girl Vampire.” One of the masks was called “Shock Monster.”

According to the Topstone catalog from 1956, the mask was originally called “Horror Zombie.” “Horror Zombie” was designed (and perhaps also sculpted) by commercial illustrator Keith Ward (1906-2000); some of Ward’s other creations that left an impact on US pop culture include the drawings of Elsie the cow (Borden’s Milk) and Elmer the bull (Elmer’s Glue, originally owned by Borden as well). But once “Horror Zombie” began appearing as an item for sale in the Captain Company advertisements in FM, the name of the mask was changed to “Shock Monster”; some collector cognescenti argue that it was Warren himself who was responsible for the name change in 1958.

With the close relationship between Famous Monsters and the SHOCK! broadcasts, I think that we can explain the name change from “Horror Zombie” to “Shock Monster” as an attempt to tap into the enthusiasm that the Captain Company’s customer base had for the SHOCK! movies. In other words, the “Shock Monster” mask sold through Warren’s mail-order operation was specifically meant to be SHOCK!’s monster mascot.

original color image from the 1960 Topstone company catalog

a private collector's foamed Topstone "Shock Monster" mask

Of course, the actual mask itself was a bit of a disappointment compared to Ward’s fantastic illustration. Nevertheless, there is a kind of bizarre art brut primitivism to that mask that is compelling and disturbing. Putting aside its historical/nostalgia value, the mask is interesting to look at because it is so childlike in its creepiness. In many ways, I would find a person wearing this cheap $2.00 mask to be more upsetting than one sporting one of those elaborately-designed and realistically-rendered monster masks that sell for a couple hundred dollars at high-end costume shops every Halloween.

Into the 1960s and even the 1970s, the Shock Monster became a recognizable and iconic face of the FM vanguard’s stake in the Horror Culture Revolution, appearing in Warren magazine graphics, t-shirts, decals, and other items--- you can easily imagine it painted on a hot rod in the mid-1960s. Unlike a t-shirt with a Frankenstein Monster face or a Dracula face design, the Shock Monster could not be identified with any specific film story. The Shock Monster was an unknown, free-floating symbol of excitement for monsters rather than a plug for any specific horror film product. He was, in a sense, an indie monster whose only connection was to the experience of the weekly “Shock Theater” or “Creature Feature” or “Nightmare” movies.

{Information for this blog post was culled from the pages of the Universal Monster Army forum and the Halloween Mask Association forum. Both of these sites are frequented by collectors of all kinds of Horror Culture memorabilia; I have found that many of the folks there are knowledgeable and can be very forthcoming with information about these items.}

THE FROZEN GHOST (1945)

2010-12-09T06:31:00.000-08:00

THE FROZEN GHOST is the fourth of the six "Inner Sanctum" pictures made between 1943 and 1945. These films were were popular money-makers for Universal and were re-released and in theatrical circulation right up to their appearances on TV in 1957 and 1958. Personally, I don't think that the series was very good and I don't think that they warrant consideration as "horror films," but to include them in the Screen Gems SHOCK! assortment makes sense because these were titles with a proven track record of attracting viewers.

Of the six movies, I think that I dislike THE FROZEN GHOST the most. It really exasperated me the last time that I saw it (about fifteen months ago)--- I lost my patience with it and dismissed it as sloppy, shoddy, apathetic filmmaking from professionals who know better but obviously just didn't care.

Salina [KS] Journal, April 7, 1959

Stage hypnotist Alex Gregor “the Great” (Lon Chaney, Jr.) blames himself for the death of a heckler who he had tried to entrance on his top-rated radio program. Feeling guilty that he murdered the man by squinting and staring at him, Gregor breaks off his engagement with his performance partner Maura (a pregnant Evelyn Ankers, trying not to show) and quits his show. To help Gregor get back on his feet again, his business manager George Keene (Milburn Stone) arranges a job for him as a researcher and tour guide at Madame Monet’s wax museum. Valerie Monet (Tala Birell) has the hots for Gregor and is jealous of Maura; she’s also jealous of the attention that her assistant (and niece) Nina (Elena Verdugo) gets from the mopey, dopey Gregor. To make the romantic entanglements even more absurd, add in Rudi Polden (Martin Kosleck), a disgraced and de-licensed plastic surgeon who does all the sculpting at the wax museum and who is obsessed with Nina and resentful of Gregor.

Monet disappears after a quarrel with Gregor; Gregor can’t remember exactly what happened because he blacked-out (or had an amnesiac episode or something or other), so he naturally assumes that he killed her by screwing up his eyes at her like he did the heckler. Police inspector Brant (Douglass Dumbrille) investigates, but he seems far more interested in impressing Rudi with his command of Shakespearean monologues than he is in finding the body of Monet. And then Nina disappears, but for some reason Gregor doesn't blame himself for that one. A knife gets thrown at Gregor while searching for Nina, but he sort of shrugs it off and runs off to Maura's apartment instead of trying to figure out who had just tried to kill him. In the end, Gregor reunites with Maura for more telepathic squinting and the truth is revealed.

The "hypnotic eyes...crawling with madness!" promised by the theatrical poster

Despite the title, there is no ghost in the movie. Nor is there anything frozen. At best, there's a corpse that's kept cool in an air-conditioned room, but that's a far cry from the Chaney-in-a-block-of-ice ballyhoo that Universal recommended to theater operators in 1945:

ridiculous publicity stunt suggestion from Universal in 1945

If I had seen THE FROZEN GHOST for the first time on television in the late 1950s, I may have blamed its multiple gaps in narrative logic and continuity on interruptions by commercial advertising--- perhaps the TV station needed to cut holes in the movie to make room for the commercials and that's why it doesn't make much sense, I would've guessed. But watching this now on DVD reveals how generous an excuse that would have been.

More than likely, though, I would've overlooked the faults in basic story-telling because of the wax museum setting. Warner Bros.'s HOUSE OF WAX, a 3-D film starring Vincent Prince as the owner-operator of a sinister wax museum, had come out in April 1953 and had caused a bit of a sensation; presumably some of the SHOCK!-watchers in the late 1950s had seen and remembered HOUSE OF WAX, so maybe the eerie lure of haunted waxworks would've made up for the gaping plot deficiencies.

Wax museums are unsettling places, after all. They seem like an ideal setting for a horror movie because of all the not-alive-but-not-dead figures that populate them. Sigmund Freud wrote an interesting essay about this in 1919 called "The Uncanny," and it may be one of the things that he actually got right. Puppets, mannequins, waxworks figures, animatronic robots, ventriloquist dummies, hyper-realistic lifesize sculptures... there's something "not right" about these things that can be disturbing on a really deep psychological level, and a good horror movie can exploit that. Out of curiosity, I checked IMDb under the key word "wax museum" and came up with a bunch of titles: MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, TERROR IN THE WAX MUSEUM, MIDNIGHT AT MADAME TUSSAUD'S, NIGHTMARE IN WAX, MIDNIGHT MANHUNT, the "Waxworks" segment of THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD, CHARLIE CHAN AT THE WAX MUSEUM, DAS WACHSFIGURENKABINETT, and many others.

I've seen a lot of those films, and the "chamber of horrors" stuff done in them is often quite atmospheric, but unfortunately, Madame Monet's wax museum in THE FROZEN GHOST is not all that interesting or creepy. It would appear that Monet's house of wax features random (if not haphazard) tableaux from history (Attilla the Hun, Genghis Khan, Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette) and literature (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Lady MacBeth), as well as scenes of very recent squalid local domestic homicides that Inspector Brant worked on. It's a less than impressive collection, and it is that kind of squandered opportunity for chills which underscores the general frustration that I feel with a number of elements in THE FROZEN GHOST...at the very least, they could have gotten the creepy wax museum part right, you know? Still, I hope that it was enough to spook SHOCK! viewers in 1958.

El Paso [TX] Herald, July 12, 1958

The SHOCK! promotional book's material on THE FROZEN GHOST included a "TV News Release" story--- perhaps since the SHOCK! movies ran in many markets immediately following the evening news, it was hoped that such a fake story would provide a lead-in for the newscast viewers and coax them to hang around for the movie. The news story for THE FROZEN GHOST is titled "Lon Chaney Without Horror," and reads in part:

"It isn't often that Lon Chaney is given an opportunity to play a sympathetic part on the screen and to appear without the disguise of 'horror' makeup. This opportunity is given him in THE FROZEN GHOST, the Shock feature film presentation to be telecast on this channel [...] As a further change from custom, he gets the girl--- in this case, blonde and beautiful Evelyn Ankers [...] Harold Young directs an excellent cast in support of Mr. Chaney in this topnotch mystery thriller."

As I read this news release, I could only imagine the bubble-headed newsreaders on my local TV station in 2010 delivering this item and then engaging in light, pseudo-extemporaneous banter about THE FROZEN GHOST as the closing theme music began to roll and the weather forecaster pipes up with a quick reminder about tomorrow's outlook. Imagining such a scene amuses me far more than viewing the film itself does.

NEXT: " 'All Who Entered Are Doomed' was the curse of Ananka's tomb! Yet they dared enter to solve a terror-ridden secret 3000 years old. See Dick Foran in THE MUMMY'S HAND on SHOCK on this channel. You won't want to miss this exciting feature film. Tune in!"

SHOCK! Ballyhoo (#3): Good Night, Nurse!

2010-12-06T04:21:00.000-08:00

OK, technically, this is not SHOCK! ballyhoo--- it is from the "Showmanship" section of a theatrical pressbook for THE WOLF MAN and is intended for patrons in movie theater lobbies rather than TV viewers in 1957: a "first-aid booth" with cigarettes and chewing gum to soothe the nerves, candles for those afraid of the dark, spirits of ammonia (smelling salts) to bring consciousness back to those who have fainted out of fear, dye for those whose hair turned white from fear, and so on.

Though it was intended for movie-theater publicity well before the movie's stint on TV, I just can't resist including this here as part of my look at THE WOLF MAN on SHOCK!. For one thing, I like the explicit mention here of treating "those who suffer from 'thrill-shock'"--- I've been gathering stuff like this for a future web log entry on how the word "shock" was used (by Universal , Film Classics, and Realart) for horror films of the '30s and '40s and how this usage may have informed Screen Gems decision to title the syndication package SHOCK! in 1957. (Another example of "shock talk" from THE WOLF MAN's pressbook appears below.)

NIGHTMARE program and THE FROZEN GHOST

2010-12-05T13:49:00.000-08:00

KAKE-TV Nightmare's "The Host" (Tom Leahy) introduces THE FROZEN GHOST, damning Lon Chaney Jr. in the process. Poor Lon! With Rodney (Lee Parsons). Broadcast out of Wichita, Kansas, initially from 1958-59. [Hat tip: Gary L. Prange.]

THE WOLF MAN (1941)

2010-12-03T07:04:00.000-08:00

On December 5, 1957, in a town near Marion, Indiana, two gunmen forced their way into the home of Ted Edwards and his wife as they were entertaining a visit from Mrs. Edwards's sister and brother-in-law. Their faces covered by the upturned lapels of their raincoats, the intruders ordered the Edwards and their guests to turn off all the lights in the house except the TV. As one of the gunman sat in the living room with the hostages and watched television, the other took Edwards four miles by car to the furniture store where Edwards worked as manager. There, Edwards was forced to open the safe and hand over "several hundred dollars"; later, Edwards and the robber returned, and the two perpetrators made their getaway in the Edwards's car.

The reporter for the UPI syndicated story played up the coincidence that a community theater production of The Desperate Hours had been staged a mere six blocks from the furniture store as it was being plundered (you may have seen the 1955 Paramount movie version with Humphrey Bogart as one of a trio of escaped convicts who hold a suburban Indianapolis family hostage in their home), but I want to point to a different detail: while the safe at the store was being robbed, "Edwards said the second gunman stayed behind and watched THE WOLF MAN, a murder mystery show, on television while Mrs. Edwards and the guests lay on the floor, their hands and feet tied, for two hours."

My best guess is that the bandit who kept the hostages on ice was watching the Indianapolis CBS affiliate WISH-Channel 8 during the robbery. Channel 8 had purchased the SHOCK! package from Screen Gems and broadcast them on the "Fright Night" showcase Fridays at 10:45 PM (starting in Fall 1958, these films were to be horror-hosted at WISH-TV by Selwin). December 5, 1957--- the night of the furniture store safe robbery ---would have been the television broadcast premiere of THE WOLF MAN for that particular market. Because the robbery took two hours, the gunman was presumably able to watch the entire telecast. (There must be more to this story, right? Doesn't it seem strange that it took two hours to drive the eight miles to and from the furniture store from the Edwards home and burgle the safe that you knew the combination of?)

(And while I'm digressing: I guess describing THE WOLF MAN as "a murder mystery show" as the UPI story does seems a little peculiar, too. It was a popular film when it was released in 1941 and it enjoyed many theatrical re-releases, so certainly people recognized that it was more of a "horror melodrama" than a "murder mystery." But then look at this television listing for the movie:

Indiana [PA] Evening Gazette, Wednesday November 8, 1958

It is technically accurate, but would you synopsize the movie in that way? It would be like writing "A girl tries to run away from home when her dog is seized for destruction by a sheriff's order" as a description for THE WIZARD OF OZ.)

There's no denying that THE WOLF MAN is a classic, "classic" in the sense that it is "timeless in its relevance and accomplishment." Unlike DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, or THE MUMMY, there's very little creaky in THE WOLF MAN that needs to be excused as "a product of its time." Despite the faint whiff of trendy (for Hollywood in the 1940s) and oh-so-modern psychoanalytic theory that screenwriter Curt Siodmak wafts over the proceedings, THE WOLF MAN feels mythic--- it unspools like a fable or a fairy tale, following a tragic arc that we've seen a zillion times in literature and motion pictures but nonetheless manages to ring true as an insight into the human condition and experience. Somewhere between Mr. Hyde and the Incredible Hulk, the Wolf Man is a Jungian "shadow" that haunts each of us, forever threatening to slip out from under our very best and well-intentioned efforts to be good, civilized, disciplined, well-behaved, and nice to each other.

And because the struggle is intimately familiar to all of us, the monster is one that arouses sympathy as well as fear. When that dark side breaks loose inside of us (to return to Marion, IN, for a second, it is that feeling that we are all helpless hostages to our own home-invading gunmen), there is a terrible feeling of dismay and the dread feeling that it will happen again. When it appeared on TV as part of SHOCK!, THE WOLF MAN may have had a special connection to people living in the anxious Cold War atmosphere of the late 1950s where conformity and self-restraint were seen as vital components of homeland security (I recommend K.A. Cuordileone's Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War for deeper meditations on all that).

It's no surprise, really, that THE WOLF MAN has forever set the standard for reluctant, doomed lycanthropes that have shown up on movie and TV screens since 1941. For example, Paul Naschy's hombre lobo, Waldemar Daninsky, uses Lon Chaney, Jr.'s Talbot/werewolf as a point of reference and a touchstone; Naschy, whose films are so obviously inspired by the Universal horror classics, makes the werewolf his own, but he does so in a way that references Chaney's Talbot and then continues that arc into his own work. In the process, Naschy's hombre lobo is not some derivative rip-off, but a deeper exploration of familiar ground. I'll probably never bother to get around to seeing Benicio del Toro's THE WOLF MAN from earlier this year, but I can't imagine that he does anything to improve or expand upon Chaney's work that Naschy hadn't already done (and with a lot less money).

But still, I have to say that--- as iconic as it is --Chaney's Talbot is a little over his head. Though he's damn good as the ferocious and fearsome werewolf, Lon is painfully miscast as the gentry scion of Talbot Castle and estates. Chaney doesn't seem to get "tragedy" in the dramatic sense and plays it instead as a privileged bratty guy who feels entitled to a better shake than what he's getting. I was watching Edmund O'Brien in D.O.A. (1950) the other night; O'Brien's character follows a very similar arc to Chaney's Talbot--- cocky, self-assured guy has the bottom drop out and then he discovers that "the way he walks is thorny, through no fault of his own." He is suddenly at war with terrifying lethal forces inside of his body that he can't understand. Maybe it's not fair to compare Chaney to O'Brien, but if you can imagine the latter's work in D.O.A. as Talbot, then you can see what I mean.

Claude Rains is spot-on as Sir John; usually you can depend on Rains to chew up the scenery like a termite, but his performance here is understated and restrained, as if he didn't want to thoroughly swamp Chaney (or Ralph Bellamy, for that matter) in his scenes. Evelyn Ankers is completely unbelievable as the small-town Welsh girl, but she does an excellent job acting emotionally drawn to a charisma-less creep who has been spying on her bedroom with a telescope and who won't take "no" for an answer (her acting is even more impressive when you read about the behind-the-scenes friction between Ankers and Chaney on the set). And props to Maria Ouspenskaya for her work, too--- the scenes between Maleva and Talbot are Chaney's worst work in THE WOLF MAN, but Ouspenskaya keeps it together well. Finally, I want to say that it's too bad that budget and shooting schedule wouldn't allow for Lugosi's gypsy werewolf to get the full make-up treatment... I would've loved to see that.

Chester [PA] Times, Saturday October 25, 1958

Nowadays, sadly, "late late show" refers to a celebrity publicity-driven talkshows hosted by smug chuckleheads rather than interesting overnight movie presentations.

NEXT: "A behind-the-scenes view of murder in a wax museum will thrill you when SHOCK presents Lon Chaney in THE FROZEN GHOST on this channel!"

THE WOLF MAN preview

2010-11-30T20:48:00.000-08:00

"A night monster...prowling, killing, terrifying a countryside. Don't miss the Hollywood SHOCK dramatic feature-length sensation THE WOLF MAN starring Lon Chaney and Ralph Bellamy on this channel! For thrill-packed drama at its best, see THE WOLF MAN!"

SECRET OF THE CHATEAU (1934)

2010-11-29T04:55:00.000-08:00

It's not uncommon for a murder-mystery-in-an-old-dark-manor-house to masquerade as a horror movie. Some people feel cheated by this; I know that, as a kid waiting all week for a monster flick and then sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night to see it, I was furious when this sort of bait-and-switch happened. For instance, I can recall being particularly incensed to learn that CASTLE IN THE DESERT--- which is a delightfully evocative horror movie title to see listed in a TV guide--- was actually a Charlie Chan picture without a monster.

But I've mellowed in my old age, and I'm far more tolerant of these titles. Truth be told, I admit that I enjoy them enough to actively seek them out. The plots are ridiculously improbable, the action is contrived, and the characters are shallow caricatures meant only as future murder victims or red herrings. But I like the mood and the ambiance and the art direction of these spooky murder-mysteries even if no monster ever materializes (a typical example would be one that finally came out on DVD a few months back, 1939's THE CAT AND THE CANARY).

But SECRET OF THE CHATEAU is not a spooky murder-mystery pretending that it is a horror movie. It's even more frustrating than that--- it's a crime film pretending that it is a spooky murder-mystery that is trying to slide in under the "horror movie" radar. It's not a bad picture on its own merits; it is competently made and features perfectly acceptable performances. But as it is put forward as a Universal horror movie, it is exasperating. The Brunas brothers and Tom Weaver in Universal Horrors blame the studio's publicity and marketing offices that promoted the movie in 1934 with eerie old-dark-house tag lines such as "Shadows Come to Life! Traps Snare Women! Trunks Swallow Men! Bells Toll Out Death!" in order to lure in audiences:

Clearfield [PA] Progress, December 31, 1934

And look at the one-sheet (designed by Karoly Grosz, maybe?) at the top of this post: an ectoplasmic monster with hooked claws looming over a frightened, fleeing crowd of silhouetted figures backlit by what appears to be a lightning strike. The titular chateau appears at the right, dark and foreboding (here's how it actually appears in the movie, bathed in bright sunshine:)

The most "horror movie" thing about SECRET OF THE CHATEAU (and there is no "secret" about the chateau, by the way, other than it has no electricity and has only one bathroom for 27 bedrooms) is the threat of the infamous murderer/rare-book thief known only as "Prahec." For at least ten years, Prahec has been cutting throats to obtain rare books, and this time around she or he has set his sights on a previously undiscovered Gutenberg Bible from the mid-1400s (there's only twenty or so complete Gutenberg Bibles today) whose value is set at a million francs. The Bible is stashed in an alarmed cabinet-trunk at a chateau in south-central France in the town of Aubazine, and there are a couple of heirs vying for it. An ex-con rare-book thief named Julie Verlaine (a charming Claire Dodd) weasels her way into the chateau just as the executor of the estate has assembled a small group of interested persons.

Pursuing Prahec is the Sûreté inspector Marotte (Ferdinand Gottschalk); he had previously arrested Julie and he turns up at the chateau just as bodies begin piling up. Marotte gets a morbid thrill from the crimes ("What a beautiful murder!" he says at one crime scene. "How delightful!") and he likes to brag about himself in the third person singular, but his ratiocination skills aren't much in evidence right up to the time that Prahec's identity is revealed. Mention should be made, as well, of the irritatingly un-funny comic relief (George E. Stone, who you might recognize from the Boston Blackie pictures of the 1940s).

Julie prowling around the chateau after dark

Within the context of my viewing project, I found the most interesting thing about SECRET OF THE CHATEAU was how its release to TV as part of the SHOCK! package has horrorized it over the years--- it's as if the deceptions made by Universal publicity agents in 1934 have continued unchallenged for decades afterward, even when it is clear that this is not even an old dark house mystery, let alone a horror movie. But it somehow attained a horror movie momentum on TV for decades. In fact, based on my (admittedly limited and perhaps statistically unsound) research, it would appear that SECRET OF THE CHATEAU was programmed as late-night horror movie fare far more in the 1970s than it was from 1957-1968.

SECRET OF THE CHATEAU turned up a lot in those Friday and Saturday night horror/sci-fi movie TV showcases in the 1970s. Sir Graves Ghastly, Son of Svengoolie, and the Fearmonger have all hosted (and, presumably, roasted) it; I've seen listings for SECRET OF THE CHATEAU that have double- and triple-featured it with SON OF DRACULA, MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, THE CONQUEROR WORM, THE MUMMY’S CURSE, WEREWOLF OF LONDON, and TARANTULA. In one 1974 listing for the Boston television market, I saw SECRET OF THE CHATEAU screened as part of the "Classic Horror Feature" showcase at 1 AM following the horror-hosted "Simon's Sanctorum" on WCVB-Channel 5. Here are some other instances of SECRET OF THE CHATEAU's horrorization in the 1970s:

Salt Lake City [UT] Tribune, Saturday July 2o, 1974

Simpson's Leader-Times, Kittanning, PA, Saturday September 3, 1977

I think that, more than any other non-horror movie included in SHOCK!, SECRET OF THE CHATEAU has succeeded in passing for a horror movie for decades. So how did this happen? I can understand if it was shown a lot when it first came out in SHOCK! in 1957 since the novelty was fresh and the movie pickings were slim. But why so prevalent in the 1970s, when folks presumably had had about ten years to realize that this wasn't really a horror movie at all? And why does SECRET OF THE CHATEAU have a horror movie afterlife that it may never shake off, but other non-horror mysteries that were "Shock!"-packaged for TV by Screen Gems (like THE LAST WARNING, NIGHTMARE or MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM) have managed to avoid being classified as such throughout the decades?

NEXT: "A night monster...prowling, killing, terrifying a countryside. Don't miss the Hollywood SHOCK dramatic feature-length sensation THE WOLF MAN starring Lon Chaney and Ralph Bellamy on this channel! For thrill-packed drama at its best, see THE WOLF MAN!"

Shock It To Me - Forthcoming Book

2010-11-27T07:31:00.000-08:00

Coming up early next year (March or April) will be a book on the horror hosts and horror Shock Theater-type programming of the San Francisco area. Titled SHOCK IT TO ME, The Featured Creatures of Bay Area TV, and written by Michael Monahan (Doktor Goulfinger), the book promises to contain a wealth of information, exquisitely researched, on the following hosts:

Terrence (Jr. and Sr.)
The Cool Ghoul
Asmodeus
Bob Wilkins
The Ghoul (syndicated)
Tom B. Stone
John Stanley
Son of Svengoolie
Creepy KOFY Movie Time (with No Name and Balrok)
Ms. Monster

... and unhosted shows and later entries like Commander USA and Elvira.

Previously unpublished photos and rare ads will serve as visual treats and the kindling of memories, even if you don't have them! The book will be published in conjunction with AMERICAN SCARY, a book version of the documentary that Michael was involved with.

We wish Michael the best on these projects and very much look forward to reading his books.

And here are a couple of ad mats from the Ghoulfinger Archives, courtesy of Michael:

Our Lady of Horrors: Vampira's Programming, Part 2

2010-11-25T07:23:00.000-08:00

What follows is another update on the pre-SHOCK! films hosted by Vampira. After reading my post last week, doctor kiss contacted me to say that he had some corrections and refinements to the original list that I had used.

In his note, doctor kiss said that he took some time to scour California newspaper TV listings for KABC during the run of Vampira's show, concluding that "although most of what I found corresponded with Dick Nitelinger's list, there were a couple of notable discrepancies among the early episodes (5/1/54 and 5/29/54), as well as the final movie (4/2/55) having been announced as a Vampira episode, but in fact ending up being shown with no host."

He goes on to say that programming did not begin as "The Vampira Show," but rather as "Lady of Horrors." The doctor explains: "The first five shows from 5/1/54 through 5/29/54 were billed in publicity, press reports, and TV listings as 'Lady of Horrors,' and it was only following Vampira's swift rise to fame did the show become billed as 'Vampira' from 6/5/54 onwards."

What follows are excerpts from doctor kiss's extensive research notes. I am putting these up here as insight to the origins of the Monster Culture revolution in the 1950s and to aid any future Vampira researcher who stumbles upon this blog:

5/1/1954 – all sources consulted from Bakersfield, Long Beach, and Van Nuys name WHITE ZOMBIE as the movie being shown on "Lady of Horrors" that night, and both the Long Beach Independent and Long Beach Press-Telegram additionally name Bela Lugosi as the star. (Nitelinger identifies THE CHARGE IS MURDER as the film shown).

The shift from a midnight slot to an 11pm slot beginning on 5/29/54 is attributed in all sources consulted to the KABC song-and-dance/variety show “Party at Ciro's” (which previously filled the 11pm slot) having lost its sponsor.

5/29/54 – all sources consulted from Bakersfield, Long Beach, and Van Nuys name CONDEMNED TO LIVE as the movie being shown on "Lady of Horrors" that night, and both the Long Beach Independent and Long Beach Press-Telegram additionally name Ralph Morgan and Mischa Auer as the stars. (Nitelinger identifies CORRIDOR OF MIRRORS as the film shown).

6/5/54 – none of the sources consulted name the film being shown on this date; Nitelinger reported the same situation in the Los Angeles press. This was the first date on which the show was billed as "Vampira" rather than "Lady of Horrors."

8/7/54 – Vampira appeared on two shows on this night, the earlier of which constituted her first appearance on a nationally-syndicated network show, "The Saturday Night Revue," hosted by Ben Blue. The show aired at 9pm on KNBH in the Los Angeles area; Blue's other guest that night was George Jessel. Vampira hosted DANGEROUS INTRUDER (1945) during her regular 11pm slot on KABC.

Ellis Walker's “Video Notes” column in the Hayward Daily Review (CA) of 8/7/54: “Ben Blue figures his stint on Saturday Night Revue tonight at 9 (KRON) will be about as jolly as a tour through the morgue. He'll introduce Vampira to the nation's televiewers. This doll hopes she kills the audience. Really.”

John Frederick's “Looking and Listening” column in the Long Beach Press-Telegram of 8/7/54: “Vampira to do haunting on 'Saturday Night Revue.' Ghoulish glamour girl Vampira of the KABC (7) 11p.m. mystery theater, will move over to KNBH (4) at 9p.m. to do a guest stint with George Jessel and Ben Blue on the 'Saturday Night Revue.' Jessel subs for Eddie Albert and Ben Blue gets involved with Vampira in her 'most horrible home in the world.'”

9/18/54 – RED DRAGON (1954).

John Frederick's “Looking and Listening” column in the Long Beach Press-Telegram of 9/18/54: “Vampira, the amazing glamour-ghoul (7) at 11p.m., will take a bath during the show. Naturally it'll be in a cauldron of fire fanned by gasoline.”

9/25/54 – THE MISSING HEIRESS. Both the Long Beach Independent and Long Beach Press-Telegram give a longer version of the film's title, as THE CASE OF THE MISSING HEIRESS [a confirmation of my own guess at identifying it in last week's post].

10/23/54 – THE SHADOW RETURNS (1946).

Terry Vernon's “Tele-Vues” column in the Long Beach Independent of 10/23/54: “Vampira, who'll be dining at Brower's in Long Beach on Thursday evening, will do a poison-to-poison interview with sponsor Fletcher Jones on her 11p.m. horror show on (7). Vampira opens at the Orpheum Theatre on Oct.29-30 in a stage horror show for Halloween.”

[10/28/54] As promoted on her 10/23/54 show, Vampira was the special guest interviewee on KFOX radio program ON THE AIR WITH DON MAY, broadcasting a Halloween-themed show from Belmont Shore that ran from 11pm to 1am. Vampira was billed in advertising as the “best lookin' spook in town.”

10/30/54 – KING OF THE ZOMBIES (1941).

Terry Vernon's “Tele-Vues” column in the Long Beach Independent of 10/30/54: “Vampira, the dream ghoul of (7) at 11p.m. will have a special show for this Halloween with fun and games for her friends (?). Formaldehyde-and-seek, bobbing for poison apples and other such games will be played and refreshments will include sui-cider and Thirteen Up.”

11/6/54 – Vampira appeared on two shows on this night, the first of which was a postponed Halloween episode of nationally-syndicated show PLACE THE FACE, hosted by Bill Cullen. The show aired in the Los Angeles area at 8.30pm on KNBH, and Cullen's other guests that night were Pat O'Brien and Tony Martin. Vampira hosted DOOMED TO DIE (1940) during her regular 11pm slot on KABC.

Ralph W. Shelden's “TV Hilites” column in the Elyria Chronicle Telegram (OH) of 11/6/54: “The October 30 'Place the Face' show was pre-empted by a political speech and will be carried over for the show of tonight on Channel 3 at 8.30. Scheduled to appear as a special guest is Vampira, TV's most frightening glamour girl. Vampira, who resembles a character in a Charles Addams cartoon, has created quite a stir throughout the country even though her TV show is seen only in the West.”

11/27/54 – DEAR MURDER (1947).

Terry Vernon's “Tele-Vues” column in the Long Beach Independent of 11/27/54: “Vampira (7) at 11p.m., will take her flying hearse to Decadence Manor for a Thanksgiving dinner of young Tom Vulture. Rest of the dinner menu includes Sparkling Arsenic, Sour Potatoes, dressing of head crumbs and tid-bits of toes, crank-berry sauce and dead lettuce salad.”

12/4/54 – CASTLES OF DOOM. John Frederick asserts below that the show's sponsor had agreed to another 26 episodes at this point.

John Frederick's “Looking and Listening” column in the Long Beach Press-Telegram of 12/4/54: “'Vampyre,' a French horror film of 1930 (silent) but said to be terrifying, will be offered by Vampira on (7) at 11p.m. The glamour ghoul is quite happy since Fletcher Jones, her sponsor, just dipped a vulture into a blood bank and signed a new 26-week contract.”

12/18/54 – RETURN OF THE APE MAN (1944). Show had a seasonal theme.

Terry Vernon's “Tele-Vues” column in the Long Beach Independent of 12/18/54: “Vampira (7) at 11p.m. goes Christmas chopping to fill her hate list.”

1/29/55 – CASE OF THE GUARDIAN ANGEL. Both the Long Beach Independent and Long Beach Press-Telegram additionally name Hugh Latimer as the star [this seems to confirm my previous attempt at identifying the film in last week's blog post].

Terry Vernon's “Tele-Vues” column in the Long Beach Independent of 1/29/55: “Vampira will receive the first 'Black Skull of Death Award' from the Mystery Writers of America during her show on (7) at 11p.m. Along with the mounted death head will be an assortment of weapons that have been featured in mystery stories written by the famous authors.”

John Frederick's “Looking and Listening” column in the Long Beach Press-Telegram of 1/29/55: “Vampira, the glamour ghoul of (7) at 11p.m., will be given the first 'Black Skull of Death Award' for her outstanding work as the most 'nightmarish ghoul of 1954' by the Mystery Writers of America.”

2/5/55 – LADY CHASER (1946).

Terry Vernon's “Tele-Vues” column in the Long Beach Independent of 2/5/55: “Vampira (7) at 11p.m. visits the spider pound to reclaim her black-widow spider.”

The shift from an 11pm slot to a 10.30pm slot beginning on 3/5/55 was identified in all sources consulted as part of a general adjustment of the KABC evening schedule after the station stopped showing live boxing matches from the Hollywood Legion Stadium on a Saturday night.

Terry Vernon's “Tele-Vues” column in the Long Beach Independent of 3/5/55: “At 8p.m. in this program realignment an old movie will take over and Vampira will do her ghoulish hostessing starting at 10.30p.m. instead of 11. This will all combine to fill the former boxing time, but we doubt that it'll improve the station's audience much.”

3/12/55 – Vampira appeared on two live shows on this night. She was a special guest on AL JANIS' HI-JINX on Channel 7 (KABC) at 9pm, in addition to hosting GLASS ALIBI (1946) during her regular slot on the station at 10.30pm.

John Frederick's “Looking and Listening” column in the Long Beach Press-Telegram of 3/12/55: “Al Jarvis will help Vampira introduce the new dance 'Vampira Vamp' during his “Hi-Jinx” on (7) at 9p.m.”

4/2/55 – Nitelinger identifies THE WOMAN WHO CAME BACK (1945) as the final film hosted by Vampira. However, although initially announced as being hosted by her, Vampira's show was canceled prior to broadcast, and the movie was instead shown without a host as the first feature in KABC's "Nitecap Theater" package, which continued in subsequent weeks with MR. WONG, DETECTIVE (1938; 4/9/55), GANG BULLETS (1938; 4/16/55), THE BATTLE OF THE RAILS (1946; 4/23/55), and THE STRANGE MR. GREGORY (1945; 4/30/55).

Vampira instead appeared at 10pm on Channel 4 (KNBH), as a last-minute addition to the line-up of the nationally syndicated GEORGE GOBEL SHOW, reviewed (incorrectly) as her first network appearance; Gobel's other (surprise) guest that night was Fred Allen.

Many thanks to doctor kiss for looking into this in more detail and for sharing his findings. What (very) little research that I have done on Vampira seems more concerned with her persona, her popularity, and her impact; so far, I haven't seen much said at all about which old wine she poured into new bottles on her show. This re-packaging of horror and murder-mysteries for TV is one of the important precursors to SHOCK!.

Vampira with Béla Lugosi on "The Red Skelton Show," October 1954

THE SPY RING (1938)

2010-11-23T04:00:00.000-08:00

ad mat for theatrical release, January 1938

Imagine it is Saturday night, March 21, 1959. You live in northwest-central Ohio in a home with a decent television antenna so that you can pick up Channel 6 (WTVN, Columbus), Channel 10 (WBNS, Columbus) and Channel 11 (WTOL, Toledo). You are in the mood for a late-night thriller-chiller movie, so you check the listings:

Lima [OH] News, March 21, 1959

At midnight, Channel 10’s “Mystery Theater” gives you something called STRANGE TRIANGLE (or does this start at 12:30? The listing is a little confusing); at 12:15, Channel 11’s “Shock Theater” has THE HOUSE OF DRACULA, and Channel 6’s “Shock Theater” has THE SPY RING at 12:30. There are no synopses here in the newspaper, there are no books that provide you with a description of these movies, and there is no IMDb to check on the internet; because it’s 1959, you can’t record one broadcast while watching the other, so you need to either choose one or flick back and forth (on a rotary tuner ---no remote control) between the three. Because you liked “I Was a Communist for the FBI” on the radio (1952-53) and watched the “I Led Three Lives” TV series (1953-56), you choose THE SPY RING.

Two officers from the US Calvary are in Washington DC developing the CQ, an experimental machine gun with a special firing mechanism (nicknamed “the weenie,” believe it or not!) that would increase the weapon's accuracy and efficiency (I guess?) enough to “revolutionize anti-aircraft defense.”

inspecting machine-gunned mannequins at the US Army proving grounds

the top-secret weenie

our hero

When one of the officers is killed by a free-lance spy who is after the CQ, the other Calvary captain, Todd “Dude” Hayden (William Hall, whose beefy face and toothy smile remind me of a young Ernest Borgnine) is assigned by Military Intelligence to complete the research and bust the espionage organization. He travels back to his regiment in Monterey to continue work on the invention, to spy-hunt, and to romance Elaine Burdette (Jane Wyman), his colonel’s daughter. And wouldn’t you know it? Hayden’s challenger for Elaine’s affections, Frank Denton (Leon Ames), turns out to be a key operative in the spy-for-hire organization and his #1 rival in the big polo championship tournament.

Oh yes, I said “polo"--- that sport where teams of people ride around on horses and hit a ball with a long-handled mallet. When I began this SHOCK! / Son of SHOCK! Viewing Project, I looked forward to blogging about ideas and images that I hadn’t encountered before, but I never expected to find myself writing about polo. And there is (what I suppose is) an exciting polo match in the second half of the picture, but I was too stunned by the fact that I was watching polo in a SHOCK! film to really appreciate it.

Director Joseph H. Lewis--- whose work in MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS (1945), GUN CRAZY (1949) and THE BIG COMBO (1955) intrigues me every time I see it ---has a few interesting camera-moves and set-ups here. Lewis shoots through walls, over car hoods, under horses' bellies, behind fireplaces, and catches reflections in mirrors and glasses of champagne; in a private moment between Hayden and Elaine, the camera moves voyeuristically through tree branches like those FRIDAY THE 13TH p.o.v. shots. Lewis pulls off a good nighttime car chase in middle of the movie that I think might be the highlight for thrill-hungry viewers. (Incidentally, the spy ring’s chauffeur who is captured and interrogated by Hayden is played by Paul Sutton, who was the voice of Canadian Mountie Sergeant William Preston on Mutual’s "Challenge of the Yukon" radio show in the early 1950s; at the time that THE SPY RING appeared on SHOCK!, Sutton had twice failed to win his campaign for US Congress as a Democrat from Michigan.)

two years before marrying Ronald Reagan & fifty years before "Falcon Crest"

I am speculating that THE SPY RING went out for TV syndication because of the presence of Jane Wyman. When the film was released originally in 1938, William Hall was given top billing (Béla Lugosi fans might recognize Hall for his bit-part as hood in POSTAL INSPECTOR; he also show's up very briefly in Universal's MAN MADE MONSTER, a SHOCK! title). But Hall never really did much lead-acting after THE SPY RING. Jane Wyman, however, is a different story.

Wyman's character in THE SPY RING is the ingénue (Esther Ralston's role as the icy spymaster Jean Bruce is a much juicier). Among other bits of fluff, she fatuously flirts with Denton to gain the attentions of Hayden and predictably ends up as a pouty hostage of the spy ring. In short, Wyman's work here is lightweight, but she was such a huge star in the 1940s and 1950s that she gets top-billing in almost every TV listing for THE SPY RING that I saw in newspapers from 1957 and 1962; the Screen Gems SHOCK! booklet's entry for THE SPY RING centers around Wyman (for example: "starring in the picture is Jane Wyman and her co-star is William Hall") and it provides stations with a quick biography crafted to be used as a "Shock Theater" plug (the same year SHOCK! hit the airwaves, she was nominated for an Emmy for her work on "Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theater"). Because of Wyman's presence in the movie, THE SPY RING got a lot of play at various times throughout the day on television, in the late '50s and early '60s, appearing far more as an afternoon feature than on late-night chiller horror theater showcases.

In retrospect, I think that you should’ve stuck with Channel 10 or 11 on that night in March 1959. STRANGE TRIANGLE, it turns out, is a 1946 B-movie crime melodrama from Fox involving bank embezzling, blackmail, and Signe Hasso as the femme fatale... after seeing the trailer on YouTube, it certainly seems like it was a perverse enough noir-lite to catch one's attention in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, THE HOUSE OF DRACULA, a Son of SHOCK! title from 1945, offered a heaping helping of monsters. In comparison, THE SPY RING is a forgettable disappointment as a "Shock Theater" title.

NEXT: "The hollow ringing of a great bell always precedes murder on SHOCK's full-length feature THE SECRET OF THE CHATEAU, telecast on this channel!"

THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1942)

2010-11-20T15:38:00.000-08:00

Thirty years after an American archaeological expedition led by Professor Stephen Banning (Dick Foran) broke into the ancient tomb of Princess Ananka, the High Priests of Karnak finally get around to exacting their terrible revenge. They dispatch Mehmet Bey (Turhan Bey at his swarthiest) and his shuffling, loping, one-armed undead killing machine Kharis (Lon Chaney, Jr., Tom Tyler, or Eddie Parker, depending on which scene you're looking at) to the provincial New England town where Banning and his family live. Sacred vengeance is derailed, however, when Mehmet starts lusting after a blond white woman (Elyse Knox) who is engaged to Banning's smug physician-son, John (John Hubbard) and diverts the mummy from his murderous mission by assigning him the job of abducting virgins.

This is a silly, poorly-written movie that relies heavily on recycled footage from THE MUMMY'S HAND and a series of trite newspaper front-page montages for exposition. And John Banning is an annoying hero--- his rapid emotional recovery from the horrific deaths of his father and his aunt in their own house seems particularly callous, and it only gets worse when he threatens Mehmet with torture (Hippocratic Oath be damned!) and encourages the club-and-torch-wielding mob of local yokels to burn down his ancestral home. Aside from the wonderful night-for-night photography, the film's direction is flat, unimaginative, and overly literal, all of which makes for rather dull viewing.

But I am being way too rough on THE MUMMY'S TOMB. It's an hour-long and has a kind of pulp/comic-book action pace that doesn't skimp on the monster quotient. There's no need for me to be such a snob about it--- it was fun when I first saw it on TV in the early 1970s and I would go across town in a heartbeat to see it projected onto a movie screen tonight. But I am such an avid fan of the 1932 THE MUMMY that I unfairly want a little more out of this one, that's all...

Apparently, the movie put up good box-office numbers in 1942 and enjoyed a prosperous re-release afterlife. By the time THE MUMMY'S TOMB hit the TV screens in the late 1950s, viewers who had missed the movie in earlier days may had at least seen 1955's ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE MUMMY--- a tedious farce featuring a mummy named Klaris (Eddie Parker again) who defends the tomb of an Egyptian princess from treasure hunters ---so the mummy-as-monster idea was a familiar one. The World War II-era references in THE MUMMY'S TOMB (there's a mention of bandleader Jan Garber and the Russian Front, while John Banning's draft notice is a plot point that kicks the kidnapping plan into high gear) may have dated the film when it appeared on TV as part of SHOCK!. So, too, did the billing of Lon Chaney, Jr. as the mute mummy, as the actor was at that time appearing as Chingachgook in the half-hour Western TV series "Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans." But despite all that, I would wager that THE MUMMY'S TOMB did a lot to haul viewers in and grow the reputation of SHOCK! on TV.

Salt Lake City Tribune, Saturday March 28, 1959

NEXT: "An inventor is killed and another takes his place only to find his own life threatened. Don't miss the thrills and action in THE SPY RING, starring Jane Wyman. It's on SHOCK over this channel!"

Update: Vampira & CASTLES OF DOOM

2010-11-18T19:56:00.000-08:00

I want to continue on the Vampira tangent that I veered towards with my last post. Yesterday, I put up a list of films that were part of Vampira's show; one of the tidbits that I stumbled upon was a listing for the film CASTLES OF DOOM which was shown on December 4, 1954. I couldn't find any information anywhere about a movie by this name, and I speculated that it could have been instead THE CASTLE OF DOOM, the name given for the re-edited English-language-dubbed cut of Carl Theodor Dreyer's haunting and disorienting horror film of 1932, VAMPYR.

I raised my theory about CASTLES OF DOOM over at the Classic Horror Film Board; doctor kiss responded (his post at CHFB is here) with this wonderful find from the Long Beach Independent (CA), December 4th, 1954:

As doctor kiss points out, "this must have been the very first TV screening of VAMPYR in any form." Considering what a well-regarded classic of the horror genre that film is today, this broadcast by Vampira is a historic one, despite the fact that THE CASTLE OF DOOM version of VAMPYR is quite a mangled version of the original.

In that same thread on the Classic Horror Film Board, Jacque Lecotier explained a little bit about the differences between THE CASTLE OF DOOM and VAMPYR (original post here). He speculated that, since there weren't censorship records at the New York State Archives for THE CASTLE OF DOOM, the 60-minute film may have been a used in roadshows, an idea which opens up a whole new avenue for exploring the intersection between exploitation and Expressionism. (Copies of THE CASTLE OF DOOM are available today through less-than-legal dealers in "collector" DVDs, but I recommend the Criterion release of VAMPYR from last year for those who have never seen the film and would like to explore it.)

But one last nagging question: was the CASTLES OF DOOM title for Vampira's broadcast merely the product of typographical error, or was there yet another cut of the film different from THE CASTLE OF DOOM that was shown on Vampira's program?

Vampira's Pre-SHOCK! Programming, 1954-55

2010-11-17T18:35:00.000-08:00

How and why did distinctly non-horror action-suspense melodramas get included in the SHOCK! syndicated movie package? I raised this question in a recent post on ENEMY AGENT for this viewing project, and my search for an explanation continues. One hunch that I had was to search for a pre-SHOCK! precedent, and the one that jumps most immediately to mind is the work of Vampira over KABC-Channel 7 from 1954-55. (A few weeks back, Mirek put up a post on Vampira and her horror-hosting.) I've often heard that Vampira's offerings were more murder-mystery than horror, so I dug around a little bit to see if she included any spy movies that might have been the precursor to the Screen Gems decision to include such titles in the SHOCK! collection.

Now, I didn't find any mention of ENEMY AGENT-kinds of thrillers, but I was surprised by some of the other movies that she used for her show. I haven't seen all of them, but many are favorites of mine (though I don't think I would call all of them "good" movies, really). All in all, I found this to be a solid and entertaining line-up that I would love to be able to see... most seem to be in the public domain, so maybe some history-minded contemporary public-access TV horror host can replicate Vampira's schedule. Otherwise, the next best thing that I can hope for is that perhaps someone can start a "Vampira Viewing Project Blog."

Friday Night at 11:00 p.m.

04/30/1954 "Dig Me Later, Vampira" (Preview Show)

Saturday Nights/Sunday Mornings at Midnight

05/01/1954 THE CHARGE IS MURDER. I’m not sure about this one, but one possibility is that it is the English-dubbed-for-TV version of the Italian thriller ATTO DI ACCUSA (1950): A wealthy lawyer discovers his wife has been having an affair; in revenge, the lawyer frames his wife’s lover by murdering the landlord of their love-nest apartment.

05/08/1954 THE FACE OF MARBLE (1946, Monogram). A mad scientist trying to reanimate the dead clashes with his housekeeper’s voodoo practices.

05/15/1954 REVENGE OF ZOMBIES (1943, Monogram). A mad scientist in the Cambodian jungle creates an unstoppable zombie army for the Nazi war effort.

05/22/1954 FOG ISLAND (1945, PRC). The search for hidden treasure in a mansion on a remote island becomes an exercise in murderous revenge.

Saturday Nights at 11:00 p.m.

05/29/1954 CORRIDOR OF MIRRORS (1948, Apollo). British film made in France about reincarnated lovers.

06/05/1954 Not listed, but probably WHITE ZOMBIE (1932, Halperin Productions). A woman becomes the zombie slave of a cruel voodoo practitioner.

06/12/1954 DEVIL BAT’S DAUGHTER (1946, PRC). The daughter of an accused mad scientist tries to uncover the truth about her dad’s experiments and nearly goes crazy in the process.

06/19/1954 THE FLYING SERPENT (1946, PRC). Murderous archaeologist commands a primordial Aztec god-monster to kill his enemies.

06/26/1954 THE MASK OF DIJON (1946, PRC). A mad magician discovers that he has the power to hypnotize and uses it bring death to his enemies.

07/03/1954 THE STRANGE MR. GREGORY (1946, PRC). A villainous magician fakes his death in order to frame his romantic rival.

07/10/1954 THE MAN WITH TWO LIVES (1942, Monogram) A man brought back to life by a mad scientist finds his body taken over by the soul of an executed gangster.

07/17/1954 CORRIDOR OF MIRRORS. See 05/29/1954

07/24/1954 FEAR (1946, Monogram) An impoverished and desperate student agrees to murder a loan shark for cash.

07/31/1954 ROGUE’S TAVERN (1936, Mercury Pictures Corporation). Shady guests at a remote inn are killed by a vicious dog prowling the grounds. Or are they?

08/07/1954 DANGEROUS INTRUDER (1945, PRC) A hitchhiking out-of-work actress is struck by a car; when the driver’s wife later turns up dead, the actress searches for the killer.

08/14/1954 MYSTERY OF THE 13^th GUEST (1943, Monogram). A masked killer murders people one-by-one in an old dark house.

08/21/1954 MIDNIGHT LIMITED (1940, Monogram). The Phantom Robber plunders and murders passengers on a luxury train; a detective and his pretty assistant go undercover to catch him.

08/28/1954 BLUEBEARD (1944, PRC). A puppeteer in 19^th-century Paris is a serial killer.

09/04/1954 MISSING LADY (1946, Monogram). An entry in Monogram’s “The Shadow” series. Lamont Cranston is accused of stealing a jade statue and murdering the witnesses.

09/11/1954 MURDER BY INVITATION (1941, Monogram) The scheming relatives of a rich old woman are gathered at her mansion for the weekend to decide the terms of the inheritance and are bumped off one at a time.

09/18/1954 RED DRAGON (1945, Monogram) Charlie Chan in Mexico City investigates three murders and the theft of some atomic secrets.

09/25/1954 THE MISSING HEIRESS. It’s not clear, but I think that this might be a British film called DR. MORELLE: THE CASE OF THE MISSING HEIRESS (1949, Hammer) ; it's a movie about a sleuthing hypnotist searching for clues to young woman who stands to inherit a pile of money who has disappeared from her family’s mansion.

10/02/1954 THE MISSING CORPSE (1945, PRC). A comedy-mystery about a newspaper publisher who opens the trunk of his car to find the dead body of his professional rival.

10/09/1954 THE FATAL HOUR (1940, Monogram). Mr. Wong is on the case when police captain Street’s best friend is murdered at the San Francisco docks by smugglers.

10/16/1954 PHANTOM KILLER (1942, Monogram). A city district-attorney is convinced that a celebrated deaf-mute philanthropist is responsible for several murders despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary.

10/23/1954 THE SHADOW RETURNS (1946, Monogram). Lamont Cranston unravels a case involving a secret laboratory, fake jewels, and murder.

10/30/1954 KING OF THE ZOMBIES (1941, Monogram). A Navy officer's plane goes down in a storm and crash lands on a Caribbean island where a voodoo master works to create zombies for a dangerous unnamed foreign power.

11/06/1954 DOOMED TO DIE (1940, Monogram). Mr. Wong and a feisty lady reporter look into the slaying of a shipping tycoon.

11/13/1954 HOUSE OF MYSTERY (1934, Monogram). A killer ape prowls around an old dark house in seeming fulfillment of a curse.

11/20/1954 MY BROTHER’S KEEPER (1948, Gainsborough Pictures). British film about a dangerous escaped criminal handcuffed to a young small-time crook who are being hunted by police and a newly-married newspaper reporter and wife.

11/27/1954 DEAR MURDER (1947, Gainsborough Pictures). A business man plots to kill his wife’s lovers in this British-made thriller.

12/04/1954 CASTLES OF DOOM. I don’t know what this could be, but the English-language, unauthorized re-cut roadshow version of VAMPYR. DER TRAUM DES ALLAN GREY (1932) was called THE CASTLE OF DOOM (1934). I wonder…?

12/11/1954 THE CHARGE IS MURDER. See 05/01/1954

12/18/1954 RETURN OF THE APE MAN (1944, Monogram). A mad scientist thaws out a prehistoric hominid and brings him back to life after giving him the brain of his assistant.

12/25/1954 MAN WITH THE GRAY GLOVE. Possibly the 1953 dubbed-for-American-TV version of the Italian musical-mystery L’UOMO DAL GUANTO GRIGIO (1948) about the theft of a Renaissance painting and a psycho killer in Rome.

01/01/1955 APOLOGY FOR MURDER (1945, Sigmund Neufeld Productions). A reporter gets tangled up with a scheming femme fatale who wants him to murder her husband, DOUBLE INDEMNITY-style.

01/08/1955 DECOY (1946, Bernhardt-Brandt Productions). A sap gets suckered into helping a femme fatale bring her executed bank-robbing boyfriend back from the dead in order to locate his missing $400,000 in loot.

01/15/1955 MURDER IS MY BUSINESS (1946, PRC). One of PRC’s “Michael Shayne” private eye mystery movies involving blackmail, robbery, and murder surrounding a wealthy woman and her two grown stepchildren.

01/22/1955 PHANTOM OF 42^nd STREET (1945, PRC) A drama critic tries to solve the murder of a Broadway actor who was killed on stage.

01/29/1955 CASE OF THE GUARDIAN ANGEL. Perhaps this is the British film THE ADVENTURES OF P.C. 49: INVESTIGATING THE CASE OF THE GUARDIAN ANGEL (1949, Hammer), wherein a London bobby goes undercover to break up a vicious gang of truck hijackers dealing in stolen booze and cigarettes.

02/05/1955 LADY CHASER (1946, PRC). The fiancé of a woman accused of poisoning her wealthy uncle tries to prove her innocence and stumbles onto a blackmail plot.

02/12/1955 KILLER AT LARGE (1947, PRC). Two reporters tackle an embezzling ring with powerful connections.

02/19/1955 SHE SHALL HAVE MURDER (1950, Derrick De Marnay Productions) UK-made movie about a mystery-writing law clerk who suspects that the person responsible for the death of a client might be one of her office co-workers.

02/26/1955 THE LADY CONFESSES (1945, PRC) A woman discovers that her fiancé’s wife isn’t dead after all and winds up getting mixed up with gangsters.

Saturday Night at 10:30p.m.

03/05/1955 LARCENY IN HER HEART (1946, PRC) Another "Michael Shayne" movie , this one involving the search for the missing stepdaughter of a popular city political reformer.

03/12/1955 GLASS ALIBI (1946, W. Lee Wilder Productions). An unscrupulous reporter and his girlfriend plot to murder his rich wife.

03/19/1955 DETOUR (1945, PRC). A hapless cross-country hitchhiker finds himself ensnared in two deaths and a dangerous femme fatale.

03/26/1955 STRANGLER OF THE SWAMP (1946, PRC). Atmospheric chiller about the ghost of hanged ferryman terrorizing a small town in search of revenge.

04/02/1955 WOMAN WHO CAME BACK (1945, Republic). A young woman descended from a witch-hunting judge returns to her family’s hometown and is haunted by the idea that a witch’s ghost is trying to destroy her.

This list of titles was originally compiled by the late Dick Nitelinger Golembiewski from his search of The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Examiner, The Los Angeles Daily News, and the L.A. edition of TV Guide for his now-defunct (but much-recommended) "Milwaukee TV Horror Hosts" website. I accessed it via the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine." Using Nitelinger's list, I have provided the films' release dates, production company information, and brief synopses. A few of the films I could only guess at--- I welcome any corrections, clarifications, hunches, and insights to this list.

THE MUMMY'S TOMB preview

2010-11-16T18:45:00.000-08:00

"See Lon Chaney [sic] --- the screen's sensational master of menace --- as the monster who would not die on Shock's feature film THE MUMMY'S TOMB... You won't want to miss seeing Kharis, the sacred living mummy that terrorized a town. Be sure to tune in."

ENEMY AGENT (1940)

2010-11-15T18:46:00.000-08:00

When I posted about DEAD MAN'S EYES a week ago, I mentioned how hard it was to watch these films without recalling what I had read about it or had seen in the multiple times that I had viewed the movies before. Well, ENEMY AGENT is one of twelve SHOCK! films that I have never seen before or ever read anything about, so I didn't have that problem--- what I saw the other night was entirely fresh and new, presumably as it had been for many SHOCK! watchers in 1957-58.

Though difficult to discern in this screen-cap, stock footage of the burning zeppelin Hindenburg can be seen in a montage beneath the superimposed newspaper front page and the word "SPY"

A wave of sabotage and the murder of an aircraft engineer tips off the FBI that there’s a spy ring at work in Los Angeles. The spies’ latest operation involves efforts to obtain plans for the high-precision Wallis bombsight being designed at Fulton Aircraft for the new B-17 Flying Fortress ("so accurate that a plane can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from five miles up," the ringleader tells us). As the G-men's investigation put the Fulton engineers under scrutiny, the spy, Lester Taylor (Jack Arnold), frames Jimmy Saunders (Richard Cromwell) in order to divert attention away from himself. Jimmy is hauled in by the FBI for interrogation and later released, but the taint of suspicion is enough to get Jimmy fired and blackballed from finding employment in the aircraft industry. As he descends into a spiral of drunkenness and frustration, the steakhouse hostess who he thought was his girl, Irene Hunter (Helen Vinson), dumps him for Taylor, leaving puppy-doggish good-girl waitress Peggy (Marjorie Reynolds) to take care of bitter Jimmy.

Jimmy is grilled by the Feds

The spymaster Dr. Arnold and his two hoods

The mastermind of the unnamed enemy nation's spy cell, suave Dr. Jeffrey Arnold (Philip Dorn, who adopts a north-central European accent here to evoke Nazi Germany for 1940 cinema-goers and the USSR for those watching it on TV in 1957), sets up a plan to murder Jimmy; Jimmy is becoming a nuisance in his attempts to clear his name and he must be killed. But before that can happen, Jimmy stumbles onto evidence that Taylor is the spy in Fulton Aircraft. Meanwhile, Jimmy's gold-digging ex-girlfriend Irene tries blackmailing both Taylor (for $5000) and Arnold (for $10,000, with an option to join the spies).

By the end of the hour, there’s (what I am guessing is supposed to be) a surprise ending (though the TV description below gives it away) as it is revealed that FBI was just as deceitful and manipulative of Jimmy as Arnold’s organization was. But Jimmy is not upset about that --- he says that he understands why the G-men ruined his life by smearing him with espionage charges, driving him to alcoholism, manipulating his love life, and getting him subjected to a few good beat-downs. And besides, they give Jimmy some money, he gets his old job back with a week’s vacation and a couple plane tickets, and he scores another chance at romance, so it’s all good, I guess.

Listing for KRON- Channel 4, San Francisco, October 25, 1958

Once I got over the simple giddiness of seeing a SHOCK! title that I knew nothing about, I was left with a straight-forward and perfectly serviceable B-movie espionage melodrama. ENEMY AGENT is completely indistinguishable from the dozen or so similar films that you’ve seen on TCM early on weekday mornings. There’s nothing vaguely fantastique here, not even a hint of dark murder-mystery chills; technically or stylistically, there isn't anything unusual or quirky by director Lew Landers (RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE and dozens of other movie and television shows), just thoroughly competent by-the-numbers movie-making (some of the two-fisted action sequences reminded me of similar flat and economical fight scenes in dull serials that I have seen). ENEMY AGENT is not a bad movie ---it is just a pedestrian action flick. (An April 22, 1940 review in the New York Times disagrees, saying that “ENEMY AGENT is considerably more entertaining than the average melodrama of this sort. First, the story is told with dispatch; second, and even more important, it has one of the strangest denouements that you are likely to see in a long time--- a scene so ludicrously funny that it alone is almost worth the price of admission.” I can’t say that I was as amused as that reviewer, but it was definitely unlike anything I had ever seen before.)

According to the television broadcast listings from 1957 to 1962 that I searched, ENEMY AGENT was shown quite frequently on TV, but primarily in non-"Shock Theatre"-style showcases: mid-morning, late afternoon, and early evening were all time-slots where the movie turned up. From my research sample, it would appear that program directors exercised their prerogative in broadcasting any SHOCK! title in any way that they chose, and that many decided that ENEMY AGENT was not enough of a horror or mystery movie to make the cut. And as I said, this is just an action picture that would have incensed anyone (who had tuned in to, say, KRON's "Nightmare" in the wee hours of Saturday morning) hoping for a monster show.

Sheboygan (WI) Press, July 16, 1940. In the 1940 first-run theater listings that I saw for ENEMY AGENT, it was paired with crime programmers like Fox's GIRL IN 313 and Columbia's BABIES FOR SALE; one exception is the listing that I have reproduced here. THE MAN WITH NINE LIVES will show up in the Son of SHOCK! package from Screen Gems in 1958.

Why did the people at Screen Gems include such obviously non-horror movies in SHOCK! when most of their promotional hullabaloo emphasized Universal's monsters? With 550-600 titles at their disposable and a seller's market for movies on television, why did they choose something as un-shocking as ENEMY AGENT to be part of the package? Equally interesting to me is how some other non-horror titles that were included in SHOCK! have come to be regarded as part of the Universal horrors canon when others (like ENEMY AGENT) have not and have all but completely disappeared from view. I'll be offering some ideas about this in future posts as we move through this viewing project.

Next: "See Lon Chaney [sic] --- the screen's sensational master of menace --- as the monster who would not die on Shock's feature film THE MUMMY'S TOMB... You won't want to miss seeing Kharis, the sacred living mummy that terrorized a town. Be sure to tune in."

THE MUMMY (1932)

2010-11-12T11:43:00.000-08:00

“Nightmare,” Bakersfield Californian, Friday November 15, 1957

Bryan Senn in Golden Horrors quotes a Universal publicity department's pressbook suggestion for drumming up interest in THE MUMMY in 1932:

"Get up a fake mummy and case. Now arrange for a delivery truck to carry the mummy to the busiest section of town and DROP IT FROM THE TRUCK...The mummy, of course, should carry no advertising or identification. The police, mystified, will report the occurrence to newspapers, and headlines will announce the finding of a mysterious mummy. That is your cue to step in and announce that the mummy was being delivered to your theatre as a display and claim it."

In the 1957 SHOCK! promotional booklet's article "Audience Promotion to Excite Your Public," Screen Gems press agents recommend:

"A mummy 'escapes' from a museum, preferably one which has an Egyptian exhibit. By some odd chance, press photographers will be notified of the 'escape.' When the mummy is interviewed at the museum, he states that he left his tomb in order to get the SHOCK treatment."

I haven't been able to find any reports of such attempts at publicity in the late 1950s. I looked around for one because I wondered which Universal mummy-- Boris Karloff's Im-Ho-Tep or Tom Tyler/Lon Chaney Jr.'s Kharis -- would be the mummy that organizers would try to evoke with such SHOCK! stunts in 1957. The Kharis films from the forties were popular with audiences, but the original from the thirties had been re-released to theaters with some regularity as well, so the familiarity with each may have been equally high. I might be reading too much into it, but perhaps the fact that WBAK used a publicity still from 1942's THE MUMMY'S TOMB in the ad (posted above) for Karloff's mummy film may have meant that Im-Ho-Tep and Kharis were interchangeable in people's minds to a certain extent.

But there's a world of difference between the first mummy picture and the four that come later. (The SHOCK! package had the first four of the Universal mummy movies, while Son of SHOCK! carried the fifth, THE MUMMY'S CURSE.) It sounds funny, I know, but I don't think that THE MUMMY should even be thought of as a mummy movie as compared to the other four. Im-Ho-Tep is a spooky undead sorcerer, much more like Karloff's Dr. Fu Manchu, Morlant (THE GHOUL), or Poelzig (THE BLACK CAT) than Tyler and Chaney, Jr.'s mute, shuffling animated corpse.

I must have been seven or eight years old when I first saw THE MUMMY on television and I was disappointed by its lack of mummy beyond the reanimation sequence at the top of film. I think other people would share my displeasure if they had been led to believe that this was going to be in the same vein as THE MUMMY'S GHOST (or even ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE MUMMY). But this is not to say that I wasn't frightened by THE MUMMY: Karloff scared the holy hell out of me in this movie. Many people point out the parallels to DRACULA in THE MUMMY; the narrative similarities are certainly there, but this movie frightened me far more than DRACULA ever did.

Mummy movie or not, THE MUMMY is a masterfully eerie, haunting motion picture bristling with the stuff that you want out of a monster melodrama, like mad love, undead terror, occult warfare, reincarnation, lost civilizations, and wall-to-wall capital-R Romantic dread-- I'd easily rank it as one of the four or five best horror movies of the 1930s. It is meticulously directed for maximum visual interest, it's crammed full of well-detailed sets and props that really set the mood, and it includes some decent performances by the actors. Those performances are worth making some mention of, but I just can't stop talking about Karloff... I can't shake Karloff's creepy presence in this one; his restraint and stillness as Im-Ho-Tep communicates both a 3700 year-old fragility but also a menacing supernatural power that's coursing through him like high-voltage electricity. There's a kind of sad, impatient asceticism to Im-Ho-Tep, as if he's frustrated and embarrassed by the limitations of his flesh and spurred by the need to transcend those boundaries ("I dislike to be touched-- an Eastern prejudice"). Karloff manages to telegraph that dead-quiet but pulsating restlessness in almost ever scene.

Until very recently, I've only ever seen THE MUMMY on TV as a commercial broadcast, and I have to say that hypnotic spell that the film casts is easily broken and tough to get back into after being interrupted by a station's ad breaks. This is especially true of the flashback scene in the magic reflecting pool with Im-Ho-Tep and Zita Johann's Anck-es-en-Amon/Helen. That sequence has an almost hand-cranked silent movie feel to the proceedings, and coming back to it following a commercial for Sears department store (as was probably the case on Channel 29's "Nightmare" in Bakersfield in mid-November 1957, according to the print ad above) or whatever had to be very jarring. It probably made for some bored, distracted viewers who were looking for more Kharis-izing from this movie. Sadly, I'm guessing that today's ADHD-addled horror movie viewers-- enthusiastic consumers of jump-cut, shaky-cam, digital video, computer-generated hyper-predatory post-Romero undead films à la 28 DAYS LATER --would be equally impatient with movies totally committed to creating a moody, brooding ambiance like THE MUMMY, even on commercially-uninterrupted DVD.

Next: "For exciting adventure with G-Men on the trail of traitors, don't miss the next feature film presentation on Shock. It's ENEMY AGENT starring Robert Armstrong and it's on this channel!"

THE MUMMY preview

2010-11-08T17:38:00.000-08:00

"If you think you've seen everything in spine-tingling excitement, you'll change your mind when you see Boris Karloff in THE MUMMY, the Shock full-length feature presentation coming to this channel!"

DEAD MAN'S EYES (1944)

2010-11-07T19:55:00.000-08:00

Salina [KS] Journal, Tuesday March 3, 1959

A difficult part of this viewing project for me is to try to watch these movies as if I am seeing them for the first time. This means consciously trying to forget things that I know about the films and the behind-the-scenes elements of their production; I also try to avoid thinking about the previous times that I have watched them. I want to simulate as best I can the experience of seeing these on TV for the first time. It's a foolish endeavor, I know, since I can't replicate all the viewing conditions, like commercial breaks or the idea that there are others watching the same thing I am at the same time. But nevertheless I do make an effort to create a fresh experience with these films.

These silly little exercises of mine were quite the struggle when it came to DEAD MAN'S EYES. I am neither a fan of the six-film "Inner Sanctum Mysteries" (for more on this, series see Mirek's 2008 post on SHOCK!'s "Inner Sanctum" titles) nor Lon Chaney, Jr. But I wanted to let go of all those prejudices in the hopes of finding a different way to watch them --- these films certainly present enough pulp fiction elements to avoid being sidetracked by my animus towards the "Inner Sanctum" movies or their star, so I thought that I could approach them in that way.

It helps if you let go of the idea that this is a horror movie in spite of the marketing of the movie and its lurid title--- it is a murder mystery about an accidentally-blinded painter accused of beating to death a corneal donor. There is a small handful of suspects to choose from and each one is presented with motives and opportunities, but I found that my attempts to engage with this movie in a new way were thwarted in large part by the actors' performances. There really doesn't seem to be a lot of effort being put forth here; I'm not being snide when I say that I've seen better acting in educational films of the 1950s than the performances here.

Moreover, I found none of the characters even remotely interesting, let alone attractive. There's Dave Stuart (Lon Chaney, Jr.), a struggling artist with a tastefully well-appointed studio apartment who owns his own tuxedo and can afford to wine and dine his upper-class fiancée Heather (who he passively-aggressively calls "Brat"). Heather (Jean Parker, looking a little bit too old for the role) seems cold and distant throughout the picture; her ex-boyfriend is a rich jerk named Nick (George Meeker) who detests Dave and is, in turn, detested by Heather's obnoxious father (Edward Fielding) who everyone chummily (and creepily) calls "Dad." Dave's model Tanya (Acquanetta) is a hot-tempered sort with a crush on him; she's being stalked by smug psychiatrist Dr. Alan Bittaker (Paul Kelly, last seen as the sketchy private eye in THE CAT CREEPS). Rounding out the cast is the overly-antagonistic and dreary police captain Drury (Thomas Gomez)--- at one point, Bittaker calls him an "inhuman, cold-blooded fish."

With the single exception of the opthamologist, all the characters seem self-centered and irritable and unpleasant throughout the proceedings to the point where I did not care about them very much. This is important since so much of the story revolves around two overlapping romantic triangles (Dave-Heather-Nick; Dave-Tanya-Alan), and I really can't think of a movie where I've seen a less convincing bunch of lovers that I cared so little about than in DEAD MAN'S EYES.

In their best moments, parts of Universal's "Inner Sanctum" movies remind me of some fair-to-middling episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." There are certainly some interesting germs of ideas in DEAD MAN'S EYES--- I think that an old-school psychoanalytic film critic would have a blast with Tanya's "accidental" blinding of Dave, Brat's joke about Dave wanting to marry "Dad" more than he wants to marry her, and with Dave being a suspect in the Oedipal slaying of "Dad." But none of these things go very far on their own and would require heavy critical intervention to turn them into something intriguing. I couldn't be bothered, really.

Tuscon [AZ] Daily Citizen, Saturday September 8, 1962

[What's worth mentioning about the TV listing above is that it would almost be a huge spoiler of the film's almost-twist ending if it were accurate. But it's actually not--- Chaney's artist pretends that the operation is not successful in order to trap the not-so-desperate killer. Those Tucsonians who tuned in that night to watch the movie for the first time after reading the description must have been surprised!]

NEXT: "If you think you've seen everything in spine-tingling excitement, you'll change your mind when you see Boris Karloff in THE MUMMY, the Shock full-length feature presentation coming to this channel!"

The Shock of Horror Comics

2010-11-07T10:21:00.001-08:00

There's a wonderful book out now, Jim Trombetta's THE HORROR! THE HORROR! COMIC BOOKS THE GOVERNMENT DIDN'T WANT YOU TO READ!, that not only offers many splendid reproductions of those notorious horror comics of the early 1950s, but text that educates and fills in some of the gaps in the birth of monster kid-dom that came with a magnificent bang with SHOCK Theater TV programming later in the decade.

Trombetta: "Of the eighty million comics that were released each month in the United States and Canada during the early fifties, a quarter were horror comics. From about 1950 to 1955, they were so popular that fifty to one hundred horror titles (everything from American Comics Group's ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN to Comic Media's WEIRD TERROR) were released monthly."

These horror comics were far more sensational than even some of the "spicy" horror pulps that preceded them and soon became the concern of parents and society. In 1954, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency examined the supposed bad influence of such comics on the young, compelling the comic industry to adopt the "Comics Code Authority," which tagged acceptable comics with a seal of approval. Comics now began to self-censure themselves into lessening the gore and sex and outright horror (unrestrained by moral or religious codes) prevalent in titles like TOMB OF TERROR and CRIME DOES NOT PAY. Many magazine/comic distributors refused to carry comics that did not have the Comics Code Authority seal.

Within a year, those wicked and subversive (and beloved) horror comics were gone. This created a considerable vacuum for kids and teenagers across the country who now missed a steady diet of delicious and gruesome frights. One can only surmise that this yearning for horror found joyous release when another mass media vehicle--television and not comics--began its steady diet of horror, with many SHOCK programs hosted by macabre characters who dabbled in some of the far-out scenarios as did the several comic character hosts of the disowned horror comics of the early 1950s.

Unless repressed by totalitarian regimes, horror will out!

THE CAT CREEPS (1946)

2010-11-03T08:22:00.000-07:00

Salina [KS] Journal, July 15, 1958

The Screen Gems promotional booklet for SHOCK! devotes a page to each film in the syndication package. On the right side of the page, there are three sections: the first has copy for two on-air teasers (ten and twenty seconds) "for use with telop BEFORE day of telecast"(for an example, see the one below for the next movie in my viewing project, DEAD MAN'S EYES); the second section is a "TV News Release," a fake news story that can be used by the station to promote the movie of the week; and the third section is a biography of one of the cast members for the film. Over on the left side of the page, there is a large illustration (usually a publicity still or a detail from a lobby card that can be reproduced for a print ad) and, beneath that, a brief but detailed synopsis (including spoilers), and a short credit list (producer, director, writer, running time, and release date).

The Screen Gems synopsis for THE CAT CREEPS begins: "Terry Nichols (Fred Brady), a reporter, learns that a fifteen-year-old suicide case was actually a murder." A few lines later, it explains that Terry is "told that the victim's soul passed into the body of a cat and will not be at peace until the murder is apprehended." This is an error in the description; actually, an old woman who claims to have information on the murder is killed while Terry is investigating the case, and it is her soul that is supposedly transmuted into the body of the black cat.

Whoever wrote up the capsule description of THE CAT CREEPS for the newspaper TV listing service misinterpreted the already incorrect Screen Gems synopsis even further:

San Antonio [TX] Light, July 17, 1960

The only explanation that I can come up for what happened here is that a copywriter for the service (I saw this same description in more than one newspaper) misread "fifteen year-old suicide case was actually murder" in the SHOCK! book as "a fifteen year-old's suicide was actually murder," thereby giving us "A teenager is murdered and her soul lingers in body of a cat." And actually, that erroneous TV listing description sounds like a much darker and more interesting movie than the one you would have seen if you had tuned in that Sunday night for THE CAT CREEPS.

Here's my own attempt at a quick synopsis: A new clue has surfaced in a suicide of bootlegger Eric Goran that suggests that a senatorial candidate is involved, so a newspaper sends a smug, wise-cracking reporter and his photographer to investigate. Before long, the reporter, the photographer, the senatorial candidate, his daughter, his lawyer, his lawyer's ailurophobic secretary, and his lawyer's shady private eye operative are all gathered in an old house on a remote island where the elderly witness, Cora Williams, lives with a hidden $200,000 stash of Goran's loot. The old woman is killed (strangled, I think, but it is never entirely made clear); a woman claiming to be Goran's daughter Kyra shows up in the house with a black cat in her arms and she says that the cat has been taken over by Cora Williams's spirit and it now has "superhuman" and "supernatural" powers. Then a few more people get killed off and everyone's a suspect, AND THEN THERE WERE NONE-style.

The movie is a mess of plot holes and hurriedly-explained back-stories, but more importantly, it is not a horror movie. When all is said and done, it is murder-mystery despite its forced flirtation with "weird mystery" atmospheres and the conventions of the "old dark house" subgenre. (In 1930, Universal made a film called THE CAT CREEPS which was a re-make of that 1927 classic, THE CAT AND THE CANARY. This 1946 movie has absolutely nothing to do with that story.) Because it pulls back from its horror-movie inclinations, THE CAT CREEPS was probably considered a very versatile picture by program directors at television stations; as I was looking at listings from between 1957 and 1962, the movie shows up in late-night showcases where other SHOCK! titles were featured but it also surfaced a lot more in late-morning and afternoon movie slots.

Yet despite its shying away from its potential horrors and of all the ineptitude, confusion, and misdirection surrounding the production of this B-movie (it was originally released in 1946 in support of SHE-WOLF OF LONDON), I didn't mind it. It's reviled as one of the most disappointing films of the Universal horror canon, but if one can watch it with the lowest possible expectations (in other words, if you hadn't seen the macabre "murdered-teenage girl's-soul-in-a-black-cat" description in the TV listings), then you might be able to kick back with a mildly diverting late-night hour's worth of viewing. I've been far less patient with the movie in the past, but anchoring it in the context of SHOCK! seemed to lessen my aggravation this time.

One thing that I found interesting in researching THE CAT CREEPS for my viewing project was its appearance in a few movie theaters in the Midwest and the South in 1957-- I would've expected FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA to still be making the rounds even though it was included in the the SHOCK! assortment, but I certainly didn't think that THE CAT CREEPS would be, too.

I want to call attention to one particular instance of its theatrical run, specifically at the Pocomoke theater in south-central Maryland at the end of May 1957 where it was billed as part of a spook show (since the other two movies were a Western and an Abbott and Costello comedy, I'm going to say that THE CAT CREEPS was meant to be the feature that followed the "Ghost Party").

Salisbury [MD] Times, May 29, 1957

The "Midnight Ghost Party" spookshow (note that "midnight" is erased from the ad since the show probably began at dusk at the Pocomoke) was hosted by the "noted mental scientist" and "physiognomist," Kirma. You'll notice that the Pocomoke theater was a drive-in; Mark Walker's Ghostmasters identifies Kirma as a performer and entrepreneur who actually specialized in drive-in spookshows, often performing on the roof of the refreshment stand or the building that housed the projection booth in an elegant white dinner jacket.

"His creep show ran thirty minutes," Walker explains. "With flood lights set up around him, the crowd had to get out of cars and gather in front of the building to to watch his presentation," which was a magic act that included mind-reading, fortune-telling, a séance stunt, and some hypnosis routines. "Following the actual show, spectators cleared out as Kirma announced it was time for the arrival of the monsters. People were instructed to lock car doors and roll up windows as management could not be held responsible for their safety. During this sequence, local helpers dressed in monster outfits ran about, banging on automobile windows and hoods."

Given that the spookshow magicians were the precursors to the TV horror movie hosts who frequently presented the SHOCK! films, I found this instance of Kirma and THE CAT CREEPS to be worthy of mention. I probably would've enjoyed THE CAT CREEPS a lot more at a drive-in in 1957 with Kirma's spookshow monsters pounding on the roof of my car than I did watching it alone last night on DVD.

NEXT: "A killer feels safe until he discovers that his victim's eyes have condemned him to death! For the most amazing story in the annals of crime, don't miss the SHOCK feature film DEAD MAN'S EYES, telecast on this channel! It's a thrill classic that you'll always remember!"

SHOCK! Ballyhoo (#2): Frankenstein's Monster at the World Series

2010-11-01T18:20:00.000-07:00

I overheard two women on the bus this afternoon talking about the Major League Baseball's on-going World Series and I took that as a timely reminder to bring up this photo of a SHOCK! publicity stunt:

As you can see, someone dressed as Frankenstein's Monster slouches in a folding chair near a beach umbrella, attached to which is a banner reading "Channel 7 Brings SHOCK! Oct. 3rd 11:15 PM"; a thermos of coffee and a tray of food are set out nearby. Behind the Monster is the Yankee Stadium box office-- supposedly, starting on September 21, the Monster waited on line in the Bronx for three days to buy tickets for bleacher seats for the opening game of the 1957 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves (Yankees won 3-1; there's no word if the Monster ever showed up for the game).

The origins of this photograph apparently lie in an article in the SHOCK! promo book called "Audience Promotion to Excite Your Public" under the subsection "Direct Audience Exploitation." Here, the crew at Screen Gems suggests:

"Frankenstein's Monster is first in line at a box office waiting to buy a ticket in a sporting event or an important theatrical opening. The monster has arrived in an ambulance. At regular intervals, an intern wearing a white jacket will come out of the ambulance to feed the monster. (The longer the monster has to wait the better the stunt.)"

Previously when I had seen the photo, I just figured that someone at WABC-Channel 7 had cooked up the stunt. But the SHOCK! promotions booklet indicated that the origins for the idea came from Screen Gems. I thought, then, that I had found an instance where one of the strange publicity strategies that Screen Gems had brainstormed had been picked up by a TV station and put to use.

But then I read this news report in Billboard: The Amusement Industry's Leading Newsweekly, which stated that the Yankee Stadium ballyhoo was orchestrated by Screen Gems itself for the SHOCK! syndication package and not by TV station WABC as I had first thought.

Billboard, September 23, 1957

(And not surprisingly, this teaser advertisement for SHOCK! appeared in Billboard three pages after the above story:)

I've heard people say that they remember seeing that photograph of the Monster sleeping out for tickets in Fall television guides newspaper supplements in cities far from NYC-- have you seen that photograph before? Who is the guy in the costume? Does anyone out there know more about this stunt?

THE CAT CREEPS Preview

2010-10-30T08:07:00.000-07:00

"A nightmare of mystery takes place on an island of terror in the Shock feature film presentation THE CAT CREEPS. There's a thrill a minute, a shiver a second, in this story of murder on an island! Don't miss THE CAT CREEPS!"

DRACULA (1931)

2010-10-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

In my October 16 post, I repeated the widely-held view that FRANKENSTEIN helped to launch the first "cycle" of horror movies in 1931; similarly, it helped to kick off the second cycle of the Golden Age in 1938 when it was officially re-released by Universal after the collapse of the so-called horror film ban. I added that --if the SHOCK! syndication series did indeed spawn the Monster Culture revolution--- then FRANKENSTEIN also midwifed a third horror cycle: seeing Golden Age horror movies on TV.

King Features syndicated television column,
Salina [KS] Journal, November 17, 1957

DRACULA was FRANKENSTEIN's co-conspirator in initiating these three cycles. In 1931, DRACULA was made and released first, and its success helped to breathe life into the FRANKENSTEIN project. Later, DRACULA was paired with FRANKENSTEIN in 1938 at some independent movie theaters as a "mammoth horror show" double bill that overcame the horror movie ban (I'll talk more about this when I get to SON OF FRANKENSTEIN); Universal saw the money that could be made with these chillers, so they struck new prints of the film and re-released them together. The two movies stayed in re-release circulation for years afterward, first as Universal movies and then as Realart Pictures after 1951. And finally, because of the films' notoriety and box office success, DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN were the two films that almost all stations with the SHOCK! package aired first on TV. In this sense, then, DRACULA, too, helped FRANKENSTEIN to pioneer the three major classic horror movie cycles which were so crucial in the development of mid-century Monster Culture.

Chicago Sun-Times, January 11, 1958

But many contemporary horror fans may find it hard to imagine DRACULA as a landmark film of any kind. After all, aside from the absolutely wonderful first half hour or so, the movie is rather stilted, stagey, and slow-moving. And for some of today's movie-watchers, the performances can be off-putting: Dwight Frye's fabulously over-the-top Renfield, Béla Lugosi's operatic (almost kabuki!) Dracula, and pretty-boy David Manners' mannered moping as John Harker have elicited snickers from a handful of audience-members every time that I've seen this movie within the last twenty years. Is there a way to get today's horror movie watchers to appreciate DRACULA?

DRACULA works for me because every time I watch it I try hard to trick myself into taking seriously the re-release tagline for this motion picture: "A NIGHTMARE OF HORROR!" I'm not saying that the story unfolds in a sort of sideways dream logic-- on the contrary, the narrative is conventionally linear-- but rather that some of the film's visual compositions and its camera movements have a sort of eerie, hypnotic feel to them. In other words, if you can convince yourself to shed your "reality television"-fed idea of what realism is supposed to be and see DRACULA as an attempt to cinematically craft a bad dream, then you may find an easy way into it.

I know that this sounds like I'm making excuses for Tod Browning's sometimes shoddy filmmaking (and I probably am), but look at it this way: previous to DRACULA, most of the spooky talkies made in the US were revealed in the end to be old-school "Scooby-Doo"-style hoaxes rather than supernatural events: there was a very human crook dressed up like a undead monster in order to frighten off interlopers, but then some meddling kids solved the mystery and unmasked the bad guy (or in the case of Browning's own film LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT [1927], it's the good guy who comes up with the scheme to use supernaturalism in order to break the case). This is what audience members were accustomed to, but DRACULA was different-- as George E. Turner says in an old American Cinematographer article, "a number of sound pictures of the spine-chilling variety had preceded DRACULA, including such popular numbers as THE TERROR, STARK MAD, THE CAT CREEPS, THE BAT WHISPERS, and THE GORILLA [...] The scary stuff was intermingled with comedy and anything that appeared paranormal was always revealed as the machinations of malevolent human beings. What made DRACULA different was that the audience was expected to accept the villain as a genuine vampire and not another crook in disguise. There was a strong feeling in the industry that the producers were insane to ask moviegoers [...] to suspend disbelief in a medieval superstition."

Maybe Browning (or Karl Freund, depending on which theory you subscribe to about the real director of this picture) recognized that the best way to get people to buy into the movie was to present it as a nightmare. And you have to admit that there are some arresting, unsettling scenes of Hollywood Gothic that seem thoroughly oneiric in DRACULA, even when the various characters aren't talking about their dreams and strange visions.

Take the much-mocked pair of armadillos in DRACULA: really, there's no way in the world that a couple nine-banded long-nosed armadillos that are native to the southern North America could have found their way alive across the Borgo Pass into Dracula's castle in Transylvania. But as freakish-looking nocturnal, bug-eating creatures that you'd hope to never find in a creepy ruined mountain fortress in the middle of the night, the armadillos are perfect... it's just the sort of uncanny thing that a slumbering unconscious mind would conjure up for a scare. And the same goes for the opossums: wouldn't your dreaming brain picture an oversized monster-rat as a possum?

Think, too, about Dracula's and Renfield's multiple appearances at Seward's home. The two of them come and go seemingly at will-- they pop up on terraces and in sitting rooms and hover over the beds of sleeping women, strolling around unannounced as if they've just dematerialized through the walls, like those phantasms of people who wander around in your dreams. And there's really nothing that anyone can do to stop them: Renfield is not at all concerned when an exasperated Seward says that he's going to use a straitjacket to keep him from always slipping away from his cell and turning up in the doctor's house; Van Helsing's expert use of garlands of wolfbane around windows, doors, and Mina's throat are little more than small speed-bumps for Dracula. Renfield and Dracula keep coming at them all with the stubborn persistence of a nightmare.

I'm sure that I'm making too much of this, but I find that watching DRACULA from this "nightmare" viewing position helps me to enjoy it more. Maybe this approach will help new viewers of the film to accept it. As I looked at it again last night, I kept thinking to myself that watching DRACULA for the first time on one of those early postwar American TVs on some late-night SHOCK! showcase in 1957 probably would have added a lot to the dreamlike nature of the whole thing. Forget for a minute your 55" LCD HDTV and Blu-ray player and try to imagine seeing Lugosi's vampire as a fuzzy antenna-reception ghost drifting around in that weird, glowing, blue-gray cathode ray tube flicker... you witness his visitation as you sit alone on a couch, in a living room lit only by a low-wattage TV lamp, listening to the wind outside quietly rustle the fallen leaves on a dark, chilly October night... It must have been a satisfying horror movie experience for many.

NEXT: "A nightmare of mystery takes place on an island of terror in the Shock feature film presentation THE CAT CREEPS. There's a thrill a minute, a shiver a second, in this story of murder on an island! Don't miss THE CAT CREEPS!"

DRACULA Preview

2010-10-25T16:11:00.001-07:00

"Thrills galore are coming your way with DRACULA, the full-length feature presentation on Shock. Bela Lugosi stars in one of his eeriest roles as the human vampire who could live only when his victims died. For chilling, thrilling entertainment, don't miss DRACULA."