THE MUMMY (1932)

“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

"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)

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

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)

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

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

"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!"