Book Sale Finds: Mental Hygiene by Ken Smith

I haven’t had this much fun with a book in quite some time 

 

I first heard about this book, which chronicles the many hundreds of classroom educational films produced from the late 1940s through about 1970, on a podcast about the evolution of the American teenager, and I tracked down a copy at a used book sale. Used copies are readily available online, and if you have even the slightest interest in independent filmmaking, ephemeral films, or retro pop culture, I can’t recommend it highly enough. 

You know these educational films from their endless parodies on The Simpsons, usually starring Troy McClure, or featured appearances on Mystery Science Theater 3000. But you probably don’t know the people responsible for making these movies, the reasons they became so prevalent, and the way in which, taken as a whole, they chronicle almost the entire postwar American experiment. 

Ken Smith profiles hundreds of these films, along with the individuals and companies responsible for making them. But beyond that, Smith weaves this information into a broader story told with a lot of insight and humor. In fact, the longest section of the book is a catalogue of hundreds of titles with blurbs about each of them. When I first got my copy, I figured I’d read the narrative chapters and probably skip the catalogue, or just look at it as a reference source. Instead, Smith’s descriptions were so entertaining and in many cases the choices the films made were so bizarre that I found myself reading the whole thing, and often subjecting my family to the descriptions after I broke up laughing while reading on the couch.

At the time this book was written, these films were not available to the public. Smith combed university archives and relied on the assistance of icons in the film preservation field like Rick Prelinger to screen these films privately and subsequently write about them. Thankfully for big ol’ nerds like me, many of these films are now available on YouTube or archive.org. I put together a playlist if you want to dive in.

Classroom Social Guidance Films

During World War II, the U.S. government relied heavily on filmmaking for the first time to aid in the war effort. Famously, directors like Frank Capra and William Wyler left Hollywood to create pro-Allied propaganda films. Disney and Warner Bros. also contributed cartoons that had some type of training angle or rallied viewers to the cause. The government realized that you could train thousands of soldiers all at once, all across the globe, by showing them a film. The military produced a ton of films on different topics, and one of the most widely seen was Sex Hygiene, directed by John Ford and starring George Reeves of the Superman TV show fame, educating servicemen about how to not get syphilis.

1943 Collier's cartoon

 

Immediately after the war, progressive educators saw an opportunity to use this same idea to benefit kids in school. My cursory understanding of these films before reading the book was that they were a method for enforcing conformity across society, but the truth is far more complex. 

Smith breaks up the bulk of Mental Hygiene into three sections: The Genres, The Producers, and The Films.

The Genres include Fitting In, Cautionary Tales, Dating, Girls Only, Drugs, Sex Education, Bloody Highways, and Sneaky Sponsors. Each genre contains a spectrum from “kinda good” to “mostly ok” to “wow, that’s cringe” to “oh no” to “what the hell did I just watch??”

The Drugs and Bloody Highways categories are the most likely to make your skin crawl. Many of the anti-drug films, which really emerged in the 1960s, rely on exploitative scare tactics and have almost no relation to the reality of drug use. Seduction of the Innocent, for instance, claims that marijuana is a powerful hallucinogenic. That movie’s 11 minutes of full-on batshit crazy. The Bloody Highways collection, which famously scarred generations of drivers-ed students by including real footage of mutilated bodies at accident scenes, is worse. These films remain grisly and disgusting – they are essentially snuff films – and Smith references other reporting that suggests that the producers of these films were giving kickbacks to police and ambulance companies to get out to accident scenes first, and that larger bribery and corruption scandals arose out of those arrangements.

I expected the “Fitting In” and “Dating” categories to be oppressive in their encouragement of rigid conformity, and some of that is definitely there (Control Your Emotions essentially advocates not having any emotions), but I found something else that I didn’t expect – actual good advice.

Isolation, a lack of community, and difficulties making meaningful connections plague our current moment, here in 2025. I have heard countless people online and in person talk about the challenges of just knowing what to do in social situations. What’s expected on a date? Should you pay for your date, or no? Is sex expected, or no? How do you make friends? How do you keep them?  What do healthy relationships look like? Check the YouTube comments on a number of these social guidance films, and you’ll find modern viewers relating to the feelings of these characters and taking comfort in the fact that people have always had these social anxieties.

In Shy Guy, a young Dick York (later of Inherit the Wind and Bewitched) plays a high school student in a new town who loves tinkering with radios and doesn’t know how to make new friends. His father suggests just going to where other students hang out, not making a big deal of it or putting too much pressure on himself, but just putting himself out there where it’s at least possible to meet people. So Dick heads to the hang out at the malt shop or wherever, and watches how people interact. He notices that the people who have the most friends seem to be good listeners, ask questions, and take a sincere interest in other people. This is still good advice. If you meet a new person, you’re much more likely to grow that relationship by asking questions and listening to them than by plowing over them and talking about yourself the whole time.

Other social guidance films, like More Dates for Kay, take this too far. Kay basically knows everything about everybody and constantly reminds every other student she sees about their upcoming tests or doctor’s appointments and everything else, to the complete elimination of her own personality, or any personal wants or needs. So don’t be like Kay. But Dick York thinks everybody will laugh at him fixing radios, until he’s at a party and overhears another kid talking about building a radio. The 1950s didn’t have language for “finding your people,” but that’s basically what Dick does in Shy Guy.

The moral of other films is sometimes totally inscrutable. My daughters and I watched Are You Popular? in which all the boys have gone out with Jenny and so they think she’s a tramp, but they’re all also going out with Caroline every night, and she’s great. We were unable to determine a difference between Jenny and Caroline, or why Caroline wound up at the dance and Jenny wound up standing by a bus bench crying one perfect tear.

Before the rise of the anti-drug scare films, these social guidance films were intended to be a progressive resource for kids, providing them with a framework for understanding expectations in new situations. In the postwar economic boom, millions of Americans were moving from rural to suburban communities, many families had stable economic resources for the first time, and the rise of the automobile and commuter culture were changing the fabric of society. These films were an effort to help kids adapt to new environments, and some actually managed to do so successfully. Some less so. Like Cindy Goes to a Party, where little Cindy’s fairy godmother comes to her in a dream with tips for how to behave at her first party at a friend’s house, including the rock-solid advice, “Don’t Break Things,” which is optically printed onscreen when Cindy looks at a lamp that she presumably would’ve been fine with breaking.

Recontextualizing Conformity

However much fun I had reading this book, though, I don’t want to gloss over the actual, profound effect it had on me and my broader understanding of America in the 20^th century. I have always had an appreciation for both educational and marketing films of the 1950s. Animated educational films from production companies such as John Sutherland (Destination Earth, Rhapsody in Steel, A is for Atom) were produced in partnership with commercial firms and industry groups, while companies like General Motors (Design for Dreaming) made consumerist fantasies designed to sell housewives on new kitchen technology and commuters on the latest automobiles. 

These films were stylistically adventurous, especially the animated ones, and provide a truly unique time capsule of a period where innovation was happening rapidly, and the American middle class was exploding in size. Against the backdrop of the dawning Cold War, the films equate the ideas of American patriotism with being a good consumer, and promise a future of ease and contentment. But until Mental Hygiene, I never fully realized that classroom social engineering films were a distinct category, separate from the types of industrial/educational films I was already familiar with. And it’s the story of these mental hygiene films that really allowed me to recontextualize much of my understanding of the 1950s.

For many people, the prevailing impression of the 1950s that lingers today is one of forced conformity. The image of the nuclear family – the breadwinner father, the homemaker mother, the two clean-cut kids staying out of trouble and getting good grades – is central to the iconography of the era. For too many people, that iconography is the only thing they know of the time. This leads to a misguided sense that “everything was better” in the 1950s – that it was an ideal time we should harken back to and try to somehow recapture. That misunderstanding (or willful misrepresentation) obscures several realities of life at the time (off the top of my head):

• The horrors of segregation and the Jim Crow South
• Polio
• The Red Scare
• The Lavender Scare
• The forced exclusion of almost everyone but white men from the workforce
• The extraordinary prevalence of alcoholism and emergence of medications in pill form (and subsequent rise of both acceptable –  “Mother’s Little Helper” (Valium) to help women forced to stay in the home battle anxiety – and unacceptable – teen – drug abuse)
• The untold levels of trauma in World War II veterans who had returned home
• The collapse of extended family support networks as large corporations began relocating workers to brand new communities around the country
• The unbelievable amount of death caused by motor vehicles that had yet to implement safety protocols, and
• The creeping cultural anxiety of the Cold War and possible nuclear holocaust.

But the successes of the New Deal and the defeat of global fascism (…at the time) created a sense of open horizons and limitless possibilities. Social guidance classroom films played a part in that and presented an opportunity for educators to try to build a better educational system that benefited the children and broader society, as well. The origin of these social guidance films was rooted in progressive education, and an anti-fascist focus on community. These films were largely good-faith efforts to help kids and reinforce a community-centric worldview that had helped defeat the fascist threat in Europe.

But here’s the rub: without anyone realizing it, the world had already moved on.

The people who were making the films – the writers, directors, and educational consultants – had endured all of that history…but the kids had not. These children, the Baby Boomers, were born into maybe the greatest economic upswing in human history, but at school they were being preached a wartime-rationing way of being in the world when it was no longer necessary and General Motors was telling them that to be good Americans they had to be good consumers. 

Even the projectors themselves were products war. The armed forces had pioneered the practice of using films to train thousands of soldiers quickly. The projectors in school classrooms used to play these social guidance films had been used first to train soldiers, and then given to the schools as war surplus. This gave progressive educators what they thought was a golden opportunity to teach kids using these same, industrialized approaches.

Then many of these kids came of age into a draft and multiple, new foreign wars. They'd grown up told by a cartoon turtle to hide under their desks in case the Soviets dropped a nuclear bomb on their town. They were being taught pro-social messages and told that if they followed these rules, they’d be happy, well-adjusted, and they’d fit in. But why? To grow up a drunk like dad, or take Valium like mom, or go fight Koreans and Vietnamese who never did anything to them? 

Traffic Safety films blamed teenagers for the massive fatalities on the road, when it had far more to do with a lack of basic safety features in cars, paired with increasingly powerful engines in vehicles built by manufacturers that didn’t - any of them - have a safety department. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed did what no scare-all classroom film could do – it got Congress to mandate safety features in cars. Only then did traffic fatalities begin to decline. In 1951, the rate of vehicle fatalities per 100 million miles driven was over 7. Since 1991, it's never been above 2. Yet teens had to watch films like Last Date (another Dick York role) that shared the concept of “teenicide,” where kids kill themselves before they can turn twenty by driving recklessly. It’s all your fault, kids!

Sponsored films were sneaky, although sometimes playing an important role. Tampon manufacturers were the only ones willing to make menstruation films, which was a positive, but they did so while promoting their own branded products. Many other companies produced pro-consumer propaganda films hoping schools would show them as educational films and not notice or not mind the product placements. Jam Handy, who was possibly the most prolific producer of these kinds of films, said they were intended “for people whose minds are to be reconditioned.” Oof.

I have to believe that the teenagers of the 1950s and 60s saw through this. The counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s seems inevitable as a reaction to the forced conformity of the 1950s that definitely was emphasized. But learning about these films showed me it’s also possible that the rebellion stemmed also from a generational divide, with parents and children talking past each other against the backdrop of unprecedented economic abundance and ever-intensifying cultural inequality and uncertainty.

The 1950s Indict the 1950s

With all this longing for the halcyon 1950s being so popular these days, it’s valuable to ask what folks in the 1950s thought about all that.

Two films stand out. The first is 1955's The Sound of a Stone, directed by Herk Harvey for Centron Pictures in Lawrence, Kansas. Harvey made hundreds of films for Centron, but is best remembered for directing the ghost story film Carnival of Souls. A careful reading of Carnival of Souls reveals a male director and male screenwriter working in 1962 acutely aware of the hazards young women faced. In the film, Mary begins to experience frightening visions, but they are in some ways depicted as less menacing than the reckless challenges of drag-racing boys on the road, the advances of her aggressive male neighbor, or the powerlessness she experiences as a church organist under the gaze of the pastor, who can throw her out of the congregation and rob her of her livelihood simply for playing the wrong music. I think Harvey picked up this sensitivity by making films for young people in a deeply troubled time.

In The Sound of a Stone, a young English teacher assigns a book to his class, but when a student’s father discovers the name of the book on a list of “subversive titles,” the English teacher and his wife begin suffering under a reign of terror from the community. Soon, even students who worked with the teacher on the school paper are also swept up, and they begin receiving threats. It isn’t commented on, but one of the actors has a severe limp in the film – most likely the result of Polio (see above). Soon the boy’s father actually reads the book he was so quick to condemn, and stands up at a school board meeting and recants. He does the right thing, and everybody learns their lesson about blind censorship the Un=American Activities Committee the McCarthy hearings jumping to conclusions. Or so it seems, until the final scene in the movie when somebody else throws a brick through the teacher’s window, almost hitting his infant son, and letting them know that they’d still better leave town. It remains a genuinely compelling film today, but it’s not uplifting.

Then there’s 1959's What About Prejudice? In this film, none of the other students like the new kid – Bruce Jones. They accuse him of stealing things they misplace, or of starting fights, and attribute his behavior to “his kind,” an idea their parents all reinforce. But then two of the gang crash their car into a bridge, and the only witness to the accident is Bruce, who receives horrible burns all over his body while rescuing the two other kids. This causes the gang to rethink their blind hatred of Bruce, and reflect on how maybe they should’ve looked at Bruce as a person first, and not just as a member of a group they didn’t like. Here’s the conceit of the film, though – as much as Bruce is clearly presumed to be Black, the filmmakers intentionally never show him, so that the audience can insert Bruce into their own personally disfavored group. Maybe Bruce isn’t Black. Maybe he’s Jewish. Or Catholic. Or Hispanic. Or any kind of immigrant. Hell, maybe Bruce just has long hair. The film chooses not to say. The fact that in 1959 the producers of an educational film about prejudice for high schools intentionally didn’t show the object of that prejudice so the audience could fill up that mental space with any number of widespread societal hatreds is itself a horrible indictment of the society that produced it.

Mental Hygiene? Five stars, good book, very fun, thought-provoking. 

The 1950s? One-star, would not go back.   

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Posted by Vance K - co-founder and cult film reviewer for nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Sometime public service announcement and educational film professional. 

Interview: Matthew Irvine on Carnival of Souls

Matthew Irvine is a film professor, producer, and director. He is also the rights-holder to one of my all-time favorite cult films, Carnival of Souls. The movie was made in 1962 by a team of filmmakers in Kansas who worked together making industrial and educational films for their day-jobs, and decided to make a feature film after director Herk Harvey found an abandoned amusement park in Utah. It had a quiet reputation as a gem of truly independent horror films, but for years, collective wisdom held that the film was in the public domain, so terrible copies of it proliferated. But now there's an unbelievably gorgeous version out from the Criterion Collection that just arrived in stores. I got to talk with Matthew about how he got involved with the movie, and some of the backstory behind how we got here.

NF: What's your connection to Carnival of Souls? What drew you to it?

MI: I got involved in the film a long time ago when I got out of film school. A few people including my manager, thought my MFA Thesis film had a tone to it similar to this old cult film called Carnival of Souls. I had never seen the film until my Thesis film was screened at the Tokyo International Student Film Festival. While there, a few audience members, usually older folks, wanted to talk with me about my film as it gave them the same feelings that this old film did back in the early 1960’s, Carnival of Souls. The funny thing was that the non-Japanese people at the fest didn’t really respond to my film, so I guess you could say I was “big in Japan” for a short time. When I got back to the states I made sure I got a hold of CoS (on VHS I believe) and finally watched it. At the same time that was happening, I was stating to work with Peter Soby, Jr. who was at Shoreline Pictures, I believe. He saw my film and the two of us connected right away. As fate would have it, he was involved in getting a sequel to CoS made. So, my connection all kind of came from that. I wrote what I thought was a damn good and faithful sequel and it eventually landed at Trimark Pictures. Well, at least the concept of doing a sequel did. My understanding was that Trimark got Wes Craven interested in lending his name to the making of a sequel and when that happened, well...it’s a common story of how people get their first entry into the business. My friends Steve Jones and John McNaughton told me that you have one choice on how you enter the film business and that is to either bend over or lay down because either way, you’re gonna get screwed. Being from Chicago though, I didn’t take kindly to that so I pursued obtaining all rights to the film as the Trimark pictures sequel was a one-off. Peter Soby and I hired an attorney to do a chain of title on the film to make sure the film was not in public domain, as many people falsely believe it is. The chain came back totally clean and we went directly to Herk Harvey and John Clifford and offered to purchase the negative and all rights to the film.

NF: At that time, did CoS already have the reputation of being a public domain film?

MI: I made sure it was NOT in public domain before I pursued the rights. The film has been floating around for some time with the belief that it is Public Domain but that is just not the case. We have done cease and desist actions over the years because people think it is in Public Domain. There are still those that could care less whether it is in Public Domain or not, they are going to do what they want with what they have to make a buck. Most every dvd, even the “colorized” version are from crappy prints that are not worth watching, IMHO. Peter and I just expected that there are people that will never be convinced that the film is not in Public Domain. Not everyone thinks that way though. A lot of people have approached us over the years asking if they could screen the film at festivals here and there and we almost always grant the request as long as no money is involved because I like to know the film is still being shown and appreciated. It screened at the Louvre a couple years ago and they contacted me before they included the film in their film retrospective. Of course I said yes. I think Herk would be pretty proud to know that his film screened at the most famous art museum in the world.

NF: Do you know where the public domain assumption came from? How did you go about finding the chain of title and verifying it was still protected?

MI: There was a bankruptcy thing that occurred where the distributor closed shop and it was assumed that CoS was part of their library, which it was not. But Herk and John had real jobs and did not have the time to pursue anything legally until interest in the film was revived in the late 90’s. They then did a director’s cut of the film and re-established copyright ownership on the film and story. The negative was being stored at the Eastman House in New York and all other elements to the film were with Herk and John in Kansas.

Herk Harvey, director and head spook in Carnival of Souls

NF: There are a number of other DVD releases — including at least one colorized one you mentioned — from video distributors that specialize in Public Domain films. When Criterion initially released the film on DVD, were they aware that it was still under copyright protection?

MI: Yes. We made that deal with them originally, but through MPI Media as an intermediary. MPI made an agreement with Peter and myself, and then made a deal with Criterion for a remastered DVD. I provided all the elements for that release and it was done with my full cooperation. Unfortunately I didn’t see a dime from that but I didn’t get involved in CoS to get rich, I got involved because it was a film worth saving and treating with respect and care.

NF: What went into creating this blu-ray release? What was the process like for restoring the film and working with Criterion?

MI: The Academy Archives did the remastering of the negative. And I believe Criterion worked with them on the Blu-Ray. I know the people who did the restoration and they love the film and treated every frame as though it were Citizen Kane.

NF: It's the rare totally independent horror film that rises to the status of curation alongside Bergman and Kurosawa movies. I mean, it's definitely rough around the edges, but the movie seems to sort of rise above. What do you think it is about Carnival of Souls that makes it a standout when so many films of similar pedigree were only at their best when they were fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000 (RiffTrax has tackled CoS but the movie stands alone - ed)?

MI: I think it was the way it was shot. Herk wanted to make a different film. Different from what most “Hollywood” films were like. I think this helped influence the way it was shot. It really has a weird tone to it. Yes, it is cheesy in spots but it only adds to the overall surreal quality to the movie, in my opinion.

NF: When can we expect Herk Harvey action figures in the Entertainment Earth catalog? Or, what's next for the film?

MI: We have been talking about doing a straight-remake of the movie for some time now. We actually have a couple producers interested. But at this point, I’m like I don’t care to make a schlocky remake for a fast buck; that already happened (Wes Craven allowed his name to be put over the title in a 1999 re-imagining of the movie that should be avoided at all costs. - ed.). If we do a remake it will be something worthy of the original film. Something that is different, weird, creepy, original. Something that would make Herk proud. I don’t have “Fuck You” money but I do have “Fuck You” time. I have been involved in CoS for so long that I won’t do anything with it until the right people come along and want to treat it seriously, like Criterion and the Blu-Ray. We had other offers for a Blu-Ray release but went with Criterion because, they’re like the Cadillac of that particular film market.

Posted by Vance K - cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, musician, and Emmy-winning producer.

ESSENTIALS: 24 Cult Films for Late, Late Nights

I feel like I should preface any list of "Best" cult films or "Most Important" cult films with the disclaimer that there is no list. The thing that makes cult films memorable is that they are a representation of a unique voice, and different voices appeal to different people. Plus, there are just so, so many movies out there, nobody can see them all. If you've got a film that you (or you and your friends) love and quote and everybody else thinks you're nuts, I think you're doing the thing right, and it doesn't matter if that movie's on a list anywhere or not.

The other key thing about cult films is that they are usually produced outside of the mainstream, so a lot of lists of "Best Cult Films" that I see online are rehashes of movies like The Big Lebowski or Office Space, which were box office flops, but gained a second life through word-of-mouth after their disappointing theatrical runs. I love both of those movies, and they certainly have cult followings — Office Space prompted Swingline to actually make a red stapler, and The Big Lebowski started a religion — but now they're so well-known I don't need to invoke them here.

Since I get to make this list, I wanted to focus on movies that didn't show up on the other lists. I also wanted to stay away from "The Worst Movie Ever" kinds of films (plus, I already covered that ground), and try to share movies that I think are legitimately good, or moving, or compelling, even if you can see their seams sometimes.

These are in no particular order, but they are all perfect for late nights or rainy days:

1. Carnival of Souls

After a traumatic accident, a woman becomes drawn to a mysterious abandoned carnival. - IMDb

Mistakenly thought to be in the public domain for decades and widely available in grainy, garbled versions, Carnival of Souls has a new blu-ray release from Criterion with restored picture and sound that really shows off this movie for what it is. It's a legitimately eerie movie, beautifully shot, full of evocative imagery and intelligent subtext. This movie also has special significance for me, because seeing the original Criterion Collection release of this movie alongside films by Renoir, Godard, Kurosawa, and Bergman was the first time I really understood that cult films didn't have to be a guilty pleasure. That release made me realize that there were other people like me who loved both art house cinema and outsider cinema and took them equally seriously.

2. Chimes at Midnight

The career of Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff as roistering companion to young Prince Hal, circa 1400-1413. - IMDb

For many years, the crown jewel of my DVD collection has been a DVD-R of this movie, which was only briefly released on VHS and was extremely difficult to find and even more difficult to own. But this is another movie that Criterion has recently rescued from the pit of abysmal picture and sound quality. And good thing, too. This movie and the never-completed Don Quixote were Orson Welles' dream projects. Constructed from texts pulled from four Shakespeare plays, Welles made John Falstaff, who has more lines than any other character in Shakespeare, the tragic hero of his own movie. The larger-than-life Welles plays the larger than life mentor to Prince Hal, later King Henry, and the thread of wasted talent and unbridled excess that runs through the film cannot help but reflect on the former boy-wonder of Welles himself. It is a movie that was financially and logistically hard to make and it shows, but it is full of stunning images, and a truly heart-rending conclusion.

3. A Bucket of Blood

A frustrated and talentless artist finds acclaim for a plaster covered dead cat that is mistaken as a skillful statuette. Soon the desire for more praise leads to an increasingly deadly series of works. - IMDb

I will go to the mat with anybody who says Roger Corman isn't a good director. He's certainly known as a producer of exploitation films and for launching the careers of people who went on to be iconic directors, but his directorial work (which he pretty much stopped doing in the late-1970s) was extremely sharp, both in terms of visual style and intelligence. A Bucket of Blood is one of the best satirical take-downs of the art scene I think I've ever watched, and it wraps it inside the costume of a schlocky horror movie. It's funny, full of gentle social commentary, and has just enough of an "ick" factor to create some intentionally cringe-worthy moments. If you've ever wanted to see the Beat Generation get some comeuppance, this one's for you.

4. Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill

Three go-go dancers holding a young girl hostage come across a crippled old man living with his two sons in the desert. After learning he's hiding a sum of cash around, the women start scheming on him. - IMDb

I'm much more of a Corman guy than a Russ Meyer guy, but when it comes to exploitation films, you have to give Russ Meyer his due. Meyer is most closely associated with busty women with quick tops, but there's actually no nudity in this, his best-known movie. Busty women, sure, and car races, and inexplicable danger aplenty. This movie is also notable for being the source of most of the movie dialogue samples used in White Zombie's breakout album La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1. That's actually what got me to watch this movie in the first place.

5. Blacula

An ancient African prince, turned into a vampire by Dracula himself, finds himself in modern Los Angeles. - IMDb

There are a lot of 1970s blaxploitation movies you can watch and have a pretty great time with, but the thing I love about Blacula is how William Marshall's performance really elevates this movie way past what you think it would be from the amazingly schlocky title. He was primarily a Shakespearean actor, plays the character of Prince Mamuwalde totally straight, and sells it. This movie is at its heart a love story, and despite some *ahem* lines that ring out particularly jarringly to modern sensibilities, the performances in this movie should earn it far more prominence among horror fans than I think it currently has.

6. Killer of Sheep

Stan works in drudgery at a slaughterhouse. His personal life is drab. Dissatisfaction and ennui keep him unresponsive to the needs of his adoring wife, and he must struggle against influences which would dishonor and endanger him and his family. - IMDb

This underground film shot in south Los Angeles in the early 1970s is not to be confused with a blaxploitation film. This is a poetic and deeply touching movie that went unseen for over two decades because of rights clearance issues with the music in the film. The picture of daily life in Watts that it shows is both stifling but also affirming and moving. When it was added to the National Film Registry in 1990, that helped raise awareness for the movie, and ultimately led to a limited theatrical release in 2007. It is now available on DVD.

7. I Bury the Living

Cemetery director Robert Kraft discovers that by arbitrarily changing the status of plots from empty to occupied on the planogram causes the death of the plots' owners. - IMDb

I came across this one on a Public Domain movies site years ago, and I was pleasantly surprised. What the description here doesn't include is that the director doesn't want to be killing people, and begins thinking that he's descending into madness. As this starts to happen, there are a couple of visual effects sequences that are really striking, and take on the air of a twisted re-imagining of Fitzgerald's "eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckelburg." The film suffers a little from a Scooby-Doo ending, but there are rumors that there was a different ending originally shot. That's going to have to be one for the angels, though, because in 1958 nobody was keeping alternate endings of B-pictures around for archivists to find later.

8. Billy the Kid vs. Dracula

Dracula travels to the American West, intent on making a beautiful ranch owner his next victim. Her fiance, outlaw Billy the Kid, finds out about it and rushes to save her. - IMDb

I reviewed this movie before, and you can read that at your leisure, but for our purposes here I will simply quote one line of that review: "At some point in 1965 or '66, some actual human being must have had this thought: 'Let's get John Carradine to play a vampire again, but this time we'll stick him in the Old West, name the movie after two characters not actually appearing in the movie, and shoot the thing for a nickel in, say, my back yard in Encino!'" The IMDb description is actually not correct: Carradine is never identified as Dracula because they didn't want Universal suing them, and "Billy" in the film did not have a previous career as a notorious outlaw. So if this sounds like it's up your alley, it probably is. If it doesn't, man, you've been warned.

9. Plan 9 from Outer Space

Aliens resurrect dead humans as zombies and vampires to stop humanity from creating the Solaranite (a sort of sun-driven bomb). - IMDb

This is also an objectively bad movie, but Edward D. Wood Jr. deserves a place on this list if for no other reason than that Ed Wood is maybe the greatest movie ever made about movies. Plan 9 is also, and I don't know anybody who would argue with me on this, the closest Ed Wood ever got to making a decent movie. The idea of a bomb made out of the sun's rays is not the worst sci-fi idea ever, and the story is more or less coherent. As opposed to, say, Glen, or Glenda?. Plus, the reach of this movie has been remarkable, from the Tim Burton biopic to the name of Glenn Danzig's record label, so it's worth watching if you haven't actually seen it. May I recommend watching Ed Wood and then Plan 9 as a double-feature?

10. Primer

Four friends/fledgling entrepreneurs, knowing that there's something bigger and more innovative than the different error-checking devices they've built, wrestle over their new invention. - IMDb

Of course, if you'd actually like to see a good sci-fi movie made for no money, you might want to skip ahead a few decades to Primer. This movie has a reputation for being quite a mind-bender of a time-travel movie, and it does not disappoint. I would argue that only with (many) multiple viewings and some graph paper could you actually untangle what's happening in all the different timelines, but at a certain point, it doesn't matter. The storytelling is dizzyingly complex, but you get the impression director Shane Carruth knows what's going on, and that he's going to take you somewhere worthwhile, so you go along. It's a tense and confusing ride, but I'm not aware of another movie like it. I actually prefer Carruth's poetic, disjointed follow-up Upstream Color, but start here.

11. It's Such a Beautiful Day

Bill struggles to put together his shattered psyche, in this new feature film version of Don Hertzfeldt's animated short film trilogy. - IMDb

As long as we're talking about bending minds, let's also dip our toes into the animation end of the pool. Don Hertzfeldt bends minds with the best of them, and I am truly at a loss as to how he is able to tell such elliptical stories with stick figures and still elicit powerful emotional responses from me. I am a big fan of Don Hertzfeldt, and this re-packaged collection of three of his related short films is a perfect example of why. Bill seems to be emotionally falling apart, but then it seems like he's actually mentally falling apart. His journey yo-yo'ing closer to and farther away from "sanity" and "reality" is both tremendously imaginative and tremendously moving. Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow short film was absolutely robbed of an Oscar, too, for whatever that's worth.

12. Sita Sings the Blues

An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. - IMDb

Animator Nina Paley made this animated feature film on her own. By herself. Alone. Feature film. Bill Plympton does the same kind of thing, and I am simply in awe of these artists. Paley's movie tells the story of Sita and her lover Rama from the Hindu epic Ramayana, and intertwines that tale with the story of the dissolution of Paley's own marriage. It's simply a beautiful, enthralling piece of work that not only explodes with imagination, but is full of beautiful visual design, too. It blurs the line between myth, fiction, and documentary, and is set entirely to torch songs. What's not to love?

13. The Beaver Trilogy

It begins in 1979 with the chance meeting in a Salt Lake City parking lot where filmmaker Trent Harris is approached by an earnest small-town dreamer from Beaver, Utah. - IMDb

And speaking of blurring lines...man, this one's something. As quick as I can tell it: Trent Harris was working at a TV station in Utah when they got their first video camera, and he was testing it in the parking lot when a guy called "Groovin' Gary" spotted him and came over.Gary always wanted to be on TV, and had his car adorned with images of Olivia Newton-John. He invited Harris back to Beaver for a talent show that Gary wanted recorded. In it, Gary dressed in drag and performed *as* Olivia Newton-John, to the befuddlement and ridicule of the small, conservative town. That really happened. A couple of years later, Harris moved to LA, and fictionalized the story a bit, and shot it as a short film with a pre-Fast Times Sean Penn. A couple of years later, while at USC film school, he made another go at the same story with a pre-Back to the Future Crispin Glover. If you can't find this amazing, unique gem, track down the new documentary The Beaver Trilogy, Part IV, which tells the whole story in stunning fashion.

14. The Sid Saga

Spurred by house guests Bob Sandstrom and Karlene Sandstrom leafing through his scrap book and asking about photographs in it, Sid Laverents begins to tell his life story. - IMDb

This is simply one of the crown jewels of amateur cinema. I don't know how to find it, except UCLA shows it sometimes and it occasionally airs as part of the sporadic TCM Underground series. But it is truly unforgettable, with Sid Laverents taking viewers through a stunning, three-part filmic biography that not only tells the story of Laverents, but of 20th Century America, too. It begins in poverty and vaudeville, goes through World War II, the 1950s and Cold War, the aerospace boom and introduction of the space program, and finally the rise of amateur film and videography that put storytelling tools into the hands of everyday people. And it's all told first-hand from Laverents, who lived it all. I reviewed this film a couple of years ago, and it is absolutely worth tracking down.

15. Head

The Monkees are tossed about in a psychedelic, surrealist, plotless, circular bit of fun fluff. - IMDb

Whoever wrote this IMDb summary can suck it. This is anything but "fan fluff." This is the weirdest damn thing, and as far from the Monkees TV show as I can really imagine. It's a smart, self-indulgent, self-reflexive piece of meta-storytelling made by Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, who would immediately after this project go on to collaborate on Five Easy Pieces, with Nicholson exploding into the mainstream world in Easy Rider in between. The Monkees got a bad rap at the time, and I think it persists, that they were just a slapped-together attempt by a record company to make an American version of the Beatles. That may have been their genesis, but their songs are great, the guys were interested in things beyond the show, which came through in songs like "Randy Souse Git" and this film, which was reportedly the first time Americans had seen the now-famous footage of  the South Vietnamese Chief of Police executing a handcuffed Viet Cong prisoner. Fan fluff, right? This was Tor Johnson's final film, and also, in a restroom, Peter Tork gives Davy Jones the advice that, "Nobody ever lends money to a man with a sense of humor."

16. The X from Outer Space

The spaceship AAB-Gamma is dispatched from FAFC headquarters in Japan to make a landing on the planet Mars and investigate reports of UFOs in the area. - IMDb

In the 1960s, the Shochiku studio in Japan, which was known for more serious, art-house films like those of Yashujiro Ozu, decided it wanted to get in on some of that sweet Godzilla money that Toho was pulling down, and this film was their attempt. In it, some swinging astronauts jet back and forth between Earth, the moon, and Mars for reasons that are clear, but don't make any logical sense. While exploring, they get some goo on the ship, which hatches into a giant space chicken called Guilala. The English dub of this movie is legitimately terrible, but the original Japanese version, subtitled, is wonderful. It is everything I love about silly, 1960s monster movies, and may even exceed some of the Godzilla movies with shady aliens in them.

17. Suspiria

A newcomer to a fancy ballet academy gradually comes to realize that the school is a front for something far more sinister and supernatural amidst a series of grisly murders. - IMDb

This movie, by Italian horror icon Dario Argento (who also co-wrote the unmatched Once Upon a Time in the West), is the real deal. It's creepy, scary, grisly, bloody, mysterious, and atmospheric. It hits all of my favorite notes of horror movies, and has an ending that is serious nightmare fuel. Emerging from the giallo scene in Italy, it took things a step farther, and is really not for the faint of heart. But man, this is such a great horror movie. I've written before about the line that connects certain films between the 1950s and early 60s, ultimately resulting in Rosemary's Baby, and I think Rosemary in turn made Suspiria possible.

18. Bay of Blood

An elderly heiress is killed by her husband who wants control of her fortunes. What ensues is an all-out murder spree as relatives and friends attempt to reduce the inheritance playing field, complicated by some teenagers who decide to camp out in a dilapidated building on the estate. - IMDb

Staying in Italy with a giallo contemporary of Argento's, we have Mario Bava's Bay of Blood. Bava was making his mark a decade before Argento hit the scene, so a lot of what Argento would build on came from Bava. And it goes way beyond that. Because Bay of Blood is not a "proto-slasher" movie, it is a full-bore, perfect example of a slasher movie, made almost a decade before slasher movies were a thing. You could pretty much take the cliched rules laid out in Scream that govern slasher movies and apply them one-for-one to this movie, but if that's the case, that means this movie invented those rules. I don't know if American filmmakers in the early 1980s looked at this movie and drew inspiration, or if Bava was simply ahead of his time, but this movie is about as good as straight slashers get, and it accomplished that while creating the lexicon, so I think that's one hell of an achievement.

19. The Wicker Man

A police sergeant is sent to a Scottish island village in search of a missing girl whom the townsfolk claim never existed. Stranger still are the rites that take place there. - IMDb

When I was in college and found 1) the Internet and 2) a pair of amazing video stores near my dorm, I spent some time combing a bunch of lists to find movies to rent. The Wicker Man consistently showed up on lists of "the scariest movies ever made" and that sort. So I rented it and I thought it was stupid. But I just sort of missed it — there's something sticky about this movie. Even though I didn't think I liked it, something made me want to revisit it, and when I did, a switch flipped and I fell in love with this movie about the collision of modern life, Christianity, and very, very old pagan beliefs that have still never really gone away. It's a movie with a lot going on under the surface, and which was also plagued for decades with a "the movie that could've been" legend that told the tale of how we never got to see the director's real vision of the movie. That has since been solved, despite the original camera negatives being used as fill underneath the M1 motorway connecting London to Leeds. And for what it's worth, my copy of The Wicker Man DVD actually came in a wicker box.

20. Equinox

Four friends are attacked by a demon while on a picnic, due to possession of a tome of mystic information. Told in flashbacks by the sole survivor. - IMDb

To be honest, this movie is mostly remarkable because of the people that worked on it. As a film on its own, it's only ok, and the present-day framing device of a police detective interviewing a survivor of all that went down is...clumsy at best. So you've really got to have some patience to get to where the movie begins to cook. This film was created by friends who met through Forest J. Ackerman (Uncle Forry), who founded Famous Monsters of Filmland in Los Angeles, and decided to make their own film. These friends, including Jack Woods and Dennis Muren, went on to become transformational figures in Hollywood through their contribution to sound and visual effects. It's truly remarkable to see their first film, knowing that they went on to redefine the modern cinematic language. No hyperbole. There are entire passages of The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 that are cribbed directly from this film, and while the humans-talking-to-each-other portion of the movie is clunky, the finale, made from stop-motion, rotoscoping, and glass mattes, is legitimately badass.

21. Incubus

On a strange island inhabited by demons and spirits, a man battles the forces of evil. - IMDb

You notice how vague the plot summary for this movie is? That's about right. I mean, what I remember from this movie is William Shatner and some girl hiding in a barn, and then I think they ran for a bit...and maybe one of them was briefly possessed, but I couldn't swear to that. This movie is totally forgettable except for one kinda important thing: it was spoken entirely in Esperanto. You know what Esperanto is, right? It's an invented language that blends elements of the Romance languages, English, and probably a few other languages into what was hoped to be a universal language. Created in the 1880s, it took almost 100 years to make a movie in the language, and that was Incubus. So if you want to watch a movie where Bill Shatner speaks a made-up language, this is your only option, folks. Who gives a shit if it is entirely, and utterly, forgettable otherwise? But look: I have friends who have learned Swedish to watch Bergman movies in the native language, and friends who have learned Japanese to watch anime in its native language (I have undeniably awesome friends), so if you want to be able to turn the subtitles off in Incubus, you can currently learn Esperanto in the free language-learning app Duolingo on your phone.

22. Venus in Furs

A musician finds the corpse of a beautiful woman on the beach. The woman returns from the dead to take revenge on the group of wealthy sadists responsible for her death. - IMDb

This is definitely an outsider kind of film. I haven't seen any other of Jesus "Jess" Franco's films, but from what I know, a number of his films have veered into the more hardcore elements of mixing sex and cinema. Venus in Furs certainly has sex and nudity, but what it has more of, and in spades, is atmosphere and intrigue. The story is told through the eyes of Jimmy, a jazz musician, who sees a beautiful girl at a swanky party, then finds her merdered body on the beach, then sees her again, walking around. There's a wonderful current of I Spit on Your Grave-style cosmic retribution for sexual violence that runs through the movie, but mainly it's just sort of out-there and entrancing. Like the jazz musician at the center of the movie, you're never quite sure what's going on, and you're kind of ok with that because it's a unique ride you want to get to the end of.

23. The Masque of the Red Death

A European prince terrorizes the local peasantry while using his castle as a refuge against the "Red Death" plague that stalks the land. - IMDb

To be honest, I didn't realize this was my favorite of the Roger Corman/Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe movies until I wrote songs about a bunch of horror movies, and the one I wrote for this one turned out to be my favorite. Like in Bucket of Blood above where Roger Corman is a good director, and in Blacula where performances can elevate an otherwise straight exploitation film, for me Hazel Court makes this movie. There are a number of wonderful things in this one, from the dwarf circus performer who murders a friend of Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) to avenge an insult to a girl he loves, to the amazing set design that was the apotheosis of the Corman/Price/Poe look, that if I have to let this one movie stand in for all the wonderful films in this series of movies, I'm happy to do so. If you can only watch one Roger Corman movie this Halloween season, I recommend this one.

24. Perversion for Profit

This anti-porn short film shows a flood tide of filth engulfing the country in the form of newsstand obscenity. - IMDb

This is maybe a bit of a cheat. This isn't a narrative film or documentary, but I guess you could say it's a sort of outsider cinema. This instructional film was created in 1965 to warn America of the dangers of the secret filth hiding in the newsstands in the form of comics, men's, and women's magazines. This film is amazing in many ways. There's the slice-of-life sense of giving the modern-day viewer a picture of what life was like in the mid-1960s, and what people could see walking into the corner drug for a magazine, but mainly it's a totally un-self aware look at the hypocrisy of the morality police. The fact is that this movie is a half-hour of words talking about how terrible the "smut" problem is in America, while showing the "smut" in question in full detail. There are very tiny black bars over nipples or eyes, but it's clear to see that this film became, in a sense, exactly what it beheld. By damning pictures of nude women while showing pictures of nude women, today this seems like a way to get soft-core porn into the hands of moral crusaders who could only enjoy nude bodies if they felt they were also condemning them. This movie is a really interesting artifact that says a lot more about the people who made and watched it than it does about they people they were trying to denigrate. It's a fascinating time-capsule that conveys a very different message these days than it was originally meant to.

Posted by Vance K — Emmy-winning producer, folk musician, and cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012.