Fright vs. Fright: The House of Seven Gables

Fright vs. Fright is a series of comparisons between classic horror films and the lesser-known works that inspired them, or subsequent remakes that stand on their own merits.

The Film: Twice-Told Tales (1963)

The Plot: Twice-Told Tales is an anthology film, like many that were produced around the same time period, including Tales of Terror and Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. In this case, each of the three stories are inspired by the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne. although only one of them actually comes from Hawthorne's short-story collection of the same name. The longest of the three, and most elaborate, is "The House of Seven Gables." In it, Gerald Pyncheon returns to his family home with his new bride Alice in order to try to find a treasure rumored to have been hidden when the house was constructed. But that construction wound up with the house falling under the curse of its maker, since Pyncheon's ancestor decided to accuse the architect, Matthew Maule, of witchcraft rather than pay him. Now, Alice begins seeing visions of Matthew and feeling drawn to Jonathan Maule, Matthew's descendant. All the while, Gerald's sister Hannah keeps reminding Gerald that he shouldn't have come back, since all Pyncheon men are cursed to die "with blood on their lips." And a painting of the first Pyncheon hanging on the wall in the study keeps bleeding from the mouth, and Gerald's drinking water keeps turning to blood. Just in case he didn't believe in spook-stuff. When Gerald thinks he's finally onto the treasure, he gets a little bloodthirsty (in the more traditional sense), and it becomes less and less certain that anybody will get out of this mess alive.

The Good, The Bad, The Indifferent: Twice-Told Tales is one of my favorite Vincent Price movies, and one I come back to almost every year around Halloween. The first two stories — "Dr. Heidigger's Experiment" and "Rappaccini's Daughter" — both have a lot of pathos and interesting twists, after a fashion. But "The House of Seven Gables" is all mustache-twirling scheming and ghost retribution. It amplifies the supernatural elements hinted at in the original story, and is short enough that in stripping away almost all but those elements, it's just Code-Era Hollywood gory fun. I'm wracking my brain to find something negative to say about it, but if you like this kind of thing, it's pretty great. But it is very much this early-60s horror vibe and not much else, so if that's not your bag, you'll probably be left flat.

Based On: The House of Seven Gables (1940)

How It Stacks Up: Watching this movie was kind of a joy. I realize that both versions share the same source material, so the 1963 version isn't directly inspired by the 1940 version, but that both of them feature Vincent Price in the lead, in two different roles, in two very different films made over 20 years apart was a lot of fun to see. This 1940 version hews much more closely to the source material, and any trace of the supernatural is circumstantial at best. Hawthorne was vexed by his family's involvement in the Salem Witch Trials two centuries earlier, and so his characters need not turn to the supernatural to do evil (even if they do invoke it for personal gain). There's no blood, really, and no horror, come to that, apart from how basely a man may treat his (literal) brother in the name of greed, so this film falls much more in line with films like the subsequent Portrait of Jennie or the Orson Welles/Joan Fontaine Jane Eyre (both the same decade), which you might call supernatural-adjacent, Old Hollywood romances.

Worth a Watch? Seeing Vincent Price play a romantic lead only two years after he made his first film is definitely worth a watch. It's not spooky, so maybe skip it for Halloween and go with Twice-Told Tales, but for sure put this one on your list for when that old-movie itch hits you.

Fun bit of connective tissue: Vincent Price, who featured last week in The Fly, brings us back to this film. So while it was completely unintentional, each of the films in this series has been connected by a performer. That we began and ended with Vincent is just icing on the cake.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Perennial watcher of dozens of horror movies each October. Does not live in a haunted house, despite what his son's friend thinks (look, kid, it was just the cats...).

Fright vs. Fright: The Fly

Fright vs. Fright is a series of comparisons between classic horror films and the lesser-known works that inspired them, or subsequent remakes that stand on their own merits.

The Film: The Fly (1958)

The Plot: Starting with a bang, The Fly introduces us to Helene Delambre as she smushes her husband Andre in a hydraulic press, then calls his brother Francois and tells him what she's done. Not sparing a thought for Andre, Francois comes over to make sure Helene's all right. The police arrive, and after careful sleuthing, determine that yes, Helene did turn her husband into a blood puddle in the press. But why??? After a nice long rest, Helene recounts the story of how Andre had begun experimenting with transporting matter from one place to another, lost the family cat in the ether, but successfully transported a guinea pig, and then accidentally scrambled his own atoms with those of a fly when he tried to send himself through. Up until the last possible moment, there was some hope that a certain "white-headed fly" (presumably a fly with Andre's head, since Andre's body now sported a fly head) might be the key to reversing the experiment. But Andre was becoming more beast than man rapidly, and asked Helene to smush him before he lost all reason and turned dangerous. Dangerouser?

The Good, The Bad, The Indifferent: This is not the first time I've tackled The Fly for this site, but it's been several years, so I revisited my old review to see if my opinion had changed any over the last five years. It hasn't. The Fly has a few indelible moments, but those are linked together by a whole lot of not much. And not yet in his horror heyday, Vincent Price is largely wasted. That said, this movie is not without its charm, and if you have kids you'd like to introduce to creature features, this is not such a bad way.

Remade As: The Fly (1986)

How It Stacks Up: This re-imagining is just a flat-out better movie than its predecessor. While the broad strokes of the plot are the same, David Cronenberg and co-writer Charles Edward Pogue sifted the original film through a sieve and got out everything extraneous — including the little kid at the center of the original who keeps asking, "When's Daddy coming home?" What remains is a tight drama with only three characters, which could really happen on stage (and would no doubt be really cool). I could spend a long time talking about all the things this movie does right, and how great Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis are in it, but it should be sufficient to say, as our reviewer Molly wrote when we first looked at these films in a different context, "this movie is a disturbing, lasting experience." She's right.

Worth a Watch? Slam dunk, must-watch for horror fans.

Fun bit of connective tissue: Jeff Goldblum also appeared in the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, last week's installment in this series.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Perennial watcher of dozens of horror movies each October. Avoider, in general, of telepods, unless they're from the Angry Birds universe.

Fright vs. Fright: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Fright vs. Fright is a series of comparisons between classic horror films and the lesser-known works that inspired them, or subsequent remakes that stand on their own merits.

The Film: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

The Plot: Dr. Miles Bennell stumbles into a police station raving about not being insane, and needing people to listen to him. A psychiatrist arrives and agrees to hear Bennell's story. It goes like this: Miles returned from a medical conference to news that many of his patients had called and made appointments in a panic while he'd been gone, and then a day or so later, all called to cancel. When a friend says that she thinks her uncle isn't really her uncle, Miles is concerned for her. But then when a little boy comes in with his grandmother saying that his mother isn't really his mother, Miles begins to worry more generally. Stuff gets really weird when Miles gets called to his friend Jack Belicec's house because Jack's wife seems to have found a...body. It's a strange body. Sized and shaped like Jack, but without distinct facial features or fingerprints. Miles remembers his would-be girlfriend Becky saying she thought her dad was behaving strangely, and he darts to Becky's. In the dark basement, he believes he sees a doppelganger body of Becky in a locker down there, but afterward can't be sure. When he and Becky return to the Belicec place, though, the four of them discover giant alien pods in the greenhouse, each pod growing a copy of each of them. They've uncovered an alien plot to replace humans with unfeeling clones, and now they have to try to get away...and stay awake.

The Good, The Bad, The Indifferent: Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about as good as 1950s horror/sci-fi gets. There's not a lot of "guilty pleasure" here — this is lean, taut storytelling that is maybe not as visceral today as it would have been in 1956, but is no less thought-provoking. That this movie can be claimed as both a tacit endorsement of McCarthy-ite Red Scare paranoia and a rejection of that very same ideology speaks to how engaging it is. The filmmakers all went to their graves insisting that there was no political motivation or didactic intent behind the film, but there's no denying that it is a product of its zeitgeist. Can we be saved from the threat of secret Communist infiltration? Or, can we be saved from the reactionary forces in control that insist on homogeneity? This is in many ways the best of genre storytelling — a metaphorical treatment of existential forces that a society is wrestling with.

Fun bit of connective tissue: Carolyn Jones (later Morticia Addams), was in last week's installment, House of Wax, and also plays Teddy Belicec in this movie.

Remade As: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

How It Stacks Up: I'm not sure which of these two version is "better," so suffice to say that when it comes to the daunting task of remaking classic movies, this is about as good as they come. There are some elements that are a little dated — like the super-fake nosebleed on the pod-body of Jack Belicec (this time played by Jeff Goldblum) — but on the whole the practical effects hold up, and Philip Kaufman's film does a great job of painting on a broader canvas than the original film. Set in San Francisco, instead of a small town, the stakes begin much higher, and the barriers to stopping the alien pod-people from spreading are much more daunting. The ick-factor is ratcheted up in this version, and one additional characteristic added to the pod people in particular really heightens the creepiness. It's the shrieks. The shrieks of the pod people. It's unsettling and kind of chilling, and such a great reminder of how the well-chosen little things can be used to much better effect in horror than gore-for-gore's sake.

Worth a Watch? Absolutely. I think it's hard to go wrong with either of these two versions. There are more versions out there, but these two I can recommend without reservation.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Perennial watcher of dozens of horror movies each October. Not a pod person. As far as you know.

Fright vs. Fright: House of Wax

Fright vs. Fright is a series of comparisons between classic horror films and the lesser-known works that inspired them, or subsequent remakes that stand on their own merits.

The Film: House of Wax (1953)

The Plot: Henry Jarrod is a gifted 19th-century sculptor whose wax museum is struggling because he refuses to recreate scenes of torture and villainy of the past. His unscrupulous business partner sets fire to the museum to collect insurance money on it, leaving Jarrod unconscious inside as it explodes. Jarrod, thought dead, reappears a few years later with a new wax museum. Now confined to a wheelchair and with badly burned hands, he relies on a pair of assistants to do the actual sculpture. Jarrod's old business partner is murdered, as is his girlfriend, and a young woman named Sue Allen witnesses a beastly, deformed creature commit the crime. When both of the corpses disappear, the police recognize something is afoot, but can't figure it out. Sue Allen begins suspecting that the bodies are actually on display in in Jarrod's museum, but has trouble convincing anyone else of such an outlandish theory.

The Good, The Bad, The Indifferent: This movie is remarkable for several reasons. It's a prime example of 50s major studio horror, and a lot of fun. But beyond that, it a) kicked off Vincent Price's career as a boogeyman, b) was one of the first studio films shot in 3-D (which is the source of some of the biggest groans in the movie, including a famous ball-paddling barker), c) features a very young (and very ripped) Charles Bronson when he was still using his given name of Charles Buchinsky, and d) features Carolyn Jones, who went on to play Morticia Addams in The Addams Family.

Based On: The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

How It Stacks Up: This movie is a hell of a thing to try to get your head around. When it starts, it feels like House of Wax is going to be a straight remake. The opening scenes with the shady business partner and the fire in the wax museum are almost identical in the two films — down to lines of dialogue, camera angles, and particular stunts. But soon after, we meet spunky, fast-talking newspaper reporter Florence Dempsey. It seems like maybe she's going to be the Carolyn Jones part, and her roommate Charlotte (Fay Wray, of King Kong fame) will be the Sue Allen role, but it becomes clear that this is going to be more complicated than that. See, there's this inexplicable subplot about a wealthy heir in some fancy family who gets arrested for the murder of a socialite, but Florence is determined to clear his name. And then the murdered girl is the one that turns up in the wax museum...so who the hell is Florence? Over the course of the film, she somehow becomes the main character. Her bickering, you're-fired-you're-rehired relationship with her editor is a total head-scratcher. Then there's a lot of cop stuff that's the same between the two movies, and the climax at the museum is basically the same between the two versions. The whole thing was kind of a mess, but I finally figured out what was going on: believe it or not, Mystery of the Wax Museum is a horror re-telling of The Front Page, the smash Broadway hit from 1928 that would later be the basis for the Rosalind Russell-Cary Grant film His Girl Friday in 1940. You can be forgiven for thinking that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Worth a Watch? Mystery of the Wax Museum is a curiosity, at best. It was shot in 2-strip Technicolor, so it has a visual texture that only a few other surviving films have, and that's definitely something to see if you're interested in that kind of thing (I am). And in the role of Florence, actress Glenda Farrell does a dynamite job as a streetwise dame with moxie to burn. Her performance is maybe not the equal of, but certainly holds its own against better known performances by Russell and Jean Arthur. But in the end, this is two very different movies fighting to exist inside the space of 74 minutes, and it just winds up reminding you that there are much better versions of each of them readily available.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Perennial watcher of dozens of horror movies each October.