First Scare: Dracula (1979)

The one that was color-graded with extreme prejudice

With this being the fourth Dracula adaptation I watch for this series, I start to wonder: is it humanly possible to tell a Dracula story where women actually make choices of their own? Even in this unabashedly horny version, directed by John Badham, Lucy's vehement wish to spent eternity with the Count can be attributed to magical coercion. It's as if there were no such thing as freely desiring your predator; with Dracula there must always be a pinch of deception thrown in the mix, a hidden hand pushing the will that believes itself free. Where human seduction depends on mutual offering and suggesting, vampiric seduction is all about control. The trick is to hide that control under a charming façade, to convince you that your surrender was your own idea. The vampire is one of those predator species that prefer a docile prey. Like an anglerfish, but hot.

The trope of the vampire as a sexual threat has been present since the very earliest vampire fiction: both Polidori's The Vampyre and Le Fanu's Carmilla revolve around serial seducers of unsuspecting maidens. It became a perennial trait in fiction even until the early years of the 21st century to handle the topic of desire with a certain deliberate ambiguity where vampires were involved. Those stories look very different now through the lens of our contemporary notion of consent: for us, upholders of bodily autonomy and personal agency, any degree of coercion is unacceptable, no matter how sugarcoated. And it's a sign of the progress we've made that the authors of classic vampire tales would have found our perspective odd, maybe too reductive. So if you're going to dive into the literary tradition of sexy vampires, you need to keep in mind two conflicting stances: that of today, according to which anything less than free consent is inarguably assault; and that of the authors, whose understanding of seduction was most likely less egalitarian.

Badham casts a handsome Dracula, removing part of the character's mystique. While it makes the movie's romantic storyline more digestible to the audience, I find that it alters the character too much. Dracula is supposed to be a master manipulator; a key component of his scare factor is that, even if he presented himself in public like the stinking, rotten corpse he actually is, his victims would still be incapable of resisting his embrace. Dracula pulls the strings of human desire in the service of his own desire, which is what makes Nosferatu so effective. If Dracula is good-looking, it doesn't strike us as horrifying that someone would desire him—even if he's using his mind control powers. With the air of effortless charm that Frank Langella gives to this character, it's entirely believable that someone would want to be possessed by him—even if he's not using his mind control powers.

Here your mileage may vary. For a segment of the audience, the fact that he's already attractive before he starts controlling you will make him feel more dangerous. In my case, I'm fascinated by the idea of an inhuman monstrosity that can nonetheless reach into your most intimate feelings and twist them against you. And here we need to invoke cultural attitudes around lookism. By making Dracula handsome, this movie joins the long tradition of folk tales that question the idea of a link between external and internal beauty. Think of the Greek siren, or the medieval succubus, or the Japanese jorōgumo: extremely beautiful, equally evil.

For this version of Dracula, the reshuffling of characters goes like this: Jonathan is engaged to Lucy, who is the daughter of Dr. Seward. There's no Arthur, no brides of Dracula, no earlier visit by Renfield, and no ruse from Dracula: he readily admits that he's visiting England as a consumer. Of more consequence is the rewrite that turns Mina into Dr. Van Helsing's daughter. This time, he isn't an established vampire hunter; he learns about vampires along with the audience. This change allows for a scenario I like to see: Dracula infiltrating human society. Langella plays the Count as a worldly hedonist who enraptures people with his vast talent for conversation. Instead of keeping to the formalities of high society, like Lugosi's Count, Langella's is almost scandalous in how openly he seeks and enjoys female attention.

Thick volumes could be written on the Freudian symbolism of the vampire as a dual object of the erotic impulse and the death impulse, on the alarmingly easy way our basic desires can be warped toward our own destruction. Badham's Dracula aims to present a believable scenario of such distorted passions. Much like desire itself, your response to this piece of art will be uniquely yours. Maybe you'll fall under the spell. Maybe you'll remain unmoved. Taste is a mystery, like life and death.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Dracula (1974)

The one with the excess of close-ups and the perpetually constipated grimace

Ideally, Jack Palance should have been a great choice for the role of Count Dracula. His suitability for the role was so widely acknowledged that Marvel Comics used his likeness for the series Tomb of Dracula years before Dan Curtis cast him in the role. This was the same Dan Curtis who created the TV series Dark Shadows. Add Richard I Am Legend Matheson writing the script, and this movie had the right pedigree to be spectacular. Unfortunately, someone must have given Palance the wrong acting instructions, because from the start to the end of the movie, he only knows how to make one face: that of the unlucky vampire who forgot to add some fiber to his all-blood diet, and is now in urgent need of a laxative.

It's not like Palance is wasted on the role. When he speaks, you believe that he's the right actor. He says his lines in an unnervingly calm, low voice, in the tone of an immortal who has seen everything and can no longer be surprised. His acting choices resemble those of Bela Lugosi in his manner of staring, standing, and carrying himself. However, where Lugosi could own a scene by raising an eyebrow, Palance invariably contorts every muscle on his face, as if the director were pressuring him to choose which emotion to show.

The director himself is no help on this matter, with his strange habit of resorting to a zoom-in to mark every emotional beat. He does make effective use of low angles and the occasional Dutch angle to underline a character's interaction with the realm of the occult, but his overreliance on close-ups becomes a form of self-sabotage against the serious tone he's clearly going for. Matheson's script keeps a tight rein on the pacing of events, an essential skill to have when the audience already knows the plot by heart, and the directing style falls short of what this script deserves.

This time, the reshuffling of characters is less drastic than in previous adaptations, but there's one key detail to pay attention to: the addition of the subplot about the Count's long-dead wife whose likeness he randomly encounters in the present. Coppola would use the same subplot in his 1992 version. This is another way of solving the eternal question about the Count's reason for moving to England: in this case, it's because he's a hopeless romantic. From his dialogues (and bizarrely melodramatic flashbacks) it can be inferred that he'd be happy to remain in his castle if it weren't for the armies that have continuously come to pillage his land and/or murder his wife. If you will just let him keep his wife, he won't have to come to kill you. This version of the Count is no less a seducer than previous ones, but here the story emphasizes his sexual needs instead of Lucy's or Mina's. In fact, the female characters in this version perform the function of hypnotizable MacGuffins rather than people. They're there for the Count to pursue and for Arthur and Van Helsing to chivalrously defend.

It's funny how the space left open by removing Jonathan Harker from the action in London raises Arthur Holmwood to an almost protagonistic position, yet the script keeps him restricted to serving as an appendix of Dr. Van Helsing. They do everything together, go everywhere together, investigate each clue together—you could remove Arthur from this movie and the only change you'd notice would be that Van Helsing would have to recite his infodumps to himself. Even Mina is almost an afterthought: her close friendship with Lucy is more told than shown, and what little autonomy she has in the plot is gone once she's fed Dracula's blood.

Changing Count Dracula from a predator to a heartbroken widower isn't enough to arouse sympathy for this character. There are still good reasons why the common folk who live near his castle shudder at his name. And on a more pragmatic level, the rough, hyperangular features of Jack Palance's face are a bad fit for a romantic lead. But the movie wants to present the Count as a suffering, tragic man who has endured loneliness for too long and just hopes for a second chance at happiness. Again, this is the same angle Coppola would try some years later, but Coppola succeeds at it because his Dracula is legible to us, because his flashback actually does the job of explaining the part of the story we need to understand instead of giving us mere hints as in this movie.

Dracula's manner of death in this version is overacted as all hell. Once the curtains are ripped open to let the sunlight in, the Count staggers and pauses multiple times to make sure you see him pose in pain from all sides. Then he helpfully gets himself in position for Van Helsing to impale him, a process that takes way more camera cuts than it needs. Overall, this movie is not without enjoyable moments, if your idea of enjoyment allows for frequent, abrupt shifts in PoV and a plot structured like a game of cat and mouse.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Dracula (1958)

The one sadly afflicted with pink eye

A few years ago, I did the experiment of watching all three film versions of Carrie on one day. It taught me a lot about the minutiae of adaptational choices: what effect it has if a certain dialogue scene is moved to a different moment in the story, what actions need to be condensed if a location is removed, how far an emotional setup needs to be from its eventual payoff. (My verdict is that 2013 has the best Margaret, 1976 has the best Carrie, and 2002 has the best prom massacre.) Watching various adaptations of Dracula is turning out to be a similar learning experience, with Terence Fisher's 1958 film a fascinating example of how drastically you can strip down a story while keeping its core intact.

If I was surprised by how much the 1931 film shuffled around the novel's characters, this version goes even further: Renfield and the sanatorium are entirely removed, as is Dracula's journey by ship, while Dr. Seward is reduced to a very minor role. Arthur is now Lucy's brother instead of suitor, and he's married to Mina. The bulk of the action is moved from England to Germany so that trips to and from Transylvania are less impractical. The most consequential change is that Jonathan Harker doesn't visit Castle Dracula as an innocent clerk bringing paperwork, but as a sort of secret agent already tasked with killing the vampire. This means that it's not the Count who lures Jonathan to his land, but Jonathan who takes the initiative to seek the Count. It also means that the Count's evil nature is known all along, so he doesn't get to mingle with human society.

Removing the Count's pretense of being a normal human massively reduces the contact he can have with the rest of the cast, which forces the director to make the most of his very few on-screen appearances. The tradeoff works: this is one of those monster movies where we get to see the monster very rarely, but each time we do, it lands with full impact.

The changes to the whole Jonathan/Mina/Lucy axis help provide a practical solution to the biggest loose thread in the novel: why did Count Dracula want to leave Transylvania in the first place? In this interpretation, Jonathan sneaks into the castle crypt in the first act and kills the Count's bride, who may or may not be desperate to be rid of the vampiric curse. This event gives the Count a clear motivation: you take my bride, I take yours. And that's why he goes after Lucy, who in this version is Jonathan's fiancée.

Jonathan doesn't make it past the first act alive (for which I was thankful, what with actor John Van Eyssen being rather mediocre in the role), so the film promptly shifts to introducing Dr. Van Helsing, who ends up being the true protagonist. As Van Helsing, Peter Cushing does a stellar job. He's helped by the script, which cleverly remolds the novel's crusader/pest exterminator into a detective-esque figure. He's apparently been on Dracula's trail for a while, and he frames his mission in terms of protecting the world from what could become a plague of vampirism.

However, precisely because the story has been stripped down to the basics, this whole talk of a threat to the world sounds incongruous. The action is confined to about half a dozen sets, beyond which the rest of society might as well not exist. Van Helsing does visit a customs officer and an undertaker in the course of his investigation, but those spaces just play their part and are quickly done with. If not for the dialogues, we wouldn't even know that Arthur and Mina are living in Germany instead of England. And the Count doesn't help sell his menace factor either; he's more interested in replacing his dead bride than in going on a biting rampage. The main conflict in this film is a strictly private affair, but the dialogues insist that Dracula sits at the head of a "reign of terror" that must be defeated yet is nowhere to be seen.

So instead of the usual dynamic in a Dracula story of the foreign Other quietly invading the civilized metropolis, here we have the civilized heroes going out into the land of the foreign Other to stamp down the threat it represents. Not a very subtle sentiment for a film produced while the Cold War was getting started (it doesn't escape the viewer that the undertaker's shop where the Count first goes to hide has the last name Marx, of all things).

This version of the vampire doesn't bother with theatrics. No beastly transformation, no fog cloud, no magical stares. His power is raw, brutal hunger (and his female victims welcome his assault with equal hunger). When he finally meets Van Helsing, he doesn't try to control his mind, as in the 1931 movie; here he goes straight for the jugular, and is only thwarted because he lets himself grow overconfident.

For a limited special effects budget, Dracula's death in this movie is impressive. Instead of erupting in flames when exposed to the sun, he simply crumbles down into a pile of ashes. It's very simple, very repulsive, and very effective. Unfortunately, the Technicolor process left many scenes more illuminated than they're implied to be, which makes it look like Dracula is walking outdoors under more sunlight than he should, so the dramatic shock of having the sun hit his face at the end is somewhat less effective. Still, this is a enjoyable watch. It's like going to the doctor's office for a needle jab: just the briefest glimpse of blood, and it's over before you feel any pain.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Dracula (1931)

The one with the intense stares

Tod Browning's Dracula is derived from a 1924 stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, and it shows. It keeps several of the hallmarks of a traditional theater script: lengthy infodumps via dialogue; time jumps that relegate some plot developments (especially the violent ones) to the implicit space between scenes; extended, continuous use of the same set for several consecutive conversations; and a marked preference for telling over showing. I understand that Western theater has a long tradition of keeping the violence offstage; what I cannot understand is how, when you translate the stage play into a movie, you produce what eventually becomes the most memorable, most revered, most iconic interpretation of The vampire without showing me one single instance of biting.

It goes without saying that Bela Lugosi carries this movie on his shoulders. Despite the excessive wordiness of the script, the obviously fake bat puppets, the lack of a music soundtrack, and the scattered, ill-advised attempts at humor, it only takes one look at the titular vampire's intense gaze to fall under his spell. When he's not engaged in the social pantomime of small talk, in a strenuous but futile effort to pass as a hot-blooded, cheerful human, his presence fills the screen with an unblinking, commanding aura of evil. Wikipedia tells me that almost a dozen actors were considered for the role, but now that I've seen the movie, the possibility of giving the Count any other face strikes me as inconceivable.

Fancy clothes and impeccable haircut aside, this version of the vampire is still very close to Nosferatu, an almost irrational monster guided by the hunting instinct, without the sentimental appeal that later reinventions would add to the archetype to create a more relatable figure, desperate to find love but cursed to see people only as food. When his character is free from the need to pretend to be a normal human, Lugosi puts on the face of a predator, giving his victims not the natural recognition of a fellow person but the hungry stare of a beast preparing to jump. He delivers a terrific performance, which anticipates later occurrences of the single-minded, uncaring killer that can be found in Alien or The Terminator.

The liberties taken with the source material are a double-edged sword. For one part, the early scenes about a real estate lawyer visiting the Count's castle are given to Renfield instead of Jonathan Harker, a change that strengthens the causal cohesion between the first and second acts. Also, Dr. Seward, who is in charge of the hospital where Renfield ends up locked in, is rewritten to be Mina's father instead of Lucy's suitor, which gives the Count a convenient reason to get close to Mina. The downside is that the role of Jonathan Harker is greatly diminished, Mina is reduced to sexy lamp status, and Lucy's death and subsequent undeath lose the weight they should have in the plot. There isn't even a scene to purify Lucy's corpse; she's simply forgotten halfway through the movie.

From our position in this century, accustomed to hundreds of variations on the vampire mythos, it would seem easy to forgive such misfires; there's always another version out there with its own aesthetic, its own vision, its own reinterpretation of the story. But in 1931, Dracula was yet to enter the public domain. The choices made by Universal Pictures did more than express artistic freedom: they set canon. There's an entire period in the history of horror during which Universal's Dracula was the only authorized Count on screen. Just like the present generation only knows Ian McKellen's version of Gandalf, and will forever think of Gandalf in that image, there was a generation whose idea of the Count was shaped by Bela Lugosi's acting style. It's the kind of first-mover advantage that forces every subsequent moviemaker to make their art as a response to it.

The irony is that Nosferatu came first, however illegally, which makes Universal's Dracula, for all its intentions of defining the character on its own terms, a response. Whereas Orlok is a cadaveric nightmare heralded by pestilence, Lugosi's Count comes across as a dusty relic of the Ancien Régime, a ruler over the human heart who repays obedience with madness. Both are corrupted, bloodthirsty abominations, but Lugosi's version knows the tricks of a stage magician, most notably the dramatic effect of a well-timed fog machine. Moreover, Nosferatu is silent, while Dracula lets Lugosi make full use of his heavy Hungarian accent to leverage the audience's learned Orientalism. Orlok feels like the fearsome Other because he's a walking corpse; Lugosi's Count feels like the fearsome Other because he's a foreigner with weird tastes.

My notion of the vampire was shaped by the film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire and Coppola's reinvention of Bram Stoker's material (plus smatterings of The Munsters Today, Forever Knight, Count Duckula, Drak Pack, and Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School). Somehow I never came into relevant contact with Dark Shadows, Salem's Lot, Hellsing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Castlevania, True Blood, or The Vampire Diaries. I did meet Blade, Underground, Vampire: The Masquerade, and Twilight, although at an age too late for them to influence my personal mythology. (Namely: if you ask me to think of vampires, the thing about sunlight that hurts them is not the UV light, they are not at war with werewolves, they have no connection with Biblical characters, and they Do. Not. Sparkle.) I don't view vampires as tragic figures or forbidden seducers; I view them as the perfect symbol for the parasitic nature of aristocracy.

Alas, I am a child of my time. This version of Dracula didn't particularly frighten me. Some of the scenes where the Count uses his mind control powers straddle the very thin line between the sublime and the ridiculous, and the uneven editing kills all sense of dramatic momentum in the last third. Worst of all, in consonance with the theatrical conventions of its time, but absurdly for a big classic of horror, we're not allowed to see the Count die. I feel sorry for the masterful lead actor who was dragged into this less than expertly made movie.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: Glamour Ghoul by Sandra Niemi

A compelling, moving chronicle that over-performs on every level

Do you know Vampira? If so, maybe you know her, like me, from Tim Burton's 1994 film Ed Wood, in which she is never referred to by her actual name—Maila Nurmi. Or maybe you know her from the Misfits song. Or maybe you know of her only vaguely, from the gauzy way in which her name has been attached to that of Elvira.

It is hard to overstate just how famous Vampira was for one vanishingly brief window of time in 1954. The creation of an essentially unknown actress, Maila Nurmi, Vampira was the host of a late-night program on Los Angeles' local ABC affiliate ABC 7, in which she showed public domain horror films starring the likes of Bela Lugosi and offered innuendo-laced commentary. From the launching pad of local late-night television, she wound up on live, nationally broadcast variety shows, and was featured in national magazines and papers across the country. And then a contract wasn't renewed, and... poof. Later, in the 1980s, there was a new spark of interest in the name, but soon it was attached dismissively to a failed lawsuit against Elvira, and the connotation was that some has-been was trying to cash in cynically on a new performer's success.

Maila in Vampira garb in a famous 1954 photo from Life magazine

I have written on this site many times about the impact watching (and re-watching ad infinitum) Ed Wood had on me and the direction of my professional and creative life. So I feel like going into this book I knew maybe as much about Vampira as anybody who didn't know Maila Nurmi personally. She was the actual character model for Disney's Maleficent, in addition to her TV show. But after the limelight of the 1950s faded, she was reduced to dire poverty, living by herself in an apartment that sometimes didn't have basic utilities. In her later years, Maila sold jewelry on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, made friends with a few people, like the comedian Dana Gould, who both helped her as her physical ailments overwhelmed her, and also were sometimes on the receiving end of her mercurial and curmudgeonly temperament. When she passed, there were online fundraisers, in the days when MySpace still stalked the Earth, for her interment and headstone, in which I participated. About ten years ago, an excellent documentary called Vampira and Me came out, which includes the only surviving kinescope footage from her TV show. I knew all of this going into Glamour Ghoul, but friends, I was not prepared.

This book was written by Maila's niece, Sandra Niemi, the daughter of Maila's estranged and never-reconciled brother. She and Maila only met once, when Sandra took a sightseeing trip to Los Angeles. Sandra is neither a writer, historian, nor researcher, so I have to admit, my expectations going into the book were pretty low. As it happens, Maila had been working off-and-on at an autobiography for many years. She kept stacks of notes and diaries, and some cassettes on which she'd recorded aspects of her story. Sandra worked through all of this material to tell a profoundly engaging story with a final emotional punch that I won't spoil, but recounts a circumstance that simply wouldn't have ever happened if the author had not undertaken the writing of this book.

Maila Nurmi grew up in a Finnish immigrant community where her most likely prospect for the future was working in a fish canning factory. So in 1941, at age 18, she got on a bus for Hollywood. A stunning beauty, it didn't take her long to catch the attention of people like Orson Welles, who impregnated her and then vanished from her life. In interviews in later years, Maila would discuss being seduced by Welles, and claim that he gave her the clap. This book reveals that instead, this was Maila's little personal code for "child," and a way to throw shade at Welles without revealing the true nature of their relationship, and the pain involved in giving her child up for adoption.

Maila Nurmi, 1947

As the decade rolled over into the 1950s, Maila became a fixture of Googie's diner, which was both a social scene and the inspiration for an architectural style. She became close friends with Marlon Brando (the book does not discuss whether or not their relationship exceeded the bounds of friendship, but given Brando's reputation, it seems like a reasonable conclusion), and was perhaps closer to James Dean than anyone else. His death destroyed Maila, and left her feeling completely unmoored, coming in close proximity to the loss of her show. Brando seems to have done all he could to help—paying for her to go to therapy and paying her phone bill for years so the two of them could stay connected and Maila could stay connected to the outside world, from which she was withdrawing.

After sliding deeper and deeper into poverty, the book discusses the afternoon where four weird-looking guys showed up at her apartment and peered through her window. When Maila went to chase them off, she discovered they were... The Misfits. They adored Vampira, and asked her to come make an appearance at their record release show that night in Hollywood. This began a return to the spotlight, and kicked off new interest in the character.

This is where the book does a tremendous service to the memory of Maila (and Vampira). Sandra dives deep into the circumstances leading up to the lawsuit against ABC 7 and Elvira, and the lawsuit itself. Contrary to the popular understanding of the suit, ABC 7 actually approached Maila and Cassandra Petersen about launching a new version of the Vampira show, in which Vampira would be Elvira's grandmother. Negotiations went on for some time, contracts were signed, but then ABC 7 decided to go ahead with the show without Maila. Cassandra Petersen became Elvira and continues her success with the character to this day. Sandra reveals through documentation that Maila was the victim of her own poverty, having to rely on ineffectual lawyers who missed deadlines and misfiled paperwork, leading to the dismissal of the suit (did didn't lose on the merits) and her being cut out of participation in the Elvira show that she was entitled to.

Even though Maila never truly rose out of the poverty that dogged her, the resurgence of Vampira's name recognition, coupled with the attention to Edward D. Wood, Jr. that came about largely as a result of the Tim Burton movie, did allow Maila to make meaningful connections with a younger generation of fans and friends. After she passed and Sandra received all of her papers and recordings, Sandra did some digging into things that Maila never had access to, and uncovers a truly powerful revelation that literally left me in tears as I finished the book.

In the end, this book is a gift to fans of old horror movies, fans of Hollywood history, and in a very real sense, to a few specific individuals who have a greater understanding of themselves in the world as a result of this book.

The Math

Highlights: A loving but nuanced portrait of a complicated individual, amazing 1950s old Hollywood vibes, unequalled context added to a pop culture mystery that seemed straightforward

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

Reference: Niemi, Sandra. Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira [Feral House, 2021].

Posted by Vance K—resident cult film reviewer and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together

First Contact: Nosferatu

The classic that codified vampires on screen for all eras

Previously in the First Contact project…

We've discussed how German Expressionism used extremes of shape and shadow to convey emotional content. Well, what better medium to tell a story about hungry things that lurk in the night? The 1922 film Nosferatu, an illegal adaptation of the novel Dracula (the ensuing copyright lawsuit forced the studio to declare bankruptcy), keeps its most iconic images confined to one short, climactic scene. But what a scene! Making the most of the technological possibilities of the time, the ending of Nosferatu uses one of the most effective tools of horror: suggesting instead of showing. It's just a silhouette moving up the stairs, just a silhouette extending toward a door, just a silhouette grasping a heart… and this little trick suffices to represent the supernatural profanation that has taken place. It's a master class in using a minimum of visual cues and letting the actual horror play out in the viewer's mind.

Nosferatu has both the strengths and the defects of a freestyle adaptation. It omits a handful of superfluous characters from the novel and streamlines the plot down to its basic components. The details that it adds (the references to occultism, the plague outbreak, the town's hunt for a scapegoat, the new method for defeating the vampire) are a natural fit for the heightened sentimentalism of this movie's tradition. However, the character of the young real estate agent who brings the purchase papers to the count's castle is made less interesting in this version. In the first part of the novel, the growing sense of dread comes from reading this character's gradual suspicions about the count's private habits. Nosferatu portrays him as blissfully oblivious to what's going on under his nose. Once the count settles into his new property, the novel switches to detective mode as our protagonists track down his movements and begin strategizing a way to kill him. In Nosferatu, the answer is conveniently found in a literal Monster Manual that the young man already owned, and the count jumps straight to the final confrontation as soon as he moves in. In striving to lose no time, the movie loses much of the novel's suspense.

The least enjoyable part of Nosferatu is the underwhelming way it ends. The method for defeating the vampire is too passive, and the special effects used for the vampire's death by sunlight are disappointingly simple, especially when seen just moments after the expert play of shadows that precedes it. Romanticism is all about feels and vibes, so a damsel's self-sacrifice is par for the course, and the script gets bonus points for the brief dialogue at the beginning where dead flowers foreshadow the loss of something beautiful, but, as I said above, the final scene is where you find the bits that you'll remember.

Apart from the titular villain, the quality of the acting is nothing remarkable. The suffering damsel knows clearly what her role is: to look vulnerable and helpless. She spends the movie visibly sighing with the oh so tragic demeanor that in any other movie would presage a death by tuberculosis. The friends she stays with for most of the runtime are basically skippable, and the madman who waits in jail for the count's arrival comes off more as comic relief (and possible anti-Semitic caricature) than as a supposed secondary antagonist. The young man who visits the count at his castle is consistently clueless, even cavalier about dining with an undead abomination, and after he returns home, he ceases to have any impact on the story. Only the sailors who unwittingly transport their killer do an interesting job in terms of acting, and they're promptly dispatched offscreen.

What Nosferatu lacks in scriptwriting it makes up for in visual memorability. Orlok, Nosferatu's substitute for Dracula, has a fantastic design. Cadaveric yet imposing, frail yet ravenous, this is a monster perfectly made for silent cinema. It's impossible to avert the eye from his unnatural presence, enhanced by a judicious dose of the stop-motion technique in some scenes. The performance is deceptively simple: his facial expressions don't hint at any reasoning intelligence behind the appropriately dead gaze he wears at all times. It's as if the rats that travel with him, spreading his curse of pestilence, had eaten his eyelids and left a hollow, desiccated set of eyes to haunt mortals with. That said, it's regrettable that Orlok's look also happens to match several anti-Semitic clichés. The Germany that birthed Nosferatu had a long and painful road ahead before reckoning with its theretofore unexamined prejudices.

To a viewer of this century, Nosferatu isn't exactly scary, much less after the many ways its memetic potential has been reused and remixed. Vampires have been everything: sublime, detestable, pitiful, sexy, cartoonish, fearsome, pathetic, elegant, repulsive, otherworldly, relatable, beastly, aristocratic, demonic, sparkly, allegorical, ostracized, dominant, solitary, clannish, contagious, playable, killable, dateable. To watch Nosferatu after seeing the plethora of movie vampires that followed grants a humbling perspective on what infinite malleability can result from a modest first showing. By virtue of its own, small addition to vampire lore (killing them with sunlight), it taught writers that more variations were acceptable: garlic, crosses, holy water, silver bullets, dead blood, a lucky roll of Turn Undead. Carmilla, The Vampyre and Dracula brought vampires from the obscurity of folklore into world literature. But it was Nosferatu that positioned them as staples of pop culture. If for nothing else, we must thank it for that.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview: The Fall of the House of Usher

Be still, my tell-tale heart

PUT IT IN MY EYE HOLES

It's a tricky business, adapting books (I think it was Gandalf who said that). Up until recently, that pretty much came in the form of movies, which frequently missed the mark when adapting novels - after all, a lot of nuance of 100,000+ words gets lost when shoved into a 2-hour box. I've long maintained that short stories and graphic novels are the best media for movies to adapt.

But the medium has changed, and for the better. Miniseries can tackle works of any length, and feed them to us in bite-sized chunks, which we then consume all at once anyway, and I am here for it. 

The Fall of the House of Usher caused both trepidation and excitement in me - that tricky business of adapting things, not least of all Poe. Tackling the Usher story itself is, on its face, simple enough - but Netflix bit off a lot by choosing to package all of it in one miniseries - and set it in 2023. I approached it the same way I approach most horror - peeking out from behind a pillow. Not because I was afraid of the show*, but because I was afraid of what they might do.

I love Poe for a myriad of reasons, but he is the author I have grown the most in my love of. There is such a tremendous weight to every word, nothing is fluff or wasted, and every line delivers so much. There are definitely filmmaking equals to this - Kubrick famously calls "every frame a painting", Denis Villeneuve is the best director working today, David Fincher delights in small, meaningful details, and I think a lot of younger filmmakers are informed by the need to embrace detailed, punchy filmmaking. 

But lifting meaningful words off a page and making them meaningful on a screen is much, much easier said than done. So hats off to Mike Flanagan for having the ambition to tackle this project, and even more impressive... I think he nailed it. 

If you read my lambasting of Zach Snyder linked up there, my feelings going into this are pretty much identical to going into Watchmen. Coming out, however, is a completely opposite feeling. What we walk away with is a modernization of all the subtext and irony that Poe brought to his writings - a stirring critique of not just capitalism, but our modern, disposable culture, filled with characters who are unlikable in the best way. You know they're going to die, in creatively grotesque fashion, and you can't wait to see it - not because you just want to see some Final Destination-style death*, but because the way they happen is so perfectly married to how that terrible person lived.

Which is by design - Poe's horror comes, not from gore, torture, jump scares, or the like, but from an overwhelming sense of foreboding inevitability. Indeed - in many of his stories, the worst has already happened. This is quite possibly where the adaptation shines the brightest - the flashbacks to the Usher twins meteoric rise is littered with corpses and broken enemies; we know this, and yet when those flashbacks occur, there is still that sense, the gloom and fear that is Poe's hallmark. 

Poe often tells the story by the story being told to a narrator, or narrated by someone who is likely unreliable. We do have a narrator, Roderick Usher narrating to his old frenemy, a modern Dupin (brilliantly portrayed by Carl Lumbly). But it's the addition of Verna (an anagram of Raven) that brings all the disparate threads of Poe's stories together. Not death or fate, but amoral and immortal, making deals with driven individuals - I don't want to say too much, on the chance you haven't watched it, but it's a hefty swing to add something to such classic tales, and have that addition fit seamlessly - and in fact, enrich it. 

There isn't a whole lot to nitpick here - the performances and directing are both brilliant, and details down to the sound design are spot on (with the possible exception of Another Brick in the Wall. A touch on the nose for my taste). The finale drags on, and gets preachy, even for having messages I 100% agree with. It's a little too cheeky for its own good on a few occasions - the reason the Rue Morgue is called that in the show leaps to mind - but it's also very self-aware. It doesn't take itself too seriously, so those moments it tries to be overly-clever work in a satirical way.

--

The Math:

Baseline Score: 9/10

Bonuses:

+1 for the all-star cast delivering brilliant performances

+1 for... not screwing it up? I was fully prepared for this to be so bad, and it went above and beyond.

Penalties:

-1 for the over-long, preachy finale. You have to work hard to lose me with an anti-capitalist speech, and it did.

-1 for shoehorning The Raven into it. I get it, but it felt forced. 

-.5 because I kind of wish it wasn't set in modern times

Nerd Coefficient: 8.5/10. It's just not quite a nine to me. Brilliantly done, and it definitely works in the modern age, which speaks to the creative team behind it. It has very few flaws, and is a must-watch.

*Also that

Dean Smith-Richard is the author of 3204AD, loves to cook, play baseball, and is way too much of a craft beer nerd. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and likes the rain, thank you very much.

Summer Reading List: Vance

As the resident cult film nerd here in the flock, sometimes a book pops up that's just so exactly up my alley that I really don't have a choice in the matter. That book simply is going to be coming home with me. A few summers ago it was Dirty Words and Filthy Pictures, about the evolution and eventual breakdown of film censorship, and this year, well, the wife found me two such books that are now demanding my eyeballs. And Summer Reading Lists being what they are, now I get to share them with you!

1. Glamour Ghoul, by Sandra Niemi
This biography of Maila Nurmi, the woman who created and played Vampira, the first late-night television horror host, was written by her niece. It was created through a combination of family history learned from her father, Maila's estranged brother, and the diary entries, tapes, and scraps of never-finished autobiography that Maila had assembled over the years, and Sandra came into possession of after Maila's death. I first learned of Vampira, like many other people did, from the Tim Burton movie Ed Wood, which was a transformational movie for me. It introduced me to outsider cinema at just the right age and in just close-enough proximity to a non-Blockbuster neighborhood video store. But Maila Nurmi, the woman behind Vampira, was always a mystery. She was the life model for Disney's Maleficent around the time of her Vampira fame in the 1950s, but by the 1980s was impoverished and unsuccessfully suing Elvira for stealing her act. Maila died not long after I moved to Los Angeles, and was reportely living in dire poverty, trying to scrape by on occasional jewelry and artwork sales. There was no money for internment, and some of her acquaintances reached out to fans to get Maila a plot at the Hollywood Forever ceremony. A few years later, there was a second fundraiser to purchase her a fitting tombstone, and I contributed to that effort. I am very excited about this book, and about learning how the few dots I know of connect in the life of this singular personality.

2. Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film, by Kevin Whitehead
In an animation class I took in college, we watched some early Betty Boop cartoons that had live-action footage of Cab Calloway and His Orchestra included in them. I love Cab Calloway, and seeing this footage was more exciting to me that even the way out-there, surreal ghost-trip that was the cartoon. A few years later, when you could walk into a Walgreens or Rite-Aid and see a spinning carousel of $1 DVDs of programs you probably never heard of and had fallen into the public domain, I discovered more films featuring Cab Calloway, as well as Duke Ellington and his orchestra, performing in the 1930s. These are gems of early jazz. There are also animated films made by John and Faith Hubley in the 1960s featuring Dizzy Gillespie, sometimes just as a voice actor, but sometimes performing, that I've been a fan of for a long time, and recently I've been able to catch landmark films with jazz performers on the Criterion Channel, such as Shirley Clarke's Ornette: Made in America, about Ornette Coleman. If this book is what it announces itself to be — the definitive guide to jazz on film — then I expect to discover many more gems I would not otherwise come across.

3. How Music Works, by David Byrne
I have to be honest — I don't really know too much about this book. I don't know if it's mostly biography, or theory, or ruminations on music in general and in specific. It's probably not a cookbook. But I think I kind of want to be David Byrne when I grow up, so it seemed like a sure thing. 

 

 

 

4. Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World and What We Can Do to Fix It, by Mike Montiero
My drummer, who is also a UX designer doing really good things for great organizations, gave me this book. It's about design ethics with an emphasis on Silicon Valley, tech start-ups, and social media platforms. The central premise is that these companies and applications that have found their way into almost every corner of our daily lives are doing tremendous harm, and that's actually on purpose. They are working the way they were designed to work. So this book, then, is an attempt to engage in a conversation about and for the designers who are employed by these companies, and who are asked to do unethical things, or things that can easily be twisted into unethical uses. Doctors have a code that begins with "do no harm," architects are having conversations about whether or not they should be involved in designing facilities like super-max prisons, where people are routinely treated in dehumanizing ways, and this book suggests designers need to be having the same kinds of conversations.

5. The Girl Who Drank the Moon, by Kelly Barnhill
When this book was released in 2016, it quickly became a favorite of the site. After Joe's wonderful review, I grabbed the book and read it to my kids. And then I read it again. And then I read it again. We just did a big reorganization of bookshelves, and one of my kids found our hardcover of this pushed back behind another book. It had been at least a year, probably closer to two, since I last read it to them. She found the book, then found me, put it in my hand, and said, "You're going to start reading this to us again. Tonight." Who am I to argue? 

 

POSTED BY Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together for a long time now. Maybe one of these days he'll have a Hugo Award above the fireplace to show for it.

Genre Fight! Horror vs. Sci-Fi In Film: The 1930s

Welcome to the second installment of my series rounding up some key horror and sci-fi movies of a particular era, forcing them stare right at each other while standing too close together, and then making them duke it out. When last we met, the horror and science fiction genres were heading back to their respective corners, after horror decisively won Round One: the silent film era (1900-1929). The bell is ringing for Round Two — will science fiction even the score in the first full decade of sound film? Or will horror once again dominate the judge’s scorecard? Might there be controversy?

Let’s see who comes out ahead.

Genre Fight! 1930-1939

Sci-Fi: 1936 gives us a very interesting artifact — Things to Come, directed by William Cameron Menzies and written by H.G. Wells, himself. I discovered this movie many years ago and actually re-cut it into a music video for the first song on the first album by my then-new musical project, Sci-Fi Romance. I’m biased, I have a soft spot for it, but also, it’s a really cool movie. It envisions the coming of World War III, and the worldwide destruction that follows, sending civilization back to little more than the Stone Age. But from the ashes, mankind rises to ever greater heights, and the film features some top-shelf retro-futuristic visuals.

 

The 1930s overall give us something else that becomes a formative component of the visual landscape of sci-fi: the theatrical serial. Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and even the gadgetry of Dick Tracy may not have filled out feature films of the 1930s, but they were a key part of the moviegoing experience — along with newsreels and cartoons — and they helped shape the narrative and visual aesthetic of James Bond and Star Wars films to come, under whose shadows every big-budget tentpole movie of today lives.

But let’s be honest. The genre that is most closely associated with the 1930s — thanks primarily to two performers, a producer, and a studio working in concert — is horror.

Horror: There's no mystery, here — the performers are Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and the producer is Carl Laemmle, Jr., head of production for Universal Studios, which his father had founded. Working with directors like Tod Browning and James Whale, Laemmle made the decision to focus Universal's output on relatively inexpensive genre films during the early years of the Great Depression, and the studio produced a string of films that became synonmous with Classic Horror. Dracula (both the English and Spanich versions), Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and The Mummy. I mean, books have been written about the Universal Monsters...many, many books. I don't need to elaborate.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The 1930s also brought Peter Lorre to the United States, and he starred in Mad Love, which was directed by fellow German ex-pat Karl Freund (who also shot Metropolis for Fritz Lang before coming to the States and shooting Dracula, directing The Mummy, and then essentially inventing TV studio production with I Love Lucy). Still in Europe, Carl Theodor Dreyer made Vampyr after his silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc. And speaking of H.G. Welles, his Island of Dr. Moreau was adapted as Island of Lost Souls with Charles Laughton.

But I hear some of you saying, "I thought Marty Shelley's Frankenstein is considered the first science fiction novel. So shouldn't Frankenstein be a science fiction movie?" You make a good point, invented naysayer. Frankenstein and Bride both have truly epic production design in the laboratories — the stuff of science fiction tropes from here to steampunk Victorian England and back. Yeah, good point. And, I mean, the movie James Whale made in between those, The Invisible Man, it's about a mad scientist...or at least a scientist whose work had the unfortunately side-effect of causing madness. And I guess in Mad Love, Peter Lorre plays a surgeon. Island of Lost Souls is about a doctor performing essentially genetic experiments. In a world that had only known that viruses were a thing for about the last forty years, a world where human flight was only a couple of decades old and the Jet Age was still beyond the horizon, science was not yet the massive portion of the zeitgeist that it would soon become.

So there's a lot of  overlap here. Too much for comfort.

The Winner: It’s a draw.

I know. I didn’t see it coming, either. But the 1930s present us with an earlier incarnation of a problem we face today, in the age of Peak Superhero. Is Jessica Jones a Neo-noir, or is it speculative fiction because of superheroes and mind control? Is it more one than the other? What’s WandaVision? What’s Frankenstein?

In the 1930s, there simply wasn’t a meaningful onscreen distinction between sci-fi and horror. They were treated largely the same way by the studios, in promotions and packaging, and shared the same talent in front of and behind the camera. At the bell that brings this round to a close, both of our battered combatants can return to their corners with their heads high. 

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012; film nerd since the local UHF channel played Dracula and Frankenstein for Halloween, tinted blue and green, respectively, many, many years ago.

Genre Fight! Horror vs. Sci-Fi In Film: The Silent Film Era

 

The Criterion Channel bookended 2020 with two genre collections — “Seventies Sci-Fi,” and “‘70s Horror” — one in January, the other timed for Halloween. I watched a ton of those movies. Many of the 70s sci-fi titles were new to me (A Boy and His Dog, Demon Seed, Dark Star) and while some of the 70s horror titles were old favorites (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), I took the opportunity to introduce myself to more George A. Romero non-zombie films.

I found both experiences very interesting, but for different reasons, and it gave me the idea for this series — in which I will attempt to pit horror movies against sci-fi movies for every decade of the 20th century. This will be an entirely subjective undertaking, of course, but I’m going to try to look at both the quality of the films produced in each given decade, as well as the impact those films had more broadly either on the culture or on the evolution of onscreen storytelling.

I know this first installment is a little bit of a fudge, since I’ll be tackling the entire silent film era, which spanned about three decades. But a couple of things make this a more-reasonable grouping than spinning my wheels for three articles before anybody even gets to hear an actor’s voice.

First, the vast majority of films created before 1930 are lost. Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation estimates that 90 percent of all films made before 1929 are lost, including key works by big stars of the silent era such as Lon Cheney. I’m working with what I’ve got.

Second, the feature film didn’t exist at all until 1906, and didn’t become the prominent type of film program until sometime in the next decade. Short films and serials existed in the same theatrical landscape alongside increasingly ambitious feature offerings focusing on increasingly sweeping spectacles. The breadth of genre content that emerges from the stew of the film industry’s formative early years seems to me like a tasty enough helping to get started with. That was some metaphor!

So that’s the pregame out of the way. Let’s get to it!

Genre Fight! 1900-1929

Sci-Fi: The very earliest days of cinema, roughly from the year 1895 to 1898, revolved around programs that were simply a single shot, lasting only a few seconds. The first film believed to employ more than a single shot, creating actual edits, is thought to have been made in 1898 by English filmmaker Robert W. Paul, who was an acquaintance of George Méliès. In the same year, Méliès began experimenting with camera tricks such as double exposure and reverse-cranking, or running the film backward. In 1902, Méliès created arguably one of the first masterpieces of film, A Voyage to the Moon, which remains a remarkable feat of artistry using a medium that had only existed for seven years. There’s no “science” in A Voyage to the Moon, but it was inspired by a Jules Verne novel, and involves space travel, so I’m putting it in the sci-fi bucket.

Méliès also adapted Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1907, but things in the sci-fi arena don’t really get cooking until the 1920s. The most significant achievement of the period is Fritz Lang’s 1927 German masterpiece Metropolis. This is one of the all-time great films, and explores the ideas of the exploitation of workers, underground cities, futuristic paradises of skyscrapers and rapid transit, robots, Messianic revolutions, and more. The image of the robot Maria has become iconic, an enduring image that still informs sci-fi design.

Other notable films of the era were The Lost World from 1925, which featured stop-motion dinosaurs created by animation pioneer Willis O’Brien, who would also animate King Kong, and Russia’s Aelita, which focused on social revolution in a sci-fi setting.

Horror: Before his foray to the moon, Méliès spent the last few years of the 19th century creating a number of what are considered the first horror films, producing at least four horror shorts between 1896 and 1898 that revolved around trick photography. He adapted the story of Faust in 1907, and continued making other horror shorts through the decade.

In the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, Edison Studios was the major player in film content, from one-shot films like 1896’s The Kiss to some of the earliest narrative short films, such as 1902’s The Great Train Robbery. They got into the genre adaptation game with the first adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1910. Carl Laemmle — a name that would become synonymous with horror in the 1930s — tackled an early adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1917.

Just like in sci-fi, the 1920s really heralded the beginning of horror films as a going concern. In Europe, the German Expressionist design aesthetic that informed Metropolis found one of its earliest and most enduring exemplars in 1920’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The following year, Victor Sjöström directed The Phantom Carriage in Sweden, a film that would have a profound influence on Ingmar Bergman. And 1922 saw both F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and the documentary-ish Danish film Häxan, or Witchcraft Through the Ages. Nosferatu still holds up as a solid adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and gave us the iconic, unforgettable images of Count Orlock, which continued inspiring filmmakers like Werner Herzog in 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre and the speculative behind-the-scenes film Shadow of the Vampire in 2000. I recommend all of these early 1920s films. By the end of the decade, in 1928, the French adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher, which borrowed heavily from the German style, arrived on the scene, and is another quality film that still rewards viewing. I liked it so much I turned it into a music video.

In the United States, Lon Cheney emerged in the 1920s as the first huge Hollywood star of the horror genre, with roles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, and The Unknown (directed by Tod Browning, who would soon helm Bela Lugosi’s Dracula), among many other films, including the now-lost London After Midnight. The success of these Universal films paved the way for the much-beloved Universal Monsters films that were to soon follow in the 1930s.

The Winner: Horror

Metropolis is great. A Voyage to the Moon is great. But the sheer volume of standout horror movies from the 1920s that hold up to this day make this is pretty easy call. In the battle of the genres during the period of silent film, horror is the clear winner.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012; silent film nerd since the waning days of the 20th century.

LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! Bonus Conversation Edition

Welcome to a loverly punctuation mark at the end of the LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! series, in which I look at how to share horror with our offspring. Today's guest is Chloe N. Clark, an author and educator who has taught far more folks about horror than I have children. So let's talk scaring tiny people!

VK: Thanks for agreeing to chat about this!

CNC: Of course, I'm excited! Thank you for asking me!

VK: In your book recommendations for this series, you talked about how you got into horror at a very, very young age. I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how I roll this type of stuff out to my kids. But do you think, in the end, it matters? I mean, you seem to have turned out ok.

CNC: I honestly think it depends on a lot of factors: openness of the family in general and the kind of other media the child is consuming (as a child, I was also watching shows like Homicide: Life on the Street and talking about it with my parents, so there was certainly a level of my parents allowing me to be comfortable talking about adult matters); it also deeply depends on the child — I'm an immediate coward, I jump at jump scares like nobody's business but I also don't carry fears over. So as a child, I didn't get nightmares, for example. So I think a big thing is knowing that the child feels really safe in their surroundings. If they do, then I feel like horror is more manageable. There's also just the fact that a lot of children's entertainment is inherently scary — in Disney films and fairy tales, fucked up stuff happens, too.

VK: That's very true. I didn't realize how twisted even Snow White was until I re-watched it as I was getting into animation more generally as a late teenager. So much of that stuff just missed me as a small kid. Maybe it was because evil step-mothers and those fairy tale tropes felt so foreign. They didn't touch my life.

CNC: That's true, definitely — like they are based out of specifics that, in a way, are true to all genres of terror. There's a quote I love that I can't remember which Italian folklorist said, but is along the lines of "Don't believe fairy tales, they're true." Because at the time of their writings, they were the issues that people dealt with (where women died in childbirth way more frequently, etc), so there were stepmothers aplenty. Or where children did have to act as scullery maids (a la Cinderella)

VK: Right. For me, as someone who has always had very vivid dreams, as a kid the idea of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies was too much for me, and I steered clear of them for a very long time. It wasn't a burned-up guy with razor knives that did it, it was the idea of my dreams turning against me. When I talked specifically about Coraline and ParaNorman in this series, I discussed how it's given me an opportunity to talk with the kids about othering in very specific terms. It's easy for me, and my kids, to identify with Norman, or Coraline, as a kindred spirit with outsider interests. As those characters are othered and rejected by those around them, we've been able to have great talks about empathy, and how we don't want to make the mistakes of the crowd. Do you think that's a central part of the horror narrative overall?

CNC: Definitely, I can see that (fun side fact, Nightmare on Elm Street is how I realized I was a lucid dreamer as a child). And that's what horror does so well: it links into that idea of base primal fears (our own mind going against us, or the beach being dangerous, or whatever), but I almost think those are *good* lessons for kids to learn early. And yes, I think empathy is a key to horror. Obviously I think about othering and horror a lot — it's literally what I teach about. It is how we view monsters as others and how that shapes the narratives of fear told culturally. Horror is actively telling us to listen to those we might not listen to, and that's one of the biggest, most valuable lessons I think it can offer to us.

VK: This is one of the big reasons why I was looking forward to you participating in this series: Monster Theory! Can you talk in general terms about that?

CNC: So in general, Monster Theory is the critical lens of examining how monstrosity is used by different cultures in order to perceive of othering or social constructs, etc. I more specifically use it to talk about constructions of privilege and how horror is often a lens to examine that. This is something Get Out, for example, does exceptionally well. Making groups we fear into monsters has been a tactic since the beginning of storytelling. It's the most effective tactic for controlling a populace. And it's one, more and more, that we see horror narratives questioning in ways other genres are not.

VK: Right. Because there's an understandable, natural aversion to something that's different. But what separates humans from, say, my cats with new people in the house, is that we have an intellect and empathy and ways to synthesize those into an understanding of others. But routinely we see those impulses weaponized by leaders who want to divert someone's gaze away from where they should be looking. I feel like that's one of the most important lessons I can pass on to my kids, because it's a fundamental mechanic of the world. And you're right — I don't know other genres that consistently explore that theme.

CNC: Yeah, that exactly sums up why I teach horror in a rhetoric class. If there is one skill I want college students to have, it is to see the world with empathy and to understand the way fear is used to promote rhetorics of violence. Horror is the perfect genre to combat and explore that.

VK: Is the "what you thought was the monster isn't the real monster" (ie, Frankenstein, etc) a sub-genre in monster stories, or is it sort of the home key, do you think?

CNC: I think for the most part, it's the home key. I mean look at zombie movies — the whole premise is often, Oh shoot, wait! The humans are the ones we should be fearing after all!" The same goes for even things like Jaws — the shark is following its natural instinct, but it's the money-grabbing mayor who is actually the villain by not allowing the knowledge to spread/closing the beach. Like at their hearts, most horror stories operate on someone-did-something-awful-and-it's-created-a-monstrosity.

VK: That winds up getting perverted in the slasher genre, though, right? Because the "something awful" gets colored almost entirely by conformity/regressive morality. The promiscuous teens get chopped to bits, the virginal Final Girl lives on. I'm not showing the kids slasher movies. I mean, it's just something else that exists in the genre waters.

CNC: Definitely, Though I'd argue that in some ways those also have at least one, perhaps unintentionally, progressive bent — the premise is "listen to women." In almost all of them, the Final Girl susses out what's up and then absolutely no one takes her seriously. Which again becomes a people-in-power-not-doing-anything-to-help-stop-the-issue.

VK: Yeah — it's hard to imagine if Kevin McCarthy got pod-peopled in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dana Wynter was the one who went to the next town over for help, that anyone would take her seriously.

CNC: Yes! That exactly! In the remake with Donald Sutherland, we even sort of see that a little bit with Veronica Cartwright versus Donald Sutherland's character.

VK: And it's so, so great.

CNC: It is one of my favorite films.

VK: We talked about the dangers of othering and how horror can provide a powerful (however bloody) window into that, so I guess we should talk about the other side of the same coin, which would be to keep a healthy skepticism of the uber-normal. I don't want to wander into the weeds of "Stranger Danger" or anything, but there's a consistent thread that connects The Stepford Wives and Body Snatchers, American Psycho, and even Get Out, I suppose, where the ultimate villain is someone who appears super normal on the surface.

CNC: Yeah, definitely. The veneer of normalcy needs to be interrogated in horror movies a lot of the time. Which I think is important — we idealize certain qualities, right? From "nuclear families" to "perfect marriages," etc, but we don't question enough what goes on beyond the surface of that. Horror helps us to push the idea of, "We can never know what secrets lurk beneath the surface." In horror, it's extreme, right? "Oh no! That successful businessman is a psychotic killer!" or, "Your neighbor is actually an alien!" But on a less extreme level, we do find that out all the time. The perfect husband is actually abusive, the business that seems so environmentally sound and respectable is actually using slave labor. Interrogation of ideals is a good skill to have.

VK: Yeah, and a perfect message for kids. Bruce Springsteen tells a story in his autobiography that he can't stand wind chimes to this day because when he was a kid, the husband in the next house was an abusive drunk, but the wife hung up these wind chimes to try to make the house appear peaceful and "normal" on the outside. You can see how that same lesson informs his entire career, and it's so easy (it's the norm, probably), for people to encourage their kids to be "like" somebody else. What's that really teaching them?

CNC: Yeah, it's teaching them this horrible lesson that if things aren't like everyone else then it's their fault. So many people don't report abuse because they don't want to be seen as being outside those cultural norms, too. Which is much more horrifying to me than a horror movie is.

VK: Agreed. Horror allows us a lens through which to process our own fears, and I'm thankful we've had so many generations of genre storytellers helping us all out.

CNC: Yes, that exactly! It also, I think, helps us to think about the ramifications of those fears. Like, we get the safety of asking "what would I do" before we ever have to actually face that question in real life. What would I do in a dangerous situation? Who would I be and who would I want to be?

VK: "Who would I want to be?" It's a perfect question, and one I think we should be encouraging our kids to ask (be they small, or in college).

CNC: Definitely. It's a lesson it's never too late to learn, but I wish we'd all learn earlier.

Posted by Vance K and Chloe N. Clark — in agreement about horror movies at nerds of a feather since at least 2016.

LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! Sleepers

Now that I've looked at some entries in the more mainstream family horror canon, I'd like to take a side-trip through the overgrown, ominous field alongside the road here to peek at some less-conventional but still easily accessible options for sharing frightening entertainment with kids.

By and large, I'm still thinking about this issue with young kids in mind. When I was growing up in the 80s, it was the era where even grocery stores had large VHS rental operations (and, with Redbox, we see all that is old is new again). Depending on the clerk at the counter, you could be 10 years old and rent any of the (as a friend of mine recently called it) unholy trinity of horror movies -- Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and any of their attendant sequels. So while I saw things like RoboCop or The Dead Zone at what was almost certainly too young an age, I don't think I'm any worse the wear for it. As a parent, you know your kids best and at a certain point, regardless of what the MPAA thinks, you're more than welcome to sit your tiny clone down on the couch and say, "Hey! Lemme show you something that scared the ever-loving shit out of me when I was your age!"

These are titles that kept popping up in my imagination as I thought about this series of posts, but that didn't conveniently fit in another post.

The Twilight Zone

Welcome to TGI McScratchy's, where it's constantly New Years Eve! Here we go again!

The Twilight Zone is on Netflix. Almost all of it. That means every day in your house can be New Year's Day, but even better, because you don't have to sit through the same three commercials on the SyFy Channel for however many hours you binge the show during their annual marathon. Something really fantastic happened in my house after I introduced the kids to Rod Serling's anthology masterpiece: the kids started asking me to tell them scary stories. But what they really wanted me to do was re-tell them the stories of the episodes. For a while there, I was really good at telling versions of And When the Sky was Opened, Mirror Image, Twenty-Two, and Little Girl Lost. The creepiness of so many of the episodes, from the uncanny to the paranoid to the unexplained, was a great way to introduce unsettling narratives into their media diet, and a lovely (for me) antidote to the Disney Channel. And the contained nature of each story makes them easily digested and easily understood. It was, and remains, a great thing to put on every now and again...if I can keep the kids from fighting about which episode to watch.

Animation

I spent a lot of time talking about animated features in the last installment of this series, but one of my favorite, favorite cartoons growing up was Disney's short The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I don't recall how I watched this so many times, separate from The Adventures of Mr. Toad — the two were originally presented back-to-back as a feature film — but I can only assume I taped the Ichabod Crane segment off the TV at some point and watched it repeatedly from that homemade VHS recording. I'm so pleased that this film is now part of my family's annual Halloween viewing programme. One of the neat things about it is that the whole thing is told in voice-over by Bing Crosby. There's very little diagetic sound in the segment, apart from the Headless Horseman's laughter and some sound effects.

The same decade that The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was produced, the Disney Animators Strike resulted in a whole bunch of animators heading out on their own to create their own studios. The most accomplished of these was almost unarguably UPA, which is now probably best remembered for Mr. Magoo. UPA was a titanic force for animation innovation and experimentation, and one of my favorite of their films is 1953's The Tell-Tale Heart, directed by Ted Parmelee. It's so creepy, and so wonderful.

And it's very difficult not to love a film that pulls all of the posts in this series together, which is Tim Burton's short film Vincent, about a little boy named Vincent who idolizes Poe, and which is narrated by Vincent Price. It's simply a joy.

 

The Best Ways to Ruin a Vacation

Here are a couple of good ways to ruin a vacation: 1) come to learn there's a man-eating shark in the water, or 2) decide that your new neighbors are serial killers. Either one of these scenarios will wreck a couple of weeks for you.

In the first case, I'm clearly talking about Jaws. This isn't a traditional horror movie, I guess, but it's the movie that gave us blockbusters, and it's been making people scared to go in the water since longer than I've been alive, so it's probably a slam-dunk crowd-pleaser for your home. The thing about Jaws, I think, that makes it such a great choice for young audiences is that even though there are frightening sequences, it's such a propulsive adventure tale that it's hard to not get caught up and just fall in love with the ride, even if parts of it scare you.

When it comes to Joe Dante's The 'burbs, it's a similar equation with different variables. It's tough to be too scared when you're laughing, and who's going to thumb their nose at a David S. Pumpkins/Princess Leia team up? In this comedy-horror that doesn't show up on nearly enough listicles these days, Tom Hanks' Ray decides to do a staycation during the same week his idiotic neighbor friends Art and ex-soldier Rumsfeld decide that the Klopek family, who just moved in to the cul-de-sac, are a bunch of murderous psychopaths. While there is plenty of gentle satire about suburban America and fan service to some lesser-known horror titles, the bottom line is this movie makes me laugh a lot, while sitting in a sandbox full of horror movie toys. If it's been a while since you've seen this one, give it another look, and see if it might be a good way to get your kids to laugh at some familiar horror tropes.

But Then, There's No Place Like Home

Finally, I have to mention one of my favorite-ever movies, and another title that I watched until the iron oxide started falling off the homemade VHS recording: The Wizard of Oz. They used to show this movie every Easter on network TV (Easter? Why? Network TV? I didn't have cable.) and one year I taped it, Maxwell House commercials and all, so I could watch it over and over and over and over again. The only other thing I'll say about this movie is that the flying monkeys have traumatized every generation of Americans for the last 80 years, so why shouldn't they traumatize your kids, too?


Recommendations

The Twilight Zone
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
The Tell-Tale Heart
Vincent
Jaws
The 'burbs
The Wizard of Oz
Ghostbusters

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather since 2012, Wizard of Oz devotee since...well, for much, much longer.