Horror of Haunted Portraits

In Virgin Witch, a pretty funny, perceptive moment. One of the girls who have come to a country house makes fun of the rather dour and stiff maid by doing, very briefly, by bedside, a quite cute Frankenstein impression. But she might also be speaking of the old portrait on the wall behind her, which has a kind of photographic quality, suggesting it might be related to her target in another way. It is funny on another level because she spends the next fifteen minutes dodging odd country types whose manner scares her, as a groundskeeper, horsewoman and local houndstooth walker, all scowl at her, in strange encounters (all members of the coven, but we don’t know that yet), making her paranoid.

As readers will come to know, it is clear to me that the go-to ultimate haunted portrait made use of in British Horror movies especially was a portrait of Mary Shelley. It shows up in the oddest places. Here it is on the wall over the mantel of the main room in the country house in The Asphyx, very odd, seeming to characterize the professors mad search for immortality as a Frankensteinian variant.

This is not the same portrait, but pretty good proof, that’s Mary Shelley. Richard Rothwell‘s portrait of Mary Shelley, shown at the Royal Academy in 1840, accompanied by lines from Percy Shelley‘s poem The Revolt of Islam calling her a “child of love and light.” At present, I can only interpret this to mean that it generically represents stiff scary English country patricians, but then connotatively, if you get the reference, refers to the Frankenstein impulse and curse. Sad to think that aging Mary became the stereotype of the haunted portrait. A distinct subgenre of the haunted portrait convention, though nothing is much done with it here.

Horror of Fire

Appreciative of the reason and purpose of fire and candles at a juncture of the agrarian calendar as it lurches unsteadily out of winter and toward spring, a few instrumentations of fire and fireplace with some meaning.

Orloff and the Invisible Dead, no review yet, but in its use of fireplaces, instrumental. The movie is a straight out hoot, but not bad either, most notable for its rather creative if simplistic way of rendering invisibility. Among other things, the movie has an invisible rape scene, an invisible fight scene, and a terrific final attack of the monster scene, also including astonishing nudity, all reviewed elsewhere. But it makes intriguing use of the fireplaces, spread throughout the castle, room by room, they give to the whole proceedings a distinct feeling of chilliness. So many fires are needed to be lit, to keep the castle warm. The doctor is made to feel unwelcome by his fire left untended in his cold room, so he has to put his coat on. Then, when Orloff’s daughter dies, grief is expressed by his sitting in front of a burned out charred black fireplace. This motif is used a few other times when he sits vigil through some evil thoughts and deeds. Proof then that the fireplace has become a symbolic representation of his state of mind., and rather effectively done.

Schoolgirl Hitchhikers, no review yet, but for the fireplace, conventional, but good extension and implementation of the convention. A very mixed Jean Rollin outing, swimming in female nudity in consecutive love scenes in the first fifteen minutes, then all silly cops and robbers business after that. But in the second, heterosexual love scene, the moustached villain makes love to the cute hitchhiker intruder narrator who has been extolling the glories of Sapphic love upstairs by writhing all over her, performing oral sex on her, and then, presumably, having intercourse, but it does not seem to me he ever takes his pants off. That’s likely due to some code of censorship, which forced soft core grindhouse porn of the time to surface most of its penetrations onto the body of the female herself, an appreciation of sex obliquely gained by visually pouring over her pink body, showing nothing other than breasts and bottoms, with a lot of writhing about around that, call it circumcourse. In order to then symbolically show what cannot be shown the fire place is brought into it to signify not only unseen anatomy but the heat generated by the act and when the lovers tumble (awkwardly) on the floor the camera swings round into the fireplace and shows us the “making the love” (pants still on) through a veil of smoke and flames—a convention usually reserved for demonstrating that a character in a movie has passed a threshold into a horror (Son of Frankenstein, Burn, Witch, Burn). As it is, then, a pretty full convention, but then it has nothing to do with the plot.

Virgin Witch, instrumental, variant. Fire comes into this tale of a coven takeover by a devious model in several ways. But it merges with the motif of picture voodoo when Ann Michelle steals the head priestess’ photo then it is suggested with her black magic evil eye lights it on fire, which then causes it to curl up, and, then, almost completely curled up, the picture switches, becomes a picture of the subject to be put a spell on screaming, and then it opens up again, the fire receding, voila, her new reality: the target of this voodoo then immediately suffering severe migraines which undermine her leadership.  Picture voodoo is fairly common, this device, however,  is not, and it is eerie and effective.

The Blob and Satan

It occurs to me that the global sized Satan of medieval art was likely a demonization literally of the gothic cathedral and that this notion existed only in folk traditions and legends. But then I mention that it maybe survives not only in pictures of demons in modern horror, but in an abstract form in images of great blob creatures composed of parts of hundreds of others absorbed into them, including the iconic giant blob from Quatermass II, which was still influencing movies in the envaginating fullness of  The Blob in the 1980s remake of the original more gelatinous movie.

Horror of Books: five examples

An essential element of classic horror is the search for an explanation of whatever events are taking place in the movie in old books. This kind of research validates the occult meaning behind the event, as contrary to the normal order of things and, therefore, on a deeper level, threatening. It has an undermining purpose, it’s important to include it: horror movies omit going to the books at their peril. Here are five just OK, good and excellent examples of searches in old books in classic and not so classic horror.

Alicard, incidental. The book search is reduced to an incidental event, going no further than copying an image of a German woodcut of Vlad Tepes the Impaler feasting in front of impaled prisoners, depicted in sixteenth century pamphlet, as first shown to popular audiences in McNally and Florescu’s In Search of Dracula back in 1972—an image repeatedly used in the decade after, and still in this quite recent indie movie. Here, however, it’s just incidental.

In Brainiac, conventional. The old book is usually found on an old bookshelf and the old books in Brainiac are original sixteenth century calfskin bound relics, very old indeed and a very good property. But the Baron makes only limited use of them to explain to himself what is going on, and so in this movie, so good in other areas, the old books served only a conventional role.

Baron Blood, instrumental. The more forceful purpose of an old book is to reveal a clue that then can be used to move the plot forward. When this happens, the book becomes instrumental to the story. The fact that an old manuscript in Baron Blood is authentic looking, with its Solomon seal on it, a good prop, and that it is then used by Elke Sommer and the male lead to call up Baron Blood from the dead, makes it important, but the search for the old book or manuscript itself is instrumental only as a set up, and falls somewhat flat, when used, with Bava placing much more emphasis on the actual calling up of the ghost.

Blood on Satan’s Claw, instrumental. The book in this exemplary work of historical horror is instrumental both because one character’s primary role is to study the book to find out what is going on in the county, but also because a wonderful illustration in it proves that the young farmer in fact saw, exactly as pictured, a demon in the fields. It’s a very good old book, put to good use, though its use is somewhat limited compared to the many other strengths of the movie. 

Asylum, inspired. And then there are old books whose appearance and purpose are inspired, not only do they meet the convention, but they excel it, they are instrumental to the plot, and, more than that, are in themselves are so intriguing and scary that they become the very centerpiece of the story. And this is exactly what happens when, in a vignette in this portmanteau movie, Peter Cushing plays a man grieving his dead son who has found an old book with a magic formula tailoring pattern in it for the making of a suit of clothes that will bring his son back to life—and that is what the story is all about. The book itself, carefully shown, in its full recipe, page by page, is truly, terrifically weird.

 

A weekend in the country

I watched The Innkeepers again, though again finding it somewhat flat and slow; however, as I stayed in a country inn last weekend, it related, in oblique ways, helping me to relate

At least where I stayed was not an old inn, which would have been creepy

The hotel bedroom did not have dark wallpaper with a floral design, so it was apotropaically subtractive. That still left the bed straight on in front of the TV as a kind of coffin away from home, and I guess I hit the zombie pose just like Sara Paxton did here

I did not take an evening wash off the tension and anxiety on the road shower, which probably was not a good idea, my bathroom was one of those cut out shaped bath insets, not a classic tiled bathroom, the one in the movie is quite clean. Did not have a problem with the towels being missing, which is the joke here, the horror!

But then, in this recapture viewing, missing an experience I did not live fully through, while living it, because I am so 2D now in my life, I noted for the first time ever that in many ways pink roses on dark wallpaper may be a conceptual metaphor signifying the scream of a frightened female figure of space and time in small town places

And then too leaving the imprint of yourself and your sleep and especially any tossing and turning and sex is a bad thing as if there is a hair there or something it gives others a power over you like voodoo. I always half make the bed to close up over that sort of exposure as I believe in being a small space taker upper who does not leave a big footprint when I move on. So I can see where seeing this tossed and turned bedding could be taken, apropos nuns in nunsploitation masturbating with avatars of lost loves with their pillows or sheet twists, a presence, a manikin, an abstract voodoo doll, I did not leave it there in the room when I was gone. Then of course she had just seen a ghost rise out of the bedding, and was trying to rationalize it, with the lights on, away.

Then, again, coming back into present, I was reminded of this movie, by seeing a glimpse of it during fits of insomnia, and when Sara Paxton ran down the stairs in her t shirt and the mother covered her son’s eyes against her I thought that for a moment what we saw was her bottomless, as that is all that would cause such a covering of eyes, but she has panties on, and they are black and sporty, so I am not sure what the issue is.

Again its an odd visual, did the mother, cultured in times when it was dark down there, when naked, because of the 70s style bush, think that she was naked? when she had black panties on, heck, they wear this on subways on no pants day now, no problem, Odd, in this the Age of Aquarian vaginism.  (Since seeing Julie Christie momentarily nude in Demon Seed and then trying to see some of Kelly Reilly from Sherlock Holmes in the nude too, dipped for a moment into that awful basement of appeal in which you troll for catching sights of nudity of actresses in their movies and only watch and appreciate the movies for the minute and second where the nudity is, and indicate it for others likewise interested in a comment on YouTube–a very, very bad, even horrifying corner of modern life to get stuck in.

But heres RoMMer review of the movie, unrelated to the above,

903 The Innkeepers, two stars,  October 3 2012

This is rather a demanding little exercise in postmodern horror from Tye West, SVA grad who previously in horror did the also somewhat appealing House of the Devil. What that movie had and this movie lacks is a compelling female lead, though the female lead is still in control. Then too the horrors are of the psychotechnic sort of ghost that might haunt an old inn, and though the effects rise above the level of the scientific blips and statics that absorb the videographers of endless tv shows from Ghost Hunters International to Ghost Adventurers, it still strikes me, going back to a Halloween sequel and also a Blair Witch sequel more than a decade ago, to try to situate horror in the interstices of technology searches for ghosts in old houses is a problem. The demanding nature of the film then is that an old hotel is closing down and a young blogger into horror but afraid of the real thing plus a young blonde assistant who ends up believing is out to find out if in the last days of its existence the hotel was in fact haunted. Their efforts are complicated by the check in of two guests, a former actress who is now a new age life coach and a drunk, and is rather cryptically surly, and a nostalgic old timer back to revisit the scene of his happy honeymoon in the room in which it took place, presumably to kill himself (or in any case he gets it). And that’s that: from there on it is searching about, including a vision of a satan in a furnace fire at the end of a long corridor in the basement, and I suppose they find something but it never does rise above the level of a question mark. It is slow, maybe too subtle, definitely a movie you have to patient enough to settle down into, and hear it out, like I said, its demanding, cant say I love it.

Christmas detox

During Street Christmas, or the deforestation of the home, the first two weeks in January, all trees set out on the curb, there were some signs of missing Christmas, with ribbons set up on small upright Charlie Brown trees, at the curb, so for them, two departures, to detox: a still from Naked and Violent, Christmas trees for the dead, and then a line delivered to the girl on the “invisible income,” in Charlie Chan in Monte Carlo, “There are no Christmas trees in Monte Carlo!”

The Janus moment

Seeing picture of old Times Square, in previous post, once presided over with much less ceremony by Dick Clark, reminds me. Back then, Janus really was two faced: you looked up to watch the ball drop,then as soon as it did you did a quick about face and got the hell out of there. Totally different feeling. Caption for below:

The Temple of Janus at Rome, with a bust of the deity looking in three different directions – past, present and future.

New Year’s Eve old school

Included, RoMMer review of a horror movie about New Year’s Eve.

824 New Year’s Evil, two stars, July 30 2012

On many levels a standard slasher according to the template which quickly fixed in place after the success of Friday the 13^th, but with a few twists. The movie has an arch appreciation of itself as playing with the conventions of horror, without indulging in spoof scares, so an early odd fully clothed triggering of shower fixture scares, and, even more so, a wonderful sequence that takes place at the Van Nuys Drive in Theater for the New Years Eve Spookathon of 8 horror movies from dusk to dawn is rather clever. That the show on at the time of the psycho’s attacks is Blood Feast is odd too, but its fun to revisit anthropologically this vanished form of entertainment, and then theres the striped shirt guy in the front seat of his parked car whose got lucky enough to get the blouse undone and has his honey puffing on pot while he fondles her rather big and creamy blonde breasts. The cutting back and forth between scenes of horror movies and then the psycho stalking the cars and slashing away is fun, so this is an example, by the way, of a real movie massacre (though it strikes me as quoting Targets too). Any time a movie steps back to step outside of old movies to show off its violation you know its got about itself a level of self-consciousness, so this movie knows that slashers mean the end of traditional horrors. But then there is an odd sequence where the girl with the boobs covers up long enough to run off and then the psycho, dressed as a priest, chases her far and wide, ending up under the bleechers of a local stadium, when he finally gets her. The police analyze the killer’s problem as having a mother fixation evidenced by his focus on mutilating breasts. The movie is also fun for framing itself around very antiquated looking midnight broadcast of New Years at Time Square in the bad old days, making the place everybody lives in a shattered tearjerky not there. The main milieu of the movie, however, in a midnight rock concert, is not so good, and the main squeeze, a very done up big hair 80s rouge monster who lives in an odd emulatively cultured apartment with odd bouquets of flowers set out as if in a shrine to a primly framed print of Botticelli’s Venus (not unlike in Woman Who Came from The Sea), is odd too. Shes got the jumpsuit suave boyfriend who plays with her with a mask on and, we finally see, is a psychopathic smooth talker, and not the psycho of convention, so that too, it would seem the movie works to set up a psychopathic versus psycho milieu, all smooth, sly, staticy. He finally takes her down an elevator and then has full control over its switchbox and terrorizes her and another by jerking it up and down. The fact that he apparently has hid the heads of his former victims in the elevator shaft is also a somewhat wonderful metaphor of his devious up and down impossible to grasp nature. The fact that the drama plays out in and around the elevator, then in a vertical run up to the roof, and he falls off the roof to end it, is also symbolic of New Years Eve. And then too there was a blonde pretty boy floating ambiguously in and out of the scene and it turns out that in some way he was the psychopaths protégé and so the to be continued ruse at the end is about him picking up where his mentor left off. Though the movie in many ways is a complete mess, this core twisty turniness is worth letting unravel.

A New Year’s Eve Christmas Carol?

Screening some obscure versions of Dickens Christmas Carol, uncovered a New Year’s Eve unconscious.RoMMer review.

981 Christmas Carol with Vincent Price, two stars, December 28 2012

Well its certainly nice to see that Vincent Price was involved once in a production of Christmas Carol, even if an early TV version. But then at the time, in the mid modern era, the book was landmarked as important literature or child’s bedtime reading by being recited by a celebrity reader (Frederic March did a version with Basil Rathbone too). Price is certainly a lively reader of the tale, from a comfy couch, under a figurative equine lamp, and a storybook version of the text. But the dramatization worked out to illustrate his reading, conceptualized on par with history shows which dramatize narrated exegesis, is poor. This Scrooge, played with Waspy b movie propriety by Taylor Holmes, does not even get undressed for bed the whole time, he lays out on his bed as if waiting up for the visits. As a result, the movie seems like a bad bout of insomnia, a visualization of worries, rather than a dream of transformation: it’s a critical error. His lays out his hands like he is on his deathbed, in a way, as if only taking a snooze between work. None of the visits are imagined well, and everything is rather stiff and plain. None of the ghosts are distinguished. I truly think all the drama was given to Price in the reading, and the visuals were just a series of tableaux, translating illustrations in a book. The main emphasis is given to Scrooge’s Christmas morning reclamation but here too the fact that Scrooge does but a jig in front of the mantel clock, and at one point laughs out loud almost in imitation of the face of the clock, suggests him as a kind of Chronos or Janus figure who was conceptualized as simply a broken clock whose bearings had to be reset to live well in time. In that regard, a correction of timekeeping, as one lives life, it occurs to one that the Christmas Carol story really is a translation of Chronos into modern tale and in fact rather a New Years Eve New Years resolution story. Theres just not much to this one.

 

Second Christmas, the I Hate Christmas Christmas of twenty-somethings, December 14 2012

Urban outfitters, traffickers in the passive neo-hippie envaginating empowerment of waif models over their emasculated boyfriends, is getting some flack for selling FUCK candles and other rude accoutrements in their current holiday gift catalog (the outraged browsers blithely unaware of the fact that 99% of the merchandise is extremely conventional). This graphic shows a Christmas tree with skeleton gloves, for sale on the same page, coming out of it–a tree comes alive to scare you. No need to fear: this plays to a particular and well versed manifestation of the Christmas holiday among twenty-something souls insecure in their breakaway from their parents into adulthood, that ornery, resentful, disappointed, shocked, appalled to be 25, unhappy with their lives, I’m cancelling Christmas Christmas of a very specific time of life. (This version of I Hate Christmas Christmas is quite different than the one seen in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation a generation ago, which has to be classified as a venting by young 35-something parents at all the onerous duties that they have to do to make the day happen, dreadfully worried that it may in fact all go wrong: in this case the ridiculously oversized tree, requiring a Jason hockey mask power sawing, the squirrel in the tree, the tree fire and the tree being knocked over are the variants of these fears). Yes, ‘I hate Christmas’ Christmas, a traditional age-appropriate keeping of the day. At present I am unclear if this particular form of Christmas is the source of Christmas slasher or Santaexploitation movies (see previous entry on santa slashers).