October 30th & October 31st | 23 Films
Halloween is many things to many people. Costumes and trick or treating. Pumpkin patches and jack-o-lanterns. Harvest celebrations. Pumpkin spice. And for fans of classic cinema, it is a time to revisit the great (and sometimes not-so-great but fun) horror movies. TCM loves Halloween so much that we dedicate the last two days of the month to an epic marathon. This year's festival spans more than 50 years, three continents, half a dozen countries and over 20 films.
The horror festival with a lightweight entry: Two on a Guillotine (1965), another in a long line of tales that involve heirs to a fortune that must spend a night in a house to inherit. In this film the heir is Connie Stevens, who plays the daughter of a stage magician who went mad after decapitating his wife in a performance gone wrong. Roddy McDowall stars in It! (1967) as an assistant museum curator who brings to life the ancient Golem of Prague and sends it on a mission of death and destruction. The British film borrows from Psycho (1960)—McDowall has very pronounced Norman Bates-like tendencies—as well as the silent German landmark Der Golem (1920) for this mix of horror, comedy and juvenile delinquent mayhem.
And courtesy of Noir Alley comes El Vampiro Negro (1953), a remake of Fritz Lang's M (1931) relocated to Argentina. So no, the vampire is not the supernatural type but that doesn't make his child murderer any less terrifying. Long overlooked and unavailable, this proto-feminist reimagining of the film was restored in 2014 by the Film Noir Foundation and the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
Universal dominated and defined horror cinema in the 1930s thanks to classics like Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931) and The Mummy (1932), but by the end of the decade the sequels were becoming silly and sloppy. The most intelligent and daring horror film of the 1940s came from a B-movie unit at RKO run by the very literate producer Val Lewton. Lewton was hired to make low-budget films to compete with the more expensive horror features coming out of Universal, in essence make A movies on a B budget, and he launched his series with Cat People (1942), a masterpiece of mood and psychological ambiguity masquerading as a cheap exploitation knock-off. Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur create mood not out of what is seen, but what isn’t. Cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, who went on to become RKO's resident master of film noir imagery, creates remarkable images on a limited budget, using light and shadow in a way that blurs the material world and the dream realm.
Lewton and Tourneur reunited almost immediately for a follow-up with an even more lurid title: I Walked with a Zombie (1943). European ennui collides with Haitian superstition in this elegant and evocative reimagining of "Jane Eyre" set on a Caribbean plantation. This is not the living dead of modern zombie movies but something between life and eternal sleep, and Tourneur embraces the dreamlike state with sequences of cinematic grace and mystery set to the thrumming beat of tom-toms. Mark Robson, who edited both films, was promoted to the director's chair for The Seventh Victim (1943) starring Kim Hunter as an innocent who leaves the protection of a boarding school to search for her missing sister and discovers a cabal of devil worshippers in Greenwich Village.
We travel across the Atlantic for Return to Glennascaul (1952), a short film starring Orson Welles that recalls the classic American tale "The Hitch-Hiker" (which Welles directed and starred in for radio) reimagined as an Irish ghost story tale. It eases us into a trio of British horrors, beginning with Eye of the Devil (1966), an occult thriller elevated by such stars as Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Donald Pleasence and Flora Robson.
Years after his Val Lewton masterpieces, American filmmaker Jacques Tourneur returned to his horror roots with Curse of the Demon (1957), a supernatural mystery that pits an American psychologist (played by Dana Andrews) against a British occultist (Niall MacGinnis) who conjures a demonic creature to dispatch his critics. Ever the resourceful director, Tourneur plays the supernatural imagery as both a literal demon emerging from the smoke and fog and dark of night and as the result of the tormented imagination of a terrified victim. There's nothing supernatural about the horror of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), a lurid psychodrama released the same year as Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and shares a few defining similarities, notably a shy, socially clumsy protagonist with a voyeuristic fetish and murderous impulses. In other ways, it is utterly unique, with its intense color cinematography, seedy urban setting and disturbing connections between sex, violence and the cinema. You could say Powell was ahead of his time. The film was condemned upon its initial release and only embraced as a classic years later when it was championed by (among others) Martin Scorsese, who sponsored its rerelease in 1979.
Roman Polanski directs and stars in The Tenant (1976), the third film in Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy" (following Repulsion, 1965, and Rosemary's Baby, 1968). He brings a Kafka-esque quality to this mix of psychological thriller and paranoid horror set in a Paris apartment building that may or may not be the home of a sinister cabal. Häxan (1922), the sole silent film in the festival, is a witty and thoughtful first person study of the history of witchcraft and the persecution of those accused from Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen, who mixes documentary, horror and fantasy. From Mexico comes Cronos (1993), an alchemic twist on vampire lore and the price of eternal life. It's the feature debut of future genre master and Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro and you can see the visual invention and compassion for "monsters" that defines his later films on display here. We travel back to France for George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), an elegantly horrifying classic of obsession, guilt and sadism. Franju creates an eerie poetry reminiscent of the fantasy imagery of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946) for his tale of a plastic surgeon who sacrifices innocents to restore his daughter's face.
Vincent Price stars in the next pair of films, which take us back to the U.S. and the culture of independent horror films made outside of the Hollywood studio system. Director Crane Wilbur, an old hand at low-budget filmmaking and horror screenplays, lets Price and costar Agnes Moorehead go big in The Bat (1959), an old chestnut of a murder mystery with a haunted house, a fortune in stolen money and a large cast of suspects slowly dispatched by a mysterious killer. William Castle's gimmick-laden comic thriller House on Haunted Hill (1959) is not so much a horror movie as a fairground funhouse come to life with Price playing the silky showman of a host to five strangers who dare to spend a night in a "genuine" haunted house.
Horror Hotel (also known as City of the Dead) (1960) takes a more serious approach to its tale of a college student who travels to a spooky old Massachusetts town for research on ancient witchcraft and walks into a practicing coven. Director John Llewellyn Moxey takes a cue from Val Lewton's 1940s classics and hides his limited budget by shrouding his ominous town in perpetual night carpeted with a thick layer of swirling mist. Christopher Lee costars as a suspicious professor and his gravitas helps set the ominous tone. Though a veteran of stage and screen, Lee was practically unknown to American audiences until a series of British horror movies propelled him into horror movie stardom. We end the night with a choice selection of those classics.
You can't underestimate the influence that England's Hammer Films had on the horror genre. It was a struggling studio turning out a slate of low budget thrillers and science fiction movies when it tackled The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). At a time when most horror films were still in black and white, The Curse of Frankenstein was shot in blood red Technicolor. In a film culture dominated by giant creatures and atomic beasts, Hammer embraced a Gothic style updated with lurid imagery and lusty sex (suggested if never quite shown this early in Hammer's run). Peter Cushing plays the not-so-good doctor as a ruthless scientist whose rejection of superstition extends to all moral considerations and Christopher Lee is his pitiable creature. Director Terence Fisher reimagines Victorian Britain (by way of old-world Bavaria) with bold colors and swirling hues and the stylish, often salacious film became Hammer’s biggest hit to date, made horror stars out of the classically trained stars, and transformed the B studio into the house that dripped blood.
Hammer struck a deal with Universal Pictures to adapt the studio’s catalogue of classics, beginning with Horror of Dracula (1958), which reunited Fisher with Cushing, now the crusading vampire hunter Van Helsing, and Lee, the elegant, confident, altogether seductive Dracula. It embraces the erotic appeal of vampires that movies had ignored for decades and reimagines Van Helsing as both a man of science and a swashbuckling hero. And for The Mummy (1959), Lee became gauze-wrapped guardian of a lost tomb plundered by Cushing's archeologist, an act that marks the entire company for death. The towering, 6’5” Lee makes for a terrifying mummy, relentlessly carrying out a mission of vengeance in giant strides, smashing his way through rooms with heavy Frankenstein-like swipes of his arm and shrugging off shotgun blasts with barely a twitch.
Lee wasn't simply Hammer's house villain, however, and he embraces a rare heroic turn as scholar and occultist Duc de Richleau in The Devil Rides Out (1968), a thriller that pits him against a satanic cult. Lee plays Richleau with a dark elegance and intensity and the flair of an action hero as he battles the Aleister Crowley-like satanic lord (Charles Gray) on both the physical and the spiritual planes. And he dons the cape of the aristocratic bloodsucker for the sixth time in Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) and reunites with Cushing, now playing the son of Van Helsing.
The Plague of the Zombies (1966), which anticipated Night of the Living Dead (1968) by a couple of years, gives the Gothic treatment to the walking dead. This take is more beholden to the Haitian tradition than the flesh-hungry ghouls of George A. Romero's influential classic, though it's been reimagined as a kind of black magic wielded by a greedy mine owner in a small Cornish village.
