Invasion of the Hell Creatures

In the old days they used to have something called "Equal Time". 

Having looked at I Was a Teenage Werewolf, which was much, much better than I thought it would be, it may be useful to look at its double feature touring buddy, Invasion of the Saucer Men.

The Werewolf was a guy dealing with civilization and its discontents who was getting help from a Wilhelm Reichian back to nature Freudian; a reptilian brained hack in favor of lobotomizing our more cerebral capacities and organizing ourselves around pure social savagery.

Invasion is kind of about the dangers of teen alcoholism seen through the metaphoric lens of an alien invasion. It could have been called Invasion of the Space Pimps. 

The movie also features a scene which predates the 1970s cattle mutilation mass hysteria. An alien dices up a cow person. The film was made in 1957, twenty-three years ahead of Linda Moulton Howe's Strange Harvest. 

That scene featuring the bovine murder constitutes about all the horror you are going to get from Saucer Men. I suppose you could follow the cattle mutilation thread to Donald Wandrei, whose book Strange Harvest contains a story entitled "The Fire Vampires," a rendering of which lives at HorrorBabble. As a means to mining horror from this harmless motion picture.

This flick is a make the spaghetti screen saver. Also good for Halloween Party background noise.

This flick lives over at Sci-Fi Central in its totality.

Count Gore's 50th Featuring THE SHINING

Count Gore de Vol, a creative dynamo of paranormal proportions and Washington D.C. Horror Icon of Nixonian immensity, is celebrating his 50th Anniversary February 4th 6:30 p.m. with a screening of The Shining (Kubrickian version) at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Here's the Count making the announcement.

The Count once played Bozo on the Bozo the Clown program on WDCA. It's interesting because Doctor Madblood, another great Horror Host, did a stint as Bozo in Richmond, Virginia, WTVR.

Is that a coincidence or am I just creepy-clowning around?

Here's an old ad on E-bay if you are a memorabilia collector:

Doctor Madblood's Past Life

 

I had a friend who won some sort of contest and he actually appeared on the Bozo and Sooper Dog show. They used to have an audience of kids. Everybody in the neighborhood watched that day. There was Rob. Top row. 

I suspect local legend Jess Duboy of being Sooper Dog. Locating proof has been difficult. Anybody out there who knows for sure, comment below.

Here's Sooper Dog singing, interestingly, Puppy Love. 

Awh Ma I'm So Conflicted: I Was a Teenage Werewolf

 

This movie is over at Team Be Good.

I had the damndest time trying to find this movie. It was almost as bad as The Enchanted Cottage. Apparently, a batch of legal crap keeps people from repackaging Enchanted Cottage and Ghost and Mrs. Muir, both of which are ripe for musical transfiguration.

The Werewolf is a human ruled by his Reptilian Brain. He/She is the quintessential incarnation of the conflict between the ego and the id. A human battling his animal nature. Instinctual urges, violence, barking out threats, overwhelms the human ego and turns humans into wolves. 

This type of wolf is not the balance of nature predator but the rabid wolf. The delirium associated with rabies has been identified as the real world antecedent to the Werewolf myth. But on a psychological level, the werewolf is not a myth anymore than mood swings or bipolar disorders are myths.

The Werewolf's cousins are Mr. Hyde, the Incredible Hulk, Darkman, and a host of others. A sentient werewolf, a la Hugh Jackman, is a dog that won't hunt (his girlfriend at any rate). Meaning, he has tamed his id. He has a modicum of self-control. He can save his romantic partner.

Perhaps it is fitting Michael Landon has a go at werewolfism given rumors about his dark side. 

But we all have a dark side. 

Does that mean we'll all have a go at werewolfism?

At one point or another.

How Many Dogs Die in John Carpenter's Halloween?

The first Halloween movie is the best Halloween movie. If you don't want to spoil the experience, don't watch any of the others. 

Except maybe Halloween III. That one was interesting.

For a movie that was made for the express purpose of making easy money, Halloween had a lot of dimension to it. No pun intended.

The cinematography was spot on. There was an ink blot feel to the darkness in the movie. It got all over you. And Carpenter the Composer was off the charts jamming what with his alarm bell stabbings and scratchings setting off premature panic that wanes until the monster pops up and you realize you were right to start running in the first place.

Good stuff.

But . . . tucked in the movie is the horror movie marathon hosted by Doctor Dementia. It features The Thing and Forbidden Planet. The Thing in The Thing is a kind of walking carrot who kills a couple malamuts. It was remade by Carpenter. Some think that remake is his best film. 

Forbidden Planet features an invisible monster which turns out to be the one-man egregore created from Dr. Morbius's primal Id. Carpenter mixes the two movies in his version of The Thing and the inner monster manifests itself in the bodies of Carpenter's characters. But this isn't about that.

If you notice, the movies appear in Halloween out of sequence. The Thing kills dogs before his flying saucer is even discovered. They hadn't blown him out of the ice yet. In Forbidden Planet, Robbie the Robot zooms in toward the space ship before it has landed. In Halloween poop hits the fan before poop hits the fan.

Doctor Loomis and the Sheriff find a dead dog at the Meyers' house before Michael chokes the German Shepherd outside the house Annie is babysitting at. Exactly when the masks and rope are stolen from the Hardware Store is not clear. You can chalk it up to bad editing but . . . is it really? 

If you are confused, it is probably the way Carpenter wanted it. At the subliminal level, we are experiencing a mental disorder, a regression if you will, and time, like a mental disorder, is out of joint. The future happens before the present. Foreshadowing is foreboding. A process of confusion and disorder depriving the audience of any means of making sense of what is happening. 

The present is as blank as Michael's mask. Even in Carpenter's soul ripping music, the horror happens before the horror happens. That music has been called a "music box" or "musical set construction." You don't have to build a haunted castle. You can make one out of sound. 

Music is used that way in Phantasm and Jaws. When a Stranger Calls. I went to see When a Stranger Calls in the theater. People were literally screaming before anything happened. That is musical genius.

What is Michael? He's a cash cow now. The various attempts to define what he is have not been sufficient. I don't really want to know what he is. Then there is no mystique. His ability to haunt us is done away with. 

As a cure I suggest getting back to nature. Get back to the original Carpenter. Open the music box. Watch the teenage girls walking down the street. 

See the spectral figure behind the bushes.

BLOOD AND WOODSMOKE

I've been thinking of Dark Shadows a lot. I miss it. Like Pro Keds commercials, Jonny Quest, and Space Ghost (the original, not the talk show).

I was disappointed in the recent Johnny Depp version. If you were going to do a Dean Martin Roast of Dark Shadows, you would do the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp wackiness. They obviously didn't take the show seriously. 

I suppose you could look at the old shows and all the mishaps on set and the forgetting of lines and deduce this was Keystone Cop Vampires but I didn't end up going there. I think the way the show was set-up filming half-live with a very serious deadline to meet fit perfectly with what its artistic goal was. 

I'm assuming that goal was terror and the evocation of half-alive creatures stuck in a fate worse than death. The actors were all placed in a tangential vortex and were permanently deprived of a comfort zone. Imagine the terror of having millions witness you having no idea where you were in the script, in the story, in the blocking, anywhere. Like trying to terminate your cell phone account.

I'm not saying I'm a method actor. Or that I believe in "preparation" other than memorizing your lines and knowing your blocking. But the theatrical situation of Dark Shadows was method acting done to perfection. 

The actors daily were going to be placed in an impossible situation and told "see what you can do with that." They used their fears as fuel and you can see the fires they lit with it on screen as the dramatic trap set for them screamed across their faces. Faithfully, they went to their executions. 

Some of those "traps" were real. How many times did they threaten to burn the set down? Did you laugh or go Oh My God when the crew got caught on film? What a bizarre situation it was when the camera caught another camera following characters into a room. It was like another perversion of time travel only on this occasion the Collins family was haunted by the coming of automation, mechanical monsters from the future like Depp and Burton baptizing them as cute little puppets from a lost era. 

I think we should bring Dark Shadows back. I'm of a mind that there should be a Southern Branch of the Collins brood and a dark mansion that is the hub of a plantation. A Southern Gothic version but embued with very serious gut-wrenching explorations of the "situational" horrors of slavery as lived out in exploitational vampirism, the human struggle with inner monstrosity, taming it or vomiting it out in bloodsucking and broody revenge upon one's fellow "man" with heaping helpings of the zombification of the "labor force".

The history of American "Magic" would play out, especially its Voodoo/Hoodoo incarnations and African liberation theology witches doing by "any means necessary" spells. The native sorcerers in the woods. Werewolf soldiers and the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Frederick Douglass. Vampire slayer.

Well, it is a David Selby/Lara Parker remembrance. The slight hint of the southern accent and the scenarios it builds in your mind of the kind of gothic horror Faulkner or McCarthy might forge. 

A Couple of Shady Places

Terror at Collinwood

Dark Shadows Fans Unite

Cornwell's Ripper

I first read Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed in the first decade of this century. I thought she nailed it. As far as I was concerned, she had apprehended Jack the Ripper!

I’m not as sure today after reading her new edition of that book. Don’t get me wrong. Her case is still strong. If she hasn’t exactly collared the killer, she is at least in proximity to him. Her research has created tools which will aid in the eventual resolution of the case. A resolution which may not comport with her findings but that I predict will validate her efforts. I hope that validation will be enough compensation for the genuine suffering she endured tackling the case.

This is in spite of all the moronic barriers the UK has set up to prevent any thorough examination of the evidence. Jack the Ripper is apparently a protected copyright of the United Kingdom. The forensic value of studying human darkness is apparently lost on Britain. The case is at once an opportunity to decode the autonomic compulsions that animate killers like the Ripper and bring them to light where things like early intervention and prevention become possible. It lends credence to the Class Theory approach to the Ripper that if he wasn’t in league with the Royals he was at least doing the upper class the service of dispatching female vermin. The suffering of the poor in Britain persists because it is of social utility to the ruling class. That is a point hard to argue with, phony calls for unity to the contrary.

Cornwell is not a class theorist. And I don’t want to misrepresent her position. Read her books. The first and the rewrite. But I went there when I read her. I went to “class warfare”. I went to Freud and Jung. I went to Oscar Wilde. And The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Freud because there seems a clear case of castration anxiety if not performance anxiety in Cornwell’s Killer. The blade becomes the substitute penis compensating for any anatomical inadequacies or deformities. With it the Ripper achieves the ultimate penetration. In psychoanalytic circles, old and new, the ability to penetrate a female was analogous to social success for the healthy Freudian Male. It was a symbol of making one’s way in the world. Reich took that further. Sexual satisfaction was the key to mental health if not bodily health for all humans, male, female, and in between or outside. Cornwell’s Ripper is a man who has been deeply humiliated in the sexual arena. Fear of being sexually laughed at, rage over the humiliation. He literally dissected his anxieties.

Jung because we’re talking about an almost completely disembodied society in Victorian England. Nothing as earthy and disgusting as sex was allowed by the stiff uppers. Freud’s return of the repressed morphs into Jung’s Shadow. The sexual impulse killed off by Judeo-Christian animal abuse is resurrected in the autonomic nervous system where it becomes an autonomous being. Blended with any unprocessed emotions endemic to anatomical deformity, it can become quite the monster. Think of Morbius’s Id in Forbidden Planet.

It doesn’t mean disfigurement necessarily leads to homicidal behavior. The Elephant Man was not a mass murderer. And I’m not sure physical disfigurement was the Ripper’s problem as much as the social disfigurement brought about by Victorian sexual mores which were crimes against humanity.

This is the reason we should study the Ripper (as opposed to exploiting him). We ourselves are in danger of complete disembodiment due to moral inquisition in the form of “wokeness”. The dark is being repressed on a scale not seen since Victoria. The monstrous is manifested by repression. The idea I have no monster in me begs the unconscious mind to make one. Why do the woke find sex so disturbing? Why is it, along with race, the weapon of choice in murder by cancellation? Why do they so readily confess the sins of others, so classically projecting the shadow that one imagines Carl Jung turning in his grave? What monster will emerge from wokeness? The completely disembodied hologram? The zombie? The Cyborg? All of them, cyborg, hologram, zombie inquisitors flogging disgusting flesh like abusive dog fighting trainers?

I would side with the Class Theorists in that Cornwell’s Ripper seems the very incarnation of “class warfare”, a monster of Upstairs, Downstairs proportions. A protector of the chastity of the wife and a deep penetrator of foul lower class genetically inferior female sexuality. Not ok to rip the wife. But you can do anything to a whore. This was a direct result of the horrific sex hatred of the period.

But Cornwell’s Ripper was a painter. If she hasn’t done so already, Cornwell might want to write an analysis of his artwork where the art is the only evidence. That would be a good book. It causes me to wonder. Oscar Wilde knew Cornwell's Ripper. Could Dorian Gray have been Wilde’s Ripper Thesis?

Of course, that would mean the painter wasn’t the Ripper. The model was. Cornwell’s Ripper painted the actual Ripper! He was the original Rippersploitationist. Maybe even his publicist.

This line of "thought" is why some believe the “Ripper” to have been an ordinary “sex killer” without any special genius to him. His work was co-opted by publicity hounds out to make a quick buck. This view certainly causes one to turn to Aaron Kosminski as a person of interest whatever the status of DNA evidence against him. Kosminski’s effeminacy fits the profile of the inadequate sexual milquetoast out to achieve penetration any way he can a la the bantam rooster syndrome.

If that seems too colorful by half, let’s check our shaming mechanisms. Sex should be a considerably lighter subject than the heavy water experiment Victorians made it out to be. As such, the true “Jack the Ripper” was toxic Victorian sexual shame. It blanketed the UK during the Ripper Era.

And that means anyone could have been the “Ripper”.

Any sex. Any class. Any one.

 

The Flight That Wasn't Cancelled

 Halloween is here.

  

OTR Halloween Holidaze is a great place to spend your Halloween.