Over the October season of horror I was watching lots of classic monsters and murder flicks and my wife and I also binged on old YouTube videos from the various Joe Bob Briggs’ movie series which featured the eponymous Joe Bob presenting films like a 1990s version of classic horror hosts of the 1960s and 1970s. The best thing about Joe Bob’s shows is that his redneck persona was tempered by his Vanderbilt University education and his obviously deep and broad knowledge about cinema history. Briggs’ shows made lots of teenagers into accidental cinephiles, but he wasn’t the only smarty celebrating American trash in the grunge era.

We also stumbled across this chestnut from the same era, Reel Wild Cinema hosted by the great Sandra Bernhard. Bernhard is currently appearing as a Satanic priestess on American Horror Story: Apocalypse, but she’s never been better than she was in her turn as a whacked-out kidnapper in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy.

Here’s a whopping playlist of Bernhard and the weird and wild film series she hosted when Beck was still a loser…

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If you read these blog posts for the druggy rockin’ weirdness I’m usually posting you might not know that I’m a film and art critic in real life. I love getting spooky on Insomnia in October, but the other night I found a great opportunity to fold in some of my critical writing as well.

If you didn’t know, horror actor supreme, Vincent Price, was also an O.G. art collector. Price was so serious about art that he curated a collection of affordable art prints, reproductions, and even originals for Sears, Roebuck to sell to its catalog customers. Here’s an amazing video of Price explaining the Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art to Sears employees…

This presentation is for the employees of Sears as they are being introduced to a new product to sell, that is, the art collection selected by actor Vincent Price. It is not focused on the customers of Sears, only the sales personnel at the various stores. It is not meant to be entertaining, only informational. Vincent Price and his wife since 1951 had been very active in introducing art to the students at East Los Angeles College. One of the galleries at the college is named after Mr. Price.

Here’s some more from Artist’s Network…

It was a surprise to us to learn that on October 6th, 1962, Sears unveiled an offering of original works of art for sale at its store in Denver, Colorado. Sears had commissioned famous actor and art collector, Vincent Price, to assemble a collection of art and gallery paintings that would be merchandised through its stores, making fine art more accessible to all Sears’ customers. They gave Price carte blanche to travel the world to put the collection together. After that first opening in Denver, the program was broadened with exhibits of art in ten additional Sears stores and after the first 1,500 pieces of art has been sold, it was expanded nationwide to all Sears stores. The program ended in 1971, but more than 50,000 original artworks had been sold during its time.

The Vincent Price Collection, as it was called, included gallery paintings and other works by Rembrandt, Chagall, Picasso, Whistler and many contemporary artists of the day. It included a watercolor by Andrew Wyeth and a painting by Salvador Dali commissioned by Price.

Here’s the video…

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John Carpenter’s original Halloween film splattered screens forty years ago, and I just got out of a preview screening for the new film with the same name.

Carpenter’s original found the him co-writing the script, directing the picture, and writing and performing its iconic synthesizer score. In 1978, Halloween seemed wholly original with its fighting female heroine played by Jamie Lee Curtis in a now-classic performance, its music, the look of the masked maniac Michael Myers, and especially Carpenter’s use of handheld camera and point of view shots that put the audience in the killer’s shoes and established a new genre of horror cinema: the slasher film.

Carpenter is on music duty in this new film, but it’s helmed by David Gordon Green. Green is best known for comedies and character-driven dramas and he brings lots of unexpected – but welcome – laughs here along with the kind of intricate character building that most horror films won’t take the time for. This new Halloween film takes place here and now, exactly 40 years after the events of the first movie. Curtis and other actors from the original are back this time around, and this new chapter does a good job of revisiting the original Michael Meyers massacre while building the plot toward a showdown between Curtis’ Laurie Strode and the killer. The idea is that they’ve both spent the last four decades dwelling on their unfinished business, and when Meyers manages to get free of his confines at a mental institution the pair embark on a collision course.

This movie could be super dumb. Strode might have had some macho one liners to spew while she’s busy strutting around tough as nails. In short, she might have been written as a typical male action hero as a cypher for a “strong female lead.” This happens all the time in lesser movies and it’s probably one of the worst things about contemporary cinema. This film is better than that, and even though Curtis is armed to the teeth and full on gunning — literally — to take Myers out, I believed it because I also saw her slugging alcohol to calm her nerves and coming unhinged at a family outing. She’s paranoid, and damaged, and maybe even kind of dangerous to be around, but she’s also relentlessly driven to fight her monster and finish him.

Halloween can’t be a groundbreaking classic this time around, and its not. But it’s a super entertaining film that revives the chills of the original while also offering a worthy second chapter to Strode and Meyers’ saga. It also honors the feminist tones of the first film in a breathless, unhinged climax of murderous catharsis that feels strikingly in tune with these strange spooky times.

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1978 was an amazing year for films — especially horror movies. I’m stoked about posting a whole plethora of monstrous missives in October’s lead-up to Halloween. But tonight I’m in the mood for fantasy and I wanted to share this kick ass mash-up I recently added to my YouTube channel.

While you’re likely at least familiar with Peter Jackson’s live action Lord of the Rings trilogy, you might not realize that the first LOTR feature was a masterpiece of strange animation created by cartooning bad boy Ralph Bakshi way back in 1978. It’s worth familiarizing yourself with the latter as many people say it was the blueprint for the former.

The LOTR Wiki comes to the rescue…

Peter Jackson first encountered The Lord of the Rings via Bakshi’s film, and some shots in his live-action trilogy appear to have been influenced by it:

One such shot features Frodo and the other hobbits hiding from a Black Rider under a big tree root, while the Black Rider stalks above them. In his version of the sequence, Jackson uses a similar shot — although he films it from a different angle (in the book, Frodo hid separately from the other hobbits).
A second sequence features the camera slowly revolving around Strider and the hobbits, who stand in a circle as the Black Riders approach them on Weathertop. In his staging, Jackson also uses a similar shot — although his camera is much faster, and Strider is not among the hobbits.

A third similarity is the depiction of Gollum losing the ring in the prologue: both films show very similar events but the book had no such prologue and indeed it runs directly counter to Tolkien’s scheme for the storyline.

Another similarly staged scene is Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn’s discovery of Gandalf the White.
On the DVD commentary of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Jackson acknowledges one shot, a low angle of a hobbit at Bilbo’s birthday party shouting “Proudfeet!”, as an intentional homage to Bakshi’s film.

By far the biggest “lift,” however, is the scene of the Nazgûl appearing in the hobbits’ room at the Prancing Pony and slashing the beds to ribbons thinking the shapes under the sheets to be the hobbits (but are actually pillows). This is almost identical to Bakshi’s version, which is significant, as the scene is not depicted in the book; a passage does appear that states that hobbit beds wind up slashed during the night, but the townsfolk of Bree are the perpetrators, not the Nazgûl.
Some of Sam’s interjections are also sourced from Bakshi rather than Tolkien.

Another idea used in both films is to depict Éomer as a late arrival at the Battle of the Hornburg, rather than the book’s Erkenbrand.
Indeed, the whole stricture of the first two installments is but Bakshi’s movie script plight in two and a little expanded with some episodes (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers ends exactly where Bakshi’s movie ends: the end of the Battle of Hornburg and Gollum leading Frodo and Sam to Shelob – the Black Gate is presumably cut, since Gollum talks about his “secret way”, and Faramir could be as well, since the Hobbits are journeying through the Mountains of Shadow).

See for yourself right here…

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Well it’s almost Halloween and I’m planning to keep the blog spooked-out right through the eerie evening. I’ve been posting a lot about horror films, but of course books are also good for a great scare, and comics provide both the deep reading of a words-on-the-page experience with the king of lurid visuals that we love to see smeared onscreen or across cheap paper.

Here’s a cool list of top scary comics from the folks at Vice…

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My last Kubrick post was well-received so I’m going back to Rob Ager to share another one of his videos deconstructing the master. Ager has done lots of analysis of Kubrick’s work, and this take on A Clockwork Orange is good for October because it touches on a contemporary horror…

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I saw a preview of the new screen version of Stephen King’s IT tonight. I’d have to think about it a little more to write a full review as I just got home and I need to stop working for the night and watch some hurricane news which has been really scary. Hurricane Irma is a real life monster bearing down on Florida, but there are plenty of reasons to be wary of going to see IT: it’s very scary, very gory, and even a bit questionable in terms of how far the onscreen violence goes in scenes where little kids are concerned. Obviously the vulnerability of children is a huge part of what makes IT terrifying, but there are at least a few sequences I’d have preferred to keep off-camera.

That said, most of the scares are right on point and feature great set-ups and killer make-up and digital effects. This Pennywise is an amazing monster and I’m sure IT will make a great showing in the technical categories come awards season. But the best part is that this flick is also funny and it features an amazing cast of kids. The masterstroke is that this version of the story only features the kids’ experiences with the monster and not their second confrontation as adults. This splitting of the story makes this condensed version super intense, and this movie is going to be so successful that there is no doubt that there will be a sequel. Get your scary movie season started right away by springing to see this one in the theater. In the meantime here’s Biography’s 2002 take on King and the weird worlds he creates…

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When we lost George Romero back in July it only helped to underline this year’s 50th anniversary celebration for the writer/director’s masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead. It’s still two months until Halloween, but I keep feeling like I want to jump-start the creepy cinema season. I’ll be seeing the IT preview this week so maybe I’ll just go with the fright flow and share this dead-eyed diamond. The movie’s Wiki page includes a hilarious “Controversy” section that includes some amazing quotes from Roger Ebert…

Night of the Living Dead premiered on October 1, 1968 at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh.[47] Nationally, it was shown as a Saturday afternoon matinée – as was typical for horror films at the time – and attracted an audience consisting of pre-teens and adolescents.[48][49] The MPAA film rating system was not in place until November 1968, so even young children were able to purchase tickets. Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times chided theater owners and parents who allowed children access to the film with such potent content for a horror film they were entirely unprepared for: “I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them,” he said. “They were used to going to movies, sure, and they’d seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else.” According to Ebert, the film affected the audience immediately:[49]

The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying… It’s hard to remember what sort of effect this movie might have had on you when you were six or seven. But try to remember. At that age, kids take the events on the screen seriously, and they identify fiercely with the hero. When the hero is killed, that’s not an unhappy ending but a tragic one: Nobody got out alive. It’s just over, that’s all.

Response from Variety after the initial release reflects the outrage generated by Romero’s film: “Until the Supreme Court establishes clear-cut guidelines for the pornography of violence, Night of the Living Dead will serve nicely as an outer-limit definition by example. In [a] mere 90 minutes this horror film (pun intended) casts serious aspersions on the integrity and social responsibility of its Pittsburgh-based makers, distributor Walter Reade, the film industry as a whole and [exhibitors] who book [the picture], as well as raising doubts about the future of the regional cinema movement and about the moral health of film goers who cheerfully opt for this unrelieved orgy of sadism…50″[]

One commentator asserts that the film garnered little attention from critics, “except to provoke argument about censoring its grisly scenes

Night of the Living Dead famously became a public domain film when a copyright stamp was left off the film’s prints. You can find it anywhere you look online. Here’s the movie at my YouTube channel. Watch the movie below, and connect at the links at the bottom of the post.

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If you look up “movies released in 1977″ on Google, you’ll probably be just as amazed as I was at the amazing run of films that flickered to life on the screen 40 years ago. I’ve already been posting up about a few of them, and here’s another one: Dario Argento’s best-known film, Suspiria. The film tells the story of an American ballerina travelling to a prestigious dance academy in Munich before the weird, supernatural goings-on at the school begin to take hold.

The story of Suspiria isn’t as important as the outrageous stylistics that Argento puts on the screen. Here’s a bit about the inspirations behind the film’s unforgettable look which has turned it into a cult classic…

Suspiria is noteworthy for several stylistic flourishes that have become Argento trademarks. The film was made with anamorphic lenses. The production design and cinematography emphasize vivid primary colors, particularly red, creating a deliberately unrealistic, nightmarish setting, emphasized by the use of imbibition Technicolor prints. The imbibition process, used for The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, is much more vivid in its color rendition than emulsion-based release prints, therefore enhancing the nightmarish quality of the film. It was one of the final feature films to be processed in Technicolor.[3]

The title and general concept of “The Three Mothers” came from Suspiria de Profundis, an uncredited inspiration for the film. There is a section in the book entitled “Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow”. The piece asserts that just as there are three Fates and three Graces, there are three Sorrows: “Mater Lacrymarum, Our Lady of Tears”, “Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs” and “Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness”.

Scriptwriter Daria Nicolodi stated that Suspiria’s inspiration came from a tale her grandmother told her as a young child about a real life experience she had in an acting academy where she discovered “the teachers were teaching arts, but also black magic.”[4] This story was later said by Argento to have been made up.[5]

A remake of the film is due this year. That sounds really scary. Here’s the classic…

Stay Awake!

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One last monstrous post before the the witches take over the night sky, the jack-o-lanterns cackle and the veil is pierced with mischief, mayhem, lunacy and eros. This year we celebrate the 90th birthday of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Call of Cthulhu” which appeared in Weird Tales in 1926. Here’s what a couple of bad ass writers have said about the tale…

The published story was regarded by Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan) as “a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest achievements of literature. Mr. Lovecraft holds a unique position in the literary world; he has grasped, to all intents, the worlds outside our paltry ken.”[12] Lovecraft scholar Peter Cannon regarded the story as “ambitious and complex…a dense and subtle narrative in which the horror gradually builds to cosmic proportions”, adding “one of [Lovecraft's] bleakest fictional expressions of man’s insignificant place in the universe.”[13]

French novelist Michel Houellebecq, in his book H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, described the story as the first of Lovecraft’s “great texts”.[14]

An article I found on Flipboard this weekend addressed how H.P. Lovecraft’s aesthetic has become a major influence on contemporary Hollywood even if the author’s works have yet to be acceptable in tinsel town. Did you know H.P. was a big racist? Check this…

HP Lovecraft wrote some of the most bizarre, imaginative and influential horror stories in the English language. But he was also a dangerous bigot. Is that why Hollywood still fears him?

HP Lovecraft’s tentacles are all over the modern horror movie. The cult author’s squelchy, slithery yarns influenced HR Giger’s iconic Alien design, inspired John Carpenter’s nightmarish masterpiece, The Thing, and have been a consistent reference point for Guillermo Del Toro, from Pan’s Labyrinth to Hellboy.

But though Lovecraft, whose jazz age fiction posited a godless universe presided over by monstrous “Great Old Ones”, can justifiably be described as a giant of the genre, he is, in other ways, deafeningly absent from our screens. His work has been adapted on many occasions, from 1970’s Roger Corman-produced The Dunwich Horror to last year’s Russian-made The Haunter of the Dark.

Yet none of these films have penetrated the public consciousness. They are appreciated by a tiny circle of uber-fans even as they remain thoroughly obscure to a mainstream audience.

Racists demonstrate the worst combination of stupid and hateful, and Lovecraft was guilty of both. He was also a literary visionary even if it could be argued that he really wasn’t a great writer. Hate the racism, but love the art. If you’re reading this blog you’re probably smart enough to do both.

Here’s H.P. Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown. Happy Halloween!

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