The Ghouls: Book Two - more inspiring horror stories

THE GHOULS: BOOK TWO

The Stories Behind Classic Horror Films

The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Beast With Five Fingers by W. F. Harvey

The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury

The Fly by George Langelaan

Viy by Nikolai Gogol

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce

The Colour Out Of Space by H. P. Lovecraft

The Skull Of The Marquis De Sade by Robert Bloch

The Oblong Box by Edgar Allan Poe

In the first volume of The Ghouls editor Peter Haining collected short stories that inspired horror films from the 1890s to the 1940s. This second paperback involves more familiar films, from 1945 to 1970, the idea being a sequential look at the history of horror films. Published in hardback in 1971, I bought them as paperbacks in 1974.

Here's the remaining nine stories and the films they inspired...

THE BODY SNATCHER

(1945, USA)

Based on The Body Snatcher (1884) by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Stevenson is well known for the novels Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. His short story The Body Snatcher is about the relationship between Dr MacFarlane and a medical school friend of his, Fettes, who both studied under Dr Knox (the real-life surgeon who employed the graverobbers Burke and Hare). Both copies I have of The Ghouls have all references to Knox obscured to read as 'K----', presumably to sidestep an old legal issue, even though it was written over fifty years later.

The film expands on Stevenson's story adding layers to the characters. Stevenson portrays the doctor and the body snatcher as scheming partners-in-crime. The film adds a middle-man, Fettes (Russell Wade), studying under an upright Dr MacFarlane (stony-faced Henry Daniell), while Gray (Karloff) is the more obvious villain. The script cleverly, slowly implicates MacFarlane as being equally responsible for Gray's crimes, adding shades of self-delusional morality to his character. The student Fettes is attracted to MacFarlane's immense knowledge and skill, but hesitates to chase after medical advances with such freshly obtained 'research material'.

This is a different angle from the subsequent adaptions of the 'Burke and Hare' story in that it portrays that characters that knew them rather than following the original events. For an American production, it displays enough authentic detail to represent the Scottish locations.

The Body Snatcher is a jewel of 1940s horror, as you're no doubt aware, it's one of Val Lewton's productions for RKO. While the budgets were low, the directing, lighting and acting were all superb. The scripts had psychological layers, moral ambiguities and regularly challenged 'untouchable' authority figures (notably in The Ghost Ship). Lewton's works are the 'films noirs' of horror.

Gray is a purely evil role for Karloff (also detestable as the asylum owner in Lewton's Bedlam), when the actor usually gave his mad doctors and monsters a sympathetic angle. Even here he initially throws us off guard by being friendly to a little girl. Compared to Karloff, Lugosi's role is tiny, with scarcely any dialogue (though the posters and trailers made it look like they were the two stars). I love their confrontational scene - it symbolically brings their much-publicised 'rivalry' as horror actors to a definitive end.

THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS

(1946)

Based on The Beast With Five Fingers (1928) by W. F. Harvey.

The story of a disembodied hand haunting the nephew of the dead owner is given a slightly more logical basis in the original. Because Adrian Borlsover is blind, but very good with his hands - he can read braille, feel his way around, and as he's slipping away, develops the talent for 'automatic writing', jotting down thoughts when he's unconscious. In this way, his hand changes his will and requests its freedom after his death. The hand then starts causing trouble in the library...

The movie dispenses with the blindness, making the hand's many skills more mysterious, but adds the Uncle's skill of great piano-playing. This is used to great effect in a key scene where his nephew (Peter Lorre) hears music when there's no-one sitting at the piano... But is Uncle exerting some kind of power over his legacy from beyond the grave, or is it all his nephew's paranoia?

The studio wanted this to be a comedy as much as a horror thriller, watering down the film's original dramatic intent. The film lurches between romantic comedy and gothic horror, at its most potent in the hallucinatory death scene - a disorientating, lurching camera and distorted music made all the more intense by Max (King Kong) Steiner's soundtrack.

Peter Lorre (The Raven, M, Maltese Falcon) is acting his heart out as the librarian on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is cruelly interrupted by Robert Alda (MASH actor Alan Alda's dad) pursuing a light-hearted romance, and J. Carroll Naish spending too much time making a joke of everything in a hokey Italian accent. This spoils what it could have been, but the antics of the hand, running around behind the books in the library (an idea from the story) and locked in a safe nailed to a block, make it strong enough to seek out. I was thrilled to see another hypnotic performance from Victor Francen, who was beyond excellent in the sound version of the extraordinary anti-war movie J'Accuse (1938).

The story was plundered by many other films, especially a great episode in Dr Terror's House of Horrors, with Christopher Lee being terrorised. The central uncertainty of whether Lorre's character is imagining the roving hand was also exploited in Oliver Stone's horror The Hand (1981). But the first 'nod' was the most popular - the character of 'Thing' which made itself so handy around The Addams Family TV household (1964).

While this was included in William K Everson's Classics of the Horror Film, The Beast With Five Fingers has never been released on DVD, but it's out there somewhere, maybe hiding in your bookcase...

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS

(1953, USA)

Based on The Fog Horn (1951) by Ray Bradbury.

This very short story, first published in a newspaper, describes one evening where two lighthouse keepers see something in the stormy sea attracted by their fog horn.

Written by his childhood friend Ray Bradbury, this single scenario grew into the basis for Ray Harryhausen's first chance to work on his own movie project, setting a template for many more in which he had huge creative input, but without actual onscreen credits for script, producing, or directing. He created spectacular results on low budgets for his fifties sci-fi movies, practically single-handed. The lack of money isn't even that noticeable, especially compared to many other monster B-movies then and since. Even the scenes of panic in the streets were memorably done.

Testing nuclear bombs in the Arctic activates and releases a frozen dinosaur (whoops). It decides to rerun to its old haunts which are, unfortunately, where Manhattan presently is. Cue mass panic, a useless army and navy and a mad old professor trying to save the citizens of New York...

I still marvel at how Harryhausen integrated the animated model of the monster into footage of the streets in a daytime scene. Matching the lighting on the creature to the sunlit street scenes even makes frame blow-ups look good today. This rampage was a step up from the nocturnal metropolitan exploits of the giant monsters seen in The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933).

The monster's visit to Coney Island is admittedly at night, but that's mainly to show up the flames, when a wooden rollercoaster is burnt down. I believe this location is still there, though the rollercoaster is long out of use. There's another smaller rollercoaster still operating at the Coney Island fair - just as terrifying as any modern ride, because it's old, creaky and wooden.

The success of this movie, and particularly the idea of a radioactively reactivated dinosaur, directly inspired Japanese producers to make the first Godzilla (1954).

THE FLY

(1958, USA)

Based on The Fly (1957) by George Langelaan.

Playboy isn't just about the bunnies and the centrefolds, it has articles, interviews and short stories. This is how The Fly first appeared, nestled between the delicately touched-up breasts in Hugh Hefner's groundbreaking magazine for men.

The story reads much like the film, starting with the mysterious murder of Andre Delambre by his wife, with a steam hammer. We know whodunnit, but why did Helene kill him, and why use the hammer twice when his head was crushed the first time?

Andre's brother Francois and the police talk to Helene about her husband's experiments, wondering why she's so fraught whenever there's a fly in the room. It turns out he was experimenting with matter transportation and something went terribly wrong...

The highlight of reading the story again was discovering that the family cat, Dandelo, is actually accounted for... though it's not a happy ending (in the film he simply disappears into an other-worldly meow). Mostly, the story and the characters are very closely adhered to - if it's not broke, don't fix it. Though the ending was tweaked to adhere to the motion picture code.

The 1958 version is completely different from the Cronenberg remake. It's much like the experiments of many other white-coated scientists in the sci-fi boom of that decade. A close comparison would be Leo G Carroll's storyline in Tarantula (1955). The addition of widescreen, vibrant colour, and a good cast set it above many contemporaries, and the concept of teleportation still fascinates.

The scene of the monster's unveiling is a genre highpoint, but I'm equally unnerved by the scientist hiding under a black veil, unable to talk to his wife, his humanity ebbing away.

Vincent Price isn't the mad scientist here, it's nice to see him as a sympathetic character for a change. It's Patricia Owens (as Helene) who has the task of carrying the whole fantastic story in and out of the flashbacks. David Hedison (as Andre) may have thought this was going to be his most unbelievable role, not realising he was about to enter Irwin Allen's lost world, and endless voyages to the bottom of the sea. 

This original version of The Fly spawned two sequels - detailed here in my the trilogy of Fly films.

VIY: SPIRIT OF EVIL

(1967, Russia)

Based on Viy (1835) by Nikolai Gogol.

Horror stories used to be rare in Russia. This tells of a hapless philosophy student who gets cornered by ancient witch. Trying to repel her advances, he kills her and abandons the body. In death, she appears young and beautiful... 

When he hears of the death of a rich Cossack's daughter in a faraway village, he sees the chance to earn a little for reading scriptures over her as she lies in state. Hitching a lift cross-country, he strikes a deal to to be locked in their old church for three nights with the recently deceased girl, while he recites blessings over her. But on the first night, he discovers that somehow the witch may yet have her revenge. She unleashes a vast array of powers to attack him before his task is over...

For the introduction to this story, Haining enthuses over Black Sunday (The Mask of Satan), Mario Bava's celebrated Italian horror. It's a must-see for horror fans, for Barbara Steele's haunted performance, the stunning monochrome photographic effects and an example of how much more violent European cinema was in comparison to the UK or US in 1960.

But. Black Sunday bears only a slight resemblance to Gogol's story, except for the idea that a witch/vampire is getting her revenge. A much closer adaption of the story is Alexander Ptushko's colourful and imaginative Viy: Spirit of Evil (1967). Russia's very first official horror film, it's a cross between a medieval fairy tale and The Exorcist! While the story's descriptions of the witch's night-time assaults are vague, the film attempts to depict them as three distinct set-pieces, using in-camera shock tactics as old those used in Nosferatu, others using free-roaming imagination... 

While the philosophy student resorts to excessive drinking before being forced back into the church has a humorous slant (his visions of demons are blamed on his drunkenness), his overnight vigils get increasingly nightmarish.

The film predates The Evil Dead with increasingly frantic, fast-cutting surrealist horrors inside a rundown wooden building. It even matches many South East Asian horrors with a twitchy, floaty, lank-haired, white-skinned, vengeful young witch.

INCIDENT AT OWL CREEK

(1962, France, La rivière du hibou)

Based on An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge (1890) by Ambrose Bierce.

This very old and very short story was perfect for The Twilight Zone and could easily have influenced several dozen plotlines of the classic TV series. It paints a simple tableau - a traitor in the American Civil War is about to be executed by being hung from a high bridge over a river. The meticulous preparation draws out the suspense and presumably describes the authentic military ceremony for an official hanging. The fate of the accused seems completely hopeless, but at the crucial moment he has a surprise...

This was faithfully adapted into a short French film in 1962, which expanded the story slightly. With very little dialogue, it's a dream-like experience, beautifully-shot and observed.

Unusually, it was then used as a fifth season episode of The Twilight Zone (airing in 1964) as An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge. It was slightly re-edited to be included as a special episode, ensuring that the film still remains accessible.

MONSTER OF TERROR

(1965, UK/USA, also called DIE, MONSTER, DIE!)

Based on The Color Out Of Space (1927) by H. P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft's nameless shapeless horrors lurch into the realm of sci-fi here with a meteor crash-landing on an old estate in the fictional New England city of Arkham. For once there's a scientific reason for the horror, radiation from space causing extensive mutations in plant and animal alike... The escalating scale of the problem depicted in this early hybrid of sci-fi and horror is ripe for a more faithful adaption.

The movie mostly retreats from showing these horrors and falls back on rather dated gothic chills (a shadowy mansion, walking around at night with candlesticks). But the deteriorating characters and the glimpses of mutation lurking in the shadows make for fascinating monsters in this classic horror setting rather than the bright light of the irradiated deserts of American nuclear sci-fi (Tarantula, Them!).

Boris Karloff is joined by Nick Adams (Invasion of the Astro-Monsters) looking like a tough guy detective and Suzan Farmer (Dracula - Prince of Darkness) as the damsel in distress. How she keeps up with the latest fashions in the middle of nowhere isn't explained.

Director Daniel Haller was obviously a Lovecraft enthusiast, he'd been production designer on Corman's The Haunted Palace and soon directed The Dunwich Horror for the psychedelic era.

My full review of Die, Monster, Die is here.

THE SKULL

(1965, UK)

Based on The Skull Of The Marquis De Sade (1945) by Robert Bloch.

Bloch's short stories are as impressive as his novels. Here he realistically described an obsessive collector of occult curiosities. Like in 'The Man Who Collected Poe' (expertly adapted in Torture Garden) you can tell that the details about Poe and De Sade were all accurate. Bloch presents a pair of ghastly characters, the collector and his favourite 'dealer', as they bargain over the actual skull of the man who 'invented' sadism.

Their relationship remains in the film, but the characters are softened, particularly Peter Cushing as Maitland (a popular name for characters in Amicus horror films). Cushing makes him sympathetic by being academically engrossed in the occult, rather than morbid and unhealthily interested.

Patrick Wymark (Repulsion, Witchfinder General) makes the most of the slimy trader who brings black magic plunder to Maitland's door, but he's repulsive in the story. Christopher Lee has a couple of scenes but is far less interesting than Wymark. To expand the story to feature-length, Maitland now has a wife, a rare horror role for celebrated stage actress Jill Bennett (The Nanny). Also features Nigel Green in yet another of his detective roles (the same year as he made The Ipcress File), and Patrick Magee (Asylum, Tales From The Crypt, A Clockwork Orange).

A good cast and a good idea still presented a huge challenge to director Freddie Francis, who had to derive a movieload of chills from a small solitary skull. He largely succeeds, using innovative point-of-view 'skull-vision', and eerie nightmares. This will please fans of Cushing, Lee and psychological horrors, though the lack of blood and 'skull on a wire' special effects won't hold modern attentions.

After seeing so many scary black-and-white photos for The Skull, when I finally saw it I was surprised that it was not only in colour, but also 2.35 widescreen. The Skull recently debuted on DVD and has just been released on blu-ray as a double-bill with The Man Who Could Cheat Death, with which it has nothing in common except country of origin.

THE OBLONG BOX

(1969, UK)

Based on The Oblong Box (1844) by Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe's tale is a mystery set aboard an ocean liner, another of his pioneering sleuth stories. A passenger is trying to solve the sleeping arrangements of his neighbours onboard and why they have a huge box in one compartment. It takes a disaster to answer his questions...

But the film has nothing to do with the tight little story, apart from using the title and featuring a large box in a completely different way. Instead it starts in colonial Africa, following two brothers back to their estate in England. One is hideously disfigured, forcibly kept in a locked room and going stir-crazy. This rich foundation for horror dissipated by tedious discussions interrupted by short outbursts of unconvincing violence.

The confusing multitude of characters takes time to pay off, though many excellent actors are in the cast. It's disappointing that Christopher Lee and Vincent Price share so little time onscreen together. Fun that Price appears here again with Rupert Davies and Hilary Dwyer, both from Witchfinder General. Shocking to see Dwyer genially playing Price's wife.

But The Oblong Box is a poor example of 'classic horror' for The Ghouls to close with.

Collecting the inspirations for horror movies into volumes of stories was a great idea that sadly didn't catch on, or was too costly to pursue. Usually a single famous short story is enough to carry a collection of less interesting fiction, justifying eye-catching movie photos on the front cover.

While it's often impossible to condense and represent a novel when adapting it into a movie, short stories can just as easily provide the basis for a script. They make for interesting comparisons, but like I've said, finding specific old short fiction isn't easy.

Good stories, however brief, used to become instantly popular by appearing in high-circulation newspapers and magazines. Movie-makers would snap the rights up because the public were already interested in the story. Hitchcock had his people scouring for new stories for his movies and TV shows. But currently short fiction is a rarity in modern publishing, meaning scriptwriters have to find their inspiration elsewhere.

You can read the first review of this collection here - The Phantom of the Opera, The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Magician and more in The Ghouls: Book One.

The superior cover art for both paperbacks was painted by John Holmes. For volume 2 of the 1974 Orbit paperback (at top) he combined a skull, a fly and a female vampire into a single striking vision. More of his gruesome and surreal cover art can be viewed here on British pulp horror fiction site The Vault of Evil. (A big thank you to Johnny Mains, of Noose and Gibbet Publishing for the info.)



BLACK DYNAMITE (2009) - the man who takes on The Man

BLACK DYNAMITE

(2009, USA)

This is already my favourite spoof of the blaxploitation era because it's the funniest and also the most accurate recreation. To be more precise, it's a homage to the sub-genre where one man takes on all the odds - Shaft, Superfly, The Mack... as opposed to the films where women took on all the odds - Coffy, Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones... and nothing to do with the horror subgenre where every iconic monster movie (up till then) was remade for a black audience.

Black Dynamite is a labour of love and is itself low-budget. One of its many strengths is the script, cleverly weaving in so many familiar elements from the originals, as well as layering in the technical distractions the original actors would have had. It's as much an homage to lowest-budget cinema of this era, as it is to this particular genre, making it accessible to anyone with a fleeting experience of early 70s exploitation.

The star, Michael Jai White (Spawn himself), co-wrote the story and the script. A dream role for someone who obviously enjoys the films as an actor and a martial arts stunt performer. The huge cast includes a short cameo from Arsenio Hall (Coming To America), and Sally Richardson-Whitfield (I Am Legend) as Gloria, Dynamite's 'black power' girlfriend.

While many of the action scenes are played for laughs, Michael Jai White also demonstrates dangerous-looking nunchuck and kung fu action in some very impressive long-take fight scenes. While he's aiming at channeling Jim Kelly (Black Belt Jones, Enter The Dragon), he more closely resembles a pumped-up Shaft, which is no bad thing.

The fashions, the language, the hairstyles are funny because they're accurate, rather than exaggerated. When shoes and hair are that high, they don't need to be any bigger. And the soundtrack is so accurately done, I had a hard time telling new music from old - new songs were recorded using authentic analogue techniques and contemporary instruments. They blend completely with library movie music in favour at the time.

Similarly, stock footage of explosions and stunts intercut smoothly with the intentionally 'badly shot' footage. Not since House of the Devil will you be so confused knowing what year you're looking at. Cleverly, they didn't create the look the hard way - by degrading the footage electronically, but by shooting it all on a 16mm stock, a grainy and very contrasty look that matches cheap 1970s' 35mm.

Faltering zooms, microphones peeking into view... aren't laid on too thick and are sometimes so subtle that they make the actual onscreen goofs look intentional. There's one fantastic back-projection gag that made me yearn for more Police Squad!

It's all too short. Several scenes have been abbreviated into montages to keep the story snappy, though after seeing the deleted scenes play out in their entirety, you can see that they weren't working or funny enough.

I'd enjoyed the more sporadic spoofs like Undercover Brother and Austin Powers in Goldmember which played the giant afros for laughs. But this is an intensive, better researched, reverential movie for fans of the originals who enjoy and embrace their style, music and politics.

Released last year on DVD, this is also available on blu-ray in the US and Germany. The DVD has deleted scenes, and some fun, informative featurettes on the movie and music production that don't outstay their welcome.

The Black Dynamite trailer is still live on Icon Home Entertainment's website for the movie.

I previously waded into the blaxploitation horror film cycle here.

DOCTOR BLOOD'S COFFIN (1961) - now on DVD

DOCTOR BLOOD'S COFFIN

(1961, UK)

Zombie tale or Frankenstein story? You decide...

(Updated in 2014, for DVD releases)

I enjoy this more each time I see it. Originally sought it out after seeing a spooky photo of a man fighting something moulderingly undead in Denis Gifford's Movie Monsters. Seeing it, at first on late-night TV, the story was disappointing in that the punchline doesn't appear sooner. But a recent less-cut version on TV added just enough to make this a low-budget b-movie nasty, with the spectacular Hazel Court sealing the deal for fans of sixties' Brit horror.

A string of disappearances from a small village in Cornwall. The local police are stumped but we can easily guess what's going on, even though the assailant attacks from the shadows, the bloody title completely gives it away. Doctor Blood is up to no good.

Yes, it's Kieron Moore (he doesn't smile like this in the movie) who usually plays a shouty, grumpy, no-nonsense hero, is more realistically cast as a shouty, grumpy, no-nonsense villain. (You're all wrong, I'm right, I can do what I like. To hell with medical ethics and human lives...)

Before even the opening titles, only thirty seconds pass before Kieron starts shouting. This isn't to say I don't find him watchable. This lack of charisma in a leading man is as unintentionally entertaining as it is a mystery. Here he's a serial murderer who radically experiments on his subjects while they're not only alive, but still awake! The clumsy storyline reveals his morally-bankrupt identity before he starts wooing the heroine. How are we supposed enjoy their romantic day out? It's not played as suspense, like Hitchcock would have done, but as a budding new relationship.

There's another amusing mis-step when one of the kidnapped spends a long twenty minutes clawing his way out of a subterranean surgery. The narrative keeps returning to the crawling character like a running gag - nope, still not getting anywhere. In addition, if this had been a Roger Corman flick, the abductees would be the scantily-clad daughters of the village, not a bunch of wheezy old extras.

The bad doctor is so focused on his 'work' that he doesn't even widen his hunting ground, leaving the police in a spin as to which kidnap victim they're supposed to be looking for. Also, anyone who gets in his way quickly winds up in Dr. Blood's coffin. He never thinks through the details, like alibis. His trail of clues is clumsy and inefficient, much like his wooing.

The picturesque Cornish locations make a welcome change from Black Park and the suburbs of London and, despite the interiors being shot in a London studio, the sets look authentic and blend in well.

Hand-coloured lobby card - not the colour he is in the film!

There's blood and even a little gore, which would have leapt off the screen in Eastmancolour at the time, presuming it wasn't snipped by the censor. The special make-up for the result of Blood's experiments (above) looks really very good, more convincing than anything that later appeared in Night of the Living Dead, and it was duly splashed across the publicity art.

To compensate for Kieron Moore's heartless lack of charisma, Hazel Court amply warms up the screen as Nurse (Nosey) Parker. The late actress is so utterly professional that she can answer the phone with, "Dr. Blood's surgery", without a hint of camp or irony. Court appears here just after starring in Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein and The Man Who Could Cheat Death, and just before a winning run of American horrors, appearing in three of Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe cycle - The Premature Burial, The Raven and The Masque of the Red Death.

Interesting to see future director Nicolas Roeg (Don't Look Now) rise from camera operator on Doctor Blood's Coffin, to director of photography on The Masque of the Red Death three years later. Visually there are a few interesting slants - low camera angles, deep focus, peeking through things and sometimes tilting the action (known as 'dutch angles'). Director Sidney J. Furie repeated and exaggerated this style for his best movie The Ipcress File (1965).

Dr. Blood is one sick little bunny - you don't see everything he gets up to, but he's a sadistic, vengeful, oblivious fan of human experimentation. He's nastier and less likeable than many of the movie Dr Frankensteins. His carelessness indicates he's more psychopathic than calculating. While the direction and script are slack, there's enough here to make it worth a look.

Doctor Blood's Coffin was very late getting an official DVD release anywhere, debuting on MGM's made-on-demand service in November 2011. While the restoration was good, the image was spoilt by being slightly horizontally squeezed. The 1.66 framing within a 16:9 anamorphic presentation, should have been stretched out to a standard 16:9 to correct the appearance of taller, thinner actors.

In July 2014, there was a DVD release in the UK, which unfortunately repeats the 'visual squeezing' fault. This is so close to the MGM release that it's even an NTSC picture, but coded for the UK as a region 2 disc.

Also, here's my quick chat with the man behind Doctor Blood's zombie, actor Paul Stockman, mid-2014.

This fantastic French poster is from sci-fi/horror poster site Wrong Side Of The Art.