Random Paperbacks: Stranger in Town by Raoul D’Orque (Unique Books, 1967)

A rare example of a ‘60s U.S. sleaze paperback snagged in the wild here in the UK, I recently picked this up at Oxfam of all places, for a bargain price presumably reflective of the fact that the binding and spine are absolutely shot.

I mean, as if they actually expected anyone to read it! The cover art by Bill Alexander is the big draw here, and I’ll freely admit to staring at its warped, weirdo beauty for far longer than is healthy.

Though the artist’s intention was probably for our attention to be focused on the figure of the innocent (white-haired?) nymphet being assaulted by a jumpsuit-clad dominatrix immediately after stepping off the bus in the Big City, my focus instead keeps getting drawn back to the male figure on the left, with his Clint Eastwood scowl, jaunty neckerchief and fragile, elongated hands, clutching at the victim’s pasteboard suitcase.

Is he working in cahoots with the dominatrix, or has he just scuttled round the corner, drawn magnet-like by the opportunity to snatch some luggage? (“Yoink!”)

Either way, the demented cartoon world created by Alexander in this one mad vignette is sublime; the implicit idea that moral standards in America’s cities have collapsed to such an extent that a buxom, mid-western lass can’t even make it out of the bus station without getting clobbered by perverts and ripped off by rat-men… and the unspoken promise that, if you’re enough of a freak to be checking out a volume like this, you should probably find this prospect exciting, and hit the mean and sticky streets in search of flesh forthwith. Yowza!

I’ve always felt you could draw a direct line between this kind of sleaze paperback artwork, the more highly regarded/subversive fetish illustration which was its contemporary cousin, and the similarly ugly/beautiful atmosphere conjured up (albeit in more self-aware fashion) by ‘90s comic artists like Dan Clowes and Charles Burns - and indeed, clicking through to the above-linked ‘This is Horror’ story on Bill Alexander reveals that his long and varied career touched on all these areas, and plenty more besides.

A rare example of an African-American commercial artist, Alexander began his career in the ‘40s, illustrating the labels of 78rpm records by cats like Roy Milton (see some examples here), before helping to create “arguably the first black superhero strip”, ‘The Bronze Bomber’, which appeared in the Los Angeles Tribune from 1941-43. (Sadly, all artwork from this strip appears lost - for more detail, see the Wikipedia entry for Alexander’s contemporary Gene Bilbrew.)

After seeing service in WWII, Alexander seems to have moved on to paperback covers and S&M / fetish illustration through the ‘50s and ‘60s, including work for the legendary Irving Klaw, before achieving renown of a different order through his covers for the Eerie Publications line of horror comics in the 1970s - for more on which, I’ll refer you back to the This is Horror article, which is a great read.

As to the book itself, this appears to be the sole volume credited to the supremely named Raoul D’Orque -- and if I was ever looking for an alias to use for anonymously checking into hotels or making pornography, I think I just found it.

Rather than trying to provide a plot synopsis or similar, I’ll just hit you with this scan of the novel’s opening pages:

I realise coherence wasn’t a big concern for authors of single draft roughie sleaze books or their publishers, but still - there’s something fairly awe-inspiring about the idea that a manuscript which descends into gobbledegook within its third sentence can still go to print unaltered.

Just imagine the Burroughs-esque cut-up mayhem and made up words (‘matine’?) which might unfold across the following 150 pages, and shudder with misplaced ecstasy.

Oh, and - you see that ‘UB’ logo stuck in the middle of the above cover, like a sticker on an apple or something? That’s not actually a sticker on the book, it’s printed on. Someone must have artlessly slapped it onto Alexander’s original artwork whilst setting it out for printing.

This practice seems to have been standard operating procedure not only at Unique Books, but across all the associated imprints operated out of Buffalo, NY during the ‘60s by frequently indicted Times Square porno/sleaze entrepreneur Eddie Mishkin. (Also see: ‘After Hours’, ‘First Niter’, ‘Nitey Night’ etc, all of which used near-identical typography, and frequently featured the work of fetish-affiliated artists like Eric Stanton and the aforementioned Gene Bilbrew.)

I wonder, incidentally, whether Eddie Mishkin was any relation to Andy Milligan’s producer / nemesis William Mishkin, who was based out of nearby 42nd street, and frequently worked with other Mishkin brothers on assorted dubious enterprises? My sole reference on such matters, Jimmy McDonough’s essential Milligan biography The Ghastly One, ain’t telling, but either way, the spider’s web of subterranean cultural connections uncovered by my visit to Oxfam grows...

Lovecraft on Film: From Beyond (Stuart Gordon, 1986)

I.

“That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.”
- H. P. Lovecraft, ‘From Beyond’ (1920)

“It ate him. It bit - off - his - head... like a gingerbread man!”
- Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs), ‘From Beyond’ (1986)

After the surprise success of 1985’s ‘Reanimator’, a follow up was inevitable. Rather than embarking upon a direct sequel however (producer Brian Yuzna would later fill that gap in the market), director Stuart Gordon seems to have envisioned a thematically linked series of H.P. Lovecraft adaptations – presumably mirroring the pattern set by the Corman/AIP Poe cycle of the 1960s, which exerted a strong influence on Gordon’s work in the horror genre throughout his career.

Gordon’s initial proposal apparently involved adapting ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ (written 1931, published 1936), one of the most conventionally structured and comparatively action-packed of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos tales, but Empire Pictures boss and executive producer Charles Band put the nix on that idea.

Band was reportedly of the opinion that rampaging fish people wouldn’t make for good box office (whatever could have given him that idea?), but to give him his due, perhaps he was also concerned about the budgetary implications and/or the story’s rather icky racial/miscegenation sub-text. Either way, Gordon had to wait nearly fifteen years to realise his ‘..Innsmouth’ project, completing his quartet of Lovecraft films with ‘Dagon’ in 2001.

Back in the mid ‘80s though, Gordon, Yuzna and screenwriter Dennis Paoli instead went back to the drawing board and worked up a script based upon ‘From Beyond’, a short but perfectly formed Lovecraft tale which comprised part of the author’s first burst of literary creativity at the dawn of the 1920s, although again, it was inexplicably overlooked for publication until 1934, when he deigned to dig it out of his archives for the June issue of a small press publication named ‘The Fantasy Fan’. (1)

Weighing in at barely 3,000 words, ‘From Beyond’ is an important but oft-overlooked entry in Lovecraft’s oeuvre, arguably marking the earliest point at which the morass of imagery and ideas which we’re now inclined the throw together under the umbrella adjective “Lovecraftian” first began to coalesce – and, if you’ll forgive me a brief digression, it is an important story for me personally too.

When I first became aware of Lovecraft’s work as a teenager, some circumstance now lost to history prevented me from getting hold of the essential third volume of the then-standard Grafton / Harper Collins paperback anthology series, which contained the bulk of the core Cthulhu mythos stories. Instead, I had to make do for a while with volume # 2 (‘Dagon and Other Macabre Tales’), largely comprised of the earlier Dunsay/Poe-inspired tales and assorted other odds and ends.

Coming to these tales as a fan of reality-bending science fiction seeking gruesome new thrills, ethereal, pulp-poetic fragments like ‘The Tomb’ and ‘The White Ship’ initially left me rather non-plussed, but ‘From Beyond’ really grabbed me. I recall re-reading it multiple times, thinking, “ok, I get it now – this guy was really on to something”.

The June 1934 edition of ‘The Fantasy Fan’ – see footnote for further info.

Essentially, the story explores the notion that electrical waves keyed to certain frequencies can serve to activate “..unrecognised sense-organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges”, expanding the range of human perception to allow us a glimpse of parallel layers of being which overlap with our day-to-day reality, causing us to realise that shapeless monsters float through the air around us in an incessant, seething throng. A simple idea, yet such a horribly compelling one.

Prefiguring the ‘multiverse’ theories first proposed by Schrödinger in the 1950s, whilst also touching upon weird, quasi-medieval notions of monads, ‘humours’ and other such unseen guff lurking within the firmament, ‘From Beyond’ finds Lovecraft tapping into the uniquely uncanny eldritch sweet spot midway between science and demonology which would go on to inform all of his best subsequent work.

In fact, ‘From Beyond’s mad scientist character, the splendidly named Crawford Tillinghast, squares that particular magick circle almost immediately, pushing his scientific fervour to the point where it impinges upon the realm of spirituality, as his ranting (which comprises a fairly hefty proportion of the text) begins to echo the kind of rhetoric espoused by advocates of the LSD experience and other such new age psychonauts over forty years later;

“‘Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.’”

The manner in which Lovecraft manages to pull these high-falutin’ notions back into the horror genre is pretty inspired (“We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight”), and the inevitable revelation that “we are able to be *seen* as well as to see” provides the perfect hook upon which to hang the grisly denouement of this extraordinarily effective little story. (“Remember we’re dealing with a hideous world in which we are practically helpless,” Tillinghast reminds our unnamed narrator. “Keep still!”)

Initially likened to polyps or jellyfish, the “semi-fluid” things glimpsed by our narrator whilst under the influence of Tillinghast’s whirring electrical machine are soon revealed to be merely an appetiser on the story’s full menu of cosmic terrors, as the increasingly hysterical scientist begins to insist that he has “drawn down daemons from the stars”, leaving him hunted by “things that devour and dissolve”;

“‘My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places where aesthetic standards are— very different. Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you—but I want you to see them. I almost saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are not curious? I always knew you were no scientist!’”

Factor into this the story’s rich, Edwardian atmosphere of clanking, electrical machinery powered by “huge chemical batteries”, and the more conventional candle-lit, barely glimpsed horrors of the “..the ancient, lonely house set back from Benevolent Street” in which Tillinghast has been reduced to “..a shivering gargoyle” over the course of ten weeks of solitude, and you’ve got one hell of a potent little pulp yarn here. A pure, concentrated dose of head-fuckery for eager young minds, ‘From Beyond’ stands as one of most efficient summations of his strange art that HPL ever produced.

All of which presumably helps explain why the ‘Reanimator’ gang picked this story out as a good prospect for their next film, but, as you might well have imagined, bringing something like this to the screen was not without its challenges, to put it mildly.

II.

“Suddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight. Over and above the luminous and shadowy chaos arose a picture which, though vague, held the elements of consistency and permanence. It was indeed somewhat familiar, for the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual terrestrial scene much as a cinema view may be thrown upon the painted curtain of a theatre.”
- H. P. Lovecraft, ‘From Beyond’ (1920)

Surprisingly, the chief issue faced by Gordon, Paoli and Yuzna in working up their script for ‘From Beyond’ was not the obvious difficulty of translating Lovecraft’s wild, inter-dimensional visions into a form which can be assembled by special effects technicians and stuck in front of a camera - but rather the more prosaic issue of the fact the source material is so narratively slight.

Boil it down to crude, storytelling terms in fact, and for all of ‘From Beyond’s mind-bending ideas and heady, delirious prose, in terms of earthbound cause and effect there’s not much going on here besides “man visits friend in creepy house, sees unspeakable stuff, goes mad”. An interesting, masculine take on the minimalist “girl gets scared in old house” formula which animated so many ‘60s gothic horror films, perhaps - but a difficult one to try to stretch out to ninety minutes.

In trying to work around this, the writers hit upon the same solution utilised so effectively by Richard Matheson in his scripts for the ‘60s Poe movies (specifically, ‘The Pit & The Pendulum’ (1961) and ‘The Raven’ (1963)) – namely, using up the entire source story during the pre-credits prologue, then just spending the rest of the run time riffing wildly off the loose thematic threads of the original tale, figuring out an entirely new story along the way. (2)

To reverse their achievement and cut a long story short though, let’s just say that the Gordon/Paoli/Yuzna adaptation of (or perhaps more correctly, ‘extrapolation from…’) ‘From Beyond’ is really quite the thing - an overpowering, hugely enjoyable and exuberantly tasteless horror film whose tone of barely controlled hysteria makes it difficult to fully digest on first viewing – or indeed to reduce to an easy capsule summation even on the fourth or fifth go-round.

In spite of its singularity and strength of vision however, I’ve always come away from the film feeling that something was slightly amiss – perhaps simply as a result of the fact that it sidesteps the essential idea which I found so compelling in Lovecraft’s story.

Here, the “thousand sleeping senses” of which HPL waxes lyrical are boiled down to mere stimulation of the pineal gland, which can't help but strike me as at least a bit reductionist, whilst the film’s idea of allowing said gland to physically change and expand, eventually bursting through the forehead of Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs), causing him to spend the final act of the movie as an albino zombie - sucking out victims brains through their eye-sockets no less - feels like an all too obvious attempt to inject some crowd-pleasing, ‘Reanimator’-style medical gore into proceedings. (Having said that however, the horror fan in me of course can’t claim that Combs’ blood-drenched rampage through the wards of Arkham General Hospital is anything less than a joy to behold.)

Though somewhat updated to include flashing banks of both computer and valve-driven equipment, ‘From Beyond’s impressive attic laboratory set, built around the fluorescent, glowing tuning forks and central Van de Graaff generator-like sphere of the all important “resonator”, retains the spirit of that described by Lovecraft. At the same time though, I’ve always found the film as a whole to be curiously over-lit, notably lacking in the kind of shadow and decay stipulated by the story’s quasi-gothic atmospherics.

Even as sickly, over-saturated shades of red, green and purple play havoc over the screen once the effect of the resonator takes hold, we’re in a considerably more earthy – more fleshy - realm here than that described by HPL’s narrator, who likens Tillighast’s unnaturally hued attic to “..some vast and incredible temple of long-dead gods; some vague edifice of innumerable black stone columns reaching up from a floor of damp slabs to a cloudy height beyond the range of my vision.” (3)

In truth though, this change in visual emphasis is entirely appropriate to the new direction in which the film’s script takes the material. For all its gothic bells and whistles, Lovecraft’s story is essentially a coldly scientific nightmare. The denizens of his hidden layer of reality remain those we might encounter under a microscope – polyps, protozoa, and stranger, more unknowable alien life-forms.

After treating us to the sight of a few toothy, conga eel/hookworm-like beasties and spectral jellyfish though, the film largely jettisons the ‘parallel dimensions’ concept (or at least, fails to communicate it very clearly). Instead, it chooses to populate its unseen realm with something a great deal more recognisable to the experience of most human beings, even if, according to most accounts, it would have had Lovecraft himself reaching for the smelling salts.

To not put too fine a point on it, the new order of reality which is revealed when that naughty, bulbous pineal gland is vibrated just so in Gordon’s movie is full of nothing but SEX.

III.

DR KATHERINE MCMICHAELS: Don't you understand? This is the greatest discovery since van Leeuwenhoek first looked through a microscope and saw an amoeba.
BUBBA BROWNLEE: Yeah, but he wasn't down there *with* the amoebas!
- ‘From Beyond’ (1986)

Of course, bringing an element of, ahem, feminine allure into screen versions of Lovecraft’s pointedly sexless tales wasn’t exactly a new innovation at this point. Until John Carpenter made the case for men-only horror with his tangentially Lovecraftian ‘The Thing’ in 1982, keeping a pretty girl or two on hand to be frightened and imperilled (if not actually slaughtered) was considered the key commercial imperative of all horror cinema, for better or for worse, and filmmakers tackling material derived from Lovecraft were happy to follow convention.

Given that mid 20th century horror cinema could be seen to represent the most misogynistic corner of the most chauvinistic of creative industries, it is perhaps no surprise that when it ran headfirst into the fear-driven psycho-sexual dynamics bubbling away beneath the surface of Lovecraft’s fiction, the results were… less than progressive, shall we say, with the female characters conveniently parachuted into HPL-derived plotlines being largely defined in terms of violence, helplessness and victimhood, even more-so than we would normally have expected within genre product of this era.

Although such a scenario never actually occurred in Lovecraft’s writing, the recurrent idea of a damsel in distress being tied down on a stone slab and sacrificed to the Great Old Ones goes all the way back to The Haunted Palace in 1963, and by the end of the decade, things were taken considerably further, with Dean Stockwell’s icky, somewhat Mansonite ritual rape of the drugged Sandra Dee in The Dunwich Horror (1970) - a scene which finds its natural successor in the even more delirious sexual assault perpetrated upon Barbara Crampton in what soon became by far the most notorious scene in Re-animator.

None of these films though had the wherewithal to fuse sex and horror in anything like the manner attempted by ‘From Beyond’.

In the most significant change the Paoli/Gordon/Yuzna team made to ‘From Beyond’s source story, Crawford Tillinghast is essentially downgraded here from his central ‘mad genius’ role, instead assuming the function of a mere traumatised assistant and witness to events, pitched somewhere between the unnamed narrator of Lovecraft’s tale and the obligatory cringing hunchback of the Universal-derived Frankenstein movie tradition.

The latter in particular seems an apt comparison, given that primary responsibility for the film’s mad science maleficence falls instead upon the shoulders of a newly created character, Dr Edward Pretorius (Ted Sorel) - the name presumably borrowed from another camp-skirting, taboo-shattering horror sequel, James Whale’s ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ (1935).

Much like the character so memorably portrayed by Ernest Thesiger in Whale’s film (though of a more aggressively heterosexual inclination, to put it mildly), our Dr Pretorius here is an imperious sadist who seems to relish the opportunity of using science to tear down conventional limits of taste and decency, colouring the nature of his scientific breakthroughs with his own egomaniacal obsessions.

More than merely making folks horny, the pineal stimulation process perfected by Pretorius seems to accelerate the human libido like some crazed horror movie variant on Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone therapy, causing all living matter within range of the ‘resonator’ to eventually fuse into a kind of polymorphous perversion of undifferentiated flesh, held under the thrall of a dominant, alpha male will (that of Pretorius himself in this case, needless to say).

By raising the idea of jaded thrill seekers being being driven insane and/or propelled beyond bodily restrictions by sheer sensation, ‘From Beyond’ jettisons the austere cosmicism of Lovecraft, touching instead upon a mixed up set of ideas stretching all way back to the aesthetic extremism of J.K. Huysmans’ ‘Against Nature’ (1884), or perhaps even to antiquarian mutterings of Roman decadence which inspired it, whilst the story’s sub/dom, battle of wills element brings us back, somewhat inevitably, to that inadvertent progenitor of so many of sex-horror’s most compelling cinematic manifestations, De Sade himself.

Closer to home meanwhile, the predatory/devouring aspect of ‘From Beyond’s take on supernatural sexual hysteria directly pre-empts Clive Barker’s ‘Hellraiser’ (which hit big the following year), whilst its startlingly lurid body horror, together with Dr Pretorius’s post-human advocacy for the idea of the spirit unleashed from the limitations of the body, also puts the film on a similar trajectory to the shape-shifting, pan-sexual hallucinations of William S. Burroughs, or the treacherous world of David Cronenberg’s ‘Videodrome’ (1983).

Heady stuff indeed for a low budget horror flick, even if the film, perhaps wisely, works these ideas through not so much with actual human bodies, but via one of the most grotesquely chaotic parades of over-sized latex abominations that had ever been seen on screen up to this point, with the hardship that Sorel in particular must have experienced in the make-up chair frankly defying belief. (Always a keen proponent of the ‘crazed latex overload’ approach to horror, producer Yuzna would take these ideas to even further extremes in his own directorial debut ‘Society’ in 1989.)

With hyper-sensual sadist Dr Pretorius thus established as the film’s Big Bad, ‘From Beyond’s most inspired departure from horror movie convention has Barbara Crampton’s Dr Katherine McMichaels, rather than the top-billed Combs, emerge as the story’s prime motivator and central ‘doomed protagonist’ figure, creating in the process the most complex and interesting female character Lovecraftian cinema has seen before or since.

IV.

“‘You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shown you worlds that no other living men have seen?’”
- H. P. Lovecraft, ‘From Beyond’ (1920)

As ridiculous as it might sound, even today it’s extremely unusual to find a horror film in the gothic lineage in which the character inhabiting what we might call the ‘Vincent Price role’ – the domineering, morally ambiguous central figure who changes over the course of the story, becoming fascinated and/or possessed by the forces of evil – is a woman, but that’s essentially what Gordon & co give us here.

Although Jeffrey Combs provides a pretty much definitive reading of the nervous, weak-willed Lovecraftian protagonist here (it is difficult to read HPL’s description of Tillinghast’s “..high and unnatural, though always pedantic, voice” without recalling Combs’ unique line readings), he nonetheless seems aware that he is essentially a supporting character – a victim rather than instigator of events – this time around, despite his top billing on the poster, and he steps back accordingly. No match for the force of Pretorius’s malevolent sexual energy, Tillinghast essentially exits prior to the film’s final act, transformed into a mindless, albino monster before he meets his sorry fate.

As for Ken Foree’s turn as good-natured cop ‘Bubba’ Brownlee meanwhile, he seems to have wandered in from another film entirely (perhaps taking a wrong turn on his way to audition for a pre-‘Lethal Weapon’ buddy-cop movie?), with his light-hearted banter and comedic appetite feel absurdly out of place in the Lovecraftian universe. It’s always nice to see Foree (whom you’ll recall from Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (1977)) getting a good role, and it’s impossible not to be charmed by his shtick - but nonetheless, Bubba’s materialist attitude and steadfast refusal to countenance the ‘other’ clearly indicate that he is no fit protagonist for this story. Indeed, his former football pro libido counts for little in the relentlessly hetero eyes of Pretorius, whose shapeless minions proceed to eat him at the first convenient opportunity.

It is Barbara Crampton’s Dr Katherine McMichaels therefore who lives on to battle ‘From Beyond’s inter-dimensional overlord, experiencing by far the most well developed arc doled out to any of this film’s characters in the process, with her earth-bound transformations between different female pulp archetypes in a way mirroring the trans-dimensional shape-shifting of Pretorius himself.

Crampton’s solid performance in ‘Re-animator’ gave us some hints that she was more than just yr average ‘80s ‘scream queen’ (or rather, more than just a somewhat competent actress who was willing to go all the way re: the singular demands of that film’s finale), but with ‘From Beyond’, the filmmakers really gave her a chance to step up and turn the tables on genre expectation, essentially taking centre stage amid the libidinous, latex excesses of the movie’s hyper-sexualised take on cosmic horror, and the results are pretty wonderful.

A radical psychiatrist who, we are told, disapproves of locking up schizophrenics, Dr McMichaels is initially introduced to us her through her antagonistic relationship with the more authoritarian Dr Bloch (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon), who accuses her younger colleague of exploiting rather than rehabilitating her patients, using them as guinea pigs for her research as they are presumably allowed to run free to indulge their most destructive whims.

Be that as it may (and to be honest, the script is clearly just using these argument to set the stage for the mayhem which will occur once Dr McMichaels is assigned custody of the incarcerated Tillinghast, rather than attempting make any grander point about contemporary psychiatry), Crampton presents an almost comically buttoned up and repressed figure during these early scenes, complete with tightly bunned hair, woollen overcoat and oversized glasses. Even here though, she already manages to inject a hint of submerged kinkiness into her performance, failing to hide her obvious excitement when Tillinghast, confined to his asylum cell, begins to tell her of the work he and Pretorius carried out.

Once our gang are back at the Pretorius house, ostensibly in an attempt to help Tillinghast by repeating the experiments which led to his collapse, Crampton gradually dials up the more sensual aspect of her character, as her prim mannerisms and fusty exterior begin to feel more and more like some kind of perverse dress-up, as the true scale and freakery of Pretorius’s activities (both earthbound and supernatural) become increasingly clear to the good doctor.

It’s almost a relief therefore when, in classic camp / fairy tale fashion, Crampton lets her blonde locks down and dons the obligatory frilly nightie in preparation for bed time, allowing things to get really charged as she knowingly takes on the role of the timorous gothic heroine, practically role-playing it for Pretorious’s unseen spirit as she takes that same nocturnal walk toward the cursed attic that thousands have trod before her. Approaching, and indeed fondling, the rather phallic edifice of the resonator, she uses it to summon her learned lover from beyond as if it were some tribal fetish object, prompting a traumatic, slimy encounter with Sorel’s by now thoroughly inhuman patriarch, apparently magnifying both her attraction and repulsion to the heavily sexualised Other.

By the time Katherine has transformed herself, via the contents Pretorius’s on-site sex dungeon, into a kind of mind-blown, insatiable dominatrix, we’re heading into pretty uncomfortable territory here, as the warped hues of the film’s lighting and garish sleaziness of its interior décor becoming increasingly nauseous.

Following a delirious special effects showcase which sees Foree (in startling tight red y-fronts) and Combs (in a Miskatonic Uni t-shirt) battling a decidedly vaginal (yet also kinda phallic) giant worm in the infernal, flooded basement, Gordon leads us on helplessly toward the trademark, “this is going considerably further than I expected” / envelope-pushing type scene which he likes to include in each of his horror movies – which in this case involves Crampton, in full black leather fetish get-up, mounting the bruised and unresponsive body of Combs, who has been reduced to a hairless, shuddering albino after being swallowed and spat out by the suggestive, spectral worm. (And honestly, they wonder why the MPAA had some issues!)

If we can reclaim our jaws from the floor whilst all this is going on, we may again wish to award the filmmakers a gold star for defying expectation by casting Crampton as the aggressor here, and concede that ‘From Beyond’s weird detournement of the kind of titillation which hetero-male horror fans tend to consider their birth-right is in many ways quite admirable (for it is here that the dark mystery of the sex-horror ideal truly resides, cf: Cronenberg’s ‘Shivers’ or Franco’s Lorna the Exorcist). By this point in proceedings in fact, things have become infused with such a miasma of sickness – of, for want of a better word, grossness - that we can’t help but be to some extent relieved when Foree intrudes upon the scene, pulling us back to reality with a dose of good ol’ fashioned restraint and self-respect and/or slut-shaming reinforcement of patriarchal values [delete according to taste].

In terms of the moral schema through which the film’s script deals with all of these inter-dimensional sexual shenanigans, submission to one’s desires is framed as triumph of pure ego over collective human responsibility. Satisfaction, under the terms imposed here by the predatory Pretorius, can only be achieved through the destruction of another soul. When Foree’s character tries to snap Katherine out of her new persona as a kind of sleazoid, brain-washed nymphomaniac, there is more than just mere puritanism at work. Bubba, as an archetypical down-to-earth realist, realises that the kind of idealistic quest for mindless sensation embodied by Pretorius can lead only to destruction – first of the bodies and souls of others, and ultimately or oneself.

Trying to extrapolate some kind of real world analogue from all this, it occurs to me that proponents of sado-masochism and/or so-called polyamorous relationships might well be inclined to take offence at ‘From Beyond’s approach to sexual ethics, but, I’ll leave that battle for them to fight, should they wish to. Instead, I’ll merely state that, in terms of a horror movie, the conflict which rages within our characters between all-consuming ego rampage and the inter-personal respect for the bodily and cerebral identities of others, works very well.

Whether or not ‘From Beyond’ ultimately works as a film however, will largely be a matter of personal taste. Even if the production veers dangerously close to outright cheesiness in places, I’ve certainly grown to love it over the years, largely thanks to the excellent set of performances delivered by the cast (another Gordon trademark) and the astounding special effects work (that basement worm battle is really a thing to behold).

Many viewers though will doubtless find the excesses of the movie’s visuals and ideas difficult to process, and, whatever fans may have had in mind for a follow up to ‘Re-animator’ back in 1986, some lunatic fusion of ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ and ‘The Thing’ on an Empire Pictures budget was probably not it. Though the film has amassed a considerable cult following over the years, the initial reaction of audiences and critics was far from kind, with the response of many leaving theatres probably best summed up by one of the more memorable lines uttered by Combs’ Tillighast; “That… will be quite enough of that.”

Though Brian Yuzna proceeded to follow this particular strain of latex insanity even further in the aforementioned ‘Society’, he soon retreated to the comparatively safer ground of ‘Bride of Re-animator’, and ‘From Beyond’ meanwhile seems to have led to a decade long hiatus in Gordon and Paoli’s Lovecraftian adventures, as the director transitioned straight into a series of considerably more audience-friendly (or perhaps more to the point, producer-friendly) ventures, beginning with the thoroughly wholesome ‘Dolls’ (1987). Thus, ‘From Beyond’ is left to stand on its own merits as a kind of fascinating historical aberration. All of the film’s principal creatives and cast members would go on to make good horror films after this, and all of them would return to Lovecraft in some form or another, but none of them ever again attempted anything quite this unconventional and tonally extreme.

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(1) Published between 1933 and 1935, ‘The Fantasy Fan’ was founded by an Elizabeth, NJ based teenager named Charles D. Hornig. Although its circulation remained minimal (subscribers numbered around 60, and the print run never exceeded 300 copies), ‘The Fantasy Fan’ is remembered an an important title within the earl ‘weird fiction’ community, publishing work by Lovecraft, Howard, Derleth and Bloch, as well as correspondence from HPL, Clark Ashton Smith and Forrest J. Ackerman. Surprisingly given their rarity and fragility, extant copies begin at a not unreasonable $150 at Abebooks. Further info via Wikipedia.

(2) In fact, there are numerous parallels between ‘From Beyond’ and Corman’s ‘The Pit & The Pendulum’ in particular. Both are the second movies in a series, coming hot on the heels of an initial big success, and both make a point of pushing the envelope far further than their respective predecessor, incorporating uncomfortable sexual content with a concentration on torture and/or S&M. Both have a rather unhinged, hysterical tone and encourage a dreamlike sense of shifting, uncertain realities, and on some level they also tell similar tales of a younger character losing his/her identity to the fleshy, sensual obsessions of an absent patriarchal figure. Both films even make extensive use of red in their colour schemes, for goodness sake. Coincidence? Quite possibly, but just putting the idea out there.

(3)Interestingly, both the extreme colour scheme used in ‘From Beyond’ and the discussion of ultra-violet light in Lovecraft’s original story seem to mirror the approach to visualising ‘impossible’ colours utilised by Richard Stanley in his recent adaptation of ‘The Color Out of Space’. As both films make clear, MAGENTA is clearly the colour of cosmic horror.

October Horrors # 1: Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Tony Randel, 1988)

Warning: pretty heavy duty spoilers for this thirty year old film follow.

As I have stated before in these pages (in last year’s review of The Void, funnily enough - a film that likely has more than a little bit of ‘Hellbound’ mixed into its polyglot DNA) -- there is nothing worse than a film that is almost really good.

In terms of the expectations one might reasonably have for a first sequel to Clive Barker’s (still exceptional) ‘Hellraiser’ directed by someone who is not Clive Barker in fact, the first few reels of ‘Hellbound’ are genuinely, unapologetically really, really good. For half an hour or so here, we have a perfect, “this-time-it’s-war” expansion of the potent themes and ideas inaugurated in the first film, confidently pulled into a bigger budget, commercial arena by a creative team who seem to have broadly understood where Barker was coming from with the whole ‘Hellraiser’ thing, and just itching to start splattering blood across the walls.

From the outset, the idea of letting Barker’s Cenobites loose within the wards of the sprawling, Victorian lunatic asylum where the first movie’s heroine Kirsty (Ashley Lawrence) finds herself confined is a tantalising one, rich in ghastly possibility, whilst the subsequent revelation that Dr Channard (Kenneth Cranham) - the corrupt and perverse, egotistical doctor who cruelly oversees this backwards institution - is secretly an artefact-hunting occultist obsessed with trying to unlock the Cenobite puzzlebox is also a delightful – if rather far-fetched – development.

The extended set-piece that sees Channard undertaking a ritual to resurrect Clare Higgins’ character Julia, utilising the blood-stained mattress upon which she was murdered and using a self-harming mental patient as an unwitting sacrificial victim, is one of the strongest and most effective gore scenes in all of ‘80s horror. Though almost sickening in its extremity (I can’t believe they really expected it to get through either the BBFC or MPAA unscathed in the late ‘80s), this sequence is horrifically compelling, and, though hair-raising in its weird psychological/symbolic implications, its nastiness never feels gratuitous.

Sickening in a slightly different way, the subsequent scenes in which Channard develops a kind of kinky relationship with the mummified, blood-drinking Julia are just as morbidly fascinating. Higgins in particular is great here, clearly enjoying her role as a monstrous femme fatale despite the various gruelling make-up jobs she presumably had to contend with, and Cranham, though clearly not really a ‘horror guy’, is an experienced enough actor to know when to just go with it, giving this villainous duo a fantastic, lip-smacking ickiness all of their own, whilst their scenes together capture a highly period specific “yuppies from hell” kind of vibe, taking the (presumably accidental) “ugly ‘80s” aesthetic that predominated in Barker’s film and running with it, to deliriously grotesque effect.

Just as we’re getting ready for the fur to really start flying as the story enters its second act however, it begins to become increasingly clear that ‘Hellbound’ does not intend to capitalise upon this strong start in quite the way we (or at least I) might have hoped.

Getting Ashley Lawrence to return as our nominal protagonist provides some welcome continuity, and throwing the mute (autistic?) puzzle-solving girl whom Channard hopes will help him unlock the Cenobite box into the mix is an interesting idea. But, whereas Barker’s film established ‘Hellraiser’ as one of the one only ‘80s horror franchises with the potential to incorporate complex, multi-layered female characters into its mythos, by the time these two girls have teamed up in ‘Hellbound’, they’ve already been whittled down to little more than wide-eyed Alice surrogates, and, as soon as they pass through a temporary gateway in the asylum wall and begin exploring the Cenobites’ dimension, the movie finds itself bound for a rather different kind of “hell” to the one the filmmakers presumably intended us to experience.

Although few (if any?) digital effects are used in ‘Hellbound’, watching the second half of the film nonetheless put me in mind of the simultaneous feelings of sensory overload and alienated boredom engendered by so many 21st century CGI “spectaculars”.

With the possible exception of Higgins’ Julia, none of the film’s characters really have a strong enough pull to their individual arcs to keep us focused after this departure from the “real world”, and any investment we initially had in them is subsequently lost, along with any sense of cause-and-effect story-telling, real world logic, suspense or narrative momentum.

As fantastical visuals, melodramatic plot turnarounds and seemingly endless corridor chases pile up with little rhyme and reason –sometimes feeling more like a goth-ified version of ‘Labyrinth’ than anything we’d wish to see in a ‘Hellraiser’ sequel - our senses are soon exhausted, leaving us easily distracted from whatever the hell is supposed to be going on.

As is so often the case in 21st century film and TV, conventional, A-to-B style plot development is more or less abandoned here, as the story turns more toward a series of ham-fisted, phantasmagorical psychodramas aimed at excavating the private traumas and family backgrounds of characters who were little more than wafer-thin to begin with. Most chronic in this regard is the protracted sequence in which Kirsty is reunited with the spirit of her monstrous Uncle Frank. Taking place in some kind of chamber filled with sheet-covered bodies on slabs, this whole business is ultimately just tedious and nonsensical, completely missing the mark of whatever portentous insight the script was presumably trying to invest it with.

Unfortunately, this approach also crosses over into the film’s treatment of the Cenobites themselves. Fascinating, terrifying, morally ambiguous and perversely beautiful creations, the four members of the first film’s Cenobite “family” are easily the most potent horror movie monsters of their era, and yet, Randel’s sequel casually torpedoes their mystery and kicks them out of the movie before the final act with scarcely more than a shrug.

Though again, it’s a potentially interesting notion, I simply do not buy the idea that Doug Bradley’s Pinhead ‘evolved’ from the spirit of a disillusioned World War One officer – at least in the way it is presented here - and to subsequently have him and his hyper-demonic family get all weepy and basically just curl up and die on us after Kirsty reminds them of their lost human identities just strikes me as the lamest, most fanbase-cheating load of weak-ass shit I’ve seen in a franchise horror film in living memory. (1)

Even worse though is the fact that the inglorious demise of Pinhead and co leaves us to battle through another half hour of additional run-time in which the role of the Big Bad is shifted across to a frankly RIDICULOUS looking Kenneth Cranham / dragon hybrid thing – a painstakingly rendered stop motion/latex creature effect than holds the rare distinction of looking even stupider than something a bunch of underpaid CG yahoos working for SyFy/Asylum might have whipped up if handed the same brief twenty five years later. Ye Gods.

In a sense I suppose, it is weirdly fitting that a Hellraiser movie should take us on a giddy journey between cinematic highs and lows, thus mirroring the “pleasure in pain” ideology so beloved of the Cenobites themselves; but, I suspect even Pinhead himself might have found the sharp plunge between the two experienced here quite gruelling. Whilst the self-evident strengths of the film’s first half make ‘Hellbound’ essential viewing for any fan of creatively executed, gory horror, what happens after that properly hurts, especially once one considers the vast potential for good stuff that has been thoughtlessly squandered.

Still, it’s not all bad I suppose. We at least get to enjoy a truly epic forced perspective / matte shot in which some tiny characters navigate a gigantic, Esher-inspired labyrinth (a well-earned round of applause to the production designer and effects team for that), whilst the general ‘look’ of the Cenobite realm reminded me very strongly of the level designs for ID Software’s epochal ‘Doom’, which turned up a few years after this film’s release, thus creating definite flashback potential for anyone who, like me, spent far too many of the golden days of their youth senselessly plasma-gunning cyber-demons. So, there’s that at least.

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(1) Admittedly, I don’t tend to watch very many high numbered horror sequels, so I’m sure that fans of Freddy and Michael Myers et al have probably been subjected to greater indignities over the years, but for now, this “boo hoo, I used to be a real boy [collapses in pile of dust]” guff holds my personal record for lameness – very much the ‘80s equivalent of Count Dracula tripping over a hawthorn bush or falling off a balcony.

Franco Files: The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus (1962)

OBLIGATORY VIEWING NOTE: Screengrabs are by necessity taken from the old DVD rather than shiny new Blu-Ray, etc etc.

AKA:
La Mano de un Hombre Muerto (Spain), Sinfonia per un Sadico (Italy), La Bestia del Castello Maldetto (Italy), Hysterical Sadique (France).

The same year that he introduced us to The Awful Dr. Orlof, the young Jess Franco also brought another, somewhat lesser known, pejorative-prefixed evil-doer to Europe’s shadier movie screens, in the shape of The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus.

Watching this French/Spanish co-production, the reason for the Baron’s failure to achieve the same enduring popularity enjoyed by the good doctor soon becomes abundantly clear. Whilst ‘The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus’ is certainly notable for establishing several important ‘firsts’ within Franco’s cinematic universe (we will go on to discuss these below), it also serves as the first fully-formed example of a frustrating tendency that the director would go on to pursue throughout his career – namely, that of weaving a small handful of potent ideas and images into the fabric of a movie that is otherwise so excruciatingly boring it would challenge the eyelids of even the most dedicated Euro-cult aficionado.

That said, the film’s opening scenes at least betray little sign of the doldrums that await. In fact, they are remarkably cheery for what is ostensibly a gothic horror film, reflecting the breezy bonhomie of the same year’s La Muerte Silba un Blues, as a busy Alpine inn erupts with music, jollity and female pulchritude.

Here, a bearded vagrant blatantly defies conventional ‘show not tell’ wisdom as he gives us a lively run down of the movie’s back story – a familiar tale of the maleficent ancestor of a local aristocrat possessing the bodies of his descendants and periodically sending them out to commit sadistic (yep) outrages against the town’s womenfolk.

“It’s a tale for children, but certainly compelling”, comments a visiting doctor listening in on the conversation, thus inadvertently encapsulating the entire history of European horror filmmaking in a single sentence.

Next, we switch to, uh.. a city? .. where the editor of the indispensable sounding ‘Maidens and Murderers’ magazine has a new assignment for his chief reporter (because yes, in Jess Franco-world, publications with names like ‘Maidens and Murderers’ actually have reporters on their staff who are sent out to chase up stories). Thus, Karl Steiner (Fernando Delgado) – a lecherous, smirking bon vivant who is essentially interchangeable with the male protagonists in most of Franco’s black & white era films - is commanded to jump in his snazzy sports-car and pay a visit to the remote mountain town of Holfen (“..noted for its gothic mood, its trout and its crimes”), to find out what gives.

In true Franco fashion, both plotting and pacing here are extremely lackadaisical, lending TSBVK (if you will) a bit of an ‘off beat’ flavour that immediately sets it apart from its more somber British and Italian gothic contemporaries. The downside of this approach however is that the film soon becomes dominated by a hell of a lot of extraneous yakking, which, though initially rendered in a lively enough fashion to make it fairly entertaining if you’re in the mood, swiftly deteriorates into a hideous, numbing drag as the gears of the plodding police procedural/whodunit stuff begin to grind slowly through their over-familiar motions, meaning that by the time we’re halfway through the eye-watering 110 minute run-time of the full, uncut version, we’ve hit a slump from which the movie never quite manages to recover, despite some intermittent points of interest.

What thrills there are here are largely of the “dark, behatted stranger stalking pretty ladies” variety, with some looming, knife-wielding silhouettes and suchlike that will inevitably have modern viewers yelling “GIALLO!”, even as more contemporary audiences would more likely have associated such imagery with the krimi cycle that was all the rage in the West German film industry at the time. (Joining the dots here, it’s always worth remembering that Mario Bava’s pivotal ‘Blood & Black Lace’ (1964) was initially intended as a cash-in on the krimi trend.)

Actually, in many ways, TSBVK spends far more time being krimi-like than it does being gothic horror-like, despite a storyline and atmosphere that initially recalls the latter genre, with its unnecessarily large cast of suspicious, oddball characters, it’s decidedly realistic and non-supernatural crimes and it’s concentration upon investigative detail all echoing Rialto’s Wallace films. Perhaps we could interpret this as Franco cannily hedging his bets between two formulas currently saleable in different markets, or perhaps just an example of his tendency to throw together a pile of random genre elements and just ramble with them where he pleased - either way, the result is the same.

One of the best things about this film is the unusually lavish scope shooting ratio, which allows Franco to utilise some beautiful faux-Alpine landscapes for establishing shots, atmospheric cut-ins and the like. Although TSBVK was not actually shot in the Alps, Franco and his collaborators took the wise decision to relocate to a small town in the Spanish Pyrenees, which stands in for the picturesque Germanic setting quite well, meaning that no matte paintings or process shots are needed here. (Who knows, perhaps they even used real snow?)

This emphasis on location shooting also allows us to enjoy numerous examples of the young Jess honing the talent for making inspired use ‘real world’ locations that would of course help to define the style of most of his subsequent filmmaking. Most notable in this regard is one particularly impressive sequence that details the killer’s pursuit of the heroine through the shadowed town streets, incorporating a number of excellent, and presumably entirely off-the-cuff, bits of noir-ish style, culminating in an audacious high angle shot across a wide, deserted square that almost seems to join the dots between ‘The Third Man’ and Argento’s use of similar spaces in ‘Suspiria’ and ‘Deep Red’.

In fact, like many of Franco’s black & white films, TSBVK contains number of elaborately composed – almost gratuitously ‘stylish’ - pictorial shots that could well represent examples of the director cheerily taking the opportunity to recreate memorable moments from other movies. Whilst I’m too much of a lazy and half-arsed cinephile to get a positive ID on any of them myself, it is easy to believe that a viewer with a more encyclopedic knowledge of classic film could sit through this one dutifully ticking off nods to Welles, Lang, Bresson and so on.

Another plus for any Jess Franco film of course is the presence of Howard Vernon, and although the role of the titular Baron doesn’t give him a great deal to sink his teeth into (he’s basically the equivalent of one of the ‘obvious red herring’ characters essayed by Klaus Kinski in so many krimis), he’s nonetheless on top form, turning in a creepy-goofy performance that seems very much like a warm up for his “Uncle Howard” persona in ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’ a decade later.

Meanwhile, his nephew, Ludwig Von Klaus (Hugo Blanco) is a fresh-faced, serious-minded young fellow who looks as if he might otherwise be found playing bass in a moody post-punk band. Dressed from head to toe in black leather when he is initially introduced, he looks, well, kind of like a SADIST might look, perhaps..?

Ludwig may not have been responsible for the murders that took place before his arrival in town (who WAS responsible is a question that, in true Franco style, the movie never really bothers to address), but by the time Von Klaus Jnr is gazing in awe at the splendidly-appointed subterranean torture chamber that his mother entrusted him with the key to upon her death bed, any aspirations TSBVK might have had toward being a krimi-style whodunit are totally out of the window.

Though this early revelation may render the subsequent outbreaks of plodding investigative detail even more redundant than they might otherwise have been, worry not, for it is with the depredations of the younger Von Klaus that we finally get to the stuff that makes this film worthy of continued attention from Franco enthusiasts.

Aside from the film’s English language export title, the first giveaway vis-à-vis the director’s real intentions with this story comes via the extract Von Klaus reads from the diary of his much-maligned sorcerer/murderer ancestor. Herein, we learn of such things as “..the tragic eroticism of the senses, finally ending in death”, making it clear that, whilst the old Marquis is never mentioned by name, ‘The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus’ nonetheless represents the first of the many, many films Jess Franco would make inspired by the works of De Sade.

Whilst our Baron’s Sadean frolics are necessarily discussed and portrayed far less openly than they would be in Franco’s later films on the subject, TSBVK nonetheless goes some way toward demonstrating that, even in 1962, the director was determined to push the envelope re: acceptable sexual content in his films.

The references in the French language dialogue track to sexual assault as the police examine the bodies of the murderer’s earlier victims are certainly somewhat stronger than anything one would encounter in an English language film of this vintage, and Franco’s perennial obsession with the familial/incestuous aspects of DeSade’s work can be seen here too in the movie’s twist on the standard issue gothic horror “cursed family line” shtick, but really, this all pales in comparison to the central set-piece scene in which we finally get to see the young Baron having his wicked way with one of his victims – a sequence so extraordinarily daring that it seems to belong to a different film – and a different era – altogether.

The victim on this occasion is Margaret, the sultry bar-maid (played by the excellently named Gogó Rojo) whom hetero-male viewers will likely have had half an eye on since the movie began, and, rather than a random abduction, she had actually been involved in a consensual affair with the young Baron. Shortly before he shoves the ol’ chloroform-soaked rag into her face during a passionate make-out session in his car in fact, he tells her, apparently in earnest, that he “loves her to death”, and the suggestion that his crimes may be interpreted semi-sympathetically as ‘acts of love’ – as opposed to the mustache-twirling villainy more commonly portrayed in horror films of this vintage – helps make the scene that follows all the more transgressive.

The Baron’s stripping of Margaret’s semi-conscious form in his subterranean lair is immediately shocking in its voyeuristic directness – I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a film from this era that showed this much skin, let alone in such a grim context – and, as her body is slowly exposed and fondled by Ludwig’s hands, the vibe of kinky, aesthetically-inclined perversity is impossible to miss.

As things start to heat up, Daniel White – whose music is excellent throughout the film, I should note - lets rip with a nerve-jangling avant garde chorale that recalls the kind of thing Morricone knocked up for the giallos a decade later. Meanwhile, the camera executes an audacious vertical pan across a rotting drape curtain to a ceiling mirror in which the lurid action below reflected in full detail, shadows of dark cloth on the bed standing out almost like the eye-holes of a skull as the two bodies writhe upon them… by which point we’re really cooking with gas.

This is Jess Franco’s erotic / cinematic imagination suddenly emerging into full bloom, like some long-repressed fantasy exploding onto the screen as a burst of decadent Sadean freakery that goes way beyond anything contemporary viewers would have expected from a gothic-ish horror movie, even if Franco does at least bow to contemporary standards of decorum by cutting away when the Baron pulls a heated knife from a brazier with which to mutilate the chained girl - even whilst the ensuing shots of her writhing legs remain far more disturbing than some poorly executed gore effect would ever have been.

Strangely, this entire sequence seems to have been shot without direct sound, and, aside from White’s jolting music, it plays out entirely in silence. Add a few juddering, unnatural camera movements and hazy, soft focus photography, and, whether by accident or design, we’re left with the unsettling impression that we could easily be watching some lost fragment of twisted, silent-era pornography.

Starkly cruel, surprisingly explicit and – it must be said – shamelessly misogynistic, this scene is undoubtedly the biggest sado-erotic showstopper in Franco’s entire pre-Necronomicon filmography, a startling fever dream that seems to have emerged from an entirely different world from the comparatively dreary material that surrounds it, and a direct precursor to the sensually over-powering sex/murder sequences of Venus In Furs.

As you might imagine, all of this proved a bit much for the film’s distributors, and initial theatrical releases in both France and Spain saw this whole sequence replaced with a milder, ‘clothed’ version that Franco apparently filmed simultaneously, in an early example of a practice that later become ubiquitous in Spanish horror. The fact that losing the ‘meat’ of the full strength version would render the film an almost total waste of time for its audience was presumably not lost on potential American distributors, who consequently took a pass on it, meaning that, unlike the majority of Franco’s other early horror films, TSBVK didn’t reach English-speaking shores until the DVD era.

Dutifully restored to its full glory via the French re-release print used for the recent Kino/Redemption Blu-Ray, this brief sequence of erotic delirium makes ‘The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus’ a minor revelation for Francophiles, but, even in its unexpurgated form, the film as a whole is unlikely to win over more casual (or indeed, more critical) viewers. Following that one astonishing diversion in fact, the sad truth is that the tedium only increases during the closing twenty minutes, leading ultimately to an attractively shot but crushingly bland finale that ends proceedings on a profound shrug of indifference.

For all of ‘The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus’s kinky transgressions and impressive filmmaking chops, the dictates of conventional plotting and genre expectations hold it back as effectively as a sadist’s chains, consigning at least 75% of its excruciatingly over-extended run-time to a pit of fusty administrative pointlessness. As such, it can’t really be counted amongst Jess Franco’s better black & white pictures, even whilst it houses one solitary sequence that kicks up more sparks than any of them.

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Kink: 3/5
Creepitude: 2/5
Pulp Thrills: 2/5
Altered States: 2/5
Sight Seeing: 3/5

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All else aside, readers are invited to observe that this movie had some *splendid* posters;

 

Gothic Originals: Nightmare Castle (Mario Caiano, 1965)

BY-NOW-FAMILIAR VIEWING NOTE: Although the review below was written with reference to Severin’s recent blu-ray edition of ‘Nightmare Castle’, the screen shots above are fairly obviously NOT taken from that disc. They are sourced instead from the truly dreadful public domain DVD of the film I owned prior to that. Apologies for any alarm or bitter tears of rage caused by this, but I’m unlikely to acquire a blu-ray equipped computer any time soon, so whatcha gonna do?

The penultimate entry in the loose cycle of horror films Barbara Steele made in Italy between 1960 and 1966, Mario Caiano’s ‘Nightmare Castle’ provides one of the wildest, but also the most frustrating, of the Steele-starring black & white gothics.

An oddly off-kilter movie in any of its assorted iterations, the film’s scattershot script (credited to Caiano and Fabio De Agostini) mixes up more horror movie plot elements than frankly seems sensible, but never bothers to sufficiently develop any of them (never mind reconciling them into a cohesive narrative), instead relying entirely upon audience familiarity with the clichés being enacted to fill in the gaps. Classic Italian scripting then, in other words. Molto buono!

So, get this for plot line: Dr Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller), a saturnine scientist involved in questionable and secretive experiments involving frogs, bubbling test tubes and exotic plants, catches his aristocratic wife (Steele, of course) in an adulterous greenhouse embrace with the hunky gardener (spaghetti western regular Rik Battaglia). Crazed with jealousy, the good doctor vows to torture the lovers to death, making use of the castle’s conveniently appointed medieval dungeon in the process, only to discover in the midst of his gloating that his wife, “..upon realising what a vile, perverted monster [she] had married”, has already disinherited him, instead leaving her estate and fortune to her “simpering idiot” twin sister Jenny.

Unperturbed, Dr. A nonetheless subjects his captives to a grisly death by electrocution, after which he removes their hearts, drains their blood (for his experiments, we presume?) and burns their bodies, placing his wife’s ashes in a plant pot, from which a strange, “fleshy”, allegedly blood-dripping plant grows.

Quite how he manages to square all this with the coroner is never discussed, but presumably everything must be cool with the law, for the next thing we know, Dr Arrowsmith has revolved to retain his access to his late wife’s estate by means of seducing and marrying her ‘crazy’ sister (Steele again, now in a blonde wig) – a task he apparently manages to accomplish in short order, despite his lack of either charm or social standing, and a countenance that at best resembles that of a humanised bald eagle (sorry Paul).

To the doc’s chagrin though, Jenny actually turns out to be quite a demure and heroically-inclined young lady, who shows little sign of being either ‘simpering’ or an idiot. She is, however, still subject to the ravages of the vaguely defined ‘fragile constitution’ that has apparently plagued her family’s female lineage since time immemorial (this is demonstrated by a quick candle-lit spin through the family vault, where it is revealed that several of her forebears have died aged in their middle twenties).

As such, Dr Arrowsmith (whose name is amusingly pronounced as ‘Aerosmith’ by some of the actors on the English dub, I feel the need to point out) figures he can still drive Jenny crazy without too much difficulty via the usual methods employed by dastardly relatives in stories like this, after which he and his new lover, sullen housekeeper Solange (Helga Liné), can continue to live in the manner to which they are accustomed, with wife # 2 safely packed off to the funny farm. What they haven’t counted on however is the vengeful spirit of wife # 1, who is still very much at large on the spectral plain, causing all sorts of mischief and attempting to possess the body of her living sister!

Meanwhile, whilst all this is going on, Dr Arrowsmith has also used some miraculous rejuvenation techniques he has developed in his laboratory – presumably using wife # 1’s blood? - to return youth and beauty to the previously disfigured and decrepit Solange. But, wouldn’t you know it, now that she looks like Helga Liné again (minus the truly awful ‘aging’ make up used in earlier scenes), Solange needs regular transfusions of fresh blood to keep her pretty, and Jenny is first in line for the chloroform. (Always the way, isn’t it?)

So, there you go. Try picking the thread of sense out of that lot, if you dare.

As eventful as all this may sound on paper however, the sad truth is that the majority of ‘Nightmare Castle’s inexplicably over-extended run-time (the longest version clocks in at an eye-watering 109 minutes) remains a crushing bore. In keeping with most other aspects of the production, Caiano’s direction exhibits only intermittent bouts of inspiration and otherwise remains largely pedestrian, whilst the sheer quantity of time dedicated to watching characters yakking somberly in medium shot about stuff we have either guessed already or should by rights be seeing instead is simply inexcusable, even by the talky standards of ‘60s gothics. On top of that, the flat and careless English dubbing will likely provide the final KO for many viewers’ attention spans (I don’t currently have access to a subtitled Italian version, but I wouldn’t hold out great hope for it being much better, to be honest).

Despite all the plot threads flying around the place, the ghost story stuff – and the accompanying spooky atmospherics - is largely sidelined through the central hour of ‘Nightmare Castle’, allowing the rehashed mad science and half-baked thriller elements to predominate, sometimes threatening to revert to a tedious plod through the old “couple have a deadly secret, must murder others to preserve it” routine that would go on to become the prime motivator in dozens of subsequent Italian horror and giallo scripts. (Whilst you’d be hard pressed to call ‘Nightmare Castle’ a ‘proto-giallo’ in any sense, certain recurrent bits of plotting, together with a general vibe of predatory cynicism, certainly point in that direction.)

The film does at least benefit from a superb shooting location – the same villa used in The Horrible Dr. Hichcock I believe? – but, although we get a good eyeful of grandly baroque dining room, some derelict exteriors and an ancient-looking medieval-ish bed chamber, surprisingly little atmosphere is wrung from these surroundings in most sequences, whilst, unhelpfully, many scenes are instead confined to bare-walled corridor and lab sets.

Such persistent tedium is disappointing, given that the sheer amount of improper shenanigans going on in ‘Nightmare Castle’ does at least invest it with a pleasing air of of cynical, polymorphous perversity. Indeed, the film is not without thematic interest, and the few bone fide ‘good bits’ are real knockouts.

Early on for instance, there is an extremely effective fantasy sequence (perhaps modeled after the ones in the Corman/Poe films?), utilising a mixture of diffuse lighting and seemingly ‘damaged’ film stock that rendered it almost unintelligible on the much-degraded public domain prints that for many years represented the only way to see this film. Much aided by the pre-Eraserhead drone and magisterial organ dirges of what I think must have been one of Ennio Morricone’s first scores for a fantastical/genre film, this sequence makes for an authentically disorientating and hair-raising couple of minutes. As with the somewhat stoned scripting decisions, it’s basically a dry run for the kind of surrealistic cheap thrills that would predominate in the Erotic Castle Movies that supplanted the old fashioned gothics in the following decade, and it also busts open one of the more interesting elements of ‘Nightmare Castle’ - namely, its position as one of the more overtly Freudian Italian gothics.

After the initial ‘trauma’ of Muller’s discovery of Steele and Battaglia, the film constantly seems to want to drag us back to this ‘primal scene’ in (where else?) the greenhouse. During the (sadly all too rare) moments when ‘Nightmare Castle’s sense of reality becomes more tenuous, we seem to plunge into the subjective consciousness of the characters, as life/death, part/present, dream/reality etc all begin to implode into one swirling stew within the troubled psyche of the blonde sister, or the doctor, or of the disembodied spirit of Steele’s brunette incarnation, or some strange mixture of all three. If the film’s crude plotting and propensity for blandness ultimately never allows these potent ideas to fully manifest themselves, there is still enough meat within the stronger sequences for cinematic dreamers to get stuck into (and god knows, they’ll have plenty of time to chew it over whilst Muller, Line et al are blabbing inconsequentially on those drab sets).

Likewise, ‘Nightmare Castle’ is also one of the few early ‘60s horror films to directly address the subject of Sado-Masochism that so frequently hangs over these stories (Jess Franco’s ‘The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus’ (1962) being the only other example that immediately springs to mind). The depiction here of Arrowsmith’s torture of his wife and her lover is quite lengthy and mean-spirited, but also highly aestheticised, as if Caiano realised that Steele’s fans would get a kick out of seeing her writhing in various stage of torment whilst we are invited to share in Muller’s delighted smirking. Though not overly explicit, it’s all rather kinky to say the least, and likewise, the electrified bedframe gimmick that Arrowsmith subsequently uses to dispose of his victims – frying them in some hideous mockery of sexual embrace - seems an alarmingly unwholesome innovation for an old fashioned gothic horror, more suited really to some blood-thirsty‘70s exploitation epic.

Once Steele (brunette version) returns as an undead avenger during the film’s conclusion, these intimations of S&M are made explicit, as she says to Muller, “you gave me extreme pleasure, you taught me the pleasure of the torment of the flesh, which turns into ecstasy that passes beyond life and death and into eternity; now I’m going to reward you with that same pleasure…” – not much room for ambiguity there.

And that brings us to the main reason why it’s worth sitting through catatonic drag of ‘Nightmare Castle’s director’s cut – namely, the fact that the movie’s closing reel is flat-out fantastic. Suddenly, the camera spins, the castle’s ornate interiors become vast, shadow-haunted and oppressive, and, as thunder roars and Ennio goes nuts on the organ, the film fully embraces the kind of maniacal atmosphere that has been so sadly lacking up to this point, as the bodies of Steele and her lover arise as avenging, acid-scarred zombies (you what!?) for a brief but exhilarating campaign of baleful carnage.

Steele is magnificent here, her performance dripping menace. Her initial appearance from the deep blackness of a castle hallway, the left side of her face covered by hair, has a quite haunting, genuinely spectral feel to it, and, once she reveals her scarred face and gets down to business vis-a-vis giving Muller what for, she just goes all out – guffawing and hissing and growing in wonderfully unhinged, scenery-shredding fashion. Tremendous stuff.

Belatedly introduced during this final fifteen minutes, her family’s ‘twin hearts’ coat of arms, ironically mirrored by the hearts of the two lovers that Arrowsmith has kept impaled on the same spike in his lab, makes for a great horror movie motif, with the closing image of the hearts consumed by flames providing an effective – if not exactly subtle – commentary on the petty cruelty and self-interest that has motivated just about every plot point in the preceding ninety minutes.

Buried somewhere within ‘Nightmare Castle’s rambling, nap-inducing expanse is the essence of a great, transgressive horror movie. As David Del Valle points out on the Severin edition’s commentary track, its best moments represent an early exemplar of the kind of delirious, irrational take on horror cinema championed by France’s Midi Minuit Fantastique magazine, and as such, it still packs a considerable punch for fans of this-sort-of-thing.

So - what went wrong? In answering that question, an interview with director Caiano on the same discs provides some illuminating background.

In short then: Caiano’s father Carlo had been a successful producer in Italy during the ‘50s, but by the early ‘60s, had fallen upon hard times. Having naturally enough grown up around movies, but with no direct writing or directing experience of his own, young Mario was mad on gothic fiction, and, seeing how the genre was ‘in’ at the time, convinced his father to give him a shot at making a horror movie, as a kind of “one last mission” deal.

Initially, Mario had envisaged more delirium, more camera tricks and special effects, and, most importantly, he wanted to off-set the film’s black & white photography by strategically inserting blobs of bright red blood (ala the techniques used in Roger Vadim’s ‘Blood & Roses’ (1960), presumably). Finances were tight though, and, after shooting began, Dad put the nix on all this.

And suddenly, the mysteries of this odd film fall into place. The over-extended run-time, the over-ambitious but nonsensical script? These are of course common errors of rookie filmmakers the world over, especially when working, as here, with no professional studio backing or more experienced creative hand on the tiller. Unable to realise his more ambitious visual ideas, Caiano must have taken the decision to concentrate on the strongest element he did have to work with – namely the excellent cast – whilst minimising action and cutting back on unnecessary camera set-ups, and… at the end of the day, we get what we get.

And if what we get is about half a year’s worth of flatly dubbed yakking, well, no matter. God bless you Mario, you tried your best, and, viewed in the context outlined above, I think you did pretty damn well - ruffling a few feathers, cannily anticipating a few subsequent developments in the horror genre, and giving one of said genre’s finest ever actresses a few of her best ever scenes. I think that’s more that worthy of celebration, and, if ‘Nightmare Castle’ isn’t exactly the rip-roaring Friday Night Horror Movie some may be hoping for, it’s still an experience that devotees of this particular corner of cinema should definitely make time for once or twice a lifetime. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just went through it a third time to get the screen grabs, and I really need a snooze…