Horror Express: The Devil Commands (Edward Dmytryk, 1941)

 Darker, creepier and more intense than the other ‘mad doctor’ movies Boris Karloff made for Columbia between 1939 and 1941, this fourth and final instalment in the loosely connected series finds incoming director Edward Dmytryk really upping the ante, delivering a film which remains startling and somewhat unnerving to this day, in spite of its brutally foreshortened 64 minute run time and all too evident budgetary constraints.

A brief but highly effective prologue gets the antennae of us Lovecraft-fanciers tingling right from the off, as the daughter of Karloff’s Dr Julian Blair delivers an ominously deadpan voiceover narration, intoned over a series of very well done model-shots which take us on a slow pan toward the doors of a derelict, storm-lashed cliff-top mansion;

“In Barsham Harbour, on nights like this, when lightning rips the night apart, why do people close the shutters which face toward my father’s house, and lock their doors, and whisper? Why are they afraid? No one goes near my father’s house. I don’t know where my father is. I only know that for one brief, terrible moment, he tore open the door to whatever lives beyond the grave.”

I don't know about you, but I’m sold.

Thereafter, we rewind seven years, and the film’s first act settles down into a pattern very much in keeping with the Karloff’s other Columbia pictures, as the gentle and soft-spoken Dr Blair, a research fellow at a fictional New England college, astounds his fellow boffins by demonstrating that the human brain generates an electro-magnetic impulse which can be recorded, and potentially ‘read’, via electrodes attached to the subject’s temples, hooked up to a primitive, EEG-like encephalogram. (1)

Claiming that “the wave impulse of woman, the so-called weaker sex, is much stronger than man’s”, Dr Blair uses his beloved wife Helen (Shirley Warde) as his primary experimental subject. His beliefs become both more questionable and more obsessive though when, stricken with grief after Helen dies in a car accident, he observes that his machinery is still recording the unique ‘signature’ of her brainwaves, convincing him that his wife’s spirit remains present in the ether, attempting to communicate with him.

As you might well imagine, ‘The Devil Commands’ becomes a gloomy and rather sad affair at this point, and Karloff conveys Dr Blair’s misery and exhaustion with almost painful conviction. Viewers who had previously turned out to see Karloff in Nick Grinde’s ‘The Man They Could Not Hang’ (1939), ‘The Man with Nine Lives’ or ‘Before I Hang’ (both 1940) will have been more than familiar with the path the good doctor subsequently takes, as his mental health gradually crumbles, and as he repeatedly ignores the advice proffered by the film’s procession of straight-laced supporting players, who urge him to give up his weird work and take a well-earned break.

The film’s tone shifts considerably however when, on the advice of his simple-minded assistant Karl (Cy Schindell) - only potentially mad scientists are assigned one of those, you see - Dr Blair attends a séance conducted by a renowned medium, the stentorian Mrs Blanche Walters (Anne Revere).

Though Mrs Walters is initially pretty pissed off when the doc busts up her phony séance, easily exposing the assorted gimmicks she has been using to hoodwink her clients, she nonetheless reveals herself to be as cold, avaricious and amoral an operator as any film noir spider-woman - so naturally, when Blair suggests that she could make herself a great deal of dough assisting him with his experiments, she’s all ears.

Before long, the doctor’s increasingly unhinged attempts to channel vast amounts of electricity through Mrs Walters’ brain in an attempt to make contact with Helen’s roving spirit lead to poor old Karl getting accidentally lobotomised. Blanche, who seems suspiciously well versed on how to handle such situations, suggests they duck out and make a quick getaway before anyone finds out about the accident, prompting the unlikely trio to flee the campus and hit the road, setting themselves up in the remote cliff-top manse we saw during the film’s prologue.

Once this memorably eerie set-up, reminiscent both of Lovecraft’s ‘From Beyond’ and the unhinged finale of Michael Curtiz’s Doctor X a decade earlier, has been established, palpable fear and loathing on claustrophobic interior sets is soon the order of the day. In a neat turn-around, we’re reintroduced to our characters a year or two down the line, through the eyes of the county sheriff, who comes a-knocking, investigating, oh, y’know, just some bodies which have gone missing from the local cemetery (uh-oh).

After the door is opened by a cowering, lantern-bearing maid (a great performance from character actress Dorothy Adams), the sheriff soon encounters the lumbering, Igor-like Karl, before Blanche descends the rickety, shadowed staircase, glaring daggers in full-on, imperious Lady Macbeth mode. And as to the good doctor, who shambles into view behind her, meanwhile… well, he’s certainly given up brushing the dust out of his hair, let's put it that way.

Under Blanche’s encouragement no doubt, Blair has of course gone full loony by this stage, and the crooked couple have indeed been re-appropriating the carcasses of the local citizenry for use in their experiments. In a breathtaking tableau of psychotronic weirdness, they have in fact wired up the mouldering corpses in what look for all the world like antiquated, metallic diving suits with flashing Tesla coils appended to their helmets. They are seated around a table with their arms out-stretched, in some perverse, quasi-scientific imitation of a séance, whilst the doctor’s banks of McFadden-esque electrical equipment whir and drone behind them. Good lord!

With shit like this going down, it’s naturally only a matter of time before a torch-wielding mob is called for - but, given that we know the house is still standing seven years hence, they’re required on this occasion to nix the flames and do their worst with clubs and wooden poles instead. Yikes.

Edward Dmytryk would soon of course go on to play a significant role in defining the aesthetic of film noir with the classic ‘Murder, My Sweet’ (1944), and he takes the opportunity here to prove himself a post-expressionist stylist per excellence here, ladling on angular shadows, spot-lighting, venetian blinds and dutch angles as if they were going out of fashion, and employing harsh, jagged editing patterns to produce a rather fevered, dissonant tempo.

The film’s production crew meanwhile douse practically every scene in thunder, lightning and squalling gales, undercutting the science-based plotting with the kind of quasi-gothic atmos you could cut up and sell by the pound, whilst mournful cellos saw away on the stock music score, emphasising the essentially tragic nature of the storyline.

Towering over the bumbling, submissive Karloff during the second half of the film, Anne Revere likewise acts up a storm, giving us the kind of vile, emotionless femme fatale / heartless bitch character who could eat Phyllis Dietrichson or Mrs Danvers for breakfast.

The uncertain nature of her relationship with Karloff’s character is in fact one of the movie’s most intriguingly perverse elements. Could they really have a romantic connection? Seems unlikely, given that Dr Blair is still utterly fixated on trying to establish contact with his late wife. We’ve already established that Mrs Blanche Walters is driven by a desire for money, but surely hanging around in a dilapidated mansion living off the diminishing resources of a crazy old geezer wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. Does she just get a kick out of lording it over the doctor and his mindless servant, or - is she hooked on the thrill she derives from having thousands of volts of electricity (and potentially the disembodied brainwaves of the dead) blasted through her nervous system on a regular basis..?

The latter possibility could have conceivably made her an early precursor to Barbara Crampton’s character in Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of From Beyond, but, forced to rattle through its potent story at breakneck speed to hit the era’s one hour b-movie finishing line, ‘The Devil Commands’ is allowed little time to explore such niceties as character motivation, leaving a wealth of rampaging ambiguity in the gaps between scenes which makes the film all the more fascinating.

Of course, the title and poster blurb assigned to this movie by Columbia upon its release are a complete misnomer. The film contains no reference to the devil, and he certainly issues no commands. Indeed, it is interesting to note that there is no allusion to religion or Christian belief to be found anywhere in the film; even the obligatory blather about defying God’s law or somesuch which was routinely shoehorned into this era’s post-Frankenstein mad doctor movies in notable by its absence.

Perhaps one explanation for this is that the script for ‘The Devil Commands’ (credited to Robert Hardy Andrews & Milton Gunzburg) was loosely derived from William Sloane’s science-based supernatural novel ‘The Edge of Running Water’ (first published in 1939) - an acclaimed work, often hailed as a landmark in the field of ‘cosmic horror’, which I’ve been meaning to obtain a copy of for many years at this point. (2)

Whilst I’d imagine that the film probably ditches or reworks many of the details of Sloane’s story, disquieting remnants of what I understand to be his core premise remain. Namely, we’re talking here about the idea that, whilst Dr Blair believes that his experiments allow him to make contact with departed human souls, he is actually tapping into something else entirely.

This truly frightening concept, beautifully implied by the novel’s title, is realised rather more bluntly during the frenzied climax of Dmytryk’s film, wherein we see Dr Blair’s table of wired up corpses become possessed by some unholy St Vitus’ dance as the riled up mob of townsfolk approaches, summoning up what, in their audio commentary for the film’s blu-ray release, the ever-reliable Kim Newman and Stephen Jones identify as perhaps cinema’s first example of a full-blown trans-dimensional vortex.

If on one level ‘The Devil Commands’ remains a morbid and joyless rumination on the self-destructive futility of seeking solace from beyond the grave, it is simultaneously animated by a crazed spark of total morbid madness which proves extremely compelling. Crashing heedlessly into the realm of what-man-was-not-meant-to-know with a fervour far more alarming than than anything generally encountered in the rather sedate world of early ‘40s scientific horror films, it stands as a raw, wild and genuinely unnerving classic of the weird/cosmic end of the genre.

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(1) I’m no scientist, but it’s interesting to note that, whilst Karloff’s learned colleagues in ‘The Devil Commands’ treat his theories as if they pretty far-out speculation, Dr Blair’s initial ideas about brainwave activity are essentially correct, and paper-and-ink EEGs very much like the once he demonstrates in the film had actually been in use since at least the early 1920s.

(1) This 1967 Bantam edition of Sloane’s novel, with its IMPOSSIBLY CREEPY cover illustration, is a particular paperback holy grail of mine.

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 # 11: The Creeping Flesh (Freddie Francis, 1973)

Although I can’t 100% confirm that this is an accurate memory, I seem to recall that, long ago in the distant past, my initial viewing of a VHS copy of ‘The Creeping Flesh’ might well have marked the point at which my interest in old British horror films first surpassed the level of idle, time-killing curiosity, prompting me to think, “my god, these things are amazing – I think I should probably try to watch as many of them as possible”.

Revisiting the film all these years later, it’s easy to see why my response was so favourable – in a profound sense, it really does the business. Whereas contemporary productions such as Amicus’s And Now The Screaming Starts and Don Sharp’s ‘Dark Places’ appeared to show the British gothic horror tradition on its last legs, exhaustedly dragging itself toward its own grave, ‘The Creeping Flesh’ by contrast is an exuberant, imaginative and confidently realised production, seemingly inheriting a sense of joie de vivre (and, it must be said, a few plot details) from Cushing & Lee’s previous assignment, the equally wonderful ‘Horror Express’.

Although this co-production between Tigon and the utilitarian-sounding World Film Services may not have been planned as an epitaph for this particular strain of British cinema, it was certainly amongst the last batch of such titles to enjoy widespread distribution, and in retrospect, it can’t help but feel like an attempt to give the classical approach to the genre the all-guns-blazing send-off it deserved. (1)

Whilst the film makes a point of evoking as many of the tropes that had helped define the legacy of the preceding fifteen years as possible though, imbuing proceedings with a warm feeling of tried-and-tested familiarity in the process, it also engages intelligently with the more psychological / visceral approach which was already beginning to twist the genre into weird new shapes as budgets plummeted and declining audiences began to demand harder-edged exploitation content (perhaps taking a few notes from Hammer’s envelope-pushing ‘Hands of the Ripper’ (’71) and ‘Demons of the Mind’ (’72)) – a cake-having / cake-eating combo, which, against all the odds, works brilliantly.

An introductory framing narrative features an infirm and unhinged looking Peter Cushing in his lab, ranting about the nature of good and evil and the grave responsibility he holds for saving humanity from a plague of darkness, and so on. As he begins relating his sorry tale to a younger doctor who has apparently turned up to assist him, we move into ‘flashback’ mode as the story proper begins with a scenario akin to what might have happened had Cushing’s character from ‘Horror Express’ managed to return home without incident, and with his crated up specimen still intact.

Upon arrival at his isolated country home, Dr Emmanuel Hildern (for such is Cushing’s character name) is immediately reacquainted with his devoted daughter Penelope (Lorna Heilbron), whom he has left alone at the house during his costly and arduous expedition to the wilds of New Guinea. Naturally enough, Penelope declares her wish to catch up with her beloved father over tea and toast, but Dr Hildern has other priorities, immediately retreating to his laboratory to unpack his big crate.

Excitedly filling his assistant (George Benson) in on the results of his trip, Hildern reveals his prize discovery – a gnarly-looking, giant sized skeleton of some ancient, previously unknown species of hominid, whose very existence throws conventional theories of human evolution into disarray!

Consulting his surprisingly extensive library of work on “the spiritual beliefs of the New Guinea primitives”, Dr Hildern is subsequently inspired to make some even more earth-shattering claims concerning the veracity of his discovery, including the suggestion that it in fact belongs to an ancient race of “evil giants” who once went to war against the people of the islands – and his speculations become even more far-fetched after an attempt to clean the skeleton reveals that the dead bones are capable of actually regrowing their living flesh when exposed to water.

Soon thereafter, Hildern makes the astounding declaration that the blood samples he has taken from this freshly-grown flesh actually contain the essence of pure evil, determining that he and his assistant must get straight to work preparing a prototype vaccine from it, which I suppose in theory should function to rid mankind of all its negative impulses?! (Whoa, back up there Doc, one thing at a time please...)

Whilst begrudgingly taking a break to partake in that aforementioned familial breakfast meanwhile, Dr Hildern gets stuck into his years’ worth of unanswered correspondence, and swiftly learns that his wife, who had been committed to an asylum many years previously, has passed away during his absence. Significantly, it transpires that he had lied to Penelope about her mother’s fate, telling her that she had died whilst she was still a child – so now of course, he must stick to his story and hide his grief from his daughter.

Even more awkwardly for Dr Hildern, the proprietor of his friendly local asylum is none other than his half-brother James, played by Christopher Lee (I suppose the “half” has been appended to the script to account for their obvious lack of family resemblance). Another scientist of questionable propriety, this younger Dr Hildern is soon revealed to be an ice-cold authoritarian who manages his mental hospital with an approach to patient well-being seemingly inspired by Torquemada, whilst spending his spare time engaging in his own Frankensteinian experiments (you know, hand-crank generated electrical charges applied to severed arms in tanks of formaldehyde – all that kind of good stuff).

Clearly there is no love lost between the brothers. Apparently suffering from a severe case of sibling rivalry, James lords his superior wealth and public standing over the grief-stricken and destitute Emmanuel, announcing straight off the bat that he will refuse to subsidise any of his brother’s foolish expeditions, and furthermore declaring that he intends to go head-to-head against Emmanuel to win the much-coveted Richter Prize!

As you’d rather imagine, Emmanuel’s frantic and rather sloppy attempts to knock up a vaccine against Original Sin, Penelope’s calamitous discovery of the truth about her mother (it turns out she was a former Parisian night club performer who allegedly succumbed to a form of hereditary insanity!) and James’s attempts at scientific espionage add up to a whole heap of trouble for all concerned -- especially when you factor in an escaped lunatic rampaging around the place and a big, gnarly skeleton which threatens to turn into an atavistic remnant of a lost race of pre-human destroyers as soon as it’s left out in the rain.

And, as life in the Hildern house becomes ever more dysfunctional, the older Dr Hildern’s extremely bad decision to test out his vaccine on his beloved daughter (I mean, it’s only injecting a solution made from the blood of an ancient evil giant into the blood-stream of an emotionally unstable teenage girl…. what could possibly go wrong?) is basically the last straw that tips the whole thing into complete chaos.

With Cushing and Lee as rival mad scientists, a hot-house gothic house melodrama with overtones of sexual repression and parental abandonment, an ancient, atavistic supernatural menace and a lurid Victorian milieu of hellish asylums, riotous taverns and buxom wenches, ‘The Creeping Flesh’ delivers everything a gothic horror fan could possibly wish for, but, rather than merely coming across as a mega-mix of Brit horror clichés, Peter Spenceley & Jonathan Rumbold’s admirably ambitious screenplay actually succeeds in incorporating all this stuff into an example of that rarest and most valuable of horror movie virtues – a good story, well told.(2)

Critics of the film have tended to draw attention to the unlikelihood of Dr Hildern’s extraordinary leap of logic in determining that he has extracted ‘the essence of pure evil’ from his pet skeleton, and have taken a dim view of the film’s apparent endorsement of the grimly puritanical, Manichean worldview this implies – especially once the injection of the botched ‘evil’ vaccine into Penelope appears to provide the catalyst for her catastrophic sexual awakening. Rarely, it seems, has a horror movie’s “sex = evil = death” message been so explicitly spelled out, and even given scientific credence, no less.

What is easy to overlook on first viewing however is that what we are seeing here is the story as recounted in flashback by Dr Hildern himself – an unreliable narrator to say the least. Whilst the supernatural nature of the creature he has unearthed remains unquestioned, we are never actually given any verifiable proof that the Doctor’s babbling about ancient mythology and good and evil has any basis in fact. Indeed, Spenceley & Rumbold’s script subtly undermines the doctor’s reactionary assumptions at every turn, clearly implying a far more mundane, psychological explanation for the tragedies which plague his family life.

Although Dr Hildern is a genial, sympathetic figure when we first meet him, as the film goes on it becomes increasingly clear that his problems run far deeper than mere bumbling absent-mindedness and nutty-professor style eccentricity. Beyond all of the mad science and monster movie hi-jinks which result from his sloppy professional practice, the clear implication here is that the malady which sends Penelope out on the town in a scarlet dress is the exact same one which drove her mother to the asylum -- and that Emmanuel himself is chiefly responsible for it, irrespective of any botched vaccine injections and vague talk of hereditary insanity.

Through his insistence that his wife and daughter remain closeted from the outside world, and through his failure to understand their needs or to return their affection, Emmanuel has inadvertently destroyed the lives of the two women he loves, and his transition from a lovable bumbler to a tragic, ruined lost soul is, of course, brilliantly realised by Cushing, adding yet another variation to the gallery of morally tormented patriarchs he had previously essayed in films as varied as The Flesh & The Fiends, ‘Cash on Demand’ and The Gorgon. Working here just a few months after his return to active service following the devastating loss of his wife, it is spiriting to see him firing on all cylinders, bringing energy, commitment and emotional nuance to a demanding lead role.

Lee, for his part, falls back on his tried and tested ‘archly superior, cold-hearted cad’ routine, and I’m sure we all know how great he was at doing that. I’m not sure what his characteristically strident thoughts on this particular production may have been, but he certainly seems to be enjoying the opportunity to indulge in a slightly more refined form of full spectrum villainy than his horror roles usually allowed for.

Meanwhile, the supporting cast is excellent too, with Heilbron (who went on of course to work with Jose Larraz on ‘Symptoms’ the following year) on fine, hysterical form as Penelope, and some great one-scene-wonder bits from a few old favourites too; Michael Ripper as one of the porters who carries Cushing’s crate into the house, Harry Locke improvising wildly as the pub landlord, and Duncan Lamont as a drawling Scottish police inspector. There’s even an extended cameo from Jenny Runacre as Cushing’s late wife during some flashback-within-a-flashback scenes of Parisian debauchery.

(The only disappointment in fact is that the hulking, mute asylum escapee is inexplicably NOT played by Milton Reid. Perhaps he was on his holidays at the time? [Cue mental image of Milton relaxing on a sun-lounger drinking a cocktail with an umbrella in it, as Hawaiian music plays.] Oh well, you can’t have everything I suppose.)

Freddie Francis was always rather uneven in his work as a horror director, but he certainly had his moments, and ‘The Creeping Flesh’ is undoubtedly one of them. In particular, he was always a director who seemed to have a good feel for production design, and the staging, props and set dressing here are indeed all top notch. I don’t know where ‘The Creeping Flesh’ actually sat in budgetary terms, but it certainly looks like one of the more extravagantly realised British horrors of its era, with location shooting taking place both around Thorpe House in Surrey and the London Docklands, whilst the standing sets used for the urban exteriors (identified as such by the film’s entry on the Reel Streets website) are so elaborate that I actually mistook them for genuine streets given a period make-over.

Meanwhile, the special effects used to realise the monster – in both its skeletal and fleshy form - are satisfyingly icky and menacing, especially during the film’s climactic nocturnal coach crash – a genuinely thrilling, beautifully evocative sequence featuring great, blue-tinted nocturnal photography, lashing rain, thunder crash editing and a sense of all-consuming chaos as the newly reconstituted revenant makes its getaway in a sutiably menacing hooded cape.

And, as to the ending, well – oh my gosh, it’s so good. The hooded creature banging at the doctor’s door with its clammy paw is just so ‘Weird Tales’, and the vengeful, sanity-wrecking price it eventually exacts from him is so E.C. Comics – just absolute classic stuff (even if Francis does ill-advisedly revive his “camera inside the skull” gimmick from 1965’s ‘The Skull’ to considerably lessened effect).

As you will have gathered, I like ‘The Creeping Flesh’ rather a lot. For some reason, it seems to have remained a fairly under-rated and infrequently discussed entry in the British gothic cycle over the years, but it really is one of the very best, managing to embody all of the arcane joys which this form of filmmaking represents for its fans, whilst at the same time presenting a solid, serious and exciting tale, compelling enough in its own right to make a perfect ‘gateway drug’ for any British horror neophytes who stumble across it. If for some reason you’ve overlooked it until now, please do make the effort to track it down - you’ll be in for a treat.

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Check out this amazing poster artwork from Italy (title translation: “The Terror From The Rain”(?)), West Germany (“At Night, The Skeleton Awakens”), and Belgium (more or less direct translations of the English title in French and Dutch).

In the UK meanwhile, Tigon put this out on a double-bill with Mario Bava’s ‘A Hatchet For The Honeymoon’ – now THAT’S what I call a good night out!

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(1)An eclectic production outfit to say the least, World Film Services appear to have had a hand in everything from Peter Watkins’ ‘Privilege’ (1967) and Joseph Losey’s ‘Boom!’ and ‘Secret Ceremony’ (both ’68) to the sub-Amicus portmanteau effort ‘Tales That Witness Madness’ (1973), the inexplicable David Niven vampire comedy ‘Vampira’ (1974), and post-E.T. kid’s sci-fi movie ‘D.A.R.Y.L’ (1985).

(2)Given how accomplished their script for ‘The Creeping Flesh’ is, it is surprising to learn that neither Spenceley nor Rumbold had much of a background in the film industry, and nor did they go on to much recognisable success. Spencely worked intermittently as an assistant editor in the UK, whilst Rumbold next popped up in Greece in 1978, directing a film which no one ever seems to have seen, before occasionally contributing script work to a number of low key productions based out of Greece, Yugoslavia and Iceland.

Blood Island Journal # 1: Terror is a Man (Gerardo de Leon & Eddie Romero, 1959)

 One of the ideas that has long been on my list of “things to do” on this blog is to start a series writing about what I tend to mentally categorise as “East Meets West” genre cinema. By this, I mean the seemingly endless number of movies that resulted from filmmakers with an eye toward the American (or occasionally European) grindhouse/drive-in circuit suddenly deciding to take advantage of the possibilities offered by East Asian culture, shooting locations or personnel – with wildly varied results, needless to say, although these productions can usually be loosely united by the fact that they’re almost always uproariously entertaining.

Naturally, the vast majority of this globe-trotting activity took place in the aftermath of Bruce Lee’s breakout success in the early 1970s and the subsequent explosion of interest in martial arts, but the foundations of the trend were actually in place long before that, and Ground Zero, of course, was The Philippines.

Now, I’m not sufficiently schooled in the history to Filipino cinema to really go into any detail about how the nation’s nascent commercial film industry was kick-started by the influx of American culture and equipment that followed in the wake of the Korean War in (and, subsequently, by the Marcos regime’s enthusiastic encouragement of international co-productions), but I DO know that the earliest film I’ve seen that fits this “East Meets West” category is ‘Terror is a Man’, an ambitious and well-realised 1959 horror film directed and produced by Filipino nationals Gerardo de Leon and Eddie Romero.

Although ‘Terror is a Man’ was technically a 100% Filipino production, the audience that Romero and de Leon were aiming their film at is as clear as the Pan Am baggage ticket that presumably took their film canisters across the Pacific. Shot in English with a Caucasian central cast, the film purports to be set on an island “…one thousand miles off the coast of Peru”, and relegates Filipino performers exclusively to servant / villager roles. In just about every respect in fact, it follows the pattern set by American b-horror films of the ‘40s and ‘50s to a tee.

The big surprise here however is that ‘Terror is a Man’ is actually a really good faux-American b-movie, drawing as much from the storied Lewton / Tourneur legacy is it does from the kind of lurid creature features that it was destined to share bills with in middle-American drive-ins.

On the face of it of course, there is no reason why we should be surprised at the film’s quality. Operating outside of anyone’s stereotypical assumptions about ‘third world’ movie making, Romero and de Leon both seem to have been cosmopolitan, internationally-minded gentlemen who had been working as film industry professionals for many years before they embarked on their first horror film.What makes ‘Terror..’ surprising in retrospect rather is the knowledge that, during the decade that followed, the two men returned to the fray with a fistful of the most shamelessly stupid, cheeseball trash-horror films that the late 1960s had to offer, produced on-spec at the behest of haemoglobin-fixated New York-based distributors Hemisphere Pictures.

Hopefully we’ll  return to those little wonders at some point in the future, but when it comes to trying to account for the drastic change of approach that separates them from this relatively sombre and seriously intended first foray into the genre, perhaps we’re best to simply conclude that ‘Terror is a Man’ taught our dynamic duo an important lesson re: subtlety rarely paying anyone’s bills at this level of the industry. (“Bring your own tranquilisers!” thundered the posters when Hemisphere belatedly re-released the film as ‘Blood Creature’ in 1965.)

Essentially operating as a minimalist rewrite of ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ - perhaps with a touch of Hammer’s ‘The Curse of Frankenstein’ thrown in for good measure - ‘Terror is a Man’ essentially concerns the travails of Bill Fitzgerald (Richard Derr), a shipwrecked American sailor who finds himself washed up upon the troubled shores of the aforementioned island.

Bill awakens to find himself recuperating in the home of one Dr Charles Girard (Francis Lederer), formerly a successful family doctor in New York, who has relocated to this unsurpassably remote locale along with his unfeasibly glamorous young wife Frances (Greta Thyssen), in order (of course) to obtain the privacy he needs to pursue his own private research. (Sure, whatever ya say, doc – I’ll just get the chains and tranquilizer darts ready in advance, shall I?)

It seems that Bill has arrived on the island at an inopportune moment. Moments after he has regained consciousness, the Doctor’s surly assistant Walter (Oscar Keesee) appears to announce that some ill-defined “animal” has escaped “again” from the doctor’s laboratory, prompting the island’s small native population to finally call it a day and bugger off for pastures new in their fishing boats. Only the two young orphans who serve as the Doctor’s loyal servants have chosen to remain, reducing the island’s human population to a slim six, with a rickety wooden dinghy constituting the only way off it.

Recuperating with admirable speed, our hero takes these unpromising developments in his stride. Finding Girard and Walter desperately digging a series of vast pit traps and baiting them with raw meat, he begins cheerfully bantering with them about what kind of critter they’re lookin’ to catch, failing to take the hint even when they continue to evade his questions through the strained, formal dinner that follows that evening. Meanwhile, the rain pours down, storm winds shake the shutters and, out in the distant undergrowth, the “animal” howls with disquieting desperation.

All of which may sound like business as usual for an island-set monster movie, but ‘Terror is a Man’s consummate execution nonetheless places it significantly above the norm for this kind of material.

For one thing, the film is flawlessly atmospheric, as Emmanuel I. Rojas’s classically brooding black & white photography - incorporating some surprisingly elaborate camera movement and looming shadows all over the joint - combines with the authentically primeval tropical locations to create a palpable sense of isolation. If I tell you that the directors’ pacing is ‘deliberate’ meanwhile, that’s not merely a synonym for ‘boring’. On the contrary, the movie ebbs and flows with a distinct rhythm that makes for a highly engaging slow-burn.

For another thing, the film takes a pleasantly off-beat approach to characterisation relative to the cardboard cut-out stuff common to movies like this, aided by a set of performances that, if not exactly Oscar-worthy, are at least pretty solid. I liked the way for instance that Bill is initially far cheerier and less immediately judgemental about all the sinister goings on than macho heroes generally tend to be, and Lederer for his part is actually pretty great in the role of the Doctor. (If you recognise him, b-movie fans, it might be for playing the title role in 1958’s ‘The Return of Dracula’.)

Though Dr Girard is shifty and secretive to a fault to begin with, the scene in which he is eventually forced to come clean about the nature of his experiments actually becomes one of the film’s highlights. After showing Bill a notebook full of (rather cool) sketches of idealised human/animal hybrids, the doctor seems surprised when, rather than greeting these revelations with outraged disgust, Bill expresses a tentative interest in the ideas behind his work. Sensing that he might finally have found a friend, the doc immediately changes his tune, happily inviting the crude sailor down to his previously verboten basement to take a look around and see what he thinks. In terms of mad scientist etiquette, it’s really quite sweet.

Poor Frances too gets a bit more to chew on than the token dames generally do in these things, especially when her character directly addresses the inevitable question of why a beautiful blonde always seems to end up hanging around in these inhospitable locales. Concisely explaining her circumstances to Bill, she asks - what trainee nurse wouldn’t jump at the chance to marry a handsome and wealthy doctor and move to a tropical island? Be careful what you wish for, etc.

Even the servants – a teenage brother and sister whose mother, it later transpires, was killed by the monster – are fairly likeable (the filmmakers are considerate enough to credit them with a certain amount of charm and intelligence), but really, what most people will take away from this film is the memory of that monster itself.

Essentially representing a panther that has, through hundreds of hours of gruelling exploratory surgery, been transformed into the shape of a man, this ghastly, hate and fear-driven shambler, with feline fangs jutting from its jaw and wild patches of fur bursting from its mummy-like bandages, lies somewhere between Christopher Lee’s creature in ‘Curse..’ and the hideous cellar-dweller in Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak on the fear vs sympathy scale.

Though ‘Terror is a Man’ may be subtle in some regards, the vividness with which de Leon and Romero depict the cruelty and torment suffered by this unlikely creature falls way outside the Lewton ballpark. Though there is little explicit gore, the ‘feel’ of the material probably rivals anything that had been done in the horror genre to this point for sheer nastiness.

I mean, at least Dr Moreau’s creations got to roam around in relative freedom, establishing a community and interacting with each other. This poor bastard by contrast has spent its entire waking existence in the House of Pain, leaving it crazed by the constant torment, even before the brutish Walter, resentful of the doctor’s fixation with the creature, begins delivering sadistic beatings to it, in a series of scenes more gruellingly upsetting than anything your correspondent has ever seen in a 50s / 60s monster movie.

Who can blame the misbegotten thing for going on the rampage? Certainly not I, given how comprehensively its suffering casts a pall over the ‘action’ that takes place in the second half of this curiously compelling, thoroughly down-beat attempt by two Far Eastern filmmakers to carve out a space for themselves in the Great American Grindhouse.

Posters sourced via Wrong Side of the Art.