Richard Matheson (February 20, 1926 – June 23, 2013) was an American author and screenwriter, primarily in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres. He may be known best as the author of I Am Legend, a 1954 horror novel that has been adapted for the screen three times, although five more of his novels have been adapted as major motion pictures: The Shrinking Man, Hell House, What Dreams May Come, Bid Time Return (filmed as Somewhere in Time), and A Stir of Echoes.

He adapted the works of Edgar Allan Poe for the Roger Corman‘s Poe series including House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and The Raven (1963).

Matheson also wrote numerous television episodes of The Twilight Zone for Rod Serling, including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and “Steel“. He later adapted his 1971 short story “Duel” as a screenplay which was promptly directed by a young Steven Spielberg, for the TV movie of the same name.

Matheson’s first published short story was “Born of Man and Woman” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Summer 1950, the new quarterly’s third issue. It is the tale of a monstrous child chained by its parents in the cellar, cast as the creature’s diary in poignantly non-idiomatic English. Later that year he placed stories in the first and third numbers of Galaxy Science Fiction, a new monthly. Between 1950 and 1971, he produced dozens of stories, frequently blending elements of the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres. He was a member of the Southern California School of Writers in the 1950s-1960s, which included Charles Beaumont, William F. Nolan, Ray Bradbury, Jerry Sohl, and George Clayton Johnson.

For Hammer Films wrote the screenplay for Fanatic (US title: Die! Die! My Darling!) and adapted Dennis Wheatley‘s The Devil Rides Out (1968). In 1973, Matheson earned an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his teleplay for The Night Stalker, one of two TV movies written by Matheson that preceded the series Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Matheson’s first novel, Someone Is Bleeding, was published in 1953. His early novels include The Shrinking Man (1956, filmed in 1957 as The Incredible Shrinking Man, again from Matheson’s own screenplay) and a science fiction vampire novel, I Am Legend, (1954, filmed as The Last Man on Earth in 1964, The Omega Man in 1971, and I Am Legend in 2007). Other Matheson novels turned into notable films include What Dreams May Come, A Stir of Echoes (as Stir of Echoes), Bid Time Return (as Somewhere in Time), and Hell House (as The Legend of Hell House), the last two adapted and scripted by Matheson himself.

Three of his short stories were filmed together as Trilogy of Terror (1975), including “Prey” (initially published in the April 1969 edition of Playboy magazine) with its famous Zuni warrior doll. Matheson’s short story “Button, Button”, was filmed as The Box in 2009, and was previously adapted for a 1986 episode of The Twilight Zone.

Wikipedia

The Cat Creeps is a 1930 horror/thriller directed by Rupert Julian and John Willard and produced by Carl Laemmle, Jr for Universal Pictures. As with many films of the late silent/early talkie era, most notoriously London After Midnight, the film is considered lost, with no surviving prints, only a few short sequences and still shots. The English language version was made in tandem with the Spanish-friendly version, La Voluntad Del Muerto, with both films being based on 1927′s The Cat and the Canary.

The Cat Creeps is based on one of the earliest spooky house tales, The Cat and the Canary, originally a 3-act play written by John Willard in 1922. The black comedy was not only a hit on the stage (staring the author and Henry Hull, later to star inWerewolf of London) but also on the silver screen, released in 1927 and directed by Paul Leni (The Man Who Laughs). The inspiration for countless films since, the first attempt to copy its winning formula was in 1930, when Rupert Julian (who directed the first cut of Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera) and Willard himself, brought the tale of a potential heiress who has to prove her sanity by surviving a night in a creepy mansion, to a mass audience.

Carl Laemmle Jr already had both Dracula and Frankenstein in the pipeline but The Cat Creeps was his first foray into foray into the horror arena and as such, makes the film the first horror film of the talkie era. To save money on building two sets, a Spanish version was filmed on the same stage at night after filming had wrapped for the day on the American production.

Strong casts were assembled for both productions; Helen Twelvetrees (famous for her over-acting and tragic personal life), Raymond Hackett, Jean Hersholt (Mark of the Vampire) and Neil Hamilton (best known as the redoubtable Commissioner Gordon in the 60′s TV series Batman) for the daytime shoot and Anotonio Morena, Lupita Tovar (excellent in the Spanish-language version of Dracula) and Paul Ellis in the Spanish cut. The musical score was composed by Heinz Roemheld, also responsible for Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Dracula’s Daughter and The Monster That Challenged the World.

Twenty years after the death of misanthropic millionaire Cyrus West, the old man’s heirs are summoned to the spooky ancestral mansion for the reading of two recently discovered sealed envelopes. The first contains West’s will; the second envelope is to be opened only if the terms of that will are carried out. Summoned to the West estate for the “grand opening” are West’s grandniece Annabelle (Twelvetrees) and several predatory would-be heirs. On the verge of opening the second envelope, the sinister Lawyer, Crosby (Lawrence Grant, Werewolf of London, Son of Frankenstein), disappears behind a secret panel…only to turn up murdered a few moments later. Is Annabelle a murderer or is she going mad? Is there an escaped, hideously disfigured lunatic (make-up presumed to be courtesy of Jack Pierce) in the house bumping off the potential heirs or is someone plotting to take all the money for themselves?

Tragically, both versions of the film are now lost. Whereas the last prints of London After Midnight are presumed destroyed in a studio fire,  no-one seems to know how The Cat Creeps fell off the radar. Surviving scenes were cobbled together with pieces of Nosferatu and Frankenstein for a short film called Boo! in 1932 and, oddly, the soundtrack is still intact and in Universal’s vaults.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Terror Tales was the name of two American publications: a pulp magazine of the weird menace genre, and a horror comic in the 1960s and 1970s.

Terror Tales was originally published by Popular Publications. The first issue was published in September 1934. One of the most successful horror magazines, it was joined shortly afterwards (1935) with its sister horror pulp, Horror Stories, also from the same publisher. Some of the writers whose work appeared in Terror Tales included E. Hoffmann Price, Wayne Rogers, Wyatt Blassingame, Ray Cummings, Paul Ernst, Arthur Leo Zagat and Arthur J. Burks. Rudolph Belarski provided several covers for the magazine. Terror Tales ceased publication in March 1941.

A later publication of the same name was a black-and-white horror-comics magazine. Terror Tales was published by Eerie Publications from 1969 to 1979.

Wikipedia

Images courtesy of coverbrowser.com

Posted by Adrian J. Smith using information via Wikipedia which is freely and legally available to share and remix under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Horrorpedia supports the sharing of information and opinions with the wider horror community.

The Zombie is a cocktail made of fruit juices, liqueurs, and various rums, so named for its perceived effects upon the drinker. It first appeared in the late 1930s, invented by Donn Beach of Hollywood’s Don the Beachcomber restaurant. It was popularized soon afterwards at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

Legend has it that Donn Beach originally concocted the Zombie to help a hung-over customer get through a business meeting. He returned several days later to complain that he had been turned into a zombie for his entire trip. Its smooth, fruity taste works to conceal its extremely high alcoholic content. Don the Beachcomber restaurants limit their customers to two Zombies apiece.

According to the original recipe, the Zombie cocktail included three different kinds of rum, lime juice, falernum, Angostura bitters, Pernod, grenadine, and “Don’s Mix,” a combination of cinnamon syrup and grapefruit juice.

Beach was very cautious with the recipes of his original cocktails. His instructions for his bartenders contained coded references to ingredients, the contents of which were only known to him. Beach’s original recipes for the Zombie and other Tiki drink have been published in Sippin’ Safari by Jeff “Beachbum” Berry. Berry researched the origins of many Tiki cocktails, interviewing bartenders from Don the Beachcomber’s and other original Tiki places and digging up other original sources. Mostly notably, Sippin’ Safari details Beach’s development of the Zombie with three different recipes dating from 1934 to 1956.

Due to the popularity of the cocktail during the Tiki craze and the fact that Beach both kept his recipe secret and occasionally altered it, today there are many variations of the Zombie made at many restaurants and bars, some showing few similarities to the original cocktail.

• Scottish comedian and actor Billy Connolly advised his audience during his An Audience With… show to try the Zombie, citing that it’s “in an extraordinary concept; [the consumer gets] drunk from the bottom-up”.
• In M*A*S*H, Season 3, Episode 17, Trapper John McIntyre orders a Zombie at the officers’ club and says “Keep them coming until I turn into one.”
• The Zombie cocktail also appears as one of many of the namechecks found in Steely Dan songs, appearing in the song “Haitian Divorce” on the album The Royal Scam.
• In 1940, pianist Fats Waller recorded a novelty song called “Abercrombie Had a Zombie” about the effects of the cocktail on a previously law-abiding citizen who has a few zombies and becomes a public menace. The song also mentions Aquacade and other features of the 1939 New York World’s Fair where the drink was popularized.
• In the “Is It Magic or Imagination?” episode of Bewitched, Darrin orders a Zombie for Samantha. When she makes them leave before receiving the drink, Darrin says “if you didn’t want the zombie I would have drank it” so she conjures one for him.
• The drink is mentioned by the doctor in the 1943 film I Walked With a Zombie as the final example of what the definition of a zombie might entail. Frances Dee’s character responds, “I tried one once, but there wasn’t anything dead about it.”
• In the 1981 film comedy Modern Problems, Nell Carter (as voodoo maid Dorita) makes a big tray of really nice looking Zombies for vacationing guests Chevy Chase, Patti D’Arbanville, Mary Kay Place and Brian Doyle-Murray in the living room of their beach house getaway. Chevy Chase’s character drinks the entire Zombie all at once, stunning the rest of the guests, and portending the weekend of chaos to come.
• In the skit entitled “Scandalous Weekend” in season two of the sketch comedy show The Kids in the Hall the recurring character Cathy Strupp, played by Scott Thompson, orders a Triple Zombie in a bar called the Love Boat Disco.
• In the “Catch a Falling Star” episode of Quantum Leap (set on May 21, 1979, aired in 1990), a number of the characters order Zombies.
• The Zombie appears in The Fiery Furnaces‘ album Rehearsing My Choir; the narrator states ‘it just bombed me’, during “A Candymaker’s Knife in my Handbag”
• The Zombie is mentioned by rapper Common in the track “8 Minutes to Sunrise” off his “Sensibility” album (02:00).
• In the Gilligan’s Island episode “Voodoo” Gilligan informs Mrs. Howell the Professor has been turned into a zombie by a witchdoctor. She asks Thurston what a zombie is; he starts giving her the recipe for the cocktail, but wonders why she asked. She explains the Professor has been turned into one. Mrs. Howell suggests they go help him, and Thurston adds, “Bring a couple of tall glasses”!
• In All in the Family episode “New Year’s Wedding”, a wedding guest asks for a Double Zombie.
• The Zombie cocktail is mentioned in the Men at Work song “Land Down Under”. Travelling in a fried out kombi; On a hippie trail, head full of Zombie.
• In a Kids in the Hall sketch, Cathy with a C (Scott Thompson) goes to the Love Boat Disco by herself and orders a triple Zombie.

José Ramón Larraz (born 1929 in Barcelona) was an idiosyncratic Spanish director of exploitation and horror fims such as the erotic and bloody cult classic Vampyres (1974). He died in Malaga on 3rd September 2013.

Larraz began making films in England with Whirlpool, an erotic thriller co-produced by a Danish company. He made many different types of films using a variety of pseudonyms, but is best known for his horror films. His last few horror films were Spanish/American co-productions. He apparently retired from feature filmmaking in 1992 at age 63.

The book Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984 (1994) by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs dedicated a chapter to him and Larraz was profiled in Tombs’ Eurotika TV series:

Pete’s personal encounters with José Larraz are here

Wikipedia

Selected filmography:

• Whirlpool (1970) aka Perversion Flash

• Deviation (1971)
  La Muerte Incierta (1971)
  Emma, puertas oscuras (1973)
• Symptoms (1973) aka “Blood Virgin”
• Scream – and Die!  (1973) aka “The House That Vanished”, aka “Don’t Go in the Bedroom”, aka “Psycho Sex Fiend”
• Vampyres (1974) aka “Daughters of Dracula”, aka “Blood Hunger”
• The Coming of Sin (1978) aka “Violation of the Bitch”

• The Golden Lady (1979)
• El Periscopio (1979) aka Give Us Our Daily Sex aka Malicia Erotica

• Stigma (1980)
• Black Candles (1980) aka Sex Rites of the Devil
• The National Mummy (1981)
  Polvos Magicos (1983)

• Rest in Pieces (1987)
• Edge of the Axe (1988)
• Deadly Manor (1990) aka Savage Lust

Tod Slaughter (19 March 1885 – 19 February 1956) was an English actor, best known for playing over-the-top maniacs in macabre film adaptations of Victorian melodramas. Born as Norman Carter Slaughter in Newcastle upon Tyne, he made his way onto the stage in 1905 at West Hartlepool.

It was in 1925 that he adopted the stage name Tod Slaughter, but his primary roles were still character and heroic leads—not the evil-doers. He finally found his true calling when, in 1931 at he played the body snatcher William Hare in The Crimes of Burke And Hare. Publicised as ‘Mr Murder’, he lapped up his new-found notoriety by boasting he committed fifteen murders each day for the duration of the run. Shortly afterwards, he played Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street for the first of 2,000 times on stage.

In 1934 aged 49, he began in films. Usually cast as a villain, his first film was Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn (1935) a Victorian melodrama filmed cheaply with Slaughter as the obvious bad-guy. Slaughter’s next film role was in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936), directed and produced by George King, whose partnership with Slaughter was continued in the subsequent shockers: The Crimes of Stephen Hawke (1936); The Face at the Window (1939) and Crimes at the Dark House (1940).

Slaughter was busy on stage during World War II, performing Jack the Ripper, Landru and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. After the war, he starred in The Curse of the Wraydons (1946), in which Bruce Seton played the legendary Victorian bogeyman Spring-Heeled Jack, and The Greed of William Hart (1948) based on the murderous career of Burke and Hare.

During the early 1950s, Slaughter appeared as the villain in crime films  and he was still regularly touring the provinces and London suburbs. However, the public’s appetite for melodrama seemed to have abated somewhat and he went bankrupt in 1953. Still performing on the stage almost to the very end, Slaughter died of coronary thrombosis. After his death following a performance of Maria Marten in Derby, his work slipped almost completely into obscurity.

In 1973, Denis Gifford‘s book A Pictorial History of Horror Movies included stills and details of Tod Slaughter’s roles and film historians have since revived interest in his cycle of melodramatic films, placing them in a tradition of “cinema of excess” which also includes the Gainsborough Melodramas and Hammer Horrors.

Wikipedia

We are grateful to Poster Palace for some of the images above.

The Ripper (1997)

Jack the Ripper. The very name conjures up images of fog-shrouded streets, grisly murder and chirpy, voluptuous Cockney street girls spilling out of East End dens of inequity to meet their fate as the cloaked and top-hatted Saucy Jack searched in vain for the elusive Mary Kelly. In fact, so ingrained is the myth of the Ripper in our collective consciousness that it’s sometimes difficult to remember that this was a very real murderer, who appeared out of the blue in 1888 and, over a few months as summer gave way to autumn, killed five prostitutes, taunting the police with letters and body parts, before vanished as abruptly as he appeared.

The mystery of the Ripper is what keeps the mythology alive – the fact that he was never caught, and that even now, the British government refuse to release the files pertaining to the case (making ludicrous excuses about protecting the families of informers, as if the underworld holds a century long grudge against people who tried to help catch the world’s most notorious sex killer) ensures that all manner of theorising can take place as to the nature of the Ripper’s identity (or identities).

What’s more, the short burst nature of the crimes, their seemingly ritualistic brutality and the mysterious, sometimes ambiguous messages that the Ripper left or sent (“The Juwes Are The Men That Will Not be Blamed For Nothing” message left on a wall, the “Dear Boss”, “Saucy Jacky” and “From Hell” letters and postcards) – as well as the Victorian trappings that lend themselves to gothic melodrama – all lend themselves to myth making and speculation. Over the years, numerous books have claimed to have ‘solved’ the murders, none of them convincing – there was even the dubious ‘dairy’ that purported to have proven the Ripper’s identity, but which inevitably turned out to be fraudulent. It’s a sign of how much the Ripper still grabs our attention that any fresh claim about the murders will still make headlines today [In fact, after this article was posted, crime writer Patricia Cornwell has announced that she can prove that the Ripper was Camden artist Walter Sickert].

The Lodger (1927)

It’s very un-PC and immediately condemned if anyone tries to make a film or TV show about a true life murder in Britain these days. The only acceptable thing is to make a thoroughly serious police procedural docu-drama – a classic recent example being the Fred West film Appropriate Adult – that concentrates on the trial or the investigation and studiously avoids the crimes. Jack the Ripper has long been an exception to that rule. It’s easy to say that this is because of the age of the case, but of course, Ripper films first began turning up within living memory of the case – Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger, based on the book by Marie Belloc Lowndes was made in 1927.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is the first British Ripper film, although it shied away from actually using the name and ultimately proves to be a case of mistaken identity, as a couple begin to suspect that their new tenant (Ivor Novello) is the murderer known as The Avenger. In the end, he turns out to be a vigilante investigating the case. The film would be remade several times, with the ending tweaked each time. In 1932, Novello revisited the role, but this time the killer – The Bosnian Murderer – turned out to be his twin brother. In 1944, all ambiguity was cast aside, and the lodger, played by arch villain Laird Cregar, was finally outed as being Jack the Ripper. This version was repeated in 1953 (retitled Man in the Attic) with Jack Palance as the murderer. The Lodger’s story was sufficiently universal for a 2009 version to use the premise while dispensing with The Ripper and much of the story, relocating the action to Los Angeles. It’s not a film many people have seen.

Man in the Attic

The Lodger was imitated in Room to Let, a 1948 radio play Margery Allingham that was subsequently filmed by Hammer a year later. In this story, Valentine Dyall is the Ripper, taking a room after escaping from a lunatic asylum. This is the first of three Ripper films from Hammer. In 1971, they made Hands of the Ripper, in which the killer’s daughter is turned into a murderer after seeing her mother die at her father’s hand, while Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde throws several Victorian horror characters, graverobbers including Burke and Hare, into the mix. In this film, the Ripper turns out to be Dr Jekyll, murdering women in order to secure their glands for his experiments.

Both films are rather better than you might imagine based on the description, shot with Hammer’s usual style but also having strong performances and intelligent screenplays. The idea of Dr Jekyll being behind the Ripper killings was later revived in Gerard Kikoine’s astonishingly deranged and slightly kinky, Ken Russellesque 1989 film Edge of Sanity, with Anthony Perkins on top form as Jack Hyde. If you haven’t seen this film because of poor reviews, stop reading now and rectify that immediately!

Edge of Sanity

Appearing a couple of years after the original Lodger film, Pandora’s Box is a German film in which the promiscuous Lulu (played by iconic actress Louise Brooks) meets a sticky end at the hands of Jack. The Ripper’s appearance here is simply as an incidental character, the film instead following its heroine’s moral decline. The two characters would meet again in Walerian Borowczyk’s Lulu, made in 1980.

Pandora’s Box

In 1959, Hammer screenwriter Jimmy ‘the Nasty’ Sangster stepped away from the company to write Jack the Ripper for producers Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker, for whom he’d previously written Sadean Blood of the Vampire. Like that film, this was a Hammer-influenced gothic tale, though shot in black and white (apart from a single, gory moment at the climax). In this version, British police inspector O’Neill (Eddie Byrne) is joined by New York detective Sam Lowry (Lee Patterson) to catch the Ripper.

As you can imagine, the film barely bothered to stick to the facts of the case, but it’s entertainingly trashy nevertheless. In common with a number of British films of the time, additional ‘Continental’ scenes were shot for foreign markets, featuring topless showgirls. This version can apparently now be found online…

Sherlock Holmes first met Jack the Ripper in 1965, in A Study in Terror. The combination of the world’s most famous (fictional) detective and the world’s most infamous (real) murderer was an obvious one, and the film is entertaining enough fluff. It loosely follows the facts of the case, with Holmes, played by John Nevill, investigating the murders, an investigation that leads him from the back streets of Whitechapel to the aristocracy. But in common with many Ripper films, it glossed over the horror of the killings while sexing up the victims – middle-aged, toothless prostitutes are played by the likes of busty Carry On queen Barbara Windsor.

Frank Finlay plays Inspector LeStrade, and quite coincidentally would repeat the role in the second Holmes / Ripper movie Murder By Decree. A high spot in the filmographies of both characters, this moody piece sees a starry cast (Christopher Plummer, James Mason, Donald Sutherland) caught up in the killings, which soon turn out to be less than random. In fact, they are part of a Masonic plot to cover up the misdeeds of the Duke of Clarence, son of Queen Victoria. This conspiracy leads to the very heart of government, and thanks to the quality of the film, the performances (Plummer is especially good as an emotive, passionate Holmes) and Bob Clark’s direction (he made the film between his horror movies Dead of Night and Black Christmas before wholly commercial movies like Porkys), you are swept along in the story.

Murder By Decree

The Royal connection and conspiracy of high powers had initially been ‘revealed’ by Stephen Knight, who originally used the theory in a 1973 BBC TV series, where modern day Scotland Yard detectives re-examine the case and uncover the truth. Monarchists and skeptics have widely dismissed Knight’s theory, but it’s as valid as any other given what we know (and would certainly account for why the Ripper files remain locked away!). In any case, it makes for great drama, and it’s no surprise that the theory has been dusted off subsequently.

Jack the Ripper (1988)

The 1988 two-part TV movie Jack the Ripper, which teamed Michael Caine and former Professional Lewis Collins as unlikely detectives, worked on a similar theory and 2001′s From Hell – adapted and simplified from Alan Moore’s exhaustive graphic novel – sees Johnny Depp as the absinthe-drinking Inspector Abberline, who uncovers the royal connection while trying to save Mary Kelly (who, in the grand tradition of Ripper films, is played by the rather too attractive Heather Graham). The 1997 film The Ripper dispensed entirely with the middle-men and had Prince Eddy himself as the killer.

Buy Jack the Ripper (1988) on Blu-ray | DVD from Amazon.co.uk

From Hell

This royal connection was mocked by comedy duo The Two Ronnies in their much-loved Ripper spoof The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town, which showed how far Jack the Ripper has become part of folklore – we could even make family-friendly comedy shows about the murders now.

Of course, most Ripper films were less serious of intent and less concerned with pesky things like historical accuracy than these movies. While there are those who suggest that Jack the Ripper probably killed more than the five women attributed to him – Ripper style murders continued to happen, but for whatever reason any connection was dismissed – many of the films dealing with the character generally ignore the known facts and simply make up their own story, with new protagonists and victims.

Jess Franco’s 1976 film Jack the Ripper is a magnificently lurid and sleazy effort in which mad doctor Klaus Kinski slices the breasts off saucy showgirl Lina Romay, while in José Luis Madrid’s Jack el Destripador de Londres (aka Seven Murders for Scotland Yard), made in 1971, the Ripper has reached 39 (!) victims – perhaps explaining why it’s set in modern day Soho. Spanish horror star Paul Naschy plays the main (but innocent) suspect.

Madrid’s film is one of several that seeks to relocate the Ripper into modern times (well, period sets and costumes cost money…). Some of these films feature copycats, while others have the Ripper reincarnated. 1988′s Jack’s Back, TV movie Terror at London Bridge – with David Hasselhoff – and early shot-on-video film The Ripper (1985) all have Jack’s spirit returning to possess others and carry on his work. None of these films are remotely good. Ripper Man and Bad Karma are more recent, no more impressive examples. Then we have the copycats – Jill the Ripper (2000) and The Ripper (2001) add little to the mythology.

The Ripper (1985)

Of the modern day Ripper films, only Time After Time is worthwhile. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, this is a fun fantasy romp rather than a slasher film, with H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) following Jack the Ripper (David Warner) to 1979 San Francisco after the latter steals Wells’ time machine to escape the police and carry on his work in the future. This is a rather charming romantic comedy, with the Ripper’s activities kept at arm’s length.

Time After Time

Of course, there are numerous other Ripper-inspired films, if only in title. Given that the Ripper name was still current enough in the 1970s to be given to real-life serial killer Peter Sutcliffe — the Yorkshire Ripper — it’s unsurprising that it would be used in many a slasher film – Blade of the Ripper, The New York Ripper, The Ripper of Notre Dame, Night Ripper (aka The Monster of Florence) and the Japanese Assault! Jack the Ripper for instance. Neither is it surprising that the Ripper would be used as a template for unconnected murderers in many a horror and thriller film – after all, he was in many was the first modern serial killer and everyone since has simply been following in his footsteps.

Assault! Jack the Ripper

The character of the Ripper would also pop up in a weird selection of films that were otherwise unconnected to the case, or to horror / thriller cinema. In The Ruling Class (1972), Peter O’Toole imagines himself to be Jack the Ripper at one point; Deadly Advice (1994) sees Jane Horrocks as a female serial killer taking advice from her ‘illustrious’ predecessors, Jack amongst them; Amazon Women of the Moon sees the Ripper exposed as The Loch Ness Monster in the segment “Bullshit- Or Not?”. And the character has turned up – in one form or another – in TV shows as varied as Boris Karloff-fronted horror anthology The Veil, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Fantasy Island, Cimarron Strip, Babylon 5, The Outer Limits and Smallville.

Amazon Women of the Moon

More recently, British TV has delved into the Ripper world. Whitechapel sees a copycat repeating the Ripper killings on the same dates as the original murders, while the current BBC hit Ripper Street is set a year after the murders, with the police investigating crimes that they initially believe to be the work of the Ripper but come to realise are unrelated. In the tradition of Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde and the work of Alan Moore, Ripper Street is mixing up all manner of Victoriana in its stories, including Elephant Man Joseph Merrick. Meanwhile, British-American series Dracula, launched in October 2013, posits that the Ripper killings were in fact the work of a vampire, with a shadowy group constructing the letters and other clues as a way of throwing the police off the scent.

Ripper Street

So it seems that our fascination with Jack the Ripper isn’t going to end soon. Short of the release of the Ripper files and the unlikely unquestioned confirmation of just who he (or she) was, this is likely to remain a mystery that will continue to inspire filmmakers, writers and artists, all of whom can use the story to explore their own beliefs, fears and obsessions.

Now, if only Black the Ripper actually existed…

Feature by David Flint

Buy Jack the Ripper: The Murders and the Movies by Denis Meikle from Amazon.co.uk

Mystery of the Wax Museum is a 1933 American mystery horror-thriller film released by by Warner Bros. in two-color Technicolor and directed by Michael Curtiz. The film stars Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Glenda Farrell, and Frank McHugh. This film is notable as the last dramatic fiction film made, along with Warner’s Doctor X, in the two-colour Technicolor process.

Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill) is a sculptor who operates a wax museum in 1921 London. His prize creation is an image of Marie Antoinette, which he shows to his investment partner, Joe Worth, along with other masterpieces. When business is failing due to people’s attraction to the macabre (a nearby wax museum caters to that), Joe Worth proposes to burn the museum down for the insurance money of £10,000. Igor won’t have it, but Worth starts a fire anyway. Igor tries to stop him, and he and Worth get into a fight. As they fight, wax masterworks are melting in the flames. Worth knocks Igor unconscious, leaving the sculptor to die in the fire. Igor survives, however, and reemerges 12 years later in New York City, reopening a new wax museum. His hands and legs have been badly crippled in the fire, and he must rely on assistants to create his new sculptures.

Meanwhile, spunky reporter Florence Dempsey (Glenda Farrell), on the verge of being fired for not bringing in any worthwhile news, is sent out by her impatient editor, Jim (Frank McHugh), to investigate the suicide of a model named Joan Gale. During this time, a hideous monster steals the body of Joan Gale from the morgue. When investigators find that her body has been stolen, they suspect murder…

‘ … there is no denying  that of its kind this one is very good. It is decidedly not a picture to which to take nervous people and that is, I suppose, also a recommendation, for it has obviously fulfilled it to do — to horrify’. Picturegoer

‘The movie, later remade as House of Wax in 1953, benefits from Curtitz’s atmospheric direction and early two-strip Technicolor photography . Performances are good and Atwill is outstanding but, unfortunately, the movie suffers from the inclusion of too much would-be comedy relief’ Alan Frank, The Horror Film Handbook

‘Atwill is splendid throughout as the sculptor forced to wear a waxen mask … but the film really only comes alive in the climatic sequence of the fire, with the waxen figures twisting and writhing as though alive while the terrified Wray, first striking at Atwill’s face and then clawing at it as she realizes it is as mask, reveals for the first time the monstrous, shrivelled thing beneath.’  The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror

Wikipedia | IMDb

The Gorilla is a 1939 Twentieth Century-Fox  American comedy horror film directed by the prolific Allan Dwan from a screenplay by Rian James and Sid Silvers. It stars the Ritz Brothers, Anita Louise, Lionel Atwill, Bela Lugosi, Patsy Kelly, Joseph Calleia and Wally Vernon. It was based on a play of the same name by Ralph Spence - which had already been made into films in 1927 and in 1930 – and is now in the public domain.

When a wealthy man (Lionel Atwill) is threatened by a killer known as The Gorilla, he hires the Ritz Brothers to investigate. A real escaped gorilla shows up at the mansion just as the investigators arrive. Patsy Kelly portrays a newly hired maid who wants to quit because the butler, played by Bela Lugosi, scares her.

“It’s all supposed to be either really funny or shockingly thrilling, depending on how you look at it. We couldn’t see it either way.” The New York Times (May, 1939)

“It’s a damn good thing The Gorilla is just barely more than an hour long. Even ten minutes of the Ritz Brothers is a long, grueling slog, and at full feature length, this movie would be simply unendurable. Indeed, I suspect that even you sick bastards who find the Three Stooges amusing will have a hard time with this one, in that the Ritz Brothers are further hampered by their close mutual resemblance and the much lower level of distinction between their onscreen personas as compared to the Stooges … The other faint lights in the darkness are Lionel Atwill and (surprisingly) Bela Lugosi, both of whom put in tasteful, proportionately understated performances that the rest of The Gorilla comes nowhere close to deserving.” 1000 Misspent Hours… and Counting

“Even though “The Gorilla” is categorized as a comedy/horror,  the horror elements are few and scattered.  The storyline itself is a jumble, and pretty much a thin excuse for one piece of disconnected silliness after another. I will say though, that I did enjoy the musical scoring- which is actually something I seldom pay any attention too. In the final analysis, this isn’t one of those films that I’d watch more than once… even as a Bela Lugosi fan.” HorrorMovies.ca

“There are plenty of strange goings on as the Ritz Brothers bumble around trying to solve the mystery. Hairy gorilla arms reach out from behind hidden panels in the walls, people disappear without trace, contorted faces peer in through windows and bodies fall out of cupboards. I personally found the Ritz Brothers’ fast firing humour to be very lame, but this may have had something to do with it being the last film in their contract with the studio.” Giles Clark, Psychotic Cinema

Wikipedia | IMDb

Christmas is generally seen as a jolly old time for the whole family – if you are to believe the TV commercials, everyone gets together for huge communal feasts while excited urchins unwrap whatever godawful new toy has been hyped as the must-have gift of the year. It is not, generally speaking, seen as a time of horror.

And yet horror has a long tradition of being part of the festive season. Admittedly, the horror in question was traditionally the ghost story, ideally suited for cold winter nights, where people gather around the fire to hear some spine chilling tale of ghostly terror – a scenario recreated in the BBC’s 2000 series Ghost Stories for Christmas, with Christopher Lee reading M.R. James tales to a room full of public school boys. That series was part of a tradition that included a similar one in 1986 with Robert Powell (Harlequin) and the children’s series Spine Chillers from 1980, as well as the unofficially titled annual series Ghost Stories for Christmas than ran for much of the 1970s and is occasionally revived to this day.

A Christmas Carol

The idea of the traditional Xmas ghost story can be traced back to Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol, where miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts in an effort to make him change his ways. It’s more a sentimental morality tale than a horror story, though in the original book and one or two adaptations, the ghosts are capable of causing the odd shudder. Sadly, the story has been ill-served by cinematic adaptations – the best version is probably the 1951 adaptation, though by then there had already been several earlier attempts, going back to 1910. A few attempts have been made at straight retellings since then, but all to often the story is bastardised (a musical version in 1970, various cartoons) or modernised – the best known versions are probably Scrooged and The Muppet Christmas Carol, both of which are inexplicably popular. A 1999 TV movie tried to give the story a sense of creepiness once again, but the problem now is that the story is so familiar that it seems cliched even when played straight. The idea of a curmudgeon being made to see the true meaning of Christmas is now an easy go-to for anyone grinding out anonymous TV movies that end up on Christmas-only TV channels or gathering dust on DVD.

A Christmas CAROL (1999)

Outside of A Christmas Carol, horror cinema tended to avoid festive-themed stories for a long time. While fantasies like The Bishop’s Wife, It’s a Wonderful Life and Bell, Book and Candle played with the supernatural, these were light, feel-good dramas and comedies on the whole, designed to warm the heart rather than stop it dead. TV shows like The Twilight Zone would sometimes have a Christmas themed tale, but again these tended to be the more sentimental stories.

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The only film to really hint at Christmas creepiness was 1945 British portmanteau film Dead of Night, though even here, the Christmas themed tale, featuring a ghostly encounter at a children’s party, is more sentimental than terrifying. Meanwhile, the Mexican children’s film Santa Claus vs The Devil (1959) might see Santa in battle with Satan, but it’s all played for wholesome laughs rather than scares.

Santa Claus vs The Devil

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the darker side of Christmas began to be explored, and it was another British portmanteau film that began it all. The Amicus film Tales from the Crypt (1972) opened with a tale in which murderous Joan Collins finds herself terrorised by an escaped psycho on Christmas Eve, unable to call the police because of her recently deceased hubby lying on the carpet. The looney is dressed as Santa, and her young daughter has been eagerly awaiting his arrival, leading to a suitably mean-spirited twist. The story was subsequently retold in a 1989 episode of the Tales from the Crypt TV series.

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This film would lead the way towards decades of Christmas horror. Of course, lots of films had an incidental Christmas connection, taking place in the festive season (or ‘winter’, as it used to be known). Movies like Night Train Murders, Rabid and even the misleadingly named Silent Night Bloody Night have a Christmas connection, but it’s incidental to the story. Those are not the movies we are discussing here. No, to REALLY count as a Christmas film, then the festive celebrations need to be at the heart of events.

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Two distinct types of Christmas horror developed. There was the Mad Santa films, like Tales from the Crypt on the one hand, and the ‘bad things happening at Christmas’ movie on the other. The pioneer of the latter was Bob Clark’s 1974 film Black Christmas, which not only pioneered the Christmas horror movie but also was an early template for the seasonal slasher film. Some critics have argued, with good cause, that this is the movie that laid the foundations for Halloween a few years later – a psycho film (with a possibly supernatural slant) set during a holiday, where young women are terrorised by an unseen force. But while John Carpenter’s film would be a smash hit and effectively reinvent the genre, Black Christmas went more or less unnoticed, its reputation only building years later. In 2006, the movie was remade by Glen Morgan in a gorier but less effective loose retelling of the original story.

Black Christmas

Preceding Black Christmas was TV movie Home for the Holidays, in which four girls are picked off over Christmas by a yellow rain-coated killer who may or may not be their wicked stepmother. A decent if unremarkable psycho killer story, the film was directed by TV movie veteran John Llewellyn Moxey.

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Also made for TV, this time in Britain, The Exorcism was the opening episode of TV series Dead of Night (no connection to the film of that name) broadcast in 1972. One of the few surviving episodes of the series, The Exorcism is a powerful mix of horror and social commentary, as a group of champagne socialists celebrating Christmas in the country cottage that one couple have bought as a holiday home find themselves haunted by the ghosts of the peasants who had starved to death there during a famine. While theatrical in style and poorly shot, the show is nevertheless creepily effective.

1980 saw Christmas Evil (aka You Better Watch Out), a low budget oddity by Lewis Jackson that has since gained cult status. In this film, a put-upon toy factory employee decided to become a vengeful Santa, putting on the red suit and setting out to sort the naughty from the nice. It’s a strange film, mixing pathos, horror and black comedy, yet oddly it works, making it one of the more interesting Christmas horrors out there.

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Also made in 1980, but rather less successful, was To All a Goodnight, the only film directed by Last House on the Left star David Hess and written by The Incredible Melting Man himself, Alex Rebar. This generic slasher, with a house full of horny sorority girls and their boyfriends being picked off by a psycho in a Santa outfit, is too slow and poorly made to be effective.

The most notorious Christmas horror film hit cinemas in 1984. Silent Night Deadly Night was, in most ways, a fairly generic slasher, with a Santa-suited maniac on the loose taking revenge against the people who have been deemed ‘naughty’. The film itself was nothing special It’s essentially the same premise as Christmas Evil without the intelligence), and might have gone unnoticed if it wasn’t for a provocative advertising campaign that emphasised the Santa-suited psycho and caused such outrage that the film was rapidly pulled from theatres.

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Nevertheless, it had made a small fortune in the couple of weeks it played, and continued to be popular when reissued with a less contentious campaign. The film is almost certainly directly responsible for most ‘psycho Santa’ films since – all hoping to cash in on the publicity that comes with public outrage – and spawned four sequels.

Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 is notorious for the amount of footage from the first film that is reused to pad out the story, and was banned in the UK (where the first film was unreleased until 2009). Part 3 was directed, surprisingly, by Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter) and adds a psychic element to the story. Part 4, directed by Brian Yuzna, drops the killer Santa story entirely and has no connection to the other films beyond the title, telling a story of witchcraft and cockroaches, while Part 5 – The Toymaker – is also unconnected to the other movies.

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Also made in 1984, but attracting less attention, Don’t Open Till Christmas was that rarest of things, a 1980s British horror film – and one of the sleaziest ever made to boot. Starring and directed by Edmund Purdom from a screenplay by exploitation veterans Derek Ford and Alan Birkinshaw, the film sees a psycho killer, traumatised by a childhood experience at Christmas, who begins offing Santas – or more accurately, anyone he sees dressed as Santa, which in this case includes a porn model, a man at a peepshow and people having sex. With excessive gore, nudity and an overwhelming atmosphere of grubbiness, the film was become a cult favourite for fans of bad taste cinema.

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The third Christmas horror of 1984 was the most wholesome and the most successful. Joe Dante’s Gremlins is all too often overlooked when people talk about festive horror, but from the opening credits, with Darlene Love’s Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) belting out over the soundtrack, to the carol singing Gremlins and Phoebe Cates’ story of why she hates Christmas, the festive season is at the very heart of the film. Gremlins remains the most fun Christmas movie ever made, a heady mix of EC-comics ghoulishness, sentiment, slapsick and action with some of the best monsters ever put on film.

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Gremlins would spawn many knock offs – Ghoulies, Munchies, Critters and more – but only Elves, made in 1989, had a similar Christmas theme. This oddball effort, which proposes that Hitler’s REAL plan for the Master Race was human/elf hybrids. When the elves are revived in a pagan ritual at Christmas, only an alcoholic ex-cop played by Dan Haggerty can stop them. It’s not as much fun as that makes it sound.

Family horror returned in 1993 stop-motion film A Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick and produced / co-written by Tim Burton. This chirpy musical see Pumpkin King Jack Skellington, leader of Halloween Town, stumbling upon Christmas Town and deciding to take it over. It’s a charming and visually lush movie that has unsurprisingly become a festive family favourite over the last twenty years.

Santa Claws

Rather less fun is 1996′s Santa Claws, a typically rotten effort by John Russo, with Debbie Rochon as a Scream Queen being stalked by a murderous fan in a Santa outfit. This low rent affair was pretty forgettable. It is one of several low/no budget video quickies that aimed to cash in on the Christmas horror market with tales of killer Santas – others include Satan Claus (1996), Christmas Season Massacre (2001) and Psycho Santa (2003).

1997 saw the release of Jack Frost (not to be confused with the family film from a year later of the same name). Here, a condemned serial killer is involved in a crash with a truck carrying genetic material, which – of course – causes him to mutate into a killer snowman. Inspired by the Child’s Play movie, Jack Frost is pretty poor, but the outlandish concept and mix of comedy and horror made it popular enough to spawn a sequel in 2000, Jack Frost 2 – Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman.

That might seem as ludicrous as Christmas horror goes, but 1998 saw Feeders 2: Slay Bells, in which the alien invaders of the title are fought off by Santa and his elves. Shot on video with no money, it’s a film you might struggle to get through.

Rather better was the 2000 League of Gentlemen Christmas Special, which mixes the regular characters of the series into a series of stories that are even darker than usual. Mixing vampires, family curses and voodoo into a trilogy of stories that are linked, Amicus style, it’s as creepy as it is funny, and it’s perhaps unsurprising that Mark Gatiss would graduate to writing the more recent BBC Christmas ghost stories.

The League of Gentlemen

Two poplar video franchises collided in 2004′s Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys, with the great-nephew of the original Puppet Master battling an evil organisation that wants his formula to help bring killer toys to life on Christmas Eve. Like most of the films in the series, this is cheap but cheerful, throwaway stuff.

2005′s Santa’s Slay sees Santa reinvented as a demon who is forced to be nice and give toys to children.Released from this demand, he reverts to his murderous ways. Given that Santa is played by fearsome looking wrestler Bill Goldberg, you have to wonder how anyone ever trusted him to come down their chimney and NOT kill them.

Santa’s Slay

Also in 2005 came The Christmas Tale, part of the Spanish Films to Keep You Awake series, in which a group of children find a woman dressed as Santa at the bottom of a well. It turns out that she’s a bank robber and the kids decide to starve her into handing over the stolen cash. But things take a darker turn when she escapes and the kids think she is a zombie. It’s a witty, inventive little tale.

A Christmas Tale

2006 saw Two Front Teeth, where Santa is a vampire assisted by zombie elves in a rather ludicrous effort. Equally silly, Treevenge is a 2008 short film by Jason Eisener, who would go on to shoot Hobo with a Shotgun. It’s the story of sentient Christmas trees who have enough of being cut down and displayed in people’s home and set out to take their revenge.

Treevenge

Recently, the Christmas horror has become more international, with two European films in 2010 offering an insight into different festive traditions. Dick Maas’ Sint (aka Saint) is a lively Dutch comedy horror which features a vengeful Sinterklaas (similar to, but not the same as, Santa Claus) coming back on December 5^th in years when that date coincides with a full moon, to carry out mass slaughter. It’s a fun, fast-paced movie that also offers a rare glimpse into festive traditions that are rather different to anything seen outside the local culture (including the notorious Black Peters).

Finnish film Rare Exports, on the other hand, sees the original (and malevolent) Santa unearthed during an excavation, leading to the discovery of a whole race of Santas, who are then captured and sold around the world. Witty and atmospheric, the film was inspired by Jalmari Helander’s original short film Rare Exports, Inc, a spoof commercial for the company selling the wild Santas.

Rare Exports

But these two high quality, entertaining Christmas horrors were very much the exception to the rule by this stage. The genre was more accurately represented by the likes of 2010′s Yule Die, another Santa suited slasher, or 2011′s Slaughter Claus, a plotless, pretty unwatchable amateur effort from Charles E. Cullen featuring Santa and the Bi-Polar Elf on an unexplained and uninteresting killing spree.

Slaughter Claus

Bloody Christmas (2012) sees a former movie star going crazy as he plays Santa on a TV show. 2009 film Deadly Little Christmas is a ham-fisted retread of slashers like Silent Night Deadly Night and 2002′s One Hell of a Christmas is a Danish Satanic horror comedy. Bikini Bloodbath Christmas (2009) is the third in a series of pointless tits ‘n’ gore satires that fail as horror, soft porn or comedy.

And of course the festive horror movie can’t escape the low budget zombie onslaught – 2009 saw Silent Night, Zombie Night, in 2010 there was Santa Claus Versus the Zombie, 2011 brought us A Cadaver Christmas, in 2012 we had Christmas with the Dead and Silent Night of the Living Dead is currently in pre-production. None of these films are likely to fill you with the spirit of the season.

So although we can hardly say that the Christmas horror film is at full strength, it is at least as prolific as ever. With a remake of Silent Night Deadly Night, now just called Silent Night, playing theatres in 2012, it seems that filmmaker’s fascination with the dark side of the season isn’t going away anytime soon.

Silent Night

Article by David Flint

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – and the ongoing industry spun off from them – have a curious connection to the horror genre. The image of the master detective, stalking the fog-bound streets of London, seem to be as much a part of the Victorian horror world as Dracula and Jack the Ripper, and it is no surprise that enterprising filmmakers and writers have chosen to pit Holmes against these infamous monsters.

But the original Holmes stories only occasionally flirted with the supernatural, and even then, a rational explanation for events would be uncovered by Holmes in the end – like Scooby-Doo, Sherlock Holmes always found an altogether human cause for seemingly demonic forces.

The most famous of the Holmes stories is one such horror tale, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Originally serialised in The Strand magazine between 1901 and 1902, it is one of only four novel-length adventures for Holmes that Conan Doyle wrote. It remains the most popular and widely adapted of the Holmes stories, even though for a large part of the novel, Holmes is absent, leaving his companion and assistant Dr Watson to carry the story. This tale of greed and murder sees Holmes and Watson investigating the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, apparently at the hands (or paws) of a gigantic supernatural hound, part of a family curse. It is down to Holmes to protect Sir Henry, the Baskerville heir, while unmasking the killer from a collection of suspects and red herrings.

This is the most widely adapted of the Holmes novels, the story for some time being the ‘go to’ Holmes adventure for filmmakers. With the current trend to bastardise the Holmes character and use original (or barely recognisable) stories, the frequency of film and television adaptations has slowed, but with Sherlock Holmes being as popular as ever (albeit in modernised and unrecognisable forms), it can’t be long before another film or TV version of the tale appears.

The first Hound… film appeared from Germany in 1914. Conan Doyle’s creation was hugely popular with German readers, and this first film was a four part silent movie based on both the novel and Der Hund von Baskerville: Schauspiel in vier Aufzugen aus dem Schottischen Hochland. Frei nach motiven aus Poes und Doyles Novellen (“The Hound of the Baskervilles: a play in four acts set in the Scottish Highlands. Freely adapted from the stories of Poe and Doyle”), a 1907 stage play. As you might expect, it played fast and loose with the original story. Three further German adaptation appeared in 1920, and Richard Oswald, who had shot the third and fourth parts of the 1914 version, had another go in 1929.

The first British film based on the story was made in 1921 by Maurice Elvey, and it would be subsequently filmed again in 1932 in what would be the first ‘talkie’ version of the story. Edgar Wallace worked on the screenplay.

1937 saw another German version of the story, and in 1939 the first American version was shot. This version, made by Sidney Lanfield, is still regarded as one of the best adaptations of the book, and was the first of fourteen Holmes movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. It’s a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel, but – bizarrely – due to copyright reasons, it is absent from the DVD box sets of the Rathbone Holmes movies.

After this flurry of Hound activity, it would be a decade and a half before the next version of the story, another German adaptation. But in 1959, Hammer films added The Hound of the Baskervilles to their series of gothic horror movies that had begun in 1957 with The Curse of Frankenstein. Starring Peter Cushing as Holmes and Christopher Lee as Sir Henry, the film was a rather loose adaptation of the story – there is more drama and the horror elements are (unsurprisingly) emphasised. Yet thanks to Cushing’s performance (many consider him the definitive Holmes) and the sheer quality of Terence Fisher’s film, this remains a much loved version of the story.

A decade later, Cushing would reprise the role of Holmes in a BBC TV series, taking over from Douglas Wilmer. The Hound of the Baskervilles was adapted as a two part story in 1968. This was more faithful than the Hammer version, but the tight schedule and reduced budgets of TV showed in the production values. Nevertheless, for fans of Holmes and Cushing, it remains well worth seeking out.

Proving the global popularity of the story, the next version appeared in 1971 from the Soviet Union. Another Russian version appeared a decade later, as part of a TV series based on Holmes. This 147 minute adaptation adds some ill-fitting humour to the story and while handsomely mounted has some eccentric performances (Vasily Livanov’s Holmes is rather too laid back while other characters chew the scenery).

1972 saw a US TV movie version of the story, with Stewart Granger making for an unconvincing Holmes in a fairly lacklustre movie that co-starred William Shatner! But the worst was yet to come.

In 1978, Paul Morrissey made a disastrous attempt to make a British comedy version of the story, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore starring alongside a host of well known British names — Denholm Elliot, Joan Greenwood, Hugh Griffith, Irene Handl, Terry-Thomas, Max Wall and Kenneth Williams — none of whom could save the film. Crass, bad taste humour that was mishandled and sheer self-indulgence all round – it feels essentially like a vanity project for Cook and Moore – made this one of the worst comedy films you could imagine, devoid of laughs or any sort of coherent story. It even includes a parody of The Exorcist…

1982 saw a four part British TV adaptation, with a rather miscast Tom Baker as Holmes, and a year later another British TV film adapted the novel.

This was the first of what was planned as a series of Holmes TV movies to be co-produced with US producer Sy Weintraub. Unfortunately for him, the Holmes stories slipped out of copyright and Granada TV announced their own series with Jeremy Brett. Only this and The Sign of Four were eventually shot. With Ian Richardson as Holmes, it’s a solid though unremarkable effort from director Douglas Hickox (who was going for the visual feel of Dario Argento’s films) and suffers from Martin Shaw’s Sir Henry being obviously and unconvincingly re-dubbed by another actor.

The Granada TV series that had scuppered the planned film series eventually adapted 42 of the 60 Holmes stories, and finally got around to The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1988. While critics praised Brett’s nervy performance, the series was often overly stagey and perhaps a little too faithful to the stories to always work as drama.

Also in 1983, Peter O’Toole voiced the character in the animated version Sherlock Holmes and the Baskerville Curse, and this would be the last version for some time. Holmes and the Hound eventually clashed again in 2000, in one of four Canadian TV films with Matt Frewer, who was hopelessly unsuited to the role.

Equally unsatisfactory was a dull BBC version from 2002, with Richard Roxburgh as Holmes. This version again made changes to the original story, but was ultimately rather flat and lifeless.

The most recent – and possibly most annoying – version of the story appeared in the second series of the BBC’s overly smug Sherlock. Titled ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’, it throws out Conan Doyle almost entirely, to tell a story of secret military research into mind-altering drugs. While Mark Gatiss’ screenplay retained the horror elements, it made the worst mistake possible when changing a familiar story – namely, that if what you come up with isn’t better than what existed to begin with, why bother? The end result of this is a version that is just as much a slap in the face as Paul Morrissey’s ‘comedy’ adaptation.

It’s to be hoped that someone will make a more faithful, full blooded horror version of The Hound of the Baskervilles soon. While the story might seem to have been done to death, there are always new generations unfamiliar with the story. And after so many ineffectual – or downright insulting – versions, we deserve a new version to match the Rathbone and Hammer versions. Meanwhile, the story still inspires writers, artists and others in a series of novels, comic books, video games and even music… as you can see in the rather unusual version of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid below!

Article by David Flint, Horrorpedia

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a 1931 American Pre-Code horror film directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March. The film is an adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the Robert Louis Stevenson tale of a man who takes a potion which turns him from a mild-mannered man of science into a homicidal maniac. March’s performance has been much lauded, and earned him his first Academy Award.

In a London of fog and gas lamps, capes and canes, kindly Dr Henry Jekyll (pronounced by the entire cast to rhyme with ‘treacle’, correctly according to Stevenson) attends a lecture to his adoring contemporaries where he announces that he has discovered that Man’s very soul is split between the good, the desire to love and perform good deeds and the bad, where Man succumbs to his baser instincts. Whilst walking home through Soho with his colleague, Dr. John Lanyon (Holmes Herbert, The Invisible Man), Jekyll spots a bar singer, Ivy Pearson (Miriam Hopkins), being attacked by a man outside her boarding house. Jekyll drives the man away and carries Ivy up to her room to attend to her. Ivy begins flirting with Jekyll and feigning injury, but Jekyll fights temptation and leaves with Lanyon.

Unable to convince his beloved Muriel’s (Rose Hobart, later seen in Tower of London) father Brigadier General Sir Danvers Carew (the equally splendidly monickered Halliwell Hobbes) that a quick wedding would be preferable to the year he insists upon, Jekyll continues his experiments in his personal lab, waited upon by his faithful servant, Poole (Edgar Norton from Dracula’s Daughter and Son of Frankenstein), eventually developing a potion which he elects to test on himself. Transforming into a quasi-Neanderthal, dubbed Mr Hyde, he continues to swagger around the upper class haunts of Victorian London but with unabashed bravado and bestial relish, gatecrashing the club Ivy frequents and seducing her in an extremely unsubtle manner.

Imprisoning her in her own room at a boarding house, Hyde torments and abuses Ivy but as the potion’s effects wear off, Jekyll realises hid absence has done his chances of marrying Murial no favours, he leaves Ivy temporarily, vowing to teach her a lesson if she attempts anything silly. Convincing his future father-in-law that his absence is completely out of character, the marriage finally receives his blessing and a large party is organised to make the announcement public. He sends Ivy £50 by way of apology, prompting her to visit the mystery benefactor and falling for him once again. Alas, Jekyll has been taking increasingly large doses of the potion and upon having a momentary ‘dark thought’, he again transforms into his alter-ego, against his will, even more hideous than before.

Returning to Ivy’s lodgings, he reveals he and Jekyll are one and the same and after some more brutality, he goes the whole hog and murders her. With Lanyon now wise to what is going on, Hyde inevitably ends up at Murial’s house, attacking her and the rest of the household, killing her father in the process. With the police on his tale, Hyde and Jekyll struggle to come to terms with who holds the upper hand – is it too late for Jekyll to make amends?

The film was made prior to the full enforcement of the Hay’s Production Code and this should come as no surprise. The film bristles with sexuality, with barely veiled nods to rape and sexual violence and with the two leading ladies revealing plenty of leg and not a little cleavage. When it was re-released in 1936, the Code required 8 minutes to be removed before the film could be distributed to cinemas. This footage was restored for the VHS and DVD releases.

The secret of the transformation scenes was not revealed for decades (Mamoulian himself revealed it in a volume of interviews with Hollywood directors published under the title The Celluloid Muse). Make-up was applied in contrasting colors. A series of coloured filters that matched the make-up was then used which enabled the make-up to be gradually exposed or made invisible. The change in color was not visible on the black-and-white film. The effects are not advanced as those of 1940′s The Wolf Man, nor as ageless as 1932′s The Invisible Man but they are nevertheless remarkable.

A disgracefully uncredited Wally Westmore’s make-up for Hyde — simian and hairy with large canine teeth — influenced greatly the popular image of Hyde in media and comic books. In part this reflected the novella’s implication of Hyde as embodying repressed evil, and hence being semi-evolved or simian in appearance. The make-up came close to permanently disfiguring March’s own face. Westmore later helped create the similarly beast-like inhabitants of Island of Lost Souls.  The characters of Muriel Carew and Ivy Pearson do not appear in Stevenson’s original story but do appear in the 1887 stage version by playwright Thomas Russell Sullivan.

John Barrymore was originally asked by Paramount to play the lead role, in an attempt to recreate his role from the 1920 version of Jekyll and Hyde, but he was already under a new contract withMetro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Paramount then gave the part to March, who was under contract and who strongly resembled Barrymore. March had played a John Barrymore-like character in the Paramount film The Royal Family of Broadway (1930), a story about an acting family like the Barrymores. March would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance of the role.

When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer remade the film ten years later with Spencer Tracy in the lead, the studio bought the rights to the 1931 Mamoulian version. They then recalled every print of the film that they could locate and for decades most of the film was believed lost. Ironically, the Tracy version was much less well received and March jokingly sent Tracy a telegram thanking him for the greatest boost to his reputation of his entire career.

The film also makes better use of music than most other horror films of the 1930′s, including the celebrated studio of Universal. Beginning with the portent of Bach’s Fugue in D Minor, it shows Jekyll as an accomplished organist, the soundtrack making use of this diegetic tool. Miriam too plays the piano, whilst Ivy, of course, sings, the musical world of the good in contrast with the guttural grunts and hissing of Hyde. There is also a rare use of song in an early horror film, Ivy’s ‘theme tune’ “Champagne Ivy”, actually being an adaptation of the 19th Century music hall song “Champagne Charley”.

It was to be March’s only role in a horror film, though it was enough for him to claim the Oscar for best actor (tying with Wallace Beerey in The Champ). Though his slightly simpering Jekyll make grate somewhat, his Hyde is a miraculous performance, energetic, twitching and frothing at the mouth with lust and vigour. His almost gymnastic feats in the film’s finale are a thing of wonder. As Hyde once taunts Ivy: ” I’ll show you what horror means!”

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

The Drums of Jeopardy is a 1931 horror thriller that is very much in the then-popular vein of the Master Criminal movie, with a sinister figure committing murders while being tracked by the police.

As such, it is more a thriller than a horror film, but as with the Fu Manchu stories, the film contains enough elements of the macabre to be classed as borderline horror.

The master criminal here, however, is a more complex character than most. Rather amusingly named (given the actor who would become a star a year later in Frankenstein) Boris Karlov, and played by Charlie Chan star Warner Oland, he is actually a somewhat sympathetic figure to begin with, driven to vengeance after his daughter, who kills herself after a doomed love affair with a Russian aristocrat. The film pretty much implies that he is right to hold the family of the man responsible for the girl’s death, even if his vengeance is perhaps a bit excessive.

The title refers to a piece of jewellery that was given to Karlov’s daughter, and which he now uses to warn his next victim of their impending doom. After the Russian revolution, the family flees to America to escape the ‘curse’ of Karlov, but he is one step ahead of them. While trying to escape from him, one of the Petrovs is saved by a young woman and her instantly annoying aunt (Clara Blandick). Karlov manages to capture his intended victims and kill them in the sort of long-winded mad scientist ways that only a super villain would consider practical – but the police, and the never-stops-talking aunt, are in hot pursuit.

And entertaining melodrama, the film is very enjoyable, if somewhat insubstantial. Oland has a great deal of fun hamming it up as Karlov, who remains a curiously likeable villain throughout – you rather want him to succeed with his revenge!

Naturally, the film is full of plot holes – it’s never made clear just how Karlov moves from grieving father to megalomaniac villain (with seemingly unlimited resources), for instance – but it’s fast paced enough for you never to worry about such trifles.

The film is based on a novel by Harold McGrath, and was also a 1922 Broadway play and 1923 film.

Posted by David Flint

The Mad Genius (1931) is an all-talking pre-code horror drama film produced and distributed by Warner Bros. and directed by Michael Curtiz. The film stars John Barrymore, Marian Marsh, Donald Cook, Charles Butterworth, and in small roles, Boris Karloff and Frankie Darro. The film is based on the play The Idol (1929) by Martin Brown, which opened in Great Neck, New York but never opened on Broadway.

In the exotic, rainy Eastern Europe of the early 20th century, two puppeteers perform to exactly no-one and are distracted by the surprisingly wicked beating of a young boy by a brutal father (a blink slowly and you’ll miss him Boris Karloff). Observing the young lad vault over fences away from his persecutor, club-footed Vladimar Tsarakov (John Barrymore, 1920′s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and one of early cinema’s biggest stars) sees a dazzling career for him, vicariously living the life of dance, women and debauchery always denied him. The young chap is duly hidden from his father and spirited away.

Dashing forward in time, the young boy, Feodor (Donald Cook from 1933′s similarly rum Babyface) is now embedded in the world of dance and theatre. Tsarakov is also present, literally draped on his casting couch, lining up nubile, starry-eyed young girls to visit him in his office later with the finer details of how they can become famous. Whilst he is happy relieving the young ladies of their innocence, he is dismayed to see his young apprentice falling in love with one of the dancers, Nana (Marian Marsh, also seen with Barrymore in what is in many ways this film’s companion piece, Svenglai). 

We watch as Tsarakov acts as puppeteer to those around him; the young girls, Feodor, his secretary and dogsbody, Karimsky (Charles Butterworth, seemingly channelling Stan Laurel) and the manager of the dance troupe, Sergei (Luis Alberni in a brilliantly wide-eyed performance) whom he is feeding a steady diet of class A drugs to keep in check.

In a twisted sequence of events, Nana is fired but elopes with her beloved to a series on European theatres with the dastardly Tsarakov in pursuit. With the young lovers determined to live their lives in blissful happiness, a strung-out Sergei frothing at the mouth for his next fix and Karimsky desperate to tell his boss of his brilliantly silly idea for a ballet, it’s a typically 1930′s Smokey and the Bandit race to the finish line.

If you thought ‘pre-code’ was simply a statement or a general term for the misty period of early cinema, then you could do a lot worse to take in this occasionally eye-popping film. From the early scene of Karloff whacking the living Hell out of his son to the seedy and rather disturbing drug dealing (and taking) to the extremely sexual portrayal of the young dancers and their elderly deflowerer, there would be uproar if a film so gloomy and comparatively realistic were released by a major studio today.

Though there is barely anything between the release dates, Karloff was essentially an unknown at the time of release, Frankenstein still yet to sweep all before it (hardly his first role, however). Ironically, Tsarakov lectures his young student early in the film of ‘The Golem’ (interesting that audiences would be expected to have seen this or be aware), ‘a homunculus or creation of Frankenstein’. The film may not yet have hit the big time but clearly the novel upon which it is based was very much part of popular culture and not an obscure reference. 

Barrymore, best known for his romantic and light-dramatic leads, is sensational as Tsarakov, perhaps not a traditional horror villain but one who develops from an innocent-looking benefactor to cruel deviant in barely perceptible speed. Director Michael Curtiz slummed it somewhat after this picture, directing White Christmas, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Casablanca. As you may expect, the sets are drenched with art deco, the ballet-themed setting being a perfect excuse for costume designers to run riot – not riotous enough to prevent significant leg and cleavage to be aired.

Warner Bros. was so pleased by the box office returns for Svengali (1931) and their first talking feature The Terror (1928), also starring Barrymore and Marsh, that they rushed The Mad Genius into production, and released it on 7 November 1931. 

The Mad Doctor is a Mickey Mouse cartoon released in 1933. The short’s horror overtones made it unusual for a Mickey Mouse cartoon. Some theaters refused to show it, believing it to be too scary for kids. At one time, for this reason, it was banned entirely in England.

The short’s title character later had a cameo in the Roger Rabbit short, “Tummy Trouble”, in which he was seen on a picture. The Mad Doctor was also the basis for, and title of the second level in the game, Mickey Mania: The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse (for Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Sega CD and PlayStation (as Mickey’s Wild Adventure); a depiction of the Mad Doctor level is used as the cover art for the game.

This cartoon is in the public domain, and can be found on many low budget VHS tapes and DVDs

Plot:

A mad scientist, Dr. XXX, has captured Mickey’s dog, Pluto. Mickey tries to rescue him before the doctor can perform his grotesque experiment: attaching Pluto’s head to the body of a chicken in order to see if a puppy will hatch from an egg (that is if the end result will “bark or crow or cackle”). Mickey battles his way through booby traps and animated skeletons before eventually getting caught and strapped onto a table to get cut open by a buzzsaw, forcing Mickey to suck in his belly, trembling. The scene then fades to Mickey asleep in bed and suddenly woken up by a fly, whose buzzing resembles the whirring of the spinning blade. Not yet realizing the events were only a nightmare, Mickey shouts for Pluto, who eagerly jumps onto Mickey’s bed with his doghouse and chain still attached to collar.

Wikipedia

WH

Although magic lantern shows, projecting apparent spirits before an assembled audience, had been popular throughout the 1800′s, it wasn’t until the 1930′s that what we would now view as ‘ghost trains’ appeared at amusement parks. Static and travelling fairs had long used theatrical presentations with a supernatural theme, freak shows, illusions and grand spectacle to wow and unnerve audiences but, perhaps inevitably for British readers, it was Blackpool Pleasure Beach which brought together many of these ideas into one attraction. Taking note of the boom in what were dubbed ‘Pretzel Rides’ in the United States, Blackpool Pleasure Beach ‘borrowed’ one to adapt the strategy that was already seen to attract large crowds – a small car on a single rail, meandering around a mazy, twisted (like a pretzel, y’see) environment; sometimes a gold mine, sometimes a winter wonderland. The unique selling factor was to brand these cars as trains and to garishly adorn the advertising banners outside with suggestions of the scares and thrills within. It opened in 1930 and was designed by Joseph Emberton; it is notable as being the first real “Ghost Train” in the world, and the first to use the name of Ghost Train - at the time, ‘Ghost Train’ was a very successful stage-show written by Arnold Ridley (better known as Private Godfrey from WW2-based TV comedy, Dad’s Army!)

Ghost trains soon caught on - Dreamland (Margate), Pleasure Beach (Great Yarmouth) and Pleasureland (Southport) all soon had rides of a similar nature – small carriages carrying no more than two people, travelling along a pre-determined twisting route, often complete with sudden drops. The ride largely took place in the dark with the occasionally punctuation of noise and lights to make the riders jump. The addition of familiar horror characters from films and popular culture came later, in the 1940′s. Such was their success, Emberton was again called upon to put Blackpool’s Ghost Train back on the map. This time, no expense was spared, a huge frontage was erected and a essentially a rollercoaster built within, across two levels. It set the standard and from this point onwards, ghost trains used ever-elaborate marketing to sell their experience, though the ride itself rarely had much to do with the visuals promised.

The key to the most desirable rides in terms of the fairground owners was that they should be cheap, easy to run and, perhaps most importantly, easy to pack up when moving on to a new location – at this stage, static fairgrounds were something of a rarity. This was, to some extent, the ghost train’s undoing; the evolution of the ride actually stifled the usefulness. So huge were many of the drops and turns of the train that the height of the attraction had reached its limit, though this did at least give huge scope was colourful, lurid displays – by the 1980′s, you were as likely to see images of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video as you were Frankenstein Dracula or later, Pinhead or Freddy Krueger. Horrific automatons often gave way to actors daubed in zombie make-up to alarm the general public yet further.

It is worth noting that ghost trains as a rule are rarely frightening. Indeed, they are possibly the shortest ride at the funfair, you’d be lucky to be on longer than 4 minutes on average. There is, however, an undeniable quaintness about them, exuding memories of a bygone age of barkers, pickpockets and plate-lipped ladies. The zillions pumped into the likes of The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland (which was even turned into a movie!) rather missed the point – flaky paint and rubber spiders are the true spirit of the ghost train, not lasers and 3D technology.

Daz Lawrence

Buy your own ghost train!

Terror at Blackpool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcNxav7W-m8

The Phantom Light is a 1935 British comedy thriller film produced by Jerome Jackson and directed by Michael Powell (Peeping Tom), based on Evadne Price and Joan Roy Byford’s play The Haunted Light. It stars Binnie Hale, Gordon Harker, Milton Rosmer and Herbert Lomas. The film makes a jokey reference to King Kong, released two years previously.

Plot:

On the Welsh coast, Mr. Higgins, a new lighthouse keeper arrives. He’s informed the former keeper has been found dead and that: “Down here they say the lighthouse is haunted. And what’s more, blokes go mad and kill themselves.” Higgins is undeterred and takes up his new post. Aided by a female detective from Scotland Yard and a naval officer, the trio discover that the supposedly supernatural apparitions are actually a gang of ship wrecking criminals…

Reviews:

“It’s true that the film was interesting less for its slim plot – which, though entertaining enough, could almost pass for an episode of Scooby Doo - than for its effective use of location and atmosphere. Particularly impressive are the night sequences of the lighthouse and bay, and an evocative opening sequence which suggested that Powell had been paying attention to the Universal horror films of the period (e.g. Dracula, US, 1931; Frankenstein, US, 1933). The effective editing – notably in the sequence in which a ship narrowly escapes disaster on the rocks – also hints at greatness to come…” Mark Duguid, BFI Screenonline

“Directed with a sure and steady hand by Michael Powell, The Phantom Light is infinitely superior to the quota-quickie melodramas then flooding the British film market.” Hal Erickson, Allmovie.com

“Of all the films he made in this period, this has the most location work, and is the one that most clearly benefits from it. It successfully disguises the stage origins of the film, but it is used by Powell to create a number of interesting effects. Most of them stem from the presumed haunting of the lighthouse, but are linked to a general air of the unreal and supernatural that is present from the very beginning, when the train emerges from a tunnel into what seems to be a highly unreal atmosphere.” Megan Abbott, Tipping My Fedora

“A creaky stage play is transformed by Powell into a cheap but splendidly atmospheric comedy thriller.” Time Out

“This Wales is another world, where the locals speak either an impenetrable language of their own, or English in the harsh cadences of some ancient epic poetry; where the talk still runs to fairies and spectral presences; where the residents battle the natural elements that yield their livelihood.” David Kehr, The New York Times

Buy The Phantom Light + Red Ensign + The Upturned Glass on DVD from Amazon.com

Wikipedia | IMDb

Murders in the Zoo is 1933 Paramount horror film directed by A. Edward Sutherland (The Invisible Woman), from a screenplay by Philip Wylie and Seton I. Miller. It stars Charles Ruggles (Bewitched, The Munsters), Lionel Atwill (The Vampire Bat, Mark of the Vampire, Son of Frankenstein), Gail Patrick, Randolph Scott, John Lodge, Kathleen Burke (Island of Lost Souls), Harry Beresford (Doctor X).

Plot teaser:

Eric Gorman (Atwill), a monomaniacal zoologist, is pathologically jealous of his beautiful but unfaithful wife Evelyn and will not stop short of murder to keep her…

Reviews:

“The cold-blooded and surprising murders are capped with the use of actual dangerous animals. One scene couldn’t be done today, when the cheetahs, lions and tigers all start fighting with each other – no way of faking that! What also adds to the film are the leading actors interacting with the animals, not always using stand-ins. The story still holds up today with it’s clever ‘perfect murder’ method… ” Black Hole

“It isn’t often that a movie is so much fun in its on moments that it is able to survive in the face of vast amounts of stock footage and painfully unfunny comic relief, and I generally find that the older a movie is, the less likely such survival becomes. But Murders in the Zoo is just such a survivor. Maybe it’s the pre-Hays Code frankness about sex and violence. (Not only does the movie open with a scene of unusually nasty torture, its very sympathetic heroine is a serial adulteress!) Maybe it’s Lionel Atwill’s Vincent Price-like portrayal of Eric Gorman. Maybe it’s the sheer lunacy of seeing the severed head of a venomous snake used as a murder weapon.” 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

“This film really is a very odd mixture. The bits that work, work brilliantly; and the bits that are painful, are so very, verypainful…. Perhaps unusually, I find that one of the real strengths of this film is the acting. It’s a classic psycho role for Lionel Atwill, of course, and his contribution is one of this film’s main pleasures.” And You Call Yourself a Scientist

Buy Murders in the Zoo on DVD from Amazon.com

“Murders in the Zoo is by no means a flawless horror-comedy film, bumping around between two tones with impunity and with nowhere near the grace or atmosphere as the amiable Doctor X… However, Atwill and Burke make the movie’s moments of horror truly memorable set pieces and demonstrate how true human predators can operate outside cages. The rest, thankfully, will fade.” Pre-code.com

” … a particularly gruesome specimen. Judged by its ability to chill and terrify, this film is a successful melodrama.” The New York Times, 1933

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Wikipedia | IMDb | Lionel Atwill on Horrorpedia

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The Live Ghost is a 1934 film starring comedy team Laurel and Hardy.

One of numerous shorts shot in the 1920s and 30s featuring the comic duo, The Live Ghost is a 20 minute film directed by Charles Rogers and produced by Hal Roach. It opens with a rough sea captain trying and failing to find a crew for his supposedly haunted ship. Desperate, he enlists the assistant of fish shop employees Stan and Ollie to help him shanghai a crew. Stan goes into a bar and provokes a sailor into chasing him outside, where Ollie bangs him on the head, knocking him out – the captain then takes the unconscious man to his ship. This trick is repeated several times until things inevitably go wrong when Stan and Ollie change roles – the captain is hit over the head and in revenge, he knocks the pair of them out and they find themselves joining the rest of the reluctant crew. Any talk of a ‘ghost ship’ is stifled by the captain’s threat to twist around the heads of anyone who dares mention the word ‘ghost’.

Naturally, the shanghaied sailors are none too happy, but as long as they are on the ship, Stan and Ollie have the captain’s protection. Whenever the ship pulls into port, the pair refuse to leave, knowing what will happen to hem if they do. In one port, the captain asks them to keep an eye on a drunken shipmate. Things rapidly get out of control, and the pair think they have killed the drunken man, tossing the ‘body’ overboard. He wakes up, swims to the shore and  and falls into a trough of whitewash. When the white figure returns to the ship, Stan and Ollie believe him to be a ghost, and panic. Just then, the captain returns, and when they tell him they’ve seen a ghost, he makes good on his threat.

Not one of the classic Laurel and Hardy shorts, The Live Ghost is nevertheless entertaining stuff, with plenty of absurdity and slapstick comedy. it is one of a handful of ‘horror’ themed Laurel and Hardy shorts that also include Oliver the Eighth, The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case and A-Haunting We Will Go.

DF

Noble Johnson (April 18, 1881 – January 9, 1978) was an African-American actor and film producer. He was one of the first black actors in Hollywood to achieve any meaningful level of fame and successfully navigated the transition from silent movies to talkies.

Born in Marshall, Missouri 18th April 1881, Noble was a boyhood friend of Lon Chaney Sr and both became well-known for their ability to immerse themselves into roles, playing a wide variety of characters, often ‘bit-parts’ who still made a big impression. The Johnsons were a well-known black family in the city and their father was an expert horse-trainer. Johnson left school at 15 and travelled with his father riding horses until 1898 when he became a cowboy and had a succession of jobs in ranching, horse training, and later in mining in 1909, as well as finding time to be a boxer and an athlete.

Noble Johnson became the first major black actor, and though achieving fame, inevitably found himself often cruelly typecast. His imposing 6’2″ frame and comparatively light-coloured skin meant that he appeared as innumerable tribal characters, servants, Russians, Asians, Polynesians, monsters, Arab Princes, Native Americans and the Devil himself! This chameleon-like ability was aided by the quality of early film-stock and make-up.

Early successful silent appearances included the Rudolph Valentino break-out smash war epic, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), as The Bronze Man in Cecil B. DeMille’s first Biblical colossus, The Ten Commandments (1923), The Indian Prince in Douglas Fairbanks’ swashbuckling, The Thief of Baghdad (1924) and Pre-Code sensation, Dante’s Inferno (also 1924), which featured completely nude actresses and scenes so dazzling they were reused in the 1935 remake, and nearly 60 years later in Ken Russell’s Altered States. A sign of the times is that although playing the somewhat critical part of The Devil, Johnson appeared uncredited. Johnson also appeared in a minor role alongside his friend, Chaney, in Tod Browning’s 1928 film, West of Zanzibar.

By the time he had made the leap to talkies, the roles, though perhaps more developed, still focussed more on Johnson’s appearance than his talent – interestingly, his appearance in The Mysterious Dr Fu Manchu (1929) was alongside another actor who struggled to escape typecasting, Warner Oland, best known as his many appearances as Charlie Chan and also the cause of everyone’s problems in 1935′s Werewolf of London. Further indignity followed when he starred as ‘Janos the Black One’ in the first film adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue; like many Poe-based films, the plot skirts timidly around the source material,

Four films that followed helped elevate Johnson to more significant roles in the industry and to the attention of horror film lovers; The Most Dangerous Game (1932), The Mummy (1932), King Kong and Son of Kong (both 1933). As the sinister Cossack, Ivan, in the seminal The Most Dangerous Game, he was subject to something which may now seem extraordinary – he was ‘whited-up’ – naturally the opposite of being blacked-up. Appearing opposite Karloff in The Mummy he played the elegant Nubian, by turns, obedient and merciless. In both Kongs, Johnson appeared a the Tribal Leader of Skull Island – fun, iconic but let’s face it, hardly a progression morally or otherwise. He played The Zombie in the Bob Hope horror-comedy The Ghost Breakers in 1940.

Johnson essentially drew a veil over his career in 1950, shortly after appearing alongside John Wayne in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon as Chief Red Shirt, though he popped up in the 1966 TV movie, Lost Island of Kioga… as a hostile Indian. Truly, we had come no further. Johnson also helped to found the first Black-American film company, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, in existence until 1921. He died at the grand old age of 96 in 1978.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia