ESSAY: Who's S-S-Scared?: The Scooby Doo Gialli

The second issue of the Fang of Joy fanzine is hot of the presses (indeed, actual presses [of a sort] were involved this time!). Included within it, among fine pieces from Jose Cruz, Simon Wright, Brad Hogue, one Richard Glenn Schmidt, and many others, is a zine-exclusive essay by yours truly on a particular sub-subgenre of Italian horror-thrillers that I've christened The Scooby-Doo Gialli. Check out the first few paragraphs below and then watch a trailer I've prepared in order to get your further pumped up for your forthcoming purchase. (Is this the first time anyone has bothered to make a trailer for an essay? Is my pat on the back traveling through the post to me as we speak?):

"On Saturday morning, September 13th, 1969, American CBS stations aired “What a Night for a Knight,” the first episode of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! The series would run for 25 episodes, concluding on Halloween of 1970. Each adventure more or less invariably found the meddling teens and gluttonous Great Dane of Mystery Incorporated breaking down in some remote American township and catching wind of a supernatural baddie haunting the area. After much spooking, munching, chasing, and sleuthing, the gang would discover that the supernatural villain of the week was no such thing: it was, instead, always a human in an elaborate costume, scheming towards some money-making human end.

Then, in the early-to-mid-1970s, several Italian and Spanish giallo horror-thrillers—with titles like The Red Queen Kills 7 Times, The Etruscan Kills Again, and Murder Mansion—employed a similar structure on the silver screen, incorporating faux-supernatural menaces into their convoluted plots as cover for nefarious inheritance schemes and psychosexual serial murder. Sure, you’d be hard pressed to spot a van full of adolescent gumshoes anywhere in these films, but the preponderance of red-haired leading ladies and sandy-maned, ascot-wearing pretty boys is certainly suspicious.

Was it merely a coincidence that these faux-supernatural gialli began cropping up immediately after Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! concluded its run on television?

Well, probably..."

Read more by purchasing Fang of Joy Issue #2 for a low, one-time payment of $6.

A Dreadful Decade (Part IX): The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012) dir. Rodrigo Gudiño

Logline: After inheriting the estate of his estranged mother (Vanessa Redgrave) upon her death, Leon Leigh (Aaron Poole) visits her empty home to gain a sense of closure to their unresolved relationship. Alone in the house and surrounded by her collection of occult relics and decorations, Leon begins to recall his traumatic childhood, during which his mother incessantly tried to induct him into the bizarre cult of angels that she and her husband belonged to. Over the course of the night, the ghosts of Leon's past and the monsters of his present will converge in order to test the strength of his disbelief.

Analysis: There are two different interpretations that we are encouraged to read from Leon Leigh's journey back through his tortured personal history and decayed family relationships. Rather than being antithetical to one another, these separate readings are both required pieces of the same sad puzzle.

At first, we're encouraged to read the haunting that Leon experiences while spending the night in his mother's home as symbolic of him confronting the trauma of his childhood spent with her. We learn as the film progresses that Rosalind subjected the juvenile Leon to borderline sadistic "games" that sought to pressure him into becoming a believer of her occult faith in the power of angels. The rift that formed between mother and son was caused by Leon's steadfast refusal to "play" his mother's game and his eventual flight away from the oppressive coercion she placed upon him at home. Now, separated from his experience for many years, Leon begins to subconsciously doubt his decision, despite his outward gestures demonstrating his continued agreement with the conclusions of his younger self (e.g. putting his cigarette out in an angel statue's stone eye). Leon begins to fear that his mother was right, and that by turning his back on the angels of her faith he has encouraged the angels to give up protecting him from the horrors of the world. Thus, the horrors of the world come scraping at the front door, in the form of a snarling, impossibly long-limbed cat-beast, a creature that could have oozed its sickeningly hairy form from the pages of one of M. R. James's tales. Thanks in part to the rationalizing psychological advice of his girlfriend/therapist as given through various phone conversations over the course his harrowing night, Leon is eventually able to shake off his frightening hallucinations and renew his conviction in the falseness of his mother's beliefs, ridding himself of her cloying spirit and his lingering self-doubts in the process. As a final gesture indicating that he's ready to move on, Leon announces his intentions to sell off every bit of Rosalind's property. This chapter of his life has been completed.

But the film's final moments provide us with the second interpretation of the events that have transpired. Rosalind, who has been speaking to us throughout the film as a disembodied voice on the soundtrack, finally reveals her words as emanating from beyond the grave, rather than from the written last will and testament of the title. From her restless spirit, we learn of her suicide, and how it was motivated by her son's unwillingness to forgive her, the loss of faith that accompanied her belief's inability to set things right, and the subsequent loneliness that crept up on her, "like an animal ready to pounce," over the years spent without her beloved son. We learn that in her continuously cruel desperation to coerce and control her son's feelings, she leaves Leon a suicide note reading, "Do you miss me as much as I miss you?" Finally, we learn that Leon never reads the note, for he never deigns to visit her accursed home, even after she bequeaths it to him. The Leon of the film is Rosalind's fantasy, an imaginative torture she puts herself through nightly as she watches, again and again, her son abandon her and her beliefs, even as she cries out pitifully for him to stay. The ghost becomes the haunted, and rightfully so. Rosalind's inability to understand the effect of her actions on her son, and thus her unwillingness to seek forgiveness or change her ways, marks her for her haunted fate. We could call this existence Rosalind has made for herself a sort of hell, but perhaps not: in her imagination, at least Leon wills himself to remember her, if only for a night.

Technical Merits: The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh is writer/director/Rue Morgue Magazine founder and president Rodrigo Gudiño's first full-length feature film, produced after creating only a handful of short films prior. Though inventive, his shorts lack the substance to elevate them above their visual gimmicks. What is so surprising about Rosalind Leigh, then, is how confident, controlled, and deliberate its style feels, and what a boon it is to the film's realization of its narrative. Though minimalist by design and budgetary necessity, the film hardly feels like an apprentice effort. Gudiño effortlessly blends long takes, voice-over storytelling, found footage, single location shooting, dodgy (but well-masked) CGI, and documentary-esque explorations of visual space as if to do so were his second nature. You could label the film's freewheeling, ever-evolving style as the product of an overeager first-time filmmaker wanting to cram all of his newly learned tricks in at once, but that feels to me like the wrong assessment. There's a clarity of purpose in the film's every wild and unexpected stylistic shift, as it seeks to make strange once again the horror stories and situations that we've become overly familiar with. I don't necessarily understand every one of Gudiño's stylistic choices (uh, opening credits over the little brother of Kubrick's cosmic fetus?), but I suspect he has his reasons. And, even if not, the cumulative effect of the film's technical experimentation is a breed of weird I can still get behind

Pared down to its bones, Rosalind Leigh contains no plot development or horror set-piece that we could call wholly unique, but the myriad ways in which these familiar elements are presented to us sure make them feel that way. An example: a character calls up a home security company to review the footage from the camera outside the front door of the house he's in. We've seen this scene before in other horror films, and we know it might (very likely) end with the discovery of some fiend or creature barely visible somewhere within the frame of the blurry footage. Gudiño makes this typical scene strange by a) implying vaguely, and without future consequence, through religious music on hold and creepy amateur web design that the security company is run by the mysterious angel cult, b) presenting the customer service representative on the other line as a strangely lifelike computer-generated voice that can seemingly respond to complex human language commands, and c) having this impossibly strange computer be voiced by the very same actor who is speaking to it over the phone. Nothing of any particularly horrific value occurs during this scene, plot-wise -- unless you find a man on the phone sitting at a computer to be a terrifying sight in and of itself -- but the film's off-kilter presentation of the action makes it one of many uniquely disquieting scenes sown throughout the film, sprouting strangeness.

Relevance: As a single-location, (more-or-less) single-actor horror film, Rosalind Leigh bears a certain resemblance to the excellent middle portions of the two adaptations of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black (1989; 2012), in which our lone protagonist wanders around the dreary home of a now-deceased occupant and uncovers curiosities, documents, and recordings that reveal a macabre secret history underlying the present day narrative. But unlike both versions of The Woman in Black, Rosalind Leigh realizes that the isolation and anxiety produced by this haunted ramble can be intensified by never leaving the property. We're given no respite from the subtle terrors lining the walls and lurking behind every door of Rosalind Leigh's unheimlich abode, and this helps make the film one of the stronger examples of horror cinema fascinated with architecture and physical space. Like The Shining's Overlook Hotel, The Innkeepers' Yankee Pedlar Inn, or Session 9's Danvers State Hospital, Rosalind Leigh's grotesque home is essentially the film's secondary protagonist, and exploring the very form and atmosphere of this space provides many of the film's most suffocating terrors. (And, again, unlike those other films, Rosalind Leigh never allows us to fill our lungs with the air from any other location, not even for a moment.)

Also of interest to horror fans is Rosalind Leigh's exploration of the relatively untapped potential of angels as objects of horror. Sure, we can't help but see shades of Doctor Who's Weeping Angels in the possibly animate angel statues of Gudiño's film, but the defining characteristic of Rosalind Leigh 's angels (besides them not being, well, time-energy feeding aliens) is how creepy they act while ostensibly trying to save our souls from an afterlife of torment. That's an impressive feat. The film employs its angels as symbols of the uneasiness you feel when a little old lady on the street hands you a church pamphlet while cheerily informing you that you're going to burn in hell. The horror of these angelic figures is generated from the jarring disconnect between the dual religious messages they impart to their victims, alternately turned towards them with open arms and turned away with grimaces carved upon their faces: If you believe in me, I will comfort and protect you; If you disbelieve, fear the worst. These are the sort of benignly horrific angels that cinema could use more of. They're a welcome development away from the mopey badass angels of The Prophecy (1995) and Legion (2010), and they're just about as frightening as a winged John Travolta in Michael (1996).

A Dreadful Decade (Part VIII): Absentia (2011) dir. Mike Flanagan

Logline: Seven years after her husband vanished without a trace and with his death now having been declared in absentia, Tricia (Courtney Bell) is finally beginning to move on with her life, despite feeling haunted by his absence. She's pregnant with her first child, involved in a new romance, and reconnecting with her long-estranged younger sister, Callie (Katie Parker). But when her husband, Daniel (Morgan Peter Brown), appears bloody, malnourished, and traumatized on the street in front of their home, Tricia's life is once again thrown into confusion and turmoil. Where has Daniel been for the past near decade, and what does his disappearance have to do with the large number of missing persons in the immediate area over the past century? The answers lie within the walls of a dark cement tunnel, underneath the reality we perceive, in a fantastic hell of unearthly origins.

Analysis: Absentia is a film about loss, grief, and the ghosts of past shames haunting us in the present. It's a film about sisterhood, family, and sacrifice. Perhaps strangely, it's also a film about the cruelty of a greedy bridge troll. Well, as we learn, it looks a little more like a silverfish than Shrek, but a troll nonetheless. Fortunately, the film's emphasis isn't placed on exploring the wickedness of a fairy tale monster, but on examining the sad lives of the gruff goats the troll gobbles up in his hunger. Though the film takes the Norwegian fairy tale "Three Billy Goats Gruff" as its partial inspiration, we're left to experience the alternate version, in which the goats fail to outsmart their adversary. We're watching the previous goats, the ones who attempted to cross the bridge before the fairy tale proper begins: the goats whose lives gave the troll its reputation for voraciousness.

These are battered, broken characters, hobbled by their addictions, mistakes, and regrets. Tricia has lost seven years of her life searching for and mourning over her lost husband, whom she never really loved to begin with. (They were high school sweethearts, we learn, and their marriage was a rash and unhappy decision.) Callie has been adrift for most of her adult life, struggling with drugs and doomed romantic relationships, all while alienating herself from her family and loved ones. Both seek solace through various methods (Tricia through rounds of therapy and meditation; Callie through religion), but both cannot escape their demons (Tricia is haunted by visions of her accusatory husband; Callie keeps her emergency stash in a jewelry box beneath her crucifix). Their lives are not happy ones, and just when things begin to look up (the sisters reconnect, a baby is on the way, a romance is in bloom, a new house is being hunted for, a fresh start is on the horizon), life kicks them off the figurative bridge into the muck: Daniel returns and then disappears once more, Callie starts using again (or at least everyone assumes-- and always will assume-- she has), romance is ruined, plans are scrapped, and trust and faith evaporate.

The film's tagline proclaims, "There are fates worse than death." True: there's always life. What option do Tricia, Callie, and even Daniel have but to absent themselves from their situations, to retreat to a realm that's not quite death but far from the disappointments of earthly existence? In their turns, all three are spirited away to a subterranean nether realm, existing beyond the laws of matter and possibly time. But, you might be asking, isn't this all the fault of that greedy troll and his famous appetite for those who wander onto his terrain by mistake? Surely these three weren't asking for their grim fates. Ah, but a counterargument: consider how easy it is for those characters who remain to justify away the absence of those missing, to imagine the hundred reasons they would have to simply disappear. When Callie attempts a trade with the troll for Tricia and her unborn infant, we might commend her selflessness for offering up herself first, instead of the customary neighborhood pets. But is it selflessness of selfishness? Is Callie envious of her sister's tortured quasi-oblivion? It might seem the cruelest trick when the troll spits out only Tricia's unborn fetus in response to Callie's offer before collecting its flesh bounty from her, but perhaps it's not a trick at all. Perhaps Tricia is precisely where she wants to be, absent from the pains of the past seven years. And as for Callie, it's telling that our last image of her in the film is a tranquil one, shot from behind and through the strange perspective of the realm she now inhabits, looking out into what she used to know as her cursed reality. We see that her new keeper has its insectile arm draped lightly over her shoulders, as if in comfort.

Technical Merits: Absentia is a testament to the potential effectiveness of horror on a limited budget, With over a third of its production funds crowdsourced from a Kickstarter campaign, the film didn't have an inordinate amount of money to play around with, but writer/director/editor Mike Flanagan sure makes the most of his pennies. Unable to afford lavish special effects to create the film's eerie subterranean netherworld or its mammoth insect overseer, Flangan and his cinematographer choose to employ suggestion and subtlety (those oft forgotten tricks of the trade) in those spots of the film where visual horror is necessitated. The dreary digital sheen of the film's mid-level high definition video is made an aesthetic asset rather than a mark of its financial inferiority: its startles us with its placement of an ancient, folkloric evil within the context of the mundane contemporary world and the digital lenses we now more often than not glimpse it through. 

This is what budget horror cinema should look and feel like in the current decade. That Flanagan was able to accomplish so much with the pocket change (relatively speaking) that he had for Absentia, and then turn in a glossy, Hollywood-esque followup with (in Hollywood's terms) a paltry $5 million for his next feature, the excellent Oculus (2014), should shame most other horror filmmakers out of the genre. You know what else cost $5 million? Paranormal Activity 4 (2012), which was funded and produced by Blumhouse Productions, just like Oculus was. It shouldn't be, but it's like comparing rotten apples and blood oranges. The rotten apples should start paying attention to the superior fruit.

Relevance: Absentia is a candied house of horrors for its viewers. As we approach it, the film gives off the sickly sweet appearance of a character drama. We imagine we'll get up close and personal to the lives of our principles, tasting the bitter outer layers of trauma and hardship before our taste buds hit the saccharine redemption at the center. Ah, but we are mistaken, for this is a witch's candy house, and as we wander inside we discover the horror locked in the basement: the endurance of the scarier fairy tales and folklore against the progression of time, sugarcoating a Lovecraftian realm of supernatural, subterranean terrors and torment. Our mouths taste sour before we're pushed into the oven, off of the troll's foot bridge, into Grandma Wolf's gaping maw. We've been tricked. The film ushers childhood bedtime stories and nightmares into horror's contemporary era, but its revisions of these interchangeable tales we dimly recall from our youth are only surface-level. (A bug for a troll isn't much.) To truly frighten us, it knows that it need only tell us the tales again.

A Dreadful Decade (Part VII): The Innkeepers (2011) dir. Ti West

Logline: On the last weekend of the historic Yankee Pedlar Inn's operation as a business, front desk clerks Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) embark on a ghost hunt when not serving their few remaining guests. The two minimum wage workers hope to capture evidence of the presence of Madeline O'Malley, the hotel's famed phantasm, for fun and possible profit. But Claire is soon to discover that the spirits of the Yankee Pedlar Inn are very real, and that they have their own plans to capture her, too...

Analysis: In traditional ghost stories, ghosts aren't created by accident. Fate (or the authorial hand) pushes certain characters-- even on occasion the protagonists-- towards their haunted afterlives, bestowing upon them an existence lonelier than death. Such a fate may seem cruel and unfair, but we can't shake the feeling that these characters are marked for ghost-dom, and that they might lead more productive lives postmortem than they were able to while still breathing.

In The Innkeepers, Claire is already a sort of ghost when we meet her. Her aimlessness and twenty-something ennui places her somewhere between life (or adolescent vigor) and death (the inevitable daily grind). When, early in the film, she flees from the range of the insipid juvenile babble issuing from the mouth of a similarly aged barista (Lena Dunham), we realize that Claire has divorced herself from the concerns of young adulthood, but her inability to even comprehend a life or passion outside of her dead-end job illustrates her failure to assume the (sometimes soul-crushing) responsibilities of being an adult. At one point in the film, Luke accuses Claire of being in the throes of a "quarter-life crisis," but this is news to her: even with the inevitable closing of her place of employment mere days away, Claire hasn't given a moment's thought to her plans post-steady paycheck.

This absence of forethought on Claire's part is because she is exactly where she's supposed to be, among the other lost and purposeless spirits (a widower, an abandoned bride) haunting the Yankee Pedlar Inn. Claire has been marked by fate: as Luke notes, when trying to comfort her, "Everything happens for a reason, Claire. Nobody just winds up at Yankee Pedlar." His aren't hopeful words.

The film posits young adulthood and minimum wage work as a sort of purgatory that one can either aspire a way out of or be trapped in forever. (Though the film also acknowledges the difficulty of making anything of one's self in our busted, post-bubble economy. What exactly is one to do for a "legitimate career"? Open a hotel?) Luke is spared a ghostly existence because at least he's trying, however poorly, to achieve a level of success outside of the doomed inn. On the contrary, Claire subconsciously realizes she has no aspirations, prospects, or literally any place else to haunt, and the end of the business is, for all intents and purposes, the end of her aimless wheel-spinning.

The rotten economy leads to the demise of both Claire and the Yankee Pedlar, but it's the hotel that emerges as the major figure worth mourning. The film imparts to us lots of little intimations that the Yankee Pedlar has a real, tangible history, and that the hotel itself is actively resisting becoming obsolete, forgotten, and unoccupied (it's making new ghosts, after all). And, if we can't bring ourselves to feel sympathy for a woman unable or unwilling to pull herself up by her still-corporeal bootstraps, we can certainly lament the loss of a home for wayward souls.

Technical Merits: Separated by actual title cards, the film's chapters unfurl before us like those of the best supernatural literature: slowly but certainly, like graveworms to the corpse buffet. The Innkeepers abandons the retro style of Ti West's previous films The Roost (2005) and The House of the Devil (2009), but revels in the slow-burn horror of the latter. West's avoidance of a deliberately nostalgic style in this retro-narrative-influenced outing is appropriate, juxtaposing the lurid appeal of ancient history (the historic hotel; the classical ghost story) with the overwhelming sterility and blandness of the modern world (dispiriting economic recession; contemporary horror cinema). Thus, West keeps much of The Innkeepers snail-paced, its exquisitely framed images rolling deliberately, almost fluidly, across the screen. He allows only fleeting glimpses of the supernatural to crawl into his compositions and remind us of the gracefully sinister storytelling traditions wallpapered over by the 21st century's drudgery.

Like all effective horror films (and like very few of its contemporaries), The Innkeepers understands that true horror is not located in the repeated build-up and release of suspense. Rather, horror is generated by mood and atmosphere, by the disquieting framing of the camera or by editing that lingers serenely on the ghastliest of sights just long enough to sear them into our retinas. In this vein, West openly pokes fun at his peers and their over-reliance on build-and-release jump scares: in one scene, Luke spooks Claire with one of the many Youtube videos in which a half minute of silent anticipation is shattered by a demonic shriek and the enlarged image of some variation of Linda Blair's face. Put into comparison with the mastery of the genre's form on display in The Innkeepers, the bulk of modern horror looks roughly as complex and polished as the uploaded shock-video efforts of hypothetical Youtube user dEMonIAC94. Sure, West is rubbing other filmmakers' noses in their own laziness a little bit (even if lightheartedly), but I won't fault him for setting a higher standard.

Relevance: The Innkeepers is a little like Charles Dickens's "The Signal-Man" (1866), if you transported the latter's action from the lonely railroad tracks of England to a lonely historic inn in Connecticut. Both The Innkeepers and "The Signal-Man" are concerned with protagonists stuck in dead-end jobs, haunted by spirits of their own static lives, and ultimately consumed by their inability to extricate themselves from their situations. There's not an exact resemblance between the two works, but Ti West, The Innkeepers' writer and director, is quite obviously paying homage to the tradition of classical Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories that "The Signal-Man" is a sterling example of: quaint, melancholy tales of the relationship between fate and the supernatural.

The film's use of this classical ghost yarn form is important because of its increasing obsolescence in 21st-century horror cinema. Traditional ghost stories simply aren't feasible in our postmodern era. Look at the ghost films of recent years: Paranormal Activity (2009), Ringu (1998), Kairo (2001). Each of these films strives to place the figure of the ghost outside of its familiar territory (no more haunted manors, hotels, moors, or cemeteries) and thoroughly enmesh its existence with the most recognizable elements of modern technology (home video cameras, telephones, VHS tapes, televisions, webcams, and the Internet). The postmodern ghost transcends fixed place and lives out its afterlife digitally through our devices and media; the traditional ghost that The Innkeepers homages is stranded, rattling its chains to deaf ears while irrevocably tied to its location. And the fact is that America's haunted locations are dying. Demolitions, re-modelings, and renovations are eradicating the country's architectural history, replacing buildings of character with antiseptic McMansions, planned communities, and strip malls. At the time of The Innkeepers' release in 2011, Phil Coldiron wrote, "who could imagine a ghost story set in a Courtyard by Marriott?" No one can, and that's why the majority of traditional ghost films produced in the last decade or so (The Others [2001], The Orphanage [2007], The Devil's Backbone [2001], The Awakening [2011]) have been period pieces set in foreign countries, alleviating our difficulty in imagining a contemporary America with standing buildings old enough to have a history.

The ghosts of yore dematerialize with the shuttering of their local haunts, and this is a reality worth mourning. In the for-real operational Yankee Pedlar Inn (est. 1891) and its ghostly inhabitants (both "real" and imagined), West finds dual last bastions worth celebrating, and his film's intelligent drawing of parallels between the demise of historic architecture and the growing irrelevancy of ghost stories demonstrates his fondness for and eagerness to preserve both, if only temporarily. Sadly, but appropriately, he ends The Innkeepers with the image of a door being shoved closed, both literally and figuratively. We could claim a spirit's forceful push was the cause, but the handprints smudged on the frame are our own.

A Dreadful Decade (Part V): Lake Mungo (2008) dir. Joel Anderson

Logline: After the accidental drowning of their teenage daughter (Alice, portrayed by Talia Zucker), the surviving members of the Palmer family have trouble sorting out their collective grief. Their problems are exacerbated by the alleged appearances of Alice's ghost in their home and abroad. This pseudo-documentary seeks to determine the existence of Alice's spectral afterlife and uncover the lingering mysteries of her corporeal days, long buried in the sands of Australia's dried-out Lake Mungo.

Analysis: When we see Alice Palmer in old photographs and video footage, those taken both before and after her untimely demise, we can't shake the feeling that we're looking at a ghost. Perhaps, as the film hints, she was always a ghost, in one sense of the term. We learn over the course of the film that she has encountered her own ghost, has dreamed of her later life as a ghost, and has taken actions that she will later take again as a ghost. Alice Palmer haunts Lake Mungo. The appropriateness of the film's title and its reference to New South Wales' famous dry lake is manifold. At the film's climax, Alice encounters a specter of her future at the dead lake, only to later die in the active waters of another, different lake. Later, she is seen haunting the lake she died in, and yet she was already haunting the dry Lake Mungo while she was alive. Lake Mungo itself materializes within the film as a phantasm, as a visual monument to a place both dead and curiously alive, lingering on as a palpable presence and vacation spot. The temporal circularity of Lake Mungo leaves the dry lake and Alice stuck somewhere between life and death, existence and nonexistence. Lake Mungo laments the tragedy of such a fate, and one way to read the film is as an ode to those sad souls like Alice who can anticipate their own ends through the troubling way they lead their lives. Alice is haunted by her own ghosts: the knowledge that her actions are leading her swiftly towards death and her resignation over the fact that no one can help her, not even those closest to her.

But I think there's a far grimmer reading to be dredged from the bottom of Lake Mungo, one derived not from Alice's personal demons but from the gross negligence of her family in recognizing her trouble before (and after) it was too late. The Palmers loved Alice, certainly, but it's clear they never really possessed any awareness of what was going on in her life. They're ignorant of her fear of death, her use of psychic counseling, and her bizarre sexual affair with the next-door neighbors. We're told of the chilly relationship between Alice and her mother, June (Rosie Traynor), who could never manage to give herself fully to her daughter. After Alice's death, each member of her small family attempts to grieve in a different way: Roy (David Pledger), her father, distracts himself with his work; Mathew (Martin Sharpe), her brother, inexplicably forges fake evidence of her ghost's presence in the family home; and June steadfastly clings to the hope that Alice might not be dead at all. With the exception of Roy (who is eager to forget Alice entirely), the family's expressions of grief are based in the logic of guilt. They don't want Alice to be gone from their lives entirely, because if she is that means they've failed her in some way, and that June's fear that Alice will have died not knowing how much they loved her is fact. Thus, the family colludes to keep Alice alive, in one form or another, until they feel absolved of their own guilt over not being able to help her during her existential depression, of which they were clueless.

It's the act of uncovering Alice's secrets in the year that follows her death that makes her family think they've finally put her spirit to rest. The film's most melancholy and heart-wrenching horror is that they're wrong. In their desire to move on with their lives, the Palmers were distracted by the superficial revelations about Alice's troubled life and were thus unable to see that her deeper problem was her inability to seek solace and assistance within her distant family unit. During the film's denouement, a masterful montage of separate psychic meditation sessions with mother and daughter conducted a year apart about an unknowingly shared dream, we learn that Alice has been trying to communicate to her family her continued existence, to no avail. In the end, her family abandons her, moves to a new house free of her association. But perhaps they had already abandoned her, back when she was alive, sobbing with fright at the foot of her parents' bed but unable to bring herself to awaken them. The film's conclusion leaves Alice's family ignorantly, blissfully sleeping on, and Alice herself haunting empty hallways, alone, in death as in life.

Technical Merits: The effectiveness of Lake Mungo's documentary approach to horror storytelling goes a long way towards lending legitimacy to the documentary/found footage horror subgenre. The film's documentary form suits the material, allowing us to glimpse Alice Palmer only through ghostly family videos and photographs, in which her vibrant life is captured in flat, lifeless celluloid and digital pixels. The documentary form allows writer/director Joel Anderson to keep Alice and her mystery at a distance from us, but it also enables him to slowly unravel a lot of the plot's big revelations in a way that feels organic to the constructed nature of a documentary, and which would probably feel cheap or unearned in a traditionally shot horror feature. Watching Lake Mungo, we're always aware that we're in the hands of a skilled documentarian who wishes to lead us gently from one mystery to the next, with the film's sheen of faux-reality making us feel (however fleetingly) like collaborators, following the leads placed before us. As if we're watching a segment on Unsolved Mysteries, and right before the commercial break we'll be flashed the phone number for the tip hotline.

Much of the film's success as a faux-documentary can be attributed to that fact that it's wonderfully shot and edited, with a keen awareness of the proper balance of static talking-head interviews, moody scenery and location shots, and amateur found footage. Like the best actual documentaries, the screen is subtly kinetic and layered, with the assembled images providing for the viewer a narrative beyond the information given through interview and observation. For the sticklers out there, you could easily (and cruelly) convince a fellow viewer that it was a real documentary (I have!), as it only very rarely stretches credibility or verisimilitude. (The only obvious flaw in this aspect of the film is the repeated occurrence of random folks around town discovering important-to-the-narrative images/figures/ghosts in their barely discernible amateur-recorded video footage. A bizarre, unnecessary form of crowdsourcing, we might say.)

Relevance: If the television series Twin Peaks (and its prequel film, Fire Walk with Me [1992]) had been filmed as a faux-documentary and lost all of its oddball humor, it would look a lot like Lake Mungo. Of course, there's no murder mystery acting as Lake Mungo's narrative backbone like in Twin Peaks, but otherwise the similarities are pertinent: a beautiful, locally adored teenage girl (also with the surname "Palmer." Imagine that...) dies tragically, her family's grief affects the whole town, a mystery (of a sort) is unraveled as the characters discover the seedy secret life of the dead girl, and eventually all gives way to a creepy, half-decipherable supernatural world. This affinity for the intrigue and narrative twists of Twin Peaks-inspired dead teen girl mysteries is actually a partial detriment to Lake Mungo, though not a fatal one. All of the focus placed upon Alice's secrets and hidden quasi-bad girl persona distract from what is, at its core, one of the most emotionally despondent horror films out there. The film drowns itself in sadness, and yet it's no less frightening for its embrace of that emotional tether. Lake Mungo is far from the first film to try to make us feel sympathy for a scary ghost, but it's one of the best at making us realize the crushing, inescapable humanity of those storied chain-rattlers.

Shepperton Screams (Part XIII): And Now the Screaming Starts (1973) dir. Roy Ward Baker

For sixteen weeks, Jose Cruz of The Grim Reader and I will be delving into the complete horror filmography of Amicus Productions and regaling you with our spirited discussions. Below is our mutual consideration of Amicus's AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973). Check back every week for more dialogues and (naturally) more nightmares.

NT: Oh, how I pined for the hoodwinking this premise appeared to promise: In 1795, a newlywed couple takes inheritance of the groom's family estate in the English countryside. Before they have the chance to unpack, the bride is catching fleeting glimpses of a whole assortment of creaky Gothic horrors: a bloody hand bursting out of a painting, an eyeless specter leering through windows, and a decapitated limb wriggling around the floorboards. It's all a little too much too soon, isn't it? This new bride attempts to explain these stupefying sights to her husband and the household help, who fail to take her breathless horror with anything but salt and (worse yet!) seem to be conspiring to keep certain information away from her delicate ears. This bride soon begins to go a little nuts, and can be found wide-eyed and bewildered most waking hours. What are the odds that the bride's new husband has cooked up these assorted scares in order to terrify his wife out of her wits and equally out of some vast bank account or bequest? Pretty good odds, really, if we're at all familiar with similarly spun webs of cinematic intrigue from the past several decades of thrillers. If AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973) were a film that you could step inside, you wouldn't be able to help but notice the aroma of softly burning gaslights infecting the air.

Alas, this is no gaslight thriller. No one is trying to drive Mrs. Catherine Fengriffen (Pete Walker regular Stephanie Beacham) to the madhouse. At least no one corporeal. Her loving husband (Ian Ogilvy) is exactly that, and the aforementioned household help (Rosalie Crutchley) soon enough finds herself victim to the same ghostly presence haunting the lady of the manor. Yes, despite my every wish to the contrary, this is a genuine supernatural thriller. Adapted from David Case's short novel FENGRIFFEN: A CHILLING TALE (1970), AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS concerns itself with a strange curse carried out by cackling phantasms, spreading torment across generations while righting a wrong wrought by antiquated class divisions.

Beyond the slightest intimation that the barbaric behavior of the ruling classes deserves to be countered by the equally ancient customs of the pagan peasantry, we're never informed by what strange magic this curse comes to fruition through. In the Amicus Cemetery of Reanimated Horrors, you might return from the dead through specific occult leanings (voodoo, witchcraft, demonic mirror possession) or you might start sucking air as a vengeful fiend simply because the plot demands it. And the plot of AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS demands a lot. But perhaps this vagueness of supernatural origins is as it should be: this film isn't one overly concerned with narrative coherence. This is a big, explosive Gothic horrorshow (our second true Amicus period piece, though its isolated castle setting means the budget doesn't have to stretch far beyond appropriate costumes and interior furnishings). The frights contained within this cinematic castle of blood are hysterically-pitched, full of melodramatic emotion and overblown action. When, at the film's climax, Ian Ogilvy's Charles Fengriffen fervently yanks his ancestor's skeletal corpse out of a coffin and then swings it repeatedly—grasped at the ankles—against the stone of his own final resting place, we know for certain (as if we didn't already) precisely what sort of frenzied film we're dealing with. I mean, AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS is even the earliest film I can think of containing what we'd call modern-style jump scares. Its setting might hark back to the dusty prestige of 1960s English horror, but in every way that matters AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS is a product of the bolder, more frantic, and slightly sillier early '70s.

Whether or not I fully enjoy the final results of all that I've mentioned above is a whole other tomb full of worms. I'll ponder that query as I bounce the skeleton over into your court.

GR: Once again, you’ve perfectly and succinctly captured my own impressions of our topic as you did with I, MONSTER (1970). The first thing that occurred to me when that great, gory appendage popped out from the regal portrait Stephanie Beacham was observing was “Wow, that was quick.” “Too much too soon” is certainly the case here, especially as the opening credits of AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973), despite that grindhouse-ready title, put you in mind of DARK SHADOWS or any number of the paperback Gothic romances that haunted the shelves of grocery stores and pharmacies of the day with their visions of beautiful ladies trying to elude the shadows of menacing manors. The idyllic shots of the stately grounds, the stirring strings composed by Amicus favorite Douglas Gamley, and Beacham’s soft narration (“…my days filled with fear, my nights filled with horror…”) makes one think that we’re going to be presented with a respectable period piece, one that settles for an aura of barely-repressed sexuality and gloomy expressions of the soul in favor of spookhouse shocks. But the minute the wriggling fingers of the Fengriffen curse make their dynamic entrance, we know exactly what kind of movie this is going to be.

Which is not to say that AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS is a bad picture, but it’s certainly not on the same level of prestige as entertainments such as Bronte’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847) or even, to go back to your point of reference, Patrick Hamilton’s GAS LIGHT (1938). This is a rough’n’tumble supernatural shocker in period clothing, no more sophisticated than any of the similar fare that Amicus has offered thus far. Which, again, is not my way of being a priss about the whole thing, but the bloody hand seems like such an incredibly early introduction of the creepy goings-on in the story that it implies some sense of uncertainty on the part of the filmmakers. They don’t think that the audience could possibly retain interest in a story about a newlywed couple in all their lace and frills, so they throw us a bone with that five-fingered beast in the hopes that we’ll sit up in our seats and say “Gee, now this is a good movie!” In this sense AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS begins very much to resemble a more modern horror film in its almost desperate attempt to capture our attention lest we drift off.

Roy Ward Baker seems a little more comfortable in these antiquated surroundings, his directorship solid throughout in his first standalone horror effort after having turned out ASYLUM (1972) and THE VAULT OF HORROR (1973) for Shepperton Studios. He shows an affinity for both the quieter moments of the piece as well as the more operatic business involving mutilation and rape. It’s those grandstanding moments though that this particular house is built on, but this being a British horror film made by old veterans of the industry it shows us very little skin and a relatively small amount of blood, minus the occasional eyeless, handless specter making its requisite appearance. When one thinks how sleazy AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS could have really been (say, in the hands of Al Adamson or Andy Milligan), what we see on screen seems fairly tame. So, when the filmmakers have no flesh or plasma to titillate our senses with, they attempt to drum up the cinematic vibrato in the scenes of murder and mental anguish which, to say the least, has a tendency to play more goofy than shocking. As a matter of fact, I’ll see your skeleton-thrashing and raise you one old biddy strangled by ghost hands tossed down a staircase… in slow motion. AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS may be game, but as you have observed in the past, that earnestness leads the film to occasionally slip on a putrefied limb and go ass over breeches in its attempt to be taken as serious horror-drama. Still, it’s not without its charms.

Now before I pass out all cross-eyed like Mrs. Beacham, I’ll turn the conversation back to you lest you curse the first virgin bride of my home. 

NT: In an earlier discussion of ours (the one concerning TORTURE GARDEN [1967], to be precise), I made a comment about how Amicus was ushering itself into the era of blood and guts, and that their films were beginning to embrace explicit themes and images about half a decade before their prim and proper contemporaries at Hammer Film Productions would. Having since revisited most of the Amicus films through this collaborative series of ours, I've come to realize I was off the mark. Well, to an extent. The Amicus films we've been discussing so far certainly imply a level of explicitness foreign to the majority of popular British horror at the time, but the on-screen depictions and elaborations of this risqué subject matter have more often been suggestive than visceral. 

By the time we reach 1973 with Amicus, we realize they've fallen behind the times in this regard. Hammer had already made their mammary-laden Karnstein trilogy, and the blood was flowing freely in films of theirs like SCARS OF DRACULA (1970). In contrast, AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS presents to us two off-screen scenes of sexual violence (one perpetrated by a ghost!), some light bloodletting, and a brief shot of a lady's bare back. "Fairly tame" is one way of putting it. You're right: I would much rather see this reconfigured as a decade-appropriate sleazefest. Imagine: Andy Milligan's THE RATS ARE COMING! THE SCREAMING STARTS HERE!

Alas, I've decided that I enjoy whatever small charms AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS bashes against the crypt. Yes, it's essentially applying hoary, William Castlesque spook tactics (minus the gimmicks) in a period package, but that's enough to elicit a guffaw of appreciation from me. It's been surprising to observe how flawed Roy Ward Baker's directorial contributions to the Amicus oeuvre have been (much more so than those of the more-or-less consistent Freddie Francis). As you've written, the film seems torn between its earnest ambitions for producing serious period horror and the presumed pressure to provide its audience with over-the-top frights. As a result, the film manages neither, resulting in it feeling like a bizarre, tonally challenged hybrid of intentions. 

I think the film just barely escapes becoming like the over-serious, ludicrous disaster I saw in ASYLUM (1972) through sheer luck: that film's mini Herbert Lom mannikins were on holiday, so the filmmakers had to settle for the normal-sized Lom causing havoc instead. But, in earnest, I think I'm able to stomach the goofy horrors on display in this picture because Baker and his crew seem to have gained an ever-so-slight sense of self awareness about the zaniness they're putting on screen. An example (and my favorite moment in the film): When the tormented Catherine Fengriffen decides to end it all by committing seppuku (!) or perhaps a home abortion (!!), her stab towards her own pregnant belly is foiled (as a slow pan down reveals to us) by the now-skewered disembodied hand we've seen crawling around the estate since the first reel. As a filmmaker, you don't toss in the antics of Thing T. Thing (of THE ADDAMS FAMILY) without the basic cognizance that you're doing something silly. At least I hope so.

Embarking on a deeper reading of the film's themes seems to me a blind, limbless fool's errand, so I will refrain. But that’s not me condemning it. AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS might be as insubstantial as a pair of wriggling, transparent ghost hands, but those spectral mitts can still play my tune.

GR: Wait. You’re saying there is a deeper reading of the film’s themes? There are themes? 

I jest, of course. There probably is at least a small cauldron full of subtext bubbling under the images of AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS, and while just about any film is worthy and prime for analytical study if you really wanted to make a go of it, as you say it seems a silly task to try and build an academic mountain out of Roy Ward Baker’s mole-hill of horrors. And for the record, I’m copyrighting the title MOLE-HILL OF HORRORS for my next screenplay.

Instead, I shall take the lead that you’ve so efficiently used in the past and simply jot down a few of the fleeting and not-so-fleeting impressions that the film made upon my mind. And since it’s Friday, I’m going to be taking this to a whole new level of laziness by writing these impressions in bullet-format. Can your heaving bosom handle the shocks that I’m sending your way right now? 

• Catherine’s visions of the gory phantom are certainly evocative enough, but they appear to evoke a different mood when, in the midst of making-out, Mrs. Beacham goes all wide-eyed while Ogilvy attempts to calm her down. Snapping out of her stupor, Catherine pulls her husband forward with renewed vigor, hoping that the demons of the past will be repelled by the scent of passion.

• Though she is frightened by a great many beast, including one of the family Rottweilers, at no point in time is Catherine spooked by a dangling spider, as the Miss Muffet headpiece she occasionally wears might lead you to believe.

• The Fengriffen cemetery is charming in its crowded, insular qualities, all crooked graves and creeping vines, but it must be the first that I’ve seen that seems to generate its own strategically-placed clouds of mist.

• Winner of Most Fabulously Dressed: Catherine in her handsome strolling attire, complete with dark skirt, overcoat, and hat, greatly aided by the presence of a riding crop she swings at the wind-whipped grass. It makes me feel naughty. 

• Baker shows he can have a good eye for visuals in those beautiful angled shots of the angry blue sky outlining the dark façade of Fengriffen Manor.

• Upon seeing a woodcut-style illustration of a bare-chested woman lying in bed as a horned fiend lurks before her, Peter Cushing’s Dr. Poe feels the need to clearly define what we are seeing with a grim whisper: “Sexual relations with demons.” Yeah, thanks for that.

• Winner of Most Fabulous Line of Dialogue: “I live in horror that this is the child of a ghost.”

• What’s the deal with that ghost anyway? His handlessness seems to indicate that he is the avenging woodsman, but his eyelessness implies that he is that spirit’s descendant Silas (also Whitehead), who has his peepers shot through the back of his skull when the frenzied Ogilvy brings an end to his smirking ways with twin pistols. In a film wrought with conflicting ideas, they can’t even settle on whose ghost is haunting the house!

• For all of its appealing missteps, the film actually generates potent tension and uneasiness during the scene where Herbert Lom’s wicked Henry defiles the bride of his groundskeeper (Geoffrey Whitehead) as the helpless groom is forced to watch. The latter’s behanding by axe is equally chilling as Whitehead doesn’t emit a gasp or a choke as his limb is lopped off, his hatred for his master more intense than any physical trauma he could possibly suffer. The whole scenario is slightly reminiscent of the family backstory from Arthur Conan Doyle’s THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. And if you expect me to make a terrible HAND OF THE BASKERVILLES joke, you can forget about it. Wait.

• …but as effective as the inciting event of the curse is, the bedevilment itself is somewhat perplexing, as the groundskeeper’s curse attacks not the direct perpetrator of the crime but some random and for-all-he-knows completely innocent woman in the future who has nothing to do with the heinous act itself. I understand that this may be the “point,” as the woodsman’s wife was herself an innocent unwillingly drawn into the madness of the Fengriffen family, but as a means of payback against the man who raped his wife it’s pretty shitty. 

• …however, it does make for a fittingly bleak climax that has the ever-stunned Catherine behold her newly-born babe to see that it bears the same red birthmark on its face as the one that Silas’ family line possessed, in addition to a missing hand. It’s interesting to note the differences one sees in Catherine’s and Rosemary Woodhouse’s reactions to their progeny. For a woman who literally bore the son of Satan, Rosemary takes on the prospect of motherhood in stride when compared to the catatonic Catherine. Maybe it’s just the changing of the times. Maybe it’s because not everyone’s fit to be a parent.

• And for all of those trials and tribulations, the sacrifice and the terror that she went through during the film’s ninety minutes, Stephanie Beacham is awarded in the final credits with the prestigious place of fourth-billing.

Fin.

Next week: Madhouse (1974)

Shepperton Screams (Part XII): From Beyond the Grave (1974) dir. Ken Connor

For sixteen weeks, Jose Cruz of The Grim Reader and I will be delving into the complete horror filmography of Amicus Productions and regaling you with our spirited discussions. Below is our mutual consideration of Amicus's FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1974). Check back every week for more dialogues and (naturally) more nightmares.

GR: Having plundered the collected works of American frighteners Robert Bloch and Entertaining Comics to varying degrees of success, Amicus turned to the short stories of one of their fellow countrymen, Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes, to supply the sundry beasts and bloody bits for their next portmanteau feature, FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1974). Chetwynd-Hayes was a literary brother to Bloch in many ways, mainly in the manner in which he utilized stock genre tropes and seasoned them with black humor, though Chetwynd-Hayes lacked some of the sharpness in prose that Bloch demonstrated with his snap endings and biting dialogue, be it however laden with bad puns. Chetwynd-Hayes’ fiction was a bit jollier in comparison, but his stories were an ideal fit for Shepperton Studios, always eager as they were to leaven their grisly subjects with little winks and pokes at the audience.

FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE is especially notable for its expert art direction and inventive design. The film is filled with neat little camera transitions, a delicious color palette, and sumptuous sets. The screen becomes awash in hues of blue when the supernatural is present, showing us ghostly vistas of fog and skeletal trees as well as decadently decorated parlors of Gothic furniture festooned with dust and cobwebs. Even the most innocuous of decisions—letting a blood drop fall from a ceiling to fill the camera lens with red—add a significant amount of visual wit to the proceedings. The overall technical skill of FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE is somewhat surprising when you take into account that this was director Kevin Connor’s very first film at the helm. Having worked previously as an editor and sound editor on a handful of features, it’s evident that Connor brought his expertise and that of cinematographer Alan Hume (THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE, THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS, STAR WARS: EPISODE VI – RETURN OF THE JEDI), art director Bert Davey (THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, SUPERMAN III, ALIENS) and set decorator Simon Wakefield (BATMAN BEGINS, CASINO ROYALE, MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND) to the project to give us a very pretty-looking picture.

Sadly, the style seems to outweigh the substance here. As wonderfully macabre as all the knick knacks are, the stories themselves are not quite as memorable as one would hope. Whereas Bloch had his share of ingenious little plots—you could easily name them off as “That one with the head-eating cat” or “The one where those body parts came back to life” and have someone instantly recognize which one you’re talking about—Chetwynd-Hayes’ offerings run a little on the dry side and, had it not been for the engaging and fun tech work, might be completely forgettable. There’s at least one entry here that stands firmly on its own two legs as a singular horror fable while the others fall on the wayside. Two of them are practically interchangeable! But we’ll get to that in the bit.

The film’s wraparound segment involves a curiosity shop called Temptations Ltd. owned by the Proprietor (Peter Cushing), a quiet little man whose shop is packed to the brim with grim antiquities that would make any genre fan’s heart skip a beat. This uniting framework is used once more to promote the moral justice of the Amicus universe, though here the punishments seem quite disproportionate to the crimes of our characters. Instead of the murderers and sadists that we’ve seen before, the victims of otherworldly justice in FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE are basically just a bunch of folks who are trying to skimp on paying the Proprietor the proper price for his artifacts. Whether it’s switching tags on the items or boorishly haggling for a lower rate, these folks find out that even if you’re nothing but a cheat in Amicusland, you’re screwed. It’s even wryly remarked that the film’s final customer, a young lad low on funds, still has to go through the hellish wringer before Cushing sees that he did in fact pay him the total and correct amount for his purchase. No one’s safe!

Speaking of which, I suggest that you step away from that iron maiden you’re eyeing there to give us your side of the story before ol’ man Cushing kicks us out for loitering.

NT: For me, FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE is the dark horse among the Amicus anthologies.

When we began preparing for these dialogues, I was surprised to realize that FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE existed. I’d previously seen every one of Amicus’s anthologies, and yet somehow this one had managed to elude my memory. Of course I fondly reminisced about the one in which Peter Cushing ran a curiosity shop, but, I thought, wasn’t that in THE VAULT OF HORROR? It was only while watching FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE—the production company’s (sorta) penultimate portmanteau—for the second time that faint recollections of the individual episodes began to flicker across my consciousness like the blue flame of a spooky séance candle. In my experience, FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE began to resemble an Amicus-patented Vengeful Corpse: dead and long forgotten in my ignorance, the film was resurrected by a second viewing and crept its way inexorably into my den, eager as it was to unleash its delectable morbidity upon me once again.

In truth, FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE might be my favorite Amicus film we’ve done thus far (though TORTURE GARDEN runs a close second). Why, then, had I almost completely forgotten about the film and all of the small, ghoulish treasures contained within? It’s difficult to say.

It’s not the fault of director Kevin Connor (MOTEL HELL) or the assembled cast and crew. As you’ve duly pointed out, this is an attractive film full of technical flourishes that set it apart from the usually quite static (if still attractive and appropriately atmospheric) Amicus visual style. The acting is on par with what we’re accustomed to in these bite-sized sketches of wicked souls, and we even a get few new welcome faces added to the roster who put in distinctive performances of their own (Donald and Angela Pleasence, David Warner). The score is effective, the sets are impeccable, and the production’s (most likely) miniscule budget was wrung dry. FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE feels invigorated by its fresh but experienced creative talent behind the camera, unlike our last entry, THE VAULT OF HORROR, which gave the impression that Amicus was exhausted with (or perhaps had exhausted) the anthology format.

You’ve pointed towards the writing as a possible culprit for the film’s unmemorable status, but I’m not sure that I can agree. These four segments feel no more featherweight than any other segment we’ve seen in an Amicus portmanteau and— as you also note—they certainly express a similarly wry wit interspersing the bloodshed. The film’s longer than average running time might lead us call them quieter, more slow-burning tales in comparison to what we’re used to from Bloch and EC Comics by-way-of Milton Subotsky. Yet, I can’t think of a finale in the Amicus oeuvre more explosive than the one we witness in the final tale, “The Door.” Hell, even “The Elemental” jumps farther over the top than we’re accustomed to with its climactic living room windstorm. All four tales are recognizably Amicus material, and (I’d argue) they’re stronger than the majority of their peers.

So what is it about these tales, then, that prevents them from sticking? My best guess relates back to your remark about how two of these tales are essentially interchangeable (I’m guessing you’re referring to the first and the fourth). FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE presents a coherence that’s foreign to us anthology connoisseurs. Rather than being disparate tales plucked at random from an author’s collected works and crammed (however clumsily) into the confines of a frame narrative (looking at you, HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD), these four tales are all of a piece. Each focuses around witchcraft, the occult, and the ancient supernatural evil that lurks in the cracks of the world (and within the cracks of various mundane antiques). These tales work together, revising each other’s basic themes and story content. This grouping of tales isn’t designed to be as attention-grabbing as we might expect (we’re not barreling swiftly from a story about a head-munching cat to a story about a murderous piano, after all), and thus they do tend to blend together in our minds. This is made especially apparent when, as you’ve said, two of the episodes only significantly differ in the identity of the haunted object and in the story’s final outcome. Even the film’s curious anthology format (which finds the film moving sequentially in time from the events of the frame narrative to the events of each tale without utilizing the conceits of flashbacks or visions of potential futures) encourages us to view the film as a cohesive unit, as a single chronological story rather than subdivided bits of horror fantasy. When we think of Amicus anthologies, we think of their wild variety of horror elements, their abandonment of consistent tone, and their tendency towards a disregard for internal coherence. FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE possesses none of these attributes, and I can only imagine this is what left it underrated in my estimation until now.

Now, I’m going to go gaze into the beyond (courtesy of this nifty haunted mirror) while you give your further thoughts on these specific curiosities.

GR: As a matter of fact, I do agree with you in regards to the high amount of sturm und dang on display in FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE, as it truly is the most ferocious Amicus picture we’ve yet seen when it comes to scenery-destroying action. So why then, as you admit, does it leave such a foggy impression in the mind? Let’s see if we can find out.

“The Gate Crasher” is the first of our crackly tales, telling of the young Edward Charlton (David Warner) who purchases a gilded, antique mirror from Cushing’s store to enliven the atmosphere of his flat. It’s a great conversation starter, as it so proves when his friends are inspired by the spooky looking-glass to hold a séance. Afterward Edward is haunted by a Rasputin-like figure from the mirror-world who demands that Edward feed him blood. Because what else do ghosts do? Connor and company certainly start with their best foot forward here, as “The Gate Crasher” is the vignette in which they really let loose with those little flourishes I mentioned earlier. The séance scene is particularly notable, the blue flame of the candle dancing high like an angered wraith as the camera pans around the little table to each of the participants’ leery faces. When Warner is transported to the mirror-world in a dream, the primary color scheme and close camera angles recall the memorable, off-the-cuff night terror that Cushing himself suffered in the “Waxworks” episode of THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1970).

Even at its abbreviated length, “The Gate Crasher” comes close to feeling a little overlong, the narrative supported solely on our protagonist’s seemingly endless supply of plasma to his new, reflective friend. The bit with Warner knifing a prostitute is a cute little wink pointing towards his future turn as Jack the Ripper in TIME AFTER TIME (1979), though it is curious how, in his hypnotized state, Warner doesn’t bother cleaning up the sticky mess in his apartment yet makes it a point to dress in his pajamas before going to bed! The story becomes an intriguing parable of a man descending into the pit of addiction, as we see Charlton’s once handsome lodgings go to shambles and his healthy pallor transformed into a waxy, sickly countenance. The Face, as it is credited, is like a demonic monkey on Charlton’s back that constantly demands more hits of the juice it loves so much; as it so tellingly intones to him at one point, “You must feed me.” Charlton eventually becomes lost himself, a restless specter ready to plague the next foolish mortal to fall under the mirror’s hold. And if that’s too self-consciously high falutin’ for you, check out that bit when the Face, finally released from his prison, orders Charlton to take his own life with the instructions of “Grip my shoulders. Now thrust forward.” That naughty monkey!

The following story, “An Act of Kindness,” is probably the film’s high mark for a number of reasons. For one, it probably has the strongest sense of character and purpose of the lot, not to mention being the one that is perhaps the most cleverly and tightly plotted. I don’t say this merely because “An Act of Kindness” has a twist ending but because for the whole of its running time you are never entirely sure where it’s going to end up. It has a canny unpredictability that’s gripping to watch. Ian Bannen portrays Christopher Lowe, a by-all-means average man who tries to become just a little more than that in the eyes of a streetside ragman, Jim Underwood (Donald Pleasence). He does this by obtaining an honorary military medal from Temptations Ltd. and Pleasance duly offers Bannen his home and heart, not to mention the hospitality of his daughter Emily (Angela Pleasence). Not only are the Underwoods remarkably kind, they also know just how to alleviate Bannen of his nasty wife and apathetic child with a little brand of their own magic.

Or is that really the case? “An Act of Kindness” is a sneaky little number, and its general atmosphere (barring the wickedly cruel finale) seems like an anomaly compared to the wild and woolly haints and ghouls that inhabit the other stories. The second vignette derives its chills from more quietly shuddersome moments, like when the veiled and white-faced Emily stalks over Diana Dors as she sleeps, a gleaming knife in her hand. Angela Pleasence is wonderful here, even outshining her father a bit as the waifish girl whose toothy smile can inspire warmth and cold-blooded terror equally. “An Act of Kindness” feels more substantial for its tragic arc of events as well; when we see Bannen, we see the insignificant worker ant who only wishes to have some kind of importance to his fellow humans, so much so that he’s willing to lie about who he really is. He sees his own life as having so little merit that he must build up an alternate, more heroic personality just to receive some kind of warmth. He’s not trying to scam Cushing out of one of his antiquities just for the sake of material possession like the others. He needs the medal to become important. It’s this that makes his ultimate fate seem harsh. He was merely a stooge, a means to an end. Just as he was in life.

“The Elemental” makes it evident from its opening prologue that this segment is going to be the oft-dreaded (but generally not too terrible) “funny” one. Think “Golf Story” from DEAD OF NIGHT (1945) or “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” from CREEPSHOW (1982). Cushing indulges in a little humor himself when he tells customer Reginald Warren (Ian Carmichael) upon making his purchase “I hope you enjoy snuffing it.” Because Warren has bought a snuff box, you see. Apparently the little case is bedeviled, as Warren finds out when he is pestered by a spiritualist named Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton, channeling Aunt Bedelia) on the train ride home. The woman claims that Warren has an elemental perched on his shoulder, a mischievous demon that proceeds to make his life a living hell. Fairly stumped by his supernatural quandary, Warren calls on Orloff to help him exterminate the pest.

Most of this story’s humor stems from Leighton’s fruity turn as the cat-lady-as-exorcist Orloff. Her wavering, eccentric tone is matched by her brassy expletives such as when she commands the elemental to “Get out, ya bastard!” Leighton has quite a few lines that tickle the ribs due to the earnestness with which she delivers them, like when she describes the demon feeding off its victims’ energy (“Sucking up the fluids like a babe at his mother’s breast”) or the evil’s magnetism to Warren’s wife Susan (“She’ll attract them like flies to a dung heap!”). A disquieting moment occurs in the middle of the program when Warren’s familiar coyishly tickles Susan in bed only to start strangling her. The scene is rather unsettling in its own small way, though the sight of Nyree Dawn Porter struggling with her invisible attacker and her race to the bathroom as she retches at the poltergeist’s awful stench will certainly provoke some laughter. The exorcism finale is a pretty crackerjack set piece, as Orloff bellows her commands as pillows burst in an eruption of goose-feathers and a ghostly wind nearly tears the house right out of the ground. Its played-for-cereal ending is just a tad ludicrous though, as we see the now-possessed Porter strike down her hubby with a poker (déjà vu…) only to break down the front door with superhero flair as she exits into the night. “The Elemental” has such an odd mixture of terror and triviality that the moments when it plays for laughs feel more and more off-kilter and weird the more you think about them. This is perhaps epitomized no more succinctly than in another “context is everything” chestnut that Orloff offers on par with the Face’s orders from “The Gate Crasher”: “His main objective is to get inside you.”

Our final selection for the evening is pretty much simplicity personified in both title and content. It’s a weird fairy tale called “The Door” in which happy couple William and Rosemary Seaton (Ian Ogilvy and Lesley Ann-Down) acquire an ornate, Gothic stone door from Cushing’s shop to use it as the entryway to a pantry (!) in their home. When Rosemary fancifully imagines the door opening to a more dramatic space, William discovers that it does just that, as his meagre shelves are replaced with a sapphire-hued parlor of the previous century. Not only that, but it is the room of the dreaded Sir Michael Sinclair (Jack Watson), a depraved aristocrat who spent his sordid life immersing himself in the study of evil. And you can bet your ascot that Sir Michael is not resting easily now that the portal to his realm has been opened.

You were correct in your guesstimation that my earlier comment about the interchangeable stories was referring to “The Gate Crasher” and “The Door,” seeing as how they both deal with two different kinds of gateways that grant access to vampiric men of the past who terrorize the modern worlds of their young protagonists. They act as interesting companion pieces though, as the former shows our hero giving in to the power of darkness where the character from the latter tale hacks it to pieces with a battle axe. As pale as it might be as a reworking of the Bluebeard tale, “The Door” certainly grabs one’s attention with more adept technical skill and bombast. Light and darkness are used to good effect when William reads Sinclair’s journal, the implications of his sacrilegious acts made by the dancing shadow of a crucifix on the wall, and Sinclair’s own entrance is quite creepy as we initially see him only as a raggedly-breathing shadow before he is revealed for the bewigged bogey that he is. Once in the light, Sinclair becomes a regular cackling villain when he sweeps the fainted Rosemary off her feet, snickering to William as the lad tries to stop him “Two souls are better than one!” Enthusiasts of performers such as Tod Slaughter will surely get a kick out of that. And the segment ends on a real blood-and-thunder note as William lays waste to the evil door, the carvings oozing plasma and causing Sinclair to collapse like a heap of sticks. I especially liked how William’s blows on the door’s hinges apparently caused Sinclair’s spine to break in two! A small amount of cleverness and a rarely-seen happy ending make “The Door” stand out, but amongst its fellows it may seem like it’s retreading ground we’ve literally just seen. But, to be fair, typing all my thoughts out has actually made this story rise in my estimation. What’s up with that? Maybe I just have a thing for bloodsuckers in curly period wigs.

Okay, I think somebody better bash my head with a poker before I babble on any more than I have. Even this little sprite on my shoulder is pissed off at me now.

NT: If only that little gremlin had stopped you sooner: For the most part, you’ve summed up my exact feelings about each of these witchy tales. I could stare long and hard into the blue candle flame and try to drudge up some further interpretations from the beyond, but why bother? Amicus anthology tales are slight by design. All I shall offer are a few stray observations about these tales before moving on to place the final nail in this flick’s coffin.

I find “The Gate Crasher” to be a rather wonderful witch’s brew of horror subgenres. Part psycho-slasher (David Warner’s murder of prostitutes brings us into seedier territory than we’re used to); part ghost story (a séance and a haunted mirror, even if this mirror doesn’t give the ones from THE BOOGEYMAN (1980) or OCULUS (2014) much competition); part LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) master/slave dynamic (yes, to Warner the ghost mirror commands, “Feed me!”); and part Lovercraftian tale of cosmic coercion (we learn that the mirror leads to a shadowy beyond of immortality and ultimate power, and that those who occupy this nether realm “are Legion.” The implication may be Satanic, but the details seem to point towards a horror far grander). I think the problematic homosexual undertones you’ve picked up on are on point: sure, the mirror man tries out the blood of women, but it’s ultimately the blood of Warner and his effeminate, cat-toting downstairs neighbor that return him to a corporeal state. Warner himself seems to be dealing with similar feelings of sexual confusion (recall, he’s unwilling to get all pointed and thrusty with his presumed galpal, Pamela). We can only hope that one day the masses become a little more understanding of other people’s lifestyles, enabling Warner and his extra-dimensional pals to come out of the ghost mirror.

“An Act of Kindness” is certainly the film’s best tale, for all the reasons you’ve mentioned. The segment captures in its characterization of Christopher Lowe (Ian Bannen) a depth, subtlety, and pathos rarely angled for in these roughly twenty minute long Amicus short films. But, yes, every scene is enlivened by the waifish, ghostly presence of Angela Pleasence. Her filmography is sparse, but those who have witnessed her in films like this and Jose Ramon Larraz’s SYMPTOMS (1974) aren’t soon to forget her. Her unsettling, improvised, nearly tuneless rendition of a creepy lullaby (which includes the charming and reassuring line, “eaten by worms in the cold wet earth”) while doing absent-minded chores around the house is going to rear up in one of my nightmares someday, I just know it.

When considered among to the other (quote unquote) funny episodes of prior Amicus anthologies (I’m thinking “Voodoo” from DR. TERROR or “Bargain in Death” from VAULT OF HORROR),  “The Elemental” is assuredly a cut or two above. I believe I chuckled a few times, thanks to the insuppressible Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton), so that’s something. For me, the ultimate success of this segment rests upon its POLTERGEIST-y climax, all sound, fury, and living room windstorms. The image of a possessed Susan (Nyree Dawn Porter) bursting out through the front door like She-Hulk in the final shot will never cease to strike a spark of amusement in me. Or perhaps that’s just the elemental perched on my shoulder pulling at my cheeks?

And despite its niggling impression of “been-there-done-that-literally-half-an-hour-ago,” I quite love “The Door.” Allow me to count the reasons: 1.) the absurdity of a grandiose antique door being installed on the hinges of a stationary pantry, 2.) said stationary pantry (who has ever even heard of such a superfluous thing?) doubling as a time travel portal, 3.) the sheer brutality of the drawn out final conflict in which the door and its demon get the butt of an ax handed to them, and 4.) the revised ending in which one of our victims is allowed to escape through good behavior, producing the cleverest sting in the tail we’ve had yet.

Again, if you average them out, I’d have no hesitation placing FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE near the very top of the Amicus canon. It’s lively, creative, provocative, well-acted, well-shot: a real devil of an anthology. I still wonder, then, why it so quickly faded from my memory. If I were to disregard the influence of its supremely unmemorable title, I might hazard that part of the reason is portmanteau fatigue. When I first viewed the Amicus anthologies several years ago, I tackled them all in short succession. By the time I arrived at this, their seventh anthology, I suppose I’d had enough of anthologies altogether. During our Shepperton Screams series, I’ve again made short order of them due to our schedule, and, believe me, I’ve felt the effects of this bombardment. I think there’s only so much anthologizing a poor elemental soul can take. Let’s agree to move on to redder pastures, shall we? Let’s see that if it’s at this late point in Amicus’s brief life that the screaming truly starts…

Next week: And Now the Screaming Starts (1973)