Yawn of the Devil: Eye of the Devil (1966)

The reputation of Eye of the Devil came to me via books on classic horror movies years before I saw the movie. To my knowledge it was never released on VHS, and it was not until TCM acquired the rights to MGM’s film library that it began to show up on cable TV in the wee hours of the morning, usually as part of a David Niven or Deborah Kerr film festival. A DVD format was not available until a few years ago as part of the Warner’s Manufacture on Demand collection

Eye of the Devil is purportedly an occult shocker complete with witches, warlocks, and human sacrifice. Add to the subject matter the presence of the beguiling Sharon Tate who was to be killed several years later by the Manson cult, and you’ve got a film ripe for a bad reputation. The DVD slipcase cover featuring the original poster art trumpets the tag-line, “This is the climax in mind-chilling terror.” Too bad the film doesn’t make good on that promise.

Depending on your tolerance for moldy oldies like Eye of the Devil, film fans seem to love it or hate it. I love the black and white cinematography, the constantly moving camera, and rapid fire edits. I love looking at Sharon Tate, sinister and seductive with her blond hair and black turtlenecks. I love the grim, joyless faces of British cinema royalty – Flora Robson, Edward Mulhare, Donald Pleasence, and David Niven – but I can’t say the same for Deborah Kerr. She enters the plot as an emotionally overwrought housewife with a nervous tremor in her voice and within ten minutes of screen time her performance accelerates to a fever pitch. Kerr is not entirely to blame. The majority of film footage was shot with Kim Novak in the role of Catherine de Montfaucon. Novak was thrown from a horse while filming the scene where Catherine visits the family crypt in the forest. Kerr was her replacement. All footage with Novak was reshot, leaving Kerr little time to create a nuanced performance.

Eye of the Devil, originally titled 13, came from an uninspired Gothic horror novel by Phillip Loraine, Day of the Arrow – which would have made a better title for the movie. I guess have issues with a Gothic horror film with the Devil in the title but not in the actual story line.

Paperback reprint cover art by Lou Marchetti

The plot follows the standard template, but it’s more a tepid exercise in slow-burn Gothic suspense than full blown occult horror. Phillippe (Niven), the Marquise de Montfaucon, is called home to the ancestral chateau, Bellenac, deep in French vineyard country. It seems the crops have failed, and Phillippe has an obligation to fulfill.  His wife, Catherine, ignores his warning for her to remain in Paris, packs up the kiddies and arrives at Bellenac in time to scamper around like a nervous kitten wondering what all the fuss is about. It’s pretty obvious from the get-go – obvious to everyone except Catherine.  Catherine whimpers and whines but all that Phillippe and the rest of the relatives and morose family retainers will say is, “You don’t understand.”

The idea of human sacrifice to ensure the abundance of the crop has been done better, and in more horrifying manner, in tales such as The Wicker Man and (The Dark Secret of) Harvest Home. Eye of the Devil presents its occult “shocks” rather timidly. Odile de Cary (Sharon Tate) and her brother Christian de Cary (David Hemmings) are some sort of witch and warlock brother/sister act who serve little purpose other than to stand around looking blond and pretty; hooded figures stalk our perpetually frightened heroine, voices chant in Latin…there’s even a mad relative locked away in a tower who only confirms what the audience has figured out well ahead of time.

From the looks of the film and the all-star cast, it seems MGM was intent on making a classy thriller, but the whole thing is too tame to be horrifying. Imagine how diabolical and lurid the film could have been if Roger Corman had been behind the camera.

But it rocks the Gothic eye-candy scale, and earns its place in the Midnight Room.

Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe: Castle of Blood (1962)

About twenty years ago I stumbled on a video company called Sinister Cinema which specialized in public domain films of every exploitation genre imaginable: old movie serials, juvenile delinquent, sword and sandal, poverty row mysteries, bottom of the barrel sci-fi, and of course, horror. I was eager to get my hands on copies of some of the more obscure films I had watched on Scream In when I was a kid, movies like Black Sunday and Terror in the Crypt. Once I started ordering from the catalog, I was hooked and picked up some fun things as well like Roger Corman’s Swamp Women, Ed Wood Jr’s Jail Bait, and a campy hoot called Teenage Devil Dolls. But the real excitement for me was the chance to finally see some of the legendary and, until then, unattainable Barbara Steele flicks such as Castle of Blood and The Terror of Dr. Hichcock.

Today, my collection of VHS tapes from Sinister Cinema is buried in a box in my basement. Since the advent of DVD, there have been a number of film companies who have gone to great lengths to painstakingly restore some of these gems. Hichcock remains unattainable, but in 2002 Synapse Films remastered and fully restored the wonderful entry in Italian Gothic cinema, 1962’s Danza Macabre, better known as Castle of Blood stateside, restoring bits of risqué dialogue and some brief female nudity.

Castle of Blood purports to be based on an Edgar Allan Poe story. It bears some resemblance to his story Never Bet the Devil Your Head, but beyond that it is strictly a fabrication of screenwriters Sergio Corbucci and Giovanni Grimaldi. Like the American counterparts filmed by Roger Corman, Castle of Blood doesn’t adapt Poe as much as it captures the dreamlike quality and sometimes hallucinatory feel of his work.

 

Poe himself appears in the prelude at the Inn of the Four Devils, where he is being interviewed by British journalist Alan Foster. In the tavern, Poe and Foster meet Lord Thomas Blackwood who offers Alan Foster one hundred pounds if he can survive the night at the haunted Blackwood family castle. Foster accepts the wager, Poe and Blackwood drop him off at the estate and the fun begins.

Visually, like most of the other Italian Gothics from the early 1960s, Castle of Blood takes its cue from Corman – we are treated to plenty of cobwebs and candelabras, mysterious piano music, and drop dead gorgeous babes, most notably Barbara Steele who somehow cornered the market on haunted Gothic heroines in many of these films. Like most boys my age who were mesmerized by her Gothic glamour, I’ve had a lifelong obsession with the actress and her films to the point where the dead heroine of my novel, The Haunting at Blackwood Hall, is not only named after Steele’s character of Elizabeth Blackwood from Castle of Blood, but possesses her physical description as well.

Castle of Blood is slow moving by today’s standards, but it positively drips with Gothic aura in its tale of a house full of ghosts who relive the last five minutes of their lives every night at midnight. While the movie has several long passages of the characters wandering through the cobwebs with eerie music playing on the soundtrack, we are also treated to some stunning outbursts of violence and even a bit of lesbian erotica. Due to the slow pacing, Castle of Blood is not necessarily to everyone’s taste. But if you are a lover of cinema as visual art and ready to tackle something different in the Gothic genre, please give Castle of Blood a try. The Synapse release is still available from Amazon.

I realized I have been writing this blog for well over a year now and have not yet touched on the Italian branch of Gothic horror films. Expect more in the weeks and months ahead.

Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe: January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849.

Daniel Haller's Lovecraft Trilogy

Why should Roger Corman get all the credit? A great deal of the success and continued popularity of Corman’s Poe adaptations are the art direction and stunning sets that Daniel Haller created on a shoestring budget. After studying at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, Haller cut his teeth on low-budget American International exploitation pictures, most notably a slew of films featuring mobsters, hot rods, and juvenile delinquents. After directing a handful of feature films for American International, he enjoyed a long career as a director of such 1970s television staples such as The Mod Squad, Ironside, and Kojak. But it is his magnificent eye for Gothic detail which keeps his name alive among fans of classic horror films.

Haller’s first foray into the Lovecraft pantheon was his work on Corman’s The Haunted Palace, an unofficial entry in AI’s Poe cycle but owing nothing more than the title to Poe. The story is a fairly faithful adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The Haunted Palace was one of Haller’s last efforts as Art Director, and once again he was able to suggest a Gothic grandeur and opulence in the cavernous interiors he designed for the film.

Two years later Haller made his directorial debut with Die, Monster, Die, (1965) loosely based on Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space. An uneven film, Die, Monster, Die has its moments, with smoke machine fog billowing in front of exterior shots of Berkshire’s Oakley Court, Freda Jackson’s disfigured face hidden behind gossamer bed curtains, and a particularly strange visit to Corbin Witley’s greenhouse. Die, Monster, Die suffers by moving the story location to England, as well as a weak script that bears little resemblance to the source material

Stephen Reinhart (Nick Adams) peruses the Necronomicon.

This can't be good.

Haller fared much better with his final Lovecraft film, 1970’s masterpiece of quasi-satanic schlock, The Dunwich Horror. Lovecraft purists may argue that the story (scripted by future Academy Award winner Curtis Hansen for his adaptation of James Elroy’s complex novel L.A. Confidential) strayed too far afield. What critics often overlook is The Dunwich Horror’s faithfulness to the mythos that Lovecraft created. As always, American International aimed the production squarely at the teen market, filling the screen with psychedelic imagery and cashing in on the late 60s craze for devil worship and the sacrifice of nubile young maidens. Thanks to another great score by Les Baxter, an over-the-top performance from Dean Stockwell, and much livelier direction from Haller, The Dunwich Horror remains a cult favorite among fans of 60s low budget horror features.

The Altar to Yog-Sothoth on Sentinel Hill.

Sadly, Haller has never returned to Art Direction, and with the exception of directing one entry in Rod Serling’s Night Gallery series, never ventured into the horror field again. The Haunted Palace, Die, Monster, Die, and The Dunwich Horror are three vastly different types of movies with varying degrees of success, but until a major league director such as Guillermo del Toro finally comes through with his proposed adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness, Haller’s Lovecraft Trilogy remains some of the best Lovecraft films we have. 

Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whately invokes Yog-Sothoth.

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

For kids growing up in the US in the 1960s, Saturday night television was a thing of wonder when we were allowed to stay up late with a bowl of popcorn and a bottle of root beer, shivering with anticipation as the minutes kicked down to the start of our local fright show. In my city it was called Scream In and was hosted by a groovy hippie vampire named The Cool Ghoul. Week after week he brought us the best in (mostly Gothic) horror films from the 40s, 50s, and early 60s. We saw our first Hammer films on these programs, low budget shockers such as Francis Coppola’s Dementia-13, dubbed Italian imports, and of course, the Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of mystery and imagination. Few things were scarier to me at that age than the bloodied hand of Barbara Steele rising from her tomb to stalk Vincent Price through the womb-like corridors of Medina Castle in 1961’s Pit and the Pendulum.

British film critic David Robinson accurately pointed out, "As in (Corman’s) House of Usher, the quality of the film is its full-blooded feeling for Gothic horror - storms and lightning, moldering castles and cobwebbed torture chambers, bleeding brides trying to tear the lids from their untimely tombs." Indeed, Pit and the Pendulum is so soaked in Gothic atmosphere that I have probably watched this film on VHS and DVD more than any other. On any rainy Saturday afternoon, sleepless midnight, and of course, the Halloween season, I find myself being drawn back to Castle Medina and the ravings of Vincent Price again and again.

To today’s younger audiences who have grown up with more graphic shockers, Pit and the Pendulum might seem too cheesy to take seriously. I have to admit that if Vincent Price was any more of a ham his performance might be mistaken for Christmas dinner. But when you drill down through the blood and thunder soundtrack by Les Baxter, the lashing rains and crashing waves, Daniel Haller’s art direction which fills the frame with an almost unparalleled Gothic atmosphere (watch for more about this guy in future posts), what we have left is a truly disturbing portrait of a mind on the brink of psychological collapse.

For those not familiar with the plot of Richard Matheson’s adaptation (spoiler alert), Don Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price) is the son of Sebastian Medina, one of the Spanish Inquisitions most notorious torturers. At an early age, Nicholas witnessed the death by torture of his Mother and Uncle at the hands of his Father, accusing both of marital infidelities. Here we have what is unofficially known as Wicked Father Syndrome, a motif found in several of Corman’s horror films as well as a staple of 20^th century romantic Gothic fiction. This psychological fissure casts Medina as a true Byronic hero, making him a character to be both feared and pitied. The irony of this childhood trauma is that his own wife, Elizabeth (played by the ever ravishing horror film icon, Barbara Steele) has engaged in adultery with Nicholas’ best friend, Dr. Leon. The core of the plot revolves around an elaborate gaslight wherein Dr. Leon and Elizabeth fake her death, going so far as to bury another woman’s body in Elizabeth’s crypt. Nicholas, and the audience, have been led to believe that Elizabeth is dead, which brings us to the memorable scene of Elizabeth rising from her tomb, very much alive.

If Pit and the Pendulum were to be adapted today, the film would undoubtedly focus on grisly torture effects, much as it did in a 1991 version. With its music, art direction, atmospherics and emotional histrionics, Corman’s 1961 film remains one of Gothic cinema’s major milestones.  

“Neeeecholas!”