The Life and Loves of Alfred Hitchock

When I was a kid racing home from school to watch Dark Shadows and staying up late on Saturday night to watch Shock it to Me and Scream In, our local sci-fi/horror double feature in glorious black and white, I was as much a fan of Alfred Hitchcock as I was of Lugosi and Karloff, and Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

Television showings of Psycho and The Birds were not as common as Hammer Horror and Universal Monsters films. We had afternoon reruns of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but at a young age I had not yet developed a taste for psychological thrillers and usually grew bored with the stories between Hitch’s on-screen appearances.

I can’t think of any other film director in my lifetime that became such a public icon the way Hitchcock did. Everyone loved his movies, from the romantic thrillers to the horror shows. Everyone recognized his face. Many loved to imitate his voice.

It’s “the voice” that actors Anthony Hopkins in Hitchcock and Toby Jones in The Girl pull off with panache, and pull us – somewhat – into the mind of the Master of the Macabre. I watched the two films over two consecutive days, and am glad I did. Chronologically, The Girl is a continuation of Hitchcock and ultimately takes us further into the mind of a genius but deeply disturbed artist.

I had previously read Donald Spoto’s biography, The Dark Side of Genius, as well as Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. The Rebello book, chock full of trivia about the making of one of the finest American horror films ever made, is the source material for the film, Hitchcock. From the search for the perfect vehicle for his next film to the notorious moment when Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Revel, tells Hitch he can’t release Psycho as is….because Janet Leigh blinks while laying murdered on the shower floor, Hitchcock manages to touch all bases within a mere 98 minute running time.

Despite my personal annoyance with several shots where the prosthetic chin is painfully obvious, I was sucked in by Hopkins’ performance and frequently forgot I wasn’t watching a documentary of the director appearing as himself. It was also great fun to see the cast who portray the familiar participants in Psycho – Jessica Biel as Vera Miles, James D’Arcy as Tony Perkins, a fabulously beautiful Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh, Ralph Macchio in a cameo as screenwriter Joseph Stefano, and a terrific supporting performance by Toni Collette as Hitch’s assistant, Peggy Robertson. Hopkins, of course, has the juiciest lines in the movie, tossing off one macabre one-liner after another which had the audience at my viewing tittering with laughter throughout. Hitchcock gives us a fiendishly entertaining portrait of the brilliant director as the loveable imp we remember from television talk shows and his appearances as host of his own TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Despite its source material and marketing campaign, Hitchcock is ultimately a story about Hitch’s relationship with wife Alma. In a way, so is The Girl, although in the second film, Alma takes a back seat to the director’s obsession with creating the perfect blond movie star from scratch.

HBO’s offering, The Girl, dares to go beneath the public persona and give us a portrait of a genius with bizarre fetishes and dangerous sexual obsessions. Based on another Spoto book, Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies, as well as the personal memories of star ‘Tippi’ Hedrin, The Girl focuses less on the actual making of The Birds and Marnie, instead placing the emphasis on Hitchcock’s self-destructive obsessions. There are a few “behind the scenes” type sequences including one highly amusing scene showing gull wranglers chasing down stunt birds along the coast of  Bodega Bay, providing levity to what is an otherwise grim and often shocking film. Perhaps the most telling moment of just how far Hitch would go with his malignant obsession and corruption of directorial authority is the planned one-day shoot using mechanical birds (the scene at the end of The Birds when Melanie Daniels goes to the attic room of the Brenner farmhouse). Hitchcock actually filmed the scene with live birds attacking the actress over and over…for a period of five days. Understandably, Hedrin collapsed from exhaustion and was hospitalized.

The Girl is riveting, and despite the Mad Men-era period detail, not a pretty film to watch. Toby Jones and Anthony Hopkins are two very different actors but as with Hopkins’ performance, I surrendered completely to Jones’ interpretation.

So, which is the better film? That’s a question I can’t answer. As a lifelong fan and Hitchcock trivia nut, I’ll be buying both on DVD. I will probably shelve them separately, however. Hitchcock will enjoy a place of honor next to Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. The Girl will be slid into place next to that other classic of sexual fetishism, Blue Velvet. 

Séance (2001)

As much as I enjoy J Horror I don’t want to stray too far from the subject of The Midnight Room. With Séance, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 television film based on the Mark McShane novel, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, I think an exception can be made. The original 1964 British film starring Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough may already be known to fans of classic Gothic thrillers.

Briefly, the original story concerns a medium who strives for validation by coercing her husband into kidnapping a little girl whom she will then “find” through her psychic powers. While the original is certainly fodder for the psychological exploration of the two main characters, Kurosawa reinterprets the character of the wife and medium, Junco Santo, as a woman frustrated by living in the shadow of her more successful husband. Kurosawa adds an interesting new subplot: a child molester is the one who attempts to kidnap a charming little girl in a vibrant green dress. The child manages to escape and hides inside an empty equipment trunk belonging to Junco’s husband, a sound recording engineer who, not knowing the girl is inside, locks the trunk and takes it back to his home in the city.

Junco has been working with a young university student hoping to prove his theory that psychics are of value in police work. The police seek her assistance in discovering the whereabouts of the missing girl. It’s a fairly contrived plot development that the missing girl just happens to be in a trunk on the floor in the garage...and unfortunately not the film’s only plot hole. Though still alive, the couple conspires to take the girl to an abandoned location and ultimately Junco will “find” her using her psychic powers.

Well, you guessed it. Plots of this sort always go horribly wrong and next thing you know the child dies and her ghost torments her accidental murderers in true Japanese style, complete with long black hair covering her face.

Next to Hideo Nakata (Ringu, Dark Water), Kiyoshi Kurosawa is one of Japan’s leading horror film-makers, but like Western directors such as Alfred Hitchcock whose name is synonymous with horror on the strength of only two films in his oeuvre, Kurosawa’s films transcend the confines of the horror film by nature of their psychological elements. Séance, Charisma, Pulse, Doppelganger, and my personal favorite, Cure, are all outstanding examples of Kurosawa’s style. His framing is formal, but what is left outside the frame is often more important than what the camera sees. The same holds true for his scripts. The screen stories have an unnerving sense of ambiguity, which brings to mind Nicholas Roeg’s adaptation on Don’t Look Now. Though the visual aspect of Kurosawa’s films are devoid of luscious Gothic eye candy, they manage to be bleak and moody, and at their core are disturbing psychological thrillers involving any number of paranormal element and thus deserve a special place upstairs in The Midnight Room.  

When It Rains It Pours: Dark Water (2005)

From the opening shot of the 2005 ghost story, Dark Water, we know we are in for a wet ride - so wet that I wonder why the filmmakers didn’t just go ahead and set it in Seattle. But the Roosevelt Island setting is, in fact, one of the standout elements of this often reviled American remake of a Japanese horror film.

Both films are adapted from the same source material, a short story by Koji Suzuki who wrote the original novel The Ring. Japanese horror flicks became wildly popular among horror fans in the 2000s after the successful American remakes of The Ring and The Grudge… so much so that they coined the nickname of J Horror. Displaying an overwhelming sense of unoriginality over the past twenty years or so, Hollywood has a way of plundering anything and everything it can get its hands on, so that by the time Dark Water arrived in 2005, fans of original foreign films were ready to ipso facto hate anything that had an English language remake. Take a look at customer reviews of Fincher’s version of TheGirl with the Dragon Tattoo on Amazon if you don’t believe me.

Prejudice in favor of foreign originals aside, I think part of the reason Dark Water has a bad rep is that it isn’t horror movie – not in the contemporary sense of the word. It is a ghost story first and foremost, with all the traditional elements in tact… and beneath the surface story lies a superb example of the Psychological Gothic. For my money, ghost stories work best when these two elements walk hand in hand. The Haunting (of Hill House), The Woman in Black, The Changeling – each a brilliant ghost story with a strong psychological undercurrent. In these stories, the lonely and bereaved are highly susceptible to supernatural manifestations.

In Dark Water we have a young mother, Dahlia (played with utter conviction by Jennifer Connelly) trying to raise a seven-year-old girl on her own while suffering through a nasty custody battle and a borderline addiction to sedatives. Connelly’s performance shows us a woman with a battered soul, already hanging by a thin, psychological thread, so that during the first half of the movie we wonder how much is in Dahlia’s head and how much is “reality.”

While Dark Water does not feature the old Gothic house which plays a starring role in the films mentioned above, the setting of the low income, industrial housing complex on Roosevelt Island is as dreary and depressing as any crumbling manor house. It is this visual element of urban decay which gives Dark Water much of its strength – an urban dwelling has not been this menacing since Rosemary’s Baby.

Dark Water hits my buttons on many levels. It’s the sort of movie that makes me say, “I wish I wrote that.” Hopefully, with the passage of time, Dark Water will be considered less an offense to J Horror enthusiasts and given the respect it deserves as a beautifully wrought Gothic ghost story. 

All in the Family: Night of Dark Shadows

After the slaughter of the Collins family as we know it at the hands of the cousin from England, Collinwood is inherited by Quentin Collins – no, not the Quentin Collins who suffered the curse of the werewolf, but a moody painter from New York City. Elizabeth probably left the house to Roger or Carolyn in her will, and after a lengthy inheritance battle it probably should have gone to David who, if memory serves correct, was the lone Collins survivor at the end of House of Dark Shadows.

So much for continuity, and continuity, or the lack thereof, is what Night of Dark Shadows is all about. If you sat through the recent Warner’s DVD release of the 1971 follow up to House of Dark Shadows, you might have scratched your head a few times wondering why plot elements fit together like a puzzle without all the pieces.

Dark Shadows loyalists know this story well – the original cut of Night of Dark Shadows ran just over two hours. Director Dan Curtis was forced to trim the movie to a brisk 90 minutes just prior to release – allegedly with only 24 hours in which to do it.

Which is a shame because Night of Dark Shadows has a lot going for it. With gauzy dream sequences, rain drenched funerals, candelabras, cobwebs, and billowing curtains, Night of Dark Shadows plays out a peculiarly violent variation on the familiar gothic reincarnation drama.

No sooner has Quentin Collins arrived at Collinwood than he begins to experience nightmares and visions from the past. Creepy housekeeper Carlotta (played to the hilt by Grayson Hall) Drake informs Quentin that not only is he the reincarnation of scar-faced Charles Collins, but also that she is the reincarnation of Sarah Castle, a little girl who lived at Collinwood two hundred years before. It is through Carlotta that the spirits of the past are kept alive at Collinwood.

I’m still not sure how Gerard, the stuttering groundskeeper, fits into the picture. Is he the reincarnation of Charles Collins’ brother, Gabriel? Gabriel was married to Angelique who was having an affair with Charles, who was married to Laura (I think). I’m also not sure if Tracy, Quentin’s wife, is supposed to be the reincarnation of Laura or not, but when Quentin is possessed by Charles he is alternately smitten with her and on the verge of killing her. Implied marital rape and drowning by swimming pool ensue.

Then there are the neighbors, a husband and wife writing team who specialize in Gothic Romance novels who happen to pick up a painting of Charles Collins in New York and in the blink of an eye have pieced the whole thing together. It’s still pretty confusing, but I’ll blame the various plot holes on the cutting room floor.

Is Night of Dark Shadows an incomprehensible mess? Yes, indeed. Is it as bad as Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows? Heck, no. Nothing is that bad. Night of Dark Shadows as it exists may be a bloody mess of a plot. Night of Dark Shadows as it was meant to be might have been a more visceral nightmare for mature audiences. But only the restoration of 30 minutes of lostfootage can provide the answer. After years of restorative work, Warner Brothers in their infinite wisdom has only released the original theatrical cut to DVD so the public at large may never know the answer.

After House of Dark Shadows’ cinematic retread of the show, it’s refreshing to see Dan Curtis attempt an original storyline, something the 1990 revival series, an unaired 2004 pilot for a reboot for the WB, and the Burton/Depp fiasco failed to do. For Dark Shadows to carry on successfully past the original TV series’ five years’ worth of crackerjack Gothic soap opera storylines, I think future producers should consider creating new material “inspired” by the original series. With its forays back, forward, and sideways through time, the world of Collinwood had no boundaries. If the Collins family is to be revived for future generations, let’s start thinking outside the box.

Vampire Season: House of Dark Shadows

You know you really love a movie when you can watch it a thousand times and still find something new to appreciate. The VHS copy of House of Dark Shadows sits on the shelf next to about one year's worth of episodes of the TV show (whatever storyline I happen to be watching this year). Compared to the MPI volumes, the top of the cardboard box of HODS is covered in dust. It’s been awhile since I’ve watched it.

One of the most distinctive features of the movie I noticed when I watched the newly released Warner’s DVD this past week was how sleek and compact the screenplay is. Primary episode scribes Sam Hall and Gordon Russell distilled months of daily storyline into 95 minutes that combines characters and reduces story arcs to their lowest common denominator, something the Tim Burton adaptation failed to do.

Those not familiar with the television show may not fully grasp the familial relationships – Elizabeth owns Collinwood manor, Roger is her brother, David is Roger’s son, and Carolyn Elizabeth’s daughter – but it isn’t necessary to follow the storyline. We don’t even need twenty minutes of prologue telling us how Barnabas came to be cursed, who Josette is and why he plans to give governess Maggie Evans her music box.

Filmed in 1970 when old school vampires were at their cinematic peak (think Count Yorga and Christopher Lee’s Dracula popping up in A.D. 1972), Jonathan Frid’s suave, European cousin Barnabas is re-imagined with a visceral taste for blood not possible on afternoon television. The television Barnabas was a bit of a whiney-butt. After all, he is the grandfather of Anne Rice’s reluctant Louis and, whether we like it or not, great-grandfather to Stephanie Meyer’s glittery Edward., two reasons why I applaud House of Dark Shadows. This is a bosom-heaving, blood thirsty vampire movie to rival the best of Hammer Films, complete with savagely bitten throats and fonts of blood when the stakes are hammered home. It’s no wonder when I saw House of Dark Shadows at the theater in 1970 at age 11, the lobby was filled with whimpering grade-schoolers. Barnabas Collins is pee-your-pants scary. If you don’t believe me, watch what happens when Dr. Hoffman takes her revenge and Barnabas shows his true age.

Hyperactive storyline aside, free from the restraints of daytime studio video work, House of Dark Shadows features frenetic cinematography. The camera zooms, tracks, swirls, and sometimes makes the viewer sick with handheld moments. The transfer from film to DVD, while not perfect, at least presents the films murky, dark colors with more clarity, the reds more precise, than was ever possible with VHS. The cast, especially Frid, deliver fever-pitched performances, making this a classic vampire film to be reckoned with.

If you’re new to Dark Shadows (and if you follow this blog, I doubt that you are) and ready to dip your foot into the bloodbath, leave the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp debacle on the video shelf, and spend the night with this lusty demise of the Collins family as we know it.

And as always, fang me later. 

Son of the Beast: Rosemary's Baby

Since the beginning of cinema as a universally shared human interest some one hundred years ago, readers who also love movies and movie fans who must read the book on which a movie is based have argued the age-old debate: the book was better than the movie or the movie was better than the book.

Rosemary’s Baby is one of those rare instances where the novel and film exist on equal footing. Ira Levin’s streamlined suspense thriller was a huge bestseller in the mid-sixties. In hiring shlockmeister William Castle as producer, Paramount Pictures probably wasn’t counting on much more than a standard Gothic potboiler. For reasons known only to him, director Roman Polanski chose to pursue a very literal adaptation of the novel in his self-penned screenplay.

Picture if you will, those of you who are as familiar with the scenes in Rosemary’s Baby as you are with other favorite classics – Casablanca or The Godfather – the scenes from Levin’s novel, however seemingly unimportant, reproduced in Polanski’s film:

A workman at a sculptured green door marked 7B looked at them and turned back to fitting a peepscope into its cut-out hole.

Mrs. Castavet was wrapped in light blue, with snow-white daubs of gloves, purse, shoes, and hat… He was dazzling, in an every-color seersucker jacket, red slacks, a pink bow tie, and a gray fedora with a pink band.

Rosemary looked outside the door. She could see only the end of the living room that was bridge tables and file cabinets; Guy and Mr. Castavet were at the other end. A plane of blue cigarette smoke lay motionless in the air.

This last one is one of my favorite shots in the movie. Only after seeing the movie or knowing the story do we realize in retrospect that this is the scene wherein Guy Woodhouse seals the fate of his unborn child. This shot also establishes an ongoing motif in the film, that of feral eyes watching the proceedings. Notice how many times two lamps, or two lighted windows in another wing of the apartment building appear as eyes. While the book and movie follow the exact same story line to the point where the dialogue is lifted verbatim from the novel, through this and other cinematic techniques Polanski is able to create a palpable sense of paranoia which isn’t present in the novel. The book reads as a tongue-in-cheek parody of a Gothic Romance with Guy and Rosemary moving into the haunted house despite the warnings of the superstitious villager, appearing here in the character of Rosemary’s friend, Hutch.

Are you aware that the Bramford had a rather unpleasant reputation around the turn of the century? It's where the Trench sisters conducted their little dietary experiments. And Keith Kennedy held his parties. Adrian Marcato lived there too. The Trench sisters were two proper Victorian ladies - they cooked and ate several young children including a niece. Adrian Marcato practiced witchcraft. He made quite a splash in the 90s by announcing that he'd conjured up the living devil. Apparently, people believed him so they attacked and nearly killed him in the lobby of the Bramford. Later, the Keith Kennedy business began and by the 20s, the house was half empty...World War II filled the house up again. They called it Black Bramford. This house has a high incidence of unpleasant happenings. In '59, a dead infant was found wrapped in newspaper in the basement

This speech from the screenplay sets the tone for this house of horrors into which Rosemary and Guy have moved. And for anyone who has lived under a rock for the past forty-five years or is simply too young to have caught wind of this classic, Rosemary winds up pregnant after dreaming of being raped by the Devil, and rapidly dissolves into paranoia believing the clan of geriatric neighbors in her apartment building are actually a coven of witches intent on sacrificing her unborn child to the Dark One.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Ira Levin wrote a handful of suspense novels which have gone into the public consciousness both from written versions and film adaptations. We all know what it means to be a Stepford wife, we all know what the boys from Brazil are, and we certainly know the fate of Rosemary’s baby.

And we certainly know what happened to the horror film in its wake. Rosemary’s Baby grew up to be the son of Satan in The Omen and a thirteen-year-old girl possessed by the African demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist.

In a 2002 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Levin expressed his dissatisfaction with the tide of popular Satanism his work appeared to unleash.

“I feel guilty that ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ led to ‘The Exorcist,’ ‘The Omen.’ A whole generation has been exposed, has more belief in Satan. I don’t believe in Satan. And I feel that the strong fundamentalism we have would not be as strong if there hadn’t been so many of these books. Of course, I didn’t send back any of the royalty checks.”

If you have never read Rosemary’s Baby or haven’t read it in awhile, what better time of year to pull it off your shelf, check it out at the library, or buy it via One Click for your Kindle (currently 2.99 USD). Pop in the movie and follow along. If you’re like me and a couple of my more colorful friends, you’ll enjoy saying the dialogue along with the film.

Tannis, anyone?

You’re in Debrovnik. I don’t hear you.

And my favorite:

Shh, I think I hear the Trench Sisters chewing.

Gothic Halloween Triple Feature: Free

This week only, download all three of my Gothic novellas in eBook form for free. These titles are available in Kindle format only, but are easy to read using the free Kindle For PC Reader or the free Kindle App for iPhones and others.

FREE TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23

The Fairies at Browning Grange

No Tinkerbells

FREE WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24

Black Valentines

Twisted Sister

FREE THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25

The Yellow Scarf

Pandora's Box

And be sure to check out my full length novels 

Night of the Pentagram

The Haunting at Blackwood Hall

and

The Haunting at Blackwood Hall in paperback