The Monster's on the Loose!!! Non-Chaney, Pt. 2: Werewolves Along the Wall

Les Lupins by Maurice Sand
[click to enlarge]

Just a few short years ago, a visit from an old chum from back home found myself and my wife (then merely my longtime girlfriend) visiting the Pasadena Antique Mall at a mostly hoity-toity retail area in Southern California. Pasadena was not a very familiar area to us; in fact, it was my first time there, and so I tackled the fresh spot in my usual way: checking out any antique, record, comic book, or book stores I might happen to cross on my wanderings that afternoon.

Entering what seemed like just any old antique store's book section to me, I discovered an overly well-kept if not crowded place. Its trappings appealed to me greatly, and all that needed to happen was a memorable purchase to seal my love for the location in my heart forever. About two minutes into the visit, it happened. After seeing a nice collection of antique Big Little Books on a shelf that nearly had my wallet saying, "Everything I have, please!", I took a sidelong glance at a table featuring various volumes being featured exclusively by the store. Most seemed to be autographed books or first editions, and while I am interested in such things on occasion (depending on the author, title, or genre), my purposes for visiting such stores are usually tied up in looking for more unusual fare, often on a mental list of particular titles that have longed escaped my grasp or with which I was formally familiar but have not seen in some time.

Sitting prominently (and still quite strangely to me) upon the table was a book by Montague Summers titled The Werewolf. The cover is doused in a blood red coloring, with black only at the fringes and dotting the figures, but it was what appeared in red that caught my eye, apart from the book itself. For anyone else, the sight of the cover would reveal the red silhouette of a series of wolf-like creatures standing on their hind-legs, but without any other reference on the cover, the design could have been a negative image of a sculpture or woodcut or some other art form. There is no real definition to the image to betray what it really is to the eye.

Unless one happened to have been looking for that exact image, and even perhaps some form of that author's writings on the subject (without remembering who the author even was or what the book was called), since one was a mere child.

Short of heading back to the third of three elementary schools of my youth to check with library records to see if they ever carried a copy of that exact book – and since forty years have passed, it is more likely that any such volumes have likely been purged from the shelves by crazy, Satan-fearing moms (hey, it's your religion that believes in such things, not me, so quit squatting over my fun) – I will never know if this is indeed the book that captured my attention way back in fifth grade or if Montague Summers was the author of record. [I am going to skip discussion of Summers himself for now, because it would take some time, and he was such a right weirdo that a brief paragraph or two would not do him justice.] But what I do know is that the real source of the cover image of The Werewolf, a drawing by the artist Maurice Sand titled Les Lupins, lies in full form as a frontispiece in this book in the same manner as it did in the book from my youth. Because, out of everything in that book that may have frightened me in the text or in the other illustrative plates scattered throughout the volume, nothing got to me more than Sand's Les Lupins.

The image is never truly gratuitous but it was stunning to me when I was young in its implication; implication that would run roughshod with my emotional state for quite a few years, especially when placed in conjunction with my home location. Les Lupins is a nighttime study of an unspecified region most likely in France, where a pack of werewolves, numbering ten or so with most standing on their hind legs, prop themselves up along a long wall as if in conspiratorial conversation underneath the moonlight on a mostly overcast evening. 

While the foliage shown in the picture is lush and overflowing in abundance, the layout and relative sparseness of the trees speaks more of the pastoral and nowhere forested. Indeed, the scene seems to either take place on the edge of an estate or some other such structural enclosure, perhaps even on the edge of a gated town. In the text of The Werewolf, however, in the section on France, Summers wrote, "In Normandy tradition tells of certain fantastic beings known as lupins or lubins. They pass the night chattering together and twattling in an unknown tongue. They take their stand by the walls of country cemeteries, and howl dismally at the moon."

I lived nowhere near a cemetery when I lived in Eagle River, Alaska (I don't even know if there was one in town before I moved, since Eagle River was, and still is, a part of the Anchorage municipality), so I had nothing to fear from werewolves at one of those. And we certainly lived nowhere near France as well, let alone Normandy. And we were deeply mired in forest, living at the base of a mountain as we were. So the scene as described visually and then married to Summers' tale brings my upbringing nowhere close to that of the image. Regardless, Les Lupins still sent a chill through me from the moment I first saw it, already at the beginning of a long, unpaid career as a fan of monster movies, but it would take a walk home after school one afternoon to solidify werewolves as my creature/demon of choice for the rest of the time that I lived in Eagle River.

Montague Summers, a right weirdo.

It was perhaps a problem of seasonal timing that led me to such a decision. It was winter when I began reading the book on werewolves featuring Les Lupins as a frontispiece in the library of my elementary school. I was in sixth grade, and was old enough to be allowed to go straight home with my own key after school. Of course, there is the requisite screwing around at the bus stop with your friends and other neighbor kids. It wasn't a long walk home from the stop, but it was one filled with distractions, in either summer or winter. Our neighborhood was more woods than house-filled, and there was always playing to do, sticks with which to sword fight, forts to build, snowballs to throw, and pranks to pull. But Alaskan winters get dark early; the deeper into winter, the darker. Currently now, on Halloween, the sun is to set in the Anchorage area around 5:55 p.m.; on December 21st, the date of the winter solstice, the time will be around 3:42 p.m. At that time of year and at that latitude, the sun is only seen for about five and a half hours, and for kids of school age, recess is the only real chance to get some sun during the school year. Otherwise, you were walking home after school in the pre-sunset. And if you dallied at all on your walk home and played around with your friends, by the time you got close to your house, you were even closer to the dark of night... or worse, deep into it.

I didn't need total darkness to practically crap my pants each time that I reached my driveway. I just needed something approaching the nearness of darkness. As I finished my walk home from the bus, after goofing around with my friends, the glow cast by the sun's going down towards the horizon as it passed through the widely spaced birch and spruce trees that lined the forest on either side of our long, sloping front driveway, reminded me immediately of the picture of Les Lupins. (As I stated in Part 1 of this article, we had a second, lower driveway at the back of our property that accessed our house more immediately, but you had to climb a set of stairs, where I was tormented by the Big Bad Wolf.) It wasn't that the scene of my driveway matched that of the picture. I never thought there were werewolves hiding behind each of the spruce trees. No, that was where Bigfoot hid. Your imagination does not need exactitude, just the merest implication that something could possibly come true in terrible, horrid ways. Most of all, once your mind connects the image that gave your imagination spark to something else in your life, it is over for you. Once I saw the trees, it would make me think of the picture with the werewolves reclining against the ivy-covered wall like drooling junkies anxious for a quick fix. Once I made the connection that my blood might be the very fix they required, I was lost.

My every trip home down that driveway after that point became a battle between my instincts to run down an often slippery path to make it all the way to our front door in time to lock it fast behind me, and my more logical brain that struggled to convince itself that werewolves were mere fantasy figures and that I should just strut safely down the snowy path and forget all this nonsense. In the end – at least to the point where we moved from that house to another following my parents' divorce not long after – the werewolves won the battle. Any time that I was alone from that point forward while I lived there, I was in fear constantly, and it carried over into my trips down that driveway in the summer, even when I was on a bicycle. But it was always when I was on my own. If I had a friend with me, or one of my brothers, and especially adults, I was just fine. Most of my fears only overtook me when I was left on my own.

There was still another factor playing into my werewolf obsession at this point, that took my fear nearly over the top, and I will get to that in Part III of this piece. But I wanted to sum up regarding the antique shop and the Montague Summers book. The moment of seeing the book before me in the Pasadena Antique Mall was yet another in a long series of encounters where my response is the same as if I were the one who had originally ridden my horse across the path of the Bigfoot in the famous Patterson film. That is, a series of seconds constructed around a stony wall of pure silence, while my jaw and limbs go numb even as my heart starts racing uncontrollably.

Instinctually, I knew this had to be the book. Picking it up, I flipped immediately to the title page, where I was greeted by the image of Les Lupins. It was exactly where it needed to be. This had to be the book, though the volume I remembered was not quite as thick as this one, and I did not remember a blood red cover at all. One would have thought I would remember such a detail. But reading the text in some sections brought a great sense of familiarity, as Summers' overly academic and archaic writing style is somewhat hard to not just get past sometimes but also to forget. The book seemed to be, especially from the text on the cover, a compilation of shorter volumes on werewolves he had written, and was broken into six distinct sections, each pertaining to different locales and their lycanthropic legends, or the supposed "science" behind the myths, and finally an exceedingly brief addendum on Witch Ointments that isn't even written by Montague Summers, but by a Dr. H.J. Norman. Since Summers died in 1949, and this first edition of the collection was dated as March 1966, I suppose it is possible that I had encountered a smaller collection at that library in my youth.

The first edition was going to run me, after tax, close to forty bucks, but for me, it was a foregone conclusion. Why, after looking so long for such a book featuring that image, would I not buy it? Sure, I had to put back a couple of other books I had found first when I entered, including one of those Big Little Books that featured Tarzan, but it had to be done. If ever forty bucks was going to be spent on a book just so I could own a single image, this was it. I kid about that, because I know that it was more important to capture the essence of the volume within my own library, to make it part of the whole, and to strengthen the ties to my own memory, along with my imagination once more. 

Getting the book home, however, after I started to flip through the book, revealed some intriguing sidebars to my initial interest. The book contains a great many notes, most of them in a constant hand, including a signature at the front of the book in the same hand, ascribing ownership to someone named Angela Allaire. The name meant nothing to me, and most of the notes are of a generic nature, reminders to pay this bill or that bill, a torn in half receipt for the San Francisco Examiner used as a bookmark, calling this person and her mom on the phone, extensive notes on menorahs and looking up more information on Hanukkah, but nothing regarding the actual text of The Werewolf. (That's kind of how people operated in the pre-iPhone days when you needed to make a note of something... use it as a temporary bookmark, to be just as forgotten as other notes.)

The Wolf article, The Golden Gater, 11-11-1980.

But there was something that triggered a deeper look into Ms. Allaire for me. There was a newspaper clipping from San Francisco State's campus newspaper, The Golden Gater (now called the Golden Gate Xpress) dated November 11, 1980. The article is headlined "Tales of terror to be catalogued" and concerns SF State's then professor of English and creative writing, Leonard Wolf, who was planning to release a book called Whole Catalogue of Unearthly Terrors. I knew full well who Leonard Wolf was, of course. I have owned a copy of his huge volume, A Complete Book of Terror, for about thirty years, which has proven instrumental in my getting to know a great many classic horror authors. I have another book of his in my library as well, and he is rather well-known as being the father of feminist and political writer and journalist, Naomi Wolf. 

The article about Wolf was folded around a piece of paper from a small notepad, on which a poem in two verses is scrawled in red pen ink:

"On the twenty fourth of May
I saundered [sic] in and planned to stay.
Fate put me in the fabled chair
of sweet and georgious [sic] Ms. Allaire

I did my job and worked so hard
and thought of you in my back yard.
Squirting cold water all over you
and putting marangue [sic] in your kazoo."

x The Author

Um... what did I just find in this book? Who is "The Author"? Was this love correspondence between Allaire and Wolf? Who puts meringue in a kazoo (unless it is of a euphemistic nature, of course)?

This meant that I naturally took to the internet to find out if Ms. Allaire was anyone of note who may have been more publicly involved with Wolf at some time. I found nothing to that effect, but did locate mentions of an Angela Allaire who lived in Chico, CA, but had died in 2005 from complications from ALS. Finding an obituary for her on a Chico website, I found this information: "Angela moved to Chico in 1975 and worked in the Administration office at California State University Chico, graduating from the college in 1978. She went on to receive her Master's degree in film at San Francisco State, then taught one year of film history at SFSU. Angela wrote three feature-length films and sold a script, which became a respected, remarkable story. She also wrote many liner notes on the back of VHS tapes and DVDs. She was successful working with the American Film Institute as a script supervisor."

So, Ms. Allaire was at SF State at the same time Wolf was a professor of English there. It doesn't take too much in the way of imagination to summon up a scenario where the teacher, himself an expert on the field of horror literature, had perhaps recommended the Summers' book to one of his female students. In going through further notes contained in the book, Allaire mentions on one note "look at TV guide" after the word "tape," and on another line, the title Death Watch (there was a Bernard Tavernier sci-fi thriller that came out in 1980, if we are dating all of this to the year of the Wolf article, titled Death Watch). Another note ties directly into the film studies category, where she writes, "6) Write about similarities in 3 films" and goes on to notate possible areas of discussion. She also has a note about "invented genres: newspaper, gangster". A third note says "Sign up for projector 5-7," "Ask about Polansky [sic] (schedule)," and "see film class".

It becomes clear that this very likely may be the Angela Allaire in the obituary, with the revelation from the notes that she was involved in film studies at the time she was keeping notes in the book. A look on IMDb, however, reveals no credits for an Angela Allaire as a screenwriter, though I know full well there is a difference between the writing and selling of screenplays and actually having one made into a movie. The obit, though, is quite remarkably ambiguous as to titles, so it is doubtful anything was made, unless she went under a different name. However, if she had written anything of note, it would have likely appeared in the obituary.

The lack of actual notation in The Werewolf itself points to the book being not one for academic purposes but one of personal interest instead, or even a gift, possibly from Wolf himself if indeed he is "The Author". My guess is that the poem may have served the purposes of an inscription, and that the signing of "The Author" was to obscure any paper trail if an affair had occurred between her and the giver. But then the poem gets wrapped up by an article featuring Mr. Wolf, and then there is nothing left to do much make sordid connections where they may or may not be.

I guess one should always be careful where they leave their meringue.

RTJ

[To be concluded in The Monster's on the Loose!!! Non-Chaney, Pt. 3: Were-Rik? There-Rik! in the near future.] 

V for Voluminous: Classics of the Horror Film

Classics of the Horror Film
by William K. Everson
Citadel Press | 1974
Paperback | 248 pgs.
5th paperbound edition

I am still waiting to see Murder by the Clock.

This 1931 mystery/horror film has always eluded my grasp, no matter where I have looked for it. I know it's out there somewhere. It is not marked as a lost film anywhere, and if you look for a DVD of it, you can find offers for it on most of the "non-legitimate" sites. I don't really trust any of those offers or sites, but they are out there. Where you don't find Murder by the Clock for sale is on places like TCM.com, BestBuy.com, BarnesandNoble.com, or Amazon.com, which is a pretty certain sign that any DVDs of the film that are floating around out there are most likely highly illegal in nature. I have found sites that say the film is definitely in the public domain and on YouTube, but the provided links are always shown to have been pulled down for copyright infringement, which would say to me the lie was put to their public domain statement in a fairly definite way. Elsewhere, I have found a notice that this Paramount title was sold to Universal along with some 700 other titles in 1958, so it is likely that is languishing in Universal's vaults somewhere.

So, what's the big deal with this Murder by the Clock film anyway? Don't know. Still haven't seen it. I have no idea if it is any good or not. 128 people have rated it a cumulative 6.8 on IMDb, so if you want to trust that rating, it sounds like it is more than good. Then again, 978 people have rated Tod Browning's 1927 film, London After Midnight, a 7.0 on IMDb, and I know that at least 99% of those people have probably never seen the film since IT IS A LOST FILM. It is likely that many of them are rating the concoction that TCM built from intertitle cards and still photographs and released as a special feature on a Lon Chaney collection a few years ago, but they still have not seen the actual film. With IMDb, you have to take popular ratings and any posted reviews with a grain of salt the size of the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota.

OK, wise guy.... then why are you so obsessed with seeing it? Well, it is one of the very few films left (not counting films, such as London After Midnight, that are definitely lost to time) in a certain book called Classics of the Horror Film that I have never seen and to which I cannot find access.

Ages ago, just out of high school and working for the first time, before I finally did have a decent film book library growing on the shelves of my apartment amongst all of my other books, I had only a handful of titles related to the movies. The Leonard Maltin Guide, of course, was standard and in my collection since I first found one as a teenager. I always had the latest edition at hand for a couple of decades. For a chunk of that time, I also kept the latest edition of Steven H. Scheuer's rival guidebook (which actually preceded Maltin's series by eleven years, being first published in 1958), though I never liked Scheuer's book as much. The Making of King Kong was there in those early years, of course, as well as Tarzan of the Movies, as well as the Medved Brothers' series of Golden Turkey Award-related books.

One of those early books, bought near the start of a very long tenure working for The Book Cache and its affiliated companies, was a volume by William K. Everson titled Classics of the Horror Film. As I was still a teenager and no internet existed to find instant information, I had no idea who Mr. Everson was when I bought the book. The volume does not contain an "About the Author" page or even a simple paragraph, nor is there a picture of Mr. Everson. So everything that I would get to learn about the author at that time would be directly through his writing. And while that writing did bear large traces of his personality, I still did not learn of his long reputation as a film society head and movie collector until much later.

But, oh! That personality! To say that it was, for a young film fan, a glimpse into the mindset of a man rather set in his opinions, which ran from a tad snooty but begrudgingly cognizant of changing trends to hardcore unwavering with a steadfastly upturned nose adorned with a clothespin, would be an understatement.

When I first encountered the book, having only seen a small portion of the films contained inside, I felt that I might never get a chance to see most of them. This was largely due to Everson's writing of the time leading up to its publication (1974 being the year), in the pre-video era, where unless you were blessed with a rare film revival, you pretty much had to hope that some local TV channel would play one of these films in the middle of the night or on a daytime matinee show. Everson broke my heart consistently throughout the book over my chances of seeing certain films. He speaks over and over again in the book about how modern audiences may never get the chance to see this film or that one, and even in the chapter devoted to Murder by the Clock, he speaks of it as if it were indeed a lost film. This is precisely how I was led to that conclusion until just recently.

The subtitle for the book is From the Days of the Silent Film to The Exorcist, the latter film having just been released the previous year in 1973. While he admits the film does work with an audience, he was clearly not built to deal with its speed, and calls it "a cheap and shoddy picture" that keeps taking "the easy way out" by dealing in disgusting imagery rather than shadowy thrills. Both points can be argued, but even when I first read the book in the early '80s, after being pretty thrilled to have read his preceding chapters relating, somewhat choppily, the history of the genre through its various cycles (German expressionism, Chaney, Universal, RKO Lewton, Hammer, Corman Poe), and its archetypal characters (vampires, mad scientists, werewolves, zombies, et al) – the final section of the book was the one that turned me off the most at the time when he started dealing far more harshly with modern pictures, especially as films had taken a turn away from monsters of the physical sort and more to those more ethereal types possessing our homes, bodies, and souls.

You can say the situation was either a snapshot of a man for whom the current movies were moving just beyond his grasp, or that he was just a guy who preferred his thrills a certain way -- and why change after all? But the genre was just on the cusp – or in the early years – of introducing us to George A. Romero, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, Joe Dante, David Lynch, and so many other filmmakers who were going to remake the genre over and over again, and Everson was clearly not up to the task of keeping up with these more modern filmmakers. He dismisses Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now in less than a paragraph (though he admires its look) for being too doom-laden from the start because of the supernatural elements of the plot. (Well, yeah, that's kind of the point of the story...) As a young man, I detected a certain fuddy-duddiness that I found somewhat unappealing.

Reading the book again in the modern sense, I was able to rather cast aside this later, and rather short, portion of the book, and enjoy Classics of the Horror Film for what is mostly was then and for what is still is today. It was a primary influence on my attitudes towards films of this bent in my young adult days, written by a man who pretty much grew up with the films of the '30s and especially the '40s (he was born in 1929) in much the same way that my horror consciousness was raised by all of those more modern directors I mentioned above. (Of course, I also had many of the films he was raised on in my range of influence, so I feel that I had it much better off than he did in the end.) What I really like about the book is the devotion he gives to some much smaller, less noticed films such as The Black Room and Strangler of the Swamp, while still paying proper obeisance to bona fide classics like Freaks, The Bride of Frankenstein and The Mummy. Without Everson's book, films like Strangler may never have attracted my notice, at least until I found it in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film a little while later.

This book was where I first read about the Halperin Brothers and White Zombie, Michael Curtiz's The Walking Dead, and James Whale's incredible production of the original version of The Old Dark House. It is also where I got my first big dose of Tod Browning lore, even if Everson mostly considers him overrated as a director and seems to hold a great fascination over the sudden increased interest in the man's career at the time this book was going to press. And years before I ever got to see Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Everson absolutely dominated my opinion over its special effects transformation being far superior to those used in the later versions of the story and even in Universal's 1941 version of The Wolf Man.

Everson's book is a thing of its time, a look at a genre that had reached the end of one major era, running out of black and white steam (you can practically feel Everson's interest in continuing to right about the genre ebbing away the deeper he gets into the book), and that was right on the edge of entering a new, fully full color, far bloodier, far more profane, far more everything era. And, at the risk of sounding a bit of a fuddy-duddy myself, a not necessarily better era, when everything that was involved within the genre in the time since is figured into the equation. These things, like almost anything film-related where mere opinion enters the fray, can be argued to the end of time, and there will never be a resolution. Because there never can be. 

We each have our loves, and we each have our hates, and they are individual unto ourselves. It is clear from Classics of the Horror Film that not only did William K. Everson love old horror films, but that he loved the very idea of film itself. How you wish to interpret his writing is up to you, but for me, while I may not agree with everything he says in the book, it will remain a prime source for me when I need a dose of genre movie obsession.

I just have to skip that short chapter about Murder by the Clock, because not seeing that film is driving me nuts...

RTJ

And for those of you wishing to play along at home, here is a list that I have created on Letterboxd which features all of the movies listed in Classics of the Horror Film by William K. Everson. How many of these films have you seen? Follow the link:
http://letterboxd.com/thecinema4pylon/list/classics-of-the-horror-film-by-william-k/

Countdown to Halloween 2016: Pylon-Style!

Even Totoro is ready for Halloween, resplendent
and relaxed in my Baby Monster Beanie...

Holy crap, I made it another year...

Not that I was expecting to go anywhere, but with everything that has happened to me over the past eighteen months or so, just being able to take part in another Countdown to Halloween has to be seen as some form of accomplishment.

That's right... once again, I am taking part in the annual Countdown to Halloween festivities. That's not just any ol' "taking part in Halloween" thing. That's easy to do, and anyone with sense and the spirit of fun does so each and every October. And I suppose just about anyone can take part in Countdown to Halloween as well. There are only two prerequisites, and most people really only need to fulfill one of them, while a far lesser number would need to fulfill both of them (though all are invited to engage in the second one, of course). 

The first prerequisite is to have access to the internet, which everyone but a Luddite would today. Computer, phone, TV, gaming system, tablet, school... most people have access. Visit http://countdowntohalloween.blogspot.com/ to see a list of all the websites and blogs that are taking part in Countdown to Halloween this year. Once there, you click on the sites that sound interesting to you, and check out everything they have to say to you or show you regarding the Halloween season or other topics tangentially related to the season.

The second prerequisite, and the reason why I am here, is having a blog or website that you are planning to devote to regular or semi-regular posts on whatever topic strikes your fancy that you believe followers of Halloween fun and frivolity might like to stop and check out for a few minutes during their time on the worldwide web. As I said, you really only need to fulfill one of these steps, but in my case, I like to post on my own sites and check out what others have to offer during the month. 

I have a lot of surprises in store this month, none of which I will give away here, but I do like to provide variety. Rest assured, if you are into monster movies, cartoons, toys, trading cards, sharks, and Halloween or horror-oriented books and music, you will find a little bit of each (and sometimes a lot) written about here on The Cinema 4 Pylon, and on its sister blog, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc. Both blogs are full participants in this year's Countdown, though the Cel Bloc will only update every five or six days, while the Pylon will try to stick to a mostly daily schedule through most of the month.

But there's more! I will also have sporadic posts on my other sites as well: The Shark Film Office and V for Voluminous, C for Cinema. However, links to any articles on those sites that might be "holiday relevant" will be posted here on the Pylon first, so you don't have to go crazy checking out so many different sites every day.

One other shout-out that I should make. My writing partner, Aaron Lowe, will have his blog, Working Dead Productions, involved in the Countdown to Halloween as well. Together, though, we recently created a website titled We Who Watch Behind the Rows: Stephen King in Print and on Film. For the Countdown, we have decided to do a concentration on King's first officially published novel (under his own name), Carrie, and after we finish discussing the novel, we will then turn our attention to several posts reviewing the four film adaptations derived from that work. To read our introduction announcement to this project, "Carrie" On, My Wayward Sons here.

I hope that you take some time to bounce around my sites while you are here, and if you like what you see and read, please return any time. Otherwise, Happy Halloween!

RTJ

V for Voluminous | Death Makes A Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween by David J. Skal (2002)

Death Makes A Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween (2002)
by David J. Skal

Bloomsbury hardcover | 227 pg.

I remember being frightened to death as a child in the mid-1970s during Halloween, not by monsters and ghosts and ghouls (they frightened/befriended me the rest of the year), but by the rumors going around our neighborhood and school (even in semi-rural Alaska) regarding tainted Halloween candy, apples and popcorn balls. My brothers, friends and I didn't care if the rumors didn't pan out to be the truth -- we would never find out anyway in those days before the internet and cable news, where most of the available information was controlled by the local papers, the evening news shows and whatever crap your parents fed you. Apart from that, you had rumor, gossip and innuendo, prevalent in any time period.

I specifically remember Halloween in my twelfth year, where our trick-or-treating activities were actually curtailed to visiting only the houses of our close friends and relatives. There was a razor-blade apple scare going about the town of Eagle River (which likely stemmed from similar rumors in larger, nearby Anchorage), and I solidly remember our spoils that year consisted of nothing but familiar and beloved candies from the local supermarket shelves. Apart from one lady in our neighborhood who actually did give out apples (without razor blades or pins, but was still practically branded a witch amongst the local kids and parents for doing so), no one wanted to be held in suspicion of threatening the kids.

The kids, after all, are held to be more important than the rest of humanity. After all, they are the ones who will grow up to fail like the rest of us... uh, no... they will grow up to... uh... grow up to be people who will hold the next generation of kids to be more important than the rest of humanity. Yeah, the notion that it is "all about the kids" is a concept that perhaps once served a great purpose in extending and expanding both civilization and families, but has switched into a truly idiotic one which for the last several decades really doesn't mean jack in our too-crowded world of over-extending resources. And so it goes... we continue to venerate things for obscure reasons that none of us truly believe but only pay lip service to because it is accepted to do so.

Which, truth be told, is exactly why the vast majority of people celebrate holidays in the first place: because we are told to do it. We grow up with it and we don't know any differently. Most of us, even rabid horror fans, really don't examine why we celebrate Halloween. I just do it because I have since I was born, the same way that I have always celebrated Christmas or Easter. It's how I was raised, and even after the Santa sham is revealed deep into childhood and I grew into my current state of atheism, I still look forward to Christmastime. Easter does not exist for me any longer in California, and yet, if I were back home, I would not hesitate to join my friends in their largely religion-inspired celebration (or to wait eagerly for the actual mysterious appearance of twin Easter bunnies...) I personally see holidays as the most solid reasons there are get together with friends and family, regardless of religious or social background. Just another reason to get out of the house and party with your loved ones.

And yet, Halloween has changed most with me in my move from state to state. Halloween has always been tied up more with friends than family for me, and I just do not have the same network here that I did back home in Alaska, not by a long-shot. The friends I have made here have been mostly work-based, and since we don't celebrate the holiday at the office, it doesn't carry out of there either. I have yet to visit anything Halloween-related since I moved here, apart from annual visits to the series of skeleton attractions (The Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, Jungle Cruise, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Indiana Jones, the train trip through Primeval World -- anything with a skull, ghost or skeleton) at Disneyland. (Which will include Space Mountain this year, as it did last year.) Jen is not a massive Halloween fan, so there is no paired impetus to visit the haunted houses, the annual bash on the Queen Mary, or other theme parks featuring Halloween celebrations here. The most I do at home is carve anywhere from two to four pumpkins and place them strategically on our balcony. Costuming? I haven't dressed up since I left the 49th state.

Which finally brings me to trick-or-treating... Even more so than back home, that tradition has now shifted to the province of the relatively safe school gymnasium, and in our complex has dwindled to the status of zero-to-none in visitations each year. Jen and I are always sure to purchase at least a couple of bags of candy before Halloween. Post-holiday, we are then forced to eat those couple of bags of candy, but you have no choice but to buy them so you are not caught off-guard as the assholes who don't have a stash of Halloween goodies. Don't want to set off those precious, darling kids...

And thus, Halloween has largely become an internal holiday for me. It involves some slight decorating of the apartment, but sometimes not, and from there it is chiefly a reason for me to indulge in scads of horror and science-fiction films, books, music, comics and toys. Which means it is basically a reason for me to do what I do the rest of the year.

You see, Halloween never really ends for me. In most of the past twenty years, I have officially counted the Halloween season as starting just after my birthday in September and carrying through until Thanksgiving. But event that is a fairly ridiculous notion to me, because I never really stop how I feel about the holiday, just as I never stop how I feel about Christmas.  I seem to have gotten beyond feeling the spirit of certain times of the year only in those certain times of the year. The other day at work, even while wrestling with what I was certain was one of my frequent migraines, I was able to cavort and joke about in service of cheering someone up nearby. They laughed and said, "Are you always happy like this?" and I said "No, I'm just always me." I hadn't really examined why I act as goofy as I sometimes do in social situations -- like some crazed, impish otter -- just to earn a surprised laugh from my target. It has just always been that way. The same way that I have not really examined why I celebrate Halloween. It just is...

Whatever my lack of reason to do so, Halloween is perhaps the only holiday to have gone through even more convolutions from its original form than even Christmas. Beginning in the recently completed century, it engendered convolutions on top of convolutions, chiefly due to how the rise of the mass media and the advent of pop culture have drastically  transformed not just Halloween itself, but also the people who celebrate it.

Which is where one of my favorite non-fiction titles of the past decade, David J. Skal's Death Makes A Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween comes into the picture for me. I opened this post with my remembrance of mid-'70s trick-or-treating precisely because of the way that Skal opens his book: with a stunning chapter detailing the Halloween culture scares of my most scarring and formative decade. It's a surefire way to suck me into the rest of a tome by opening with something so deeply resonant to my spirit and my attitudes towards the effects of the news media run amok.

From there, the rest of the book is gravy: an incisive look into how the holiday has transformed us and been transformed in turn, each metamorphosis wrapped neatly around the prevailing tone of each period's cultural wars. While there are certainly other more detailed accounts around concerning Halloween's ancient past, the volume solidly hits each of the major movements in its history (Samhain, Guy Fawkes, the Day of the Dead, and the revolutions that Hollywood and modern merchandising both created), and gives some very well-researched insight in other areas less traveled, such as the gradual adoption of Halloween as the de facto official holiday of the gay community in San Francisico (and now far beyond that area). There is also a nice section on L.A.'s haunted house king Bob Burns, showcasing his influence on Halloween in Southern California. And, of course, Skal touches most deftly upon the controversies and urban legends sparked by a holiday so mired in the mythic activities of witches, demons and the undead. His eye for detail is always spot on when dealing with the social aspects and the consequences of the actions of his subjects.

I have read this book twice since I bought it upon its initial release, and now has come the time, with my direct interest in Halloween perhaps waning a tad bit, for another go at it. In fact, I have probably read at least one book by Mr. Skal in each Halloween season over the past two decades, since I first encountered him in 1990 in his excellent history called Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (which I have read three times since then). I was entranced with his writing then, and I am still entranced now.

Unlike Halloween, Christmas, trick-or-treating and everything else mentioned, where I can give you the full details but still remain purposefully obscured by the true reasons behind my devotions, I know exactly why I return to Skal every single year.

V For Voluminous: Book of the Dead

Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (2005)
by Jamie Russell
FAB Press | 320 pages

I have umpteen books in my library detailing the histories of just about any genre -- OK, maybe not chick flicks or romance -- but otherwise, I am doing just fine. Even when it comes to sub-genres, I have a few select volumes on various subjects (kaiju, aliens, slapstick, German expressionism, etc.), but never before did I consider that I would require an entire volume detailing the history of zombies and the undead (sometimes two very different things) in my collection.

Hell, I never even considered that I would want an entire book on zombie cinema in my home. This is based on my perception of the people that I know who are deeply into zombie films. Outside of my pal Aaron -- aka The Working Dead, who does have considerable critical faculties (check his blog out by clicking here) -- most of my acquaintances who thrive on zombie flicks pretty much just outright love anything with a zombie in it. Sensing this might be the case for someone perversely intent on filling 300-plus pages on the subject, please understand my reticence, and outright lack of consideration, in this regard.

Unbelievably, a pair of trips to the super-scrubbed squeaky-clean Downtown Disney changed my mind on this matter. Just enough time for a quick five-minute perusal at Compass Books, right before going to a film in the adjacent theatre, left me swiftly scanning the entertainment section, where I saw my first copy of Book of the Dead by Jamie Russell. Subtitled The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, the book's grimly beckoning cover (portrayed at right) naturally made me pick it up. Thanks to the intriguing pair of hair-bedecked skulls with glowing yellow eyes peeking out of their graves, I had to check it out to see if perhaps I would be proven wrong by my long-ingrained belief about the zombie-obsessed.

Here's the first shocker: that this book is allowed within two miles of Disneyland. Don't get me wrong: I'm glad it was there, and it certainly proved me wrong (which provides the second shocker). A fairly good-sized volume (320 pages, heavy paper, 7-1/4"x10"), even a cursory glance at the book revealed a well-researched and seemingly thorough trip through the nearly eighty -- yes, that's right -- eighty-year history of zombie films, from Bela Lugosi's White Zombie (1932) on down to Romero's Land of the Dead. Flipping through the book, I found two incredibly generous sections of garish color plates, showing innumerable classic and non-classic zombie movie posters and some wonderfully bloody scenes. And finally, it has a comprehensive filmography, not necessarily (as the author suggests) a "complete" one, but built on the movies that make up the referenced films in the text, including some that are not specifically "zombie" films, such as Romero's The Crazies, but ones that are important to the discussion of the subject peripherally. Nor did the author seek to maintain a full list of films; indeed, mere minutes after getting the book home, I discovered that Richard Elfman's Shrunken Heads was nowhere to be found in the book, despite involving both voodoo and the living dead. (Maybe the next edition, eh?) Despite my delight with this initial look at the contents, I did not buy the book. After my allotted time expired, it was off to the movies for Jen and I, but I did mark the title down in my notebook to remind myself to seek it out at a later date.

That later date came during my next trip to Compass, and after zipping once more through the book's contents before we hit Ocean's Thirteen, I at last purchased Book of the Dead (which is a tad expensive at a nickel under thirty bucks) while waiting for Jen to get off work to join me. It was an absolute joy to read the book while standing around Disneyland, with a very bloody ghoul hanging about on the back cover, grabbing the odd stare from disturbed mothers as they passed by me. (You can take what I mean by the phrase "disturbed mothers" any way you wish. I meant them all...) Certainly there are books within Compass which might not be exactly "family" material, but in a bookshop that is half devoted to children's fare, to find this volume, with its graphic depictions of gore and nudity, couched between the latest Roger Ebert effort and, inexplicably, a half-dozen books on Audrey Hepburn (did I miss something recently?), and sitting out prominently on a shelf at the eye level of a five-year-old certainly caught me by surprise. I'm not demanding they don't carry such things -- I readily encourage that they do -- I was just surprised to find it there, since they tend to only carry bestsellers in most categories, or the latest in mainstream-safe blather.

Reading the book at home has proven an exhaustive effort. Beginning with William Seabrook's seminal zombie travel opus The Magic Island, the book that made zombie talk an American fad in the early part of the 20th century, Russell breaks down each film in his narrative in such detail and with attention to their metaphorical implications that it becomes almost necessary to stop reading and review the actual films oneself before continuing forward with one's reading. I have seen White Zombie a handful of times, but I still found myself revving up my copy to make sure I had not seen a different film than the one of which Russell speaks. Suffice to say that Russell has turned out to be a very astute guide through most of the movies thus far, and while the short film reviews might come up a little more scant on detail than I wished, Russell is not one to give an easy pass to a film just because he is a hardcore fan of the subgenre. It turns out Russell is much like me: deeply in love with a couple handfuls of these films, and more than willing to sternly (though sometimes lovingly) critique those that fall short of his standards. Also, kudos must be given to Russell for including any number of zombie-oriented pornographic titles in his book, which helped toward showing me that he has left no stone unturned in his search for as many zombie films as possible, even if it might have something icky underneath it. One cannot be afraid of the icky when discussing zombies. Or if one orders a book on them for a Disney-locked bookstore. (Either their book buyer knows full well what he is doing, or he doesn't haven't a clue. Or maybe both.)

So, now I have a book in my library about zombie films, and I am happy with this. My fears of being trapped inside a book by an uncritical zombie nut have abated. Most of my friends, though, will have zero interest in seeking out or even paying for this book, but I didn't write this review for them. It is directed at two of my friends specifically. Andrea and Aaron: this book is for you. Don't delay in its immediate purchase. Shouldn't be hard to find... the dead do walk the earth, and they don't buy books like this. They buy Tim LaHaye books and Celine Dion CDs...

Catchin' Up with the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film...

Almost a year ago, I related to you my love for a book by Michael J. Weldon called The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. I have had a copy in my possession (the same ragged, dog-eared, spine-ravaged copy) since it came out in 1983. One of the benefits of working for a bookstore is that you get to jump on these things when they first premiere, sometimes even earlier, and this was a title that simply leaped out at me. Hard not to, considering the insane cover (see cover at right), and I was hooked immediately.

You see, up to about 1980, my movie obsession had been primarily TV-based, and network and local TV, at that. The movies that I saw were those that I caught on late night broadcasts, or afternoon matinee shows. I had cable at home with my parents by 1980, and we also had a VCR. Not only weren't there a tenth as many cable channels as there are now, Anchorage itself had a single cable channel at the time called Visions, which carried HBO between this hour and that in prime time, and WTBS and WGN stuff in the mornings and afternoons so you got Cubs and Braves games, Calliope, Bill Tish news reports, and Space Giants. At midnight, on certain nights, full-on hardcore porn would be shown on Visions (the listings would go from “10:00 pm – The Island of Dr. Moreau – PG” to "12:00 am – Tigresses and Other Man-Eaters – XXX) and the only parental block was to make sure the kiddies weren’t awake by that time of the night. (And, of course, I found every possible way of seeing that porn.) So even with the addition of a cable channel, I still had limited choices for movies. 

The world at that time was bombarded with fly-by-night VHS (and Beta) rental places, and as a kid who was just barely old enough to rent much of the good stuff, i.e. the junk with mucho sex and violence and gore, I was in heaven. The problem? What the hell to rent... there was so much easily available for the first time, that it was often hard to find out what was worth your while and what sucked. You've heard the phrase "can't tell the players without a scorecard"? Well, within a couple of years, after I had moved out of the house and gotten a job and started serving time in the real world as a somewhat functioning young adult, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film become that scorecard for me. Weldon’s tome wasn't really a book of critical reviews, however, but more of a catalogue of, well, the cover states "Over 3,000 of the wildest movies ever made!!" The keyword was "weird,” and the Encyclopedia delivered weird in spades. The back cover points out, in short phrases punctuated with rampant exclamation points, some of the topics covered in the book:

"Ghouls! Science Fiction! Beach Blankets! Drag Racing! Sex Changes! Crazed Farmers! Mad Scientists! Disaster! Surfing! Vampires! Sex Goddesses! Ax Murderers! Cave Women! Bikers! Killer Teens! Gorillas! Rock 'N' Roll! Jungle!"

The book covered not only these topics, but so many, many more. If it was goofy and on film and released by 1981, it was pretty much in this book. Also helpful were alternate titles, directing, writing and producing credits, and availability on video (a new concept just hitting review books at the time). Many of the films had their film posters printed within the pages of the guide, and Weldon even saw fit to print a handful of film frames with ample nudity on display here and there. What a guy!

Earlier this year, I picked up two far-less-dog-eared copies of the Encyclopedia at a used bookstore in Santa Rosa (which I wrote about here in January). My intent at the time was to keep one as a backup copy to my much-loved first edition, and to send the other copy to my pal Aaron back in Anchorage. (Mr. Lowe, I know I have not sent it yet, but I seem to have misplaced your address. Please get it to me again, and I will get this in the mail to you post-haste.) So, as I have been perusing the book anew over the intervening months, something struck me... when I first purchased this book, while many of the titles in it were out on video, there were still a large number that I never got around to watching. Or even finding: there were titles in there that I was interested in, but that I was unable to locate at the time. Then adulthood happens; marriage happens; divorce happens; work happens; everything happens. The resolve with which I used to attack video stores has waxed and waned over the years, and films that I once expressed an interest in seeing long ago have fallen to the wayside for films of more recent vintage.

But now it is almost 2007, and DVD is king. More and more older and obscure titles seem to crawl back out of their hidey-holes all the time, and with a greater emphasis on special editions and superior film elements, this is perhaps the best time to seek out some of these older, stranger films. And flipping through the book, I decided it was time that I did a film-by-film analysis to discover which of those films I still needed to see. Just in A alone, there were a great many films that I had yet to see, so I decided the best thing to do would be to go alphabetical and start checking on Netflix to see which films they were carrying.

As it turns out, a great many of them, though there are still pitfalls in the book. Right on the second page is an entry for the 1974 blaxploitation Exorcist rip-off Abby, which apparently, due to legal threats, never been released on video at all. So, I probably won't be seeing that one -- ever -- even though I am interested because William (Blacula and Pee Wee's Playhouse's King of Cartoons) Marshall is in the film. But there are more than enough films sitting now in my Netflix queue that I will be watching the bigger films in the book for a good while or so.

Ah, the insanity that my love for these films inspires in me!!

[I will be posting my comments on this progress from here on out. I have actually been renting them for the better part of the last month already, so keep checking back for updates on this project.]

RTJ