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/

The Psychotronic Video Guide: Straight to Video but a Long Time to Letterboxd

[This post has been published simultaneously here and on my new film book website – V for Voluminous, C for Cinema. To read this post on that site instead, go to https://vforvoluminous.wordpress.com/.]

The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film

by Michael Weldon
St. Martin's Press/Griffin | 1996
Trade paperback | 646 Pages

1st U.S. edition

My love for Michael Weldon's 1983 book, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, is well-known to my friends and longtime readers of my websites. Much of the early drive of my original blog, The Cinema 4 Pylon, was dedicated to playing catch up (in a series of posts that went by the title "Psychotronic Ketchup") in trying to see all of the films within that book, a volume which contained roughly 3,000 film titles of the not exactly middle of the road variety.

If there is a book within my library that I consider to be a "bible," though not in a truly religious sense of course, it is Weldon's Encyclopedia. As rough hewn and lowbrow as it is, for a fan of so-called "trash" cinema, it is indispensable. Before that book, which was published by Ballantine Books at roughly the same time I started working for a book chain in Anchorage, Alaska, Weldon put out a fanzine (that I never saw back in the day) called Psychotronic TV. After the Encyclopedia came out, he transformed his fanzine into a more widely distributed publication (though still pretty much tied to its fanzine roots in its sporadic publishing schedule and DIY aesthetic) titled Psychotronic Video. I grabbed a copy any chance that I got, and sure enough, just like with the book, I was always certain to read about films that made my head spin. I couldn't fathom that some of the titles could even be considered, let alone actually filmed and put into theatres or on video.

The magazine ran until 2006, when Michael Weldon finally closed the doors on the psychotronic world for good, but before that he put out a sequel to his first book. In 1996, Weldon published The Psychotronic Video Guide, an even larger book than the Encyclopedia in dimensional size, but it has a couple of hundred less pages and the rough movie count comes out around the same (at least according to Weldon's foreword) to somewhere around 3,000 films.

Since the Encyclopedia was published, the home video market really blew up throughout the eighties and into nineties, and straight-to-video titles became a really big seller, especially in the genres in which Weldon specialized: science-fiction, horror, martial arts, and action... tons and tons of action films. The Video Guide came out just before DVD hit the United States and started to slowly take over as the primary video format within the next few years. Like the first volume, which concentrated heavily on the '50s through the '70s – the prime years of exploitation and drive-in classics – the Video Guide does a fairly thorough job of snapshotting the bulk of the '80s output up through the mid-'90s. A big difference this time, though, is the inclusion of actual video compilations in the mix (many of them by Johnny Legend and Rhino Video, for example), once video started to become a home for original content and not just a second-run arena for former theatrical titles. Hardcore porn titles – well, a good handful or two of them, when they have content that goes beyond just bedroom antics – are represented as well.

Weldon also took the time to class things up just a little bit with the inclusion of certain directors who were renowned for their flirtations with genre form, even when they were considered general masters of film itself, e.g., Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. Weldon did a similar trick in the first volume by including nearly every film starring Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre, whether or not the films were genre flicks or not. The assumption was that the very inclusion of these actors within any cast placed that film automatically within the psychotronic category.

Something I have noticed that is a slight difference between this book and the first is that Weldon seemed more intent on actually reviewing many of the titles on the second go around. In the Encyclopedia, he seems mostly content with saying "This film is loaded with zombies. And Nazis. And tons of gore and blood. And Christopher Lee is in it!" and leaving it at that. (That is a completely made up example, but it strikes the tone of many an entry.) Very rare is the paragraph that really rips into a film, though there are a handful of entries where either his disdain or his high regard for a film is pretty clear. In the Video Guide, he seems more comfortable with telling his opinion on whether not a film stinks, and really lets go on many films. It is an attitude that I really wish the first book had, and perhaps he was less comfortable with striking such an attitude when he was younger and more freshly excited about the "B" genre.

Now, because my life turned to one of married discord for many years in the late '80s and early '90s, when the second book came out, I was freshly divorced in my early thirties, and suddenly not worrying so much about watching 37 movies a day. As a result, even though I really enjoyed going through the Psychotronic Video Guide when I first bought it, I have never really used the second book as much as the original volume. It is odd for me to say this, but movies, for a brief period, went to the back-burner as I readjusted myself to single life, and so the Weldon books went by the wayside for a good while. And unlike the first book, where the enjoyment I experienced as an 18-year old was in playing catch up with psychotronic history up to that point in time, the bulk of the films in the Video Guide are titles that came out after I had just reached my (presumed) adulthood. So, when this guide was released, by my own misguided accounting, I had pretty much seen the ones listed in it that I really wanted to see (with a few glaring exceptions), and so never really pressed myself to play catch up (at the time) like I did The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.

Then Letterboxd came into the picture...

When Letterboxd started up online a few years ago, after my initial flirtation with Flickchart (another movie site that I love), I created an account and started using Letterboxd to maintain my regular film diary, something I was already doing (and still do) via spreadsheet (there are still many titles, mostly shorts and cartoons, that I watch that do not show up in Letterboxd.) The site allows you great flexibility in creating lists of any size, and after they have been published, it shows you the percentage of films that you have seen and fades the title images as well, so you can focus on what remains to be watched. Pretty groovy function and the site looks nice as well. 

One of my first goals was to transfer the titles from The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film to Letterboxd so that I could not only easily figure out what I still needed to see, but so that others that might happen upon the list could use it for their own guidance through the "B" movie world. It took me a while to build those lists and when I was done, I sat back and thought, "There is no way that I could do this again." And then I started up on The Psychotronic Video Guide. I got a quick early start on the first couple of letters... and then let it sit for a year or two. Maybe even three. 

I kept getting remarks from users who liked the other Psychotronic lists begging me to create the rest of them. Finally, I decided to start using the last hour or so before bedtime to knock in a few more pages each night, and then took the giant book with me on my Alaska trip, knowing that I would have several hours each morning before my friends were up and ready to do things where I could make a pretty severe dent in the book. And now, two months after returning from that trip, I just put the finishing touches on the final letter, "W", and the entire book, save for a handful of titles not yet on Letterboxd under each letter (which are recounted in my notes), is now live on the site.

My Lists for The Psychotronic Video Guide on Letterboxd.com:

• Films Beginning with "A"
• Films Beginning with "B" 
• Films Beginning with "C"
• Films Beginning with "D"
• Films Beginning with "E"
• Films Beginning with "F"
• Films Beginning with "G"
• Films Beginning with "H"
• Films Beginning with "I"
• Films Beginning with "J"
• Films Beginning with "K"
• Films Beginning with "L"
• Films Beginning with "M"
• Films Beginning with "N"
• Films Beginning with "O"
• Films Beginning with "P"
• Films Beginning with "Q"
• Films Beginning with "R"
• Films Beginning with "S"
• Films Beginning with "T"
• Films Beginning with "U"
• Films Beginning with "V"
• Films Beginning with "W"
• Films Beginning with "X,Y, and Z"

And if you enjoy using these lists, feel free to leave a comment on Letterboxd or follow my page there if you decide to join yourself. It's a really wonderful website.

Andy Dufresne and the Shawshank Connection?

I turned on the TV yesterday afternoon to watch a little old school Match Game '78 on BUZZR (which plays reruns of old game shows) while I had my lunch with our cat, the Blueberry. When Match Game was over, the next show on was Child's Play. The contestants were announced by Bill Cullen, and the first one was a lady named Andy Dufresne.

It took me a second before I flashed on The Shawshank Redemption and realized that she had the same exact name as Tim Robbins' character in that movie. The name is the same in Stephen King's original novella, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. Knowing that the book in which the novella was published, Different Seasons, came out in the early '80s, I started to wonder if perhaps Stephen King had been watching daytime TV back then and happened upon this episode and said, "What a great name for my lead character!" and then used Andy Dufresne for his story.

Looking up Different Seasons, I found out it was published in hardcover in August 1982, which triggered memories of the summer where my pals Wayne, Shane, Tony, and I putzed around much of the time while only semi-seriously looking for gainful employment (Tony, of course, was employed). When Different Seasons came out, we were all reading it at various points at the end of that summer. (For the uninitiated, Different Seasons is the same collection that has the story, The Body, that was turned into the Rob Reiner classic Stand By Me, and Apt Pupil, turned into a Bryan Singer movie with the same title.) I seem to recall we had some pretty good, deep arguments about Apt Pupil.

The next step was looking up that game show, Child's Play. The info button on the cable remote told me that the show was from 1982, and this made me wonder if, indeed, I was correct in my King theory. However, a search at a couple of different sources online revealed that Child's Play only ran for a single full season, and that was from September 1982 through early September 1983. Ratings killed it, and CBS replaced it with the much more famous Press Your Luck. No whammies!

Since it is likely that King finished Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption well before that August 1982 publishing date, probably even before the start of 1982, that definitely killed my theory before it had time to even breathe. Still, it was exciting for a few short afternoon minutes. King is known for being more of a regular Joe than many writers equal to his fame, so it wouldn't surprise me if he did get inspiration from a failed game show.

RTJ

The Roadshow More Traveled, Pt. IV: Attitude is Nothing, and Neither is Your Damn Book...

I suppose that I had seen glass fire extinguishers before, but I had never really given them pause for thought. But there they were, the fourth of five items on the list of things that the Antiques Roadshow does not appraise at their events. It just seemed such an odd, specific thing to be on a list comprised otherwise of coins, currency, stamps or vehicles. I later asked our Roadshow "in," Rod, exactly why one cannot bring, assuming one is amongst that surely limited class of collectors, a glass fire extinguisher, and his answer was pretty definite. Yes, it probably isn't a good idea to bring in an antique, fragile item filled with potent and highly combustible chemicals into a crowded convention center.

But why not my stamp collection? Rod's answer was the problem of keeping qualified experts at each show, but I also proffered up my take on it, which he agreed might be a good reason too. Go to even a relatively small town and you can find stamp and coin shops readily available. There seems to be no shortage of places at which one can get a stamp collection appraised. It's much harder to find someone who can take a qualified glance at that ancient portrait of a grinning fisherman that has been handed down in your family for innumerable generations. And so they keep the stamp and coin people to the strip mall shops, and offer up the Roadshow services to everyone else that thinks they might strike gold.

Which is something I knew that I would never do, given what I was bringing to the show in lieu of being able to bring in my uncle Sam's stamp book. I had to scramble, and it was only the day before that I finally decided on bringing my precious volume of The King in Yellow and that old 8mm camera. The point for me wasn't to learn anything much at all. The point was that each ticketholder is told from the onset they must bring two items to the event. Assuredly, I have a great many things that could have been easily brought for appraisal. My problem is that I know what most of them are worth... or not worth. I have an Avengers #1 from 1963 that my pal Tony gave me as a present. I have 1950s Topps baseball cards once owned by my father with the likes of Mantle, Aaron, Williams, Clemente, Mays, Snider and Maris in their ranks. In fact, I have a million baseball cards and 12,000 comics, many of them a certain value, and that is exactly why I couldn't bring them to the show. Because I already have a fair idea of their worth.

The stamp book was different, but now I couldn't bring it. And so my focus for the show was just on enjoying the experience, studying how they film the show, and taking part in a unique cultural event. I already had a fair idea of what my Chambers book went for in the market, and I knew the camera was merely to carry about something old and interesting, as it was of little worth. And compared to the jewelry line, which seemed long until one looked at the painting line, which itself could wrap around the entire jewelry line about a dozen times over, my waits amounted to nothing. The Science and Technology line, for the camera, held but a single person. The Books table, with three appraisers chewing through the inferior texts like the bookworms they really were, only held four visitors when I strode up to it. If I had gone to the show by myself, once I made it inside the place, I would have been done in ten minutes.

With the camera taken care of already and my brief wait in the Books line ending, I could learn what I really wanted to know: how to take care of The King in Yellow. With a home full of old "Oz" books and so many other collections, the drive since I gathered all of my belongings once more in a single central location has been on finally taking care of everything properly. That means new boxes and bags for the entire comic collection, a thorough listing of every single baseball card, and the cataloging and proper storing of my full library. Much of this has already been put into play to varying degrees, but I have never known what to do with my old books, especially since the change in climate when I moved from Alaska to the far hotter and drier Southern California air.

It's hard to ignore the slightly Dahmer-esque vibe of the appraiser with whom I became, through sheer luck of the draw, acquainted. Admittedly, the guy sort of put me on edge from the beginning, and I instantly went on the defensive. (More on this in a second.) But he's a smart one, and he had me sized up from the very second that I handed him The King in Yellow. He surmised immediately that only someone reasonably familiar with this book would have taken the time to bring it, outside of a couple of boxes or a giant stack of other antique books, to this show. Instead of hitting me with a "What you have here is..." type of statement, he looked into my eyes and said, "Tell me what you know." Which I did: the Sam lead in, the Lovecraft discovery, the eventual readings, the obsession, and my knowledge of what it was trading for over the net. Upon telling him that very good copies of the same vintage were currently being offered for between $1000-1250 on some out-of-print book sites, he sniffed and said, "Oh, I was under the impression that these usually went for around $300 or so."

It's only natural that I wanted to hear him say, as most people at these events wish, that my particular copy was a true treasure that would bring me unfathomable riches and would allow me to retire and purchase a yacht. This was the furthest thing from my mind, but there was that moment as I unreeled my tale of legendary discovery, probably much like a thousand other tales he has heard from eager book holders, when I fervently hoped he would find something unique about my copy, like a hidden mark that revealed it as the very first copy in the run or something else equally ridiculous.

Instead, he chose to do his job and pick apart my copy, pointing out the wear along the top edge which he declared would mark it down considerably, and also the trio of wormholes along the spine edge of the back cover (which I had initially pointed to him). He did state that my copy was in good to very good condition, but didn't close with a dollar amount. I didn't want him to anyway, and he probably sensed this. And then I asked him about caring for the book, and he looked at what I had done -- wrapping it in a mylar comic bag -- and said I probably couldn't do much more for it than taking one of these bags and cutting a cover for it in which to encase it, and keeping it as cool as possible. Easy to do where once I lived; impossible to do now. Maybe I just need to re-rent my old apartment on Tudor Road and keep my library up in Anchorage.

And that was it. He barely glanced at the Oz book I brought, and for good reason. It was tattered beyond belief, but I only wanted him to put a date on it. And here's where I was struck with this notion: that the bulk of people here are expecting a price. And most of them are also expecting that price to be a miracle. And that these guys, these appraisers, who don't get paid to be at the Roadshow, but merely get publicity for their own businesses, must -- they must! -- get tired of these expectations. But they also probably get tired of the back-pedalers too: those people who hear what their junk is really worth, and then insist that all they really wanted to know what it was worth, and then pretend they had no intentions at all of selling their items if they had turned out to be incredibly high in value.

Myself, I also announced this very ideal to my friendly appraiser. But in my case, the statement was undeniably true. Maybe I would sell the stamp book, and maybe I would, were it worth more than a dime, sell the Oz book too. But there is no way I will ever sell my copy of The King in Yellow, and not just because it is inscribed to a remote member of my family in the 19th century. It almost seems as if I was meant to have that book, and also meant to include it in the string of events that led me to even gain the awareness that I owned such a book.

Back at the Roadshow, the ladies made sport of mocking me as a know-it-all, because not only did I have to show off what I knew -- "He asked me to tell him!" I insisted, to a slew of girlie giggles -- but because I bristled at his even more knowledgeable response, arguing his every point. Oh well... I can't help that. It's the way I am built.

And after my slightly depressing encounter, a stand in line for the Prints table (which lasted for about an hour) allowed me the time to reflect and center myself. Since the line ran past the back of the filming area, I took in the television production itself, watching the director and seeing how they used the cameras in concert with one another, and seeing how they prepared to film the next setup on one of the three stage areas. We were also amazed at how people cutting through our line also seemed to do so exactly where we were standing, no matter where we were. The hour elapsed (in retrospect) far quicker than I would have liked for my purpose of studying the filming, but soon enough, all of us slightly demoted in our feelings about our respective treasures, we departed the Antiques Roadshow for good.

Of course, I would do the whole thing again, but next time, I am going to play the bumpkin, and pretend not to know a goddamn thing about nuthin'.

Now, where can I find me one of them there glass fire extinguishers?

The Roadshow More Traveled, Pt. II: The King In Yellow

Before I continue with our visit to the Antiques Roadshow, I offer to the reader a rather largish nugget of background:

I first met The King in Yellow in the early 1980s in Alpha, Wisconsin, though it was only an acquaintance. The end of a pleasant vacation at Huntley’s Few Acres, my grandparents’ wonderful home (of which I am crazily nostalgic even though I was only ever there on a handful of occasions), found me leaving the environs with a brace of boxes in my possession. My granny had thrust into my hands numerous volumes of antique books that had passed down through various members of her family. Since I was nuts about books in general, she decided to send me back to Alaska with a couple of boxes full of them.

One of these books was a copy of Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, much fabled by my mother as a book (along with the poetry of James Whitcomb Riley), that would get read to the family. It was also one of the few books in the batch – outside of some Twain, Zane Grey and the Hardy Boys – which I recognized. Amongst the unrecognizable in the lot was a book by Robert W. Chambers, a gorgeously adorned, small but plump volume from 1895 called The King in Yellow.

It sat undisturbed on my bookshelves for about a decade, without my really knowing what wonders there were to behold inside its slightly moldered pages. The key to its treasures lie somewhere else, in another book altogether, Lovecraft, a splendid and meticulous biography of H.P. Lovecraft by L. Sprague de Camp, which I happened to stumble upon at a garage sale which I had accidentally stopped by just because I happened to be in the neighborhood on another matter. Destiny? Fate? Who knows? But it all seems slightly ominous given the books and their subjects of which we are speaking. Whether it be unseen force, divine providence or sheer coincidence behind this ladder of discoveries, causing me to climb ever higher into a musky, beshadowed attic of weird literary connection, it hardly matters. All I know is that the book mentions Robert W. Chambers as an influence on Lovecraft, a writer of whom I had been most enamored since a teen. (I was more than just slightly less enamored of ol' H.P. once I discovered what a reprehensibly racist shithead he was, but I still enjoy his writing.) Supposedly, after Lovecraft read Chambers’ more macabre stories, especially The Yellow Sign, one of the tales in The King In Yellow, he was intrigued enough to begin reflexively incorporating (some would say stealing) some of the names in Chambers' work into his own, as well as experimenting with some of Chambers' narrative concepts.

Even at this point, having only fleetingly glanced at the cover years earlier and then having stored away the book, I had to think a while about Robert W. Chambers. "Where had I seen that name before? It is so very familiar to me," I mused for numerous weeks. (Mind you, this is long before the internet made such research an instant task.) A search at the local library revealed nothing at all to me, as there were no books on the shelves (or in the card cabinet) bearing Chambers’ name. Since I worked for a bookstore chain, I consulted our Books in Print volumes within one of our satellite locations, and managed to discover that Mr. Chambers was the author of The King in Yellow, though the book itself was not currently in print then. But at last I knew! I had read his name in my very own reserves! It was in that monstrous pile of old books from Wisconsin!

Following a quick and successful scan of my own bookshelves, I found myself suddenly immersed in the then nearly 90-year old volume, carefully turning the pages as timidly as one could possibly turn the pages of a book while one was filled with longing to race unfettered by concerns over the decrepit state of said pages. A mysterious, all-knowing agent with missing ears and fingers who gets attacked constantly by his feral pet cat, a possible future (in the 1920s) where suicide is not only legal but endorsed through the construction of public gas chambers, and the aforementioned malignant text, which is only hinted at through the course and connected tissue of the opening quartet of stories – these wonders and more await the reader of The King In Yellow. Also awaiting those that enter this realm are stories later in the book which are more draggingly romantic than the darker tales which begin it, so its discovery is not thoroughly engaging. But at its best, it’s enough to make one wish, once one reads further into Chambers’ oeuvre, that he had stuck with his short fantastical career. That he was influenced by Poe, Bierce and Wilde, just as he further jolted Lovecraft, is readily apparent, and I was glad to move my one overlooked copy over to a shelf crammed with my favorite titles. Truthfully, The King In Yellow has remained by my bedside since I moved to California, though to reduce wear on the ancient text, I have replaced it with a more recently published collection for reading purposes.

A swift peek at the internet revealed to me a handful of copies of this same printing and vintage available for purchase at various out-of-print book sites, and the price range often fell into the $1000-1250 range for a very good copy. Despite my library, I was really not adept in the details of book collecting, so I couldn’t really say where my copy resided on the ever so very testy chart of condition. This question became the second part of my reason in taking the copy to the Antiques Roadshow on Saturday.

[To be continued on Sunday…]

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...